Gillian Russell
Gillian Russell is a Professor of Philosophy at the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy at ACU in Melbourne and a part-time professor at the Arché Research Center at the University of St Andrews. He is currently working on the issue of "barriers to involvement", that is, the thesis on the impossibility of obtaining certain types of conclusions from certain types of premises, such as: duty from being, or statements about the future to starting from statements about the past.
He published a very influential book on the analytic / synthetic distinction (Truth in virtue of Meaning - A Defense of the Analytic / Synthetic Distinction, Oxford University Press, 2008) and several articles on the philosophy of logic (epistemology of logic, normativity of logic). logic, logic and indexicals, logical pluralism, logical nihilism).
Gillian Russell
Hume’s Law and Ought implies Can
Gillian Russell
Abstract
A Barrier to Entailment says that you can’t get certain kinds of con-clusion from certain kinds of premises, for example: you can’t get normative conclusions from descriptive premises (the is/ought barrier), or you can’t get conclusions about the future from premises about the past (the past/future barrier) or universal conclusions from particular premises (the particular/universal barrier.) The literature on how to prove the is/ought barrier is often a response to the counterexamples proposed by A.N. Prior in “The Autonomy of Ethics” (1960) but more recent criticisms (due to e.g. Peter Vranas and Gerhard Schurz) of proofs that avoid Prior’s worries in simple deontic logics (due to e.g. Restall and Russell) have emphasised the importance and difficulty of extending such proofs to complex logics which allow for
the expression of counterexamples involving e.g. the contrapositive of ought implies can (¬♦φ ⊨ ¬Oφ) and principles such as φ Oφ. This paper proposes a new way to handle such counterexamples to the
is/ought barrier and shows how to generalise it to analogous counterex-
amples to other barrier theses (e.g. φ ⊨ F φ.)