Month: January 2017

10 Feb 2017: Noes and Nots

Shay Logan

A growing number of philosophers of logic have suggested that logic is best analyzed in terms of acceptance and rejection. In several influential papers, it has been proposed that we understand acceptance in terms of answering a yes-or-no question with `yes’ and understand rejection in terms of answering a yes-or-no question `no’. In this talk I will examine question-answer setups of this sort very generally, and use them to examine what sorts of negations can be endorsed by a deflationist about negation.

27 Jan 2017: Computing with numbers and other non-syntactic things: de re knowledge of abstract objects

Stewart Shapiro

Michael Rescorla has argued that it makes sense to compute directly with numbers, and he faulted Turing for not giving an analysis of number-theoretic computability. However, in line with a later paper of his, it only makes sense to compute directly with syntactic entities, such as strings on a given alphabet. Computing with numbers goes via notation. This raises broader issues involving de re propositional attitudes towards numbers and other non-syntactic abstract entities.