Identity, Indeterminacy, and Supervaluationism (Achille Varzi)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 25th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Achille Varzi (Columbia).

Title: Identity, Indeterminacy, and Supervaluationism

AbstractI am a friend of supervaluationism. A statement lacks a determinate truth value if, and only if, it comes out true on some admissible precisifications of the relevant vocabulary and false on others. In this talk I want to focus on the special cases of identity statements. There is, I think, a potentially devastating objection that can be raised against the supervaluationist treatment of such statements—in fact two objections. Luckily, both can be resisted. But seeing how requires that we take a closer look at the ontological presuppositions of supervaluationism, allowing for more leeway than is usually supposed.

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