The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 29th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm).

Title: Physicalism, intentionality and normativity: The essential explanatory gap

Abstract: In this paper, I present an explanatory gap argument against the view that the semantic facts are fully grounded in the physical facts. Unlike traditional explanatory gap arguments, which stem from the failure of analytic reductive explanation, the explanatory gap I point to stems from the failure of metaphysical explanation. I argue for the following theses. (i) Physicalist grounding claims are metaphysically necessary, if true. (ii) To be explanatorily adequate, these grounding claims must be deducible from facts about essence. (iii) Semantico-physical grounding claims are possibly false, not (only) because they are conceivably false, but because they cannot be deduced from facts about essence. (iv) Semantic properties are essentially weakly normative: it lies in their natures to have correctness conditions and subjectively rationalize—rather than merely cause—behaviour. This gives rise to an explanatory gap that indicates that the semantic facts are not fully grounded in the physical facts.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 6th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Lorenzo Rossi (Turin).

Title: Alethic pluralism and Kripkean truth

Abstract: According to alethic pluralism, there is more than one way of being true: truth is not unique, in that there is a plurality of truth properties each of which pertains to a specific domain of discourse. This paper shows how such a plurality can be represented in a coherent formal framework by means of a Kripke-style construction that yields intuitively correct extensions for distinct truth predicates. The theory of truth it develops can handle at least three crucial problems that have been raised in connection with alethic pluralism: mixed compounds, mixed inferences, and semantic paradoxes.

Note: This is joint work with Andrea Iacona (Turin) and Stefano Romeo (Turin).

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

Title: Imaging is Alpha + Aizerman

Abstract: I give a non-probabilistic account of the imaging revision process. Most familiar in its various probabilistic forms, imaging was introduced by David Lewis (1976) as the form of belief revision appropriate for supposing subjunctively that a hypothesis be true. It has played a central role in the semantics of subjunctive conditionals, in causal decision theory, and, less well known to philosophers, in the computational theory of information retrieval. In the economics literature, non-probabilistic imaging functions have been called “pseudo-rationalizable choice functions”. I show that the imaging functions are precisely those which satisfy both Sen’s Alpha Principle (aka “Chernoff’s Axiom”) and the Aizerman Axiom. This result allows us to see very clearly the formal relationship between non-probabilistic imaging and AGM revision (which is Alpha + Beta).