The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 16th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7395 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by David Papineau (CUNY).

Following guidance from CUNY concerning the coronavirus, this event has been cancelled.

Title: The Statistical Nature of Causation

Abstract: For over a hundred years econometricians, epidemiologists, educational sociologists and other non-experimental scientists have used asymmetric correlational patterns to infer directed causal structures. It is odd, to say the least, that no philosophical theories of causation cast any light on why these techniques work. Why do the directed causal structures line up with the asymmetric correlational patterns? Judea Pearl says that the correspondence is a “gift from the gods”. Metaphysics owes us a better answer. I shall attempt to sketch the outline of one.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 2nd from 4:15-6:15 in room 7395 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Alex Citkin (Metropolitan Telecommunications).

Title: Deductive Systems with Unified Multiple-Conclusion Rules

Abstract: Some people fight for the rights of animals, I am fighting for the rights of rejected propositions. Following the approach suggested by Brentano and accepted and developed by Lukasiewicz, I study the deductive systems that treat asserted and rejected propositions equally, in the same way. By “statement,” we understand the expressions of form +A – “A being asserted”, and -A$ – “A being rejected”, where A is a proposition. Accordingly, by a “unified logic,” we understand a consequence relation between sets of statements and statements. We introduce the unified deductive systems which can be used to define the unified logics. Unified deductive system consists of axioms, anti-axioms, and the multiple conclusion inference rules which premises and conclusions are the statements rather than the propositions. In particular, we study the deductive systems that contain the coherency rule, which means that one cannot assert and reject the same proposition at the same time, and the fullness rule, which means that each proposition is either asserted or rejected. Inclusion of these rules though does not enforce the law of excluded middle, or the law of non-contradiction on the propositional level.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 24th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7395 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Dongwoo Kim (CUNY).

Title: A Truthmaker Semantics for Modal Logics

Abstract: This paper attempts to provide an exact truthmaker semantics for a family of normal modal propositional logic. The new semantics can be regarded as an “exactification” of the Kripke semantics in the sense of Fine (2014). For it offers an account of the accessibility relation on worlds in terms of the banning and allowing relations on states. The main idea is that an exact truthmaker for “Necessarily P” is a state that bans the exact falsifiers of P from obtaining, and an exact truthmaker for “Possibly P” is a state that allows the exact verifiers of P to obtain.