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Holy Saturday Reflection

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 14:24:00 +0100

This Easter season, my church marked the occasion with an art exhibition on the theme of Betrayal, and some short reflective evening services on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. For the Saturday service, I was asked to give a short reflection on the gospel text: John 19:31-42. Christ in the Tomb, by Mihály Munkácsy (1881) Since I have a website and somewhere to archive my presentations, I’ve uploaded the text of the reflection here.

Debating the Status of Mathematics

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:12:00 +0000

The St Andrews Union Debating Society is a long-standing institution around these parts. Founded in 1794, this student-run society hosts regular debates. Last week, the society collaborated with SUMS, the St Andrews University Mathematics Society, to host a public debate on the status of mathematics, featuring the eminent Emeritus Professor Peter Cameron and my colleague Dr Walter Pedriali on one side, and on the other, Dr David Waszek (an historian and philosopher of mathematics working at the ÉNS in Paris), and me.

The Shape of an Intermediate Logic Class

Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:40:00 +0100

Alongside coordinating and lecturing in PY2010: Intermediate Logic this semester, I have the fun task of teaching one of the tutorial groups, together with our enthusiastic and capable graduate student tutors. My Tuesday morning cohort is a microcosm of the diverse student body at St Andrews. Of the 13 students, we have two each from England, China, and the USA, and we have one each from Botswana, Denmark, France, Greece, Hong Kong, Scotland and Spain. That’s a diverse bunch. In addition, six of the 13 are Philosophy majors, six are Mathematics majors, five major in International Relations, and we have one each from French, Computer Science and Psychology. (I haven’t miscounted: some of our students are completing double majors.) Finally, this cohort consists of eight women and five men. Given their submissions for our first tutorial, starting tomorrow—and given the engagement and enthusiasm that the whole group are showing in lectures—I’m looking forward to spending time with them.

Back in Edgecliffe

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 12:15:00 +0100

I’ve returned from a productive semester of research leave, and I’m enjoying being back in the classroom teaching Intermediate Logic. Now that my big book has a complete first draft, my writing energies are focused elsewhere. I’m gearing up to give the 2025 Wendy Huang Lectures in Taiwan next month, so from this coming Wednesday, I’ll be giving the material a test run with the home crowd. The handout for the first Wendy Huang Lecture

Upcoming trip to North America

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 22:00:00 +1000

In a few days, I’m heading off to North America, for a brief trip to give a few talks, at Chapman University in California, Calgary University in Alberta, and finally, a brief stop at CUNY in New York. I’m looking forward to meeting new friends and catching up with old ones, as well as the chance to talk with smart people about my research.

Meanwhile, I’ve managed to do a bit of reading during February, as I’ve been preparing for this trip.

Books Read: January 2025

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 15:52:00 +1000

This month’s reading was mostly nonfiction, featuring Kevin Hart’s Contemplation (The Movements of the Soul), Haruki Murakami’s essay collection Novelist as a Vocation, the harrowing Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck by Tim Lane and Elliot Cartledge, Drew Neil’s Practical Vim (I’m trying to brush up my text editing skills), and finally, Timothy Larsen’s George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles. I rounded off the month enjoying my next two instalments of Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series, the short story Showdown and the rollicking novel The Aleph Extraction. That was a fun read on the flight to Australia.

Books Read: December 2024

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 20:00:00 +0100

Happy New Year, everyone!

As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve finished another month of reading, so let’s close out my log of books read over 2024 with a short description of December’s reading.

First up, I enjoyed reading the second entry in Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series: The Bayern Agenda. As with the previous entry, this was a fun spy thriller, with a cold war science fictional setting. Dan Moren has a deft hand as an author, weaving a plot which balances ratcheting tension and building suspense, while treating the reader—and his characters—with respect. I will enjoy reading the remaining entries in the series in the coming months.

