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Speaker: Federico Pailos (Buenos Aires)
Title: Preserving suspension of judgement
Date:
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Location: SP107 F1.15 (ILLC Seminar Room)

Abstract

We provide three different accounts for representing the formal epistemic norms that regulate preserving suspension of judgement. The first way to achieve our goal will be through the Strong-Kleene mixed logic nn, a paraconsistent and a paracomplete contraclassical logic. Interpreting it as preserving suspension of judgement may have as a drawback, that Excluded Middle cannot be accepted in all cases. It is possible to bypass this objection through a sub/supervaluationist setting. The target logic, NotS, is the one that sanctions as valid inferences from neither supertrue nor superfalse premises to a (or to at least one) neither supertrue nor superfalse conclusion. Nevertheless, supporters of paracomplete or paraconsistent solutions to the sorites paradox might take this solution as simply wrong. For them, suspending judgement about a sentence means suspending judgement for every sentence built with said sentence, about which judgment has been suspended. We will therefore re-introduce the validity notion of nn in a non-deterministic framework, and refer to the new logic as nnND. Restricting the valuation space might suitably accommodate the intuitions of the supporter of Strong-Kleene deterministic nn and also the preferences of the ones that benefit from the sub/supervaluationist approach to this problem.