This Semester
- 9/10Logic Colloquium: Rashed Ahmad
Logic Colloquium: Rashed Ahmad
Friday, September 10th, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs Campustba
Join us for the first Logic Colloquium of the semester:
Rashed Ahmad:
"A Recipe for Paradox (A Better Schema than the Inclosure Schema)"
Abstract:
In this paper, we provide a recipe that not only captures the common structure between semantic paradoxes, but it also captures our intuitions regarding the relations between these paradoxes. Before we unveil our recipe, we first talk about a popular schema introduced by Graham Priest, namely, the inclosure schema. Without rehashing previous arguments against the inclosure schema, we contribute different arguments for the same concern that the inclosure schema bundles the wrong paradoxes together. That is, we will provide alternative arguments on why the inclosure schema is both too broad for including the Sorites paradox, and too narrow for excluding Curry’s paradox.
We then spell out our recipe. Our recipe consists of three ingredients: (1) a predicate that has two specific rules, (2) a simple method to find a partial negative modality, and (3) a diagonal lemma that would allow us to let sentences be their partial negative modalities. The recipe shows that all of the following paradoxes share the same structure: The Liar, Curry’s paradox, Validity Curry, Provability Liar, a paradox leading to Löb’s theorem, Knower’s paradox, Knower’s Curry, Grelling-Nelson’s paradox, Russell’s paradox in terms of extensions, alternative liar and alternative Curry, and other new paradoxes.
We conclude the paper by stating the lessons that we can learn from the recipe, and what kind of solutions does the recipe suggest if we want to adhere to the Principle of Uniform Solution.
https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/ - 10/1Logic Colloquium: Dilip Ninan (Tufts)
Logic Colloquium: Dilip Ninan (Tufts)
Friday, October 1st, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs CampusITE 336
Join us for the Logic Colloquium
Dilip Ninan (Tufts)
“An Expressivist Theory of Taste Predicates”
Abstract:
Simple taste predications typically come with an ‘acquaintance requirement’: they normally require the speaker to have had a certain kind of first-hand experience with the object of predication. For example, if I told you that the crème caramel is delicious, you would ordinarily assume that I have actually tasted the crème caramel and am not simply relying on the testimony of others. The present essay argues in favor of a ‘lightweight' expressivist account of the acquaintance requirement. This account consists of a recursive semantics and a ‘supervaluational’ account of assertion; it is compatible with a number of different accounts of truth and content, including contextualism, relativism, and purer forms of expressivism. The principal argument in favor of this account is that it correctly predicts a wide range of data concerning how the acquaintance requirement interacts with Boolean connectives, generalized quantifiers, epistemic modals, and attitude verbs.
All welcome!
https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/ - 11/3Brown Bag: Marcus Rossberg & Shay Logan, "A Fine Semantics For Relevant Second-Order Logic"
- 11/5Logic Colloquium: Sarah Murray (Cornell)
Logic Colloquium: Sarah Murray (Cornell)
Friday, November 5th, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs Campusonline
Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by
Sarah Murray (Cornell):
The Logic of Speech Acts: Sentential Force vs Utterance Force
Across languages, sentences are marked for sentence type, or sentential mood, e.g., declarative and interrogative. These sentence types are associated with speech acts: assertions and questions, respectively. However, sentential mood does not determine the force of an utterance of a sentence. We argue that the semantic contribution of sentential mood is a relation that constrains utterance force. This relation takes a proposition as an argument and uses it to affect a component of the context. The semantic constraint together with additional pragmatic factors produce utterance force.
This logic for speech acts involves a semantics for the three main sentence types found cross-linguistically (declarative, interrogative, imperative) as well as a distinction between speaker commitment and discourse reference. In addition to a semantics for sentential mood, this approach provides a framework for a range of phenomena, including evidentials, parentheticals, hedges, and “speech act modifiers”. We conclude by discussing the Linguistic Modification Thesis, the idea that linguistic material can only influence utterance force by influencing sentential force.
All welcome!
