Ruth Barcan Marcus

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Ruth Barcan Marcus (2005)

Ruth Barcan Marcus (born August 2, 1921 , New York ; † February 19, 2012 , New Haven ) was an American philosopher and logician .

She is considered to be one of the founders of quantified modal logic (or modal predicate logic ) and the theory of rigid designation ('direct reference'). The Barcan formula , which she herself first formulated, is named after her. In addition, she has published relevant publications on the philosophy of logic, especially on essentialism , the necessity of the identity relation and the status of possible but not really existing objects (possibilia) ; also on the theory of epistemic beliefs and on clashes of duties from the standpoint of deontic logic .

Life

Ruth Barcan grew up as the youngest of three sisters in a socialist household in the New York Bronx .

After high school, Ruth Barcan moved to Washington Square College at New York University , where she studied math, physics, classical literature, history, and philosophy. The pragmatist Sidney Hook was one of her influences there . Contrary to the weight that he placed on the philosophy of science in the natural sciences, Ruth Barcan was primarily concerned with the history of ideas in philosophy. Ruth Barcan received support from the mathematician and pioneer of game theory John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , who directed her interest to the logical foundations of mathematics and modal logic.

After earning a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1941, Ruth Barcan moved to Yale University to continue studying modal logic. There she studied with Ernst Cassirer and Frederic Brenton Fitch, among others . Here Ruth Barcan began to deal extensively with the philosophy of Bertrand Russell , in particular with the logical system of Principia Mathematica and its theory of meaning. In retrospect, she described Russell's work as the most significant philosophical influence on her work.

After gaining a master’s degree in 1942, Barcan became a PhD student at Fitch, and based on the modal logic calculi of Clarence Irving Lewis , she developed a modal predicate logic . Parts of her unpublished dissertation were previously published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic and were reviewed by Willard Van Orman Quine . In particular, their proof of the necessity of the identity relation in modal calculi broke with the prevailing doctrine. Her dissertation was accepted at Yale in 1946.

Also in 1942, Ruth Barcan married the physicist Jules Alexander Marcus , whom she had met at Yale. A scholarship from the American Association of University Women allowed her to continue her studies with her husband at the University of Chicago , where she studied with Rudolf Carnap . In 1948 her husband was offered a position at Northwestern University , she could only accompany him as a 'visiting professor'. In 1952 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In the years that followed, Ruth Barcan Marcus gave birth to four children: James in 1948, Peter in 1949, Katherine in 1952, and Elizabeth in 1957. Since 1959, she has been a visiting lecturer at Roosevelt University .

In the early 1960s she worked closely with David Kaplan , and in 1962 she attended a seminar with Arthur Norman Prior at the University of Chicago.

A discussion volume and the participation in a subsequent colloquium at Harvard University in Boston allowed Barcan Marcus to defend her point of view against Quine, whose negative reviews had slowed down further development of modal predicate logic. The actual founding act of modal predicate logic took place through the Colloquium on Modal Theories and Many Valued Logic in August 1962, in which Barcan Marcus also took part. In 1963, Ruth Barcan became a Marcus Fellow of the National Science Foundation.

When the University of Illinois at Chicago was founded, Barcan Marcus was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Founding Department Chair in 1964 . She played a key role in setting up the institute. In 1970 Ruth Barcan Marcus moved to Northwestern, but in 1973 she accepted a call to the Reuben-Post-Halleck Professorship at Yale University, which she held until her retirement in 1992. The marriage with Jules Marcus was divorced in 1976. During her time as an active faculty member at Yale, she also held numerous visiting professorships:
1978–79 at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1979), as a fellow at the Humanities Institute of the University of Edinburgh Fellow in 1983, two trimesters in 1985 and 1968 at Wolfson College of Oxford University and a Visiting Fallow at Clare Hall Colledge of Cambridge University in 1988. After her retirement she remained as a Senior Research Scholar at Yale, but she regularly spent the winter as a guest professor at the University of California, Irvine .

Offices and honors

From 1961 to 1976 Ruth Barcan Marcus held various offices and functions in area departments of the American Philosophical Association (APA), of which she was also temporarily chairman, from 1976 to 1983 she was a member of the Board of Officers of the national umbrella organization. She was Vice President from 1980–83 and President of the Association for Symbolic Logic from 1983–86 .

