The other day, Arnon Avron asked on FOM whether the Second Incompleteness Theorem holds for Robinson's Q. I remembered wondering about that myself back when I was preparing for the foundations qual. The issue is this: the usual proof of the unprovability of Con(T) requires that T is not just "sufficiently strong" in the usual … Continue reading The Second Incompleteness Theorem for Weak Theories

In a comment to an Antimeta post about the Formal Epistemology Workshop, Jon Cohen asks: [W]hat's the deal with the "commentator" listed for some of the talks? To me it sounds like someone will be sitting there saying things like "Kenny has gone for the slide striptease trick, not sure how this will go down … Continue reading A better way to run comments at philosophy talks?

Since school's out, I thought I'd try to spend some of my time otherwise than reading, writing, and grading. So I started a blog about things to do in Calgary. Not that many of you care, but perhaps there's someone from Calgary reading this. My plan for next Summer is to actually go out and … Continue reading My Other Life, er, Blog

The Society for Exact Philosophy is meeting in Toronto right now. (Someone told me that the name of the society is a joke, but maybe they were joking. It's serious philosophy, in any event. And it's the 33rd annual conference, so if it's a joke, it's a long-running joke.) The keynote speakers are Jason Stanley, … Continue reading Exact Philosophy

John MacFarlane's entry on logical constants is up at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Everyone interested in this should also read John's dissertation (including me, I admit).

Stewart Shapiro posted a little "Primer on Vagueness" on the FOM list yesterday.

There are two new logic blogs linked on the sidebar. The first is Andrej Bauer's Mathematics and Computation, the other is Logicomp, a blog on logic and complexity theory by Anthony Widjaja at the University of Toronto.

This year's workshop Prologic 2005, July 6-8 at LSE, will focus on objective Bayesianism. Registration deadline is June 3.

There's an interesting discussion going on at Leiter's blog and on Certain Doubts about Dreben and the history of analytic philosophy. I recommend especially Jason Stanley's comment on the Certain Doubts post.While on the subject of Dreben, I thought I'd point out something pointed out to me not too long ago by Bill Tait. Dreben … Continue reading Dreben, Logic, Nonsense, Herbrand

I try to keep an eye out for uses of logical connectives, etc., in "everyday life" that I can use in logic classes. Here's a nice use of excluded middle, in which neither disjunct is assertible, from "Two to go," the penultimate episode of Buffy, Season Six. Or maybe it's really an example of the … Continue reading Buffy and Disjunction

The deadline for submissions of abstracts to the Logic Colloquium in Athens this summer has been extended to May 7. Which is a good thing, 'cause I totally forgot about it.