Catarina Dutilh Novaes
Biographic Data
| ID | 491636 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catarina Dutilh Novaes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catarina Dutilh |
| FAMILY NAME | Novaes |
| SIGNATURE | NOVAES C D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Groningen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7347-3795 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Carnap meets Foucault
What is the relevance of historical, and in particular genealogical, investigations for projects of conceptual engineering? I address this question by bringing together two prominent authors in each of these traditions: Foucault for genealogy, and Carnap for conceptual engineering. I argue that Foucaultian genealogy is a suitable approach to address a specific lacuna in Carnap’s articulation of explication, namely, insufficient attention for the …
How conspiratorial beliefs spread, and how real conspiracies are covered up
Recent research on conspiracy theories (in philosophy and elsewhere) has tended to focus on beliefs that seem (from a ‘mainstream’ perspective) outlandish and patently false: QAnon, Covid-19 vaccines containing traceable microchips, 9/11 as an ‘inside job’. What is arguably conspicuously absent in much of this literature is a parallel reflection on the existence of real conspiracies. To fill this lacuna, I adopt an environmental epistemic perspec…
Who Gets to Play
Brandom’s inferentialism relies on a highly idealized account of discursive practices of giving and asking for reasons, which deviates considerably from concrete, real-life practices. In particular, it abstracts away features pertaining to politics and to the power relations among those involved in these practices. In this paper, I contrast Brandom’s account of the “game of giving and asking for reasons” with the conceptualization of argumentatio…
The (higher-order) evidential significance of attention and trust—comments on Levy’s Bad Beliefs
In Bad Beliefs, Levy presents a picture of belief-forming processes according to which, on most matters of significance, we defer to reliable sources by relying extensively on cultural and social cues. Levy conceptualizes the kind of evidence provided by socio-cultural environments as higher-order evidence. But his notion of higher-order evidence seems to differ from those available in the epistemological literature on higher-order evidence, and …
Should We Be Genealogically Anxious
Genealogical anxiety is the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by “irrelevant” factors such as personal histories and circumstances of upbringing, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs. Discussions on these irrelevant influences in the epistemological literature have so far primarily focused on their contingency. But there is another issue that merits further examination: the fact that epistemic environments…
The relevance of salience for the epistemology of mathematics
I have argued that the case for moral and mathematical realism is surprisingly parallel. In particular, our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident, provable, plausible, or analytic than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have a better claim to being empirically justified than our moral beliefs. It is also incorrect that reflection on the genealogy of our moral beliefs undermines them, while reflection on t…
Two Types of Refutation in Philosophical Argumentation
In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic ( elenchus ), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples t…
Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis
A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both …
Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide
Carnapian explication, formalisms as cognitive tools, and the paradox of adequate formalization
Explication is the conceptual cornerstone of Carnap’s approach to the methodology of scientific analysis. From a philosophical point of view, it gives rise to a number of questions that need to be addressed, but which do not seem to have been fully addressed by Carnap himself. This paper reconsiders Carnapian explication by comparing it to a different approach: the ‘formalisms as cognitive tools’ conception (Formal languages in logic. Cambridge U…
Obligationes
Obligationes are a special, regimented kind of oral disputation involving two participants, known as opponent and respondent. Obligational disputations were an important topic for Latin medieval logicians in the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries (and beyond); indeed, most major fourteenth-century authors have written on obligationes. And yet, perhaps due to their highly regimented nature, modern interpreters have often described obli…
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic
This volume, the first dedicated and comprehensive companion to medieval logic, covers both the Latin and the Arabic traditions and shows that they were in fact sister traditions, which both arose against the background of a Hellenistic heritage and which influenced one another over the centuries. A series of chapters by both established and younger scholars covers the whole period including early and late developments, and offers new insights in…
A Dialogical, Multi-Agent Account of the Normativity of Logic
The paper argues that much of the difficulty with making progress on the issue of the normativity of logic for thought, as discussed in the literature, stems from a misapprehension of what logic is normative for. The claim is that, rather than mono-agent mental processes, (deductive) logic in fact comprises norms for quite specific situations of multi-agent dialogical interactions, in particular special forms of debates. This reconceptualization …
Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy
