[PhilWeb] Online Talk: A truthmaker semantics for modal logic

We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 6 at 17.00 (CET), Alessandro Giordani (Catholic University Milan, USI) and Vita Saitta (Catholic University Milan) will give the talk A truthmaker semantics for modal logic. This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso, FTL Building (USI West Campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi@usi.ch<mailto:events.isfi@usi.ch>. Abstract: Truthmaker semantics is an innovative framework addressing key philosophical questions about meaning and logic. It is emerging as a significant tool in philosophical logic, challenging possible worlds semantics in areas like semantic and linguistic analysis, non-classical logics, counterfactuals, and modalities. This talk has three main aims. The first is to explore what a semantics for modal notions looks like when adopting a truthmaker semantics, wherein truthmakers for modal sentences are identified with specific kinds of norms. The second is to demonstrate that such a semantics is general enough to allow us to capture modal systems characterized by classes of Kripke frames. The final aim is to prove that this semantics also allows us to capture those modal systems that are characterized by classes of neighborhood frames. The results we obtain are somewhat surprising, as they show that an intuitively appealing idea—namely, that every world is endowed with a set of norms determining which other worlds are possible relative to it---is sufficient for unifying Kripke and neighborhood semantics within the framework of truthmaker semantics.