A polemical account of Australian philosophy up to 2003, emphasising its unique aspects (such as commitment to realism) and the connections between philosophers' views and their lives. Topics include early idealism, the dominance of John Anderson in Sydney, the Orr case, Catholic scholasticism, Melbourne Wittgensteinianism, philosophy of science, the Sydney disturbances of the 1970s, Francofeminism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of law and Mabo, ethics and Peter Singer. Realist theories especially praised are David Armstrong's on universals, David Stove's on logical probability (...) and the ethical realism of Rai Gaita and Catholic philosophers. In addition to strict philosophy, the book treats non-religious moral traditions to train virtue, such as Freemasonry, civics education and the Greek and Roman classics. (shrink)

“Paraconsistent” means “beyond the consistent” [3, 15]. Paraconsistent logics tolerate inconsistencies in a way that traditional logics do not. In a paraconsistent logic, the inference of explosion A, ∼AB is rejected. This may be for any of a number of reasons [16]. For proponents of relevance [1, 2] the argument has gone awry when we infer an irrelevant B from the inconsistent premises. Those who argue that inconsistent theories may have some logical content but do not commit us to everything, (...) have reason to think that these theories are closed under a relation of paraconsistent logical consequence [12, 18]. Another reason to adopt a paraconsistent logic is more extreme. You may take the world to be inconsistent [14], and a true theory incorporating this inconsistency must be governed by a paraconsistent logic. (shrink)

In his famous work on vagueness, Russell named “fallacy of verbalism” the fallacy that consists in mistaking the properties of words for the properties of things. In this paper, I examine two (clusters of) mainstream paraconsistent logical theories – the non-adjunctive and relevant approaches –, and show that, if they are given a strongly paraconsistent or dialetheic reading, the charge of committing the Russellian Fallacy can be raised against them in a sophisticated way, by appealing to the intuitive reading of (...) their underlying semantics. The meaning of “intuitive reading” is clarified by exploiting a well-established distinction between pure and applied semantics. If the proposed arguments go through, the dialetheist or strong paraconsistentist faces the following Dilemma: either she must withdraw her claim to have exhibited true contradictions in a metaphysically robust sense – therefore, inconsistent objects and/or states of affairs that make those contradictions true; or she has to give up realism on truth, and embrace some form of anti-realistic (idealistic, or broadly constructivist) metaphysics. Sticking to the second horn of the Dilemma, though, appears to be promising: it could lead to a collapse of the very distinction, commonly held in the literature, between a weak and a strong form of paraconsistency – and this could be a welcome result for a dialetheist. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, a (...) position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

Why must incompatibility be symmetric? An odd question, but recent work in the semantics of non-classical logic, which appeals to the notion of incompatibility as a primitive and defines negation in terms of it, has brought this question to the fore. Francesco Berto proposes such a semantics for negation argues that, since incompatibility must be symmetric, double negation introduction must be a law of negation. However, he offers no argument for the claim that incompatibility really must be symmetric. Here, I (...) provide such an argument, showing that, insofar as we think of incompatibility in normative pragmatic terms, it can play its basic pragmatic function only if it is symmetric. The upshot is that we can vindicate Berto’s claim about the symmetry of incompatibility but only if we, pace Berto, think about incompatibility, in the first instance, as a pragmatic relation between acts rather than a semantic relation between contents. (shrink)

We present and defend the Australian Plan semantics for negation. This is a comprehensive account, suitable for a variety of different logics. It is based on two ideas. The first is that negation is an exclusion-expressing device: we utter negations to express incompatibilities. The second is that, because incompatibility is modal, negation is a modal operator as well. It can, then, be modelled as a quantifier over points in frames, restricted by accessibility relations representing compatibilities and incompatibilities between such points. (...) We defuse a number of objections to this Plan, raised by supporters of the American Plan for negation, in which negation is handled via a many-valued semantics. We show that the Australian Plan has substantial advantages over the American Plan. (shrink)

Special issue: "Reflecting on the Legacy of C.I. Lewis: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Modal Logic".

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on alternative logics. It discusses a hierarchy of logical reform. It presents case studies that illustrate particular aspects of the logical revisionism discussed in the chapter. The first case study is of intuitionistic logic. The second case study turns to quantum logic, a system proposed on empirical grounds as a resolution of the antinomies of quantum mechanics. The third case study is concerned with systems of relevance logic, which have been the subject of an especially detailed reform (...) program. Finally, the fourth case study is paraconsistent logic, perhaps the most controversial of serious proposals. (shrink)

The paradoxes of self reference have to be dealt with by anyone seeking to give a satisfactory account of the logic of truth, of properties, and even of sets of numbers. Unfortunately, there is no widespread agreement as to how to deal with these paradoxes. Some approaches block the paradoxical inferences by rejecting as invalid a move that classical logic counts as valid. In the recent literature, this deviant logic analysis of the paradoxes has been called into question.This disagreement motivates (...) a re-examination of the philosophy of formal logic and the status of logical truths and rules. In this paper I do some of this work, and I show that this gives us the means to defend the deviant approaches against such criticisms. As a result I hope to show that these analyses of the paradoxes are worthy of more serious consideration than they have so far received. (shrink)

The first degree entailment (FDE) family is a group of logics, a many-valued semantics for each system of which is obtained from classical logic by adding to the classical truth-values true and false any subset of {both, neither, indeterminate}, where indeterminate is an infectious value (any formula containing a subformula with the value indeterminate itself has the value indeterminate). In this paper, we see how to extend a version of star semantics for the logics whose many-valued semantics lack indeterminate to (...) star semantics for logics whose many-valued semantics include indeterminate. The equivalence of the many-valued semantics and star semantics is established by way of a soundness and completeness proof. The upshot of the novel semantics in terms of the applied semantics of these logics, and specifically infectiousness, is explored, settling on the idea that infectiousness concerns ineffability. (shrink)

Here, we outline UPJA’s recent developments and the contents of Volume 2, Issue 2.

