Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Deduction and the Loss of Belief Ted Shear, University of California, Davis
It seems intuitively obvious that if an agent with all true beliefs reasons according to classically valid inferences and contracts only when she discover that her beliefs are inconsistent, then she ought never (i) contract, or (ii) derive a falsehood. We show that supposing very little about how such agents reason and update so long as they are working with a language rich enough to express beliefs about their current and future doxastic states both (i) and (ii) can be violated. e argument will hinge on the consideration of a pair of cases modeled using a novel language which represents the doxastic states of agents whose only actions are inferences about the consequences of their beliefs. e rst case will be a slight variant on the classic instance of the Prediction Paradox called the Surprise Exam Paradox, while the second will be a new twist on the Surprise Exam Paradox, which we will call the Students Revenge Paradox.
Reference, Logical Consequence, and Mathematical Fictionalism James Davies, University of Toronto
Mathematical ctionalists often motivate their position by claiming that if abstract mathematical objects are causally isolated from us, then we cannot refer to them. Hence our mathematical theories, read at face value, suer from massive reference failure; thus they cannot be true. However, varieties of ctionalism that explain the usefulness of mathematics in the sciences in terms of mathematical theories being conservative extensions of physical theories, and also nominalize logical consequence in modal terms, are committed to our mathematical theories being possibly true. I argue that this entails that the ctionalist must accept that we actually have the ability to refer to abstract mathematical objects. e only thing that could prevent us from so referring is if those objects dont exist. us these varieties of ctionalism cannot motivate the denial that our mathematical theories are true by appealing to scepticism about our ability to refer to abstract objects.