Department of Philosophy

Charles B. Cross

Professor of Philosophy and
Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence

Office: Peabody 101A
Phone: (706) 542-2653
e-mail: ccross@uga.edu
mailing address:

Department of Philosophy
Peabody Hall
290 South Jackson Street
University of Georgia
Athens, GA 30602-1627, USA

Office Hours, Spring 2012: Tuesdays 3:30-5:00pm, and by appointment.

My office is a Safe Space.

PHIL(LING) 4520/6520 Model Theory, Spring 2012

Meets Wednesdays 9:05-11:50am.

A course in the semantic metatheory of classical sentential and predicate logic. The course will be of interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate students in philosophy, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and math education.

We will prove soundness, completeness, and related results for classical sentential logic and predicate logic. We will prove these results for the Fitch-style natural deduction systems of sentential and predicate logic covered in PHIL(LING) 4510/6510.

Time permitting, we may cover an additional advanced topic in philosophical logic.

No text (handouts only).

Written work will consist of weekly homework assignments and a cumulative final exam.

For both graduates and undergraduates, the prerequisite is PHIL(LING) 4510/6510 or equivalent preparation. If you have not taken PHIL(LING)4510/6510, please check with me and I will be happy to talk with you about whether your background is sufficient.

PHIL 8600 Seminar in Metaphysics, Spring 2012

• Meets Tuesdays, 12:30-3:15pm.
• The topic of the seminar will be particulars and modality.
• The seminar will examine issues about individuals (particulars) that arise in the metaphysics of possibility and necessity. Some of the topics to be covered are essential and accidental properties, necessary and contingent existence, the necessity of identity, and modal realism.
• The readings include works by Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Robert Adams, Alvin Plantinga, Robert Stalnaker, Kit Fine, Katherine Hawley, Timothy Williamson, and Laurie Paul.
• Required texts: Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity; David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds; a number of journal articles and book chapters that will be provided electronically.
• Each student will be required to give a class presentation and submit a term paper in the range of 3500 to 4500 words.

Research

I work on issues at the intersection of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic. I am especially interested in the logic and semantics of conditionals and in the roles conditionals play in metaphysical and epistemological issues. Here are three examples of current and recent work reflecting this interest.

In my 2009 Journal of Philosophy paper I show that a gap in Robert Adams's so-called Continuity Argument against the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles can be bridged by an assumption that exploits a counterfactual analysis of causal independence. I show that the same notion of causal independence also sheds light on a point Nathan Salmon makes about Kripke's argument for the essentiality of origins.

In a paper currently in progress I uncover a surprising result concerning the status of epistemic closure in Dretske's conclusive reasons account of knowledge. Despite the association of the conclusive reasons account (and other counterfactual "tracking" accounts of knowledge) with the rejection of epistemic closure, conclusive reasons turn out to be governed by a robust logical transmission principle.

In another work in progress I examine the very idea of a counterfactual analysis. Counterfactual analyses are always attractive at first but seem never to work out. In this paper I diagnose the underlying chronic problem facing all counterfactual analyses, and the result is surprisingly optimistic. It turns out that every non-trivial, contingent proposition can be analyzed as a non-trivial counterfactual conditional proposition. That's the good news. The bad news is that obstacles remain when one tries to turn counterfactual analyses of propositions into counterfactual analyses of concepts, and the proof of my result reveals what these obstacles are.

Selected Publications

Each link provided below allows a paper to be downloaded from the website of the relevant publisher. If you use one of these links and the publisher's website does not recognize your institution's online subscription, it may be necessary for you to access the paper online via a different gateway. If you do not have access to an online subscription, you are welcome to ask me for a copy of the paper.

Abstracts (and additional links) for many of the journal articles listed below can be found on PhilPapers.org.

