The Inaugural Symposium on Logic in the Arab World

The symposium accepts contributions related to the following areas in logic:*

Topics include (but not limitid to):

Topics include (but not limitid to):

Topics include (but not limitid to):

*Abstracts submission is currently closed!

For many decades now, logics which permit inconsistent but non-trivial theories have been investigated and discussed. However, in recent years, we have seen the recognition that there are logics which not only permit contradictions, but which deliver contradictions: the logical truths are themselves inconsistent. As yet, they have no standard name as far as I know. Let us call them überconsistent logics.
Dialetheism is the view that some contradictions are true. It might well be thought that these logics which deliver contradictory logical truths provide an open-and-shut case for dialetheism. After all, as Quine puts it, ‘if sheer logic is not conclusive, what is?’ Matters are not that straightforward, however.
This talk is an investigation of the relationship between überconsistent logics and dialetheism. The investigation is a provisional and preliminary one. Since überconsistent logics are themselves a relatively novel phenomenon, so is the issue at hand.

In the second half of ``Two Dogmas", Quine argued that there could be empirical grounds to revise logic–at least in principle. Since then, the most (though still not very) popular proposal for what those empirical grounds look like has involved quantum mechanics. Still, most logicians seem to think that this does not give us good enough reason to revise. This paper considers and evaluates an alternative proposal for empirical grounds for revision of logic: perhaps the experiences acquired in virtual reality give us reason to adopt an assessment-sensitive logic.

This talk will be about Nothing. It is not the case that there will be no-thing that I will be talking about, nevertheless I will indeed talk about absence of referents as well as reference to absence. Nothing is said to have many extraordinary properties, but in predicating anything of Nothing we contradict its nothingness. In trying to avoid such misleading descriptions, Nothing could be theorised as ineffable, apart from perhaps being expressed as a dialetheia. Since Nothing could quickly explode into infinity, and having only restricted finite time, this talk covers some introductory thoughts on conceptualising (or modelling) Nothing as the empty set, which contains no-thing.

Validity is usually taken to be a consistent property: every inference is either valid or invalid, and never both. In this talk, I argue for the controversial thesis that, if someone endorses a many-valued semantics for the object language formulas, then they should also endorse a many-valued notion of validity.
I'll present logical systems based on Belnap’s algebra 4 whose notion of validity is non-bivalent. Then I claim that such systems should be paraconsistent and/or paracomplete also at the level of metainferences (viz. inferences whose premises and conclusions are themselves inferences ), and show how this paraconsistency and/or paracompleteness can be achieved. Indeed, I prove that there is a sense in which the metalogic of each of our systems coincides with some well-know paraconsistent and/or paracomplete logic. Finally, I am also going to give some philosophical motivation to adopt an inconsistent logic.
(This presentation is based on Barrio, Fiore & Pailos "Non-Bivalent Validity")

Kuwait University

Rashed Ahmad (KU), Alzawawi Baghorah (KU), Abdullah AlJasmi (KU), and Mohammad AlSayid (KU).