Stephen Yablo

Last updated
Stephen Yablo
SteveYablo.jpg
Education University of Toronto (B.Sc.)
University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.)
Spouse Sally Haslanger
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Doctoral advisor Donald Davidson
Doctoral students Carolina Sartorio
Main interests
Philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind
Notable ideas
Yablo's paradox

Stephen Yablo is a Canadian-born American philosopher. He is David W. Skinner Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and taught previously at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. [1] He specializes in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics.

Contents

Biography

He was born in Toronto, on 30 September 1957, to a Polish father Saul Yablo and Romanian-Canadian mother Gloria Yablo (née Herman), both Jewish. [2] He is married to fellow MIT philosopher Sally Haslanger.

His Ph.D. is from University of California, Berkeley, where he worked with Donald Davidson and George Myro. In 2012, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published a number of influential papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, and gave the John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 2012, which formed the basis for his book Aboutness, which one reviewer described as "an important and far-reaching book that philosophers will be discussing for a long time." [3]

Yablo's paradox

In 1993, he published a short paper showing that a liar-like paradox can be generated without self-reference. Yablo's paradox is a logical paradox published by Stephen Yablo in 1985. [4] [5] It is similar to the liar paradox. Unlike the liar paradox, which uses a single sentence, this paradox uses an infinite list of sentences, each referring to sentences occurring later in the list. Analysis of the list shows that there is no consistent way to assign truth values to any of its members. Since everything on the list refers only to later sentences, Yablo claims that his paradox is "not in any way circular". However, Graham Priest disputes this. [6] [7]

Statement

Consider the following infinite set of sentences:

S1: For each i > 1, Si is not true.
S2: For each i > 2, Si is not true.
S3: For each i > 3, Si is not true.
...

Analysis

For any n, the proposition Sn is of universally quantified form, expressing an unending number of claims (each the negation of a statement with a larger index). As a proposition, any Sn also expresses that Sn + 1 is not true, for example.

For any pair of numbers n and i with n < i, the proposition Sn subsumes all the claims also made by the later Si. As this holds for all such pairs of numbers, one finds that all Sn imply any Si with n < i. For example, any Sn implies Sn + 1.

Claims made by any of the propositions ("the next statement is not true") stand in contradiction with an implication we can also logically derive from the lot (the validity of the next statement is implied by the current one). This establishes that assuming any Sn leads to a contradiction. And this just means that all Sn are proven false.

But all Sn being false also exactly validates the very claims made by them. So we have the paradox that each sentence in Yablo's list is both not true and true.

First-order logic

For any , the negation introduction principle of propositional logic negates . So no consistent theory proves that one of its propositions equivalent to itself. Metalogically, it means any axiom of the form of such an equivalence is inconsistent. This is one formal pendant of the liar paradox.

Similarly, for any unary predicate and if is an entire transitive relation, then by a formal analysis as above, predicate logic negates the universal closure of

On the natural numbers, for taken to be equality "", this also follows from the analysis of the liar paradox. For taken to be the standard order "", it is still possible to obtain an omega-inconsistent non-standard model of arithmetic for the theory defined by adjoining all the equivalences individually. [8]

Books

Related Research Articles

First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantified variables over non-logical objects, and allows the use of sentences that contain variables, so that rather than propositions such as "Socrates is a man", one can have expressions in the form "there exists x such that x is Socrates and x is a man", where "there exists" is a quantifier, while x is a variable. This distinguishes it from propositional logic, which does not use quantifiers or relations; in this sense, propositional logic is the foundation of first-order logic.

In logic, the law of excluded middle states that for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. It is one of the so-called three laws of thought, along with the law of noncontradiction, and the law of identity. However, no system of logic is built on just these laws, and none of these laws provides inference rules, such as modus ponens or De Morgan's laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logical connective</span> Symbol connecting sentential formulas in logic

In logic, a logical connective is a logical constant. They can be used to connect logical formulas. For instance in the syntax of propositional logic, the binary connective can be used to join the two atomic formulas and , rendering the complex formula .

Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions and relations between propositions, including the construction of arguments based on them. Compound propositions are formed by connecting propositions by logical connectives. Propositions that contain no logical connectives are called atomic propositions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Contradiction</span> Logical incompatibility between two or more propositions

In traditional logic, a contradiction occurs when a proposition conflicts either with itself or established fact. It is often used as a tool to detect disingenuous beliefs and bias. Illustrating a general tendency in applied logic, Aristotle's law of noncontradiction states that "It is impossible that the same thing can at the same time both belong and not belong to the same object and in the same respect."

