Logic and Foundations of Mathematics Commons^™

Necessity, Essence And Analyticity: Toward An Analytic Essentialist Account Of Necessity, Dongwoo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Some truths could not have failed to hold. Such are called metaphysically necessary truths. As Michael Dummett once aptly formulated, the philosophical problem about necessity is twofold: what makes necessary truths necessarily true and how do we recognize them as such? This dissertation aims to address these questions by developing and defending a novel account of necessity, which has the following three main theses: (1) the necessity of a statement about an entity is established as a consequence of a general principle implying that if the entity is a certain way then it is necessarily that way and the fact …

Logical Pluralism And Vicious Regresses, Daniel Boyd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This material in this dissertation will be divided into two parts. The first part is a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in the philosophy of logic in the 20th century. The second part will focus on three different versions of logical pluralism, i.e., the view that there are many correct logics. In each case an argument will be developed to show that these versions of logical pluralism result in a vicious regress.

The material in part one will be divided into three chapters, and there are a few reasons for having a preliminary discussion of vicious regress arguments in …

The C3 Conditional: A Variably Strict Ordinary-Language Conditional, Monique L. Whitaker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I provide a novel logic of the ordinary-language conditional. First, however, I endeavor to make clearer and more precise just what the objects of the study of the conditional are, as a lack of clarity as to what counts as an instance of a given category of conditional has resulted in deep and significant confusions in subsequent analysis. I motivate for a factual/counterfactual distinction, though not at the level of particular instances of the conditional. Instead, I argue that each individual instance of the conditional may be interpreted either factually or counterfactually, rather than these instances dividing …