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ACU philosopher has top-cited article

ACU philosopher Dr Gillian Russell has been named the author of the top-cited article in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research for 2019-20.

Publisher Wiley named Dr Russell’s article Deviance and Vice: Strength as a Theoretical Virtue in the Epistemology of Logic as the most popularly-cited paper in the field. The paper was published in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in November 2019 and received seven citations in its first year of publication.

The paper is about the putative theoretical virtue of strength, as it might be used in abductive arguments to the correct logic in the epistemology of logic. It argues for three theses. The first is that the well‐defined property of logical strength is neither a virtue nor a vice, so that logically weaker theories are not—all other things being equal—worse or better theories than logically stronger ones. The second thesis is that logical strength does not entail the looser characteristic of scientific strength, and the third is that many modern logics are on a par—or can be made to be on a par—with respect to scientific strength.