The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on October 16th from 4:15-6:15 (NY time) in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 4419) for a talk by Yale Weiss (CUNY).

Title: Maximal deontic logic

Abstract: The worlds accessible from a given world in Kripke models for deontic logic are often informally glossed as ideal or perfect worlds (at least, relative to the base world). Taking that language seriously, a straightforward but nonstandard semantic implementation using models containing maximally good worlds yields a deontic logic, MD, considerably stronger than that which most logicians would advocate for. In this talk, I examine this logic, its philosophical significance, and its technical properties, as well as those of the logics in its vicinity. The principal technical result is a proof that MD is pretabular (it has no finite characteristic matrix but all of its proper normal extensions do). Along the way, I also characterize all normal extensions of the quirky deontic logic D4H, prove that they are all decidable, and show that D4H has exactly two pretabular normal extensions.

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