LoPSE

This is quite off-topic, but please bear with me. After some moving around I am back in Belgium (Ghent). I discovered that while I was away, the local "student association which promotes active European citizenship and European integration" (this is from their description) organized a Polish evening. [Click on any of the images to enlarge.] ITEM 1: The organization description from their Facebook profile. "Minos Ghent is a student association which promotes active European citizenship and European integration. With us you can attend debates and lectures, cultural evenings and exchange with our partner organizations." They organized a Polish evening and to introduce people to Polish culture, they decided that people who dress up in typical Polish clothes will get free shots of vodka. Of course, traditional Polish clothes are those of plumbers and cleaning ladies. ITEM 2: The event posting from their fb profile. The description reads:  "The moment...

Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science of Ghent University was founded in 1993. On the occasion of its 20th anniversary the Centre organizes an international Conference on Logic and Philosophy of Science (CLPS13). We will schedule parallel sessions with contributed papers and special symposia with a limited number of papers. I am the organizer of a symposium titled: NOMINALISM AND ITS FOES: FORMAL METHODS If you're interested in presenting a paper at this symposium, please upload an abstract in PDF format (between 500 and 1000 words) to: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=clps13  by April 1, 2013 (You will be asked to choose between one of the following submission categories: - Logical analysis of scientific reasoning processes - Methodological and epistemological analysis of scientific reasoning processes - Symposium submission Select the last option and mention the symposium number - 7 - in the title of your abstract.) -...

The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at Polish Academy of Sciences and the Chair of Logic, Computer Science and Philosophy of Science at University of Bialystok are putting together a conference on, I take it, a mixture of philosophy of religion and formal methods. It will take place in Warsaw, September 17-19, 2013.  The list of expected participants includes (just to pick a few names)  M. Szatkowski, J. Kvanvig, J. Lowe, R. Murawski, G. Sandu, J. Wolenski, J. Hawthorne, P. Simons and P. van Inwagen. Once the website is up, I'll link to it.

A paper in which I criticize what I take to be somewhat hasty arguments for platonism about numbers is now available open access in Erkenntnis. Here (then follow the link to Springer). Abstract:  Salmon and Soames argue against nominalism about numbers and sentence types. They employ (respectively) higher-order and first-order logic to model certain natural language inferences and claim that the natural language conclusions carry commitment to abstract objects, partially because their renderings in those formal systems seem to do that. I argue that this strategy fails because the nominalist can accept those natural language consequences, provide them with plausible and non-committing truth conditions and account for the inferences made without committing themselves to abstract objects. I sketch a modal account of higher-order quantification, on which instead of ranging over sets, higher order quantifiers are used to make (logical) possibility claims about which predicate token...

If you look at Bob Hale and Crispin Wright's Logicism in the twenty-first century, in this book (esp. pp. 168-169) (also: at Frege's works themselves and at other explications of Frege), the way things are supposed to have gone is this: Frege used Hume's Principle (see my previous post) to derive second-order Peano Arithmetic. Yet, he was unhappy with the explanatory role of Hume's Principle: "we can never—to take a crude example—decide by means of our definitions whether any concept has the number JULIUS CAESAR belonging to it, or whether that same familiar conqueror of Gaul is a number or not." So, he introduced extensions by means of Basic Law V (the extension of F is the same as the extension of G iff exactly the same objects are Fs and Gs), and defined numbers in terms of extensions. While people usually think that Frege moved to BLV to avoid the Ceasar problem, I haven't found anywhere, neither in Frege, nor in secondary literature, a clear...