Diversity Reading List

Abstract: Once a standard tool in the epistemologist’s kit, the analytic/synthetic distinction was challenged by Quine and others in the mid-twentieth century and remains controversial today. But although the work of a lot contemporary philosophers touches on this distinction – in the sense that it either has consequences for it, or it assumes results about it – few have really focussed on it recently. This has the consequence that a lot has happened that should affect our view of the analytic/synthetic distinction, while little has been done to work out exactly what the effects are. All these features together make the topic ideal for either a survey or research seminar at the graduate level: it can provide an organising theme which justifies a spectrum of classic readings from Locke to Williamson, passing though Kant, Frege, Carnap, Quine and Kripke on the way, but it could also provide an excuse for a much more narrowly construed research seminar which studies the consequences of really contemporary philosophy of language and linguistics for the distinction

Abstract: Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of meaning, the relationship of language to reality, and the ways in which we use, learn, and understand language. This companion provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, charting its key ideas and movements, and addressing contemporary research and enduring questions in the philosophy of language. Unique to this companion is clear coverage of research from the related disciplines of formal logic and linguistics, and discussion of the applications in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of mind. The book is divided into seven sections: Core Topics; Foundations of Semantics; Parts of Speech; Methodology; Logic for Philosophers of Language; Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy; and Historical Perspectives.

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Logical nihilism can be understood as the view that there are no laws of logic. This paper presents both a counterexample-based argument in favor of logical nihilism, and a way to resist it by using Lakatos' method of lemma incorporation. The price to pay is the loss of absolute generality.

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This chapter asks whether there is any such thing as feminist logic. It defines feminism and logic, and then goes on to present and evaluate four possible views, introducing and critiquing the work of Andrea Nye, Val Plumwood, and Susan Stebbing. It argues that Stebbing’s approach—on which feminism is one among many political applications of logic—is correct, but that feminist logic could do more, by providing a formal framework for the study of social hierarchies, much as it presently provides a formal framework for the study of numbers and similarity rankings among possible worlds.

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Some writers object to logical pluralism on the grounds that logic is normative. The rough idea is that the relation of logical consequence has consequences for what we ought to think and how we ought to reason, so that pluralism about the consequence relation would result in an incoherent or unattractive pluralism about those things. In this paper I argue that logic isn’t normative. I distinguish three different ways in which a theory – such as a logical theory – can be entangled with the normative and argue that logic is only entangled in the weakest of these ways, one which requires it to have no normativity of its own. I use this view to show what is wrong with three different arguments for the conclusion that logic is normative.

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Anti-exceptionalists about formal logic think that logic is continuous with the sciences. Many philosophers of science think that there is feminist science. Putting these two things together: can anti-exceptionalism make space for feminist logic? The answer depends on the details of the ways logic is like science and the ways science can be feminist. This paper wades into these details, examines five different approaches, and ultimately argues that anti-exceptionalism makes space for feminist logic in several different ways.

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This paper uses logic - a formal language with models and a consequence relation - to think about the social and political topics of subordination and subordinative speech. I take subordination to be a matter of three things: i) ranking one person or a group of people below others, ii) depriving the lower-ranked of rights, and iii) permitting others to discriminate against them. Subordinative speech is speech - utterances in contexts - which subordinates. Section 1 introduces the topic of subordination using examples from the 1979 novel Kindred by Octavia Butler. Section 2 uses these examples to clarify and illustrate the definitions of subordination and subordinative speech. Sections 3 and 4 then develop a way of modeling subordination using a system of social spheres, an adaptation of (Lewis, 1973)'s approach to modeling the relation of comparative similarity on worlds for counterfactuals. Section 4 looks at three possible applications for this work: giving truth-conditions for social quantifiers, identifying fallacies involving such expressions, and explaining the pragmatics of subordinative speech. The last section anticipates objections and raises further questions.

Abstract: In recent years, autopoietic enactivism has been used to address persistent conceptual problems in psychiatry, such as the problem of demarcating disorder, that other models thus far have failed to overcome. There appear to be three main enactive accounts of psychopathology with subtle, although not incompatible, differences: Maiese characterizes disorder as distinct disruptions in autonomy and agency; Nielsen characterizes disorder as behaviors that relevantly conflict with the functional norms of an individual; De Haan emphasizes patterns of disordered sense-making, that are transformed through the existential dimension. Given that these accounts are intended to provide not only an ontologically richer account of psychopathology but also reduce the stigma experienced by individuals with mental disorders by accounting for lived experience, a critical analysis of these approaches is needed. Russell provides a problematization of enactive accounts of mental disorder, showing that this particular framework does not, as it stands, necessarily reduce the harm and suffering experienced by individuals with mental disorder because of its ontological openness; enactivism leaves much to be interpreted and applied by the clinician (or patient) such that practical and ethical problems in its use arise.

Abstract: "[T]he sceptical argument that Kripke attributes to Wittgenstein, and even the 'sceptical solution', are of considerable importance regardless of whether they are clearly Wittgenstein's. The naturalistically inclined philosopher, who rejects Brentano's irreducibility and yet holds intentionality to be an objective feature of our thoughts, owes a solution to the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox." The challenge is a welcome one. Although I will argue that the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox is not a problem for naturalists only, I will propose a naturalist solution to it. (Should the Kripke-Wittgenstein paradox prove to be soluble from a naturalist standpoint but intractable from other standpoints, that would, I suppose, constitute an argument for naturalism.) Then I will show that the paradox and its solution have an important consequence for the theories of meaning and truth. The Kripke-Wittgenstein arguments which pose the paradox also put in question Dummett's and Putnam's view of language understanding. From this view it follows that truth rules must be "verificationist rules" that assign assertability conditions to sentences, rather than "realist rules" that assign correspondence truth conditions. The proposed solution to the paradox suggests another view of language understanding, according to which a speaker can express, through his language practice, a grasp of correspondence truth rules.

Abstract: After surveying the strengths and weaknesses of several well-known approaches to wisdom, I argue for a new theory of wisdom that focuses on being epistemically, practically, and morally rational. My theory of wisdom, The Deep Rationality Theory of Wisdom, claims that a wise person is a person who is rational and who is deeply committed to increasing his or her level of rationality. This theory is a departure from theories of wisdom that demand practical and/or theoretical knowledge. The Deep Rationality Theory salvages all that is attractive, and avoids all that is problematic, about theories of wisdom that require wise people to be knowledgeable.