Philosophy Colloquium (Extra Credit Opportunity!)
Students in my logic class can get (a small but not-insignificant amount of) extra credit for attending this colloquium and writing a brief (about one page, double spaced) report on what it was about. The report is due by Wed., March 12.
Philosophy Department Colloquium
Thursday, March 6, 4 p.m. ABAH 345
“Contradiction in Fiction (How to Imagine the Impossible without Inferring the Insane)"
A presentation by Casey McGinnis
Logic plays a role in determining what’s true in a work of fiction. For example, if X is true in a work of fiction, and X logically implies Y, then Y is also true in that work of fiction. Many works of fiction are inconsistent or contradictory — some even deliberately so. For example, the philosopher and logician Graham Priest has written a thought-provoking story (“Sylvan’s Box”) about a mysterious box that is somehow both empty and not empty (at the same time). Classical logic tells us that contradictions imply everything, so, from a classical point of view, everything must be true in an inconsistent work of fiction! Intuitively, this seems wrong.
For this and other reasons, some (such as Priest) have recommended that we give up classical logic in favor of a paraconsistent (inconsistency-tolerant) logic. I will argue that replacing classical logic with paraconsistent logic is neither necessary nor sufficient for solving the puzzle about inconsistent fiction. The alternative solution I propose appeals to what I call logical relativism — roughly, the view that judgments about what follows from what are correct or incorrect only relative to a set of background assumptions about what is considered a “live” possibility.