Department of Philosophy

Charles B. Cross

Professor of Philosophy and
Faculty Fellow of the Artificial Intelligence Center

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, Summer 2008: by appointment only.

My office is a Safe Space.

An introduction to the mathematics of good reasoning.

Topics include translation of arguments into a symbolic notation and techniques for evaluating symbolized arguments.

No prerequisites.

Required text: Virginia Klenk. Understanding Symbolic Logic, 5th Edition (2008). Prentice-Hall.

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, 5th Edition (2008). McGraw-Hill.

Research Interests

• Philosophical Logic, including conditionals, belief revision, epistemic logic, and logics for artificial intelligence
• Epistemology, especially coherentism and formal models of epistemic coherence
• Metaphysics, especially contemporary ontology

Current Work

• Nonmonotonic Inference and the Formalizability of Induction
• The Identity of Indiscernibles

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 hardcopy of the paper.

My Erdös Number is 4.

• C. Cross, "Jonathan Bennett on 'Even If'," Linguistics and Philosophy 8: 353-357, 1985
• C. Cross, "'Can' and the Logic of Ability," Philosophical Studies 50:53-64, 1986
• 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, "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, "Temporal Necessity and the Conditional," Studia Logica 49:345-363, 1990
• C. Cross, "Explanation and the Theory of Questions," Erkenntnis 34:237-260, 1991
• 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, "Counterfactuals and Event Causation," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 70:307-323, 1992
• C. Cross, "From Worlds to Probabilities: a Probabilistic Semantics for Modal Logic," Journal of Philosophical Logic 22:169-192, 1993
• C. Cross, "Probability, Evidence, and the Coherence of the Whole Truth," Synthese 103:153-170, 1995
• C. Cross, "Max Black on the Identity of Indiscernibles," Philosophical Quarterly 45:350-360, 1995
• C. Cross, "The Modal Logic of Discrepancy," Journal of Philosophical Logic 26:143-168, 1997
• C. Cross, "Coherence and Truth Conducive Justification," Analysis 59:186-193, 1999
• C. Cross, "A Characterization of Imaging in Terms of Popper Functions," Philosophy of Science 67:316-338, 2000
• C. Cross, "The Paradox of the Knower Without Epistemic Closure," Mind 110:319-333, 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, "A Theorem Concerning Syntactical Treatments of Nonidealized Belief," Synthese 129:335-341, 2001
• C. Cross, "Doesn't-Will and Didn't-Did," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80:101-106, 2002
• C. Cross, "Armstrong and the Problem of Converse Relations," Erkenntnis 56:215-227, 2002
• C. Cross, "Nonmonotonic Inconsistency," Artificial Intelligence 149:161-178, 2003
• 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, "More on the Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure," Mind 113:109-114, 2004
• C. Cross, "A Correction to 'Nonmonotonic Inconsistency'," Artificial Intelligence 160:191-192, 2004
• 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, "Conditional Logic and the Significance of Tooley's Example," Analysis 66:325-335, 2006
• C. Cross, "Antecedent-Relative Comparative World Similarity," Journal of Philosophical Logic 37:101-120, 2008.
• C. Cross, "Nonbelief and the Desire-As-Belief Thesis," Acta Analytica 23:115-124, 2008.

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 and PHIL(LING) 8300 Seminar in the Philosophy of Language.

I would like to bring together a group of graduate students interested in doing research in philosophical logic. Possible topics include conditionals, epistemic logic, logical aspects of metaphysics and epistemology, 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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