University of Oxford
Faculty of Philosophy
DPhil, 1978
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Interest
Medieval Logic
  •  116
    Peirce's example puts another nail in the coffin of the truth-functionality thesis. Conditionals are not truth-functional.
  •  85
    Paradoxes of Signification
    Vivarium 54 (4): 335-355. 2016.
    _ Source: _Volume 54, Issue 4, pp 335 - 355 Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine’s successors in the fourteenth century. Bradwardine’s solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequentia…Read more
  •  71
    Symmetry and Paradox
    History and Philosophy of Logic 27 (4): 307-318. 2006.
    The ?no???no? paradox (so-called by Sorensen) consists of a pair of propositions each of which says of the other that it is false. It is not immediately paradoxical, since it has a solution in which one proposition is true, the other false. However, that is itself paradoxical, since there is no clear ground for determining which is which. The two propositions should have the same truth-value. The paper shows how a proposal by the medieval thinker Thomas Bradwardine solves not only the Liar parad…Read more
  •  48
    Aristotle and Łukasiewicz on Existential Import
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (3): 535--544. 2015.
    Jan Lukasiewicz's treatise on Aristotle's Syllogistic, published in the 1950s, has been very influential in framing contemporary understanding of Aristotle's logical systems. However, Lukasiewicz's interpretation is based on a number of tendentious claims, not least, the claim that the syllogistic was intended to apply only to non-empty terms. I show that this interpretation is not true to Aristotle's text and that a more coherent and faithful interpretation admits empty terms while maintaining …Read more
  •  8
    Logical pluralism is the claim that different accounts of validity can be equally correct. Beall and Restall have recently defended this position. Validity is a matter of truth-preservation over cases, they say: the conclusion should be true in every case in which the premises are true. Each logic specifies a class of cases, but differs over which cases should be considered. I show that this account of logic is incoherent. Validity indeed is truth-preservation, provided this is properly understood.…Read more
  •  31
    Validity and the intensional sense of 'and'
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (3). 1981.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  • J. NORMAN and R. SYLVAN "Directions in relevant logic" (review)
    History and Philosophy of Logic 12 (2): 254. 1991.
  •  81
    General-Elimination Stability
    Studia Logica 105 (2): 361-405. 2017.
    General-elimination harmony articulates Gentzen’s idea that the elimination-rules are justified if they infer from an assertion no more than can already be inferred from the grounds for making it. Dummett described the rules as not only harmonious but stable if the E-rules allow one to infer no more and no less than the I-rules justify. Pfenning and Davies call the rules locally complete if the E-rules are strong enough to allow one to infer the original judgement. A method is given of generatin…Read more
  •  20
    Hugh MacColl and the algebra of strict implication
    Nordic Journal of Philosophical Logic 3 59-84. 1998.
  •  204
    In this book, Stephen Read sets out to rescue logic from its undeserved reputation as an inflexible, dogmatic discipline by demonstrating that its technicalities and processes are founded on assumptions which are themselves amenable to philosophical investigation. He examines the fundamental principles of consequence, logical truth and correct inference within the context of logic, and shows that the principles by which we delineate consequences are themselves not guaranteed free from error. Cen…Read more
  •  4
    A survey of the life of Hugh MacColl (1837-1909)
    with Michael Astroh and Ivor Grattan-Guinness
    Philosophia Scientiae 15 7-29. 2011.
    Introduction Contrary to a widespread assumption the modern history of modal logic did not start with C. I. Lewis’ Survey of Symbolic Logic [Lewis 1918]. His eminent work was preceded by some 20 years by H. MacColl’s fifth article on ‘The Calculus of Equivalent Statements’. This article was read at the London Mathematical Society on 12 November 1896. Some months later it was published in the Society’s Proceedings [MacColl 1896-1897]. During the following years MacColl presented his logic prim...