Anil Gupta

Truth and paradox

In what case do you like reading so much? What about the type of the truth and paradox book? The needs to read? Well, everybody has their own reason why should read some books. Mostly, it will relate to their necessity to get knowledge from the book and want to read just to get entertainment. Novels, story book, and other entertaining books become so popular this day. Besides, the scientific books will also be the best reason to choose, especially for the students, teachers, doctors, businessman, and other professions who are fond of reading.

Empiricism and experience

Anil Gupta asks one of the key questions in philosophy: what is the contribution of experience of knowledge? Gupta develops an account of experience that allows it to inform knowledge while respecting two constraints - the contribution of experience to knowledge must be both rational and substantial. He says that these constraints cannot be met if we make the assumption that experience only aquaints us with partial truth about the world. Instead he uses tools from philosophical logic, specifically the logic of interdependent concepts, to show that a natural account of experience is available using the interdependence of views and perceptual judgements. In essence he argues for a reformed empiricism that embraces experience as conditional.

A Theory of Conditionals in the Context of Branching Time

In Stalnaker [9] and in Stalnaker and Thomason [10], a theory of conditionals is presented that involves a “selection function”. Intuitively, the value of the function at a world is the world as it would be if a certain formula (the antecedent of a conditional) were true.

Modal logic and truth

I explain and justify the first premise in Section 1. The justification relies on a particular conception of semantics developed and argued by Donald Davidson. I begin Section I with a brief exposition and motivation of Davidson’s semantic program and I show how the program yields the adequacy condition on logics formulated in premise (1). Section II is devoted to Wallace’s argument for premise (2). 1 evaluate the arguments presented in Sections I and II in Section III. The evaluation requires us to distinguish two concepts of truth which seem to be of independent philosophical interest, The last two sections, Sections IV and V, are more technical than the rest. Here I present homophonic truth theories (see below for explanation) for a variety of modal systems.

Truth or Consequences Essays in Honor of Nuel Belnap

On Two Deflationary Truth Theories.- Some Reflections On The Prosentential Theory of Truth.- Paradox and Reference.- Two Theorems concerning Stability.- The Complexity of Decision Procedures in Relevance Logic.- Relevant Predication 3: Essential Properties.- The Dog: Relevance and Rationality.- Consistency and Logical Consequence.- On What Cannot Be.- Durations: Temporal Intervals with Gaps and Undetermined Edges.- Categorical Semantics.- The Myth of the Intuitionistic Or.- What Mathematical Truth Need Not Be.- A Tour of the Multivariate Lambda Calculus.- Choice Trees.- The Extensional but Hyper-Intensional Calculus C? with Orderless Constants and Variables.- A Skeptical Theory of Mixed Inheritance.- The Logic of Mitchill v. Lath.- What are Absolute Probabilities a Function of?.- How Prediction Enhances Confirmation.- Figures in a Probability Landscape.- Nuel Belnap: Curriculum Vitae.- Nuel Belnap: Doctoral Students.- Nuel Belnap: Publications.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Definition and Revision: A Response to McGee and Martin

Vann McGee and Donald A. Martin are critics of the sort that authors wish to have: critics who spare no labor in getting to the bottom of their subject; critics who have the wisdom to distinguish the central from the peripheral; and critics who are perceptive and fair. I believe it was Mark Wilson who proposed McGee and Martin for this session. My first reaction when I heard the proposal was to wonder why Mark was suggesting such tough and penetrating critics when gentler ones were available. I now recognize that tough critics can be good critics, if they are wise and fair.

Conditionals in Theories of Truth

We argue that distinct conditionals—conditionals that are governed by different logics—are needed to formalize the rules of Truth Introduction and Truth Elimination. We show that revision theory, when enriched with the new conditionals, yields an attractive theory of truth. We go on to compare this theory with one recently proposed by Hartry Field.

Replies to Six Critics

I want to thank my critics not only for their attention to my book but also for their hospitality in Valencia, where they first presented me with their stimulating and wide-ranging criticisms. 1 These criticisms fall naturally into three groups. The first group consists of objections that concern the overall project of Empiricism and Experience (henceforth E & E ): what that project is, and what burdens it entails. The objections raised by José Martínez and by Jordi Valor fall into this group, and I shall address them first (section 1). The second group consists of objections to some specific elements in my execution of the project. The objections of Valeriano Iranzo and of Tobies Grimaltos and Carlos Moya fall into this group, and I shall address them in sections 2 and 3 respectively. In the final group is the criticism offered by Josep Corbí, who argues that I cannot provide an answer to a certain question he raises about experience. I shall offer resistance to Corbí’s argument in section 4.

Two Theorems Concerning Stability

The theory of truth developed by Nuel Belnap, Hans Herzberger, and myself views the concept of truth as governed by a rule of revision. It interprets the truth-concept via a rule that determines the extension of truth, not absolutely, but relative to an antecedent hypothesis concerning this extension. And it attempts to explain the behavior of truth in terms of this rule. One finds, when one repeatedly revises a hypothetical extension of truth, that sentences like the Liar (‘this very sentence is not true’) always oscillate in the resulting revision process. Whatever we hypothesize the truth-value of the Liar to be, the rule revises it to something different. Sentences like the Truth-Teller (‘this very sentence is true’) do not oscillate, but the value they acquire in the revision process depends on the initial hypothesis. Ordinary, intuitively unproblematic, sentences, on the other hand, exhibit a perfect stability: whatever the initial hypothesis of revision, these sentences always stabilize at the same value (after perhaps some initial oscillations).2

A Critical Examination of Sellars’s Theory of Perception

It is a central thesis in Sellars’s theory of perception that the given is mythical, that the non-conceptual element in perception has no rational force. Sellars thus offers a coherence theory of the reasonableness of perceptual judgments. I suggest that Sellars is right in rejecting the idea that the non-conceptual element provides knowledge; more generally, he is right in rejecting the propositional given. I argue, however, that Sellars’s coherence theory is unable to make sense of basic features of perceptual judgments. Sellars is not right, I argue, in denying all rational role to the non-conceptual element in perception. The given exists, but it is not propositional.