[Alta-Logic] Talk next week

[Gillman Payette]

Title: Preservationism and Truth

Place and time: Wed Feb 24, 2:30pm. SS 1253.

Abstract:

What is preservationism? It's rather simplistic really: consequence is
given by preservation of properties between premises and consequences in
general, not simply the preservation of truth. The preservationist
position has been a methodology--what in lay parlance is a philosophy--for
the study of logic. Implicit in this methodology of studying logics by the
properties the inference relations preserve, is the thesis that logics
should be studied in this way. One can see positive results of
preservationism in the work of Bryson Brown for FDE (First Degree
Entailment). Also, preservationism has given rise to a unique approach to
paraconsistent inference in a general setting in chapters 5-7 of On
Preserving. But these uses do not sate desires for philosophical
foundations.

This paper first introduces preservationism and then give it a precise
formulation. Second, Field's discussion of Kreisel's ``squeeze" argument
for using model-theoretic consequence as capturing the intuitive notion of
validity is exposed. Discussion of Field's analysis of validity will lead
to a discussion of Field's own view on the matter of soundness and his
thesis that validity should be considered as a basic notion, given that
validity can't be captured, even extensionally, by necessary truth
preservation. I call his position ``sociologism"--to be reminiscent of
psychologism--since it relies on what we think to be valid reasoning, but
it has less of a psychological bent. It is shown how the ``sociologism"
fits with the preservationist program. The end of the paper ties the
preservationist program to the theme of universal logic.


For the moment, I wanted to send around a paper to read by Hartry Field
that gives some background if you want.



-- 
Gillman Payette
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
Ph 403.220.6463
Fax 403.289.5698


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