Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from August, 2019

Not a Knot I

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