This paper will address the question of whether the logic of a fiction can be specified as part of the fiction. For example, can one tell a fictional story in which it is part of the story that the logic in question is, say, K3? It seems unproblematic that we can do this. After all, we can tell a story about a world with a different geometry from ours, different physical laws, and even different numbers of dimensions (e.g. the two-dimensional world of Flatland). While allowing fictions to specify their own logics seems a natural extension of such science fiction, there are problems looming. Fictions are, by their very nature, incomplete. Specifying that the logic in question is classical is to embrace, amongst other things, classical principles such as excluded middle. But if the fictional world is incomplete, in what sense can it be part of the story that excluded middle holds? We would, in effect, be specifying that the incomplete situation described in the fiction is complete. Imposing excluded middle where it doesn’t belong leads to contradiction. These are especially pressing issues for (particular kinds of) fictionalism about mathematics.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop
September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING
September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA
September 16 Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen
September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews
September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC
October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING
October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC
October 28 Barbara Montero, GC
November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC
November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster
November 18 Matias Bulnes, CUNY
November 25 Vincent Peluce, CUNY
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto
December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney
December 16 MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT
Each colloquium is held on Wednesday at 4:15 P.M. All colloquia will take place at the Graduate Center in rooms 9205/9206 except as otherwise noted. Please call (212) 817-8615 for further information.
Download an interactive PDF version of the schedule here.
September 11 • Jonathan Adler Memorial Lecture
Philip Kitcher (Columbia University)
“Progress in the Sciences—and in the Arts”
September 18 • Note: colloquium will begin at 5:45pm
Jason Stanley (Yale University)
“Hustle: The Politics of Language”
September 25 • Note: colloquium will be held in C201/C202
Noël Carroll (CUNY Graduate Center)
“Forget Taste”
October 2
Zoë Johnson King (New York University)
“Radical Internalism”
October 23
Michelle M. Dyke (New York University)
“Could Our Epistemic Reasons Be Collective Practical Reasons?”
October 30
Stephen Grover (CUNY Queens College | Graduate Center)
“The Problem of Ugliness”
November 6
Sari Kisilevsky (CUNY Queens College)
“The Ethics of Punishment in the Age of Mass Incarceration”
November 13
Taylor Carman (Columbia University)
“Heidegger’s Nietzsche”
November 20
Luvell Anderson (Syracuse University) • Co-hosted by Minorities and Philosophy (MAP), CUNY GC Chapter
“Navigating Racial Satire”
November 27 • All-day Workshop for Practice Job Talks (Note: attendance limited to CUNY community)
TBD (CUNY Graduate Center)
TBD
December 4 • All-day Workshop for Practice Job Talks (Note: attendance limited to CUNY community)
TBD (CUNY Graduate Center)
TBD
December 11 • Alumni Day
Elvira Basevich (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
“Du Bois’s Theory of Justice”
While non-classical theories of truth that take truth to be transparent have some obvious advantages over any classical theory that evidently must take it as non-transparent, several authors have recently argued that there’s also a big disadvantage of non-classical theories as compared to their “external” classical counterparts: proof-theoretic strength. Some of them have concluded that this gives a decisive advantage to classical logic theories. Williamson has argued this too. While conceding the relevance of proof-theoretic strength to the choice of logic, I will argue that there is a natural way to beef up extant internal theories so as to remove their proof-theoretic disadvantage. Given this, the resulting internal theories should seem preferable to their external counterparts.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Spring 2020
Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU
Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING
Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC
Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications
Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence
Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest
Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC
Mar 30 David Papineau, GC
Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC
Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING
Apr 20 Michał Godziszewski, Munich
Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers
May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol
May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC
May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING
February 5
Hayley Clatterbuck (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Learning Incommensurable Concepts”
February 19
Andy Egan (Rutgers University)
“What Kind of Relativism is Right for You?”
February 26
Benjamin Vilhauer (City College, CUNY)
“Free Will and the Asymmetrical Justifiability of Holding Morally Responsible”
March 4 · Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
Tommie Shelby (Harvard University)
“What’s Wrong with the Prison-Industrial Complex? Profit, Privatization, and the Circumstances of Injustice”
Note: colloquium held in Martin E. Segal Theatre, GC
March 11 · Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
“Fragmentation and Singular Propositions”
March 18
Steve Ross (Graduate Center, Hunter College, CUNY)
“Two Conceptions of Objectivity, and How Morality is Objective When It Is”
March 25
Karen Green (University of Melbourne)
“Did Tarski Refute Frege?”
