LoPSE

or Don't diss the logician I’m on my way back from The Second Conference on Concept Types and Frames in Language, Cognition and Science in Dusseldorf. It was a nice conference that gathered linguists, cognitivists, philosophers of science and logicians interested in the functional approach to concepts. One of the things that surprised me was that both experienced cognitivists (like Paul Thagard ) and younger researchers still stick to the distinction between inductive and deductive types of reasoning and attach that much importance to it. Interestingly, “deductive” in their use has a pejorative content and the term is sometimes used condescendingly to emphasize that whatever it is that logicians do is boring and useless and that pretty much the only source of insight and real knowledge are “inductive inferences” taking place in “the real brain”. So, here’s a short rant about this sort of attitude ( Frederik is reading over my shoulder and tossing in his remarks). To start with, I ...

Diderik Batens is working on a book about adaptive logics. He made drafts of first few chapters available online and invites comments. Here.

1. The paper on dynamic frames has been accepted and is forthcoming in the Logic Journal of the IGPL . As I understand their self-archiving policy , it can't be publicly accessible for 12 months after it's published by OUP. Hence, I'm making the final version available now, it'll be available till the official publication. If you feel like grabbing it before it disappears, it's here . 2. In the same vein, in Ghent this Friday (August 21) we're having a mini-workshop on frame theory. If you're around at that time, feel free to swing by. There's gonna be an outing afterwards. Title: Frames , Frames and Frames Time : Friday, August 21. 17:00-19:00 (There will be three talks, 30 minutes each + discussion) Place: Room 2.19, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Universiteit Gent, Blandijnberg 2 Talks: 1. Capturing dynamic frames . It's based on the paper I just mentioned: I explain what frames are, how certain frames can be expressed by sets of ...

... and the postponed report on Non-Classical Mathematics 2009 continues... The second talk was given by Giovanni Sambin . He talked about his minimalist foundation and about a way constructive topology can be developed over a minimalist foundation. It's quite interesting to see how much stuff can be done constructively. Also, Giovanni is a devoted and areally charming constructivist. I was chatting with him at a pub one night and only by finding myself almost converted to constructivism I knew it was time to go home. By the way, among many inaccurate things that are being said about Godel's theorem (like these ) you can find a remark that Godel's incompleteness and undefinability proofs/theorems don't work in intuitionistic mathematics. Actually, they do. And the person to talk to is Giovanni, who worked out all the details making sure everything is constructive. Arnon Avron talked about a new approach to Predicative Set Theory. Roughly,the underlying principles of t...

Here is a new database (by Andrew Cullison) gathering data pertaining to philosophy journal experience. I mentioned its being in preparation before. Now it seems to be up and running (although, the journal wiki data import is yet about to happen). It is certainly more user-friendly than its predecessor.