Thomas M Ferguson

In this talk, I aim to connect two strands of work related to strict-tolerant consequence and the logic of paradox (LP). First is work (“Monstrous Content and the Bounds of Discourse”, JPL) that argues that considerations of topic-theoretic conversational boundaries are captured by the strict-tolerant interpretation of weak Kleene matrices. Second is work (“Deep ST”, JPL) arguing that all the metainferential properties of inference rules in the strict-tolerant hierarchy are already encoded in standard LP. Synthesizing these two strands is particularly useful when asking about settings accommodating both topic-theoretic and veridical semantic defects. Importantly, this synthesis yields a novel defense of LP as a particularly compelling logic and allows a reevaluation of the failure of detachability for the LP conditional.

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