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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 December 13, 2005 06:08 PM
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