My second novel was very different: I re-read George MacDonald’s Lilith, a fantasy, first published in 1895. MacDonald was a Scottish author (and Congregational minister) who mentored Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), and whose work inspired and influenced other religiously inflected writers of fantasy, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle and C. S. Lewis. Lilith is an odd book: it’s the story of Mr Vane, a man whose life centres on his library (and, we later discover, his love of horses), and who has few significant relationships with other people. His library seems to be haunted by its former librarian, and soon, Mr Vane is transported to another world, many adventures are had, mistakes are made and lessons are learned. (I’m being very general and schematic here. I’d rather leave it for you to read to learn the details for yourself.) What most interested me most in this re-reading was MacDonald’s view of conversion and personal transformation. MacDonald was a universalist (one who believes that God will save everyone in the end), and in Lilith, MacDonald’s universalism is on display, telling a tale in which the resolution is not one where the antagonists are destroyed, but rather, move towards reconciliation.

Another semester done

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 16:35:00 +0000

I’ve completed the moderation of the exam for Intermediate Logic, and with that, the final administrative responsibilities for this semester are complete. Now it’s time to take a short break over Christmas and the New Year, and then to start a semester of research leave. I’m looking forward to time set aside to think, to write, and to talk to colleagues, near and far. I have some trips lined up, to North America, and to continental Europe, in the months ahead. I’ll post notice of these here, as the details are ironed down. In the mean time, I’m looking forward to having that time to think and to write. An in-place away notice

Congratulations, John!

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 10:25:00 +0000

My last PhD student at the University of Melbourne has completed his project, and is now Dr John Cleary. Congratulations, John!

It was so much fun to help supervise your project. I’ve learned a lot about Albert Lautman, and his account of the development of mathematics and the dialectic of ideas, problems and mathematical progress.

Graham Priest is in the house

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:45:32 +0100

This week, Aaron Cotnoir’s Instruments of Unity project and I are hosting a short visit from our friend (and my PhD supervisor), Professor Graham Priest. It’s always enjoyable to spend time with him, and tomorrow, we’re going to teach a the second-last lecture class for my Intermediate Logic cohort together, on the liar paradox and non-classical logic.

Today, he gave a talk on nothing and its paradoxical properties.

Graham Priest and the Inclosure Schema

Podcast recommendation: Marooned on Mars

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:25:00 +0000

I mentioned yesterday that this month I’ve enjoyed rereading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. This time around, after completing my re-read, I’ve enjoyed listening to Marooned on Mars, a podcast devoted to Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction. The initial conceit of the podcast was that the hosts, Matt Hauske and Hilary Strang (two humanities academics, based in Chicago) would take a section from the Mars Trilogy, one episode at a time, and discuss it, drawing out themes, pointing out connections, and generally, enjoying talking about the work.

Books Read: September, October, November 2024

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 17:55:00 +0000

This teaching semester has been keeping me so busy that I have not kept up with my monthly reading logs. I’ve had enough time to read, but I haven’t found the time to keep you, my reader, up with what I’ve been reading. I’ll attempt to remedy this now, by giving a very brisk run-down of my reading over the last three months.

This last three months has been dominated by fiction reading, so let me start with the little pile of non-fiction that I enjoyed. First, for the philosophy, I enjoyed Todd May’s Friendship in an age of Economics, a nice little work in moral/social psychology on the value of friendship and its usefulness as giving us insight into value that does not register in our econometric age. For theology, I enjoyed one longer book, Women and the Gender of God, by Amy Peeler, and two very slim books, Why Did Jesus Have to Die?, by Jane Williams and Passions of the Soul, by Jane’s husband, Rowan Williams. The little Buddhist text on mindul living, The Practice of Not Thinking, by Ryunosuke Koike was a fun read, too. The final non-fiction book from the last three months was very different to all of the others: Daniel P. Friedman and David Thrane Christiansen’s fun little dialogue The Little Typer was a sweet little introduction to dependent type theory, which I’ve been thinking about lately, and I plan to think about this some more in the coming year.

Books Read: August 2024

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 21:25:00 +0100

Here’s August’s book haul: This month I enjoyed three novels. The most experimental of which was Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd Century, which has the form of a series of witness statements from the crew of a ship, now far away from earth. The workers, both human and artificial, have been tending a number of exotic objects from the planet New Discovery, and they find their lives changed in subtle and not-so subtle ways. The novel touches on workplace oppression, freedom, and longing for what is absent.

