# Sanderson Molick PhD

Sanderson Molick successfully defended his PhD today (with great distinction!). His thesis is titled Topics in logical anti-exceptionalism and paraconsistent logics. In the first part of his thesis he discusses:

1. the problem of underdetermination by data in logical theory choice with a special emphasis on the role of the background logic,
2. the question whether logic can be considered a priori and whether this causes friction with anti-exceptionalism (his answer is yes to the former and no to the latter question and relies on Tahko’s (2011) notion of the a priori),
3. and he applies Laudan’s (1984) reticulated model of scientific rationality to logical theory choice.

Items 1 and 2 are joint work with Jonas Arenhart.

In the second part of his thesis,

1. he investigates a class of 1st order inconsistency-tolerant logics in the tradition of LP$$^m$$ (Priest, 1991), but with the twist that the cardinality of the abnormal parts of models are compared (instead of opting for subset-comparisons) and he shows that this class of logics satisfies the strong reassurance property and therefore also a number of properties of nonmonotonic inference,
2. he proposes a new solution to the problem of quantification in the context of finitely-valued logics based on nondeterministic matrices (see also Avron&Zamansky 2005 and Ferguson 2014),
3. and provides a general proof of the compactness of these logics (including one for their corresponding multiple-conclusion entailment) which generalizes Shoesmith and Smiley’s (1978) result for the propositional language.

The works in the second part are joint work with Christian Straßer.

Sanderson’s PhD was conducted on the basis of a Cotutelle agreement between Natal and Bochum. His supervisor on the Brasilian side was Joao Marcos and on the German side Christian Straßer. Sanderson is the third candidate to obtain a PhD-degree in the Logic in Philosophy and Argumentation Group. :-)

Citations.

• [Avron and Zamansky, 2005] Avron, A. and Zamansky, A. (2005). Quantification in nondeterministic multi-valued structures. In 35th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic (ISMVL’05), pages 296–301. IEEE.
• [Ferguson, 2014] Ferguson, T. M. (2014). On non-deterministic quantification. Logica Universalis, 8(2):165–191.
• [Laudan, 1984] Laudan, L. (1984). Science and values: The aims of science and their role in scientific debate. Univ of California Press.
• [Priest, 1991] Priest, G. (1991). Minimally inconsistent LP. Studia Logica, 50(2):321–331.
• [Shoesmith and Smiley, 1978] Shoesmith, D. J. and Smiley, T. J. (1978). Multiple-conclusion logic. CUP
• [Tahko, 2011] Tahko, T. E. (2011). A priori and a posteriori: A bootstrapping relationship. Metaphysica, 12(2):151.