Is there a notion of contradiction—let us call it, for dramatic effect, “absolute”—making all contradictions, so understood, unacceptable also for dialetheists? It is argued in this paper that there is, and that spelling it out brings some theoretical benefits. First it gives us a foothold on undisputed ground in the methodologically difficult debate on dialetheism. Second, we can use it to express, without begging questions, the disagreement between dialetheists and their rivals on the nature of truth. Third, dialetheism has an operator allowing it, against the opinion of many critics, to rule things out and manifest disagreement: for unlike other proposed exclusion-expressing-devices (for instance, the entailment of triviality), the operator used to formulate the notion of absolute contradiction appears to be immune both from crippling expressive limitations and from revenge paradoxes—pending a rigorous nontriviality proof for a formal dialetheic theory including it.

In Kripke’s classic paper on truth it is argued that by adding a new semantic category different from truth and falsity it is possible to have a language with its own truth predicate. A substantial problem with this approach is that it lacks the expressive resources to characterize those sentences which fall under the new category. The main goal of this paper is to offer a refinement of Kripke’s approach in which this difficulty does not arise. We tackle this characterization problem by letting certain sentences belong to more than one semantic category. We also consider the prospect of generalizing this framework to deal with languages containing vague predicates.

We show how in the hierarchies ${F_\alpha }$ of Fieldian truth sets, and Herzberger’s ${H_\alpha }$ revision sequence starting from any hypothesis for ${F_0}$ (or ${H_0}$) that essentially each ${H_\alpha }$ (or ${F_\alpha }$) carries within it a history of the whole prior revision process.

As applications (1) we provide a precise representation for, and a calculation of the length of, possible path independent determinateness hierarchies of Field’s (2003) construction with a binary conditional operator. (2) We demonstrate the existence of generalized liar sentences, that can be considered as diagonalizing past the determinateness hierarchies definable in Field’s recent models. The ‘defectiveness’ of such diagonal sentences necessarily cannot be classified by any of the determinateness predicates of the model. They are ‘ineffable liars’. We may consider them a response to the claim of Field (2003) that ‘the conditional can be used to show that the theory is not subject to “revenge problems”.’

This paper is concerned with a propositional modal logic with operators for necessity, actuality and apriority. The logic is characterized by a class of relational structures defined according to ideas of epistemic two-dimensional semantics, and can therefore be seen as formalizing the relations between necessity, actuality and apriority according to epistemic two-dimensional semantics. We can ask whether this logic is correct, in the sense that its theorems are all and only the informally valid formulas. This paper gives outlines of two arguments that jointly show that this is the case. The first is intended to show that the logic is informally sound, in the sense that all of its theorems are informally valid. The second is intended to show that it is informally complete, in the sense that all informal validities are among its theorems. In order to give these arguments, a number of independently interesting results concerning the logic are proven. In particular, the soundness and completeness of two proof systems with respect to the semantics is proven (Theorems 2.11 and 2.15), as well as a normal form theorem (Theorem 3.2), an elimination theorem for the actuality operator (Corollary 3.6), and the decidability of the logic (Corollary 3.7). It turns out that the logic invalidates a plausible principle concerning the interaction of apriority and necessity; consequently, a variant semantics is briefly explored on which this principle is valid. The paper concludes by assessing the implications of these results for epistemic two-dimensional semantics.

We have begun a theory of measurement in which an experimenter and his or her experimental procedure are modeled by algorithms that interact with physical equipment through a simple abstract interface. The theory is based upon using models of physical equipment as oracles to Turing machines. This allows us to investigate the computability and computational complexity of measurement processes. We examine eight different experiments that make measurements and, by introducing the idea of an observable indicator, we identify three distinct forms of measurement process and three types of measurement algorithm. We give axiomatic specifications of three forms of interfaces that enable the three types of experiment to be used as oracles to Turing machines, and lemmas that help certify an experiment satisfies the axiomatic specifications. For experiments that satisfy our axiomatic specifications, we give lower bounds on the computational power of Turing machines in polynomial time using nonuniform complexity classes. These lower bounds break the barrier defined by the Church-Turing Thesis.

In this paper I defend the tenability of the Thesis that the probability of a conditional equals the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. This is done by adopting the view that the interpretation of a conditional may differ from context to context. Several triviality results are (re-)evaluated in this view as providing natural constraints on probabilities for conditionals and admissible changes in the interpretation. The context-sensitive approach is also used to re-interpret some of the intuitive rules for conditionals and probabilities such as Bayes’ rule,Import-Export, and Modus Ponens. I will show that, contrary to consensus, the Thesis is in fact compatible with these re-interpreted rules.

A commonly used dynamic epistemic logic is one obtained by adding commonknowledge and public announcements to a basic epistemic logic. It is known from Kooi (2007) that adding public substitutions to such a logic adds expressivity over the class K of models. Here I show that substitutions also add expressivity over the classes KD45, S4 and S5 of models. Since the combination of common knowledge, public announcements and substitutions, was shown in Kooi (2007) to be equally expressive to relativized common knowledge these results also show that relativized common knowledge is more expressive than common knowledge and public announcements over KD45, S4 and S5. These results therefore extend the result from van Benthem et al. (2006) that shows that relativized common knowledge is more expressive than common knowledge and public announcements over K.

This paper presents a probabilist paraconsistent theory of belief revision. This theory is based on a very general theory of probability, that fits with a wide range of classical and nonclassical logics. The theory incorporates a version of Jeffrey conditionalisation as its method of updating. A Dutch book argument is given, and the theory is applied to the problem of choosing a logical system.

