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Cons and cons of closed workshops

In Europe (at least in logic and/or philosophy) the dominant model of a conference involves: a few invited speakers, some contributed papers (acceptance is usually based on abstracts). Some conferences diverge from this model. Sometimes, there are no invited speakers (e.g. EetN 2013). Sometimes, full contributions are required and reviewed (e.g. EetN 2010, EetN 2011, EetN 2013, TiL XIV). Sometimes, there are  no contributed papers (on purpose, I won't give any example) and the only speakers are those who were invited by the organizers.  On the face of it, closed workshops/conferences are kinda  cool: If you're the organizer: You don't have to prepare and distribute your CFP. You don't have to collect and manage the submissions. You don't have to find referees to review the submissions. You don't have to message the contributors with the results. Some of the speakers might later invite you to their closed event. If you're an invited ...

A general audience paper on Lesniewski's Mereology

This material is intended for a general audience. The paper is  forthcoming in European Review  (special issue on Logic and Philosophy in Poland). I would like to express my gratitude to Dagfinn  Follesdal for his comments. It's not going to be terribly surprising if phil  of math is your thing, but for an exposition it's almost bearable (he said proudly). Also, p. 7 par . 5 from the bottom and fn . 13 give you an example of what logician's revenge looks like (and how harmless it is). [EDIT: Thanks to Paweł Pawłowski for his correction.] [EDIT 2: Thanks to Jack MacIntosh ( this one , not this one ) for his comments and a pointer to Lowe's paper .]

Nominalistic plural quantification paper is out...

...in Synthese  (Open Access). Thanks to Oystein Linnebo for discussion and comments. Title:  Plural quantifiers: a modal interpretation Abstract:  One of the standard views on plural quantification is that its use commits one to the existence of abstract objects–sets. On this view claims like ‘some logicians admire only each other’ involve ineliminable quantification over subsets of a salient domain. The main motivation for this view is that plural quantification has to be given some sort of semantics, and among the two main candidates— substitutional and set-theoretic—only the latter can provide the language of plurals with the desired expressive power (given that the nominalist seems committed to the assumption that there can be at most countably many names). To counter this approach I develop a modal - substitutional semantics of plural quantification ( on which plural variables, roughly speaking, range over ways names could be) and argue for its nomina...