What does it mean that Contradiction is the Norm of Truth? (Elena Ficara)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 1st from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Elena Ficara (Paderborn).

Title: What does it mean that Contradiction is the Norm of Truth?

Abstract: In my talk I argue for the thesis CT: contradiction is the norm of truth, and ask about its relevance for contemporary philosophical logic. I first present three positions in the history of philosophy that have advocated some versions of CT, namely Plato’s idea of the “dialectical gymnastics” in the Parmenides (Plato, Parmenides 136 B-E), Aristotle’s notion of dialectics in the Topics (Aristotle, Topics I, 2-3) and Metaphysics (Aristotle, Met III 1, 995 a 24-29), and Hegel’s contradictio est regula veri (Hegel Werke 2, 533), then derive from them some answers to the questions:

What is meant by “contradiction” in CT?

What is meant by “truth” in CT?

What is meant by “norm” in CT?

I will show that to examine the meaning of CT in historical perspective is useful to understand the seeds of genuine glut theories.

 

Classical Logic and the Strict Tolerant Hierarchy (Chris Scambler)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 8th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Chris Scambler (NYU).

Title: Classical Logic and the Strict Tolerant Hierarchy

AbstractIn this talk I will do three things. First: I will present the central results from Barrio, Pailos and Szmuc’s recent paper “A hierarchy of classical and paraconsistent logics” (forthcoming in the JPL) along with some generalizations derived by observing certain symmetries; second, I will discuss the relation between the strict tolerant logics and classical logic, K3 and LP; third, I will try to convey the exact state of uncertainty about the philosophical significance of the foregoing I find myself in on the day.

Inferences First (Romina Padró)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 18th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Romina Padró (CUNY).

Title: Inferences First

AbstractTwo ways of giving an epistemic justification of basic logical principles will be introduced, intuition-based accounts and concept or meaning constitution-based accounts. We will briefly consider different versions of these views and argue that they face parallel dilemmas. While ‘robust’ accounts are subject to what I call the ‘adoption problem,’ ‘weak’ accounts fail to ground our basic inferential dispositions. Either way, intuitions and meaning-constituting rules turn out to be irrelevant. A more general moral for the epistemology of logic and its priorities will be drawn from the discussion.

Deep Structure (Jeremy Goodman)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 11th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Jeremy Goodman (USC).

Title: Deep Structure

AbstractRussell proved over a century ago that a naive conception of structured propositions is inconsistent. Hodes (2015), Dorr (2016), and Goodman (2017) have recently reformulated Russell’s argument in the language of higher-order logic, and concluded from it that distinctions in reality cannot always reflect all the syntactic structure of the language in which we draw those distinctions. But they also float the idea that such distinctions might nevertheless have sentence-like structure, so long as this structure fails to neatly correspond to the syntactic structure of the sentences we use to draw those distinction. Perhaps, that is, the popular metaphor of facts being like sentences written in God’s “book of the world” is tenable after all. In this talk I’ll give a way of making this metaphor precise, and prove a new limitative result showing that, given natural assumptions, it too is inconsistent. 

A Theory of the Conditional (Kit Fine)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 25th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Kit Fine (NYU).

Title: A Theory of the Conditional

Abstract: I provide a truth-maker semantics for the conditional and consider the application to imperative and deontic conditionals.

Note: the title/topic of this talk was changed on March 14th, 2019.

Coverage-Reliance Ignorance (Eric Bayruns Garcia)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 4th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Eric Bayruns Garcia (CUNY).

The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4th. This meeting is cancelled

Title: Coverage-Reliance Ignorance

Abstract: I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on.  I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these societies are unjustly structured.  I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief. In section one, I describe features of coverage-reliance ignorance, its relation to coverage-supported belief and white ignorance, its bad epistemic consequences and a case of coverage-reliance ignorance where a subject holds a true, but unjustified, belief.  In section two, I argue that racial prejudice can make a news source less reliable because racial prejudice can make it less likely that news sources report on racial injustice related topics.  In section three, I argue that a society’s unjust structure can make a news source less reliable because it can make it less likely that reports on racial-injustice-related topics reach subjects who lack information on these topics.  In section four, I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief.

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.

Stages in Spacetime: The Languages of Persistence (Benjamin Neeser)

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 11th from 4:15-6:15 in room 7314 of the CUNY Graduate Center for a talk by Benjamin Neeser (Geneva).

Title: Stages in Spacetime: The Languages of Persistence

AbstractMotivated by considerations from relativity theory, philosophers have recently contended that talk about an object’s existence in time should not be taken as fundamental, but rather analysed in the language of a formal theory of location in spacetimeThis suggestion has important consequences for the debate about persistence: how do ordinary objects exist at different times? It has triggered a program of recovery whereby the main views from the classical debate, previously expressed using the language of temporal mereology, have been redefined in a locational framework. In this paper, I extend this program to the stage theory of persistence, the view according to which objects are instantaneous three-dimensional stages which exist at different times by virtue of having counterparts at these times. I offer a new characterization of the view, the first in a purely locational language, and argue that this locational approach helps dissolve confusions about the view.

Bilattices and Strict Tolerant Logics (Melvin Fitting)

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

Title: Bilattices and Strict Tolerant Logics

Abstract: Strict/tolerant logic is a formally defined logic that has the same consequence relation as classical logic, though it differs from classical logic at the metaconsequence level.  Specifically, it does not satisfy a cut rule.  It has been recommended for use in work on theories of truth because it avoids some objectionable features arising from the use of classical logic.  Here we are not interested in applications, but in the formal details themselves.  We show that a wide range of logics have strict/tolerant counterparts, with the same consequence relations but differing at the metaconsequence level.  Among these logics are Kleene’s K3, Priest’s LP, and first degree entailment, FDE.  The primary tool we use is the bilattice.  But it is more than a tool, it seems to be the natural home for this kind of investigation.

Spring 2019 Schedule

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 7314 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The provisional schedule is as follows (* indicates a change):

Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY

Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva

Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia

Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY

Mar 11. Jeremy Goodman, USC*

Mar 18. Romina Padro, CUNY*

Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU

Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn

Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU

Apr 15.  Jenn McDonald, CUNY

Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY

May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal

May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia

May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY