The Virtual International Consortium for Truth Research (VICTR) will have a talk by Eduardo Barrio (University of Buenos Aires), on “Anti-exceptionalism, Truth, and the BA-Plan” on April 26, 10:00am EDT / 14:00 UTC.

Abstract: Anti-exceptionalism about logic states that logical theories have no special epistemological status. Such theories are continuous with scientific theories. Contemporary anti-exceptionalists include data about semantic paradoxes as a part of the logical evidence. Exploring the Buenos Aires Plan, the recent development of the metainferential hierarchy of ST-logics shows that there are multiple options to deal with such paradoxes. There is a whole ST-based hierarchy, of which LP and ST themselves are only the first steps. The logics in this hierarchy are also options to analyze the inferential patterns allowed in a language that contains its own truth predicate. This talk explores these responses analyzing some reasons to go beyond the first steps. I will show that LP, ST, and the logics of the ST-hierarchy offer different diagnoses for the same evidence: the inferences and metainferences the agents endorse in the presence of the truth-predicate. But even if the data are not enough to adopt one of these logics, there are other elements to evaluate the revision of classical logic. How close should we be to classical logic? Which logic should be used during the revision? Should a logic be closed under its own rules? How could a logic obey the validities it contains? And mainly, which is the best explanation for the logical principles to deal with semantic paradoxes? I will argue that, if the answers to these questions are provided from an anti-exceptionalist perspective, ST-metainferential logics in general are the best available options.

You can register for this event at this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIocu-prj4iGdY0NwHUWjPYWLvywnGfLeku

VICTR is sponsored by the Future of Truth Project at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, the University of Alabama, and the University of Waikato

This week: Kristin Culbertson, "Buddhism and Moral Anger"
A series of informal talks by philosophy faculty and graduate students. For a description and how to sign up, see http://philosophy.uconn.edu/brown-bags/.

Join us for this week's Logic Colloquium!

Bjørn Jespersen (Utrecht)

"Impossibilities without impossibilia"

Circumstantialists already have a logical semantics for impossibilities. They expand their logical space of possible worlds by adding impossible worlds. These are impossible circumstances serving as indices of evaluation, at which impossibilities are true. A variant of circumstantialism, namely modal Meinongianism, adds impossible objects as well. The opposite of circumstantialism, namely structuralism, has some catching-up to do. What might a structuralist logical semantics without impossible worlds or impossible objects look like? This paper makes a structuralist counterproposal. I present a semantics based on a procedural interpretation of the typed l-calculus. The fundamental idea is that talk about impossibilities should be construed in terms of procedures yielding as their product a condition that could not possibly have a satisfier, or else failing to yield a product at all. Dispensing with a ‘bottom’ of impossibilia requires instead a ‘top’ consisting of structured hyperintensions, intensions, intensions defining other intensions, a typed universe, and dual predication. I explain how the theory works by going through a couple of cases.


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