What Proofs and Truthmakers are About

Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)

Greg Restall (Melbourne) will give a talk titled "What Proofs and Truthmakers are About". 

Abstract: This talk is a comparison of how three different approaches to subject matter treat some pairs of statements that say different things but are (classically) logically equivalent. The pairs are

-- p∨¬p and ⊤

-- p∨(p∧q)  and p

-- (p∨¬p)∨(q∨¬q) and (p∨¬p)∧(q∨¬q)

I compare and contrast the ontion of subject tmater introduced in Stephen Yablo’s Aboutness (Princeton University Press, 2014), truthmakers conceived of as situations, as discussed in my “Truthmakers, Entailment and Necessity,” and the proof invariants I have explored in recent work.