Oxford University Press have just published a new monograph co-authored by Dr Salvatore Florio, Reader in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. Written in collaboration with Øystein Linnebo (University of Oslo), this is the most comprehensive discussion to date of plural logic and its significance for philosophy and linguistics.
Plural expressions found in natural languages allow us to talk about many objects simultaneously. Plural logic is a logical system that takes plurals as primitive alongside singular expressions. After introducing plural logic and its main applications, the book provides a systematic analysis of the relation between this logic and other theoretical frameworks such as set theory, mereology, higher-order logic, and modal logic. The result is a more nuanced picture of plural logic's applications than has been given thus far. The book also addresses questions about the correct logic of plurals. Traditional plural logic is rejected in favor of a “critical” alternative. This leads to a novel approach to the relation between the many and the one, an approach that paves the way for an account of sets capable of solving the set-theoretic paradoxes.
Dr Florio specialises in philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics. His published work, which focuses on questions about the nature of logic and the foundations of semantics, has appeared in journals such as Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Nous, Philosophers' Imprint, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Since 2019 he has been an editor of The Review of Symbolic Logic. He is currently working on foundational issues in knowledge representation, a field of Artificial Intelligence.
The book is available as part of OUP’s open-access series, available online under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.