Formal Philosophy-66: Report by Jonas Held "Inference and Predication"

Jonas Held

Junior faculty member at the University of Leipzig

will present the talk 

"Inference and Predication"

The aim of my talk is to show that central problems arising in the current debate about the nature of the mental activity of inferring can be solved by means of a predicative account of inference. This predicative account of inference is inspired by recent accounts of judgment and propositional content (Bronzo 2019, Hanks 2011, 2015, Kimhi 2018, Rödl 2020). By contrast to the dominant Fregean view, which construes judgment as the activity of assenting to an already structured proposition, these new accounts take a judgment to be a combinatory activity of predicating a property of an object; the unity of the proposition is then understood as constituted by this predicative activity. I will show that an account of the activity of inferring can be formed on the basis of these new accounts of judgement and proposition. Inference, on my understanding, is a complex kind of predicative activity. One of the main upshots of the predicative account is that it can meet Boghossians (2014) taking condition – that a thinker draws an inference because she takes the premises to support the conclusion – without falling prey to Carroll’s regress. The predicative account of inference I offer has some similarities to classical syllogistic. However, as I will argue, it can deal not only with syllogistic inferences, whose validity depends on the inner structure of the sentences involved, but also with inferences that involve truth- functionally complex propositions, such as modus ponens.

Zoom: 

https://zoom.us/j/95166216579?pwd=L2xLREJMOWY0Z2Y3NjZJbmJUeldJQT09

ID: 951 6621 6579
Password: 311793

Everyone is invited.
Working language of the seminar is English (translation to Russian is not provided)



Contact information
llfp@hse.ru
(International laboratory for Logic, Linguistics and Formal Philosophy)