Ken Akiba Bibliography

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE

DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

COLLOQUIUM

"Vagueness in the World"
Abstract: I shall present and defend the worldly (objectual, or ontic) view of vagueness and indeterminacy -- the view that there is vagueness in the world, in objects and properties themselves, not just in language. A version of the worldly view, the modal view, is set forth. According to this view, just as objects extend over metaphysical and temporal possible worlds, they extend over worlds of another kind, precisified worlds. A vague object is conceived as an object that coincides with different precise objects in different precisified worlds. I shall refute Evans's argument against vague objects, and solve "The problem of the many" (or "the paradox of 1001 cats") from the modal point of view. Appropriate semantics for vague language will also be considered.

Ken Akiba

Department of Philosophy

University of Missouri

Friday, October 26, 2001

3:00 p.m.

SST 777

Ken Akiba

A Bibliography
Compiled by
Eddie Yeghiayan

1994

"Do Logical Inferences Preserve Truth?" (In Japanese) Philosophy of Science (1994), 27:69-82.

1995

"Fictionalism in Logic; Modality, Truth, and Conservativeness." PhD Dissertation, University of Southern California, 1995.
Abstract in Dissertation Abstracts International (June 1995), 55(12A):3867-A.
"It is usually held that what distinguishes a good inference from a bad one is that the former is but the latter is not truth-preserving. What is behind this view is the basic assumption that whether a certain inference is truth-preserving or not is a genuine issue, an issue the answer to which is determined objectively. This view is called the realist view of logic. In this dissertation the realist view of logic is criticized and an alternative view is presented. The alternative is called the fictionalist view of logic. On this view, what makes a logical system good is not that its inferential rules are truth-preserving, but rather that it has a certain proof-theoretic property, called deductive conservativeness. More specifically, it is argued that if the inferential rules for the logical operators involved in the system are conservative over the deductive system which is devoid of logical operators, then the conservative system will have all the virtues we expect in a good logical system. It is shown however that insofar as the system is conservative, there is no way to determine whether its inferential rules are truth-preserving or not; thus the latter is simply irrelevant to the goodness of the logical system. To support this claim, the view that the meaning of a logical operator is determined not by its semantic properties such as truth but by its inferential role, is advocated. A significant implication of this view is that there is no answer to the question which of the conservative logical systems is the correct logic for the world. Furthermore, it is maintained that metalogical claims of implication and consistency, namely claims of the forms 'A implies B', and 'A is consistent', can be taken as modal claims which involve modal operators as logical operators, and thus the above approach is applicable to such metalogical claims, too. This idea is used to avoid our ontological commitment to mathematical entities such as models and proofs employed in metalogic."
"Quine and the Linguistic Doctrine of Logical Truth." Philosophical Studies (June 1995), 78(3):237-256.

1996

"Field on the Notion of Consistency." Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (1996), 37(4):625-630.
"Logic as Instrument: The Millian View on the Role of Logic." History & Philosophy of Logic (1996), 17(2):73-83.

1997

"The Truth-Functional Theory of Conditionals." (In Japanese) Kumamoto Journal of Humanities Philosophy (1997), 54:42-58.

1998

"Nominalistic Metalogic." Journal of Philosophical Logic (February 1998), 27(1):35-47.

1999

"On Super- and Subvaluationism: A Classicist's Reply to Hyde." Mind (October 1999), 108(432):727-732.
Hyde (1997) introduced subvaluationism, a logical system for vague words that employs paraconsistent logic, and maintained that subvaluationism is substantially different from supervaluationism, and is at least as good for a logic of vagueness. In reply, this paper argues that subtruth in subvaluationism may reasonably be taken not as truth simpliciter but as possible truth in a certain sense of "possible", and that supertruth in supervaluationism may likewise be taken as necessary truth. It is shown that there is a plausible way of interpreting super- and subvaluationism which integrates the two and validates classical logic.
Full-text from ECO

2000

"Identity Is Simple." American Philosophical Quarterly (October 2000), 37(4):389-404.
"Indefiniteness of Mathematical Objects." Philosophia Mathematica (2000), 8(1):26-46.
"Logic and Truth: A Fictionalist View." Journal of Philosophical Research (2000), 25:101-123.
"Shogenji's Probabilistic Measure of Coherence is Incoherent." Analysis (October 2000), 60(4):356-359.
Full-text from Ingenta
"Vagueness As a Modality." Philosophical Quarterly (July 2000), 50(200):359-370.
Full-text from Ingenta

Forthcoming

"Can Deflationism Allow Hidden Indeterminacy?" Pacific Philosophical Quarterly.
"A Deflationist Approach to Indeterminacy and Vagueness." Philosophical Studies.
Review of Terence Parsons' Indeterminate Identity: Metaphysics and Semantics. Philosophical Quarterly.