Meaning and Proscription in Formal Logic

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Proscriptive Principle

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 1-16

3. Nonsense and Proscription

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 17-39

4. Metaphysical Considerations on State Space Semantics

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 41-72

5. A Computational Interpretation of Conceptivism

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 73-105

6. Faulty Belnap Computers and Subsystems of \(\mathsf{E}_{\texttt {fde}}\)

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 107-131

7. Cut-Down Operations on Multilattices

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 133-161

8. Correia Semantics Revisited

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 163-183

9. Concluding Remarks

   • Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

   Pages 185-194

10. Back Matter

    Pages 195-198

    PDF

This book aids in the rehabilitation of the wrongfully deprecated work of William Parry, and is the only full-length investigation into Parry-type propositional logics.

A central tenet of the monograph is that the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the mereological analogy emerges – its effervescence with respect to fields ranging from metaphysics to computer programming – provides compelling evidence that the study of logics of analytic implication can be instrumental in identifying connections between topics that would otherwise remain hidden. More concretely, the book identifies and discusses a host of cases in which analytic implication can play an important role in revealing distinct problems to be facets of a larger, cross-disciplinary problem.

It introduces an element of constancy and cohesion that has previously been absent in a regrettably fractured field, shoring up those who are sympathetic to the worth of mereological analogy. Moreover, it generates new interest in the field by illustrating a wide range of interesting features present in such logics – and highlighting these features to appeal to researchers in many fields.

• William T. Parry on Analytic Implication
• Containment Logic
• Conceptivist Theories of Entailment
• Relevant Entailment
• Rivals to Relevant Logics
• Meaningfulness and Logic
• Alternative Interpretations of Disjunction
• Kit Fine’s truthmaker semantics
• Failure of disjunctive addition
• Infectiousness of nonsense
• Positivism, inference, and category mistakes
• Computational interpretations of logic
• Richard Angell on analytic containment
• Constructive nonsense logics
• Faulty Belnap computers
• cognate implication
• William Parry mathematics
• William Parry computer science
• William Parry philosophy
• William Parry mereology

“This book contains a series of studies devoted to so-called containment logics. … It is readable and contains a lot of interesting material for logicians and philosophers interested in non-classical logics in general, and particularly in their semantic characterization.” (Andrzej B. Indrzejczak, Mathematical Reviews, October, 2018)​

• Cycorp, Inc., Cycorp and Saul Kripke Center, Austin, USA

  Thomas Macaulay Ferguson

Thomas Macaulay Ferguson received his PhD in philosophy with a focus on philosophical logic from the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has published material on a wide variety of subjects, including theories of semantic information, many-valued model theory, formal epistemology, and non-classical mathematics. He is currently editing the volume Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency (with Can Baskent and Hitoshi Omori), to appear in Springer’s “Outstanding Contributions to Logic” series. He is working as an ontologist for the Cyc artificial intelligence project at Cycorp in Austin and maintains an affiliation as a research scholar with the Saul Kripke Center at CUNY in New York.

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