ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines work that has been done in the logic of rules. From the work done specifically by the Dalhousie team, the chapter draws a new definition of rules, which avoids the circularity of definitions currently in circulation. Starting up closer to the concerns that ethnographers have with settled social rules than to the concerns of economists or decision-theorists, some philosophers have asked what distinguishes rules from other social phenomena, in particular, from other phenomena that involve expressions in language. In his book Norm and Action, von Wright arrives at a logic of norms through a three-tier construction on top of the prepositional calculus. Each tier adds logical operators to help specify those forms of propositions which the logic of norms is especially concerned to identify among the possible substitutions available in the propositional calculus.
