Peli Grietzer shared a blog post by David Auerbach on Twitter yesterday containing the following lovely quote about Smullyan and Carnap: I particularly delighted in playing tricks on the philosopher Rudolf Carnap; he was the perfect audience! (Most scientists and mathematicians are; they are so honest themselves 'that they have great difficulty in seeing through … Continue reading Proof by legerdemain
Zach, Richard. 2018. “Rumfitt on Truth-Grounds, Negation, and Vagueness.” Philosophical Studies 175 (8): 2079–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1114-7. In The Boundary Stones of Thought (2015), Rumfitt defends classical logic against challenges from intuitionistic mathematics and vagueness, using a semantics of pre-topologies on possibilities, and a topological semantics on predicates, respectively. These semantics are suggestive but the characterizations of … Continue reading Rumfitt on truth-grounds, negation, and vagueness
Yesterday, @gravbeast asked on Twitter, Does anyone know why we traditionally use Greek phi and psi for metasyntactic variables representing arbitrary logic formulas? Is it just because 'formula' begins with an 'f' sound? And chi was being used for other things? Although Whitehead and Russell already used φ and ψ for propositional functions, the convention … Continue reading Why φ?