Supervaluational consequence again

I’ve just finished a new version of my paper supervaluational consequence. A pdf version is available here. I thought I'd post something explaining what's going on therein.

Let’s start at the beginning. Classical semantics requires, inter alia, the following. For every expression, there has to be a unique intended interpretation. This single interpretation will assign to each name, a single referent. To each predicate, it will assign a set of individuals. Similarly for other grammatical categories.

But sometimes, the idea that there are such unique referents, extensions and so on, looks absurd. What supervaluationism (in the liberal sense I’m interested in) gives you is the flexibility to accommodate this. Supervaluationism requires, not a single intended interpretation, but a set of interpretations.

So if you’re interested in the problem of the many, and think that there’s more than one optimal candidate referent for “Kilimanjaro”; if you’re interested in theory change, and think that relativist and rest mass are equi-optimal candidate properties to be what “mass” picks out; if you are interested in inscrutability of reference, and think that rabbit-slices, undetached rabbit parts as well as rabbits themselves are in the running to be in the extension of “rabbit”; if you’re interested in counterfactuals, and think that it’s indeterminate which world is the closest one where Bizet and Verdi were compatriots; if you think vagueness can be analyzed as a kind of multiple-candidate indeterminacy of reference; if you find any of these ideas plausible, then you should care about supervaluationism.

It would be interesting, therefore, if supervaluationism undermined the tenants of the kind of logic that we rely on. For either, in the light of the compelling applications of supervaluationism, we will have to revise our logic to accommodate these phenomena; or else supervaluationism as a theory of these phenomena is itself misconceived. Either way, there’s lots at stake.

Orthodoxy is that supervaluationism is logically revisionary, in that it involves admitting counterexamples to some of the most familiar classical inferential moves: conditional proof, reductio, argument by cases, contraposition. There’s a substantial hetrodox movement which recommends a hetrodox way of defining supervaluational consequence (so called “local consequence”) which is entirely non-revisionary.

My paper aims to do a number of things:

1. to give persuasive arguments against the local consequence heterodoxy
2. to establish, contra orthodoxy, that standard supervaluational consequence is not revisionary (this, granted a certain assumption)
3. to show that, even if the assumption is refused, the usual case for revisionism is flawed
4. to give a final fallback option: even if supervaluational consequence is revisionary, it is not damagingly so, for it in no way involves revision of inferential practice.
   

It convinces me that supervaluationists shouldn't feel bad: they probably don't revise logic, and if they do, it's in a not-terribly-significant way.