The logical function of property talk
A project funded by the European Commission through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie IF
Based at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam
This project is generously funded by the European Commission through a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (LOFUPRO, Grant No. 792202)
About
In recent decades, philosophers have developed deflationary accounts of a number of important philosophical concepts such as truth, reference, and even existence. According to these accounts, predicates such as "is true" are unlike predicates such as "is red". Whereas the latter picks out some salient feature of reality, the nature of which we can investigate and hope to discover, this is not the case with the former. "is true" was only introduced into our language as a quasi-logical device that enables us to express certain propositions that we can not easily express otherwise. For example, we cannot assert all theorems of arithmetic one by one as there are innitely many of them; however, the truth predicate allows us to assert all of them by saying "All theorems of arithmetic are true". Structural similarities between the 'logical' principles governing the notion of truth and the notion of property suggest that the notion of property should be understood in a similar way. The aim of the project is to lay down the fundamental theoretical framework for the deflationary account of properties.
The project’s principal objectives can be summarized as follows:
(1) Developing a precise account of the logical function of property talk.
(2) Developing a philosophical account of the nature of properties based on their role in language.
(3) Developing formal theories of properties suitable for applications in the foundational studies
Events
Propositions, properties, sets, and other abstract objects
A two-day workshop providing a platform for recent work in philosophical logic and metaphysics
February 7 - February 8, 2020. University of Amsterdam
Talks
Towards a minimalist account of numbers
Propositions, properties, sets, and other abstract objects
February 2020, University of Amsterdam
A Russell-Gödel theory of propositional functions
Propositions, properties, sets, and other abstract objects
February 2020, University of Amsterdam
Numbers and numerically definite quantifiers
Foundational Studies seminar
November 2019, University of Bristol
Deflationism and the function of truth
Conceptual Engeneering seminar
June 2019, University of St. Andrews
A Gödelian solution for the class-theoretic paradoxes
Logic seminar
June 2019, University of St. Andrews
New Axioms for type-free classes
Logic in London I: workshop on type-free concepts
May 2019, University of London
Universal classes and unrestricted quantification
LIRa seminar
May 2019, University of Amsterdam
What are properties?
Logic seminar
May 2019, University of Florence