Timothy McCarthy

Ungroundedness in classical languages

The intuitive notion of groundedness for sentences in an interpreted language has received several characterizations in recent years. (See, for example, Kripke (1973, Gupta (1982) and Herzberger (1982).) These explanations tend to connect the property of ungroundedness with semantic closure: the ability of a language L to phrase a predicate which is true in L of precisely the sentences true in L (or of the Code1 numbers of these senten&). However, in an aside to his ‘Outline of a Theory of Truth’, Saul Kripke has called into question that ungroundedness is connected to semantic closure in an essential way:

Modality, invariance, and logical truth

ConclusionLet us sum up. We began with the question, “What is the interest of a model-theoretic definition of validity?” Model theoretic validity consists in truth under all reinterpretations of non-logical constants. In this paper, we have described for each necessity concept a corresponding modal invariance property. Exemplification of that property by the logical constants of a language leads to an explanation of the necessity, in the corresponding sense, of its valid sentences. I have fixed upon the epistemic modalities in characterizing the logical constants: to be a logical constant in the language of a population is to be invariant over a modality describing complete possible epistemic states of that population (or an idealized analogue thereof). The grounds for this characterization are these: (1) It leads, I believe, to an extensionally reasonable demarcation of the logical constants, including clear cases and excluding clear non-cases. It gives a principled criterion for deciding unclear cases. (2) It provides an analysis of the topic-neutrality of logic. (3) It leads to an explanation of the epistemic necessity of the logical truths in terms of the topic-neutrality of the logical constants.All the same, it is reasonable to ask, even if the suggested demarcation of logic is extensionally correct, whether it can reasonably be expected to be fundamental. The epistemic invariance of an expression is a rather striking property, one which we should want to explain. What is missing, then, is an explanation of the distinguishing epistemic properties of the constants in terms of more fundamental properties involving their understanding and use. It would be these that properly define the nature, not just the extent, of logic.

Radical interpretation and indeterminacy

McCarthy develops a theory of Radical Interpertation - The project of characterizing from scratch the language and attituteds of an agent or population - and applies the theory to the problems of indeterminacy of interperation first descrided in the writings of Quine. The major theme in McCarthys study is that a relatively modest set of interpertive principles, properly applied, can serve to resolve the major indeterminacies of interperation. Its most substantive contribution is in proposing a solution to problems of indeterminacy that remain unsloved in the literature.

Social choice and the risks of intervention

In this chapter we shall describe and illustrate a framework for assessing risk in the context of social intervention, where by a social intervention we mean a set of actions undertaken, typically by an organized ensemble of agents external to a given society, in order to solve a problem identified within that society. We focus on the general problem of amalgamating expert risk assessment and lay risk assessment. A methodology for integrating divergent assessments of risk has at least two virtues: (1) Where these are presumed to differ, this methodology forces the normative and descriptive assumptions underlying the assessments into the open, so that they can be examined; and (2) It provides risk policymakers with a tool for systematically prioritizing the normative constraints underlying the assessments of risk. We argue that there is no need either to rationalize or to condemn the systematic gap in risk analyses that exists between experts and laypersons. Rather, experts and laypersons should be understood as having different competencies, capabilities and normative requirements. Public (and private) risk managers need a systematic approach to managing these distinctive capabilities and requirements—an approach that recognizes the strengths and constraints of each analytical group, and which allows risk managers to integrate all of these factors. In this paper, we are interested in identifying and analyzing how technical experts’ risk analyses interact with the lay public’s assessments of risk with the principal goal being first to specify formal representations or models of the divergent assessments of risk generated by experts and the lay public and second, to introduce a model for integrating those assessments. We then apply the model to case studies involving natural disasters and health.

Engineering Decisions in a Global Context and Social Choice

In this paper we specifically tackle the methodological problem of constructing an ethical framework for how professionals are to work within the global setting, and while this is an issue for a number of disciplines and professions including medicine, computer science, and education, for purposes of this paper we turn our attention to engineering. Specifically, we examine engineering in a global context and offer an analysis of how conflicts between normative constraints, imposed from several points of view, on engineering solutions are to be resolved.