[lit-ideas] Re: Ruth Barcan Marcus 1921-2012
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 00:49:19 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 3/15/2012 9:13:12 P.M. UTC-02, rpaul@xxxxxxxx writes:
http://tinyurl.com/7gp5rfj
>Philosopher-Logician
Interesting sobriquet, if that's the word, 'sobriquet'. I collect
sobriquets for Grice. In ONE source, he is referred to as "British logician";
the
OED used to have him as "linguist". He was of course a _plain_ philosopher,
simpliciter, if that's the word. Platts called Grice, "a philosopher's
philosopher", which is confusing (it confuses me).
In the body of the article, the 'philosopher-logician' of the title becomes
a plain 'philosopher':
>Ruth Barcan Marcus, a philosopher esteemed for her
>advances in logic, a traditionally male-dominated subset of a
traditionally male-dominated field, died on >Feb. 19.
Note the sarcasm: 'subset' -- that's a male-dominated choice of a noun,
then? Note the sarcasm: a male-dominated field may have a non-male-dominated
subset, and so on.
>she retired in 1992 as the Reuben Post Halleck professor of philosophy.
Yale can confuse. Oxford has it easy: all professorship chairs start with W
Wykeham -- prof of logic.
Waynflete -- prof of metaphysics
White -------- prof of ethics
Wilde -------- prof of mental philosophy.
----
>For a woman of Professor Marcus’s generation to elbow her way into the
field, ... was almost unheard of.
It would be interesting to trace about the earliest female logician ever. I
think the first Greek female philosopher ever was good at logic, too?
>“The rest of philosophy became less male dominated, less macho, more
quickly than logic,” Stephen Neale, said in a telephone interview. “She was
working in a field which was really run by these giants.”
--- I wonder if that's what he said, in the telephone interview. Perhaps he
meant, "less male dominated, less 'macho'...": i.e. perhaps he used scare
quotes for 'macho', but then what can a telephone interview know?
"Quantified logic centers on the roles of words of quantification, like “
all,” “every” and “some,” in logical statements."
I have written, elsewhere, of the marriage of Grice and Barcan-Marcus.
Grice was obsessed with all those words -- and MORE. In later years, Grice
became obsessed, in work with G. Myro, with '=', and it is with '=' that R. B.
Marcus's works relates more. For Grice, '='-statements can be 'relative',
in ways that Marcus allows.
>An example of a quantified statement is the sentence “All humans are
mortal.”
>The sentence “Necessarily, humans are mortal” is an example of a modal
statement.
Grice prefers:
Humans MUST be mortal.
What's the good of a modality if you don't have a short Anglo-Saxon way to
express it? For Grice, the modalities are:
OUGHT
MUST
SHOULD
MAY
Humans may be mortal.
There is something heavy about 'necessarily'. Plus, it confuses, in that it
may be taken, wrongly, as a sentence modifier, as in:
"Hopefully, we'll find the house."
----
"Quine, ... argued that combining quantifiers and modals produced
unintelligible results."
Grice and Strawson who hosted Quine at Oxford tried to prove Quine wrong,
and they succeeded!
"Such issues"
as "must" vs. "necessarily"
"may seem of small consequence,"
the NYT explains,
"but the need to talk about them is necessarily the meat of philosophical
logic."
Or pragmatics, as Grice prefers. Grice's disciple, Noel Burton-Roberts,
argued for a pragmatic-implicature approach to the square of modalities:
che sera sera.
What must be must be
What may be, must it be too? ---- It ain't necessarily so.
What must be, may it be too? --- YES! It must!
People use 'must' and 'may' as in a square of opposition, but surely if
"You must do it", then, "You MAY do it."
----
"Under her formula, “the second one entails the first one,” Professor
Neale explained. “That is, if all humans are necessarily mortal, then
necessarily, all humans are mortal.”"
----
I'm glad McEvoy took upon this, and that Palma commented on it.
"In other work, Professor Marcus examined the philosophical arguments
underpinning moral dilemmas."
The wiki entry is pretty complete and adds to the great philosophical
lecture in areas OTHER than the Barcan formula.
keywords: The Grice-Myro theory of relative identity.
Barcan Marcus and Grice.
