Logic List Mailing Archive
Two postdoctoral research fellowships in "Foundations of Logical Consequence", St. Andrews (Scotland), Deadline: 26 Sep 2008
UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS
SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND FILM STUDIES
Arch: Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and
Epistemology
TWO Postdoctoral Research Fellowships in the Foundations of Logical
Consequence
Please quote ref: JC028/08
Closing date: 26 September 2008
FURTHER PARTICULARS
Arch, the Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics
and Epistemology, seeks to appoint two Postdoctoral Research Fellows to
work within the scope of the AHRC funded project Foundations of Logical
Consequence for a three and a half-year term with a probationary period of
one year. The appointees will take up their posts on the 1st of January
2009, or as soon as possible thereafter.
Applicants must be on track to receive a PhD in Philosophy by the time of
appointment and must demonstrate outstanding research potential in the
areas of the project. A track record of high quality publications will be
an advantage. The Fellows will pursue original research within the scope
of the Foundations of Logical Consequence programme, broadly conceived.
In addition it will fall within their remit to:
(*) foster informal philosophical discussion within Arch, especially
among graduate students.
(*) convene the core project seminars and oversee the production of
online minutes.
(*) maintain up-to-date online bibliographies and online information
about project seminars and outcomes.
(*) lead collaborative production of annual 'milestone' articles on the
work of the project.
(*) take responsibility for the organisation of workshops and assist the
Directors and project leaders in organising conferences and other events
and in editing associated anthologies.
(*) undertake up to thirty hours of teaching per annum for the School.
As Arch is a collaborative research centre, and financed primarily by
competitive awards, a willingness and enthusiasm to work within a team
ethos and to help the Centre to pursue external research funding is
essential.
Please include with your application a CV, research proposal (1000 word
max.), recent writing sample (5000 word max.) and the names and addresses
of three academic referees. We expect the interview process to take place
in St Andrews from 22 24 October 2008.
Foundations of Logical Consequence
In June 2008, Arch was awarded major AHRC funding for a research project
on the Foundations of Logical Consequence commencing on the 1st of January
2009.
Below is a brief project synopsis.
The Research Problem
Logical consequence is the relation between premises and conclusion of a
valid piece of reasoning (an argument). Foundations of Logical Consequence
will concentrate on two principal positive approaches to explicating this
notion, model-theoretic and inferentialist. According to the former, a
conclusion is a logical consequence of some premises if it is true in
every model in which they are true. (A model is an interpretation which
assigns meanings to non-logical expressions uniformly.) According to
inferentialism, the conclusion is a logical consequence of the premises if
it may be derived from them by step-wise application of primitive
inference-rules, conceived (according to some inferentialists) as
implicitly defining the logical expressions they contain, whose acceptance
(some hold) is constitutive of understanding those expressions. Certain
very general problems attend both approaches. Model-theoretic accounts
have characteristically been proposed in a reductive spirit: logical
consequence, an apparently modal notion, is explained in terms of an
apparently non-modal, purely extensional apparatus of models. How can any
illuminating account 'cross levels' in this fashion? Another important
concern reflects on the quantification over interpretations standard in
this approach: how might anyone know that an argument is truth-preserving
under all interpretations of a certain sort, save by knowing by some
independent means that it is valid? And by what principle do we select the
vocabulary (the 'logical constants') to be held invariant under
re-interpretation? The classic objection to inferentialism is posed by
Arthur Prior's demonstration that not every characterisation of
inferential role determines an admissible logical operation. Responses to
Prior's challenge have tended to provoke further puzzles: a recurrent
proposal has been to demarcate acceptable cases by additional
proof-theoretic constraintse.g., harmony, conservativeness, uniqueness,
consistency, or normalisation. But the proper characterisation of these
notions remains stubbornly controversial, as does their claim to be
proof-theoretic notions at all. Our over-arching focus in the first half
of the project will be to explore the resources that both positive views
have to address the above difficulties; and to establish whether they are
really in competition. The second half of the project will turn to two
large groups of issues on which a satisfactory characterisation of
consequence might be expected to shed light, and which in turn might
constrain its form. One concerns the absoluteness of logic. Frege believed
that the 'laws of thought' were universal, topic-invariant, and certain.
This conception is challenged by a number of tendencies in more recent
philosophy of logic. Some philosophers have argued that the logic
introduced by Frege fails to accommodate a requirement of relevant
connection between premises and conclusion, others that it is unsuitable
as a vehicle for reasoning about infinite totalities, vague concepts,
quantum phenomena, or the logical paradoxes. A major concern of our
research will be to explore the interaction between these broadly
revisionary views and the model-theoretic and inferentialist approaches.