In proof-theoretic semantics of intuitionistic logic it is well known that elimination rules can be generated from introduction rules in a uniform way. If introduction rules discharge assumptions, the corresponding elimination rule is a rule of higher level, which allows one to discharge rules occurring as assumptions. In some cases, these uniformly generated elimination rules can be equivalently replaced with elimination rules that only discharge formulas or do not discharge any assumption at all—they can be flattened in a terminology proposed by Read. We show by an example from propositional logic that not all introduction rules have flat elimination rules. We translate the general form of flat elimination rules into a formula of second-order propositional logic and demonstrate that our example is not equivalent to any such formula. The proof uses elementary techniques from propositional logic and Kripke semantics.

In the topological semantics for propositional modal logic, S4 is known to be complete for the class of all topological spaces, for the rational line, for Cantor space, and for the real line. In the topological semantics for quantified modal logic, QS4 is known to be complete for the class of all topological spaces, and for the family of subspaces of the irrational line. The main result of the current paper is that QS4 is complete, indeed strongly complete, for the rational line.

This paper outlines a second-philosophical account of arithmetic that places it on a distinctive ground between those of logic and set theory.

A Gödel sentence is often described as a sentence saying about itself that it is not provable, and a Henkin sentence as a sentence stating its own provability. We discuss what it could mean for a sentence of arithmetic to ascribe to itself a property such as provability or unprovability. The starting point will be the answer Kreisel gave to Henkin’s problem. We describe how the properties of the supposedly self-referential sentences depend on the chosen coding, the formulae expressing the properties and the way a fixed points for the formulae are obtained. This paper is the first of two papers. In the present paper we focus on provability. In part II, we will consider other properties like Rosser provability and partial truth predicates.

Uniform interpolation property of a given logic is a stronger form of Craig’s interpolation property where both pre-interpolant and post-interpolant always exist uniformly for any provable implication in the logic. It is known that there exist logics, e.g., modal propositional logic S4, which have Craig’s interpolation property but do not have uniform interpolation property. The situation is even worse for predicate logics, as classical predicate logic does not have uniform interpolation property as pointed out by L. Henkin.

In this paper, uniform interpolation property of basic substructural logics is studied by applying the proof-theoretic method introduced by A. Pitts (Pitts, 1992). It is shown that uniform interpolation property holds even for their predicate extensions, as long as they can be formalized by sequent calculi without contraction rules. For instance, uniform interpolation property of full Lambek predicate calculus, i.e., the substructural logic without any structural rule, and of both linear and affine predicate logics without exponentials are proved.

We axiomatize Leitgeb’s (2005) theory of truth and show that this theory proves all arithmetical sentences of the system of ramified analysis up to ε0. We also give alternative axiomatizations of Kripke’s (1975) theory of truth (Strong Kleene and supervaluational version) and show that they are at least as strong as the Kripke-Feferman system KF and Cantini’s VF, respectively.

A crucial part of the contemporary interest in logicism in the philosophy of mathematics resides in its idea that arithmetical knowledge may be based on logical knowledge. Here, an implementation of this idea is considered that holds that knowledge of arithmetical principles may be based on two things: (i) knowledge of logical principles and (ii) knowledge that the arithmetical principles are representable in the logical principles. The notions of representation considered here are related to theory-based and structure-based notions of representation from contemporary mathematical logic. It is argued that the theory-based versions of such logicism are either too liberal (the plethora problem) or are committed to intuitively incorrect closure conditions (the consistency problem). Structure-based versions must on the other hand respond to a charge of begging the question (the circularity problem) or explain how one may have a knowledge of structure in advance of a knowledge of axioms (the signature problem). This discussion is significant because it gives us a better idea of what a notion of representation must look like if it is to aid in realizing some of the traditional epistemic aims of logicism in the philosophy of mathematics.

In this investigation we explore a general strategy for constructing modal theories where the modal notion is conceived as a predicate. The idea of this strategy is to develop modal theories over axiomatic theories of truth. In this first paper of our two part investigation we develop the general strategy and then apply it to the axiomatic theory of truth Friedman-Sheard. We thereby obtain the theory Modal Friedman-Sheard. The theory Modal Friedman-Sheard is then discussed from three different perspectives. First, we show that Modal Friedman-Sheard preserves theoremhood modulo translation with respect to modal operator logic. Second, we turn to semantic aspects and develop a modal semantics for the newly developed theory. Third, we investigate whether the modal predicate of Modal Friedman-Sheard can be understood along the lines of a proposal of Kripke, namely as a truth predicate modified by a modal operator.

A formalization of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems using the Isabelle proof assistant is described. This is apparently the first mechanical verification of the second incompleteness theorem. The work closely follows Świerczkowski (2003), who gave a detailed proof using hereditarily finite set theory. The adoption of this theory is generally beneficial, but it poses certain technical issues that do not arise for Peano arithmetic. The formalization itself should be useful to logicians, particularly concerning the second incompleteness theorem, where existing proofs are lacking in detail.

In this sequel to Self-reference in arithmetic I we continue our discussion of the question: What does it mean for a sentence of arithmetic to ascribe to itself a property? We investigate how the properties of the supposedly self-referential sentences depend on the chosen coding, the formulae expressing the properties and the way a fixed point for the expressing formulae are obtained. In this second part we look at some further examples. In particular, we study sentences apparently expressing their Rosser-provability, their own ${\rm{\Sigma }}_n^0$-truth or their own ${\rm{\Pi }}_n^0$-truth. Finally we offer an assessment of the results of both papers.