Category: Logic
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I might be being an idiot here, but I can't for the life of me figure out how the following inference is disallowed in the Barker-Plummer/Barwise/Etchemendy textbook: 1. Ex(Rax) 2. ExEx (Rxx) 1, E introduction This is clearly invalid, because there are anti-symmetric relations (note that if it were valid one can prove ExEx (Rxx)…
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reflections on beautiful souls, hypocrites, undecidability results, and the structure of normativity
In much of the philosophy of language and mind coming out of the late Wittgenstein and/or early Heidegger, a distinction is made between merely following a norm versus also being able to correctly assess whether others are following that norm. Note that the Brandom of "Dasein, the Being that Thematizes" (in Tales of the Mighty…
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I am currently supervising a student writing a paper on Wittgenstein’s notion of therapy as a metaphilosophical concept. The paper relies centrally on a very useful distinction discussed in N. Rescher’s 1985 book The Strife of Systems (though I do not know whether it was introduced there for the first time), namely the distinction between…
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) Genuine Realists about modality typically understand propositional content to be a function of the set of worlds where that proposition is true (the set of worlds might include impossible ones). Actualist Realists take the dependence to go in the other direction, taking a world to be a function of the set of propositions true…
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I'm currently running a series of posts at M-Phi with sections of a paper I'm working on, 'Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide', which may be of interest to at least some of the NewAPPS readership. It focuses on the idea that, when it comes to axiomatizing arithmetic, descriptive power and deductive power cannot…
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Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question. [… are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than…
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I'm not a logician. Nor do I play one on T.V. So please be patient if I'm messing up something basic in what follows. An explanation of what I'm messing up and/or some relevant citations would be pretty helpful too. Gregory Moore's masterful Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its Origins, Development, and Influence contains the following…
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(Cross-posted at M-Phi) Formal/mathematical philosophy is a well-established approach within philosophical inquiry, having its friends as well as its foes. Now, even though I am very much a formal-approaches-enthusiast, I believe that fundamental methodological questions tend not to receive as much attention as they deserve within this tradition. In particular, a key question which is…
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A few days ago, while trying to open the interwebs thingy to allow me to start entering my grades, I was prevented from doing so by a pop-up menu that referenced LSU's Policy Statement 67. The text included unsubstantiated and highly dubious claims such as that most workplace problems are the result of drugs and alcohol…
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