PHIL 812 Selected Topics in Logic I

Hartry Field's Philosophies of Truth and of Logic

(Full Title: Disquotationalism, Normativity, Indeterminacy, Empirical Applicability, A priority, Modality, Pluralism....and More! Field's Philosophies of Truth and of Logic: Early. Middle, Later, Still Later...;)

Spring Semester 2012 | Evening | Burnaby

INSTRUCTOR  P. Hanson, WMC 5658

TEXT

• A selection of papers by or about or relevant to Field on truth and logic from 1972 to the present.  The selection is still to be finalized, but most will be available as PDFs through J-Stor and other licenses the SFU Library holds for electronic versions of journals, etc.  Any other material will also be made available through the Library.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Over the past 40 years, Hartry Field has published, much of it in philosophy’s first-ranked journals, a very great deal of remarkable and influential work on the nature of truth and of logic.  Field’s views on these subjects also exhibit dramatic changes during this period – e.g., from viewing truth as a causal-explanatory notion to viewing it as a mere disquotational device of ‘semantic ascent’; from viewing the truths of logic as factual to viewing their content as (at least partly) normative; from viewing the formal representation of truth conditions as involving an hierarchy of languages to viewing it as all taking place in a ‘ground language’.  This latter turns out, as Field has recently explained, to have substantive implications, via the Curry Paradox, for how we view both the nature of logical validity and the scope of logic.  The result is a highly integrated, and in many ways highly attractive, account in the making of truth and logic.  There is much to be learned from a careful tracking of the complex philosophical articulation and argumentation that has eventually led Field to his current configuration of views.  In the course of reviewing all of this, at appropriate junctures, we will look at why, especially in key metaphysical and epistemological respects, respects  that Field cares about and tries to develop, his current configuration of views has still not yet stabilized.  For instance, the accounts on offer of the modal and epistemic status of logical truths and inferences remain underdeveloped and, I will argue, problematic, and for reasons partly internal to his project.   Field is also too dismissive of what he refers to as ‘The Benacerraf Problem for Logic’, roughly, the problem of explaining how logic manages to be so useful to us – why it works so well -- in our interactions with, and in our empirical explanations of, the natural world. Field has argued that there cannot be such a problem for logic, by contrast with, say, mathematics, for reasons that draw on the so called ‘logocentric predicament’, and  partly also to do with the internalist way in which Field sees core logic as constitutive of our rationality.  I do not think that these arguments succeed.  The sobering, but perhaps for some liberating  upshot of all of this is to take us in the direction of a view of ‘core’  logic as empirical, contingent,  subject to vaguarities,  indeterminacies, perhaps pluralisms --  not the received view, certainly!

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

• One shorter paper (2400 words)
• Class presentation
• One final paper worth - 50%

NOTE:  acquaintance with Standard First Order Predicate Logic with Identity is strongly recommended (e.g., Phil 110), and at least some passing acquaintance with its core metatheory and with set theoretic notation and concepts (both normally provided in Phil 210, or thoroughly studied in Phil 214) can only help. But this course isn't primarily a course in which we do some formal logic. It is a course in the philosophy of logic. Be prepared for both a philosophically and technically challenging course.