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This week Viviane will be leading a discussion on a paper about Val Plumwood’s feminist critique of classical negation. This will be a ‘pre-read’ discussion. The paper will be sent out with the weekly M&L email on Monday. Towards a Feminist Logic: Val Plumwood’s Legacy and Beyond By Maureen Eckert & Charlie Donahue 2020. In…

Quine, in ‘On What There Is’, discusses a problem that he calls the ‘Platonic riddle of nonbeing’. The riddle is this: ‘Nonbeing must in some sense be; otherwise what is it that there is not?’ (Quine 1948, 21). Take Pegasus, the flying stallion of Bellerophon, and the statement, ‘Pegasus does not exist’. On the one…

I think Hegel’s dialectic is, in Brandomian fashion, a very inferentialist theory of concepts. There’s conspicuous textual evidence that the majority of theoretical claims in the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic, the Encyclopaedia, are about conceptual connections. Conceptual contents are individuated by the connections with the concepts they entail and which entail them. Since theoretical as well as ordinary language expressions can be…

Belnap-Dunn logic (BD), sometimes also known as First Degree Entailment, is a four-valued propositional logic that complements the classical truth values of True and False with two non-classical truth values Neither and Both. The latter two are to account for the possibility of the available information being incomplete or providing contradictory evidence. We present a probabilistic extension of BD that permits agents…

Abstract: Semantic theories are supposed to be theories of meaning, so ascriptions of meaning should play a role in guiding and constraining our semantic theories. To play this role, however, we need to know the meaning of “means” itself. In this paper I develop a semantics for the verb “means,” as it is used to specify…