  The standard notion of formal theory, in Logic, is in general biased
exclusively towards assertion: it commonly refers only to collections of
assertions that any agent who accepts the generating axioms of the theory
should also be committed to accept. In reviewing the main abstract approaches
to the study of logical consequence, we point out why this notion of theory is
unsatisfactory at multiple levels, and introduce a novel notion of theory that
attacks the shortcomings of the received notion by allowing one to take both
assertions and denials on a par. This novel notion of theory is based on a
bilateralist approach to consequence operators, which we hereby introduce, and
whose main properties we investigate in the present paper.
