Ernst Mally (11 October 1879 - 8 March 1944) was an
Austrian
philosopher affiliated with the so-called
Graz School of
phenomenology. A pupil of
Alexius Meinong, he was one of the founders of
deontic logic and is mainly known for his contributions in that field of research.
Life
Mally was born in the town of
Kranj () in the
Duchy of Carniola,
Austria-Hungary (now in
Slovenia). His father was of
Slovene origin, but identified himself with
Austrian German culture (he also
Germanized the orthography of his surname, originally spelled Mali, a common Slovene surname of
Upper Carniola). After his death, the family moved to the
Carniolan capital of
Ljubljana (). There, Ernst attended the prestigious
Ljubljana German language Gymnasium. Already at a young age, Mally became a fervent supporter of the
Pan-German nationalist movement of
Georg von Schönerer. In the same time, he developed an interest in philosophy.
In 1898 he enrolled to the University of Graz, where he studied philosophy under the supervision of Alexius Meinong, as well as physics and mathematics, specializing in formal logic. He graduated in 1903 with a thesis entitled Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie des Messens (Investigations in the Object Theory of Measurement). In 1906 he started teaching at a high school in Graz, at the same time working Meinong's assistant at the university. He also maintained close contacts with the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology, founded by Meinong. In 1912, he wrote his faculty-rank (Habilitation) thesis entitled Gegenstandstheoretische Grundlagen der Logik und Logistik (Object-theoretic Foundations for Logics and Logistics) with Meinong as supervisor.
From 1915 to 1918 he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the end of World War I, Mally joined the Greater German People's Party, which called the unification of German Austria with Germany. In the same period, he started teaching at the university and in 1925 he took over Meinong's chair. In 1938, he became a member of the National Socialist Teachers' Association and two months after the Anschluss he joined the NSDAP. He continued teaching during the Nazi administration of Austria until 1942 when he retired. He died in 1944.
Mally's deontic logic
Mally was the first ever logician to attempt an axiomatisation of
ethics. He used five axioms, which are given below. They form a
first-order theory that quantifies over
propositions, and there are several predicates to understand first. !x means that x ought to be the case. Ux means that x is unconditionally obligatory, i.e. that !x is necessarily true. ∩x means that x is unconditionally forbidden, i.e. U(¬x). A f B is the
binary relation A requires B, i.e. A materially implies !B. (All
entailment in the axioms is
material conditional.) It is defined by axiom III, whereas all other terms are defined as a preliminary.
Note the implied universal quantifiers in the above axioms.
The fourth axiom has confused some logicians because its formulation is not as they would have expected, since Mally gave each axiom a description in words also, and he said that axiom IV meant "the unconditionally obligatory is obligatory", i.e. (as many logicians have insisted) UA → !A. Meanwhile, axiom 5 lacks an object to which the predicates apply, a typo. However, it turns out these are the least of Mally's worries (see below).
Failure of Mally's deontic logic
Theorem: This axiomatisation of
deontic logic implies that !x
if and only if x is true, OR !x is unsatisfiable. (This makes it useless to deontic logicians.)
Proof: Using axiom III, axiom I may be rewritten as (!(A → B) & (B → C)) → !(A → C). Since B → C holds whenever C holds, one immediate consequence is that (!(A → B) → (C → !(A → C))). In other words, if A requires B, it requires any true statement. In the special case where A is a
tautology, the theorem has consequence (!B → (C → !C)). Thus, if at least one statement ought be true, every statement must materially entail it ought be true, and so every true statement ought be true. As for the converse (i.e. if some statement ought be true then all statements that ought be true are true), consider the following logic: ((U → !A) & (A → ∩)) → (U → !∩) is a special case of axiom I, but its consequent contradicts axiom V, and so ¬((U → !A) & (A → ∩)). The result !A → A can be shown to follow from this, since !A implies that U → !A and ¬A implies that A → ∩; and, since these are not both true, we know that !A → A.
Mally thought that axiom I was self-evident, but he likely confused it with an alternative in which the implication B → C is logical, which would indeed make the axiom self-evident. The theorem above, however, would then not be demonstrable. The theorem was proven by Karl Menger, the next deontic logician. Neither Mally's original axioms nor a modification that avoids this result remains popular today. (Menger did not suggest his own axioms.) See also deontic logic for more on the subsequent development of this subject. Mally's grandson, Thomas, is currently at Emory University attempting to prove the theories of his grandfather.
See also
Graz School
External links
Entry Ernst Mally at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Entry Mally's deontic logic at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Category:1879 births
Category:1944 deaths
Category:Austrian philosophers
Category:20th-century philosophers
Category:Austrian logicians
Category:People from Kranj
Category:People from Ljubljana
Category:People from Graz
Category:Phenomenology
Category:Austrian people of Slovenian descent
