The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Camillo Fiore (Licentiate student, Philosophy, University of Buenos Aires) will deliver the sixth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Tuesday, December 15, 2020, from 2:00 to 4:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register if they are not already on the Saul Kripke Center’s mailing list.
Title: What the Adoption Problem does not show
Abstract: Saul Kripke proposed a skeptical challenge which Romina Padro defended and popularized by the name of the Adoption Problem. The challenge is that, given certain notion of adoption, there are some logical principles that cannot be adopted—paradigmatic cases being Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens. Kripke has used the Adoption Problem to argue that there is an important sense in which logic is not revisable. In this talk, I will defend two claims. First, that there is an alternative notion of adoption which (i) is adequate to assess the kind of revisability that Kripke seems to address, and (ii) delivers that Universal Instantiation and Modus Ponens are sometimes adoptable. Second, that even if we stick to the notion of adoption assumed by Kripke and Padro, the Adoption Problem does not entail that logic is never revisable in the sense that Kripke seems to address. I reckon that my conclusions are compatible with the philosophical import attributed to the Adoption Problem; however, I hope that my critical discussion will shed some light upon the scope of the skeptical argument.