In lieu of new blogposts, I thought I’d post up drafts of two papers I’m working on. They’re both in fairly early stages (in particular, the structure of each needs quite a bit of sorting out. But as they’re fairly techy, I think I’d really benefit from any trouble-shooting people were willing to do!
The first is “Degree supervaluational logic“. This is the kind of treatment of indeterminacy that Edgington has long argued for, and it also features in work from the 70’s by Lewis and Kamp. Weirdly, it isn’t that common, though I think there’s a lot going for it. But it’s arguably implicit in a lot of people’s thinking about supervaluationism. Plenty of people like the idea that the “proportion of sharpenings on which a sentence is true” tells us something pretty important about that sentence—maybe even serving to fix what degree of belief we should have in it. If proportions of sharpenings play this kind of “expert function” role for you, then you’re already a degree-supervaluationist in the sense I’m concerned with, whether or not you want to talk explicitly about “degrees of truth”.
One thing I haven’t seen done is to look systematically at its logic. Now, if we look at a determinacy-operator free object language, the headline news is that everything is classical—and that’s pretty robust under a number of ways of defining “validity”. But it’s familiar from standard supervaluationism that things can become tricky when we throw in determinacy operators. So I look at what happens when we add in things like “it is determinate to degree 0.5 that…” into our object-language. What happens now depends *very much* on how validity is defined. I think there’s a lot to be said for “degree of truth preservation” validity—i.e. the conclusion has to be at least as true as the premises. This is classical in the determinacy-free language. And its “supraclassical” even when those operators are present—every classically valid argument is still valid. But in terms of metarules, all hell breaks loose. We get failures of conjunction introduction, for example; and of structural rules such as Cut. Despite this, I think there’s a good deal to be said for the package.
The second paper “Gradational accuracy and non-classical semantics” is on Joyce’s work on scoring functions. I look at what happens to his 1998 argument for probabilism, when we’ve got non-classical truth-value assignments in play. From what I can see, his argument generalizes very nicely. For each kind of truth-value assignment, we can characterize a set of “coherent” credences, and show that for any incoherent credence there is a single coherent credence which is more accurate than it, no matter what the truth-values turn out to be.
In certain cases, we can relate this to kinds of “belief functions” that are familiar. For example, the class of supervaluationally coherent credences I think can be shown to be Dempster-Shafer belief functions—at least if you define supervaluational “truth values” as I do in the paper.
As I mentioned, there are certainly some loose ends in this work—be really grateful for any thoughts! I’m going to be presenting something from the degree supervaluational paper at the AAP in July, and also on the agenda is to write up some ideas about the metaphysics of radical interpretation (as a kind of fictionalism about semantics) for the Fictionalism conference in Manchester this September.
[Update: I’ve added an extra section to the gradational accuracy paper, just showing that “coherent credences” for the various kinds of truth-value assignments I discuss satisfy the generalizations of classical probability theory suggested in Brian Weatherson’s 2003 NDJFL paper. The one exception is supervaluationism, where only a weakened version of the final axiom is satisfied—but in that case, we can show that the coherent credences must be Dempster-Shafer functions. So I think that gives us a pretty good handle on the behaviour of non-accuracy-dominated credences for the non-classical case.]
[Update 2: I’ve tightened up some of the initial material on non-classical semantics, and added something on intuitionism, which the generalization seems to cover quite nicely. I’m still thinking that kicking off the whole thing with lists of non-classical semantics ain’t the most digestable/helpful way of presenting the material, but at the moment I just want to make sure that the formal material works.]
J Robert G Williams 