Title: Vagueness in Parthood and Identity: Applications of Boolean-Valued Semantics

Speaker:   Xinhe Wu (University of Bristol)

Time: 16:00 ~ 18:00  (Mar. 21st)

Location: Room 501, No.2 Teaching Building

Abstract:  Some philosophically important relations are vague, or at least appear to be so. Two examples are the relation of parthood and the relation of identity. In this talk, I present a novel kind of many-valued semantics - Boolean-valued semantics - and argue that it makes for a very attractive semantic framework for modeling vagueness in parthood and identity. In particular, I argue that it works better than the traditional choice - fuzzy-valued semantics.

Speaker information: ​Xinhe Wu is a Research Associate on the ERC project "Truth and Semantics" at the University of Bristol. She recently earned her PhD in philosophy from MIT. Before that, she studied as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, double majoring in philosophy and mathematics. 

​​She works primarily on philosophical logic, mathematical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. She is especially interested in Boolean-valued models, vagueness and indeterminacy, semantic paradoxes, set theory, formal theories of truth, and truthmaker semantics.