-
1260How Expressivists Can and Should Explain InconsistencyEthics 125 (2): 391-424. 2015.Mark Schroeder has argued that all reasonable forms of inconsistency of attitude consist of having the same attitude type towards a pair of inconsistent contents (A-type inconsistency). We suggest that he is mistaken in this, offering a number of intuitive examples of pairs of distinct attitudes types with consistent contents which are intuitively inconsistent (B-type inconsistency). We further argue that, despite the virtues of Schroeder's elegant A-type expressivist semantics, B-type inconsist…Read more
-
754Model Theory, Hume's Dictum, and the Priority of Ethical TheoryErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4 419-440. 2017.It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum…Read more
-
417Handling rejectionPhilosophical Studies 180 (1): 159-190. 2022.This paper has two related goals. First, we develop an expressivist account of negation which, in the spirit of Alan Gibbard, treats disagreement as semantically primitive. Our second goal is to make progress toward a unified expressivist treatment of modality. Metaethical expressivists must be expressivists about deontic modal claims. But then metaethical expressivists must either extend their expressivism to include epistemic and alethic modals, or else accept a semantics for modal expressions…Read more
-
134A Sketchy Logical ConventionalismAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 97 (1): 29-46. 2023.Anti-realism about the foundations of logic are curiously absent from the literature. This is especially striking given natural analogies with moral anti-realis.
-
85The Semantic Conception of Logic : Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2021.This collection of new essays presents cutting-edge research on the semantic conception of logic, the invariance criteria of logicality, grammaticality, and logical truth. Contributors explore the history of the semantic tradition, starting with Tarski, and its historical applications, while central criticisms of the tradition, and especially the use of invariance criteria to explain logicality, are revisited by the original participants in that debate. Other essays discuss more recent criticism…Read more
-
82A possible worlds treatment of the normal alethic modalities was, after classical model theory, logic’s most significant semantic achievement in the century just past.[1] Kripke’s groundbreaking paper appeared in 1959 and, in the scant few succeeding years, its principal analytical tool, possible worlds, was adapted to serve a range of quite different-seeming purposes – from nonnormal logics,[2] to epistemic and doxastic logics[3], deontic[4] and temporal logics[5] and, not much later, the logic…Read more
-
58The Role of the Common in Cognitive Prosperity: Our Command of the Unspeakable and UnwriteableLogica Universalis 15 (4): 399-433. 2021.There are several features of law which rightly draw the interest of philosophers, especially those whose expertise lies in ethics and social and political philosophy. But the law also has features which haven’t stirred much in the way of philosophical investigation. I must say that I find this surprising. For the fact is that a well-run criminal trial is a master-class in logic and epistemology. Below I examine the logical and epistemological properties of greatest operational involvement in a …Read more
-
48John Woods Department of Philosophy University of British Columbia 1866 Main Mall Vancouver B.C. V6T1Z..
-
27Does changing the subject from A to B really provide an enlarged understanding of A?Logic Journal of the IGPL 24 (4). 2016.There are various ways of achieving an enlarged understanding of a concept of interest. One way is by giving its proper definition. Another is by giving something else a proper definition and then using it to model or formally represent the original concept. Between the two we find varying shades of grey. We might open up a concept by a direct lexical definition of the predicate that expresses it, or by a theory whose theorems define it implicitly. At the other end of the spectrum, the modelling…Read more
-
24“A model is a work of fiction(. There are the obvious idealizations of physics – infinite potentials, zero-time correlations, perfect rigid rods, and frictionless planes. But it would be a mistake to think entirely in terms of idealizations of properties we conceive of as limiting cases, to which we can approach closer and closer in reality. For some properties are not even approached in reality. They are pure fictions.” Nancy Cartwright..
-
20An inferential community: Poincaré’s mathematiciansIn Frank Zenker (ed.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA), May 18-21, 2011, . pp. 156-166. 2011.Inferential communities are communities using specific substantial argumentative schemes. The religious or scientific communities are examples. I discuss the status of the mathematical community as it appears through the position held by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré during his famous ar-guments with Russell, Hilbert, Peano and Cantor. The paper focuses on the status of complete induction and how logic and psychology shape the community of mathematicians and the teaching of mathematics…Read more
-
11Inconsistency RobustnessCollege Publications. 2015.Inconsistency robustness is information system performance in the face of continually pervasive inconsistencies---a shift from the previously dominant paradigms of inconsistency denial and inconsistency elimination attempting to sweep them under the rug. Inconsistency robustness is a both an observed phenomenon and a desired feature: Inconsistency Robustness is an observed phenomenon because large information-systems are required to operate in an environment of pervasive inconsistency. Inconsist…Read more
-
11The use of models in the construction of scientific theories is as widespread as it is philosophically interesting (and, one might say, vexing).1 In neither philosophical nor scientific practice do we find a univocal concept of model.2 But there is one established usage to which we want to direct our particular attention in this paper, in which a model is constituted by the theorist’s idealizations and abstractions. Idealizations are expressed by statements known to be false. Abstractions are ac…Read more
-
Introduction: The semantic conception of logic : problems and prospectsIn Gil Sagi & Jack Woods (eds.), The Semantic Conception of Logic : Essays on Consequence, Invariance, and Meaning, Cambridge University Press. 2021.
John Woods
Illinois Mathematics And Science Acadamy
-
Illinois Mathematics And Science AcadamyUndergraduate