Barcan Marcus had been a Permanent Member of the Common Room, Clare Hall, Cambridge since 1986. In 1973 and 1990 she was a visiting fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio on Lake Como. In 1973 she was co-opted into the Institut International de Philosophie , of which she was chairman from 1989-92, after which she was given an honorary chairmanship. In 1977 she was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1986 she gave a guest lecture at the Collège de France .

She received the Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1995, and the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University in 2000. In May 2008 the Lauener Foundation organized an international symposium on analytical philosophy in her honor in Bern and awarded her the Lauener Prize in Analytical Philosophy, named after Henri Lauener .

In 2007 Barcan Marcus received the American Philosophical Association's Quinn Prize for service to the professional association.

Philosophical positions

Modal predicate logic

Ruth Barcan Marcus earliest publications provide the first axiomatic formulation of modal predicate logic. This early work was an extension of Clarence Irving Lewis ' modal propositional logic systems and marked a milestone in the development of formal logic in the 20th century.

In the philosophy of logic it takes a reading according to which the subject area of ​​an interpretation function includes the objects of the real world. She has also proposed an alternative to the usual model-theoretical semantics ( Alfred Tarski ) for certain applications of logic, if “the truth conditions of the quantified terms can only be given in the form of truth conditions without making use of an assignment [of the logical terms].” Barcan Marcus is the Successful proof that such a theory, also known as truth value semantics or substitutional semantics , does not lead to contradictions. While such semantics are particularly relevant for a formalistic theory of mathematics, according to Barcan Marcus, a correct understanding of ontological terms such as (numerical) identity necessarily requires object-related semantics and an assignment function. At the same time, Barcan Marcus represents a modal actualism , according to which only possible objects (so-called possibilia , possible but not real objects) are not logically meaningful entities - a direct consequence of the fact that it restricts the occupancy functions to individuals from the current world.

In the formal systems proposed by Barcan Marcus, therefore, the necessity of identity applies. Her interpretation of identity, based on her theory of proper names and the Barcan formula , sparked an unfinished debate. For the Barcan formula , see also modal logic # Quantifiers, Barcan formulas .

In addition, Barcan Marcus has argued against Willard Van Orman Quine's view that modal systems necessarily imply an Aristotelian essentialism . She succeeded in defining essentialist properties within the framework of formal modal logic systems, of which she was able to show that, in certain interpretations, they do not meet the requirements of an essentialist theory. This proof was later formalized by Terence Parsons .

Meaning theory

In the philosophy of language Barcan Marcus advocated a theory of rigid designation , according to which proper names are only labels (tags) that refer directly to their wearer (direct reference) . The meaning of proper names should be completely exhausted in this referential function and not be dependent on an intention of the name. With this, Barcan Marcus contradicted the prevailing theories, the labeling theory of Bertrand Russell and the bundle theory of John Searle . This position, which Barcan Marcus presented as early as 1962 in the context of a colloquium held by Van Orman Quine, shows clear similarities to the theory of meaning by Saul Kripke , which the latter presented a few years later in name and necessity . However, it cannot be ruled out that Kripke, who worked in the same problem area, came to his opinion independently of Barcan Marcus.

Deontic logic

Barcan Marcus developed a modal theory to explain the conflict of duties. According to her, a lot of morally prescriptive sentences are to be considered consistent if there is a possible world in which they can all be obeyed at the same time. It is compatible with the fact that there is a conflict between commandments from this set in the actual world - a conflict of duties. Thus, systems of moral rules would not necessarily be inconsistent just because there is a specific conflict of duties. There was great opposition to this view.

Epistemic Belief Theory

Barcan Marcus rejected the language-centered approach to explaining beliefs, such as found in Donald Davidson . According to the classical definition of knowledge this is justified true is opinion (justified true totaled) . According to Barcan Marcus, it is wrong to attribute a justified opinion to a cognizant subject, the content of which is something impossible (e.g. a contradicting statement). An epistemic subject who possessed a belief the content of which turns out to be false in retrospect cannot meaningfully say that it possessed this belief as a justified opinion, but that it falsely ascribed it to itself as a justified belief.