The other two novels were Lords of Uncreation, the final entry in a series by Adrian Tchaikovsky, and The Mercy of Gods, the first entry in a new saga by James S. A. Corey Both Tchaikovsky and Corey are adept at weaving together a compelling tale at interplanetary scale. I particularly enjoyed The Mercy of Gods, which starts off with the petty academic politics of research teams competing for funding, before all hell literally breaks loose with an invasion from an implacable colonising force. We get to see our research collective deal with the PTSD resulting from witnessing the destruction of their entire way of life and being swept away to another world to do the coloniser’s bidding.

Books Read: July 2024

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 21:40:00 +0100

July and August have been really busy, not with teaching (it’s the summer teaching break), but with research and research supervision, a little bit of holiday travel, and various life things taking up my time and attention. I have had time to read, but not so much time to write paragraphs about each book. Instead of skipping the books-of-the-month post entirely, here’s a stripped back version with a link and a sentence for each book.

July was Kierkegaard month. I enjoyed reading through: Fear and Trembling, which I’d known of for many years, but never read through. He’s a striking prose stylist, as well as a thoughtful reader of the biblical Abraham and Isaac story. Alongside, I read Jeffrey Hanson’s Kierkegaard and the Life of Faith, which is not only a commentary and analysis of Fear and Trembling, but an extensive treatment of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, and a thoughtful and sympathetic treatment of Kierkegaard’s account of the life of faith.

Books Read: June 2024

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 22:58:00 +0100

June was also an enjoyable month for reading. This month’s reading was dominated by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s 864 page doorstopper Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Having been educated in Australia, the view of history I was taught was oriented around the colonisation of the continent by the British and its aftermath. As far as the religious and social history of Europe was concerned, and the division of the Western Church that predated that colonisation, I knew some of the details, but I had no idea of how the centuries-long convulsion in church and state that was the reformation (and the counter-reformation) spread across Europe, over the 16th and 17th Centuries. MacCulloch’s painstakingly researched and very readable history helped me understand how the historical contingencies and the different twists and turns of these times have led to the distinctively modern world that took shape in the reformation’s wake.

Books Read: May 2024

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 21:25:32 +0100

May was a great reading month, but I forgot to upload my notes until June was nearly done. This month I read nine books, but one was an unpublished draft of a novel that a friend is writing, so I won’t say more about that, until there is more news to share. The other fiction reads this month could not be more different from each other. Beyond the Light Horizon concludes Ken MacLeod’s most recent politically charged Scotland-based near-future science fiction trilogy. The ending was a bit rushed for my taste, but it was an enjoyable ride along the way.

Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy could not be more different. A gargantuan (736 page) novel, it reads like a stream of consciousness. It is set in the north of Australia, with a cast of indigenous characters making their way in a surreal world falling apart around them. I was enchanted by the rhythm and the texture and the distinctive voice of the words, sentences and paragraphs, while I struggled to hold the whole thing in view. It’s not an easy read, but it is up there with the most memorable novels I’ve read in the last few years.

A Chinese Translation!

Tue, 21 May 2024 16:05:32 +0100

Earlier this month I got a lovely package in the mail. A Chinese translation of my intro logic text. My colleague and friend Min Xu completed his translation of my text, and it’s now available. The beginning of Chapter 5.

Books Read: April 2024

Wed, 01 May 2024 21:25:32 +0100

Another month, and another pile of books I’ve managed to read. This month’s reading started on the Isle of Iona, where we had a short Easter break. On the last day on the island, and then on the ferry journeys back to the “mainland”, I finished The Life of St Columba, who served as the Abbot of Iona and, as legend has it, brought Christianity to Scotland, from Ireland, dying in 597.

Proofs, Rules, and Meanings, Arché Workshop

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 13:46:32 +1000

I’ve just emerged from two intense days of proof theory. Three of my graduate students, Sophie Nagler, Viviane Fairbank and Francisca Silva, organised a two-day workshop on proof theory and its connections to philosophy and other fields.

