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FPST Seminar: Viviane Fairbank (In-person) – Feminist Logics, Alien Logics
June 24 @ 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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Abstract: Recently, some philosophers have argued that feminists ought to be logical pluralists, on the grounds that different communities of reasoners use different logics, all of which are (in some sense) equally correct. One popular, “anti-exceptionalist” defence of such logical pluralism draws an analogy between feminist philosophy of science and feminist philosophy of logic. Saint-Croix & Cook (2024), for example, argue that “if we adopt an anti-exceptionalist understanding of feminist arguments for logical revision, then pluralism follows immediately: … Challenges to the standard conception of scientific objectivity… should apply to logic as much as they apply to any other scientific inquiry. As a result, there are good reasons to doubt that any particular logic will turn out to be correct” (38). In this talk, I criticize this approach to logical pluralism, on the grounds that the analogy between science and logic fails precisely at the level where questions of objectivity and pluralism arise. We must therefore think more carefully about feminist accounts of logical pluralism and how they might deal with worries regarding relativism and incommensurability.
