The Logic of The Goldhagen Debate

Since Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustattempts to show that the Holocaust is explicable and can be understood largely in terms of a single cause, “eliminationist anti-Semitism”, it is not surprising that the book has generated an international debate. What is surprising is the magnitude and emotional intensity of the debate. This article argues that the deepest flaws in it Hitler's Willing Executioners,as well as the chasm of disagreement between Goldhagen's detractors and defenders, have as much to do with reasoning and concepts as with matters of fact. It concludes that Goldhagen's central argument is stronger than many of his critics claim, but that the inadequacy of his cognitive interpretation of anti-Semitism and his unexamined psychological assumptions weaken his attempt to explain the Holocaust. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Deflationism About Logic

Journal of Philosophical Logic - Logical consequence is typically construed as a metalinguistic relation between (sets of) sentences. Deflationism is an account of logic that challenges this...     

A STIT Logic for Reasoning About Social Influence

In this paper we propose a method for modeling social influence within the STIT approach to action. Our proposal consists in extending the STIT language with special operators that allow us to represent the consequences of an agent’s choices over the rational choices of another agent.     

Limits of Abductivism About Logic

I argue against abductivism about logic, which is the view that rational theory choice in logic happens by abduction. Abduction cannot serve as a neutral arbiter in many foundational disputes in logic because, in order to use abduction, one must first identify the relevant data. Which data one deems relevant depends on what I call one's conception of logic. One's conception of logic is, however, not independent of one's views regarding many of the foundational disputes that one may hope to solve by abduction.     

Correction to: Deflationism About Logic

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of this article unfortunately contains mistakes introduced by the publisher during the production process. The mistakes and corrections are...     

On Moderate Pluralism About Truth and Logic

According to moderate truth pluralism, truth is both One and Many. There is a single truth property that applies across all truth-apt domains of discourse, but instances of this property are grounded in different ways. Propositions concerning medium-sized dry goods might be true in virtue of corresponding with reality while propositions pertaining to the law might be true in virtue of cohering with the body of law. Moderate truth pluralists must answer two questions concerning logic: (Q1) Which logic governs inferences concerning each truth-apt domain considered separately? (Q2) Which logic governs inferences that involve several truth-apt domains? This paper has three objectives. The first objective is to present and explain the moderate pluralist’s answers to (Q1) and (Q2). The second objective is to argue that there is a tension between these answers. The answer to (Q1) involves a commitment to a form of logical pluralism. However, reflection on the moderate truth pluralist’s answer to (Q2) shows that they are committed to taking logic to be topic neutrality. This, in turn, forces a commitment to logical monism. It would seem that the moderate truth pluralist cannot have it both ways. The third objective is constructive in nature. I offer an account of what moderate truth pluralists should say about logic and how they might resolve the tension in their view. I suggest that, just like moderate truth pluralists distinguish truth proper and “quasi-truth,” they should endorse a distinction between logic proper and “quasi-logic.” Quasi-truth is truth-like in the sense that instances of quasi-truth ground instances of truth. Quasi-logic is logic-like in the sense that it concerns arguments that are necessarily truth-preserving but are not generally so in a topic neutral way. I suggest that moderate truth pluralists should be monists about truth proper and logic proper but pluralists about quasi-truth and quasi-logic. This allows them to say that logic proper is topic neutral while still accommodating the idea that, for different domains, different arguments may be necessarily truth-preserving.     

The Moral Dilemmas Debate, Deontic Logic, and the Impotence of Argument

In this paper I argue for modesty concerning what theoretical reason can accomplish in the moral dilemmas debate. Specifically, I contend that philosophers' conclusions for or against moral dilemmas are driven less by rational argument and more by how the moral world intuitively appears to them.I support this thesis by first considering an argument against moral dilemmas, the argument from deontic logic, and showing that its persuasive force depends on one's having already accepted its conclusion. I then make a different, and general, case that any argument in the moral dilemmas debate concerning the defeasibility of conflicting obligations can be marginalized by making not-unreasonable adjustments in the conditions for wrongdoing.These two strands of argument are related by the notion of inescapable wrongdoing. It is our standing intuitions about inescapable wrongdoing which make the relevant deontic logical principles plausible or implausible to us. And whether wrongdoing can be inescapable is central to deciding what the conditions for wrongdoing are. My conclusion is that the arguments in the moral dilemmas debate merely implement whatever standing intuition we have concerning inescapable wrongdoing, and that apart from any such intuition the arguments are unpersuasive.     

