Belief Content and Rationality: Why Racist Beliefs Are Not Rational (Eric Bayruns Garcia)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 15th from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Eric Bayruns Garcia (Cal State San Bernardino).

Title: Belief Content and Rationality: Why Racist Beliefs Are Not Rational

Abstract: I present a novel defense of the evidentialist thesis in the debate between epistemologists who defend this thesis and those who defend the moral encroachment thesis. Both sides of the moral encroachment-evidentialism debate suppose that the belief class of what I call seemingly-rational-racist beliefs obtains. I reject that this belief class of seemingly- rational-racist beliefs obtains on the basis that beliefs with this kind of content are false and evidentially unsupported. I submit that they are false and evidentially unsupported because of how the content of these beliefs relate to the social-linguistic practices and habits that compose racial injustice in the US and other similarly colonized societies. I diagnose that a problem with this debate is that both sides in this debate conceive of the content of race terms and beliefs that attribute negative features to Black, Indigenous and Latinx persons without considering how they function in a racially unjust society.

Two applications of Herzberger’s semantics (Hitoshi Omori)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 8th from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Hitoshi Omori (Bochum).

Title: Two applications of Herzberger’s semantics

Abstract: In his paper “Dimensions of truth”, Hans Herzberger develops a semantic framework that captures both classical logic and weak Kleene logic through one and the same interpretation. The aim of this talk is to apply the simple idea of Herzberger to two kinds of many-valued semantics. This application will be led by the following two questions.

(i) Is de Finetti conditional a conditional?
(ii) What do CL, K3 and LP disagree about?

Note: This is a joint work with Jonas R. B. Arenhart (Santa Catarina).

The Easy Argument Against Noncontractive Logics Doesn’t Work (Shay Logan)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 1st from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Shay Logan (Kansas State).

Title: The Easy Argument Against Noncontractive Logics Doesn’t Work

Abstract: The Easy Argument against noncontractivism is the argument that essentially amounts to pointing out that contraction is just repeating oneself. The purpose of this talk is to explain why the Easy Argument fails. I show first that the Easy Argument fails by being insufficiently precise, since there are many ways we can combine premises in an argument. After correcting for this, the Easy Argument then fails by being straightforwardly invalid. The premises required to correct for *this* failure, however, have controversial consequences. Altogether, it seems arguments against noncontractive logics, if there are any, will be Hard—not Easy—Arguments.

Substructural Solutions to the Semantic Paradoxes: a Dialetheic Perspective (Graham Priest)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 22nd from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Graham Priest (CUNY).

Title: Substructural Solutions to the Semantic Paradoxes: a Dialetheic Perspective

Abstract: Over the last decade or so, a number of writers have argued for  solutions to the paradoxes of semantic self-reference which proceed by dropping some of the structural rules of inference, most notably Cut and/or Contraction.  In this paper, we will examine such accounts, with a particular eye on their relationship to more familiar dialetheic accounts.