Although the terms ‘poles’, ‘bipolar’, and ‘bipolarity’ do not appear in the Tractatus, it is widely held that Wittgenstein maintained his commitment to bipolarity in the Tractatus. As it is usually understood, the principle of bipolarity is that every proposition must be capable of being true and capable of being false, which rules out propositions that are necessarily true or necessarily false. Here I argue that Wittgenstein was committed to bipolarity in the Tractatus, but getting a clear view of this commitment requires a different understanding of bipolarity. Properly understood, bipolarity is the view that every proposition represents two possible states of affairs, one positive and the other negative. Of course, in the case of elementary propositions, the sense of a proposition is only the positive state of affairs. There is thus an asymmetry between what a proposition represents, its true-false poles, and what it says, its sense. In this paper I show how Wittgenstein accounted for this asymmetry in Notes on Logic and I consider two ways he might have accounted for it in the Tractatus.
SSHAP 2014
The Third Annual Conference was held at the Université de Quebec à Montréal (UQAM), May 23-25, 2014. The invited speakers were:
- Patricia Blanchette (University of Notre Dame)
- Cheryl Misak (University of Toronto)
- Alan Richardson (University of British Columbia)
Pacific APA 2014 (Cancelled)
Philosophical Revolutions 1895-1935: Analytic Philosophy, Pragmatism And Phenomenology
Chair: Professor Maria Baghramian (University College Dublin)
Speakers
Cheryl Misak (University of Toronto)
Pragmatism’s Analytic Heritage: C.S. Peirce and Frank Ramsey
James Levine (Trinity College Dublin)
Russell, Pragmatism, and Meaning as Use
Michael Beaney (The University of York)
John Cook Wilson and the Origins of Oxford ordinary language philosophy
Sarin Marchetti (University College Dublin)
The Nature of Verification Between Pragmatism and Logical Positivism
Central APA 2014
Session 1
Kantian Problems in Early Analytic Philosophy
Chair: Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)
Speakers
Nick Stang (University of Miami)
Kant, Russell, and the Unity of the Proposition
Jack Woods (Bilkent Univeristy):
‘A judgment forced upon us’: Poincaré on Intuition and Mathematical Induction
Lydia Patton (Virginia Tech)
Space and Methodology in Helmholtz, Mach, and Kant
Clinton Tolley (UCSD)
Geometry and the possibility of synthetic apriori cognition in the early Carnap
Session 2
Between Analytic Philosophy and American Pragmatism: C. I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars
Chair: James Conant (University of Chicago )
Speakers
Aude Bandini (Université de Montréal/Université du Québec à Montréal)
C. I. Lewis: Transcendental Realism with a Pragmatist Turn
Steven Levine (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
James and Lewis on the Given
Peter Olen (University of Central Florida)
Sellars vs. Lewis, Round 1: The Realist Challenge to Conceptual Pragmatism
Carl Sachs
Is the Given a Myth?: Analytic Pragmatism in C. I. Lewis and Wilfrid Sellars
SSHAP 2013
The Second Annual Conference was held at Indiana University, Bloomington, May 9-11, 2013. The invited speakers were:
- Joan Weiner (Indiana University)
- Warren Goldfarb (Harvard University)
- Peter Sullivan (Stirling University)
The website of the meeting at IU is here.
Pacific APA 2013
Paul Grice’s Philosophy of Language
Chair: Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)
Speakers
Daniel Harris (CUNY Graduate Center)
Grice on the Composition of Timeless Meaning
Stephen Neale (CUNY Graduate Center)
What is Said
Kent Bach (San Francisco State University)
Getting Grice Straight and Straightening Out Grice
Central APA 2013
Session 1
Logical Form
Chair: Nicholas F. Stang (University of Miami)
Speakers
Julie Brumberg (CNRS-Paris)
The Origins of Logical Hylomorphism
Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)
Is Logic Formal? Bolzano and Kant
Danielle Macbeth (Haverford College)
Logical Form in Mathematical Practice
Session 2
Chair: Kelly Jolley (Auburn University)
Speakers
Ian Proops (University of Texas, Austin)
Russellian Acquaintance
Michael Kremer (University of Chicago)
Acquaintance before ‘On Denoting’
Mike Martin (University of California, Berkeley)
Acquaintance and Memory
SSHAP 2012
The First Annual Meeting was held at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, May 24-26, 2011. The invited speakers were:
- Michael Friedman (Stanford University)
- Paolo Mancosu (University of California, Berkeley)
- Thomas Uebel (University of Manchester)
Pacific APA 2012
Session 1
Pragmatism and Early Analytic Philosophy
Chair: Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)
Speakers
Henry Jackman (York University)
James vs Russell on the Nature of Acquaintance
Alexander Klein (California State University, Long Beach)
What (Use) Did Russell Make of Functionalist Psychology?
Eric Dayton (University of Saskatchewan)
C.I. Lewis, the Pragmatic A Priori and the American Assimilation of Logical Positivism
Session 2
Kant, Frege, and the Science of Logic
Chair: Jeremy Heis (UC Irvine)
Speakers
Clinton Tolley (UC San Diego)
The Necessity of Receptivity in Logic: Frege’s Criticism of Kant
Commentator: Danielle Macbeth (Haverford College )
Erich Reck (UC Riverside)
From Kant to Frege and Beyond: On the Objects of Modern Logic
Commentator: Joan Weiner (Indiana University)
Central APA 2012
Transcendental Idealism in the Tractatus
Chair: Sandra Lapointe (McMaster University)
Speakers
Robert A. Hanna (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Michael Potter (University of Cambridge)
Peter Sullivan (University of Stirling)