Metaphor is the borrowing of a meaning proper to one thing or kind and the transfer of that meaning to another. The metaphor of "domination" corresponds roughly to the analytic metaphors of "reduction" and to the common philosophical metaphors of "priority". Derrida is an anti-metaphysical analyzes as a work on metaphor whose entire surface is worked by a metaphorics. Derrida, given that he accepts that Davidsonian interpretation permits an under…
The Formal and the Formalized
As a discipline, logic is arguably constituted of two main sub-projects: formal theories of argument validity on the basis of a small number of patterns, and theories of how to reduce the multiplicity of arguments in non-logical, informal contexts to the small number of patterns whose validity is systematically studied (i.e. theories of formalization). Regrettably, we now tend to view logic 'proper' exclusively as what falls under the first sub-p…
A Dialogical Account of Deductive Reasoning as a Case Study for how Culture Shapes Cognition
In this paper, I discuss how certain social, cultural practices, namely different kinds of dialogical and argumentative practices, may influence how humans reason. I will focus particularly on deductive reasoning and address the question of whether deductive reasoning skills must be learned to be mastered, or whether they arise spontaneously in untrained reasoners. Based on a historically-informed dialogical reconceptualization of deductive reaso…
Form and Matter in Later Latin Medieval Logic
The paper investigates the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics, especially of the concepts of form and matter, in the development of Latin medieval logical theories, in particular theories of consequence and theories of supposition. More specifically, it presents the main lines in the development of the concepts of formal/material consequence and formal/material supposition in the 13 th and 14 th centuries. It is suggested that the growing infl…
Formal Languages in Logic
Formal languages are widely regarded as being above all mathematical objects and as producing a greater level of precision and technical complexity in logical investigations because of this. Yet defining formal languages exclusively in this way offers only a partial and limited explanation of the impact which their use (and the uses of formalisms more generally elsewhere) actually has. In this book, Catarina Dutilh Novaes adopts a much wider conc…
Reassessing logical hylomorphism and the demarcation of logical constants
The paper investigates the propriety of applying the form versus matter distinction to arguments and to logic in general. Its main point is that many of the currently pervasive views on form and matter with respect to logic rest on several substantive and even contentious assumptions which are nevertheless uncritically accepted. Indeed, many of the issues raised by the application of this distinction to arguments seem to be related to a questiona…
Lessons on Truth From Mediaeval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Some fourteenth‐century treatises on paradoxes of the liar family offer a promising starting‐point for the formulation of full‐fledged theories of truth with systematic relevance in their own right. In particular, Bradwardine's thesis that sentences typically say more than one thing gives rise to a quantificational approach to truth, and Buridan's theory of truth based on the notion of suppositio allows for remarkable metaphysical parsimony. Brad…
Lessons on Sentential Meaning From Mediaeval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Fourteenth-century treatises on paradoxes of the liar family, especially Bradwardine's and Buridan's, raise issues concerning the meaning of sentences, in particular about closure of sentential meaning under implication, semantic pluralism and the ontological status of 'meanings', which are still topical for current theories of meaning. I outline ways in which they tend to be overlooked, raising issues that must be addressed by any respectable th…
A Comparative Taxonomy of Medieval and Modern Approaches to Liar Sentences
Two periods in the history of logic and philosophy are characterized notably by vivid interest in self-referential paradoxical sentences in general, and Liar sentences in particular: the later medieval period (roughly from the 12th to the 15th century) and the last 100 years. In this paper, I undertake a comparative taxonomy of these two traditions. I outline and discuss eight main approaches to Liar sentences in the medieval tradition, and compa…
Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories
Roger Swyneshed’s Obligationes
Buridan's Consequentia
I examine the theory of consequentia of the medieval logician, John Buridan. Buridan advocates a strict commitment to what we now call proposition-tokens as the bearers of truth-value. The analysis of Buridan's theory shows that, within a token-based semantics, amendments to the usual notions of inference and consequence are made necessary, since pragmatic elements disrupt the semantic behaviour of propositions. In my reconstruction of Buridan's …
Carnapian explication, formalisms as cognitive tools, and the paradox of adequate formalization
Explication is the conceptual cornerstone of Carnap’s approach to the methodology of scientific analysis. From a philosophical point of view, it gives rise to a number of questions that need to be addressed, but which do not seem to have been fully addressed by Carnap himself. This paper reconsiders Carnapian explication by comparing it to a different approach: the ‘formalisms as cognitive tools’ conception (Formal languages in logic. Cambridge U…
Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis
A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both …
Medieval Obligationes as Logical Games of Consistency Maintenance
A Dialogical Account of Deductive Reasoning as a Case Study for how Culture Shapes Cognition
In this paper, I discuss how certain social, cultural practices, namely different kinds of dialogical and argumentative practices, may influence how humans reason. I will focus particularly on deductive reasoning and address the question of whether deductive reasoning skills must be learned to be mastered, or whether they arise spontaneously in untrained reasoners. Based on a historically-informed dialogical reconceptualization of deductive reaso…
