The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 1st from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Elena Ficara (Paderborn).

Title: What does it mean that Contradiction is the Norm of Truth?

Abstract: In my talk I argue for the thesis CT: contradiction is the norm of truth, and ask about its relevance for contemporary philosophical logic. I first present three positions in the history of philosophy that have advocated some versions of CT, namely Plato’s idea of the “dialectical gymnastics” in the Parmenides (Plato, Parmenides 136 B-E), Aristotle’s notion of dialectics in the Topics (Aristotle, Topics I, 2-3) and Metaphysics (Aristotle, Met III 1, 995 a 24-29), and Hegel’s contradictio est regula veri (Hegel Werke 2, 533), then derive from them some answers to the questions:

What is meant by “contradiction” in CT?

What is meant by “truth” in CT?

What is meant by “norm” in CT?

I will show that to examine the meaning of CT in historical perspective is useful to understand the seeds of genuine glut theories.

 

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 8th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Chris Scambler (NYU).

Title: Classical Logic and the Strict Tolerant Hierarchy

Abstract: In this talk I will do three things. First: I will present the central results from Barrio, Pailos and Szmuc’s recent paper “A hierarchy of classical and paraconsistent logics” (forthcoming in the JPL) along with some generalizations derived by observing certain symmetries; second, I will discuss the relation between the strict tolerant logics and classical logic, K3 and LP; third, I will try to convey the exact state of uncertainty about the philosophical significance of the foregoing I find myself in on the day.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 18th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Romina Padró (CUNY).

Title: Inferences First

Abstract: Two ways of giving an epistemic justification of basic logical principles will be introduced, intuition-based accounts and concept or meaning constitution-based accounts. We will briefly consider different versions of these views and argue that they face parallel dilemmas. While ‘robust’ accounts are subject to what I call the ‘adoption problem,’ ‘weak’ accounts fail to ground our basic inferential dispositions. Either way, intuitions and meaning-constituting rules turn out to be irrelevant. A more general moral for the epistemology of logic and its priorities will be drawn from the discussion.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 11th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Jeremy Goodman (USC).

Title: Deep Structure

Abstract: Russell proved over a century ago that a naive conception of structured propositions is inconsistent. Hodes (2015), Dorr (2016), and Goodman (2017) have recently reformulated Russell’s argument in the language of higher-order logic, and concluded from it that distinctions in reality cannot always reflect all the syntactic structure of the language in which we draw those distinctions. But they also float the idea that such distinctions might nevertheless have sentence-like structure, so long as this structure fails to neatly correspond to the syntactic structure of the sentences we use to draw those distinction. Perhaps, that is, the popular metaphor of facts being like sentences written in God’s “book of the world” is tenable after all. In this talk I’ll give a way of making this metaphor precise, and prove a new limitative result showing that, given natural assumptions, it too is inconsistent. 

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 25th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Kit Fine (NYU).

Title: A Theory of the Conditional

Abstract: I provide a truth-maker semantics for the conditional and consider the application to imperative and deontic conditionals.

Note: the title/topic of this talk was changed on March 14th, 2019.