Comments from wiki then:
"Ruth Barcan Marcus (b. 1921, d. February 19, 2012) was a philosopher and
logician who developed the "Barcan formula".
"Barcan Marcus was a pioneering figure in the quantification of modal logic
and the theory of direct reference."
She wrote seminal essays on
identity,
essentialism,
possibilia,
belief,
moral conflict as well as some critical historical studies.
"Education: B.A., New York University (1941), M.A., Yale University (1942),
Ph.D., Yale University (1946). Posts: Professor of philosophy and founding
department chair, University of Illinois at Chicago (1962–1970), Professor
of philosophy, Northwestern University (1970–1973), Halleck professor of
philosophy, Yale University (1973–1991), Professor emerita and senior
research scholar, Yale University 1992-2012); Visiting distinguished
professor,
University of California, Irvine (one quarter each year, 1992–97), Chair of
the Board of Officers, American Philosophical Association (1976–83),
President, Association for Symbolic Logic (1983–86), President, International
Institut de Philosophie (1989–92) and Presidente Honoraire (continuing),
Served on various visoring committees for programs and departments, Serves on
various editorial boards."
"Ruth Barcan Marcus' earliest published work was the publication of the
first axiomatic study of modal logic with quantifiers."
"These three ground-breaking articles were
1) "A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication",
Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL, 1946),
2) "The Deduction Theorem in a Functional Calculus of First Order Based on
Strict Implication" (JSL, 1946),
3) "The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second
Order", (JSL, 1947).
The three articles are published under Marcus' maiden name:
"Ruth C. Barcan."
The widely discussed Barcan Formula is introduced as an axiom in QML.
"The papers of 1946 and 1947, were the first systems of quantified modal
logic, which extended some propositional modal systems of C. I. Lewis to
first and second order."
"A major accomplishment in the development of 20th century logic. "
Lewis gives Marcus special recognition in his
"Notes on the Logic of Intension",
originally printed in Structure, Method, and Meaning: Essays in Honor of
Henry M. Sheffer (New York, 1951).
Here, Lewis recognizes Barcan Marcus as the first logician to extend
propositional logic as a higher order intensional logic.
Barcan Marcus proposed the view in the philosophy of language according to
which proper names are what Marcus termed mere
"tags".
("Modalities and Intentional Languages" (Synthese, 1961)(and elsewhere).
These "tags" are used to refer to an object (the bearer of the name).
The meaning of the name is regarded as exhausted by this referential
function.
This view contrasts for example with late B. A. W. Russell description
theory of proper names as well as J. R. Searle's cluster description theory of
names which prevailed at the time.
This view of proper names (presented in 1962 with Quine as commentator) has
been identified by Quentin Smith with the theory of reference given in
Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity.
However, in a recent laudatio to Ruth Barcan Marcus, T. Williamson writes:
"One of the ideas in them that resonates most with current philosophy of
language is that of proper names as mere tags, without descriptive content."
"This is not Kripke's idea of names as rigid designators, designating the
same object with respect to all relevant worlds, for ‘rigidified’ definite
descriptions are rigid designators but still have descriptive content."
"Rather, it is the idea, later developed by David Kaplan and others, that
proper names are directly referential, in the sense that they contribute
only their bearer to the propositions expressed by sentences in which they
occur."
Marcus formally proved the necessity of identity in 1946 and informally
argued for it in 1961 and thereafter thus rejecting the possibility of
contingent identity.
See Journal of Symbolic Logic, (1947) 12: pp 12–15
Marcus prefers an interpretation where the domain of the interpretation
comprises individual entities in the actual world.
She also suggests that for some uses an alternative substitutional
semantics is warranted.
She provides arguments against possibilia. See "Dispensing with Possibilia"
(Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 1975–76);
"Possibilia and Possible Worlds" (Grazer Philosophische Studien, 1985–86).
T
Marcus defines a consistent set of moral principles as one in which there
is some "possible world " in which they are all obeyable.
That they may conflict in the actual world is not a mark of inconsistency.
As in the case of necessity of identity, there was a resistance to this
interpretation of moral conflict.
Her argument counts against a widely received view that systems of moral
rules are inevitably inconsistent.
It is proposed that believing is a relationship of an agent to a possible
state of affairs under specified internal and external circumstances.
Assenting to a quoted sentence (the disquotation account of belief) is only
one
behavioral marker of believing.
