NOL Seminar with Vann McGee
published: 2023-01-10
event date:
2023-01-30
The Nordic Online Logic Seminar is organised monthly over Zoom, with expository talks on topics of interest for the broader logic community. The seminar is open for professional or aspiring logicians and logic aficionados worldwide. If you wish to receive the Zoom ID and password for it, as well as further announcements, please subscribe here: https://listserv.gu.se/sympa/subscribe/nordiclogic.
Date Monday, 30 January 2023 at 16:00 (CET), over Zoom
Speaker Vann McGee (Professor, MIT)
Title Boolean Degrees of Truth and Classical Rules of Inference
Abstract Compositional semantics that acknowledge vagueness by positing
degrees of truth intermediate between truth and falsity can retain classical
sentential calculus, provided the degrees form a Boolean algebra. A valid
deduction guarantees that the degree of truth of the conclusion be at least as
great as every lower bound on the degrees of the premises. If we extend the
language to allow infinite disjunctions and conjunctions, the Boolean algebra
will need to be complete and atomic. If we extend further by adding quantifiers
ranging over a fixed domain, we get the supervaluations proposed by Bas van
Fraassen.