The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 13th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 9205) for a talk by Eno Agolli (SKC/CUNY).

Title: Two-Dimensional Monsters

Abstract: Epistemic modality has long threatened to upend well-established tenets of semantic orthodoxy. One target is the Kripkean package about singular terms and de re modality. Against Russell and Quine, Kripke argued that (i) names are rigid, (ii) that descriptions are non-rigid, and (iii) that quantifying into modal contexts is both possible and coherent. But his arguments were built around cases of metaphysical modality. In parallel epistemic cases, the standard Kripkean picture appears to falter. This has fueled a range of revisionary responses, including dynamic, counterpart-theoretic, and impossible-worlds approaches. I argue that this is an overreaction. Working within a two-dimensional framework, I propose that variables at logical form range over two-dimensional individual concepts (rather than individuals). This single, minimal departure from orthodoxy yields a surprisingly unified treatment of the epistemic data and, crucially, retains a version of Kripke’s trifecta.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 30th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 9205) for a talk by Shin Matsuura (CUNY).

Title: A paraconsistent theory of truth with a connexive conditional

Abstract: The semantic paradoxes show that one cannot retain the unrestricted T-schema while maintaining classical logic. Since Kripke’s “Outline of a Theory of Truth,” it has been known that non-classical theories of truth can maintain the transparency of truth. However, any such theory must also be equipped with a suitable conditional to adequately express the T-schema. In this talk, I propose a paraconsistent theory of truth based on a connexive conditional and report its non-triviality result. Unlike other paraconsistent theories of truth, my proposal is not based on relevance logic. Instead, its underlying logic is an “irrelevant” connexive logic with a simple Kripke semantics and closely related to (sub)intuitionistic logic. I argue that this theory can overcome some difficulties faced by earlier paraconsistent theories of truth, including the treatment of restricted quantification. 

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 23rd from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 9205) for a talk by Jamie Beardmore (Columbia).

Title: Mereological Fusions as Mere Manys

Abstract: Philosophical attention to developments in plural logic has led to the theory of “Manyism”: fusions are “mere manys” in that they are pluralities and not also individuals (Thunder 2023; Trueman and Thunder 2025). Manyism gives a further result of “Mereologicism”: the axioms of (atomistic) classical mereology are theorems of higher-level plural logic. Mereologicism (and therefore Manyism) is claimed to secure the ontological innocence of mereology because logic is ontologically innocent, and mereology is shown to be logic. I first investigate the Mereologicist model presented in (Trueman and Thunder 2025) to determine the payoff of going “superplural”. I argue however that Mereologicism may be recovered from standard plural logic. I then raise attention to various semantics for plural logic, to i) argue against the Manyist claim that fusions, qua pluralities, exist in the same sense as individuals; and ii) raise questions of indeterminacy for plural quantification, given a plural analogue of Henkin semantics for second-order logic introduced by Florio and Linnebo (2021). I close by questioning whether Manyism is better suited as a theory of speaker-meaning for everyday talk of mereological fusions, rather than a metaphysical theory distinct from mereological nihilism.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 16th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 9205) for a talk by Liam Ryan (New York) and Otto Lehto (NYU).

Title: The Accretive View of Consciousness: Phenomenal Gradation in Ontogeny and Phylogeny

Abstract: There is a growing body of evidence in the science of consciousness suggesting that experience activates and develops gradually. This paper defends the Accretive View of Consciousness (AVC), focusing on infant consciousness as the primary methodological and normative proving ground. We argue that the neonatal case is decisive: it necessitates “no-report” strategies that triangulate experience from behavioral, neurodevelopmental, and network-level markers. By centering the infant, we show that phenomenal consciousness—what it is like to be a subject—can be increasingly modeled as a capacity that “boots up” through staged accretion rather than switching on at a sharp ontological milestone. This view is buttressed by recent conceptual work that renders gradability coherent, showing how multidimensional profiles can ground principled comparisons of magnitude without collapsing into a single scalar metric. Crucially, this logic extends beyond ontogeny to encompass phylogeny, as shown by animal consciousness and possibly artificial intelligence. We demonstrate that AVC is compatible with leading theories, such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and Global Workspace Theory (GWT), provided they account for the incremental construction of enabling architectures. Finally, we address the normative stakes. If the onset of experience is graded, ethical frameworks that inform moral status must move beyond “on-off” idealizations. The infant case provides a model for an egalitarianism that respects developmental grey zones while maintaining principled protections for all subjects.

Note: This is a joint talk.