The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Peter Susanszky (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the seventh Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 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: Trying to Adjunct Without Knowing How: Adjunction and the Adoption Problem
Abstract: Adopting a logical rule is coming to infer in accordance with it in virtue of accepting it as correct. The adoption question asks whether it is always possible to adopt a logical rule if one does not already infer in accordance with it, and if not, which rules cannot be adopted this way. Picking up on previous work by Saul Kripke, Romina Padró argued that there are such unadoptable rules. Though the two rules which have taken center stage in the discussions of both Kripke and Padró are modus ponens (MP) and universal generalization (UI), they both hold that adjunction (AD) is also unadoptable. Pace Kripke and Padró, in a recent paper, Suki Finn argued that AD is not in the scope of the adoption problem. In the negative part of my talk, I will show that Finn’s arguments fail to show AD to be adoptable. In the positive part, I will elaborate on the reasons why AD is unadoptable, which will, in turn, shed light on the source of the adoption problem.