“Lukasiewicz, Supervaluations and the Future,” Logic and Philosophy of Science, 3 (2005), 1-10.
In this paper I consider an interpretation of future contingents which motivates a unification of a Łukasiewicz style logic with the more classical supervaluational semantics. This in turn motivates a new non-classical logic modelling what is “made true by history up until now.” I give a simple Hilbert-style proof theory, and a soundness and completeness argument for the proof theory with respect to the intended models.
This paper is available at http://www.units.it/~episteme/L&PS_Vol3No1/contents_L&PS_Vol3No1.htm.
Comments
Browsing over at arXiv.org, I came across a review paper on the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics (quant-ph/051161), which - to this non-expert - looks like something that this kind of thing could be fruitfully applied to, though this paper is inderterministic about the future (I think) while the histories approach is deterministic in general but indeterministic about which history you find yourself in. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Iorwerth Thomas at January 29, 2005 04:08 AM
(I think the arXiv reference is wrong: it should be quant-ph/0501161.)
Anyway, I haven’t really thought about it much (and I don’t know enough physics to read the paper quickly with much understanding) — however, I’d think that it’d be a tough call to say that a history approach like this is deterministic in general. It’s true that if you’re in a particular history (and only that history) then that “determines” what happens. (By definition, that’s what a history does.) However, the truths of history up until a moment of time are not enough to settle the future (on an approach like this). So I’d be very uneasy to say that this is a deterministic approach in any sense.
Posted by: Greg Restall at February 4, 2005 09:38 PM
I tried to download the paper, with the only effect that I got an error message:
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /papers/lsf.pdf on this server.<
Is the paper still available?
Richard Dietz
(Postdoc Research Fellow, Arche AHRC Research Centre, St Andrews, Scotland)
Posted by: Richard Dietz at April 23, 2005 02:24 AM
Ooops! Sorry about that. There was a permission problem with the file. That should be fixed now.
Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Posted by: Greg Restall at April 23, 2005 06:46 AM
Browsing over at arXiv.org, I came across a review paper on the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics (quant-ph/051161), which - to this non-expert - looks like something that this kind of thing could be fruitfully applied to, though this paper is inderterministic about the future (I think) while the histories approach is deterministic in general but indeterministic about which history you find yourself in. Any thoughts?
Posted by: Iorwerth Thomas at January 29, 2005 04:08 AM