Abstracts
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at AAP 2013. If you've just submitted an abstract, it may take a few days to appear.
| Name: Dr Jeremiah Joven Joaquin |
| Institution: De La Salle University |
| Title: Sidering Prior's Tonk |
| Abstract: In his 1960 paper, “The Runabout Inference-Ticket,” Prior presented the now famous “Tonk argument” against the inferential view of logical connectives—the view that the meaning of logical connectives are solely defined by (conventionally determined) inferential roles. Prior’s case was simple. If the inferential view is right, then we could have a “well-defined” connective, Tonk, whose employment yields invalid inferences. There are two quick replies against this argument, each of which is premised on the claim that Prior’s story (of how logical connectives are defined) is wrong. On the one hand, Stephenson (1961) argues that Prior’s story misses the fact that connectives are defined in such a way that they preserve truth. Belnap (1962), on the other hand, argues that Prior misses the fact that the “antecedently given context of deducibility” serves as a background in defining any new connective. In this paper, I argue that though Stephenson and Belnap’s objections might put into question Prior’s Tonk argument, its main insight—that the meaning of logical connectives is not solely determined by (conventionally) stipulating their inferential roles—still perseveres. Furthermore, I argue that this main insight might be put positively in terms of Sider’s (2011) claim that these connectives “carve at the joints of reality.” |
| Keywords: philosophy of logic, metaphysics, fundamentality |