Intuitionistic logic, sometimes more generally called constructive logic, refers to systems of symbolic logic that differ from the systems used for classical logic by more closely mirroring the notion of constructive proof. In particular, systems of intuitionistic logic do not assume the law of the excluded middle and double negation elimination, which are fundamental inference rules in classical logic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logical biconditional</span> Concept in logic and mathematics

In logic and mathematics, the logical biconditional, also known as material biconditional or equivalence or biimplication or bientailment, is the logical connective used to conjoin two statements and to form the statement " if and only if ", where is known as the antecedent, and the consequent.

In mathematics, constructive analysis is mathematical analysis done according to some principles of constructive mathematics.

In propositional logic, double negation is the theorem that states that "If a statement is true, then it is not the case that the statement is not true." This is expressed by saying that a proposition A is logically equivalent to not (not-A), or by the formula A ≡ ~(~A) where the sign ≡ expresses logical equivalence and the sign ~ expresses negation.

A paraconsistent logic is an attempt at a logical system to deal with contradictions in a discriminating way. Alternatively, paraconsistent logic is the subfield of logic that is concerned with studying and developing "inconsistency-tolerant" systems of logic which reject the principle of explosion.

Dialetheism is the view that there are statements that are both true and false. More precisely, it is the belief that there can be a true statement whose negation is also true. Such statements are called "true contradictions", dialetheia, or nondualisms.

In logic, a truth function is a function that accepts truth values as input and produces a unique truth value as output. In other words: The input and output of a truth function are all truth values; a truth function will always output exactly one truth value; and inputting the same truth value(s) will always output the same truth value. The typical example is in propositional logic, wherein a compound statement is constructed using individual statements connected by logical connectives; if the truth value of the compound statement is entirely determined by the truth value(s) of the constituent statement(s), the compound statement is called a truth function, and any logical connectives used are said to be truth functional.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Material conditional</span> Logical connective

The material conditional is an operation commonly used in logic. When the conditional symbol is interpreted as material implication, a formula is true unless is true and is false. Material implication can also be characterized inferentially by modus ponens, modus tollens, conditional proof, and classical reductio ad absurdum.

In mathematical logic, Heyting arithmetic is an axiomatization of arithmetic in accordance with the philosophy of intuitionism. It is named after Arend Heyting, who first proposed it.

In mathematics, a set is inhabited if there exists an element .

In logic and mathematics, contraposition refers to the inference of going from a conditional statement into its logically equivalent contrapositive, and an associated proof method known as proof by contraposition. The contrapositive of a statement has its antecedent and consequent inverted and flipped.

In mathematics and philosophy, Łukasiewicz logic is a non-classical, many-valued logic. It was originally defined in the early 20th century by Jan Łukasiewicz as a three-valued modal logic; it was later generalized to n-valued as well as infinitely-many-valued (0-valued) variants, both propositional and first order. The ℵ0-valued version was published in 1930 by Łukasiewicz and Alfred Tarski; consequently it is sometimes called the Łukasiewicz–Tarski logic. It belongs to the classes of t-norm fuzzy logics and substructural logics.

Minimal logic, or minimal calculus, is a symbolic logic system originally developed by Ingebrigt Johansson. It is an intuitionistic and paraconsistent logic, that rejects both the law of the excluded middle as well as the principle of explosion, and therefore holding neither of the following two derivations as valid:

In logic, philosophy, and theoretical computer science, dynamic logic is an extension of modal logic capable of encoding properties of computer programs.

References

  1. http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/cv.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  2. Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Stephen Yablo
  3. Morton, Adam (10 September 2014). "Aboutness".
  4. S. Yablo (1985). "Truth and reflection". Journal of Philosophical Logic . 14 (2): 297–348. doi:10.1007/BF00249368. S2CID   36735626.
  5. S. Yablo (1993). "Paradox Without Self-Reference" (PDF). Analysis . 53 (4): 251–252. doi:10.1093/analys/53.4.251.
  6. G. Priest (1997). "Yablo's paradox". Analysis . 57 (4): 236–242. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.626.8312 . doi:10.1093/analys/57.4.236.
  7. J. Beall (2001). "Is Yablo's paradox non-circular?" (PDF). Analysis . 61 (3): 176–187. doi:10.1093/analys/61.3.176.
  8. Yablo’s Paradox and ω-Inconsistency, Ketland