Dave DeVidi
Professor

PhD, MA, University of Western Ontario
BA, Carleton University

Office: HH 325
Extension: 35701
Email: ddevidi@uwaterloo.ca

Areas of Interest
Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language and Philosophy of Science

Academic Biography
When I started in grad school, I thought I wanted to work in philosophy of mind and ethics. Before long I had convinced myself that many arguments in these fields simply assumed answers to interesting metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions; moreover, it seemed to me that real progress on the initial questions wouldn’t be made until the background issues were sorted out, and that the background issues were more interesting anyway. I was preparing to write a thesis where issues of metaphysics, epistemology and logic come together in debates about what was right and wrong in Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language when John L. Bell arrived at the University of Western Ontario, where I was a student. When I got the chance to work with him I quickly became convinced that there was another class of problems that were still deeper, and still more interesting and fun. I changed tracks again, and set about trying to really learn some logic, and the mathematics necessary to do logic seriously. My PhD thesis was a fairly technical piece of work in mathematical logic (having to do with formal semantics for constructive logics, and with the effects term forming operators (basically, metaphysical principles) have on the validity of logical principles). But, unlike some more mathematically minded logicians, my interest in formal philosophy always comes back to my view that headway on the formal issues is the surest way to real progress on the issues that, when introduced to undergraduates, make philosophy fascinating in the first place.

My research has usually been of that sort—fairly technical, but wearing its philosophical motivations on its sleeve. As mentioned, my thesis research has implications for the relationship between metaphysics and logic. I have published on truth definitions and consistency proofs, in history of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science (especially on Carnap), a number of times on the knowability paradox, on realism and anti-realism, on the paradoxes of vagueness, on the axiom of choice in non-classical mathematics, and so on. My most recent research has been on pluralism in a priori realms, first on logical pluralism and more recently on mathematical pluralism.  I have also recently begun circling back to work directly on some of the issues that first drew me to philosophy, in particular issues to do autonomy and disability.  

Selected Publications
Forthcoming: “Advocacy, Autism and Autonomy,” to appear in Autism and Philosophy, edited by Jami Anderson and Simon Cushing.
2011: Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy: Vintage Enthusiasms (Springer, co-edited with Michael Hallett and Peter Clark).
2011: “The Municipal By-Laws of Thought,” in Vintage Enthusiasms.
2006: A Logical Approach to Philosophy (Springer, co-edited with Tim Kenyon.)
2006: “Empirical Negations in Intuitionistic Logic,” in A Logical Approach to Philosophy (with Graham Solomon).
2006: “Assertion, Proof and the Axiom of Choice,” in A Logical Approach to Philosophy.
2005: “Vagueness and Intuitionistic Modal Logic: On the Wright Track,” in Mistakes of Reason: Essays in Honour of John Woods, edited by Kent Peacock and Andrew Irvine, University of Toronto Press.
2004: “Choice Principles and Constructive Logics,” Philosophia Mathematica. 12 222-243.
2003: “Analogues of knowability,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 481-95 (With Tim Kenyon)
2001: Logical Options: An Introduction to Classical and Alternative Logics (Broadview, with John L. Bell and Graham Solomon)
1998: “Tarski on ‘Essentially Richer’ Metalanguages,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 28 1–28 (with Graham Solomon).
1995: “Intuitionistic ε- and τ-Calculi,” Mathematical Logic Quarterly 41 523–546.

Selected Grants, Fellowships & Awards
2009-12: Principal Investigator, SSHRC Standard Research Grant, “Pluralisms, Logical and Mathematical.”
2003-2007: Principal Investigator, SSHRC Standard Research Grant: “Non-Constructivist Applications of Constructive Logics.”
1997-99: Principal Investigator, SSHRC Standard Research Grant: “Between Classical and Intuitionistic Logic”.
1994-96: SSHRC Post-doctoral fellowship.

Current Research
Much of my current research is on issues raised by the question of whether there is any interesting and non-trivial sense in which it is true that there can be more than one correct mathematics. This was a natural outgrowth of my earlier interest in the question of logical pluralism. There has also recently been more overlap between my professional work and volunteer work I have long been doing in the community, much of it involving sorting through philosophical issues raised by the sorts of accommodations for disabilities the groups I have been involved with are advocating.  I continue to be interested in philosophical applications of constructive logic that have motives inconsistent with constructivism.  And I always become hooked on issues being investigated by some of the excellent graduate students I get to supervise. Right now these include paraconsistent deontic logics and moral dilemmas, the relationship between existence assumptions and logical principles, and the implications of logical pluralism for argumentation theory.

Recent Graduate Supervision and Teaching

PhD Theses:

• From Objects to Individuals: An Essay in Analytic Ontology
• Thinking the Impossible:  Counterfactual Conditionals, Impossible Cases and Thought Experiments
• A Defence of Semantic Conventionalism

MA Theses:

• Moral Dilemmas, Trumping and Paraconsistent Deontic Logics
• Reference and Reinterpretation
• Slingshots and Arrows: Contemporary Truth-maker Theory
• Quantum Logic: Formal Semantics and the Quantum Conditional
• Gaps and Gluts in Semantic Models of Vagueness
• Justifying Principles of Logical Inference
• Essentialism, Reference and Logical Possibility

Recent PhD Research Areas:

• Decision Theory, Game Theory and Formal Epistemology
• Non-classical Logics and Their Applications
• Logic and Epistemology of Logic

• Truthmaker Theory and Analytical Metaphysics
• Epistemology
• Feminist Epistemology and Standpoint Theory
• Logic and Set Theory
• Theories of Truth and Meta-ethics
• Philosophical Logic
• Information Theory and Bioinformatics
• Philosophy of Logic

Selected MA Research Papers:

• “Carnap’s Conventionalism and ‘Physical Geometry’”
• “Dummett on the Reality of the Past”
• “The Knowability Paradox”
• “Quine, Davidson and Dummett on Holism”
• “Problems in Modal Logic”

Recent Courses and Seminars:

• Philosophical Uses and Abuses of Game Theory
• Pluralisms
• Explanation
• Intuitionistic, Relevance and Linear Logics
• Conditionals and Negations
• Truth
• Substructural Logics