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145Around the Tree: Semantic and Metaphysical Issues Concerning Branching and the Open Future (edited book)Springer. 2013.Over the past few years, the tree model of time has been widely employed to deal with issues concerning the semantics of tensed discourse. The thought that has motivated its adoption is that the most plausible way to make sense of indeterminism is to conceive of future possibilities as branches that depart from a common trunk, constituted by the past and the present. However, the thought still needs to be further articulated and defended, and several important questions remain open, such as the …Read more
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82Truth preservation in any contextAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 47 (2): 191. 2010.Many arguments are affected by context sensitivity, because they include sentences that have different truth conditions in different contexts. Therefore, it is natural to think that a general criterion for evaluating arguments must take context sensitivity into account. One way to give substance to that thought is provided by the definition of validity offered by David Kaplan within his theory of indexicals. However, the route indicated by Kaplan is hindered by a problem whose importance is ofte…Read more
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534Saying More (or Less) than One ThingIn Richard Dietz & Sebastiano Moruzzi (eds.), Cuts and clouds: vagueness, its nature, and its logic, Oxford University Press. 2010.In a paper called 'Definiteness and Knowability', Tim Williamson addresses the question whether one must accept that vagueness is an epistemic phenomenon if one adopts classical logic and a disquotational principle for truth. Some have suggested that one must not, hence that classical logic and the disquotational principle may be preserved without endorsing epistemicism. Williamson’s paper, however, finds ‘no plausible way of substantiating that possibility’. Its moral is that ‘either classical …Read more
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23T×w epistemic modalityIn Vincenzo Fano, Francesco Orilia & Giovanni Macchia (eds.), Space and Time: A Priori and a Posteriori Studies, De Gruyter. pp. 195-208. 2014.
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381Modal PredicatesAustralasian Journal of Logic 2 44-69. 2004.Despite the wide acceptance of standard modal logic, there has always been a temptation to think that ordinary modal discourse may be correctly analyzed and adequately represented in terms of predicates rather than in terms of operators. The aim of the formal model outlined in this paper is to capture what I take to be the only plausible sense in which ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’ can be treated as predicates. The model is built by enriching the language of standard modal logic with a quantificati…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
Università Del Piemonte Orientale
Alumnus, 2001
Torino, Piemonte, Italy