A/Prof Drew Khlentzos Seminar

Topic: Detachment, possibility and the None From One puzzle
Speaker: Adjunct Professor Drew Khlentzos, Macquarie University
Host: Distinguished Professor Stephen Crain
Venue: The Australian Hearing Hub, Level 3, Room 3.610
Date: Monday, 30 September 2019
Time: 1.00pm - 2.00pm

Abstract
Ever so often logic turns up some surprises. This one certainly surprised us. It concerns the way the word ‘IF’ interacts with modals such as CAN, MAY, MUST, as in ‘IF you have the cake, you CANNOT have the ice-cream’ and ‘IF the coin landed Heads, it COULD NOT have landed Tails’. The surprise is that these IF-sentences do not behave the way you’d expect them to — the way conditionals ordinarily behave. We demonstrate this by means of a rather curious little puzzle: the None From One puzzle, as we call it. We use this puzzle to develop a novel account of modal IF-sentences.

Bio
Drew Khlentzos is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University. His research ranges over logic, semantics, psychology and cognitive neuroscience  with a particular focus on human reasoning: its nature, neural mechanisms, linguistic expression and pathologies.