The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 8th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Asya Passinsky (CEU).

Title: Social construction and meta-ground

Abstract: The notion of social construction plays an important role in many areas of social philosophy, including the philosophy of gender, the philosophy of race, and social ontology. But it is far from clear how this notion (or cluster of notions) is to be understood. One promising proposal, which has been championed in recent years by Aaron Griffith (2017, 2018) and Jonathan Schaffer (2017), is that the notion of constitutive social construction may be analyzed in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. In this paper, I argue that a simple ground-theoretic analysis of social construction is subject to two sorts of problem cases and that existing ground-theoretic accounts do not avoid these problems. I then develop a novel ground-theoretic account of social construction in terms of meta-ground, and I argue that it avoids the problems. The core idea of the account is that in cases of social construction, the meta-ground of the relevant grounding fact includes a suitable connective social fact.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 1st from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Andrew Tedder (Vienna).

Title: Relevant logics as topical logics

Abstract: There is a simple way of reading a structure of topics into the matrix models of a given logic, namely by taking the topics of a given matrix model to be represented by subalgebras of the algebra reduct of the matrix, and then considering assignments of subalgebras to formulas. The resulting topic-enriched matrix models bear suggestive similarities to the two-component frame models developed by Berto et. al. in Topics of Thought. In this talk I’ll show how this reading of topics can be applied to the relevant logic R, and its algebraic characterisation in terms of De Morgan monoids, and indicate how we can, using this machinery and the fact that R satisfies the variable sharing property, read R as a topic-sensitive logic. I’ll then suggest how this approach to modeling topics can be applied to a broader range of logics/classes of matrices, and gesture at some avenues of research.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 18th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Michał Godziszewski (Warsaw).

Title: Modal quantifiers, potential infinity, and Yablo sequences

Abstract: When properly arithmetized, Yablo’s paradox results in a set of formulas which (with local disquotation in the background) turns out to be consistent, but omega-inconsistent. Adding either uniform disquotation or the omega-rule results in  inconsistency. Since the paradox involves an infinite sequence of sentences, one might think that it doesn’t arise in finitary contexts. We study whether it does. It turns out that the issue depends on how the finitistic approach is formalized. On one of them, proposed by Marcin Mostowski, all the paradoxical sentences simply fail to hold. This happens at a price: the underlying finitistic arithmetic itself is omega-inconsistent. Finally, when studied in the context of a finitistic approach which preserves the truth of standard arithmetic, the paradox strikes back — it does so with double force, for now the inconsistency can be obtained without the use of uniform disquotation or the omega-rule.

Note: This is joint work with Rafał Urbaniak (Gdańsk).

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 25th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Dan Marshall (Lingnan).

Title: A moderate theory of overall resemblance

Abstract: This paper defends the moderate theory of overall resemblance stated by: A) y is at least as similar to x as z is iff: i) every resemblance property shared by x and z is also shared by x and y, and ii) for any resemblance family of properties F, y is at least as similar to x as z is with respect to F. In this account, a resemblance property is a property that corresponds to a genuine respect in which two things can resemble each other, whereas a resemblance family is a set of properties with respect to which things can be more or less similar to each other. An example of a resemblance property is being cubical, an example of a non-resemblance property is being either a gold cube or a silver sphere, and an example of a resemblance family is the set of specific mass properties.