## B entails that a conjunction of determinate truths is determinate

October 26, 2010

I know it’s been quiet for a while around here. I have finally finished a paper on higher order vagueness which has been  a long time coming, and since I expect it to be in review for quite a while longer I decided to put it online. (Note: I’ll come back to the title of this post in a bit, after I’ve filled in some of the background.)

The paper is concerned with a number of arguments that purport to show that it is always a precise matter whether something is determinate at every finite order. This would entail, for example, that it was always a precise matter whether someone was determinately a child at every order, and thus, presumably, that this is also a knowable matter. But it seems just as bad to be able to know things like “I stopped being a determinate child at every order after 123098309851248 nanoseconds from my birth” as to know the corresponding kinds of things about being a child.

What could the premisses be that give such a paradoxical conclusion? One of the principles, distributivity, says that a (possibly infinite) conjunction of determinate truths is determinate, the other, B, says $p \rightarrow \Delta\neg\Delta\neg p$. If $\Delta^* p$ is the conjunction of $p, \Delta p, \Delta\Delta p,$ and so on, distributivity easily gives us (1) $\Delta^*p \rightarrow\Delta\Delta^* p$. Given a logic of K for determinacy we quickly get $\Delta\neg\Delta\Delta^*p \rightarrow\Delta\neg\Delta^* p$, which combined with $\neg\Delta^* p\rightarrow \Delta\neg\Delta\Delta^* p$ (an instance of B) gives (2) $\neg\Delta^* p\rightarrow\Delta\neg\Delta^* p$. Excluded middle and (1) and (2) gives us $\Delta\Delta^* p \vee \Delta\neg\Delta^* p$, which is the bad conclusion.

In the paper I argue that B is the culprit.* The main moving part in Field’s solution to this problem, by contrast, is the rejection of distributivity. I think I finally have a conclusive argument that it is B that is responsible, and that is that B actually *entails* distributivity! In other words, no matter how you block the paradox you’ve got to deny B.

I think this is quite surprising and the argument is quite cute, so I’ve written it up in a note. I’ve put it in a pdf rather than post it up here, but it’s only two pages and the argument is actually only a few lines. Comments would be very welcome.

* Actually a whole chain of principles weaker than B can cause problems, the weakest which I consider being $\Delta(p\rightarrow\Delta p)\rightarrow(\neg p \rightarrow \Delta\neg p)$, which corresponds to the frame condition: if x can see y, there is a finite chain of steps from y back to x each step of which x can see.

## Size and Modality

March 25, 2009

There’s this thing that’s been puzzling me for a while now. It’s kind of related to the literature on indefinite extensibility, but the thing that puzzles me has nothing to do with sets, quantification or Russell’s paradox (or at least, not obviously.) I think it is basically a puzzle about infinities, or sizes.

First I should get clear on what I mean by size. Size, as I am thinking about it, is closely related to what set theorists call cardinality. But there are some important differences.

(i) Cardinality is heavily bound up with set theory, whereas I take it that size talk does not commit us to sets. For example, I believe I can truly say there are more regions than open regions of spacetime, even if I’m a staunch nominalist. Think of size talk as analogous to plural quantification: I am not introducing new objects into the domain (sizes/pluralities), I am just quantifying over the existing individuals in a new way.

(ii) Only sets have cardinalities. I believe you can talk about the sizes of proper class sized pluralities.

(iii) Points (i) and (ii) are compatible with a Fregean theory of size. But Fregean sizes, as well as cardinalities, are thought to be had by pluralities (concepts, sets) of individuals in the domain. In particular: every size, is the size of some plurality/set. I reject this. I think there are sizes which no plurality has – I think there could have been more things than there in fact are, and thus, that there are sizes which no plurality in fact has. So sizes are inherently bound up with modality on this view – sizes are had by possible pluralities.

