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This seminar talk from the Orange County Inland Empire (OCIE) Seminar series in History and Philosophy of Mathematics features Greg Restall from the University of St Andrews defending contingentism - the philosophical position that some things exist contingently. Explore the tension between natural reasoning principles concerning possibility and necessity versus existential and universal quantifiers, which has led some philosophers to adopt necessitism (the view that everything exists necessarily). Delve into an analysis of modal semantics that goes beyond traditional possible worlds models, as Restall develops an inferentialist semantics for modal and quantificational vocabulary. Rather than replacing possible worlds models, this approach explains how our concepts can be modeled using possible worlds while clarifying contingentist commitments and addressing necessitist objections. The talk was presented in hybrid format at Chapman University's Keck Center as part of a series co-organized with researchers from UC Riverside, CSU San Bernardino, and Pitzer College.