Is it a constraint on a satisfactory account of logical consequence that
it leave space for a revisionary debate? Or might the correct account
teach us that these debates are fundamentally misguided? The final part of
the project will turn to the epistemology of logical consequence. In
particular, it will compare the strengths of the two principal approaches
regarding such issues as: (i) our apparent knowledge of the validity of
simple principles of inference, e.g., Modus Ponens; (ii) the phenomenon of
'blind inference' - inference uninformed by explicit beliefs about
validity, with which we regularly credit children, and perhaps intelligent
animals; (iii) the question of the nature of inference itself - what it is
for a thinker to have inferred a particular conclusion from other beliefs,
whether rightly or wrongly. Essentially, then, there are two overarching
problems involved in our research: the metaphysical problem of explaining
what constitutes logical consequence, and the epistemological problem of
how we recognise instances of it. At its most general level, our project
is thus concerned with what Peacocke an 'integration challenge': that of
providing a unified response to both problems. There are also two
three-year postgraduate studentships associated with the project. For
further details please visit the Foundations of Logical Consequence
website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/projects/logic/index.shtml or
contact the Principal Investigator, Professor Stephen Read
(slr@st-and.ac.uk).
The Arch Research Centre
Arch was founded in 1998. It is an externally funded Research Centre
within the School of Philosophical and Anthropological Studies, dedicated
to the prosecution and publication of research of the highest quality in
analytical metaphysics and epistemology, formal and philosophical logic,
philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind,
and to the promotion of the research of younger scholars. Arch pursues
these goals by bringing together philosophers from the UK and abroad to
collaborate in research.
The Centre has been the recipient of a major five-year AHRC Research Grant
for a project on the Logical and Metaphysical Foundations of Classical
Mathematics, and of a five-year AHRC Research Centre Grant for research
projects in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Modality and into the
Nature and Logic of Vagueness. Its new AHRC funded projects concern Basic
Knowledge, Contextualism and Relativism, Philosophical Methodology, and
the present project, Foundations of Logical Consequence.
Each current project has a core team working in St Andrews, comprised of a
project leader and a number of Postdoctoral Research Fellows and
postgraduate students. Other members of Arch include its Associate
Fellows: scholars with an interest in the work of the Centre who
participate regularly in its activities, and Professorial Fellows,
distinguished scholars who visit regularly for half a semester. In
addition, a network of international scholars is associated with each
project, supported by awards from the British Academy and the Leverhulme
Trust. These networks include many internationally renowned philosophers;
current membership lists can be viewed on our website. Programmes of
weekend workshops and international conferences are associated with each
project.
For further information on the Arch Research Centre, including its
projects, activities and staff, see the Arch website:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/
The Graduate School
The Graduate School in Philosophy at St Andrews is run in partnership with
the Philosophy Department at the University of Stirling (the St Andrews
and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy SASP further de
tails
supplied on request). The programme is based on a one-year Master's
(MLitt) course taught in St Andrews by both St. Andrews and Stirling
staff, leading to research at Masters (MPhil) or Doctoral level in eithe
r
St Andrews or Stirling. One of Archs main aims is the provision of
training and support for graduate students. Several current PhD students
are members of Arch please visit the Arch website for details
and at
least two MLitt-level seminars are provided by Arch each semester.
The Philosophical Research Culture at St Andrews
St Andrews is Scotlands premier centre for philosophy and one of the top
philosophy schools in the United Kingdom, receiving a 5-rating in both the
1996 and 2001 Research Assessment exercises.
Weekly research seminars are run in connection with each current Arch
project. There are in addition several reading groups meeting regularly,
including a Metaphysics Reading Group and a Medieval Logic Reading Group.
There are talks by visiting speakers and regular weekend workshops.
Research seminars within the Philosophy Departments more generally include
the fortnightly Departmental Colloquium (our regular forum for external
speakers) and a weekly seminar for staff in Moral Philosophy. A Friday
afternoon seminar is reserved for presentations by research students.
The Philosophical Quarterly is edited in St Andrews by an Editorial Board
chaired by Katherine Hawley. It is managed by a committee of
representatives of the University Court of St Andrews and of the Scots
Philosophical Club (an association of all Scottish professional
philosophers which meets twice yearly around the Scots universities in
rotation).
The Gifford Lectures are delivered every second year. In addition the
University offers a Gifford Postdoctoral Fellowship which is often held in
one or other of the philosophy departments.
=09=09=09=09 The Setting
The Philosophy Departments are accommodated in a pair of semi-detached
houses, Edgecliffe, Victorian Scottish Baronial in style, situated on a
small cliff with views across StAndrews Bay to the eastern Grampian
mountains. A study centre for graduate students, including common room,
kitchen, a number of small offices, and computer terminals, and
affectionately known as The Hut, is situated in the Edgecliffe garden
.
Arch has its own accommodation in North Street and College Street.
Edgecliffe contains a departmental library with around 5000 volumes. The
main University Library, just across the road, has a very substantial
Philosophy collection, including around 100 current Philosophy journals.
St Andrews itself is an ancient and very attractive small town
(officially, a city) of a little over 20,000 people of whom 7,000 are
students. The University was founded in 1413. The climate is drier than
many parts of Britain and, owing to the effects of the Gulf Stream, the
winters tend to be less severe than the latitude might lead one to expect.
The town is little more than an hours drive from Edinburgh, and has
frequent rail connections with the south from Leuchars station (5 miles
distant). There are hourly planes between Edinburgh and London and also
flights to London from Dundee airport (about a half hour drive away).
Glasgow airport is about one and three quarters hours by road, with daily
morning flights to the Eastern United States.