The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on December 6th from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) via Zoom for a talk by Diderik Batens (Ghent).

Title: Every Logic has its Proper Semantics

Abstract: Many logics are sound and complete with respect to a multiplicity of semantic systems. These assign different sets of models to the logic. It will be shown that a series of problems result if all these semantic systems are on a par. I shall present a method to define a unique ‘proper’ semantics for the members of a huge class of logics, containing all usual deductive logics, and argue (i) that the proper semantics is defined in terms of syntactic criteria and so depends fully on the logic, (ii) that there are philosophical arguments to consider a logic’s proper semantics as natural, for example it correctly describes the ‘situations’ that are possible according to the logic. This solves the problems mentioned previously. Implications for the discussion on inferentialism are obvious. For some logics, the proper semantics coincides with the Henkin semantics. For other logics L, the proper semantics counts more models than the Henkin semantics: moreover, not all Henkin models are maximally L-non-trivial. A small change to the Henkin method has the effect that, for every logic L, the Henkin semantics coincides with the proper semantics.

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