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December 16, 2005
A sad day for the blogosphere...
Well, this comes as a great shock, but languageandlogic.net net did not win the Weblog Award it was up for. However, it did get several more votes after I put more effort into campaign visibility (by posting about it here the day before yesterday.) Thanks to everyone who voted!
Posted by logican at 10:40 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 15, 2005
Searching for Satisfaction
Bloggers sometimes post the odd words and expressions that, with the help of a search engine, surfers used to find their way onto the site. Jonathan Kvanvig has been doing it here, and Brian did it a very long time ago. But I thought I could go one better. These people were actually looking for things, right? So here's a push in the right direction...
"Christmas Logic" - you know, that's when you open your first present, and it's the new System of a Down
"richard montague death feferman" - er, I don't think he did it.
"kit fine philosophy" - here he is!
"feferman solomon on richard montague" - I doubt he thinks he did it, either.
"adam morton s definition of evil" - when somebody steals his unicycle
"what to ask at a postdoc interview" - what are you going to pay me? do you expect me to do anything for that?
"being superhuman" - well, this is what you eat, apparently.
"solomon feferman- facts about his life" - look, he didn't kill Montague, ok?
"wild answering machine messages" - er, will "I'm not here now" do?
"famous axioms" - I like Peirce's law, here's a candid photograph:
"psychology how to deal with a liar" - some people around here favour using a metalanguage...
"what does gillian mean" - I'd try to tell you, but I fear you wouldn't understand my answer.
"i m failing logic class" - actually, this I can help with. Send me an email!
"philosophers on christmas" - don't swap all your presents for your brother's; you'll never get any Tofurkey.
"frehg" - I think you might mean "Frege"
"jews dont use which natural number" - ?!?!
"photo of sahotra sarkar" - seek and ye shall find...scroll down, it's a very cool photo
You're welcome. We live to please.
Posted by logican at 07:50 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 14, 2005
The 2005 Weblog Awards
So, erm, it turns out that logicandlanguage.net has been nominated for an award. It is, admittedly, kind of a naff award: we're one of 15 nominees for, ahem, "Best of the Top 6751 - 8750 Blogs" (as ranked by The Truth Laid Bear), and frankly, loosing badly to something called "Save the GOP". But we'll take what we can get, so thank you very much to KaneCitizen at News on the March for nominating us.
I don't think there's much chance of a win, but, hey, it would be good, you know, not to be last. So er, The 2005 Weblog Awards vote early, vote often. yay.
Posted by logican at 01:48 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 13, 2005
Logic and Belief Revision
My copy of the newest issue of Phi-News arrived today. You can also get it online here, but sometimes it's nice to have a little bound booklet that you can read over breakfast (if you finish the cereal boxes, of course.)
Starting on page 4 there's an interview with Patrick Blackburn that has lots of interesting stuff about the relation between logic and natural language, but there's also a passage that will have Frege turning in his grave:
I mean, if you go back and look at the logic books that were written about 1870 and 1880 and so on, for instance, John Stuart Mill's text or other texts that were written about that stage, two things strike you. First of all, in on sense they are surpisingly modern. There is actually explicit reference to psychology, to cognitive themes, in some sense, and above all, to language. [p.7, my emphasis]
There's an except from the forthcoming Formal Philosophy
In my graduate quantum theory course, the professor labored to produce a clumsy theorem (I don't remember what) of the form "if p then q." The contrapostive was more intutive and I said so, only to hear the professor adamantly deny the truth of the contrapostive formulation, and when presented with the general logical principle, deny that too. I learned, as had better minds before me, Boole's and Frege's included, that logic is not about people. [p. 20]
Go check out what he has to say about his Heidegger prof. Phi-news is brilliant. They'll be selling it by the checkout in your local supermarket before the end of the year...
Posted by logican at 06:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
New Goedel's Theorems Book
Via FOM I note that the first 15 chapters of Peter Smith's book An Introduction to Goedel's Theorems are available online. He's looking for feedback, so if you have a comment on any part of the book, you might contact him...
Posted by logican at 01:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 09, 2005
Mill's Father and the Problem of Evil
Mill talks about his father's attitude to God and the problem of evil in his Autobiography
He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open contradiction. The Sabean, or Manichean theory of a Good and an Evil principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him express surprise, that no one revived it in our time.
This passage struck me because I heard that very theory - or at least something like it - proposed on the Greyhound bus the other day. I ended up talking, as one sometimes does, to the woman in the seat next to me. She told me about her children and their desires to study computer graphics, I told her about the talk I was giving at the University of Calgary, she told me about her church, and I tried to persuade her that free will was no solution to the problem of evil. We eventually hashed out that she didn't believe that God is omnipotent. Rather, he's in a scarily well-balanced fight with the devil. The devil causes all the unnecessary natural suffering and evil and God's just trying to hold up our end the best he can.
This was more than a month ago and I've been mulling it over ever since. This strikes me as a much more attractive solution than any solution which implies that suggests there's really no unnecessary natural evil in the world.
Posted by logican at 10:34 AM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
December 06, 2005
Context-Shifting
Intriguing thing about Jason Stanley's new book: in the US it's 140 pages
Posted by logican at 12:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 04, 2005
Is the pursuit of truth ever reprehensible?
Adam suggested the following case: our reading group was looking at Gila Sher's "Ways of Branching Quantifiers" and it occurred to him to wonder whether Sher was male or female - something that can be easily checked using google. But Adam suspected that it might be wrong to check. And so he suspected that this might be a case in which is wrong to pursue the truth.
I feel the force of the case, but I was wondering what might be behind the intuition that it is wrong to check. When challenged it's natural to appeal to the fact that Sher's gender is irrelevant to the quality of Sher's article, which makes one suspect that the worry is that one might judge the article less or more sympathetically given knowledge of the author's gender. This is the same kind of worry that one might have when one wonders whether a job candidate is male or female. Or black or not. Or from a decent graduate programme or not. Or also works on Foucault or not. Or wrote that paper on decision theory that you half remember. Or has a blog. (There seems to be some kind of slippery slope here - when is to ok to start pursuing truth?) But one might worry about one's assessment of the article being skewed by knowledge of the author's gender for two reasons. One might be worried about doing an injustice to the author. But one might also be worried about corrupting one's own epistemic processes - that is, placing obstacles in the way of one's own pursuit of truth. And in that case, the worry that investigating the truth might be wrong is motivated precisely by one's pursuit of truth.
Anyway, Adam guessed that Sher was female, and I said "I bet you anything they aren't", which no doubt made me guilty of all kinds of grammatical sin as well as of the sin of despair. To which I might have to add the sin of pursuit of truth - I checked.
Posted by logican at 10:21 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 03, 2005
Philosophy Merchandise (slight return)
Al McLuckie put me on to the Unemployed Philosophers' Guild, where you can buy, among other things, a T-shirt that reads "here's looking at Euclid", a "Will to Power Bar (the official nutritional supplement of the superman" and a Kierkegaard finger puppet. Well, that's my family sorted for Christmas presents...
Posted by logican at 12:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack