John MacFarlane (philosopher)
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John MacFarlane is an American professor of philosophy at the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
interested in
logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
and
metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
. He has made influential contributions to truth-value theory inferential semantics. In 2015, he was elected a
Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...
the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
. He is also known for his contributions to
open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open ...
, especially the
Pandoc Pandoc is a free-software document converter, widely used as a writing tool (especially by scholars)- - - and as a basis for publishing workflows. It was created by John MacFarlane, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berke ...
document converter and other
Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...
parsers and verifiers. MacFarlane was among the group of people that helped launch the CommonMark standardization effort for Markdown.


Education

MacFarlane graduated from
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
and the
University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the universit ...
.


Career and research

Most of McFarlane's work is in the
philosophy of logic Philosophy of logic is the area of philosophy that studies the scope and nature of logic. It investigates the philosophical problems raised by logic, such as the presuppositions often implicitly at work in theories of logic and in their application ...
and language. Other research interests include
metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, the first principles of being, identity and change, space and time, causality, necessity, and possibility. It includes questions about the nature of conscio ...
and
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
, the
philosophy of mathematics The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in people's ...
,
philosophical logic Understood in a narrow sense, philosophical logic is the area of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. Some theorists conceive philosophical ...
, the
history of logic The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logics developed in ancient times in Indian logic, India, Logic in China, China, and Greek philosophy, Greece. Greek methods, particula ...
,
Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philo ...
,
Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemolo ...
and
ancient philosophy This page lists some links to ancient philosophy, namely philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history (). Overview Genuine philosophical thought, depending upon original individual insights, arose in many cultures ...
particularly
Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of phil ...
.


Normativity of Logic

With respect to the
normativity Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. A norm in ...
of logic for human thought, MacFarlane defends a certain claim made by
Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philo ...
, a German mathematician and logician. In his book "''The'' ''Foundational Laws of Arithmetic''", which is a follow-up work to "
The Foundations of Arithmetic ''The Foundations of Arithmetic'' (german: Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik) is a book by Gottlob Frege, published in 1884, which investigates the philosophical foundations of arithmetic. Frege refutes other theories of number and develops his own t ...
" (1884), Frege claims to have overcome the limitations of
Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemolo ...
's logic, and MacFarlane acknowledges this. MacFarlane elaborates the idea in ''Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism'' (2002): The comparability of Frege's and Kant's systems is disputed in scholarly discourse. MacFarlane argues that the systems are indeed comparable, because both thinkers Kant and Frege define logic fundamentally by its generality as a central characteristic. Accordingly, Frege's approach is suited to overcome Kant's. In "''In What Sense (If Any) Is Logic Normative for Thought?''" (2004), MacFarlane turns to a problem raised by
Gilbert Harman Gilbert Harman (May 26, 1938 – November 13, 2021) was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of min ...
of the fundamental relationship between logic and human thought. He develops an approximative methodology that seeks to contain Harman's position: that there are no bridging principles. MacFarlane proposes an improved principle as a starting point for further conceptual research in the field. Normativity of logic is a basic theme of MacFarlane's philosophy and was already on his mind while he was doing his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2000.


Linguistic Relativism

In his 2014 book titled ''"Assessment Sensitivity"'', MacFarlane elaborates a three-layered theory of
linguistic relativity The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view, worldview or cognition, and ...
(''Semantics proper, Semantics post, Pragmatics''). The project seeks to unify the respective advantages of the three traditional semantic positions - Objectivism, Contextualism, and Expressivism - into one Assessment-
Relativist Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...
position. Thus MacFarlane circumvents the respective disadvantages of the three existing positions. To this end, after rejecting the standard arguments against relativist positions, MacFarlane extends the established context sensitivity of the established non-relativist semantics to include judgment sensitivity in an analogous handling. In doing so, the thinker avoids the problems normally associated with semantic relativism. The technical underpinning that seeks to achieve judgment sensitivity of
proposition In logic and linguistics, a proposition is the meaning of a declarative sentence. In philosophy, " meaning" is understood to be a non-linguistic entity which is shared by all sentences with the same meaning. Equivalently, a proposition is the no ...
s using an index-based semantics is based on David Kaplan and David Lewis. ''Assessment Sensitivity'' has been extensively reviewed in philosophical journals, and has been the subject of a book symposium with Diana Raffman, Jason Stanley, and Crispin Wright. Unusually, it has been made available as
open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...
(as cited below).


Publications

His books and monographs include: * * Paperback edition. His articles include * Future contingents and relative truth * Making sense of relative truth * Nonindexical contextualismhttps://johnmacfarlane.net/nonindexical-contextualism.pdf 2009.
Synthese ''Synthese'' () is a scholarly periodical specializing in papers in epistemology, methodology, and philosophy of science, and related issues. Its subject area is divided into four specialties, with a focus on the first three: (1) "epistemology, me ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:MacFarlane, John Date of birth missing (living people) Living people American philosophers Harvard College alumni University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty Year of birth missing (living people)