(iv) Frege and the set theorists both believe sizes are individuals. I’m not yet decided on this one, but Frege’s version of Hume’s principle forces the domain to be infinite, which contradicts (i) – that size talk isn’t ontologically committing. Interestingly, the plural logic version of HP is satisfiable on domains of any size – thus size’s can be always be construed as objects, if needs be. But I’m inclined to think that size talk is fundamentally grounded in certain kinds of quantified statements (e.g., “there are countably many F’s”.)

I’m going to mostly ignore (iv) from hereon and talk about sizes like they were objects, because as noted, you can consistently do this if needs be (given global choice.) That said, I can’t adopt HP because of point (iii). It’s built into the notation of HP that every size is the size of some plurality. Furthermore, Hume’s principle entails there is a largest size. (Cardinality theory say there is no largest cardinality, but this is because of an expressive failure on it’s part – proper classes don’t have cardinalities.) However, if we accept the following principle:

• Necessarily, there could have been more things.

it follows from (iii) that there is no largest size.

I think this is right. It just seems weird and arbitrary to think that there could be this largest size, $\kappa$. Why $\kappa$ and not $2^\kappa$? Clearly, it seems, there are worlds, that have this many things (think of, e.g. Forrest-Armstrong type constructions.) If not, what metaphysical fact could possibly ground this cutoff point?

What I don’t object to is there being a largest size of an actual plurality. I’m fine with arbitrariness, so long as it’s contingent. But to think that there is some size that limits the size of all possible worlds seems really strange. Just to state the existence of a limit seems to commit us to larger sizes – it’s like saying there are sizes which no possible world matches.

Here is a second principle about sizes I really like. Any collection of sizes has an upperbound. This is something that Fregean, and in a certain sense, cardinality theories of size share with me, so I’m not going to spend as long defending it. But intuitively, if you can have possible worlds with domains of sizes $\kappa$ for each $\kappa \in S$, then there should be a world containing the union of all these domains – a world with at least $Sup(S)$ things.

So this is what I mean by size. Here is the puzzle: this conception of size seems to be inconsistent. To see this we need to formalise a bit further. Take as our primitive a binary relation over sizes, < (informally “smaller than”.) For simplicity, assume we are only quantifying over sizes. Here are some principles. You can ignore 3. and 4. if you want, 1. and 2. are obvious, and 5. and 6. we have just argued for.

1. $\forall x \neg x < x$
2. $\forall xyz(x
3. $\forall xy(xy)$
4. $\forall xx\exists x(x \prec xx \wedge \forall y(y \prec xx \rightarrow x \leq y))$
5. $\forall x \exists y x
6. $\forall xx\exists x\forall y(y \prec xx \rightarrow y \leq x)$

The first three principles say that < than is a total order, which is pretty much self evident. The fourth says it’s a well order. (The inconsistency to follow doesn’t require (3) or (4).) The fifth encodes the principle that there is no largest size, and the sixth says that every collection of sizes has an upper bound.

These principles are jointly inconsistent: let xx be the plurality of self-identical things. By (6) xx has an upper bound, k. By (5) there is a size larger than k, k<k+. Since k+ is in xx, and k is an upperbound for xx, k+ $\leq$ k. Thus k<k by (2) and logic, which is impossible by (1).

There are roughly three ways out of this usually considered. Fregean theories reject (5), cardinality theory (with unrestricted plural quantifiers) deny (6) and indefinite extensibilists do something funky with the quantifiers (I’ve never really worked out how that helps, but it’s there for completeness.) Also note, the version of (6) restricted to “small” (roughly, “set-sized”) pluralities is consistent.

My own diagnosis is that the above formulation of size theory simply fails to take account of the modal nature of sizes. If we are pretending that sizes are objects at all (which, I think, is also not an innocent assumption), we should remember that just because there could be such a size, doesn’t mean in fact there is such a size. This is the same kind of fallacious reasoning encoded in the Barcan formula and its converse  (this is partly why it is very unhelpful to think of sizes as objects; we are naturally inclined to think of them as abstract, necessarily existing objects.)

Anyway – a natural way to formulate (1)-(6) in modal terms would be in a second order modal logic, perhaps with a primitive second level size comparison relation. For example (1) would be ‘necessarily, if the xx are everything, then there aren’t more xx than xx‘, (2) would be ‘necessarly for all xx, necessarily for all yy, necessarily for all zz, if there are more zz‘s than yy‘s and more yy‘s than zz‘s there are more zz‘s than xx‘s’ and (5) would be ‘necessarily, there could have been more things’. The only problem is, how would we state (6)?

I’ve been toying around with propositional quantification. Let me change the primitives slightly: instead of using $\Box p, \Diamond p$ to talk about possibility and necessity, I’ll interpret them as saying p is true in some/every accessible world with a larger domain than the current world. Also, since I don’t care about anything about a world except the size of it’s domain, let us think of the worlds not as representing maximally specific ways for things to be, but as sizes themselves. Thus the intended models of the theory will be Kripke frames of the following form: $\langle W, R \rangle$ where (i) the transitive closure of R is a well order on W, and (ii) for each w in W, R is a well order on R(w). (We’re going to have to give up S4, so we mustnt assume R is transitive on W, although it’s locally transitive on R(w) for each w in W.) Propositions are sets of worlds, so the range of the propositional quantifiers differ from world to world, since R is non-trivial.

Call R a local well order on W iff it satisfies (i) and (ii). I’m going to assert without defence (for the time being) that the formulae valid over the class of local well orders, will be the modal equivalent of (1)-(4) holding (I expect it would be fairly easy to come up with an axiomatisation of this class directly and that this axiomatisation would correspond to (1)-(4). For example, the complicated one, (4), would correspond to $\forall p(\Diamond p \rightarrow \exists q\forall r(\Box(r \rightarrow p) \rightarrow \Box(q \rightarrow \Diamond r)))$.)

The important thing is that it is possible to state (5) and (6) directly, and, it seems, consistently (although we’ll have to give up on unrestricted S4.) [Note: I may well have made some mistakes here, so apologies in advance.]

1. $\Box p \rightarrow p$
2. $\forall pqr(\Diamond(p \wedge \Diamond(q \wedge \Diamond r)) \rightarrow \Diamond(p \wedge \Diamond r))$
3. $\forall p(\Diamond p \rightarrow \exists q\forall r(\Box(r \rightarrow p) \rightarrow \Box(q \rightarrow \Diamond r)))$
4. $\Box\exists p(p \wedge \Diamond \neg p)$
5. $\forall p \Diamond\exists q(q \wedge \neg p)$

(I decided halfway through writing this post it was simpler to axiomatise a reflexive well order, so the modal (1)-(4) above don’t correspond as naturally to the original (1)-(4) – I’ll try and neaten this up at some point).

What is slightly striking is the failure of S4. Informally, if I were to have S4 I would be able to quantify over the universal proposition of all worlds, take its supremum by (6), and find a world not in the proposition by (5). This would just be a version of the inconsistency given for the extensional size theory above.

Instead, we have a picture on which worlds can only see a limited number of world sizes – to see the larger sizes you have to move to larger worlds. At no point can you “quantify” over all collections of worlds – so, at least in this sense, the view is quite close to the indefinite extensibility literature. But of course, the non-modal talk is misleading: worlds are really maximally specific propositions, and the only propositions that exist are those in the range of our propositional quantifiers at the actual world – the worlds inaccessible to the actual world in the model should just be thought of as a useful picture for characterising which sentences in the box and diamond language are true at the actual world.

## A question about modal logic

September 5, 2008

Say that a class of Kripke frames, $\mathfrak{C}$, is compact just in case, for every set of propositional modal formulae, $\Gamma$, $\Gamma$ has a model in $\mathfrak{C}$ (i.e. a model based on a frame in $\mathfrak{C}$) iff every finite subset of $\Gamma$ has a model in $\mathfrak{C}$.

We know some sufficient conditions for $\mathfrak{C}$ to be compact, for example, if $\mathfrak{C}$ is closed under taking ultraproducts. Does anyone know any necessary conditions (or even necessary and sufficient conditions) for compactness in this sense?