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About

I'm Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. [Email: greg at consequently.org; Skype: greg_restall; Post: Department of Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.]

Writing

These are the three last modified entries on my writing page.

“Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity 2008,” an addendum to “Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity,” to appear in Truth and Truth-making, edited by E. J. Lowe and A. Rami, Acumen, 2008. →
[with Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance] Appendix to Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons, Harvard University Press, to appear. →
“Curry’s Revenge: the costs of non-classical solutions to the paradoxes of self-reference,” in The Revenge of the Liar, ed. JC Beall, Oxford University Press, pages 262–271, 2008. →
“Anti-Realist Classical Logic and Realist Mathematics,” under revision. →
“Proof Theory and Meaning: on second order logic,” to appear in the Logica 2007 Yearbook, Filosofia. →

Classes

In Semester 2, which starts on July 31, I’ll be teaching an honours seminar 161-438 Logic and Philosophy, in which we cover proof theory and its applications to semantics.

Events

AAL2007: the annual conference of the Australasian Association for Logic, University of Melbourne November 9 to 11, 2007.

Recent Past

University of Melbourne Philosophy Undergraduate Workshop, University of Melbourne September 21 to 23, 2007.

Logic Colloquium 2007, Wrocław, Poland, July 14-19, 2007.

1st GPMR Workshop on Logic & Semantics on Medieval Logic and Modern Applied Logic, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany, on June 28-30, 2007.

Logica 2007, Hejnice Monastery, Czech Republic, 18-22 June 2007.

Heart of Philosophy Café talk and discussion on “What Marx, Freud and Nietzsche have taught me about belief in God”. Tuesday May 8, 7--9pm in the Merrick's General Store.

Week 1

We’re now in the second day of “week 1” of Michaelmas, here in Oxford, and the philosophy faculty library is considerably busier than it was in week 0, let alone the negative weeks. It’s just as well that I’ve got some writing done already. Today I’m heading off to Nottingham to give two talks. The Philosophy Department will get the first outing of my fresh-off-the-presses paper Invention is the Mother of Necessity in which I try out a (new, I hope) semantically anti-realist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility. Have a look at the paper and let me know what you think, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’ll be presenting it also in Bristol, St. Andrews and here in Oxford, so it will probably see signifiant modifications and updates over the next months. The other talk is the formal partner of that one, on proof theory for S5. I’m still writing the notes up for this (we’ll see how much I can get written on the train today), and I’ll upload that when I can.

Then, with these papers largely written, I can get back to the book! I’m looking forward to it.

Posted 07:46 PM on October 11, 2005

Comments

Impressive work. I think the paper makes great progress on implementing the insights of Dummett and Brandom into the concept of logical consequence. But I’m a bit suprised that there’s no reference to Prawitz or other work in proof-theoretical semantics (like Schröder-Heister).

There seems to be two different routes of explanation now: one where assertion\rejection + (proof-theoretical) consequence gives coherence\incoherence. And another (your route) where assertion\rejection + coherence\incoherence gives (proof-theoretical) consequence. I am not sure, though, if your paper contains an argument for why we should prefer the latter.

Ole Hjortland , October 13, 2005 11:09 PM

Sounds great Greg. I really like it, it fits with my gut feels about modality and the neat connection to the proof theory is lovely. I had a thought and a question. In reverse order …

The question (long extended question) is concerned with why you think this is a semantic anti-realist approach. I got the justification coming from something other than truth conditions being the centre of the meaning-theory but I wasn’t sure if that was enough. In ‘the logical basis of metaphysics’ Dummett argues that a theory of truth has to be central to a meaning-theory even if it is not the most important aspect. I guess that you may want to deny this and have the meaning-theory based on proof theory alone. The proof of the pudding for Dummett would be that bivalence does not hold for discourse concerning possible worlds, why did you not consider this? Does bivalence hold?

The thought was concerned with generalising this to other forms of modal logic, something that from one footnote it seems you have already thought about (i vaguely recall the proof theory side). The idea goes like this. You have suggested that sometimes we suppose P to be the case even thought it isn’t, this shifts us to another context…., well what if I supposed that []P was the case even though P is not the case. Now we shift to a context where I can assert []P but this can no be used to conclude that I am free to assert P in the actual context. Similarly supposing ~P when []P is the case and so on (and supposing modal propositions in further contexts). Each of these would demand alterations to the proof rules and, in effect, giving different modal logics. In the footnote regarding use of other modal logics you suggested that this would require a change to what contexts were, that might be what is behind my suggestion but I’m not sure about that.

NotThisHandle , October 17, 2005 12:49 PM

Greg, I do like the ‘really long title’ displayed in your photo. It has caused me to reflect on the issue of ‘title anxiety’ (perhaps only a problem for us early career people) - I submitted a title for a paper on a panel and when the panel details came out I discovered that my title was about twice as long as everyone else’s. Will people think I’m pretentious? Or trying to hog the limelight? Will I be forever known as that tacky Australian who insisted on using a quote in her title?

Joanna , November 11, 2005 08:35 AM

Hope you and your family and in special Z like everything in England and feel at home.

All the suddenly the Goldblatt-Thomason theorem is getting fashionable once again in the discussion of the semantics of modal systems, especially in the discussion of Kripke Semantics.

But I have a far simpler question for you, since I am no expert in metaphysics. You talk about necessity and possibility. I assume that you somehow approach the issues using some concepts of Modal Logic. The question I have in mind is this:

When the subject is metaphysics, do you also think of a formal language and a system, so that everything that one derives syntactically can be proven semantically? Or is metaphysics so especial that, by any reason, this fact does not apply? Forgive my ignorance.

Tony Marmo , November 14, 2005 03:10 AM