Department of Philosophy

Charles B. Cross

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

External Member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy

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, April 29 to August 9, 2013: By appointment only.

My office is a Safe Space.

COURSES:

PHIL(LING) 4510/6510 Deductive Systems, Fall 2013

• An introduction to the formal syntax and semantics of propositional and first-order logic.
• Prior knowledge of symbolic logic will be assumed.
• For undergraduates, the prerequisite is PHIL 2500 or 2500H.
• Course material will come largely from printed handouts, but in addition the following text is required: Merrie Bergmann, James Moor, Jack Nelson. The Logic Book, 6th Edition (2013). McGraw-Hill. (Be sure to buy the new 6th edition, not the 5th edition.)

PHIL(LING) 8300 Seminar in the Philosophy of Language, Fall 2013

• The topic will be fictional discourse and fictionalism.
• In recent years fictional discourse has been both an object of investigation in philosophy and an ingredient in philosophical theories. As an object of investigation, fictional discourse raises such questions as the following:
  • Do fictional characters exist, and, if so, what sort of thing are they?
  • Is what is said about characters in fictional discourse true, and, if so, how?
  • What kinds of speech acts are performed when a piece of fictional discourse is uttered?
  Fictional discourse appears as an ingredient in philosophical theories, too. Such theories are called fictionalisms because they construe as fictional certain kinds of discourse that appear at first not to be fictional. For example, authors have argued for fictionalism about numbers, about entities postulated in physics, about possible worlds, and about moral qualities. In this seminar we will investigate how fictional discourse and fictional characters should be accounted for, and we will look to use an understanding of fictional discourse to evaluate some of the fictionalist theories that have been proposed in recent years.
• Readings:
  • Mark Sainsbury, Fiction and Fictionalism. Oxford: Routledge, 2010.
  • Amie Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Mark Kalderon, Fictionalism in Metaphysics. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2005.
  We will also read journal articles by, among others, David Lewis, Peter van Inwagen, Daniel Nolan, and Jason Stanley.
• Assigned work will be one class presentation and a term paper in the range of 3500-4500 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. For example, 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.

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.

I have a Google Scholar profile.

My Erdös Number is 4.

• C. Cross, "The Paradox of the Knower Without Epistemic Closure - Corrected," Mind 121: 457-466, 2012.
• 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 Fran�ois 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 G�rdenfors, (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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