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The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized ViewpointBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1078-1083. 1991.
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453Truth and Scientific ChangeJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 48 (3): 371-394. 2017.The paper seeks to answer two new questions about truth and scientific change: What lessons does the phenomenon of scientific change teach us about the nature of truth? What light do recent developments in the theory of truth, incorporating these lessons, throw on problems arising from the prevalence of scientific change, specifically, the problem of pessimistic meta-induction?
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333Lessons on Truth from KantAnalytic Philosophy 58 (3): 171-201. 2017.Kant is known for having said relatively little about truth in Critique of Pure Reason. Nevertheless, there are important lessons to be learned from this work about truth, lessons that apply to the contemporary debate on the nature and structure of truth and its theory. In this paper I suggest two such lessons. The first lesson concerns the structure of a substantive theory of truth as contrasted with a deflationist theory; the second concerns the structure of a correspondence theory of truth. T…Read more
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9Johannes L. Brandl and Peter Sullivan (eds) new essays on the philosophy of Michael Dummett (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (1): 185-189. 2001.
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27A Characterization of Logical Constants Is PossibleTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 18 (2): 189-198. 2010....
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8Review: D. M. Gabbay, What is a Logical System? (review)Journal of Symbolic Logic 61 (4): 1396-1400. 1996.
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79A conception of Tarskian logicPacific Philosophical Quarterly 70 (4): 341-368. 1989.In this paper I develop a new conception of Tarskian logic based on Tarski’s intuitive characterization of logical consequence as formal and necessary in his 1936 paper. Special emphasis is placed on the role of logic in our system of knowledge, the origins of semantics, the semantic definition of logical consequence, and the role of logical and non-logical terms in a logical system. The paper offers a new definition of logical terms based on the question: what division of terms into logical and…Read more
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144The formal-structural view of logical consequencePhilosophical Review 110 (2): 241-261. 2001.In a recent paper, “The Concept of Logical Consequence,” W. H. Hanson criticizes a formal-structural characterization of logical consequence in Tarski and Sher. Hanson accepts many principles of the formal-structural view. Relating to Sher 1991 and 1996a, he says
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651Substantivism about truthPhilosophy Compass 11 (12): 818-828. 2016.Substantivism is a general philosophical methodology advocating a substantive approach to philosophical theorizing. In this article, I present an overview of this methodology with a special emphasis on the field of truth. I begin with a framework for understanding what is at stake in the substantivist–deflationist debate and describe the substantivist critique of deflationism. I then proceed to discuss contemporary substantivism as a positive methodology, present examples of recent substantivist…Read more
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25Book Review: Quantifiers in Language and Logic (review)Journal of Philosophy 107 (2): 103-112. 2010.
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390Epistemic Friction: An Essay on Knowledge, Truth, and LogicOxford University Press UK. 2016.Gila Sher approaches knowledge from the perspective of the basic human epistemic situation—the situation of limited yet resourceful beings, living in a complex world and aspiring to know it in its full complexity. What principles should guide them? Two fundamental principles of knowledge are epistemic friction and freedom. Knowledge must be substantially constrained by the world (friction), but without active participation of the knower in accessing the world (freedom) theoretical knowledge is i…Read more
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119Ways of branching quantifersLinguistics and Philosophy 13 (4). 1990.Branching quantifiers were first introduced by L. Henkin in his 1959 paper ‘Some Remarks on Infmitely Long Formulas’. By ‘branching quantifiers’ Henkin meant a new, non-linearly structured quantiiier-prefix whose discovery was triggered by the problem of interpreting infinitistic formulas of a certain form} The branching (or partially-ordered) quantifier-prefix is, however, not essentially infinitistic, and the issues it raises have largely been discussed in the literature in the context of fini…Read more
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626Wallace, Free Choice, and FatalismIn Steven M. Cahn & Maureen Eckert (eds.), Freedom and the Self: Essays on the Philosophy of David Foster Wallace, Columbia University Press. pp. 31-56. 2015.In this paper I reconstruct David Foster Wallace’s argument against fatalism in his undergraduate honors thesis, “Richard Taylor’s ‘Fatalism’ and the Semantics of Physical Modality”. My goal is to present the argument in a clear and concise way, so that it is easy to see its main line of reasoning and potential power. A secondary goal is to offer clarificatory and critical notes on some of the issues at stake. The reconstruction reveals interesting connections between Wallace’s argument and John…Read more
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337Truth as Composite CorrespondenceIn T. Achourioti, H. Galinon, J. Martínez Fernández & K. Fujimoto (eds.), Unifying the Philosophy of Truth, Imprint: Springer. pp. 191-210. 2015.The problem that motivates me arises from a constellation of factors pulling in different, sometimes opposing directions. Simplifying, they are: (1) The complexity of the world; (2) Humans’ ambitious project of theoretical knowledge of the world; (3) The severe limitations of humans’ cognitive capacities; (4) The considerable intricacy of humans’ cognitive capacities . Given these circumstances, the question arises whether a serious notion of truth is applicable to human theories of the world. I…Read more