Reassessing logical hylomorphism and the demarcation of logical constants
The paper investigates the propriety of applying the form versus matter distinction to arguments and to logic in general. Its main point is that many of the currently pervasive views on form and matter with respect to logic rest on several substantive and even contentious assumptions which are nevertheless uncritically accepted. Indeed, many of the issues raised by the application of this distinction to arguments seem to be related to a questiona…
Lessons on Sentential Meaning From Mediaeval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Fourteenth-century treatises on paradoxes of the liar family, especially Bradwardine's and Buridan's, raise issues concerning the meaning of sentences, in particular about closure of sentential meaning under implication, semantic pluralism and the ontological status of 'meanings', which are still topical for current theories of meaning. I outline ways in which they tend to be overlooked, raising issues that must be addressed by any respectable th…
Buridan's Consequentia
I examine the theory of consequentia of the medieval logician, John Buridan. Buridan advocates a strict commitment to what we now call proposition-tokens as the bearers of truth-value. The analysis of Buridan's theory shows that, within a token-based semantics, amendments to the usual notions of inference and consequence are made necessary, since pragmatic elements disrupt the semantic behaviour of propositions. In my reconstruction of Buridan's …
Medieval Obligationes as Logical Games of Consistency Maintenance
Roger Swyneshed’s Obligationes
Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories
A Comparative Taxonomy of Medieval and Modern Approaches to Liar Sentences
Two periods in the history of logic and philosophy are characterized notably by vivid interest in self-referential paradoxical sentences in general, and Liar sentences in particular: the later medieval period (roughly from the 12th to the 15th century) and the last 100 years. In this paper, I undertake a comparative taxonomy of these two traditions. I outline and discuss eight main approaches to Liar sentences in the medieval tradition, and compa…
Lessons on Sentential Meaning From Mediaeval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Fourteenth-century treatises on paradoxes of the liar family, especially Bradwardine's and Buridan's, raise issues concerning the meaning of sentences, in particular about closure of sentential meaning under implication, semantic pluralism and the ontological status of 'meanings', which are still topical for current theories of meaning. I outline ways in which they tend to be overlooked, raising issues that must be addressed by any respectable th…
Lessons on Truth From Mediaeval Solutions to the Liar Paradox
Some fourteenth‐century treatises on paradoxes of the liar family offer a promising starting‐point for the formulation of full‐fledged theories of truth with systematic relevance in their own right. In particular, Bradwardine's thesis that sentences typically say more than one thing gives rise to a quantificational approach to truth, and Buridan's theory of truth based on the notion of suppositio allows for remarkable metaphysical parsimony. Brad…
Form and Matter in Later Latin Medieval Logic
The paper investigates the influence of Aristotelian metaphysics, especially of the concepts of form and matter, in the development of Latin medieval logical theories, in particular theories of consequence and theories of supposition. More specifically, it presents the main lines in the development of the concepts of formal/material consequence and formal/material supposition in the 13 th and 14 th centuries. It is suggested that the growing infl…
Formal Languages in Logic
Formal languages are widely regarded as being above all mathematical objects and as producing a greater level of precision and technical complexity in logical investigations because of this. Yet defining formal languages exclusively in this way offers only a partial and limited explanation of the impact which their use (and the uses of formalisms more generally elsewhere) actually has. In this book, Catarina Dutilh Novaes adopts a much wider conc…
Reassessing logical hylomorphism and the demarcation of logical constants
The paper investigates the propriety of applying the form versus matter distinction to arguments and to logic in general. Its main point is that many of the currently pervasive views on form and matter with respect to logic rest on several substantive and even contentious assumptions which are nevertheless uncritically accepted. Indeed, many of the issues raised by the application of this distinction to arguments seem to be related to a questiona…
A Dialogical Account of Deductive Reasoning as a Case Study for how Culture Shapes Cognition
In this paper, I discuss how certain social, cultural practices, namely different kinds of dialogical and argumentative practices, may influence how humans reason. I will focus particularly on deductive reasoning and address the question of whether deductive reasoning skills must be learned to be mastered, or whether they arise spontaneously in untrained reasoners. Based on a historically-informed dialogical reconceptualization of deductive reaso…
A Dialogical, Multi-Agent Account of the Normativity of Logic
The paper argues that much of the difficulty with making progress on the issue of the normativity of logic for thought, as discussed in the literature, stems from a misapprehension of what logic is normative for. The claim is that, rather than mono-agent mental processes, (deductive) logic in fact comprises norms for quite specific situations of multi-agent dialogical interactions, in particular special forms of debates. This reconceptualization …
