Presenting the first comprehensive, in-depth study of hyperintensionality, this book equips readers with the basic tools needed to appreciate some of current and future debates in the philosophy of language, semantics, and metaphysics. After introducing and explaining the major approaches to hyperintensionality found in the literature, the book tackles its systematic connections to normativity and offers some contributions to the current debates. The book offers undergraduate and graduate students an essential introduction to the topic, while also helping professionals in related (...) fields get up to speed on open research-level problems. (shrink)

This article proposes a systematic application of recent developments in the logic of preference to a number of topics in deontic logic. The key junction is the well‐known Hansson conditional for dyadic obligations. These conditionals are generalized by pairing them with reasoning about syntactic priority structures. The resulting two‐level approach to obligations is tested first against standard scenarios of contrary‐to‐duty obligations, leading also to a generalization for the Kanger‐Anderson reduction of deontic logic. Next, the priority framework is applied to model (...) two intuitively different sorts of deontic dynamics of obligations, based on information changes and on genuine normative events. In this two‐level setting, we also offer novel takes on vexed issues such as the Chisholm paradox and modelling strong permission. Finally, the priority framework is shown to provide a unifying setting for the study of operations on norms as such, in particular, adding or deleting individual norms, and even merging whole norm systems in different manners. (shrink)

Centered around the analysis of the prescriptive portion of the Vedas, the Sanskrit philosophical school of Mīmāṃsā provides a treasure trove of normative investigations. We focus on the leading Mīmāṃsā authors Prabhākara, Kumārila and Maṇḍana, and discuss three modal logics that formalize their deontic theories. In the first part of this paper, we use logic to analyze, compare and clarify the various solutions to the _śyena_ controversy, a two-thousand-year-old problem arising from seemingly conflicting commands in the Vedas. In the second (...) part, the formalized Mīmāṃsā theories are analyzed and employed to provide alternative perspectives on well-known paradoxes from the contemporary field of deontic logic. Thus, we go from logic to Mīmāṃsā and back again. (shrink)

Philosophers like G.H. von Wright and D. Makinson have pointed to serious challenges regarding the foundations of deontic logic. In this paper, I suggest that to deal successfully with these challenges a reconsideration of the research program of the discipline is useful. Some problems that have troubled this particular field of logical study for decades may disappear or appear more tractable if we view them from the perspective of a language game introduced by D. Lewis involving three characters: the Master, (...) the Slave and the Kibitzer. The adoption of this perspective opens a natural approach to a new layout of the domain of deontic studies. I propose dividing deontic logic into six sub-areas which are distinguished by their focus on the different idioms typical of the individual players, by conceiving the language game as either being static or as dynamic and by the aims of the logical inquiry. What kind of insights the proposed perspective provides is illustrated by an analysis of the so-called Ross paradox—a problem that has troubled deontic logic since its origins and, though it was many times pronounced solved, still keeps coming back ‘alive and kicking’. (shrink)

We translate unconstrained and constrained input/output logics as introduced by Makinson and van der Torre to modal logics, using adaptive logics for the constrained case. The resulting reformulation has some additional benefits. First, we obtain a proof-theoretic characterization of input/output logics. Second, we demonstrate that our framework naturally gives rise to useful variants and allows to express important notions that go beyond the expressive means of input/output logics, such as violations and sanctions.

The aim of this paper is to strengthen the point made by Horty about the relationship between reason holism and moral particularism. In the literature prima facie obligations have been considered as the only source of reason holism. I strengthen Horty’s point in two ways. First, I show that contrary-to-duties provide another independent support for reason holism. Next I outline a formal theory that is able to capture these two sources of holism. While in simple settings the proposed account coincides (...) with Horty’s one, this is not true in more complicated or “realistic” settings in which more than two norms collide. My chosen formalism is so-called input/output logic. A bottom-line example is introduced. It raises the issue of whether the conventional wisdom is right in assuming that normative reasons run parallel to epistemic ones. (shrink)

We provide a logical analysis of private international law, a rather esoteric, but increasingly important, domain of the law. Private international law addresses overlaps and conflicts between legal systems by distributing cases between the authorities of such systems (jurisdiction) and establishing what rules these authorities have to apply to each case (choice of law). A formal model of the resulting interactions between legal systems is proposed based on modular argumentation. It is argued that this model may also be useful for (...) governing the interactions between heterogeneous agents, belonging to different and differently regulated virtual societies, without recourse to a central regulatory agency. The model also provides for multiple interpretations concerning rules of private international law as well as substantive rules of the different legal systems. (shrink)

This article proposes a systematic application of recent developments in the logic of preference to a number of topics in deontic logic. The key junction is the well-known Hansson conditional for dyadic obligations. These conditionals are generalized by pairing them with reasoning about syntactic priority structures. The resulting two-level approach to obligations is tested first against standard scenarios of contrary-to-duty obligations, leading also to a generalization for the Kanger-Anderson reduction of deontic logic. Next, the priority framework is applied to model (...) two intuitively different sorts of deontic dynamics of obligations, based on information changes and on genuine normative events. In this two-level setting, we also offer novel takes on vexed issues such as the Chisholm paradox and modelling strong permission. Finally, the priority framework is shown to provide a unifying setting for the study of operations on norms as such, in particular, adding or deleting individual norms, and even merging whole norm systems in different manners. (shrink)

Modern belief revision theory is based to a large extent on partial meet contraction that was introduced in the seminal article by Carlos Alchourrón, Peter Gärdenfors, and David Makinson that appeared in 1985. In the same year, Alchourrón and Makinson published a significantly different approach to the same problem, called safe contraction. Since then, safe contraction has received much less attention than partial meet contraction. The present paper summarizes the current state of knowledge on safe contraction, provides some new results (...) and offers a list of unsolved problems that are in need of investigation. (shrink)