Can Smiley be Carnapped?

The Second Cambridge Graduate Conference on the Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics took place over the weekend. You can see what you missed here. It would be nice to drum up just a bit more support next time — for I’m sure there will be a third in the series. The most substantial talk was, perhaps unsurprisingly, by Tim Williamson, who was running through some of the arguments of his piece Barcan Formulas in Second-Order Modal Logic.

I was responding to a talk by Julien Murzi and Ole Hjortland, based on their ‘Inferentialism and the Categoricity Problem: Reply to Raatikainen‘ (which is coming out in Analysis). One part of their talk was about Timothy Smiley’s bilateralist treatment of the Carnap problem, and that’s what my comments focussed on. Here’s a slightly expanded version of my comments, defending the local hero, rewritten though to be more stand-alone.

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