Foundations of Logical Consequence

The Conference will be the last event organised during the AHRC-funded Foundations of Logical Consequence project, and so will aim to bring together all the themes considered during the project. The overall goal has been to clarify the foundations of logical consequence. Are these absolute or relative, or pluralist? Are the 'laws of thought' universal, topic-invariant, and certain, or are they relative to context, or are there different admissible senses of validity? Is pluralism a form of relativism? Should the foundations be essentially model-theoretic, or proof-theoretic, or some hybrid of the two, or is there a third way, e.g., deflationary? Is there a clear conception of a logical constant, such that all consequence is formal, or are there different logics for different concepts, modal, temporal, epistemic and so on? Further issues concern the relata of the consequence relation: are they sentences, propositions, utterances, statements or states of affairs? are they sets of such relata, or multi-sets, or sequences? are they finite or can they be infinite? Moreover, what of the epistemology of inference? How do the competing accounts of logical consequence, and of the meanings of the logical constants, respectively, connect with the justification of logical principles? The aim is to bring together researchers in these fields to share their findings, reach conclusions, and provide a stimulus to further research.