Some of the workshop participants at the end of a busy day of proof theory.

Books Read: March 2024

Sun, 07 Apr 2024 13:46:32 +1000

Lately, I’ve been keeping track of my book reading, and to help focus my reflection (and as an aid to my own memory), I have taken to writing a few lines for each book I complete. March was a particularly good book-reading month, and since I’ve not posted anything on this website for more than year, I thought I’d share last month’s reading notes.

First, over March I read a few books that are broadly philosophical:

Interview with the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 08:42:32 +0000

A few months ago, Anna Day, Eloise Hickey, Mark Rothery, and James Cafferky from the Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Australasia gave me an opportunity to ramble on about my early days as a mathematics and philosophy student in the 1980s and 1990s, my current research interests, and what I’m thinking about now. They asked thoughtful questions and managed to edit the interview into something coherent. Check it out, if only for the photos of me in my teens and twenties, then stay for the philosophy.

A Brush with Fame

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 21:02:27 +0000

In my PY1012 Reasoning lecture this evening, I used a slide with a photo of Sally Haslanger and a short section from her book Resisting Reality to give an example of an argument to a universal generalisation. (I’ve been teaching reasoning using examples from throughout the philosophical canon.) After class a young student came up to me, all excited, asking: do you know Professor Haslanger!? (I had described her as a colleague.) I explained that yes, we’d met and I’d known her for some time. She reacted as if I had been in the presence of a rock star, and that she was now a little bit closer to true greatness as a result. When I said I loved Sally’s work, and then added that Kate Manne had been a student of mine at the University of Melbourne before she went to MIT to study with Sally, the student was absolutely beside herself. It’s a delight to exploit my own personal contacts with colleagues and friends, to help a student feel a little closer to what she truly treasures in the sometimes humdrum matter of teaching intro reasoning.

Kicking off Semester 2 in St Salvator's Chapel

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 16:20:58 +0000

I grew up in Australia: my university training and my initial academic positions took place in the explicitly secular institution of the Australian university. So, it’s an uncanny experience to arrive in St Andrews to become a part of a university in a town marked by martyrdom, in which the Chaplaincy plays a central and visible role. University functions, including graduations, are opened with prayers in Latin. There are regular services in Chapel, including graduation services, and many involve an procession of academics, in robes. The separation of “church” and “state” is nowhere near as sharp here in St Andrews as it was in Australia. The university is explicitly pluralist, and the chaplains work very hard to make space for students of all faiths and none. And at the same time, this place owns its Christian heritage. So, it was to my surprise – and my trepidation – that I was invited to preach the sermon at the Sunday chapel service at the start of this new semester. I seem to have survived the experience of doing something in my work context that is far outside the everyday responsibility of my academic role as a Professor of Philosophy.

Erdős Number: 3

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 09:29:30 +0000

According to the AMS’s handy Mathematics Collaboration Distance calculator, my Erdős number is down to three, given the following path: Vedran Čačić, Pavel Pudlák, Greg Restall, Alasdair Urquhart, Albert Visser, “Decorated linear order types and the theory of concatenation,” Logic Colloquium 2007, p. 1–13, ed. F. Delon, U. Kohlenbach, P. Maddy and F. Stephan, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Noga Alon and Pavel Pudlák, “Equilateral Sets in $l^n_p$,” Geometric & Functional Analysis, 13 (2003), 467-482. Noga Alon and Paul Erdős, “Disjoint edges in geometric graphs,” Discrete and Computational Geometry 4 (1989), no. 4, 287–290. This makes my Erdős number equal to my Trotsky number, but that is another story.

Wombat, Conditional, or Inference?

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 16:41:24 +0000

As my colleague and PY1012 Reasoning co-lecturer, Franz Berto knows, it’s never too early to introduce your students to wombats, or to the difference between a conditional and an inference. A slide from my first week’s PY1012 lecture. Yes, next semester’s classes are just about to start, and I’m in the depths of preparation.

Logical Methods Publication Day

Tue, 03 Jan 2023 06:55:00 +0000

Today MIT Press releases our book, Logical Methods into the big wide world. It was an absolute delight to work on this long-term project with my co-author and friend, Shawn Standefer.

