880. Hartshorne talks about . . .

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1.
H talks about "logical in a broad sense that includes informal as well as formal logic" ("John Hick on Logical and Ontological Necessity": 165). But what, exactly, does he mean by this?
2.
He refers elsewhere to "the idea of logical necessity" as allowing of "the distinction between those cases which involve [no] more than the constants of formal logic as now recognized, and those which involve meanings additional to purely logical ones" (160; adding the "no" to what stands in the text). In the same vein, he elsewhere distinguishes "the sharp definition of necessary or 'analytic' used by formal logicians," according to which "a proposition, to be analytic, has to be fully stable through the 'constants of formal logic'" (157). By contrast with this, there are propositions that are logically necessary given "meaning postulates," i.e., given "the meanings of the terms," which are either implicit or explicit. Thus, H says, "'God does not exist' is not contradictory in the purely formal sense in which 'P & -P' is so" (157). I take it that "God does not exist" is an example of a proposition that is contradictory and thus logically impossible in a broad, rather than in a strict sense of "logical."
3.
Another such proposition is "nothing exists," whose denial "something exists" is logically necessary. Significantly, however, H claims that it is "semantically, and hence in a broad sense logically, necessary; since its denial [i.e., 'nothing exists'] violates the rules relating concepts to reality" (162 f.). The fact that H distinguishes "semantically" from "purely formal or syntactical" and thus "syntactically" suggests that this is yet another way of formulating what logical in a broad sense means.
n.d.; rev. 13 February 2010