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252Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis: a systematic comparisonSynthese 197 (3): 1011-1034. 2020.A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both have the potential to serve as instrument for soci…Read more
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226The Different Ways in which Logic is (said to be) FormalHistory and Philosophy of Logic 32 (4). 2011.What does it mean to say that logic is formal? The short answer is: it means (or can mean) several different things. In this paper, I argue that there are (at least) eight main variations of the notion of the formal that are relevant for current discussions in philosophy and logic, and that they are structured in two main clusters, namely the formal as pertaining to forms, and the formal as pertaining to rules. To the first cluster belong the formal as schematic; the formal as indifference to pa…Read more
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170Reassessing logical hylomorphism and the demarcation of logical constantsSynthese 185 (3). 2012.The paper investigates the propriety of applying the form versus matter distinction to arguments and to logic in general. Its main point is that many of the currently pervasive views on form and matter with respect to logic rest on several substantive and even contentious assumptions which are nevertheless uncritically accepted. Indeed, many of the issues raised by the application of this distinction to arguments seem to be related to a questionable combination of different presuppositions and e…Read more
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111VII—Can Arguments Change Minds?Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 123 (2): 173-198. 2023.Can arguments change minds? Philosophers like to think that they can. However, a wealth of empirical evidence suggests that arguments are not very efficient tools to change minds. What to make of the different assessments of the mind-changing potential of arguments? To address this issue, we must take into account the broader contexts in which arguments occur, in particular the propagation of messages across networks of attention, and the choices that epistemic agents must make between alternati…Read more
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104A Contentious Trinity: Levels of Entailment in Brandom’s Pragmatist InferentialismPhilosophia 40 (1): 41-53. 2012.We investigate the relations among Brandom’s three dimensions of semantic inferential articulation, namely, incompatibility entailments, committive consequences, and permissive consequences. In his unpublished manuscript “Conceptual Content and Discursive Practice” Brandom argues that (1) incompatibility entailment implies committive consequence, and that (2) committive consequence in turn implies permissive consequence. We criticize this hierarchy both on internal and external grounds. Firstly,…Read more
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100A Dialogical, Multi‐Agent Account of the Normativity of LogicDialectica 69 (4): 587-609. 2015.The paper argues that much of the difficulty with making progress on the issue of the normativity of logic for thought, as discussed in the literature, stems from a misapprehension of what logic is normative for. The claim is that, rather than mono-agent mental processes, logic in fact comprises norms for quite specific situations of multi-agent dialogical interactions, in particular special forms of debates. This reconceptualization is inspired by historical developments in logic and mathematic…Read more
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89Roger Swyneshed’s Obligationes: A Logical Game of Inference Recognition?Synthese 151 (1). 2006.In [Dutilh Novaes, Medieval-obligations as logical Games of Consistency maintenance, synthese, (2004)], I proposed a reconstruction of Walter Burley’s theory of obligationes, based on the idea that Burley’s theory of obligationes could be seen as a logical game of consistency maintenance. In the present paper, I intend to test the game hypothesis on another important theory of obligationes, namely Roger Swyneshed’s theory. In his treatise on obligationes [edited by P.V. Spade, cf. Spade History …Read more
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87Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divideSynthese 196 (7): 2583-2597. 2019.It is often remarked that first-order Peano Arithmetic is non-categorical but deductively well-behaved, while second-order Peano Arithmetic is categorical but deductively ill-behaved. This suggests that, when it comes to axiomatizations of mathematical theories, expressive power and deductive power may be orthogonal, mutually exclusive desiderata. In this paper, I turn to Hintikka’s :69–90, 1989) distinction between descriptive and deductive approaches in the foundations of mathematics to discus…Read more
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83This book presents novel formalizations of three of the most important medieval logical theories: supposition, consequence and obligations. In an additional fourth part, an in-depth analysis of the concept of formalization is presented - a crucial concept in the current logical panorama, which as such receives surprisingly little attention.Although formalizations of medieval logical theories have been proposed earlier in the literature, the formalizations presented here are all based on innovati…Read more
