Work-in-Progress Workshop: Truthmaker Semantics

14.30 – 15.30: Kit Fine: A Truthmaker Semantics for Conditional Imperatives

15.30 – 15.45: Coffee Break

15.45 – 16.45: Friederike Moltmann: Underspecification of Attitudes and Truthmaker

Semantics

16.45-17.00: Coffee Break

17.00 – 18.00: Federico Faroldi: Truthmaker Semantics for Justification Logics – Open

Problems (joint work with Tudor Protopopescu)

18.00-18.15: Coffee Break

18.15 – 19.15: Cian Dorr: Truthmaking in the Object Language

K. Fine: A Truthmaker Semantics for Conditional Imperatives

I provide a truth-maker semantics for conditional imperatives and indicate how it might be extended to other conditional constructions.

F. Moltmann: Underspecification of Attitudes and Truthmaker Semantics

It has been argued that the satisfaction conditions of a desire can be underspecified by the complement clause. This provides support for the view according to which the complement clause gives a partial content of the reported desire, where partial content is formulated in terms of truthmaker theory. In this talk, I will discuss the extent of such underspecification and whether it truly supports a truthmaker-based approach to the content of attitudes.

Optional preparatory reading here.

F. Faroldi: Truthmaker Semantics for Justification Logics – Open Problems

Justification logics are a family of logic where "implicit" modal operators are substituted by explicit terms to get formulas of the form t : A, where t could be evidence, a reason, etc. why A is known, believed, obligatory, etc., thus resulting in an “objectual” approach to modalities. In this talk we explore how to give a truthmaker semantics for justification logics, we provide some philosophical reasons to do so, and note some technical open problems.

Cian Dorr: Truthmaking in the Object Language

I consider a simple language with Boolean connectives, sentential variables and quantifiers binding them, and a connective for propositional identity (‘for it to be the case that … is for it to be the case that …’).  Using familiar techniques, the possible-worlds model theory for such a language can be ‘internalised’ to derive a theory stated in the language itself, based on the definition of ‘world-proposition’ as ‘maximal consistent proposition’, and this theory can be shown to follow from the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra. In this paper, I will consider to what extent something similar can be done for Fine’s truthmaker semantics.  This will involve looking for a way of picking out a class of special propositions to serve as surrogates for the states, and a binary relation among propositions to serve as a surrogate for the verification relation, and using these definitions to rewrite the metalinguistic definition of a model as theory in the object-language.  I will make a start at considering to what extent the axioms of this theory can be derived from an independently natural weakening of the theory that propositions form a complete atomic Boolean algebra.