Monism, Emergence, and Plural Logic

Monism: the One True Logic

Logical pluralism is the claim that different accounts of validity can be equally correct. Beall and Restall have recently defended this position. Validity is a matter of truth-preservation over cases, they say: the conclusion should be true in every case in which the premises are true. Each logic specifies a class of cases, but differs over which cases should be considered. I show that this ac...

Mass nouns and plural logic

A dilemma put forward by Schein (1993) and Rayo (2002) suggests that, in order to characterize the semantics of plurals, we should not use predicate logic, but plural logic, a formal language whose terms may refer to several things at once. We show that a similar dilemma applies to mass nouns. If we use predicate logic and sets when characterizing their semantics, we arrive at a Russellian para...

A plural resolution logic

This paper presents an integration of centering theory ([GJW95]) into incremental dynamic logic. The formalism is based on an idea found in [vE00a], where contexts are permutable in order to model salience. Building on this idea, centering theory is restated as a formalism on contexts. Subsequently the system is used to consider some problems centering theory has once plurality is taken into ac...

A Plural Resolution Logic

Burgess on Plural Logic and Set Theory

John Burgess (Burgess, 2004) combines plural logic and a new version of the idea of limitation of size to give an elegant motivation of the axioms of ZFC set theory. His proposal is meant to improve on earlier work by Paul Bernays in two ways. I argue that both attempted improvements fail. John Burgess (Burgess, 2004) combines plural logic and a new version of the idea of limitation of size to ...