A Stack of Copies of Logical Methods

Time for a little grease and oil change

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:08:30 +0000

2022 has been another big year, not that you’d know it from looking around the news section of this website. Settling in to St Andrews has taken up a lot of my energy (in a good way), and I’ve been having too much fun writing things and giving talks to spend time updating this website.

With the break between Christmas and New Year, I finally had time to clean up a bit of the mess around here, and update things.

A little book on Proofs and Models

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Late last month, my little manuscript on Proofs and Models in Philosophical Logic was published by Cambridge University Press. This, like all entries in the new Cambridge Elements series, is a tiny little manscript, with an aim to give students, and researchers in allied fields, a quick, accessible introduction to a research topic and current methods. My mansucript is a breezy 84 pages, and it tries to introduce the role of proofs and models in contemporary philosophical logic, with a focus on work on the paradoxes.

You can download the book for free on the Cambridge University Press website until April 13. After that, you’ll need to either buy a hardcopy or an electronic copy, or access it with some institutional subscription.

Leaving Melbourne

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +1000

As June 2021 turns to a close, this is my last official day at The University of Melbourne. I’ve taught my last classes, the marking for the semester is all done, I’ve wound up all my committee work, I’ve supervised my last undergraduate theses, and wrapped up all the end-of-semester administration. I’m now packing up my office (which I’ve rarely seen over the last 18 months) and tying up lots of loose ends. If I weren’t starting a new position, things would be falling eerily silent, with no Semester 2 subjects to prepare, no committee work to do, and no students to supervise. And with my new academic year starting in September, I do have a few moments to pause, to breathe, and to reflect on my 19 years at the University of Melbourne, before I head off on the next adventure.

Teaching During a Pandemic

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 22:10:00 +1000

As I write this, the first week of the second semester of 2020 is nearing its end, and I’ve taught my first two seminars in Logical Methods, my main undergraduate teaching responsibility for this semester. Melbourne has just entered Stage 4 of its lockdown, as we attempt to deal with the ongoing community transmission of COVID-19. The streets are quiet, it has been over four months since I’ve been on campus, and all my teaching is done from the chair at my desk in my study, peering into the 15 inch screen of my laptop, with the green cyclops dot in the middle of the top screen bezel showing that yet again, my image is being transmitted across the internet, to students scattered across Melbourne, across Australia, and across the world.

Notes from a Pandemic

Wed, 27 May 2020 21:19:47 +1000

I’ve been up to a few things during the pandemic. Quite a few things, it seems. Here are links to some of the traces you can find elsewhere on the internet.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve become good at using Zoom, but I have been doing a heck of a lot of it. My three subjects for this semester moved online, and running seminars, workshops, classes over Zoom has become a part (only a part) of keeping the ship going. I don’t record those classes (for obvious reasons!) but I have recorded a couple of research seminars presentations I’ve made over the last few weeks.

Teaching Logical Methods

Thu, 14 Nov 2019 20:01:45 +1100

It’s been a big year. At the start of 2019, Shawn Standefer and I decided to throw all our cards in the air and upend the curriculum for the Level 2 logic unit in the philosophy program here at Melbourne. We wrote 200 pages of a draft textbook (while I really should have been finishing my other book). Shawn designed and implemented a whole raft of multiple choice practice questions, and we worked on a range of class activities to help our class of 60 students grapple with the material. I recorded hours of video lectures covering the content. We stuffed all of this into the LMS. And we spent hours in the classroom teaching 60 students the ins and outs of proof theory and model theory for propositional logic, modal logic (including two-dimensional modal logic), and first-order predicate logic. Like I said, it was a big year putting all of this together. Now we’ve wrapped up our first semester teaching the new unit, so we can sit back, breathe and reflect on how things went.

Summer Reading 2018-2019

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 20:49:05 +1100

This summer break, I set aside some time to turn off my devices, unplug from the internet, and read some honest-to-goodness books. Some I received from friends and family as Christmas or Birthday gifts (thanks, Sharon, Zac, Neil!), and some I had accumulated on my “to-read” pile waiting for just the right time. Here are some short reviews of my summer reading pile, in case you’d like to follow along.