Conceptual Genealogy for Analytic Philosophy
Metaphor is the borrowing of a meaning proper to one thing or kind and the transfer of that meaning to another. The metaphor of "domination" corresponds roughly to the analytic metaphors of "reduction" and to the common philosophical metaphors of "priority". Derrida is an anti-metaphysical analyzes as a work on metaphor whose entire surface is worked by a metaphorics. Derrida, given that he accepts that Davidsonian interpretation permits an under…
The Formal and the Formalized
As a discipline, logic is arguably constituted of two main sub-projects: formal theories of argument validity on the basis of a small number of patterns, and theories of how to reduce the multiplicity of arguments in non-logical, informal contexts to the small number of patterns whose validity is systematically studied (i.e. theories of formalization). Regrettably, we now tend to view logic 'proper' exclusively as what falls under the first sub-p…
Obligationes
Obligationes are a special, regimented kind of oral disputation involving two participants, known as opponent and respondent. Obligational disputations were an important topic for Latin medieval logicians in the thirteenth and especially fourteenth centuries (and beyond); indeed, most major fourteenth-century authors have written on obligationes. And yet, perhaps due to their highly regimented nature, modern interpreters have often described obli…
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic
This volume, the first dedicated and comprehensive companion to medieval logic, covers both the Latin and the Arabic traditions and shows that they were in fact sister traditions, which both arose against the background of a Hellenistic heritage and which influenced one another over the centuries. A series of chapters by both established and younger scholars covers the whole period including early and late developments, and offers new insights in…
Carnapian explication, formalisms as cognitive tools, and the paradox of adequate formalization
Explication is the conceptual cornerstone of Carnap’s approach to the methodology of scientific analysis. From a philosophical point of view, it gives rise to a number of questions that need to be addressed, but which do not seem to have been fully addressed by Carnap himself. This paper reconsiders Carnapian explication by comparing it to a different approach: the ‘formalisms as cognitive tools’ conception (Formal languages in logic. Cambridge U…
Axiomatizations of arithmetic and the first-order/second-order divide
Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis
A distinction often drawn is one between conservative versus revisionary conceptions of philosophical analysis with respect to commonsensical beliefs and intuitions. This paper offers a comparative investigation of two revisionary methods: Carnapian explication and ameliorative analysis as developed by S. Haslanger. It is argued that they have a number of common features, and in particular that they share a crucial political dimension: they both …
Two Types of Refutation in Philosophical Argumentation
In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic ( elenchus ), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples t…
The (higher-order) evidential significance of attention and trust—comments on Levy’s Bad Beliefs
In Bad Beliefs, Levy presents a picture of belief-forming processes according to which, on most matters of significance, we defer to reliable sources by relying extensively on cultural and social cues. Levy conceptualizes the kind of evidence provided by socio-cultural environments as higher-order evidence. But his notion of higher-order evidence seems to differ from those available in the epistemological literature on higher-order evidence, and …
Should We Be Genealogically Anxious
Genealogical anxiety is the worry that the origins of beliefs, once revealed to be influenced by “irrelevant” factors such as personal histories and circumstances of upbringing, will undermine or cast doubt on those beliefs. Discussions on these irrelevant influences in the epistemological literature have so far primarily focused on their contingency. But there is another issue that merits further examination: the fact that epistemic environments…
The relevance of salience for the epistemology of mathematics
I have argued that the case for moral and mathematical realism is surprisingly parallel. In particular, our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident, provable, plausible, or analytic than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have a better claim to being empirically justified than our moral beliefs. It is also incorrect that reflection on the genealogy of our moral beliefs undermines them, while reflection on t…
Carnap meets Foucault
What is the relevance of historical, and in particular genealogical, investigations for projects of conceptual engineering? I address this question by bringing together two prominent authors in each of these traditions: Foucault for genealogy, and Carnap for conceptual engineering. I argue that Foucaultian genealogy is a suitable approach to address a specific lacuna in Carnap’s articulation of explication, namely, insufficient attention for the …
How conspiratorial beliefs spread, and how real conspiracies are covered up
Recent research on conspiracy theories (in philosophy and elsewhere) has tended to focus on beliefs that seem (from a ‘mainstream’ perspective) outlandish and patently false: QAnon, Covid-19 vaccines containing traceable microchips, 9/11 as an ‘inside job’. What is arguably conspicuously absent in much of this literature is a parallel reflection on the existence of real conspiracies. To fill this lacuna, I adopt an environmental epistemic perspec…
Philosophy (24 works) · Epistemology (23 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Philosophy and Theoretical Science (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Medieval and Classical Philosophy (7 works) · History (6 works) · Metaphysics (6 works)