Edited volumes and editorships

  • The Logical Enterprise , ed. With A. Anderson, R. Martin, Yale, 1995
  • Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science , VII, eds. R. Barcan Marcus et al., North Holland, 1986
  • Modalities: Philosophical Essays , Oxford University Press , 1993. Paperback; 1995 (collection of her most important articles)

literature

  • Max Cresswell : Ruth Barcan Marcus , in: Aloysius P. Martinich, David Sosa (Eds.): A Companion to Analytic Philosophy , Blackwell Publisher, Malden-Oxford 2001, pp. 357-360.
  • Henri Lauener (Ed.): Dialectica (1999), 53 (3-4). "Festschrift in honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus".
  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Diana Raffman, Nicholas Asher (Eds.): Modality, Morality, and Belief: Essays in Honor of Ruth Barcan Marcus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York 1995.
  • Paul W. Humphreys, Jame H. Fetzer (Eds.): The New Theory of Reference. Kripke, Marcus, and its Origins Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - Boston - London 1999.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Tamar S. Gendler: Ruth Barcan Marcus in: Jewish Women. A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia . Retrieved February 21, 2012 .
  2. ^ Brian Leiter: In Memoriam: Ruth Barcan Marcus (1921-2012). Entry in the blog head of reports . Retrieved February 21, 2012 .
  3. ↑ According to a remark by Barcan Marcus, the family especially revered Eugene Victor Debs .
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Ruth Barcan Marcus: A Philosopher's Calling. 2010 John Dewey Lecture of the American Philosophical Association. Download from Head of Reports. Retrieved February 21, 2012 .
  5. ↑ There are three articles that appeared under her maiden name Ruth C. Barcan in the Journal of Symbolic Logic : A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication (1946), The Deduction Theorem in a Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication (1946), The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order (1947).
  6. ^ WV Quine: Review of “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication,” by Ruth C. Barcan , in: The Journal of Symbolic Logic 11, no. 3 (September 1946): 96-97.
  7. ^ Marx Warthofsky, ed., Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, 1961-62, vol. 1 of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1963), 77-112.
  8. ↑ The work discussed at the colloquium was published in Acta Philosophica Fennica , vol. Published 16, 1963.
  9. ↑ There are three articles that appeared under her maiden name Ruth C. Barcan in the Journal of Symbolic Logic : "A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication", (1946), "The Deduction Theorem in a Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication "(1946)," The Identity of Individuals in a Strict Functional Calculus of Second Order ", (1947).
  10. ↑ “… [if] the truth conditions for quantified formuli are given purely in terms of truth with no appeal to domains of interpretation”, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Modalities and Intensional Language in: Synthesis Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 303-322 (1961)
  11. ^ "Dispensing with Possibilia" (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 1975-76); "Possibilia and Possible Worlds" (Graz Philosophical Studies, 1985–86).
  12. ↑ Journal of Symbolic Logic, (1947) 12: pp. 12-15
  13. ^ Terence Parsons, Essentialism and Quantified Modal Logic in: The Philosophical Review , Vol. 78, No. 1 (1969), pp. 35-52.
  14. ^ "Modalities and Intentional Languages" ( Synthesis , 1961) (and elsewhere)
  15. ↑ See Quentin Smith Marcus, Kripke, and the Origin of The New Theory of Reference , in: Synthesis 104/2, August 1995, pp. 179-189.
  16. ↑ So also Timothy Williamson : "One of the ideas in them that resonates most with current philosophy of language is that of proper names as mere tags, without descriptive content. This is not Kripke's idea of ​​names as rigid designators, designating the same object with respect to all relevant worlds, for 'rigidified' definite descriptions are rigid designators but still have descriptive content. Rather, it is the idea, later developed by David Kaplan and others, that proper names are directly referential, in the sense that they contribute only their bearer to the propositions expressed by sentences in which they occur. " Timothy Williamson's Tribute to Ruth Barcan Marcus on the Occasion of Her Receipt of the Lauener Prize , Head of Reports: A Philosophical Blog, October 14, 2008.
  17. ↑ See "Moral Dilemmas and Consistency" (Journal of Philosophy, 1980)
  18. ↑ See "A Proposed Solution to The Puzzle About Belief" (Foundations of Analytic Philosophy in Midwest Studies, 1981) and "Rationality and Believing the Impossible" (The Journal of Philosophy, 1983 and elsewhere).
personal data
SURNAME Barcan Marcus, Ruth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barcan, Ruth C .; Marcus, Ruth Barcan; Barcan Marcus, Ruth C.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American logician and philosopher
BIRTH DATE August 2, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Bronx , New York City
DATE OF DEATH 19th February 2012