Oradora Convidada: Clarence Protin, Center of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon

Abstract: In this talk we develop a formal logic called Natural Term Logic (NTL) which is based on the syntactic and logical structure of natural language. NTL can be seen as a refinement of the ideas of Quine's paper 'Variables Explained Away' and the technical concepts introduced by Bealer and Zalta. NTL is more fine-grained than Bealer's first-order intensional logic (BL): there is a many-to-one correspondence between NTL terms and closed BL terms as well as a one-to-one correspondence which assigns to each BL term a corresponding NTL term.  We define a series of reductions on NTL for which every NTL term T reduces to a unique normal term N. We show that these reductions preserve the corresponding BL term and that closed terms of BL represent normal NTL terms. The above results depend on a mathematical treatment of permutations and equivalence relations on finite totally ordered sets, a theory we call plectology and which we believe to be of interest in its own right. (Joint work with Bruno Dinis).

Online:  https://bigbluebutton.uevora.pt/rooms/jbv-e2n-yhk-qqj/join