Notice Board

The Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series presents:

"A Formal Approach to Laws of Nature"

Speaker: Bryson Brown (Department of Philosophy)
Thursday, April 3 | 5 - 6:30 p.m.
University Hall C610

Abstract: First order logic and a continuous “spacetime” are the basic ingredients of David Lewis’s Hume worlds. “Basic” predicates are assigned to each point of the spacetime, each independent of the predicates assigned to other points. As in many other philosophical contexts, the consequence relation that applies to these worlds is that of first order logic. This paper presents a different formal treatment of possible worlds, based on a more general treatment of consequence relations and how descriptive languages contribute to them. There are three basic principles for these relations: they must be reflexive, monotonic and transitive. Beyond this, they need not be formal consequence relations – in particular, the predicates included in these relations may have descriptive meanings, unlike the predicate letters of first order logic, which are assigned arbitrary extensions independent of other predicate letters; descriptive predicates come with what Wilfrid Sellars called material inference rules.