Philosophy of Mathematics seminar

Luca Incurvati, Amsterdam

On logical and scientific strength  

The notion of strength has featured prominently in recent debates about abductivism in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Following Timothy Williamson and Gillian Russell, I will distinguish between logical and scientific strength. After discussing Williamson’s and Russell’s characterizations of these notions, I will suggest understanding logical strength in terms of interpretability strength and scientific strength as a special case of logical strength. I will present applications of the resulting characterizations to comparisons between logics in the traditional sense and mathematical theories. This is joint work with Carlo Nicolai.