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77Should We Be Genealogically Anxious?Midwest Studies in Philosophy 47 103-133. 2023.Genealogical anxiety is the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by “irrelevant” factors such as personal histories and circumstances of upbringing, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs. Discussions on these irrelevant influences in the epistemological literature have so far primarily focused on their contingency. But there is another issue that merits further examination: the fact that epistemic environments condition beliefs suggests that epistemic agency …Read more
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68Validity, the Squeezing Argument and Alternative Semantic Systems: the Case of Aristotelian Syllogistic (review)Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2). 2012.We investigate the philosophical significance of the existence of different semantic systems with respect to which a given deductive system is sound and complete. Our case study will be Corcoran's deductive system D for Aristotelian syllogistic and some of the different semantic systems for syllogistic that have been proposed in the literature. We shall prove that they are not equivalent, in spite of D being sound and complete with respect to each of them. Beyond the specific case of syllogistic…Read more
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66Reasoning Biases, Non‐Monotonic Logics and Belief RevisionTheoria 82 (4): 29-52. 2016.A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics, probabilistic systems, belief revision systems, neural networks, among others. Now, it seems reasonable to require that formal models of human reasoning be empirically adequate if they are to be viewed as models of the phenomena in question. How are formal models of human reasoning typically…Read more
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61Pornography, ideology, and propaganda: Cutting both waysEuropean Journal of Philosophy 26 (4): 1417-1426. 2018.
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60The Role of ‘Denotatur’ in Ockham’s Theory of SuppositionVivarium 51 (1-4): 352-370. 2013.In the scholarship on medieval logic and semantics of the last decades, Ockham’s theory of supposition is probably the most extensively studied version of such theories; yet, it seems that we still do not fully understand all its intricacies. In this paper, I focus on a phrase that occurs countless times throughout Ockham’s writings, but in particular in the sections dedicated to supposition in the Summa logicae: the phrase ‘denotatur’. I claim that an adequate understanding of the role of the c…Read more
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59Beyond Single‐Mindedness: A Figure‐Ground Reversal for the Cognitive SciencesCognitive Science 47 (1). 2023.A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting mind…Read more
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54Public engagement and argumentation in scienceEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (3): 1-29. 2022.Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation _Horizon 2020_. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between scien…Read more
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53The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on ReasoningCambridge University Press. 2020.This comprehensive account of the concept and practices of deduction is the first to bring together perspectives from philosophy, history, psychology and cognitive science, and mathematical practice. Catarina Dutilh Novaes draws on all of these perspectives to argue for an overarching conceptualization of deduction as a dialogical practice: deduction has dialogical roots, and these dialogical roots are still largely present both in theories and in practices of deduction. Dutilh Novaes' account a…Read more
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43Towards a Practice-based Philosophy of Logic: Formal Languages as a Case StudyPhilosophia Scientiae 16 (1): 71-102. 2012.Au cours des dernières décennies, les travaux portant sur les pratiques humaines réelles ont pris de l'importance dans différents domaines de la philosophie, sans pour autant atteindre une position dominante. À ce jour, ce type de tournant pratique n'a cependant pas encore pénétré la philosophie de la logique. En première partie, j'esquisse ce que serait (ou pourrait être) une philosophie de la logique centrée sur l'étude des pratiques, en insistant en particulier sur sa pertinence et sur la man…Read more
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42Formalizations après la lettre: Studies in Medieval Logic and SemanticsDissertation, Leiden University. 2006.This thesis is on the history and philosophy of logic and semantics. Logic can be described as the ‘science of reasoning’, as it deals primarily with correct patterns of reasoning. However, logic as a discipline has undergone dramatic changes in the last two centuries: while for ancient and medieval philosophers it belonged essentially to the realm of language studies, it has currently become a sub-branch of mathematics. This thesis attempts to establish a dialogue between the modern and the med…Read more
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38Varieties of Logic (review)History and Philosophy of Logic 37 (2): 194-196. 2016.11We thank Rohan French for a detailed discussion of this review. We also wish to reciprocally thank Shawn Standefer for detailed discussions about the book.Logical pluralism is the view according...
