Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Australia

This morning I found out that my paper on "Paraconsistent Tense Logic, the Metaphysics of Change and the Epistemic Consequences of Dialetheism" was accepted for presentation at the Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency this summer at the University of Melbourne. Should anyone be interested, here's the abstract:

"Graham Priest has argued that there are some true contradictions, but that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low, and that as such the epistemic probability of any particular contradiction being true is very low. This claim is essential to his justification for the ‘classical re-capture.’ At the same time Priest has identified some concrete extra-semantic candidates for the status of true contradictions in analysis of the metaphysics of change. Expressed in terms of a paraconsistent logic (his own LP) outfitted with tense operators like P, which can be read as ‘it was the case that,’ Priest argues for 'Zeno’s Law,' the principle that (α & P¬α) entails the disjunction of (α & ¬α) or P(α & ¬α). Despite his repeated claims to the contrary, it will become clear that Priest is so deeply committed to the tensed theory of time that his analysis falls apart once the tenseless theory is substituted. More importantly, Priest’s argument for 'Zeno’s Law' exhibits a methodology which undermines his claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. A closer examination of this point should demonstrate that there is no good reason why arguments at least as good in more mundane contexts couldn’t turn up enough true contradictions to overturn the claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. As such, if dialetheism is correct, we are not justified in generally assigning low epistemic probabilities to contradictory outcomes in our arguments, and the ‘classical re-capture’ fails."

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