Here are a few different possible essay topics for 161-438 in 2006. You aren’t limited to these. If you want to write on something else, add the topic to this list by editing this page.
- Select an advanced or project question from the text and write it up.
- Do Prior's rules for 'tonk' actually define anything?
- Discuss and evaluate Bob Brandom’s discussion of ‘tonk’ in his book Articulating Reasons, and, if you are game, in Making it Explicit.
- Examine John Burgess’ discussion of cut-elimination in his paper “On Anti-anti-realism” (presented to the Workshop on Realism and Anti-Realism about Mathematics at ECAP5, Lisbon, August, 2005. To appear in a new European journal Facta Philosophica). Is Burgess right to conclude that we cannot actually eliminate cut, and the meanings of the logical connectives cannot be determined by the cut-free rules of a sequent system alone.
- What should Achilles say to the Tortoise?
- Is Restall’s account of assertion and denial as a basis for multiple conclusion consequence (in “Multiple Conclusions”) successful?
- The proper semantic treatment of quantification is neither “objectual” nor “substitutional”. Discuss.
- Prove an interpolation theorem for the modal logic S5 using the sequent system given in “Proofnets for S5: sequents and circuits for modal logic.”
- We understand possible worlds only by way of our competence with modal operators, and we can become completely competent with the modal operators by using them according to certain inferential rules. Is this correct?