On Logical and Scientific Strength: On Logical and Scientific Strength

The notion of strength has featured prominently in recent debates about abductivism in the epistemology of logic. Following Timothy Williamson and Gillian Russell, we distinguish between logical and scientific strength and discuss the limits of the characterizations they employ. We then suggest understanding logical strength in terms of interpretability strength and scientific strength as a special case of logical strength. We present applications of the resulting notions to comparisons between logics in the traditional sense and mathematical theories.