LoPSE

This post belongs to LoPSE popularization (#pop) series written both in English and in Polish. ENGLISH VERSION [POLISH VERSION BELOW] In a previous post we presented the background needed to follow  Paula Teijeiro  in her Not a knot.  Now we're ready to move to the paper discussed during the seminar, which raises two key points. First, it is possible to provide a syntactic characterization of  Knot . This is done in a proof system which is a bit different from what one might see in an intro to logic class, but there are no clear reasons not to call this a proof-theoretic characterization. Since the notion of a conservative extension doesn't help here, the question arises as to whether there is a similar criterion in the vicinity that would allow to establish that  Knot  in some sense hasn't been properly introduced. One strategy, that Teijeiro investigates, is to define a new notion: that of a preservative extension. Roughly speaking, the idea here is that pres

This post belongs to LoPSE popularization (#pop) series written both in English and in Polish.   ENGLISH VERSION [POLISH VERSION BELOW] On June 28, 2019 in our seminar we connected with Paula Teijeiro  to discuss her recent draft, Not a Knot . Before we get to the actual content of the paper, some background is needed. It will be provided in this post, and a discussion of Paula's own contribution will follow in another post. Most logicians don't think they merely play syntactic games when they do logic. They claim that the enterprise is meaningful and goes beyond pure manipulation of sequences of symbols. Yet, it turns out to be quite hard to say what exactly this meaning is. Let's take a seemingly simple example of the meaning of a logical connective, such as and . It will turn out that all methods of adding a meaningful connective to a formal language seem appears a bit problematic. It seems that there are two ways of introducing a new connective to a f

This post belongs to LoPSE popularization (#pop) series written both in English and in Polish.  ENGLISH VERSION [POLISH VERSION BELOW] Say we want to treat people equally - what does it even mean? This question pops up quite often in political science, economics, policy considerations, or local government decisions. Since AI is often involved in the decision-making process, a puzzle for a mathematical philosopher arises: how do you define fairness so that the definition is precise enough to be applicable to predictive algorithms and so that philosophically it still seems plausible? It turns out the task is non-trivial. Three attempts of such explications are discussed in The Measure and Mismeasure of Fairness: A Critical Review of Fair Machine Learning   by Sam Corbett-Davies and Sharad Goel: anti-classification is the requirement to exclude protected attributes such as gender or race in the decision process. classification parity  requires that common measures of pr

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS Assistant Professorship (“adiunkt” in Polish terminology) in the Chair of Logic, Philosophy of Science and Epistemology is available at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology and Journalism, University of Gdansk, Poland. The position is to start on February 1, 2019 at the earliest and on October 1, 2019 at the latest. The position is for a fixed number of years (most likely, 2) with the possibility of further extensions (up to a permanent position). The successful candidate will be expected to do research in mathematical philosophy, philosophical logic or philosophy of science, teach about 240 academic hrs (each is 45 minutes) per academic year, apply for external research funding, participate in the research activities of the Chair, in the life of the department, and in the administrative work as necessary. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the position is filled or until November 23, 2018, whichever comes first. No knowledge o