April 1
Prospective Students Day
TBA
April 22
Hagop Sarkissian (Graduate Center, Baruch College, CUNY)
“Self-Knowledge and Effective Moral Agency”
April 29
Iakovos Vasiliou (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Eudaimonism and Moral Theory”
May 6
Serena Parekh (Northeastern University)
“Global Refugee Crisis as a Structural Injustice”
May 13
Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State University)
“Beliefs and Biases”
Download a PDF version of the schedule here.
2/7: Uriah Kriegel Philosophy, Rice University
2/21: Megan Peters Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine
2/28: Iris Berent Psychology, Northeastern University
3/6: Michael Glanzberg Philosophy, Rutgers University
3/20: Sam Coleman Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire
4/3: Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini Philosophy, Rutgers University
4/26: Nicholas Shea Institute of Philosophy, University of London Philosophy, University of Oxford
5/8: Diana Raffman Philosophy, University of Toronto
I explore the implications of the Tense Phrase deletion operation known as sluicing (Ross 1969) for the semantic and pragmatic literature on the Free Choice effect (Kamp 1973, von Wright 1969). I argue that the time-honored ‘I don’t know which’-riders on Free Choice sentences, traditionally taken to show that the effect is pragmatic, are sensitive to scope. Careful attention to such riders suggests that these sluices do not show cancellation on Free Choice antecedents in which disjunction scopes narrower than the modal.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Spring 2020
Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU
Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING
Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC
Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications
Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence
Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest
Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC
Mar 30 David Papineau, GC
Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC
Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING
Apr 20 Michał Godziszewski, Munich
Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers
May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol
May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC
May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING
February 5
Hayley Clatterbuck (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
“Learning Incommensurable Concepts”
February 19
Andy Egan (Rutgers University)
“What Kind of Relativism is Right for You?”
February 26
Benjamin Vilhauer (City College, CUNY)
“Free Will and the Asymmetrical Justifiability of Holding Morally Responsible”
March 4 · Marx Wartofsky Memorial Lecture
Tommie Shelby (Harvard University)
“What’s Wrong with the Prison-Industrial Complex? Profit, Privatization, and the Circumstances of Injustice”
Note: colloquium held in Martin E. Segal Theatre, GC
March 11 · Jerrold Katz Memorial Lecture
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
“Fragmentation and Singular Propositions”
March 18
Steve Ross (Graduate Center, Hunter College, CUNY)
“Two Conceptions of Objectivity, and How Morality is Objective When It Is”
March 25
Karen Green (University of Melbourne)
“Did Tarski Refute Frege?”
April 1
Prospective Students Day
TBA
April 22
Hagop Sarkissian (Graduate Center, Baruch College, CUNY)
“Self-Knowledge and Effective Moral Agency”
April 29
Iakovos Vasiliou (Graduate Center, CUNY)
“Eudaimonism and Moral Theory”
May 6
Serena Parekh (Northeastern University)
“Global Refugee Crisis as a Structural Injustice”
May 13
Shannon Spaulding (Oklahoma State University)
“Beliefs and Biases”
Download a PDF version of the schedule here.
Debates over what is fundamental assume that what is fundamental must be either a “top” level (roughly, the biggest or highest-level thing), or a “bottom” level (roughly, the smallest or lowest-level things). Here I sketch a middle view between top-ism and bottom-ism, that a middle level could be the most fundamental, and argue for its possibility. I then suggest that this view satisfies the desiderata of asymmetry, irreflexivity, intransitivity, and well-foundedness of fundamentality, and that it is on par with the explanatory power of top-ism and bottom-ism.
2/7: Uriah Kriegel Philosophy, Rice University
2/21: Megan Peters Bioengineering, University of California, Riverside Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine
2/28: Iris Berent Psychology, Northeastern University
3/6: Michael Glanzberg Philosophy, Rutgers University
3/20: Sam Coleman Philosophy, University of Hertfordshire
4/3: Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini Philosophy, Rutgers University
4/26: Nicholas Shea Institute of Philosophy, University of London Philosophy, University of Oxford
5/8: Diana Raffman Philosophy, University of Toronto
This paper attempts to provide an exact truthmaker semantics for a family of normal modal propositional logic. The new semantics can be regarded as an “exactification” of the Kripke semantics in the sense of Fine (2014). For it offers an account of the accessibility relation on worlds in terms of the banning and allowing relations on states. The main idea is that an exact truthmaker for “Necessarily P” is a state that bans the exact falsifiers of P from obtaining, and an exact truthmaker for “Possibly P” is a state that allows the exact verifiers of P to obtain.
Logic and Metaphysics Workshop
Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU
Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia
Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING
Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC
Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications
Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence
Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest
Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC
Mar 30 David Papineau, GC
Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC
Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING
Apr 20 Michał Godziszewski, Munich
Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers
May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol
May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC
May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING