Speakers: Andrew Tedder & Grace Paterson (Ruhr University Bochum)
Date and Time: Thursday, June 11th 2026, 15:00-18:00
Venue: ILLC Seminar Room F1.15, Science Park 107 and online.
First talk by Andrew Tedder
Title: Relevance for Tarskian Logics.
Abstract. Relevant logics seek to formalise a notion of logical consequence where the conclusion must be relevant to the premises in order to be validly derivable from them. Usually these logics are presented as sets of theorems, and the relevance property in question is stated for provable implication formulas. In this talk, I’ll investigate a property appropriate to logics understood as Tarskian consequence relations, the Basic Relevance Property (BRP). I’ll argue that this property can be understood to be a relevance property insofar as it concerns overlap between the topics of conclusions and premises and show that a logic has this property iff its class of reduced matrix models satisfies a version of the Joint Embedding Property (JEP) studied in universal algebra. I’ll also discuss some results we can obtain using this correspondence theorem, indicating some logics with BRP and some classes of matrices with JEP.
Second talk by Grace Paterson
Title: Plausible Deniability for Whom?
Abstract. It is possible for a strategically minded speaker to perform communicative acts in such a way as to allow the speaker to “plausible deny” a particular reading of what they have said. On standard accounts, this is done so that the speaker can potentially evade certain unpleasant consequences of their speech act should it be taken poorly. However, many actual cases of ‘’plausibly deniable’’ speech do not seem to be truly deniable – or at least not plausibly so. In this talk I shall take up these more puzzling cases and provide an alternative analysis that centers the audience. In particular, I will argue that speakers can design their speech acts so that members of the audience may plausibly deny having understood what the primary message was even when the speaker themselves might not be able to plausibly deny this meaning. A speaker who understands this and communicates in a manner that provides this kind of “out” for their audience can therefore better retain that audience even as they themselves skirt the boundaries of social acceptability.