OK, it’s a short day here today – thankfully, since I’m knackered after Day #1 – with two talks. Last night we dined at an Italian Restaurant, and I learned more about Roger Swyneshed from Stephen Read, than I ever expected to learn. Talks today are:
This is a good question: I think that this is a good case where being a pluralist makes sense: if we think of validity as classifying deduction steps into those that are valid and those that aren’t, then actualist and universalist validity notions have their place. Take the step from p to actually p. This is OK in one obvious sense (we’d make a mistake to assert p and deny actually p), and bad in another (that step doesn’t work if we are under a counterfactual assumption – we grant that not p, and then consider what would have happened were p the case – we can’t infer from that to actually p).
More must be done, of course, on what it is to endorse the logic, and to say why we might like to have both of these criteria in our toolkit. I think we do want both, and I don’t think that arguing abou which of these is the ‘deductive validity’ is fruitful.
The next talk is
I’m very glad that the paper this talk was based on will be appearing in the AJL, with commentaries by others, too. So hopefully, that will bring the dynamic epistemic approach into conversation with other traditions.
Then after lunch, we’re off to the lake.
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my personal website. ¶ I am the Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews.
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