The most recent issue of The Journal of Symbolic Logic contains the long-awaited (well, by me) article on "On mathematical instrumentalism" by Patrick Caldon and Aleks Ignjatović. It presents the results from Chapters 2 and 3 of Aleks's excellent 1990 Berkeley PhD thesis. Here is the abstract: In this paper we devise some technical tools … Continue reading Caldon and Ignjatović on Mathematical Instrumentalism

The October issue of Synthese, edited by Bernd Buldt, Volker Halbach, and Reinhard Kahle, contains a bunch of exciting papers on Frege and Hilbert: Amending Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, by Fernando Ferreira Real numbers and set theory – Extending the Neo-Fregean Programme Beyond Arithmetic, by Bob Hale Frege’s permutation argument revisited , by Kai Wehmeier … Continue reading Synthese special issue on Frege and Hilbert

Every once in a while, I get asked by students with a background in math (usually with an interest in logic) what they should do if they want to get into grad school in philosophy. I know there's quite a number of accomplished philosophers who started out as math majors and then went on to … Continue reading From Math to Philosophy

I put up a revised and expanded version of my survey of Hilbert's Program up on arXiv. If you have comments, you could post them here. You know, try out the whole blogging-revolutionizing-scholarly-communication-etc. thing.

As reported on CT and Cosmic Variance, the preprint archive arXiv has now track-back enabled their entries. This means that if you discuss a paper available on arXiv in your blog and send a trackback ping, the arXiv page of the paper will link back to you post. arXiv is hugely popular in physics, but … Continue reading arXiv math.LO RSS feed and trackbacks

Sorry for dropping the ball on the LC'05 conference reporting. Day 5 was when I had my talk, so it was a little hectic, and then after my talk they had already turned off the wireless ethernet and locked the computer lab. Now, of course, I don't remember what happened. Oh well.

Greg Restall is way more dedicated and wired than I am. He already has two posts about what's happening at the Logic Colloquium, and I just made it up the hill in the midday sun. I am so glad I didn't pack my computer. So thank you, Greg, for blogging from the Logic Colloquium, so … Continue reading Thank you, Greg!

Games in logic are incredibly fashionable, and there's lots of exciting work that I could write about. But I won't. Instead, I'll give you an exercise that can be solved with just the very basics of logic.A finite game is a subset W ⊆ M1, …, Mn, where each Mi is a finite set. Mi … Continue reading Logic and Finite Games

Wow, it's just raining Gödel references. The latest issue of the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic is all about Gödel, with exciting-sounding titles like "Future tasks for Gödel scholars" (John W. Dawson, Jr. and Cheryl A. Dawson), "On Gödel's way in: the influence of Rudolf Carnap" (Warren Goldfarb), and "Gödel's reformulation of Gentzen's first consistency proof … Continue reading More on Gödel in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic

If you happen to be in or near Vienna, there's a little workshop at the TU Wien, Monday to Wednesday of next week, sponsored by the Gödel Society. It's on cut-elimination; speakers include Lev Beklemishev, Ale Carbone, Grigori Mints, Pavel Pudlák, and Helmut Schwichtenberg as well as a bunch of up-and-coming young logicians like Arnold … Continue reading Collegium Logicum 2005: Cut Elimination

Don't you wish someone would write a book that catalogs all the various ways in which one can misstate, misunderstand, and misapply Gödel's theorems, and how to correct such misunderstandings? A book that you can send your students off to read when they say stuff like, "Gödel showed that there is no mathematical truth," or … Continue reading Franzén on Use and Abuse of Gödel’s Theorem

Christos Papadimitriou has a novel called Turing (A Novel About Computation). (He also has a few other excellent textbooks on technical stuff, but y'all know that.) I didn't know about the novel before, and so when I went to the MIT Press website, I noticed that it's on sale! Only 9 bucks (US) for the … Continue reading Papadimitriou’s Turing (A Novel about Computation)

I'm re-reading Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap in preparation for my course on the Vienna Circle, and was struck by this quote on p. 14: With his characteristic blend of genius and insanity, Leibniz had conceived of a project in which the simple constituents of concepts would be represented by prime numbers … Continue reading Gödel and Leibniz

Well, I spent the last 2 weeks finishing a paper and cleaning house, and now I'm in Vienna and jetlagged. But I got all my library cards in order and checked out some books. Now all I need is some sleep, setting up some kind of internet access at home, and I'll be back to … Continue reading Jetlag

There's a link on OPP to Chris Pincock's new paper A Role for Mathematics in the Physical Sciences (forthcoming in Nous), so I thought I'd draw everyone's attention (well, the attention of the handful of people reading this) to Chris's other work, all very good, available on his website.

Yarden Katz emailed me this query, which I unfortunately don't have time right now to think about. Please, someone help him out by posting a comment! I was reading Graham Priest's account of intuitionist logic (in Intro to Non-Classical Logics), where he gives a possible world semantics for several intuitionist logics. In addition to few … Continue reading Non-monotonic intuitionist logic?

Peter Smith writes: Just in time for its first birthday, I've updated the LaTeX for Logicians site. Maybe the title is getting rather misleading, as there is stuff there that may well be of interest to many philosophers and assorted other TeXies too! (My sense is that more and more philosophy grad students are picking … Continue reading LaTeX for Logicians updated

Philip Ebert reports that a formula editor for Begriffsschrift notation with output in XML and LaTeX begriff.sty format is available on the Arché Wiki.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2005. The success rate for philosophy grants was 38%, down from 48% last year, with applications only increasing slightly (96 vs. 92 last year). The funding rate went down from 46% last year to 25% this … Continue reading SSHRC Grants in Philosophy for 2005

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