Philosophy Department Colloquium on February 9

Join us on Friday, February 9 from 4:00-6:00 PM (MDT) in-person, in the Philosophy Department seminar room (Assiniboia Hall 2-02A), and online for “Logical positivism and relevance logic”, a talk by Katalin Bimbó. 

Abstract: Logical positivists were concerned about (grammatical) sentences, which are meaningless. A. J. Ayer proposed verifiability principles that rely on the notion of logical consequence. A. Church showed that -- assuming 2-valued logic -- Ayer's principle is way too permissive. C. Wright introduced a new verifiability principle (together with the notion of compact consequence), of which B.-U. Yi claimed that it leads to all sentences being verifiable. In this talk, I will focus on Ayer's insistence on relevance, and how the logic of relevant implication and its relational semantics defuse the aforementioned CE's to verifiability principles.

Speaker: Katalin Bimbó is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on logic, especially on relevance logic and combinatory logic, as well as other substructural and non-classical logics -- including their proof theory and semantics. She is an author of numerous articles and book chapters, an author of three books and an editor of three collections of papers. Bimbo had the privilege to work with J. Michael Dunn for decades; the collaboration produced results and publications. Notably, Dunn and she proved the decidability of the logic of implicational ticket entailment and the decidability of (full propositional) linear logic.

Zoom ID: 920 6023 5649
Passcode: 470504