Philosophical Logic

Catalog description

Between the 1930s and the 1970s there was a general consensus amongst logicians that the best solution to the Liar and related paradoxes was Tarskian: no language can be allowed to contain its own truth predicate. In the 1970s this consensus disappeared, and it is now more generally held that an appropriate solution should accommodate a language with its own truth predicate. How that should be done is, of course, another matter. This course will include reading and discussing a number of papers that deal with that issue from a variety of different perspectives. Topics to be discussed include: classical vs non-classical logic, definitions of truth vs axiomatic theories, fixed point constructions, dialetheism, conditionals and restricted quantification, revenge paradoxes, sub-structural solutions