Nicole Wyatt

In this paper we consider whether the background logic problem actually presents a serious challenge for anti-exceptionalists about logic. We argue that logical theorizing does not depend upon a background logic to get started, but merely on the defeasible assumption that the specific arguments offered are good ones. These assumptions are compatible with multiple explanations of the goodness of these arguments, including accounts on which they are not formally valid but materially justified. Furthermore, as in other areas of science, the success of the general research program is compatible with the rejection of initial characterizations of the data—in this case initial claims about the goodness of specific arguments—as well as rejections of initial hypotheses about both the logical form of those specific arguments and the explanation of their goodness.

Despite obstacles to their participation in education and intellectual communities, medieval women philosophers made a wide variety of contributions to philosophical inquiry. This chapter illustrates this via an overview of the philosophical views of four medieval women: Hildegard of Bingen on gender identity; Heloise de Argenteuil on love and marriage; Marguerite Porete on the will and morality; and Julian of Norwich on human knowledge of God. In each case their views are compared with the views of their male contemporaries.

If validity, consequence, and related notions comprise the subject matter of logic then, intuitively, logics should provide us with explanations when those concepts are involved. On this view, a model theory might be seen as explaining why there is no way to make the premises true and conclusion false. However logical explanation, like mathematical explanation, does not fit easily into standard theories of explanation. In this chapter we give an overview of arguments for and against the claim that logics explain, survey the theories of explanation in relation to logic, and discuss the role of modelling in logical explanation. We also consider the relationship(s) between accounts of logical explanation and debates about the epistemic status of logic, and explore the tension between the descriptive goal of explanations and the traditional normative role of logic.

What constitutes illocutionary silencing? This is the key question underlying much recent work on Catherine MacKinnon's claim that pornography silences women. In what follows I argue that the focus of the literature on the notion of audience `uptake' serves to mischaracterize the phenomena. I defend a broader interpretation of what it means for an illocutionary act to succeed, and show how this broader interpretation provides a better characterization of the kinds of silencing experienced by women.

Logics—that is to say logical systems—are generally conceived of as describing the logical forms of arguments as well as endorsing cer- tain principles or rules of inference specified in terms of these forms. From this perspective, a correct logic is a system which captures only (and perhaps all) of the correct principles, and good—i.e. logical— reasoning is reasoning which at the level of logical form conforms to the principles of a correct logic. In contrast, as logical particularists we reject the idea that logical validity is a property of logical forms or schema, and instead take validity to be a property of particular in- ferences. In this paper we describe and defend this radically different approach to validity, and explore the particularist understanding of the relationship between logical systems and logical reasoning.

In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, period. In the bulk of the chapter, we develop an account of shared sexual agency we think is a plausible precondition of genuinely having sex. In the final section, we remark briefly on the issue of what it would take to form a sexual we (as we call it) with a robot. For if we can do this, we can probably have sex with robots; but if we can’t, we can’t.

Disputes about logic are commonplace and undeniable. It is sometimes argued that these disputes are not genuine disagreements, but are rather merely verbal ones. Are advocates of different logics simply talking past each other? In this paper we argue that pluralists (and anyone who sees competing logics as genuine rivals), should reject the claim that real disagreement requires competing logics to assign the same meaning to logical connectives, or the same logical form to arguments. Along the way we argue that ascriptions of logical form, as well as connective meaning, are always theory-relative.

It has become standard for feminist philosophers of language to analyze Catherine MacKinnon's claim in terms of speech act theory. Backed by the Austinian observation that speech can do things and the legal claim that pornography is speech, the claim is that the speech acts performed by means of pornography silence women. This turns upon the notion of illocutionary silencing, or disablement. In this paper I observe that the focus by feminist philosophers of language on the failure to achieve uptake for illocutionary acts serves to group together different kinds of illocutionary silencing which function in very different ways.

Fred Adams and collaborators advocate a view on which empty-name sentences semantically encode incomplete propositions, but which can be used to conversationally implicate descriptive propositions. This account has come under criticism recently from Marga Reimer and Anthony Everett. Reimer correctly observes that their account does not pass a natural test for conversational implicatures, namely, that an explanation of our intuitions in terms of implicature should be such that we upon hearing it recognize it to be roughly correct. Everett argues that the implicature view provides an explanation of only some of our intuitions, and is in fact incompatible with others, especially those concerning the modal profile of sentences containing empty names. I offer a pragmatist treatment of empty names based upon the recognition that the Gricean distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive, and argue that such a solution avoids both Everett's and Reimer's criticisms.