Saturday, October 4, 2008

What You Don't Need Paraconsistency or Pluralism For

Yesterday, I gave a Miami Forum talk entitled "What You Don't Need Paraconsistency Or Pluralism For." Here's the abstract:

"If dialetheism is right, classical logic is wrong, at least for the context of reasoning about the domain of the inconsistent. As such, classical monism--the claim that there is One True Logic, and that logic is classical--must be rejected in favor of either paraconsistent monism or some sort of logical pluralism. Many paraconsistent logicians, however, reject the claim that there are real contradictions ‘out there in the world,’ but think that there are good reasons short of that to reject classical monism in favor of some sort of paraconsistent approach. I argue that standard defenses of this claim fail to hit their target, examining and rejecting claims that classical logic somewhow gets negation wrong, and showing how standard motivations for paraconsistency from inconsistent fiction, counterpossible conditionals and so on offered by Greg Restall, J.C. Beall, Newton Da Costa and others can be accommodated in a classical monist framework."

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Your talk sounds interesting. Are you going to post it?

Ben said...

I probably won't post the whole thing, but I just put up one blog-post-sized excerpt, and I'll probably do at least one or two others in the future.