Rodney Stark, One True God. Historical Consequences of Monotheism

One True Logic?

Logic is the study of validity and validity is a property of arguments. For my purposes here it will be sufficient to think of arguments as pairs of sets and conclusions: the first members of the pair is the set of the argument’s premises and the second member is its conclusion. An argument is valid just in case it is truth-preserving, that is, if and only if, whenever all the members of the pr...

One True Anaphor

1.0 Introduction In this paper I will argue that there is only one true anaphor in natural language which takes many shapes. Building on the idea that some pronouns are constructed and others are 'native born' with features, as suggested in Kratzer (2009), I suggest further that, just like locally bound variables, all non-locally anteceded bound variable pronouns that are traditionally bound (c...

The Rank One Abelian Stark Conjecture

Monism: the One True Logic

Logical pluralism is the claim that different accounts of validity can be equally correct. Beall and Restall have recently defended this position. Validity is a matter of truth-preservation over cases, they say: the conclusion should be true in every case in which the premises are true. Each logic specifies a class of cases, but differs over which cases should be considered. I show that this ac...

The true one-handed tie.

OCCASIONALLY, surgeons find themselves in a dilemma in which one of their hands is required to maintain exposure while, at the same time, the surgeon is the only one in position to tie a suture or ligature. The technique described herein can then be used. I a tie steady. With the free hand, the surgeon can place knots against the assistant's fixed end of the string (Fig. la). To facilitate the ...