LoPSE

Like some of you I had to spend some time submitting my stuff to one of the biggest logic events these years, CLMPS . What I found slightly surprising is how complicated the submission procedure is. 1. Before you submit your materials you have to actually register as a participant. This seems slightly impractical, especially since some of people probably decide whether they will participate only when they find out whether their proposal has been accepted. 2. When you register, you have to fill a pretty detailed form which contains all sorts of unusual questions: you're supposed to mark your function at a conference (for instance you may choose "participant without contributed paper" or "participant with contributed paper). While some people will know their status, some people will have no idea before the submission and acceptance notification. They also ask you whether you plan to attend the opening ceremony and the welcome banquet on July 19, which concert you prefe...

In case you haven't noticed, Stephan Hartmann , one of the editors, made preprints from the forthcoming rather newly published volume on inductive logic available online . His Bayesian Epistemology is also a good read.

Mirosław Szatkowski, Anthony Anderson, Jonathan Lowe, Dariusz Łukasiewicz, Richard Swinburne and Daniel von Wachter are putting together a conference in Bydgoszcz (Poland), titled Ontological Proofs Today (6-8 Sept 2011). Alas, parts of the details are available only in Polish and the information available isn't too specific. But I would expect them to update the info some time soon. In case you have more urgent queries, I guess you can always drop the organizers a line.

I'm reading The problem of induction by John Vickers. The entry is quite comprehensive and enjoyable. There is a thing which seems a bit hasty, though. Vickers, at some point, makes a distinction between the problem of finding a method for distinguishing reliable inductive habits and the problem of saying what the difference between reliable and unreliable inductive habits is. While the distinction is quite sensible, I'm not sure what to think about the example Vickers uses to clarify it (section 2): The distinction can be illustrated in the parallel case of arithmetic. The by now classic incompleteness results of the last century show that the epistemological problem for first-order arithmetic is insoluble; that there can be no method, in a quite clear sense of that term, for distinguishing the truths from the falsehoods of first-order arithmetic. But the metaphysical problem for arithmetic has a clear and correct solution: the truths of first-order arithmetic are precisely t...