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37Two Types of Refutation in Philosophical ArgumentationArgumentation 36 (4): 493-510. 2022.In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of _refutation_ in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic (_elenchus_), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples to putative definitions familiar from twentieth c…Read more
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35Articulating Medieval Logic, by Terence Parsons: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. xiii + 331, £50 (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (2): 400-403. 2015.
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33The Buridanian Account of Inferential Relations between Doubly Quantified Propositions: a Proof of SoundnessHistory and Philosophy of Logic 25 (3): 225-243. 2004.On the basis of passages from John Buridan's Summula Suppositionibus and Sophismata, E. Karger has reconstructed what could be called the 'Buridanian theory of inferential relations between doubly quantified propositions', presented in her 1993 article 'A theory of immediate inference contained in Buridan's logic'. In the reconstruction, she focused on the syntactical elements of Buridan's theory of modes of personal supposition to extract patterns of formally valid inferences between members of…Read more
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26Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy and the Inevitability of ConflictJournal of Philosophical Research 46 155-171. 2021.Overdoing Democracy is an important contribution to the literature on (deliberative) democracy, as it offers a sobering diagnosis of the risks and pitfalls of (overdoing) democracy in the form of internal critique. But the book does not go far enough in its diagnosis because it is not sufficiently critical towards some of the basic assumptions of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In particular, Talisse does not sufficiently attend to the inevitable power struggles in a society, where differ…Read more
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25Dialectic and logic in Aristotle and his traditionHistory and Philosophy of Logic 37 (1): 1-8. 2016.Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravish'd me,Bene disserere est finis logices.Is to dispute well logic's chiefest end?Affords this art no greater miracle?(Christopher Marlow, Doctor Faustus, Act 1,...
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22Formal Languages in Logic: A Philosophical and Cognitive AnalysisCambridge University Press. 2012.Formal languages are widely regarded as being above all mathematical objects and as producing a greater level of precision and technical complexity in logical investigations because of this. Yet defining formal languages exclusively in this way offers only a partial and limited explanation of the impact which their use actually has. In this book, Catarina Dutilh Novaes adopts a much wider conception of formal languages so as to investigate more broadly what exactly is going on when theorists put…Read more
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16The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2016.This volume, the first dedicated and comprehensive companion to medieval logic, covers both the Latin and the Arabic traditions, and shows that they were in fact sister traditions, which both arose against the background of a Hellenistic heritage and which influenced one another over the centuries. A series of chapters by both established and younger scholars covers the whole period including early and late developments, and offers new insights into this extremely rich period in the history of l…Read more
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13Formal Methods and the History of PhilosophyIn Sven Ove Hansson & Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Introduction to Formal Philosophy, Springer. pp. 81-92. 2012.Although not entirely mainstream, uses of formal methods for the study of the history of philosophy, the history of logic in particular, represent an important trend in recent philosophical historiography. In this chapter, I discuss what can be achieved by the application of formal methods to the history of philosophy, addressing both motivations and potential pitfalls. The first section focuses on methodological aspects, and the second section presents three case studies of historical theories …Read more
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13Consequences of a closed, token-based semantics: the case of John Buridan (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 10 (4): 592-593. 2004.
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8Numerosities are not ersatz numbersBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.In describing numerosity as “a kind of ersatz number,” Clarke and Beck fail to consider a familiar and compelling definition of numerosity, which conceptualizes numerosity as the cognitive counterpart of the mathematical concept of cardinality; numerosity is the magnitude, whereas number is a scale through which numerosity/cardinality is measured. We argue that these distinctions should be considered.
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