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399The Evidential ConditionalErkenntnis 87 (6): 2897-2921. 2022.This paper outlines an account of conditionals, the evidential account, which rests on the idea that a conditional is true just in case its antecedent supports its consequent. As we will show, the evidential account exhibits some distinctive logical features that deserve careful consideration. On the one hand, it departs from the material reading of ‘if then’ exactly in the way we would like it to depart from that reading. On the other, it significantly differs from the non-material accounts whi…Read more
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357Strictness and connexivityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (10): 1024-1037. 2021..This paper discusses Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the most distinctive theorems of connexive logic. Its aim is to show that, although there is something plausible in Aristotle’s thesis and Boethius’ thesis, the intuitions that may be invoked to motivate them are consistent with any account of indicative conditionals that validates a suitably restricted version of them. In particular, these intuitions are consistent with the view that indicative conditionals are adequately formalized…Read more
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120Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural LanguageSpringer Verlag. 2018.Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as a correct answer to the ques…Read more
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Formal Languages and Natural LanguagesIn Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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The Ideal of Logical PerfectionIn Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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Further Issues Concerning QuantificationIn Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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Logical Knowledge vs Knowledge of Logical FormIn Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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Logical Form and Syntactic StructureIn Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language, Springer Verlag. 2018.
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612Counterfactual FallaciesHumana Mente 4 (19). 2011.A widely accepted claim about counterfactuals is that they differ from strict conditionals, that is, there is no adequate representation of them as sentences of the form . To justify this claim, Stalnaker and Lewis have argued that some fallacious inferences would turn out valid if counterfactuals were so represented. However, their argument has a flaw, as it rests on a questionable assumption about the relation between surface grammar and logical form. Without that assumption, no conseque…Read more
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58Logical Form and Truth-ConditionsTheoria 28 (3): 439-457. 2013.This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the …Read more
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47Per la verità: relativismo e filosofia – By Diego Marconi (review)Dialectica 62 (4): 561-564. 2008.No Abstract
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319Future Contingents and Aristotle’s FantasyCritica 39 (117): 45-60. 2007.This paper deals with the problem of future contingents, and focuses on two classical logical principles, excluded middle and bivalence. One may think that different attitudes are to be adopted towards these two principles in order to solve the problem. According to what seems to be a widely held hypothesis, excluded middle must be accepted while bivalence must be rejected. The paper goes against that line of thought. In the first place, it shows how the rejection of bivalence leads to implausib…Read more
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87Validity and InterpretationAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2): 247-264. 2010.This paper claims that there is a plausible sense in which validity is a matter of truth preservation relative to interpretations of the sentences that occur in an argument, although it is not the sense one might have in mind. §1 outlines three independent problems: the first is the paradox of the sorites, the second concerns the fallacy of equivocation, and the third arises in connection with the standard treatment of indexicals. §2 elucidates the claim about validity, while §§3-5 show how the …Read more
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1141Quantification and Logical FormIn Alessandro Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics, and Language. (Synthese Library vol. 373), Springer. pp. 125-140. 2015.This paper deals with the logical form of quantified sentences. Its purpose is to elucidate one plausible sense in which quantified sentences can adequately be represented in the language of first-order logic. Section 1 introduces some basic notions drawn from general quantification theory. Section 2 outlines a crucial assumption, namely, that logical form is a matter of truth-conditions. Section 3 shows how the truth-conditions of quantified sentences can be represented in the language of first…Read more
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926Faultless or DisagreeementIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), Relative truth, Oxford University Press. pp. 287. 2008.Among the various motivations that may lead to the idea that truth is relative in some non-conventional sense, one is that the idea helps explain how there can be ‘‘ faultless disagreements’’, that is, situations in which a person A judges that p, a person B judges that not-p, but neither A nor B is at fault. The line of argument goes as follows. It seems that there are faultless disagreements. For example, A and B may disagree on culinary matters without either A or B being at fault. But standa…Read more
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747Two Notions of Logical FormJournal of Philosophy 113 (12): 617-643. 2016.This paper claims that there is no such thing as the correct answer to the question of what is logical form: two significantly different notions of logical form are needed to fulfil two major theoretical roles that pertain respectively to logic and semantics. The first part of the paper outlines the thesis that a unique notion of logical form fulfils both roles, and argues that the alleged best candidate for making it true is unsuited for one of the two roles. The second part spells out a consid…Read more
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44The expressing relationDialectica 56 (3). 2002.The paper deals with the question of what it is for a sentence to express a proposition. In the first part of the paper I argue that a certain notion of proposition widely adopted in contemporary philosophy is more theoretically loaded than is commonly assumed. The fact is that some properties are typically assigned to propositions, but no support for the claim that there are things with those properties can be found in the “evidence” from ordinary language. My point is that if we assume about p…Read more
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429Ockhamism and Quantified Modal LogicLogique Et Analyse 58 353-370. 2015.This paper outlines a formal account of tensed sentences that is consistent with Ockhamism, a view according to which future contingents are either true or false. The account outlined substantively differs from the attempts that have been made so far to provide a formal apparatus for such a view in terms of some expressly modified version of branching time semantics. The system on which it is based is the simplest quantified modal logic.
