The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 29th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm).

Title: Physicalism, intentionality and normativity: The essential explanatory gap

Abstract: In this paper, I present an explanatory gap argument against the view that the semantic facts are fully grounded in the physical facts. Unlike traditional explanatory gap arguments, which stem from the failure of analytic reductive explanation, the explanatory gap I point to stems from the failure of metaphysical explanation. I argue for the following theses. (i) Physicalist grounding claims are metaphysically necessary, if true. (ii) To be explanatorily adequate, these grounding claims must be deducible from facts about essence. (iii) Semantico-physical grounding claims are possibly false, not (only) because they are conceivably false, but because they cannot be deduced from facts about essence. (iv) Semantic properties are essentially weakly normative: it lies in their natures to have correctness conditions and subjectively rationalize—rather than merely cause—behaviour. This gives rise to an explanatory gap that indicates that the semantic facts are not fully grounded in the physical facts.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 6th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Lorenzo Rossi (Turin).

Title: Alethic pluralism and Kripkean truth

Abstract: According to alethic pluralism, there is more than one way of being true: truth is not unique, in that there is a plurality of truth properties each of which pertains to a specific domain of discourse. This paper shows how such a plurality can be represented in a coherent formal framework by means of a Kripke-style construction that yields intuitively correct extensions for distinct truth predicates. The theory of truth it develops can handle at least three crucial problems that have been raised in connection with alethic pluralism: mixed compounds, mixed inferences, and semantic paradoxes.

Note: This is joint work with Andrea Iacona (Turin) and Stefano Romeo (Turin).

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 15th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Jessica Collins (Columbia).

Title: Imaging is Alpha + Aizerman

Abstract: I give a non-probabilistic account of the imaging revision process. Most familiar in its various probabilistic forms, imaging was introduced by David Lewis (1976) as the form of belief revision appropriate for supposing subjunctively that a hypothesis be true. It has played a central role in the semantics of subjunctive conditionals, in causal decision theory, and, less well known to philosophers, in the computational theory of information retrieval. In the economics literature, non-probabilistic imaging functions have been called “pseudo-rationalizable choice functions”. I show that the imaging functions are precisely those which satisfy both Sen’s Alpha Principle (aka “Chernoff’s Axiom”) and the Aizerman Axiom. This result allows us to see very clearly the formal relationship between non-probabilistic imaging and AGM revision (which is Alpha + Beta).

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 8th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Asya Passinsky (CEU).

Title: Social construction and meta-ground

Abstract: The notion of social construction plays an important role in many areas of social philosophy, including the philosophy of gender, the philosophy of race, and social ontology. But it is far from clear how this notion (or cluster of notions) is to be understood. One promising proposal, which has been championed in recent years by Aaron Griffith (2017, 2018) and Jonathan Schaffer (2017), is that the notion of constitutive social construction may be analyzed in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. In this paper, I argue that a simple ground-theoretic analysis of social construction is subject to two sorts of problem cases and that existing ground-theoretic accounts do not avoid these problems. I then develop a novel ground-theoretic account of social construction in terms of meta-ground, and I argue that it avoids the problems. The core idea of the account is that in cases of social construction, the meta-ground of the relevant grounding fact includes a suitable connective social fact.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on April 1st from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Andrew Tedder (Vienna).

Title: Relevant logics as topical logics

Abstract: There is a simple way of reading a structure of topics into the matrix models of a given logic, namely by taking the topics of a given matrix model to be represented by subalgebras of the algebra reduct of the matrix, and then considering assignments of subalgebras to formulas. The resulting topic-enriched matrix models bear suggestive similarities to the two-component frame models developed by Berto et. al. in Topics of Thought. In this talk I’ll show how this reading of topics can be applied to the relevant logic R, and its algebraic characterisation in terms of De Morgan monoids, and indicate how we can, using this machinery and the fact that R satisfies the variable sharing property, read R as a topic-sensitive logic. I’ll then suggest how this approach to modeling topics can be applied to a broader range of logics/classes of matrices, and gesture at some avenues of research.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 18th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Michał Godziszewski (Warsaw).

Title: Modal quantifiers, potential infinity, and Yablo sequences

Abstract: When properly arithmetized, Yablo’s paradox results in a set of formulas which (with local disquotation in the background) turns out to be consistent, but omega-inconsistent. Adding either uniform disquotation or the omega-rule results in  inconsistency. Since the paradox involves an infinite sequence of sentences, one might think that it doesn’t arise in finitary contexts. We study whether it does. It turns out that the issue depends on how the finitistic approach is formalized. On one of them, proposed by Marcin Mostowski, all the paradoxical sentences simply fail to hold. This happens at a price: the underlying finitistic arithmetic itself is omega-inconsistent. Finally, when studied in the context of a finitistic approach which preserves the truth of standard arithmetic, the paradox strikes back — it does so with double force, for now the inconsistency can be obtained without the use of uniform disquotation or the omega-rule.

Note: This is joint work with Rafał Urbaniak (Gdańsk).

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 25th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Dan Marshall (Lingnan).

Title: A moderate theory of overall resemblance

Abstract: This paper defends the moderate theory of overall resemblance stated by: A) y is at least as similar to x as z is iff: i) every resemblance property shared by x and z is also shared by x and y, and ii) for any resemblance family of properties F, y is at least as similar to x as z is with respect to F. In this account, a resemblance property is a property that corresponds to a genuine respect in which two things can resemble each other, whereas a resemblance family is a set of properties with respect to which things can be more or less similar to each other. An example of a resemblance property is being cubical, an example of a non-resemblance property is being either a gold cube or a silver sphere, and an example of a resemblance family is the set of specific mass properties.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 11th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Otávio Bueno (Miami).

Title: Dispensing with the grounds of logical necessity

Abstract: Logical laws are typically conceived as being necessary. But in virtue of what is this the case? That is, what are the grounds of logical necessity? In this paper, I examine four different answers to this question in terms of: truth-conditions, invariance of truth-values under different interpretations, possible worlds, and brute facts. I ultimately find all of them wanting. I conclude that an alternative conception of logic that dispenses altogether with grounds of logical necessity provides a less troublesome alternative. I then indicate some of the central features of this conception.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on March 4th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Elise Crull (CUNY).

Title: Declaring no dependence

Abstract: Viable fundamental ontologies require at least one suitably stable, generic-yet-toothy metaphysical dependence relation to establish fundamentality. In this talk I argue that recent experiments in quantum physics using Page-Wootters devices to model global vs. local dynamics cast serious doubt on the existence of such metaphysical dependence relations when – and arguably, inevitably within any ontological framework – physical systems serve as the relata.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on February 26th from 4:15-6:15 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Matteo Plebani (Turin).

Title: Semantic paradoxes as collective tragedies

Abstract: What does it mean to solve a paradox? A common assumption is that to solve a paradox we need to find the wrong step in a certain piece of reasoning. In this talk, I will argue while in the case of some paradoxes such an assumption might be correct, in the case of paradoxes such as the liar and Curry’s paradox it can be questioned.