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Added by: Jamie CollinSummary: Argues against deflationary conceptions of truth. Deflationism provides a descriptive account of the term 'true', but these claims, argues Gupta, are both very strong and problematic.Comment: This would be very useful in a course on the nature of truth, or any course in which deflationary conceptions of truth are relevant. The paper is not technical and provides a good account of deflationism about truth. This would be suitable for undergraduates or graduates.
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Added by: Jamie CollinSummary: The Liar and other semantic paradoxes pose a difficult problem for all theories of truth. Any theory that aims to improve our understanding of the concept of truth must, when fully stated, include an account of the paradoxes. Not only deflationism but also its competitors - for instance, correspondence and coherence - must ultimately address the paradoxes. The question that concerns me in this essay is whether it is especially urgent for deflationism to do so. Are the paradoxes a special threat, a special problem, for deflationism? I will argue that they are not.1 Deflationists can leave the paradoxes to the specialists to puzzle over. It is the specialists who will be well served if they keep some insights of deflationism firmly in view.Comment: This would be useful in a course on the nature of truth, or on paradoxes. This is slightly more specialised than 'A Critique of Deflationism' but still good reading material for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course. The paper is not easy, but clear and not very technical.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
The concept of truth serves in logic not only as an instrument but also as an object of study. Eubulides of Miletus (fl. fourth century BCE), a Megarian logician, discovered the paradox known as ‘the Liar,’ and, ever since his discovery, logicians down the ages - Aristotle and Chrysippus, John Buridan and William Heytesbury, and Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke, to mention just a few - have tried to understand the puzzling behavior of the concept of truth.
Comment: Can be used in an advanced course on (formal approaches to) truth or the Liar paradox. Familiarity with the semantics of first-order classical logic and transfinite induction is assumed (for the latter, Ch.3 of the Blackwell Guide might be of help - using the Blackwell Guide as a blueprint may also be a way to incorporate this reading in a general advanced course on philosophical logic).
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Added by: Jie GaoPublisher's Note: The first systematic exposition of all the central topics in the philosophy of logic, Susan Haack's book has established an international reputation (translated into five languages) for its accessibility, clarity, conciseness, orderliness, and range as well as for its thorough scholarship and careful analyses. Haack discusses the scope and purpose of logic, validity, truth-functions, quantification and ontology, names, descriptions, truth, truth-bearers, the set-theoretical and semantic paradoxes, and modality. She also explores the motivations for a whole range of nonclassical systems of logic, including many-valued logics, fuzzy logic, modal and tense logics, and relevance logics.Comment: This textbook is intended particularly for philosophy students who have completed a first course in elementary logic. But, though the book is clearly written, such students still may find the content difficult, as it addresses difficult topics in the foundations of logic the primary literature for which is very technical. That said, it has been a widely used textbook for courses on philosophy of logic. Chapters of it can be used individually in accordance with the arrangements of the course.
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Added by: Jie GaoAbstract: It is often taken for granted by writers who propose - and, for that matter, by writers who oppose - 'justifications' of inductions, that deduction either does not need, or can readily be provided with, justification. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, contrary to this common opinion, problems analogous to those which, notoriously, arise in the attempt to justify induction, also arise in the attempt to justify deduction.Comment: This paper argues that justification for deduction, like justification for induction, also has the problem of circularity. It is suitable for teachings on topic of justification for inference in a course on philosophy of logic.
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Added by: Giada FratantonioSummary: In the debate over the structure of epistemic justification, epistemologists have opposed foundationalism to coherentism. In this paper, the author argues for "Foundherentism".Comment: Great as a further reading in an undergraduate epistemology course on the topic of the structure of the epistemic justification.
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Added by: Franci MangravitiAbstract:
This chapter gives a survey of the field of philosophy where the philosophical foundations of modern logic were discussed and where such themes of logic were discussed that were on the borderline between logic and other branches of the philosophical enterprise, such as metaphysics and epistemology. The contributions made by Gottlob Frege and Charles Peirce are included since their work in logic is closely related to and also strongly motivated by their philosophical views and interests. In addition, the chapter pays attention to a few philosophers to whom logic amounted to traditional Aristotelian logic and to those who commented on the nature of logic from a philosophical perspective without making any significant contribution to the development of formal logic.
Comment: Could be used in a history of logic course, as an overview of developments at the turn of the century. It spends a lot of time contextualizing and comparing Frege and Husserl's philosophies of logic, so it could also be a good further reading for a course focusing on either of them. The text assumes almost no previous knowledge of logic, or of the authors in question.
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Added by: Simon FoktContent: The paper examines various arguments looking at the responsibility psychopaths bear for their immoral actions, using neurological knowledge about psychopathy.Comment: Useful in teaching about the 'mad or bad' dilemma, and about responsibility and issues in psychiatric ethics in general.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Thomas HodgsonAbstract: A current debate in semantics and pragmatics is whether all contextual effects on truth-conditional content can be traced to logical form, or 'unarticulated constituents' can be supplied by the pragmatic process of free enrichment. In this paper, I defend the latter position. The main objection to this view is that free enrichment appears to overgenerate, not predicting where context cannot affect truth conditions, so that a systematic account is unlikely (Stanley, 2002a). I first examine the semantic alternative proposed by Stanley and others, which assumes extensive hidden structure acting as a linguistic trigger for pragmatic processes, so that all truth-conditional effects of context turn out to be instances of saturation. I show that there are cases of optional pragmatic contributions to the proposition expressed that cannot plausibly be accounted for in this way, and that advocates of this approach will therefore also have to appeal to free enrichment. The final section starts to address the question of how free enrichment is constrained: I argue that it involves only local development or adjustment of parts of logical form, any global developments being excluded by the requirement for the proposition expressed to provide an inferential warrant for the intended implications of the utterance.
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Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was born in British Jamaica, and educated in Oxford. A long-term political activist, especially in anti-racism, he taught at the Open University and was a fellow of the British Academy. He co-created and headed the Creator of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which contributed greatly to the definition and orientation of British cultural studies. In the neoliberal climate of the 1980s, Hall coined the term "Thatcherism", and generally contributed to Marxism as a founder of the New Left Review, developing a Gramsci inspired theory of power and applying textual analysis to the media. He bridged French Theory (Foucault, Derrida) with anglo-saxon race and gender theory. This 1990 paper is one example of Hall as a theorist of the Caribbean experience, diasporas, and more generally of collective cultural identities. Drawing on Senghor and Césaire, he sees in the Caribbean the intersection of several cultural traditions, and argues against an accomplished, transparent understanding of identity, trying to take into account the position of the creator of representations and the situation of discourse on identity. Hall finds two ways of thinking identity: (1) as a collective "true self" which each individual holds within themselves, the essence of which can be studied, and which he finds in Senghor or Césaire ; (2) as a "becoming" rather than a "being" (p. 225-226), in a constant transformation at the intersection of "history, culture and power". This view of identity crosses "the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture", allowing to show how something can be and not be at the same time.
Comment: This is one of Hall's most famous and discussed paper. It elaborates upon other doctrines (Césaire, Senghor, Fanon, Said), tracing their actualization in the last decades of the 20th century, and bridging them with cultural studies. It also allows to explore a specific Jamaican approach to the Caribbean, and touches on the difference between French and British post-colonization.