Debby Hutchins

In 1963, Frederic Fitch published a paper in which he attempted to provide a logical analysis of value concepts. Although knowledge was not the primary thrust of this paper, Fitch included knowledge in his discussion of so-called alpha-operators. He pointed out that these value concepts all function in a similar way and have the same general form: ∼alpha. Fitch argued that any statement of this form leads to a contradiction. Fitch's reasoning about value concepts led to his Theorem 5 which states: ;If there is some true proposition which nobody knows to be true, then there is a true proposition which nobody can know to be true.1 ;In other words, if there is at least one fact, the truth of which remains forever unknown, then it is not the case that all truths are knowable even in principle. Fitch's argument was rediscovered and named the "knowability paradox" in 1985 by Dorothy Edgington. ;Most anti-realists endorse the idea that all truths are knowable; hence, Fitch's proof poses a potential threat to epistemic conceptions of truth. Anti-realists have, consequently, treated his result as a paradox and have attempted to show how it may be resolved while leaving much of verificationism intact. To date, there are three classes of proposed solutions: semantic restriction; syntactic restriction and logical revision. In my dissertation, I examine the prospects for each type of solution and argue that they all fail to rescue anti-realism. I conclude that Fitch's proof is not a paradox but, rather, a valid refutation of any form of anti-realism which entails the knowability principle. ;1Frederic B. Fitch, "A Logical Analysis of Some Value Concepts," Journal of Symbolic Logic 28, Issue 2 : 137

Our goal is to analyze the distinction between factual statements and opinions from a philosophical—specifically an epistemological—perspective. Section 1 reviews the most common criteria for drawing the distinction, which while inadequate, as explained in Section 2, still plays an important cultural and political role. In Section 3, we argue that the difference between factual statements and opinions does not involve a single criterion. Instead, the conceptual structure of the terms ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’ is analogous to that of natural kinds—terms with multiple dimensions. We expect that improved theory will lead to improvements in pedagogy, decision-making, and public discourse. But these consequences are not our chief focus.

For many students, success or failure hinges on their ability to locate logic within the context of everyday thought. One way of accomplishing this task is to emphasize the connections between natural and symbolic language. Many students, however, find that symbolic logic occasionally deviates from their expectations. In particular, they commonly have difficulty understanding the rationale behind the false antecedent conditional and the inclusive disjunction. In this article, I outline a teaching strategy that employs promise keeping as an analogy for these standard interpretations of the propositional operators.

Rationality has long been held to be the hallmark of what it means to be human. Consequently, the act of deductive inference—a central element of human reasoning—may be assumed to be natural. Not surprisingly, the study of formal logic has traditionally been regarded as essential for the philosophy major and recommended for many others. Yet both empirical study and pedagogical experience suggest that we deduce, on the whole, rather poorly. In fact, reasoning within formal systems seems to pose insurmountable difficulties for some students. In this article, I suggest that both classroom experience and psychological research point to the possibility of a logic-related learning disability which I refer to as inference blindness. I further suggest that the dual-mechanism theory proposed by Vinod Goel offers the best way of understanding deductive reasoning and that the application of this theory suggests a preliminary hypothesis regarding inference blindness.