Location






The seminar is held in hybrid format, in person (Múzeum krt. 4/i Room 224) and online.


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3 May  (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Elia Zardini
Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy
Complutense University of Madrid
 
Against the World
In previous works, I’ve developed a theory of transparent truth (LW) and a theory of tolerant baldness (NLS) which validate the law of excluded middle (LEM) and the law of non-contradiction (LNC), and which solve the semantic paradoxes and the paradoxes of vagueness by restricting instead the structural properties of contraction and transitivity respectively. Moreover, the principle of distributivity of conjunction over disjunction (D) fails in the systems—in fact, even the weaker principles of modularity (M) and orthomod- ularity (O) fail. However, since neither kind of paradox seems to involve D, M or O in the first place, it might seem that the solutions I’ve proposed feature logics that are unnec- essarily weak. I’ll first argue that these appearances are deceiving: if a non-contractive or non-transitive theory of anything making certain natural assumptions (which crucially include LEM and LNC and which are shared by both LW and NLS) is to work at all, D, M and O just have to fail. I’ll then offer a philosophical explanation of the failures of these principles in LW and NLS, which will require to bring out a common, hitherto unnoticed metaphysical consequence of these systems, and which will thus have the upshot of bringing for the first time together two systems that might up to now have seemed very remote from one another. More in detail, I’ll show that both LW and NLS assert the non-existence of the world, and that such assertion in turn implies the relevant instances of LEM; I’ll then argue that these circumstances explain the failure of D, M and O, since these principles allow one to go from the disjunctions of incomplete ways things are licenced by LEM to a disjunction of complete ways things are, with the latter contradicting the non-existence of the world.