LoPSE

So I got into an interesting discussion with Alan Rhoda about the relation between rational assertability and meaning. He suggested that: Whatever anyone must believe in order rationally to assert a proposition p is part of the meaning of p. and used this assumption to argue for the the Peircean semantics for the future tense (on this view, the future tense is intrinsically modal , and to assert that an event E "will" happen implies that the world is now tending strongly (probability > 0.5) toward E's happening.). I begged to differ. More details here . The discussion continues here .

I was asked to send the Kirchberg paper to someone, so I used this occasion to actually upload it. It's here . It's quite short and pretty sketchy, though. There's lots of philosophical and logical heavy-lifting left to be done, but it gives the basic idea of the Chihara-style approach to iterative hierarchies.

Michael De Smet (Ghent) and Stefan Wintein (Tilburg) are organizing a workshop in logic. It will take place Feb 19-20, in Ghent, Belgium. Among people who're gonna give tutorials in mathematical logic are Raf Cluckers (K.U. Leuven), Benedikt Lowe (ILLC Amsterdam), Francoise Point. Tutorials in philosophical logic will be given by Reinhard Muskens (Tilburg), Karl-Georg Niebergall (HU Berlin), and last but not least, Jean Paul van Bendegem (V.U. Brussells). Also, there'll be submitted papers sessions, so if you feel like sending something, or just coming over for a couple of days, here are some details .

So I'm back from Scotland . From my experience, the public transit is pretty bad there. The good thing is, this gave me plenty of time to read Richard Kaye's recent book, The Mathematics of Logic (Cambridge University Press 2007). It's fun to read it. Below is the first draft of a review. All comments and suggestions are welcome. ---------------------------------------------- Kaye’s book is devoted to a topic discussed in many existing textbooks: the Completeness theorems for classical logics. Nevertheless, it is far from a standard presentation of a few basic notions and proofs of a bunch of classical results in metalogic. Instead of giving such a presentation, Kaye focuses on extracting interesting mathematical content of Completeness Theorems and showing some of their more sophisticated applications. * To give the reader a sample of mathematically interesting aspects of metalogical results, Kaye starts his book with introducing the notion of a tree, explains and prove...