The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Michael Hillas (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the ninth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, April 7, 2022, from 4:00 to 6:00 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: Logic is All Skill: A Response to Devitt and Roberts on Adoption
Abstract: In Devitt and Roberts’ “Changing Our Logic: A Quinean Perspective” the authors give a neo-Quinean (in a particular sense of neo-Quinean) defense of adoption in logic. To a degree this is a non-defense – they concede that some may not take them as providing an account of rational adoption, but suggest that this is primarily because skill acquisition is not rational more generally, at least in the manner that we may have been hoping it was. However their work tries to establish that there is a large degree to which adoption is possible. My project here will be a critique of the paper on its own terms, accepting for the sake of discourse the core assumptions of the approach proposed. I will go through the examples that are used by Devitt and Roberts and show that even if their assumptions are accepted, their conclusions do not all follow. The conclusion of these arguments will be that Devitt and Roberts are better off embracing the irrationality of skill acquisition, and the consequence that rational adoption is impossible.