Thanks for the comment! Probability theory is a natural thing to reach for in order to both recover defeasibility while still upholding "logicism about reasons" (seeing the inferences as underwritten by a logical formalism). And of course it's a very useful calculational tool (as is classical logic)! But I don't think it can play the role that material inference plays in this theory. I think a whole post would be needed to make this point clearly[1], but I will try in a comment.
Probability theory is still a formal calculus, which is completely invariant to substituting nonlogical vocabulary for other nonlogical vocabulary (this is good - exactly what we want for a formal... (read more)
I recently wrote this post for the Topos Institute blog, engaging with some recent work in the philosophy of language which I believe is relevant to foundational questions regarding semantics. Many concepts (which we might call 'fuzzy' or tied up with 'values') aren't amenable to logical formalization, so their input is systemically unrepresented in science and technology building. But, through a change in our perspective about what the role of logic is, we can work with these concepts and build an approach to science that bakes these values in, while still being able to use all the great mathematical logic that we are used to. I believe this clarification about meaning sheds... (read 5282 more words →)
Hi, sorry I'm not directly familiar with that Dewey work. As far as classical American pragmatism goes, I can only point to Brandom's endorsement of Cheryl Misak's transformative new way of looking at it in Lecture 4 of this course, which might be helpful for drawing this connection.