No Fact of the Matter? | Attic Philosophy

Some things are true, some things are false, but sometimes, there seems to be no fact of the matter either way. How can we make sense of that idea, logically and philosophically? In this video, we go over some of the philosophical interpretations of three-valued logic, focusing on the Open Future and Vagueness.

00:00 - Intro
01:45 - The Open Future
02:59 - Logic for the Open Future
03:53 - Vagueness
06:20 - Logic for Vagueness
06:33 - Philosophical problems
09:25 - Non-truth-functional logics
11:05 - Wrap-Up

If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, leave me a comment below.

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#logic #philosophy

[rauljvila]

I have discoverd your channel via the last Computerphile video and this series seemed interesting; indeed it is!
TIn this 6th video I went to the comments to take a look at the discussions. I was expecting at least a couple of dozen threads.... then I saw that this video has less than 500 views!!! I know that the YT algorithm needs some time to get the real good stuff... but how does this series not have some thousand views per video more??

Double thanks for the great ocntent, specially because the views are not on the level the quality.

[vitusschafftlein]

Great video, Mark! There is no channel I enjoy watching as much as yours. I have a question: At 10:52, you say that in order for LEM to hold although it is unclear which one of its disjuncts will hold, we need a non-truth-functional intensional logic. I completeley agree with you on the non-truth-functional part, but isn't there a way to solve all this without intensional logic? I'm specifically thinking about supervaluation, but I've only studied it in the context of free logics (specifically, Lambert's FM2). Maybe I even got you wrong and you talk about intensional logic not because of LEM but because the examples you give are only expressible in tense logic, which is, of course, an intensional logic.

[animore]

Thanks very much for the video! I know this is a bit of a late reply, but I'm wondering if you could expand upon the idea that the law of the excluded middle could hold even if there's no fact of the matter about which disjunct is true.

Taking, say, a semantic understanding of vagueness, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. If the concept of "cloud" isn't sufficiently well-defined so as to cover cases of e.g. the little wisps around the center, to the point that there is no fact of the matter whether or not those wisps are part of the cloud, how could we say that "it's either part of the cloud or not" could still hold?

Sorry if this is a bit of a dumb or not very clear question. This is my first time learning stuff like this.

[BelegaerTheGreat]

4:50 I'm the semantic.
Sentences referring to undefined stuff like "cloud" or "tall" are just invalid

[musicarroll]

To assert that "there is no fact to the matter" seems to project/foist an epistemic opinion onto the world. All of your examples of future propositions are propositions that will be either T/F eventually, but we are currently unable to honestly assign such values due to our limitations when it comes to reading the future. Vagueness, on the other hand, seems to be a problem of meaning per se, not one of truth value assignment. And meaning, as in your case of clouds, can be contingent on some more or less arbitrary convention or definition. Claiming the future world is inherently unknowable seems like an epistemic dodge.