About the project
InFors brings together philosophy, logic, and mathematics to explore meaning, belief, knowledge, and information.
We can describe the same thing in different ways, yet those descriptions may convey different ideas. These differences matter to what people believe and know, but logical theories can struggle to capture them. Some approaches also encounter paradoxes when dealing with meaning and truth.
To address these challenges, InFors draws on forcing, a mathematical technique developed in set theory, and Boolean-valued models, which use a richer range of truth values than simply “true” and “false”. We will adapt these tools to develop a unified framework for studying meaning and the content of thoughts and beliefs.
By combining mathematical models with philosophical analysis, we aim to represent subtle distinctions in thought and language more precisely. The project seeks to offer new perspectives on fundamental questions in philosophy and logic, with potential relevance to linguistics, the social sciences, and computer science.
Research questions
The project will develop new logical tools and explore what they can tell us about meaning, belief, and knowledge. Four questions guide our work:
How can forcing help us capture subtle differences in meaning that existing approaches overlook?
Can the framework express a wide range of ideas precisely while avoiding paradoxes?
How can it be extended beyond classical logic?
How should we interpret these mathematical models, and what philosophical insights can they offer?
