LoPSE

I see Tuomas Tahko , besides posting a bunch of pictures from his recent trip, posted also his paper on modal epistemology . It's quite interesting. Title and details below. Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, Conceivability, and Modal Epistemology ABSTRACT The combination of two-dimensional modal semantics and conceivability purports to be very powerful: it upholds modal rationalism, explains a posteriori necessity, and even accounts for metaphysical impossibilities—all this while committing to only one modal space, conceptual modality. In this paper I will examine whether two-dimensional modal semantics and conceivability can produce a complete account of modal epistemology and argue that they cannot. We will see that the framework fails to account for metaphysical modality or to deal with metaphysically substantial, essentialist statements because it is unable to distinguish between trivial and substantial modal truths.

Leszek Kołakowski , an important figure in political philosophy and an interesting Polish thinker has passed away . Brian Leiter, despite his severe criticism of Kołakowski actually cared to post a short note about this, too. [pointed out by Ziel of the Polish blog Jakies Przepisywania z Prasy Wszelakiej fame in personal communication]

Okay, I know, this isn't logic-related. Anyway, I see Elizabeth Brake's (University of Calgary) Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Marriage and Domestic Partnership is now available.

A paper I already mentioned has been accepted and is coming out in Logique et Analyse soon. I'm keeping the copyright and I like open-access stuff, so the most recent version is available here . Title and (updated) abstract below: Leitgeb, "about", Yablo Leitgeb (2002) objects against the clarity of the debate about the alleged (non-)circularity of Yablo's paradox, arguing that there are actually two notions of self-reference and circularity at play. One, on which Yablo's paradox is not circular, is defined via the reference of the constituents of a sentence, and another, on which the paradox is circular, is defined via syntactic mappings and fixed points. More importantly, Leitgeb argues that both definitions aren't satisfactory and that before we can undertake a serious debate about the circularity of Yablo's paradox we first need to clarify the notions involved. I will focus on Leitgeb's criticism of the first definition and will argue that the ...

As promised, I begin a series of posts about Non-Classical Mathematics 2009. (I've just started using this LaTeX editor for internet , so the formulas look kinda weird, I should get used to this system within a couple of weeks). The conference started with Greg Restall's talk titled Theories, Co-Theories & Bi-Theories in Non-Classical Mathematics . In the non-classical setting the assertion of a negation of a formula and its denial are different things. Those who accept gluts will assert negations of certain formulas without denying the formulas themselves. Those who accept gaps will deny certain formulas without asserting their negations. Now, in a setting of a mathematical theory we're dealing with a consequence operation such that for any A and B , if A entails B , then asserting A and denying B is a clash. This generalizes to sets of formulas. The rules we buy into unconditionally are at least these: There are two interesting negation rules: Both rules hold i...