Lecture: Dana Goswick

Title: What Logic Does Not Tell Us

Abstract: Many of us (myself included) were inculcated in graduate school with the Quine/Kripke/Lewis line which takes classical logic to be sacrosanct and to provide an important constraint on metaphysical theorizing.  Having spent nearly ten years in the marvelously logical pluralist environment of the University of Melbourne, I'm far less certain of the classical logic party line than I once was.  In this talk, I'll (i) raise the question of whether classical logic should be taken to constrain metaphysical theorizing, (ii) provide some general reasons for thinking that it should not be, and (iii) argue via specific case studies (from fictional characters, quantum objects, and nonsort objects) that we have good reason to think that classical logic should not constrain our metaphysical views, i.e., we should not reject -- or even think less of -- metaphysical view m simply because it cannot be modelled by classical logic.