Blog

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Jillian Rose Roberts (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the fifth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Friday, September 11, 2020, from 1:00 to 3:00 pm (NY time) via Zoom. (This talk was previously scheduled for March 24, 2020.) The talk is free and open to all, but those interested in attending should email the Saul Kripke Center in advance to register.

Title: The Adoption Problem in Logic: Devitt’s Flawed Quinean Solution

Abstract: Can we adopt a new logic? If so, how? In unpublished talks, Saul Kripke has presented a certain message about this that Romina Padro has vigorously defended in What the Tortoise Said to Kripke—the Adoption Problem (2015). Padro contends certain basic logical principles cannot be adopted: “if a subject already infers in accordance with basic logical principles, no adoption is needed, and if the subject does not infer in accordance with them, no adoption is…possible.” Michael Devitt has taken up Kripke and Padro’s challenge in an unpublished paper, “The Adoption Problem in Logic: A Quinean Picture” (2016). Devitt argues for a Quinean solution to the adoption problem, concluding it is possible in principle for someone who does not reason by basic inferences to come to do so as a result of adopting the basic logical principles and training. I simply ask—does his solution work? I contend that Devitt’s attempted solution is critically flawed in a way that sheds new light on the problem.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that James Shaw (Associate Professor, Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh) will deliver a talk for the Saul Kripke Center on Tuesday, March 31, 2020, from 2:00 to 4:00 in room 9207 of the CUNY Graduate Center.

This event has been cancelled. It may be rescheduled contingent on public health developments.

Title: Naming and Knowledge of Meaning

Abstract: What does it take to know the meaning of a word? Early analytic philosophers gravitated towards views on which meanings are ‘transparent’: if someone knows the meanings of two words, they are in a position to know whether those words mean the same or not. I note that a shift away from the standard of transparency in the analytic tradition seems to coincide with the advent of theories of direct reference. Then, focusing on the impact of Kripke’s work on names, I suggest that perhaps the shift was unwarranted. I first note that there are resources in Naming and Necessity that can be used to support certain semantic transparency principles. Then, partly drawing on themes from the work of Gareth Evans, I try to remove two of the more salient obstacles for such principles. I conclude by discussing some implications that reverting to transparency would have for Kripke’s arguments for the existence of necessary a posteriori truths.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Jillian Rose Roberts (MA student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the fifth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Tuesday, March 24, 2020, from 2:00 to 4:00 in room C201 of the CUNY Graduate Center.

This event has been cancelled. It may be rescheduled contingent on public health developments.

Title: The Adoption Problem in Logic: Devitt’s Flawed Quinean Solution

Abstract: Can we adopt a new logic? If so, how? In unpublished talks, Saul Kripke has presented a certain message about this that Romina Padro has vigorously defended in What the Tortoise Said to Kripke—the Adoption Problem (2015). Padro contends certain basic logical principles cannot be adopted: “if a subject already infers in accordance with basic logical principles, no adoption is needed, and if the subject does not infer in accordance with them, no adoption is…possible.” Michael Devitt has taken up Kripke and Padro’s challenge in an unpublished paper, “The Adoption Problem in Logic: A Quinean Picture” (2016). Devitt argues for a Quinean solution to the adoption problem, concluding it is possible in principle for someone who does not reason by basic inferences to come to do so as a result of adopting the basic logical principles and training. I simply ask—does his solution work? I contend that Devitt’s attempted solution is critically flawed in a way that sheds new light on the problem.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Vincent A. Peluce (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the fourth Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, December 5, 2019, from 2:00 to 4:00 in room 9206 of the CUNY Graduate Center.

Title: Absolute Provability and Intuitionistic Tense

Abstract: Well-known ties between arithmetical proof and intuitionistic logic make it natural to think of provability in terms of intuitionistic logic and hence absolute provability in terms of one of its extensions. For this reason, we propose Intuitionistic Tense Logic, or tINT, to study absolute provability. We delineate tINT models and a Hilbert-style system, and then prove soundness and completeness. We then use the tINT framework to discuss and compare ideas of absolute provability of authors in the literature.

The Saul Kripke Center, together with the Buenos Aires Logic Group and Chris Scambler (NYU), sponsors a workshop on meta-inferences at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York on September 26th, 2019.

Professor Saul Kripke and Dr. Romina Padro will discuss anti-exceptionalism about logic at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York on September 20-21, 2019, as part of a workshop organized by the Saul Kripke Center and the Bergen Logic Group. For additional details, see this website.

Professor Saul Kripke will revisit some of the more contentious points of Naming and Necessity in London on May 30th, 2019. Find details here.

Professor Saul Kripke will revisit rule following at Rules, Norms, and Reasons at the University of Milan on May 21st, 2019. Find details here.

The Saul Kripke Center is pleased to announce that Dongwoo Kim (PhD student, Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) will deliver the third Saul Kripke Center Young Scholars Series talk on Thursday, March 7, 2019, from 4:30 to 6:30 in room 6495 of the CUNY Graduate Center.

Title: On Frege’s Assimilation of Sentences with Names

Abstract: I shall discuss some of the issues concerning a notorious doctrine of Frege that sentences are names of truth-values. I am interested in a problem raised by Kripke that the doctrine obscures the distinction between judgeable and unjudgeable contents. I shall present what I take to be Frege’s account of judgeable content. A proper expression of a judgeable content, for Frege, is susceptible to an analysis into a predicate and an argument-word, where a predicate is understood as a concept-word used to attribute a certain property to the referent of the argument-word. In the light of this analysis, I shall argue that the doctrine does not obscure the distinction. The problem will also be discussed within the formal context of Grundgesetze. A new light will be shed on his rather peculiar conception of the symbol ‘|-’.