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31Logical QuantifiersIn Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 579-595. 2011.This chapter offers a logical, linguistic, and philosophical account of modern quantification theory. Contrasting the standard approach to quantifiers (according to which logical quantifiers are defined by enumeration) with the generalized approach (according to which quantifiers are defined systematically), the chapter begins with a brief history of standard quantifier theory and identifies some of its logical, linguistic, and philosophical strengths and weaknesses. It then proceeds to a brief …Read more
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214On the possibility of a substantive theory of truthSynthese 117 (1): 133-172. 1998.The paper offers a new analysis of the difficulties involved in the construction of a general and substantive correspondence theory of truth and delineates a solution to these difficulties in the form of a new methodology. The central argument is inspired by Kant, and the proposed methodology is explained and justified both in general philosophical terms and by reference to a particular variant of Tarski's theory. The paper begins with general considerations on truth and correspondence and concl…Read more
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112Between logic and intuition: essays in honor of Charles Parsons (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2000.This collection of new essays offers a 'state-of-the-art' conspectus of major trends in the philosophy of logic and philosophy of mathematics. A distinguished group of philosophers addresses issues at the centre of contemporary debate: semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes, the set/class distinction, foundations of set theory, mathematical intuition and many others. The volume includes Hilary Putnam's 1995 Alfred Tarski lectures, published here for the first time.
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847The Formal-Structural View of Logical ConsequencePhilosophical Review 110 (2): 241-261. 2001.This paper offers a response to William’s Hanson’s criticism of Sher’s formal-structural conception of logical consequence and logical constants.
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44Truth and Knowledge in Logic and MathematicsThe Logica Yearbook 2011 289-304. 2012.Logic and mathematics are abstract disciplines par excellence. What is the nature of truth and knowledge in these disciplines? In this paper I investigate the possibility of a new approach to this question. The underlying idea is that knowledge qua knowledge, including logical and mathematical knowledge, has a dual grounding in mind and reality, and the standard of truth applicable to all knowledge is a correspondence standard. This applies to logic and mathematics as much as to other discipline…Read more
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35Review of Robert Hanna, Rationality and Logic (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (4): 1-6. 2007.
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78Is There a Place for Philosophy in Quine’s Theory?Journal of Philosophy 96 (10): 491-524. 1999.In the early part of the 20th century the logical positivists launched a powerful attack on traditional philosophy, rejecting the very idea of philosophy as a substantive discipline and replacing it with a practical, conventionalist, meta-theoretical view of philosophy. The positivist critique was based on a series of dichotomies: the analytic vs. the synthetic, the external vs. the internal, the apriori vs. the empirical, the meta-theoretical vs. the object- theoretical, the conventional vs. th…Read more
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64Epistemic Friction: Reflections on Knowledge, Truth, and LogicErkenntnis 72 (2): 151-176. 2010.Knowledge requires both freedom and friction . Freedom to set up our epistemic goals, choose the subject matter of our investigations, espouse cognitive norms, design research programs, etc., and friction (constraint) coming from two directions: the object or target of our investigation, i.e., the world in a broad sense, and our mind as the sum total of constraints involving the knower. My goal is to investigate the problem of epistemic friction, the relation between epistemic friction and freed…Read more
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74Functional pluralismPhilosophical Books 46 (4): 311-330. 2005.This is a critique of Michael P. Lynch’s functional pluralism with respect to truth. The paper is sympathetic to Lynch’s overall approach to truth, but is critical of (i) his platitudinous characterization of the general principles of truth, (ii) his excessive pluralism with respect to the “realizers” of truth, (iii) his treatment of atomic truth, and (iv) his analysis of “mixed” logical inferences. The paper concludes with a proposal for a functional pluralism that puts greater emphasis on the …Read more
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667The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized ViewpointMIT Press. 1991.The Bounds of Logic presents a new philosophical theory of the scope and nature of logic based on critical analysis of the principles underlying modern Tarskian logic and inspired by mathematical and linguistic development. Extracting central philosophical ideas from Tarski’s early work in semantics, Sher questions whether these are fully realized by the standard first-order system. The answer lays the foundation for a new, broader conception of logic. By generally characterizing logical terms, …Read more
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Logical TermsIn D. M. Borchert (ed.), Supplement to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan. pp. 317-319. 1996.
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