Ben Martin

I currently serve as the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council funded project The Unknown Science: Understanding the Epistemology of Logic through Practice (2018-20), which brings together my two broad areas of research expertise, solutions to the self-referential paradoxes and logical epistemology.

Much of my early work was on dialetheism, the thesis that some contradictions are true, which is a prominent solution to the self-referential paradoxes. In my published work I have highlighted both the strengths of dialetheism and some of the weaknesses that theory suffers in comparison to competing solutions.

In my current project I am working on a theory of logical epistemology based upon case studies from the history of logic. Particularly, I argue that historical views of logical knowledge which claim that we come to recognise logical truths through direct appeals to intuitions or definitions are wrong because they cannot make sense of important historical logical disagreements and arguments. Instead, I argue for a position called logical abductivism, which proposes that logical theories are justified holistically by their ability to solve puzzles and accommodate mathematical results.