The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 25th from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 5382) for a talk by Tore Fjetland Øgaard (Bergen).

Title: Logical Suppression Anew

Abstract: Val Plumwood and Richard Sylvan argued from their joint paper The Semantics of First Degree Entailment and onward that the variable sharing property is but a mere consequence of a good entailment relation; indeed they viewed it as a mere negative test of adequacy of such a relation, the property itself being a rather philosophically barren concept. Such a relation is rather to be analyzed as a sufficiency relation free of any form of premise suppression. Suppression of premises, therefore, gained center stage. Despite this, however, no serious attempt was ever made at analyzing the concept. A first rigorous analysis of their notion of suppression was given in Farewell to Suppression-Freedom. Therein it was shown that Plumwood and Sylvan’s notion of suppression is in fact properly weaker than variable sharing. I will in the current talk explore ways of strengthening the suppression criterion. One plausible way of doing so, I will argue, yields a principle equivalent to the standard variable sharing property. I hope to show, then, that the notion of suppression is not as unfruitful as I previously made it out to be.

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