Betting behavior is another.
The wholly language-centered account of belief (e.g. Davidson) is rejected.
Where an agent behaves as if an impossibility obtained Marcus proposes that
under those circumstances the agent, on the disclosure of the
impossibility should say that she only claimed to believe an impossibility.
In much the same way, when a mathematician discovers that one of his
conjectures is false, and since if it is mathematically false it is impossible,
he would say he only claimed to believe it. Odd as this proposal is, it is
analogous to the widely accepted principle about knowing: if we claim to
know P, and P turns out false, we do not say we used to know it, we say we
were mistaken in so claiming.
The GRICE-MYRO theory of relative identity pertains to Barcan's
metaphysics.
Aristotelian Essentialism is concerned with properties which Marcus defines
in the context of a modal framework.
One proposal is that a property is essential if something has it, not
everything has it, if something has it then it has it necessarily, and it is
not
wholly individuating e.g. a natural kind property.
It is otherwise claimed by Quine and others that modal logic or semantics
is committed to essentialist truths.
Marcus argues informally that there are interpretations of some modal
systems in which all essentialist claims are false.
Terence Parsons later formally proved this result.
An alternative to Tarskian (model theoretic) semantics is proposed for some
uses where "the truth conditions for quantified formuli are given purely
in terms of truth with no appeal to domains of interpretation".
(Later called by others "truth value semantics".)
She shows that the claim that such a semantics leads to contradictions is
false. Such a semantics may be of interest for mathematics e.g. Hartry
Field, or for fictional discourse.
Objectual quantification is required for interpretation of identity and
other metaphysical categories.
Awards: -- Guggenheim Fellow (1952), National Science Foundation Fellow
(1963)
Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, 1973 and 1990)
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1979)
University of Edinburgh Fellow, Humanities Institute (1983)
Wolfson College of Oxford University, Visiting Fellow (1985 and 1986)
Clare Hall of Cambridge University, Visiting Fellow (1988)
National Humanities Center, Mellon Fellow (1992–93)
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences(1977--)
Medal of the Collège de France (1986)
Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, University of Illinois at Chicago
(1995)
Wilbur Cross Medal, Yale University (2000)
Lauener Prize in Analytic Philosophy, Lauener Foundation, 2007-08.
Permanent Member of the Common Room, Clare Hall (1986-)
Phi Beta Kappa (1941)
Membre, Institut International de Philosophie, Presidente 1989-92,
President Honoraire 1992-
Quinn Prize, American Philosophical Association 2007, for service to the
profession
Dewey Lecture, APA, Dec 2009
---
Work:
The Logical Enterprise, ed. with A. Anderson, R. Martin, Yale, 1995
Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, VII, eds. R. Barcan Marcus et
al., North Holland, 1986
"Modalities: Philosophical Essays".
Oxford University Press, 1993.
Paperback; 1995
(contains many of Marcus's important papers)
[edit] See also
American philosophy
List of American philosophers
[edit] References and notes
1.^ Timothy Williamson's Tribute to Ruth Barcan Marcus on the Occasion of
Her Receipt of the Lauener Prize, Leiter Reports: A Philosophical Blog,
October 14, 2008.
2.^ See "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency" (Journal of Philosophy, 1980)(and
frequently published elsewhere)
3.^ See "A Proposed Solution to The Puzzle About Belief" (Foundations of
Analytic Philosophy in Midwest Studies, 1981) and "Rationality and Believing
the Impossible" (The Journal of Philosophy, 1983 and elsewhere).
4.^ Philosophical Review, 78 (1969).
[edit] External linksYale University philosophy department biography: Ruth
Barcan Marcus
Encyclopedia of Jewish Women: Ruth Barcan Marcus
Persondata
Name Marcus, Ruth Barcan
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth 1921
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death
Categories: 1921 births2012 deaths20th-century philosophers21st-century
philosophersAmerican educatorsAmerican philosophersAmerican philosophy
academicsWomen philosophersPhilosophers of languageAmerican JewsJewish
philosophersAnalytic philosophersAmerican logiciansNew York University
alumniYale
University alumniYale University facultyUniversity of Illinois at Chicago
facultyFellows of Clare Hall, CambridgeFellows of Wolfson College, Oxford
---
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
