Being a logician means sometimes having to say that you're sorry. Or at least, that you're wrong.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 11:18AM
I’m sorry, I truly am.
Back in the period 1990-1992, I wrote a couple of papers on the semantics of relevant logics. I thought they were pretty nifty, and I submitted them to a prestigious journal. They got accepted. The first of these papers is ”Simplified Semantics for Relevant Logics (and some of their rivals).”
Unfortunatley, there’s a hole in the middle of this paper. That’s the problem with being a logician, people can sometimes prove you wrong by presenting a counterexample to your claim. That’s the nice thing about playing a game with relatively clear rules. You can figure out what constitutes good play!
Anyway, Tony Roy did a fantastic job of isolating the problem, which exists in not only my paper, but Graham Priest’s text An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic, which followed the simplified semantics rather closely. The problem is serious, for in my semantics for the relevant logic R, it turns out that disjunctive syllogism (the inference from A v B and ~A to B) is valid, and it shouldn’t be.
Tony isolated the problem, and we came up with a fix. The result is the paper ”On Permutation in Simplified Semantics.” Please take a look over it before we sent it off to a journal.
Oh, and to the greater philosophical community (or at least, the tiny fraction that has come across this paper) – I’m sorry for deceiving you. I hope this paper helps make up for it.
News Archive
2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | Happy 2006 – Teaching in Semester 1, 2006 – Assorted crosscultural observations, upon visiting the supermarket – Phase Change – Fun with Playlists: Squeezing your music library onto a 2GB iPod – Degrees of Truth, Degrees of Falsity – Masses of Formal Philosophy – Greg Hjorth coming back to Melbourne – Marathon Effort – Last Night at the MCG – Dame Edna at the Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony – Being a logician means sometimes having to say that you're sorry. Or at least, that you're wrong. – Oh, and there's another paper, too – Spooky coincidence? I think not – AJL Papers – 2006 redesign in progress – Enclosures – The Shifty Salesman – Well, that was easy... – Happy 5 day! – Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 1 – On the Cable Guy Paradox – On Regret and Slingshots – End of Semester – Interviewed – This football game is pretty tense... – Key Ideas in the theory of proofs #1: The Duality of Proofs and Counterexamples – Teaching in Semester 2, 2006 – Off to France – Here in Nancy, Day 1 – Here in Nancy, Day 2 – Back home – Assorted Observations – Interviewed again – On Politics – On the Interview – Ten Questions about Books – Visits – An idea... – Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 2 – Party on Tuesday – A Philosophical Poll: on a priori knowledge of possibilities – Horn tooting – Scenes from an afternoon – Off to India... – 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
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About
I’m Greg Restall, and this is my website. I work in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Email: greg at consequently.org; Post: School of of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry, University of Melbourne, Parkville 3010, Australia.
Start at the home page—a summary of the site. The left column is news, archived on the news archive page. The central column contains recent items from the writing page, which lists my publications. These are also categorised by topic. You can follow my links at my account on delicious and occasional short snarky remarks at @consequently on twitter.
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This site is handcoded: I write text in Textmate, and Webby files things in the right place and uploads them to the server. This page was last modified on 2009-01-07 at 10:41AM.
Thought
I have no reason for believing the existence of matter. I have no immediate intuition thereof: neither can I immediately, from any sensations, ideas, notions, actions or passions infer an unthinking, unperceiving, inactive substance–either by probable deduction or necessary consequence.
— George Berkeley Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.