the boundaries of language

News that I've been hoping to hear has just gone up on Leiter Reports. Alan Weir, currently at Queen's University Belfast, has just accepted a Professorship in our home city. Alan works mainly in philosophy of maths and logic, but also in language, mind and epistemology. I hope his work starts to receive more attention as a result of the move. In particular, he's defended the view that the Russell paradox is to be blamed on the background logic rather than the axioms of Naive Set Theory. Even those (like myself) who incline towards orthodoxy on this issue should recognise Alan's work as a challenge that has as yet gone unanswered. (The few reactions I have seen in print have usually simply pointed out that the revisions that need to be made to logic to block the derivation of the contradiction are severe. I've yet to be convinced that we can in good philosophical conscience dismiss Alan's challenges on those grounds.)

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