Title: A Comparison of Bundled Approach to Deontic Logic for Strong Permission with Nygren's Alternative Semantics Approach and Fine's Truthmaker Semantics Approach

Speaker: Zilu Wang (Peking University) 

Time: 2025/11/18 (Tuesday) 15:10-18:00 

Location: Room 211, Natural Sciences Teaching Building (理教), Peking University 

Abstract: 

It is widely recognized that deontic modalities, as normative concepts, are applied to actions. This insight has been pointed out by von Wright (1951) in his groundbreaking work on modern deontic logic and later developed by Segerberg (1982) in his seminal work on deontic action logic based on Boolean algebra. However, these traditional frameworks struggle to adequately capture certain interactions between deontic modalities and action connectives. This motivates the search for new semantic frameworks for deontic action logic--ones capable of providing a more faithful account not only of actions themselves but also of the deontic modalities applied to them. 

In recent works (Wang and Wang, 2023, 2025), we propose a novel approach to deontic logic, which combines an action interpretation of problem semantics with a bundled interpretation of modalities, to capture and even predict many intuitive inferences about strong permission. Interestingly, we find that this framework exhibits striking affinities with two other recent developments in deontic action logic: Nygren's alternative semantics approach (2019, 2021, 2022) and Fine's truthmaker semantics approach (2018a, 2018b). In this talk, I will compare our framework with these latter two frameworks, examining the connections and contrasts from both conceptual and technical perspectives.