Please contact logic@uconn.edu to receive the log-in information for this online talk. - 11/12Logic Colloquium: Richard Zach (Calgary)
Logic Colloquium: Richard Zach (Calgary)
Friday, November 12th, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs Campusonline
Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by
Richard Zach (Calgary):
Semantics of First-order Logic: The Early Years
Abstract: The model and proof theory of classical first-order logic are a staple of introductory logic courses: we have nice proof systems, well-understood notions of models, validity, and consequence, and a proof of completeness. The story of how these were developed in the 1920s, 30s, and even 40s usually consists in simply a list of results and who obtained them when. What happened behind the scenes is much less well known. The talk will fill in some of that back story and show how philosophical, methodological, and practical considerations shaped the development of the conceptual framework and the direction of research in these formative decades. Specifically, I'll discuss how the work of Hilbert and his students (Behmann, Schönfinkel, Bernays, and Ackermann) on the decision problem in the 1920s led from an almost entirely syntactic approach to logic to the development of first-order semantics that made the completeness theorem possible.
https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/ - 11/19Logic Colloquium: Julien Murzi (Salzburg)
Logic Colloquium: Julien Murzi (Salzburg)
Friday, November 19th, 202110:00 AM - 11:30 AMStorrs Campusonline
Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by
Julien Murzi (Salzburg)
"Revenge"
Murzi & Rossi (2020) put forward a recipe for generating revenge arguments against any non-classical theory of semantic notions that can recapture classical logic for a set of sentences X provided X is closed under certain classical-recapturing principles. More precisely, Murzi & Rossi show that no such theory can be non-trivially closed under natural principles for paradoxicality and unparadoxicality.
In a recent paper, Lucas Rosenblatt objects that Murzi & Rossi’s principles are not so natural, and that non-classical theories can express perfectly adequate, and yet unparadoxical, notions of paradoxicality.
I argue that Rosenblatt’s strategy effectively amounts to fragmenting the notion of paradoxicality, much in the way Tarski’s treatment of the paradoxes fragments the notion of truth. Along the way, I discuss a different way of resisting Murzi & Rossi’s revenge argument, due to Luca Incurvati and Julian Schlöder, that doesn’t fragment the notion of paradoxicality, but that effectively bans paradoxical instances of semantic rules within subproofs, on the assumption that they are not evidence-preserving.
Please contact logic@uconn.edu for log-in informations.
https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/ - 12/3Logic Colloquium: Damian Szmuc (Buenos Aires)
Logic Colloquium: Damian Szmuc (Buenos Aires)
Friday, December 3rd, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs Campusonline
Join us in the Logic Colloquium for a talk by
Damian Szmuc (Buenos Aires / IIF-SADAF, CONICET):
"On sequent calculi for Classical Logic where Cut is admissible"
The aim of this talk is to examine the class of Gentzen-style sequent calculi where Cut is admissible but not derivable that prove all the (finite) inferences that are usually taken to characterize Classical Logic—conceived with conjunctively-read multiple premises and disjunctively-read multiple conclusions. We’ll do this starting from two different calculi, both counting with Identity and the Weakening rules in unrestricted form. First, we’ll start with the usual introduction rules and consider what expansions thereof are appropriate. Second, we’ll start with the usual elimination or inverted rules and consider what expansions thereof are appropriate. Expansions, in each case, may or may not consist of additional standard or non-standard introduction or elimination rules, as well as of restricted forms of Cut.
Please contact logic@uconn.edu for log-in information.
https://logic.uconn.edu/calendar/ - 12/3Linguistics Colloquium: Kathryn Davidson (Harvard)
- 12/10Logic Colloquium: S. Florio, S. Shapiro, E. Snyder: Definitional Equivalence And Plural Logic
Logic Colloquium: S. Florio, S. Shapiro, E. Snyder: Definitional Equivalence And Plural Logic
Friday, December 10th, 20212:30 PM - 4:00 PMStorrs Campusonline
Join us for the Logic Colloquium for a talk by Salvatore Florio, Stewart Shapiro, and Eric Snyder on definitional equivalence and plural logic.
All welcome.
