Expressing Validity: Towards a Self-Sufficient Inferentialism

For semantic inferentialists, the basic semantic concept is validity. An inferentialist theory of meaning should offer an account of the meaning of "valid." If one tries to add a validity predicate to one's object language, however, one runs into problems like the v-Curry paradox. In previous work, I presented a validity predicate for a non-transitive logic that can adequately capture its own meta-inferences. Unfortunately, in that system, one cannot show of any inference that it is invalid. Here I extend the system so that it can capture invalidities

On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)

Say the words gun registration to many Americans – especially pro-gun Americans, including the 3.5 million-plus members of the National Rifle Association ( NRA ) – and you are likely to hear about Adolf Hitler, Nazi gun laws, gun confiscation, and the Holocaust. More specifically, you are likely to hear that one of the first things that Hitler did when he seized power was to impose strict gun registration requirements that enabled him to identify gun owners and then to confiscate all guns, effectively disarming his opponents and paving the way for the genocide of the Jewish population. German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust, writes Stephen Halbrook, a pro-gun lawyer. If the Nazi experience teaches anything, Halbrook declares, it teaches that totalitarian governments will attempt to disarm their subjects so as to extinguish any ability to resist crimes against humanity. Or, as David Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute, states more succinctly: Simply put, if not for gun control, Hitler would not have been able to murder 21 million people

Insolubility Theorems and EPR Argument

I wish to thank in particular Arthur Fine for very perceptive comments on a previous draft of this paper. Many thanks also to Theo Nieuwenhuizen for inspiration, to Max Schlosshauer for correspondence, to two anonymous referees for shrewd observations, and to audiences at Aberdeen, Cagliari and Oxford (in particular to Harvey Brown, Elise Crull, Simon Saunders, Chris Timpson and David Wallace) for stimulating questions. This paper was written during my tenure of a Leverhulme Grant on ‘The Einstein Paradox’: The Debate on Nonlocality and Incompleteness in 1935 (Project Grant nr. F/00 152/AN), and it was revised for publication during my tenure of a Visiting Professorship in the Doctoral School of Philosophy and Epistemology, University of Cagliari (Contract nr. 268/21647).Peer reviewedPostprin

Routing Games over Time with FIFO policy

We study atomic routing games where every agent travels both along its decided edges and through time. The agents arriving on an edge are first lined up in a \emph{first-in-first-out} queue and may wait: an edge is associated with a capacity, which defines how many agents-per-time-step can pop from the queue's head and enter the edge, to transit for a fixed delay. We show that the best-response optimization problem is not approximable, and that deciding the existence of a Nash equilibrium is complete for the second level of the polynomial hierarchy. Then, we drop the rationality assumption, introduce a behavioral concept based on GPS navigation, and study its worst-case efficiency ratio to coordination.Comment: Submission to WINE-2017 Deadline was August 2nd AoE, 201

Can Modal Skepticism Defeat Humean Skepticism?

My topic is moderate modal skepticism in the spirit of Peter van Inwagen. Here understood, this is a conservative version of modal empiricism that severely limits the extent to which an ordinary agent can reasonably believe “exotic” possibility claims. I offer a novel argument in support of this brand of skepticism: modal skepticism grounds an attractive (and novel) reply to Humean skepticism. Thus, I propose that modal skepticism be accepted on the basis of its theoretical utility as a tool for dissolving philosophical paradox

A Contextualist Defence of the Material Account of Indicative Conditionals

The material account of indicative conditionals faces a legion of counterexamples that are the bread and butter in any entry about the subject. For this reason, the material account is widely unpopular among conditional experts. I will argue that this consensus was not built on solid foundations, since these counterexamples are contextual fallacies. They ignore a basic tenet of semantics according to which when evaluating arguments for validity we need to maintain the context constant, otherwise any argumentative form can be rendered invalid. If we maintain the context fixed, the counterexamples to the material account are disarmed. Throughout the paper I also consider the ramifications of this defence, make suggestions to prevent contextual fallacies, and anticipate some possible misunderstandings and objections

Dissolving the Paradoxicality Paradox

Non-classical solutions to semantic paradox can be associated with conceptions of paradoxicality understood in terms of entailment facts. In a K3-based theory of truth, for example, it is prima facie natural to say that a sentence φ is paradoxical iff φ ∨ ¬φ entails an absurdity. In a recent paper, Julien Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi exploit this idea to introduce revenge paradoxes for a number of non-classical approaches, including K3. In this paper, I show that on no understanding of ‘is paradoxical’ (for K3) should both rules needed for their paradox be expected to hold unrestrictedly. Just which rule fails, however, depends on various factors, including whether the derivability relation of a target system of reasoning is arithmetically definable