• C. Cross, "Brute Facts, the Necessity of Identity, and the Identity of Indiscernibles," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92:1-10, 2011.
• C. Cross, "Comparative World Similarity and What is Held Fixed in Counterfactuals," Analysis 71:91-96, 2011.
• C. Cross, "Causal Independence, the Identity of Indiscernibles and the Essentiality of Origins," The Journal of Philosophy 106:277-291, 2009.
• C. Cross, "Conditional Excluded Middle," Erkenntnis 70:173-188, 2009.
• C. Cross, "Nonbelief and the Desire-As-Belief Thesis," Acta Analytica 23:115-124, 2008.
• C. Cross, "Antecedent-Relative Comparative World Similarity," Journal of Philosophical Logic 37:101-120, 2008.
• C. Cross, "Conditional Logic and the Significance of Tooley's Example," Analysis 66:325-335, 2006
• C. Cross, "A Formal Model of Holistic Epistemic Coherence," in Bryson Brown and François Lepage (eds.), Truth and Probability: Essays in Honour of Hugues Leblanc, (London: King’s College Publications, 2005), pp. 111-122.
• C. Cross, "A Correction to 'Nonmonotonic Inconsistency'," Artificial Intelligence 160:191-192, 2004
• C. Cross, "More on the Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure," Mind 113:109-114, 2004
• C. Cross, "Relative Coherence and Cumulative Reasoning," in The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer, Erik Olsson (ed.), (Philosophical Studies Book Series, Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, 2003), pp. 109-127
• C. Cross, "Nonmonotonic Inconsistency," Artificial Intelligence 149:161-178, 2003
• C. Cross, "Armstrong and the Problem of Converse Relations," Erkenntnis 56:215-227, 2002
• C. Cross, "Doesn't-Will and Didn't-Did," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80:101-106, 2002
• C. Cross, "A Theorem Concerning Syntactical Treatments of Nonidealized Belief," Synthese 129:335-341, 2001
• D. Nute and C. Cross, "Conditional Logic," in The Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Second Edition, Volume 4, Dov Gabbay and Franz Guenthner (eds.), (Kluwer: Dordrecht, 2001), pp. 1-98. (Revision of Nute's chapter from the first edition with a new 40+pp section on conditionals and the Ramsey Test written by Cross)
• C. Cross, "The Paradox of the Knower Without Epistemic Closure," Mind 110:319-333, 2001
• C. Cross, "A Characterization of Imaging in Terms of Popper Functions," Philosophy of Science 67:316-338, 2000
• C. Cross, "Coherence and Truth Conducive Justification," Analysis 59:186-193, 1999
• C. Cross, "The Modal Logic of Discrepancy," Journal of Philosophical Logic 26:143-168, 1997
• C. Cross, "Max Black on the Identity of Indiscernibles," Philosophical Quarterly 45:350-360, 1995
• C. Cross, "Probability, Evidence, and the Coherence of the Whole Truth," Synthese 103:153-170, 1995
• C. Cross, "From Worlds to Probabilities: a Probabilistic Semantics for Modal Logic," Journal of Philosophical Logic 22:169-192, 1993
• C. Cross, "Counterfactuals and Event Causation," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70:307-323, 1992
• C. Cross and R. H. Thomason, "Conditionals and Knowledge-Base Update," in Belief Revision: Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 29, ed. Peter Gärdenfors, (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), pp. 247-275
• C. Cross, "Explanation and the Theory of Questions," Erkenntnis 34:237-260, 1991
• C. Cross, "Temporal Necessity and the Conditional," Studia Logica 49:345-363, 1990
• C. Cross, "Belief Revision, Nonmonotonic Reasoning, and the Ramsey Test," in Knowledge Representation and Defeasible Reasoning, ed. Henry E. Kyburg, Jr., et al, (Kluwer: Boston, 1990), pp. 223-244
• C. Cross and R. H. Thomason, "Update and Conditionals," in Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, ed. Zbigniew Ras and Maria Zemankova, (North-Holland: Amsterdam, 1987), pp. 392-399
• C. Cross, "'Can' and the Logic of Ability," Philosophical Studies 50:53-64, 1986
• C. Cross, "Jonathan Bennett on 'Even If'," Linguistics and Philosophy 8: 353-357, 1985

I regularly teach PHIL 2500 Symbolic Logic, PHIL(LING) 4510/6510 Deductive Systems, PHIL(LING) 4520/6520 Model Theory, and PHIL 8500 Seminar in Problems of Logic. I occasionally teach PHIL 3610 Theory of Knowledge, PHIL(LING) 8300 Seminar in the Philosophy of Language, and PHIL 8600 Seminar in Metaphysics.

I am interested in directing graduate student research in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic. Possible topics include ontology, the metaphysics of modality, essentialism, the essentiality of origins, conditionals, epistemic logic, belief revision, and logics for artificial intelligence. Prospective graduate students interested in working with me are invited to apply to the Ph.D. Program in Philosophy, the M.A. Program in Philosophy, or the M.S. Program in Artificial Intelligence. Joint enrollment for the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and the M.A. or Ph.D. in Philosophy is possible and represents a unique opportunity for prospective graduate students interested in logic and its applications.

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