精东传媒

Abstract: Plato and Pegasus do not exist, but otherwise they have so much going for them. They are nameable, in range of quantifiers, and able to stand in some relations. These familiar points lead to a range of puzzles (including what Quine famously called 鈥淧lato鈥檚 beard鈥�), as to how we can name, quantifier over, and…

This week Viviane will be leading a discussion on a paper about Val Plumwood’s feminist critique of classical negation. This will be a ‘pre-read’ discussion. The paper will be sent out with the weekly M&L email on Monday. Towards a Feminist Logic: Val Plumwood鈥檚 Legacy and Beyond By Maureen Eckert & Charlie Donahue 2020. In…

Quine, in 鈥極n What There Is鈥�, discusses a problem that he calls the 鈥楶latonic riddle of nonbeing鈥�. The riddle is this: 鈥楴onbeing must in some sense be; otherwise what is it that there is not?鈥� (Quine 1948, 21). Take Pegasus, the flying stallion of Bellerophon, and the statement, 鈥楶egasus does not exist鈥�. On the one…

I think Hegel鈥檚 dialectic is, in Brandomian fashion, a very inferentialist theory of concepts.聽There鈥檚 conspicuous textual evidence that the majority of theoretical claims in the聽Phenomenology, the聽Science of Logic,聽the聽Encyclopaedia,聽are about conceptual connections.聽Conceptual contents聽are individuated by the connections with the concepts they entail and which entail them. Since theoretical as well as ordinary language expressions can be…

Belnap-Dunn logic (BD), sometimes also known as First Degree Entailment, is a four-valued propositional logic that complements the classical truth values of聽True聽and聽False聽with two non-classical truth values聽Neither聽and聽Both. The latter two are to account for the possibility of the available information being incomplete or providing contradictory evidence. We present a probabilistic extension of BD that permits agents…

Abstract:聽Semantic theories are supposed to be theories of meaning, so ascriptions of meaning should play a role in guiding and constraining our semantic theories. To play this role, however, we need to know the meaning of “means” itself. In this paper I develop a semantics for the verb “means,” as it is used to specify…