Val Plumwood and Richard Sylvan argued from their joint paper The Semantics of First Degree Entailment and onward that the variable sharing property is but a mere consequence of a good entailment relation, indeed they viewed it as a mere negative test of adequacy of such a relation, the property itself being a rather philosophically barren concept. Such a relation is rather to be analyzed as a sufficiency relation free of any form of premise suppression. Suppression of premises, therefore, gained (...) center stage. Despite this, however, no serious attempt was ever made at analyzing the concept. This paper shows that their suggestions for how to understand it, either as the Anti-Suppression Principle or as the Joint Force Principle, turn out to yield properties strictly weaker than that of variable sharing. A suggestion for how to understand some of their use of the notion of suppression which clearly is not in line with these two mentioned principles is given, and their arguments to the effect that the Anderson and Belnap logics T, E and R are suppressive are shown to be both technically and philosophically wanting. Suppression-freedom, it is argued, cannot do the job Plumwood and Sylvan intended it to do. (shrink)

Consequence is at the heart of logic; an account of consequence, of what follows from what, offers a vital tool in the evaluation of arguments. Since philosophy itself proceeds by way of argument and inference, a clear view of what logical consequence amounts to is of central importance to the whole discipline. In this book JC Beall and Greg Restall present and defend what thay call logical pluralism, the view that there is more than one genuine deductive consequence relation, a (...) position which has profound implications for many linguists as well as for philosophers. We should not search for one true logic, since there are many. (shrink)

The present discussion takes up an issue raised in Section 5 of Ross Brady and Penelope Rush’s paper ‘Four Basic Logical Issues’ concerning the (claimed) triviality – in the sense of automatic availability – of soundness and completeness results for a logic in a metalanguage employing at least as much logical vocabulary as the object logic, where the metalogical behaviour of the common logical vocabulary is as in the object logic. We shall see – in Propositions 4.5–4.7 – that this (...) triviality claim faces difficulties in the face of Halldén incompleteness, for essentially the same reasons that Halldén thought this phenomenon raised seman- tic difficulties for the modal logics of C. I. Lewis exhibiting it. To counter any inclination to dismiss the phenomenon as providing at best a marginal range of counterexamples to the triviality claim, a Postscript assembles some reminders of the extent of – and the varied considerations favouring – Halldén incompleteness. (shrink)

Frame semantics for negation on the Australian Plan accommodates many different negations, but it falls short on accommodating subminimal negation when the language contains conjunction and disjunction. In this paper, I will present a multi-relational frame semantics –multi-incompatibility frame semantics– that can accommodate subminimal negation. I will first argue that multi-incompatibility frames are in accordance with the philosophical motivations behind negation on the Australian Plan, namely its modal and exclusion-expressing nature. Then, I will prove the soundness and completeness results of (...) a subminimal logic that consists of the multi-incompatibility semantics and a proof system with operational rules that characterize subminimal negation, conjunction and disjunction. Lastly, I will prove some key correspondence theorems that relate frame conditions to certain principles that are associated with stronger negations, which will give rise to a new kite of negations that includes subminimal negation. (shrink)

We present a case study for the debate between the American and the Australian plans, analyzing a crucial aspect of negation: expressivity within a theory. We discuss the case of non-classical set theories, presenting three different negations and testing their expressivity within algebra-valued structures for ZF-like set theories. We end by proposing a minimal definitional account of negation, inspired by the algebraic framework discussed.

There is a natural story about what logic is that sees it as tied up with two operations: a ‘throw things into a bag’ operation and a ‘closure’ operation. In a pair of recent papers, Jc Beall has fleshed out the account of logic this leaves us with in more detail. Using Beall’s exposition as a guide, this paper points out some problems with taking the second operation to be closure in the usual sense. After pointing out these problems, I (...) then turn to fixing them in a restricted case and modulo a few simplifying assumptions. In a followup paper, the simplifications and restrictions will be removed. (shrink)

I introduce a novel and quite intuitive interpretation of the ternary relation that figures in the relational semantics of many relevance logics. Conceptually, my interpretation makes use only of incompatibility and parthood relations, defined over a set of states. In this way, the proposed interpretation—of the ternary relation and the conditional—extends Dunn’s and Restall’s works on negation and the Routley star operator. Therefore, the interpretation is unified, and hence not only intuitive but also parsimonious. Additionally, the interpretation provides us with (...) a cogent argument to the effect that a ternary relation is indispensable, and we cannot merely do with a binary relation. (shrink)

Disjunctive Syllogism, that is, the inference from 'not-A or B' and 'A', to 'B' can lead from true premises to a false conclusion if each of the sentences 'A' and 'not-A' is a statement of a partial truth such that affirming one of them amounts to denying the other, without each being the contradictory of the other. Such sentences inevitably occur whenever a situation which for its proper precise description needs the use of expressions such as 'most probably true' and (...) so forth, is described (less precisely) by sentences not containing such expressions. (shrink)