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58On the completeness of non-philonian stoic logicHistory and Philosophy of Logic 16 (1): 39-64. 1995.The majority of formal accounts attribute to Stoic logicians the classical truth-functional understanding of the material conditional and exclusive disjunction.These interpretations were disputed,...
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79A note on scale invarianceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (1): 49-55. 1983.A note on scale invariance.
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206Not every truth has a truthmaker IIAnalysis 73 (3): 473-481. 2013.A proof employing no semantic terms is offered in support of the claim that there can be truths without truthmakers. The logical resources used in the proof are weak but do include the structural rule Contraction
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54Is there a logic of confirmation transfer?Erkenntnis 53 (3): 309-335. 2000.This article begins by exploring a lost topic in the philosophy of science:the properties of the relations evidence confirming h confirmsh'' and, more generally, evidence confirming each ofh1, h2, ..., hm confirms at least one of h1, h2,ldots;, hn''.The Bayesian understanding of confirmation as positive evidential relevanceis employed throughout. The resulting formal system is, to say the least, oddlybehaved. Some aspects of this odd behaviour the system has in common withsome of the non-classic…Read more
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15Science without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural SciencesPhilosophical Books 30 (1): 62-63. 1989.
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87Frege, informative identities, and logicismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (2): 155-166. 1989.
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217Classical harmony: Rules of inference and the meaning of the logical constantsSynthese 100 (1). 1994.The thesis that, in a system of natural deduction, the meaning of a logical constant is given by some or all of its introduction and elimination rules has been developed recently in the work of Dummett, Prawitz, Tennant, and others, by the addition of harmony constraints. Introduction and elimination rules for a logical constant must be in harmony. By deploying harmony constraints, these authors have arrived at logics no stronger than intuitionist propositional logic. Classical logic, they maint…Read more
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150Bruno de finetti and the logic of conditional eventsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2): 195-232. 1997.This article begins by outlining some of the history—beginning with brief remarks of Quine's—of work on conditional assertions and conditional events. The upshot of the historical narrative is that diverse works from various starting points have circled around a nexus of ideas without convincingly tying them together. Section 3 shows how ideas contained in a neglected article of de Finetti's lead to a unified treatment of the topics based on the identification of conditional events as the object…Read more
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233On Gödel Sentences and What They SayPhilosophia Mathematica 15 (2): 193-226. 2007.Proofs of Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem are often accompanied by claims such as that the gödel sentence constructed in the course of the proof says of itself that it is unprovable and that it is true. The validity of such claims depends closely on how the sentence is constructed. Only by tightly constraining the means of construction can one obtain gödel sentences of which it is correct, without further ado, to say that they say of themselves that they are unprovable and that they are tru…Read more
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4Review of Ralph Charles Sutherland Walker: Kant: the arguments of the philosophers (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 34 (3): 312-313. 1983.
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27Annabel and the bookmaker: An everyday tale of bayesian folkAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1). 1991.This Article does not have an abstract
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14Languages of Possibility: An essay in Philosophical LogicPhilosophical Books 31 (4): 222-224. 1992.
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155Tarski on truth and its definitionIn Timothy Childers, Petr Kolft & Vladimir Svoboda (eds.), Logica '96: Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium, Filosofia. pp. 198-210. 1997.Of his numerous investigations ... Tarski was most proud of two: his work on truth and his design of an algorithm in 1930 to decide the truth or falsity of any sentence of the elementary theory of the high school Euclidean geometry. [...] His mathematical treatment of the semantics of languages and the concept of truth has had revolutionary consequences for mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy, and Tarski is widely thought of as the man who "defined truth". The seeming simplicity of his famo…Read more
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101Indicative conditionals, conditional probabilities, and the “defective truth-table”: A request for more experimentsThinking and Reasoning 18 (2): 196-224. 2012.While there is now considerable experimental evidence that, on the one hand, participants assign to the indicative conditional as probability the conditional probability of consequent given antecedent and, on the other, they assign to the indicative conditional the “defective truth-table” in which a conditional with false antecedent is deemed neither true nor false, these findings do not in themselves establish which multi-premise inferences involving conditionals participants endorse. A natural…Read more
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119Subformula and separation properties in natural deduction via small Kripke models: Subformula and separation propertiesReview of Symbolic Logic 3 (2): 175-227. 2010.Various natural deduction formulations of classical, minimal, intuitionist, and intermediate propositional and first-order logics are presented and investigated with respect to satisfaction of the separation and subformula properties. The technique employed is, for the most part, semantic, based on general versions of the Lindenbaum and Lindenbaum–Henkin constructions. Careful attention is paid to which properties of theories result in the presence of which rules of inference, and to restriction…Read more
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42Existence and Identity in Free Logic: Two CommentsMind 116 (464): 1079-1082. 2007.Professor Tennant and I agree on much regarding the proof-theoretic semantics of free logic. Here I point to two issues, one on which we disagree, the other on which I find it hard to say how closely we may agree. The first concerns the exact content of Tennant's Rule of Atomic Denotation. The second concerns the nature of assumptions whose formal counterparts contain parametric occurrences of names
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149A note on Popper, propensities, and the two-slit experimentBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (1): 66-70. 1985.
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48Notes on Teaching LogicDiscourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies 4 (1): 137-158hese notes don’t reach any conclusions. Their purpose is to point to issues one needs to think through seriously when thinking about logic teaching. They indicate some of the relevant literature where some of these issues are addressed, but they also raise points that seem to have been overlooked. They aim to promote informed discussion. That indeed was their origin: they are descended from an internal discussion document prepared a few years ago when the then Department of Philosophy at the Uni…Read more
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159Tarski, truth and model theoryProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 99 (2). 1999.As Wilfrid Hodges has observed, there is no mention of the notion truth-in-a-model in Tarski's article 'The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages'; nor does truth make many appearances in his papers on model theory from the early 1950s. In later papers from the same decade, however, this reticence is cast aside. Why should Tarski, who defined truth for formalized languages and pretty much founded model theory, have been so reluctant to speak of truth in a model? What might explain the change …Read more
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34Review of I nference to the Best Explanation (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (4): 970-972. 1993.
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62Hartry field on measurement and intrinsic explanationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 37 (3): 340-346. 1986.
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1Cohen, Jonathan L., "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Induction and Probability" (review)Mind 99 (n/a): 313. 1990.
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92Belief, Degrees of Belief, and AssertionDialectica 66 (3): 331-349. 2012.Starting from John MacFarlane's recent survey of answers to the question ‘What is assertion?’, I defend an account of assertion that draws on elements of MacFarlane's and Robert Brandom's commitment accounts, Timothy Williamson's knowledge norm account, and my own previous work on the normative status of logic. I defend the knowledge norm from recent attacks. Indicative conditionals, however, pose a problem when read along the lines of Ernest Adams' account, an account supported by much work in …Read more
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25On Tennant's intuitionist relevant logicsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1). 1996.This Article does not have an abstract