LUW April 19, 2023: An Intensional Formalization of Generic Statements by Hugolin Bergier

[jean-yves beziau]

The next session of the Logica Universalis Webinar will be  Wednesday 19 at 4pm CET.

Speaker: Hugolin Bergier 

Title of the talk: An Intensional Formalization of Generic Statements

Abstract:  A statement is generic if it expresses a generalization about

the members of a kind, as in, ’Pear trees blossom in May,’ or, ’Birds lay

egg’. In classical logic, generic statements are formalized as universally

quantified conditionals: ’For all x, if ..., then ....’ We want to argue that

such a logical interpretation fails to capture the intensional character of

generic statements because it cannot express the generic statement as

a simple proposition in Aristotle’s sense, i.e., a proposition containing

only one single predicate. On the contrary, we’ll show that lambda abstraction

and combinatory logic can help us transform the classical,

non-simple and extensional expression of generic statements into a new,

simple and intensional formalization, through the introduction of an

operator that we will call ALL*. We will show that this new operator

allows for the possibility of a single predication, e.g. fly(), because it

builds, out of a concept like ’bird’, a concrete universal, e.g. ’birds’, upon

which the single predicate can be applied to authentically formalize a

generic statement, e.g. ’birds fly’.

https://www.springer.com/journal/11787/

Associate organization: InterPARES

https://interparestrustai.org/

presented by Kenneth Thibodeau

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Thibodeau

Chair: Srecko Kovac 

https://www.ifzg.hr/~skovac/

Editorial Board LU 

Everybody is welcome to attend

Jean-Yves Beziau, Editor-in-Chief LU and LUW organizer

https://cassyni.com/s/logica-universalis/seminars