PHIL 428/522, Pelletier
Winter 2009
The syllabus for this course is here. A (tentative) order in which we will cover the topics is here. Please continue to monitor this website (or the U. Alberta one, when I finish it). I will have assignments and readings posted on this page (or linked from this page).
I am VERY sorry that I made a mistake about ordering the books. I will pass out the "classical logic" chapters of Graham Priest's book, and will spend some time discussing issues in classical logic. I hope this will suffice until students can either get books from the late order submitted to the bookstore, or get them through amazon.ca. It is important for students to get the Graham Priest book. It is good for students interested in philosophical logic generally to own the Lou Goble book; and those who find the topic of vagueness fascinating really ought to own the Keefe/Smith book.
Assignment #1 is to be electronically passed out on January 21st, and is due in class (at the beginning) on January 28th. Please do your work independently, except as indicated on the assignment.
Assignment #2 is to be electronically passed out on March 11th, and is due in class (at the beginning) on March 18th [one week later].
Assignment #3 is to be electronically passed out on April 1st, and is due in class (at the beginning) on April 8th [one week later].
[Note change of date for Assignment #3!!]
Please read Priest, Chapter 2 on "Basic Modal Logic"
and Chapter 3 on "Normal Modal
Logic". We will not be dealing with the Proofs of Theorems
sections in either chapter (2.9 and 3.7), except in passing. I also want to take a look at the
"Non-normal Modal Logics" chapters (Chapter 4, 5, and 6), but not in
great detail. So: those chapters
form the next set of readings for the following few weeks.
Here is
an example of a proof done in an axiomatic (Hilbert/Frege) style. It is the proof of (pƒp) done in Whitehead & Russell Principia
Mathematica. (Thank your lucky stars that you didnÕt
have to do elementary logic like this!!)
In the course of discussing Post's functional completeness
theorem, I mentioned that there was a very nice personal and intellectual biography of
Emil Post, written by Alasdair Urquhart. Check it out, although some of it will
be pretty heavy going. The part
that is particularly relevant to functional completeness is Urquhart's Section
5, but the earlier and later parts on Post's life are quite interesting too. It is forthcoming in Dov Gabbay &
John Woods Handbook of the History of
Logic. Volume 5: Logic from Russell to Church.
(Elsevier).
The Midterm Exam will take place Wednesday, February 25th. As mentioned in class, it is an
open-book, open-note exam. But you
are not allowed to use other people, nor electronic devices (iPods, PDAs, cell
phones, messengers, etc.). The exam
will be between 1 and 1.5 hours in length and given at the beginning of the
class. There will be no lecture
during the second half of the class.
For the week following the midterm, you should read Priest's
Chapter 7 on many-valued logics.
You could also look at MalinowskiÕs article on many valued logic in Lou
Goble's Blackwell Guide to Philosophical Logic (chapter 14) and also Michael Tye's
ÒSorites Paradoxes and the Semantics of VaguenessÓ in the Keefe/Smith Vagueness:
A Reader. This book is available electronically in our library. (Find it in the catalog, click on the
electronic access link, and you'll be prompted for your computing ID [if youÕre
off-campus]). Tye's article is
Chapter 15 in this book. Tye
argues for a strange type of 3-valued logic, which is very interesting. It seems to have a 3-valued
metalanguage, perhaps thereby making it immune to certain types of criticisms
that have been leveled at 3-valued logics (especially concerning "higher
order vagueness").
With regards to our discussion of Timothy Williamson's
argument defending the epistemicist view of vagueness against the gap theories
(both supervaluation gap theories and 3-valued gap theories), here is a paper
written by me and
Rob Stainton arguing against it. (Published in Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, 2003). Williamson has put forth that argument
in a variety of places, such as his book Vagueness; but because it is online through our library,
finding the article in the Keefe/Smith Vagueness: A Reader might be easiest. (See directions in previous paragraph).
Your next two readings should be Priest Chapter 11 (Fuzzy
Logic), although since we did not cover his earlier Chapter 10 (Relevant Logic)
you should not bother with Section 11.7 (Fuzzy Relevant Logic), and Priest
Chapter 13 (Free Logic). I am also
linking an old paper of mine and Charles
Morgan (Linguistics and Philosophy,
1977) which outlines some logical problems with fuzzy logic. Priest doesn't give any tableaux
methods for fuzzy logic. Here is a
link to an
unpublished paper by me and Chris Lepock (a recent Alberta Philosophy PhD)
that describes Fregean Analytic Tableaux (FAT) for fuzzy logics. [It is located after the background
chitchat. It starts on p.9, but
the tableaux proper starts p. 11.]
I mentioned in class that Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore have written a polemical
paper arguing against supervaluation theory. That is an informal paper, and here
is a link to it. I also mentioned
that Josh Dever, Nicholas Asher, and Christopher Pappas had
written a formally-oriented paper that claims to take care of certain
shortcomings in supervaluation theory.
I do not know whether it is published; here
is a link to an unpublished version.
SECOND EXAM INFORMATION: A number of students have
requested that there be a one-day take-home version of the second exam. An equal number have expressed a
preference for the planned sit-down version. Here is a solution: do both. I cannot give out the take-home version on Wednesday April 8th
because I need to leave Edmonton to attend the American Philosophical
Association that evening. So: I will be in my Philosophy Department
office on Tuesday (April 7th) between 2 and 4pm to give out the
take-home version of the exam. It
will be due in class, at the beginning, the next day. Those
taking the regular sit-down version will start their writing that day in class
(at 2pm, Wednesday April 8th).
This second exam, regardless of the version you take, is worth 33% of
your grade if you are in Phil 428 and 25% of your grade if you are in Phil 522.
NOTE!! If you pick up the take-home version,
then you MUST finish it and turn
it in as your second exam. You CANNOT
change your mind and take the sit-down
version after you have seen the take-home version. And NO late submissions of the take home version
will be accepted.
I mentioned the Bernard Linsky and Ed Zalta paper on "the
simplest modal logic" in class as a nice followup to the brief discussion
we had about quantified modal logic.
Here
it is.