Dear all, Welcome back! For the first meeting of the SMG in Lent we will have Prof. Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) and Prof. Richard Bradley (London School of Economics) jointly presenting a talk entitled ‘Conditionals: Truth and Safety’ (abstract below). As usual it will be on Wednesday (the 23rd), from 4.30 to 6.00pm in the Philosophy Faculty Board Room. The talk should last about 45 minutes followed by questions and discussion. All graduate students are welcome.
After the talk we will be going to a nearby restaurant for dinner. If you would like to join Prof. Mellor and Prof. Bradley (at your own expense) please let me know by midday on Tuesday. A full list of speakers for Lent term is available here: https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG Abstract: We argue that for conditionals to be true is for them to be truth-preserving or, for short, safe: i.e. for their consequents to be true if their antecedents are true. We start by noting how some of the conditionals we accept affect whether we will or should do something as a means to an end, and how those actions will succeed if and only if those conditionals are safe. This link between instrumental success and conditional safety mirrors that between actual fact and unconditional truth, a coincidence we say is best explained if, for all conditionals, truth is safety. We argue for this in two stages: first, by showing how conditionals other than those we act on – third-person, indicative and subjunctive, past-referring, non-contingent, and complex – also have ‘safety values’ that coincide with credible truth values; and secondly, by giving a semantics for conditionals on which their safety values behave like truth values in truth functions with other conditional and unconditional constituents. I hope to see you there! Nathan Hawkins PhD student in Philosophy Cambridge University _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
