We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 6 at 17.00 (CET), Alessandro Giordani
(Catholic University Milan, USI) and Vita Saitta (Catholic University Milan) will give the
talk A truthmaker semantics for modal logic.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso, FTL Building (USI West Campus) and
online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi@usi.ch<mailto:events.isfi@usi.ch>.
Abstract: Truthmaker semantics is an innovative framework addressing key philosophical
questions about meaning and logic. It is emerging as a significant tool in philosophical
logic, challenging possible worlds semantics in areas like semantic and linguistic
analysis, non-classical logics, counterfactuals, and modalities. This talk has three main
aims. The first is to explore what a semantics for modal notions looks like when adopting
a truthmaker semantics, wherein truthmakers for modal sentences are identified with
specific kinds of norms. The second is to demonstrate that such a semantics is general
enough to allow us to capture modal systems characterized by classes of Kripke frames. The
final aim is to prove that this semantics also allows us to capture those modal systems
that are characterized by classes of neighborhood frames. The results we obtain are
somewhat surprising, as they show that an intuitively appealing idea—namely, that every
world is endowed with a set of norms determining which other worlds are possible relative
to it---is sufficient for unifying Kripke and neighborhood semantics within the framework
of truthmaker semantics.
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