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29Brevissima introduzione alla filosofia del linguaggio – By Paolo Casalegno (review)Dialectica 66 (2): 299-300. 2012.
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38Not Everything is PossibleLogic Journal of the IGPL 15 (3): 233-237. 2007.This paper makes a point about the interpretation of the simplest quantified modal logic, that is, quantified modal logic with a single domain. It is commonly assumed that the domain in question is to be understood as the set of all possibile objects. The point of the paper is that this assumption is misguided.
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385Vagueness and QuantificationJournal of Philosophical Logic 45 (5): 579-602. 2016.This paper deals with the question of what it is for a quantifier expression to be vague. First it draws a distinction between two senses in which quantifier expressions may be said to be vague, and provides an account of the distinction which rests on independently grounded assumptions. Then it suggests that, if some further assumptions are granted, the difference between the two senses considered can be represented at the formal level. Finally, it outlines some implications of the account prov…Read more
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50Rethinking BivalenceSynthese 146 (3): 283-302. 2005.Classical logic rests on the assumption that there are two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive truth values. This assumption has always been surrounded by philosophical controversy. Doubts have been raised about its legitimacy, and hence about the legitimacy of classical logic. Usually, the assumption is stated in the form of a general principle, namely the principle that every proposition is either true or false. Then, the philosophical controversy is often framed in terms of the question…Read more
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6Il criterio informale di validitàRivista di Estetica 34 (34): 75-93. 2007.1. La logica è la teoria del ragionamento corretto. O come si dice di solito, è una teoria normativa del ragionamento. Non intende fornire una descrizione del modo in cui di fatto si ragiona, ma cerca piuttosto di chiarire in che modo si dovrebbe ragionare. Questo però non significa che la logica possa prescindere dall’osservazione dei ragionamenti che di fatto sono ritenuti corretti. Qualsiasi teoria che pretenda di fissare norme per un certo ambito deve tenere conto dei giudizi preteorici i...
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304Petitio principii: What's wrong?Facta Philosophica 7 (1): 19-34. 2005.One of the most common strategies in philosophical dispute is that of accusing the opponent of begging the question, that is, of assuming or presupposing what is to be proved. Thus, it happens quite often that the credibility of a philosophical argument is infected by the suspicion of begging the question. In many cases it is an open question whether the suspicion is grounded, and the answer lurks somewhere in the dark of what the proponent of the argument does not say. This is why it may take y…Read more
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61True in a senseGrazer Philosophische Studien 72 (1): 141-154. 2006.The aim of this paper is to show that in order to make sense of the ascription of truth and falsity to the things we say it is essential to acknowledge a divergence between two basic intuitions. According to one of them it is plausible to talk of what is said as what the speaker has in mind. According to the other it is plausible to talk of what is said as the bearer of truth or falsity. The paper presents three cases in which these two intuitions seem not to coincide, and shows how this lack of…Read more
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949Ockhamism without Thin Red LinesSynthese 191 (12): 2633-2652. 2014.This paper investigates the logic of Ockhamism, a view according to which future contingents are either true or false. Several attempts have been made to give rigorous shape to this view by defining a suitable formal semantics, but arguably none of them is fully satisfactory. The paper draws attention to some problems that beset such attempts, and suggests that these problems are different symptoms of the same initial confusion, in that they stem from the unjustified assumption that the actual c…Read more
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1121Counterfactuals as Strict ConditionalsDisputatio 7 (41): 165-191. 2015.This paper defends the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Its purpose is to show that there is a coherent view according to which counterfactuals are strict conditionals whose antecedent is stated elliptically. Section 1 introduces the view. Section 2 outlines a response to the main argument against the thesis that counterfactuals are strict conditionals. Section 3 compares the view with a proposal due to Aqvist, which may be regarded as its direct predecessor. Sections 4 and 5…Read more
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338TxW Epistemic ModalityLogic and Philosophy of Science 10 3-14. 2012.So far, T×W frames have been employed to provide a semantics for a language of tense logic that includes a modal operator that expresses historical necessity. The operator is defined in terms of quantification over possible courses of events that satisfy a certain constraint, namely, that of being alike up to a given point. However, a modal operator can as well be defined without placing that constraint. This paper outlines a T×W logic where an operator of the latter kind is used to express the …Read more
Università Del Piemonte Orientale
Alumnus, 2001
Torino, Piemonte, Italy