consequently.org/news

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.

Here in Nancy, Day 1

I’m conference blogging here in Nancy at the Realism/Anti-Realism conference. It’s been neet, chatching up with people I’ve not seen for a while.

Today, after a not-completely-rested-night as I tried to sleep through a rather rowdy French community beeping car horns after their 3-1 victory in the round of 16, I went to five talks. Here’s the quick run-down.

Jacques Dubucs talked about his feasible antirealism, according to which feasible computable functions should play a role in meaning theory rather than the computable functions of more traditional constructive logic. Dubucs and Mathieu Marion and Shahid Rahman are interested in the application of substructural logics (and game semantics) to these matters, and I should have a look at this more. There are interesting connections between feasibility and structural rules, worth pursuing.
John Cogburn gave a nice paper on Moore’s paradox for anti-realists. The Moorean inference is the step from p to “I believe that p”. This inference is clearly wrong, but on semantically anti-realist lights (at least, for those kinds of constructivists for whom an argument is valid if warrant for the premises can be converted into warrant for the conclusion) then it seems valid enough. If I have warrant for p, then this warrant is the kind of thing that convinces me that p is true —- I’ll believe it. John pointed out that even for a constructivist, the fact that I can find no particular counterexample to the Moore inference (some proposition such that I assert it but deny that I believe it) it doesn’t make it valid in the general sense: since for validity, we need the inference to work in any context, and the Moore inference clearly doesn’t. If we suppose that there are truths that I don’t believe. Call one of them, p. From p we can’t infer Bp. We can allow the inference from a statement that we’ve asserted to the fact that we believe it, but it’s another move to say that this inference under hypotheses.
Me, giving my anti/realism paper. Not the best presentation of a paper I’ve ever done, but I got some good comments on the paper. Download the paper and give me some comments of your own if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Luca Moretti (I didn’t know that he was in Sydney at the Centre for Time — it’s a long way to go to find out that someone is at the other end of the Hume Highway from me) gave a talk about minimalism about truth and whether it’s neutral between realism and anti-realism. Luca pointed out that on Wright’s kind of pluralism, we can apply the minimalist T principle to the claim that if p then p (for some choice of p in mind: Luca chose “snow is white”, I think). It’s true that if p then p iff if p then p, and this biconditional is true necessarily. (Wright’s minimalism is about the T biconditional for propositions.) Now, since it’s necessary that if p then p, we can infer that it’s necessary that (it’s true that if p then p). But this has the form “necessarily Fa” (as the claim of truth is a predication of truth to a proposition), and so, we can infer that it’s necessary that a exists. Here a is the proposition that if p then p: this proposition exists necessarily. This kind of minimialism, allegedly neutral between kinds of realism and anti-realism seems to conclude a kind of realism about propositions. Sorting out the options here seems quite difficult.
Michael Lynch gave a paper about pluralism about truth, and distinguishing role functionalism about truth from other kinds of pluralism about truth. The motivating idea is that there are different ways that things can be true: correspondence, coherence, etc., describe different ways that things can be true, and different kinds of things can be true in different ways. Lynch argued that you can make sense of this kind of intuition if you are happy to say that there’s an overarching role that truth can play and that there are different realisers to this role. I think that there’s something quite interesting in this, however, I’m hampered by my lack of a clear understanding when people confidently individuate properties… (this is common in all discussions of the role/realiser distinction, and I see people having confident intuitions of one property (say pain) realised by another property (brain state)).

More blogging later if the wireless is still working. Now I’m off to drinks…

Posted 12:32 AM on June 29, 2006

Comments

I’m pretty sure that the links to your paper are wrong. They should probably point to http://consequently.org/writing/antirealist/.

Cheers.

thsutton , June 29, 2006 02:13 AM

Thanks! The link is fixed.

Greg Restall , June 29, 2006 06:50 AM

About Cogburn’s thoughts:

I agree that [A] below is really a problem for natural languages: [A] p ⇒ ◊p

Examples: (1) #If it is snowing outside, then it may be snowing outside.

As a linguist I know these phenomena. But, the point for a logician is completely different. Cogburn is asserting that A is wrong. Now, how can we think of a modal system S-[A], i.e., a modal system where [A] is not an axiom?

Sentence (1) may be infelicitous, for the consequent provides less information than the antecedent, but it is not false. And it is difficult to think that p is the case and at the same time may not be the case,i.e., there is no possible world where it is the case. It is redundant to assume that if p is the case then there is a possible world where it is the case.

Of course, if we consider that the epistemic agent is a modal parameter the story is a little bit different. Assume that we talk about an individual, Barney. Then (3) is not evident:

(3) If it is snowing then Barney believes it is snowing. p&<B>p

Moore’s paradox surfaces when the epistemic agent and the utterer are the same:

(4) I do not believe in the existence of witches but they do exist. p&¬<I>p

Tony Marmo , June 30, 2006 09:05 AM

The paper link isn’t working for me … :(

Carrie Jenkins , June 30, 2006 06:39 PM

Gosh! I managed to bugger up the link again. It should be fixed now: the link should’ve been to http://consequently.org/writing/antirealist/

Greg Restall , June 30, 2006 06:47 PM