The Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science Colloquium Series and the Center for the Advancement of Logic, its Philosophy, History and Applications present

"Predicate Logic with Explicit Scope Markers"
with Rohan French, Monash University

Friday, February 14, 2014  
3:00 p.m.
Social Science Tower, Room 777

Issues of scope arise frequently in the philosophy of language, typically when non-denoting singular terms or propositional attitudes are under consideration. In this talk, French will present a sequent calculus for novel reformation of the language of predicate logic in which issues of scope are dealt with by having terms play not only their traditional ‘object denoting’ role, but also an additional ‘scope indicating’ one. In the case of names which may fail to refer, such as descriptive names like Evans’s ‘Julius’ (intended to name the unique person who invented the Zip), this allows us to distinguish two different ways of formalising a sentence like “Julius is not tall”, namely: (i) j ¬Tj and (ii) ¬j Tj. Using the sequent calculus presented French will then look at some problems in the philosophy of language concerning the interaction between the quantifiers and propositional attitudes.

For further information, please contact Patty Jones, patty.jones@uci.edu or 949-824-1520.