Anderson's Overlap-Hypothesis and the Discontinuities of Growth

Role-taking ability and level of moral development were measured in three groups of boys and girls including 16 moderately retarded adolescents (mean chronological age 15; mean mental age 9), 16 nonretarded adolescents matched for chronological age, and 16 nonretarded children matched for mental age. The mentally retarded adolescents scored significantly lower on role-taking ability and moral development than the adolescents matched for chronological age. They did not differ from children of their same mental age in role-taking ability; and they tended to score lower in moral development. The results supplied qualified support for Kohlberg's theory of moral development.     

真理：重温一场传统的论战

按照对"真"的结构分析,真理论可分为:内在论、符合论、融贯论和紧缩论。这四种方案各有其适用范围,但经过深入研究发现,除符合论以外的三种方案都存在棘手的难题。融贯论不能证成逻辑上的不矛盾律,不能合理地解决如何选择"支配性"信念系统的问题,并且它和内在论都不能解决偶然真问题。紧缩论的问题则是:若将"真"理解为提供一种认知担保,与其所主张的等值图式相结合,就可推出:信念p没有认知担保当且仅当非p有认知担保,这与实际情形不相符——关于p和非p,我们有可能都没有认知担保。为摆脱传统符合论的困境,可以通过列举"老生常谈"的方式,发展一种多元真理论:"真"在不同领域取决于不同的事物——在一个区域内取决于符合,在另一个领域内取决于融贯。"超可断定性"这一概念可以解释这种多元真理论的可行性。     

The Debate: A Strategic Technique

This paper describes the work of a strategic team that came out from behind the one-way mirror. A debate among the team is enacted before the family as a strategy for change. The case of a family that refused to provide information illustrates an application of this method. The debate among the therapists represents a dilemma that is a strategically constructed isomorph of the family situation. From this position, therapists have the option of changing levels between themselves and the family, asking the family to help solve the therapists' dilemma so that they in turn can be free to help the family. The combination of the debate and the change of levels between the therapists and the family creates a therapeutic neutrality for the family. From their meta position, they observe the therapists' struggle to solve the family's problem, which is re-presented as a problem among the therapists. This perspective offers the family the choice of more adaptive solutions to their own dilemma.     

图式逻辑:哲学逻辑的一个新分支

逻辑研究有效推理,判定其有效的依据是结论所传达的信息与前提所传达的信息之间的必然关系,而传达这些信息的媒介不一定就是语言。日常推理是运用语句、图形甚至声音、气味等多种信息进行的多模态推理,对这些多模态表示系统和推理的研究已经成为心灵哲学、认知科学、心理学、教育学、数学、逻辑学和计算机科学等领域的交叉地带。自从     

A History of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate

From antiquity to the present, humans have debated whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. This presentation will survey this debate, examining the roles played in it by science, religion, philosophy, and other areas of human learning. One thesis that will be developed is that whether or not extraterrestrials exist, ideas about them have strongly influenced Western thought.     

A Paraconsistent Conditional Logic

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We develop a paraconsistent logic by introducing new models for conditionals with acceptive and rejective selection functions which are variants of Chellas’...     

A Modal Sortal Logic

An intensional semantic system for languages containing, in their logical syntax, sortal quantifiers, sortal identities, (second-order) quantifiers over sortals and the necessity operator is constructed. This semantics provides non-standard assignments to predicate expressions, which diverge in kind from the entities assigned to sortal terms by the same semantic system. The nature of the entities assigned to predicate expressions shows, at the same time, that there is an internal semantic connection between those expressions and sortal terms. A formal logical system is formulated that is proved to be absolutely consistent, sound and complete with respect to the intensional semantic system.