The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 12th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Mircea Dumitru (Bucharest).

Title: Does a Tarskian theory of truth offer a theory of meaning? A Sellarsian-type evaluation and critique of Donald Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics

Abstract: The paper examines how problems with Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics can be fixed through Sellars’ brand of inferentialism. I begin by presenting Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics for a natural language, viz. the program according to which the meaning of a language is to be given by a Tarskian truth-theory for that language. Against this background, I build a scenario in which a competent logician can give a truth-theory for sentences of a language that he/she cannot speak/read/understand without thereby giving/knowing/understanding the meaning of the sentences that he/she cannot comprehend. The logician knows that the sentences in the unknown (for him/her) language are true but, nevertheless, he/she does not know what they mean. In order to fix this drawback of the Davidsonian truth-conditional based theory of meaning, I present the main elements of Sellars’ subtle views on meaning and truth, pointing at how the latter can circumvent the problems with the extensional Tarskian truth-conditional approach put forward by Davidson.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 28th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Graham Priest (CUNY).

Title: The Moebius world

Abstract: As many philosophers have noted, we have two takes on the world: the view from nowhere and the view from here. In the latter the cognitive agent occupies a privileged position; in the former they do not. But the two views are contradictory. Reality has two sides, as it were, like a ring made of paper, each side contradicting the other. In fact the two views are more intimately related to each other than this, since each presupposes the other. Reality is, then, more like what happens when you put a twist in the ring, producing a Moebius strip. There is just one side which is self-contradictory. The talk explores these matters.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 21st from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Jacob McNulty (Yale).

Title: A hole within being: Consciousness as nothingness in the early Sartre

Abstract: Among Sartre’s best-known theses in Being and Nothingness is his claim that the world of experience contains what he calls “négatités,” little pools or pockets of nothingness. The most famous example of a négatité is Pierre, the friend who is absent from the café. Sartre’s conviction that there are négatités all around us has another side, often obscured from view: I mean his (apparent) conviction that we ourselves are a kind of non-being or nothingness. In this paper I try to shed some light on this Sartrean thesis by connecting it to perennial problem in metaphysics concerning the status of holes, shadows or absences — in short, non-beings. However I see more than mere analogy here. Sartre’s view, as I understand it, is that we literally are a type of hole. We are holes in the sense that we are the kinds of nonbeings that require beings as our hosts. More accurately, it is being and not beings that host the holes that we are. Ordinary holes have some particular material thing as their hosts: cheese or fabric. Yet our “host” is not any particular being (cheese or fabric) but being itself: the in-itself [en soi]. 

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 5th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Luca Incurvati (ILLC).

Title: On class hierarchies

Abstract: In her seminal article ‘Proper Classes’, Penelope Maddy introduced a theory of classes validating the naïve comprehension rules. The theory is based on a step-by-step construction of the extension and anti-extension of the membership predicate, which mirrors Kripke’s construction of the extension and anti-extension of the truth predicate. Maddy’s theory has been criticized by Øystein Linnebo for its ‘rampant indeterminacy’ and for making identity among classes too fine-grained. In this paper, I present a theory of classes that builds on Maddy’s theory but avoids its rampant indeterminacy and allows for identity among classes to be suitably coarse-grained. For all the systems I discuss, I provide model theories and proof theories (formulated in bilateral natural deduction systems), along with suitable soundness and completeness results.