Event Detail

Wed Oct 21, 2015
234 Moses
6:10–8 PM
Working Group in the History and Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Science
Jeff Sanford Russell (USC)
Possible Patterns

According to David Lewis (among others) “There are no gaps in logical space” (1986) and thus “Possibility is governed by a combinatorial principle” (2009). But what principle could this be? Taking an argument from Peter Forrest and David Armstrong (1984) and a reply from Daniel Nolan (1996) as our jumping-off point, we use resources from model theory to show the consistency of certain packages of combinatorial principles and the inconsistency of others. (This work is a collaboration with John Hawthorne.)