Philosophy in Public

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 13:34:27 +1100

Last Wednesday, I went down to the studios at ABC Southbank, to be interviewed by Libbi Gorr for ABC Radio Melbourne’s Sunday program. As I made my way through the building, and settled into the little studio, I thought I heard a familiar voice, faintly in the distance. Libbi explained that this was Kevin Rudd (the former Prime Minister), who was being interviewed in the next room. Unlike the former PM, I wasn’t doing the rounds of media because I had a book to promote. But I was doing promotion in my own small way. The University of Melbourne’s Media Office does a good job at getting the word out about public lectures, and the description for the lecture I’m giving on Tuesday night apparently appealed to Libbi Gorr and her producer, and they thought it would be fun to interview me for the Sunday program, so on Tuesday midday, I get an email from the Media Office asking if I’d be up for an interview in the studio with Libbi, talking about Truth and Stereotypes. So, that’s why I found myself in the studio having a fun 20 minute conversation with Libbi about stereotypes, thoughts, language and communication, and the possibility of objectivity and agreement (or disagreement) when we’re all situated in different places and have different perspectives.

With help from Hugo, GitHub, Netlify, Working Copy and Shortcuts, I might update this website more frequently

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 16:39:00 +1100

If you’ve been following my travels, you’ll get some sense that this has been a busy year. I’ve done lots of writing on my book, and I’ve managed to give lots of talks, both in the US and in Argentina, as well as at home. I haven’t posted here for nearly a year–writing elsewhere has been a higher priority. However, this weekend, I’ve made a few changes to the website which means that I might post here a little more often. The site is produced by Hugo, a really sweet static site generator. Until yesterday, if I wanted to update my site, what I did was Write files on whatever device I was using–most probably my Mac, but maybe my iPad–and push them to my my Git repository, which contains the source for the whole website. Then, on my Mac, sync up the repository. Run hugo to update the generated files. Sync the result up to GitHub. That worked fine, but I needed to do steps 2–4 on my Mac, and I don’t always have my Mac with me. Sometimes I prefer to write on my (smaller, less fiddly an distracting) iPad, and sometimes I only have my phone with me, and it’d be nice to update files on the website without having to run through my Mac to do that.

Community (the twelfth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 17:12:57 +1100

I love the way I’ve met so many different people through working in logic, that I’ve made good friends, good colleagues, good teachers and mentors. I’ve been part of an enterprise that’s larger than any one person. I have been shaped by that community, and have had the opportunity to made some small mark on it myself. Logic, like any other academic discipline, has a history. The activities of doing logic — of studying, researching and teaching — are spread out through time. Those activities are also, equally, spread out in space. Logic is done in many different places, in many different contexts, by many different individuals, and research teams. As I’ve already pointed out, those activities are shaped by different disciplinary connections (into philosophy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, engineering, etc.), but they are also shaped by the emphases of different research groups and traditions. Research, these days, is dominated not so much by a small number of iconic logicians, but by research groups with distinctive research programmes. Here are some examples: think of the difference between Amsterdam-style modal logic, on the one hand, and exact truthmaking semantics on the other, concerning approaches to intensionality and hyperintensionality, or for examples on the proof theoretical side of the street, the different traditions of Higher Order Type Theory and of Linear Logic and Ludics as frameworks for understanding proof, computation and meaning.

Learning and Teaching (the eleventh of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 22:47:48 +1100

Working in philosophical logic, I love the opportunity to learn from so many people through history, and not only to learn, but to pass on a tradition, and to have the opportunity to extend the tradition, and to refine it a little, in passing it on. It’s been a delight to learn from some great figures, the historical figures through their writing, and my contemporaries in person, both as face-to-face teachers (while a student, I learned logic from Sheila Oates-Williams, Neil Williams, Rod Girle, Ian Hinckfuss, and Graham Priest), but the learning doesn’t stop when you finish your degree. I’ve learned much from colleagues (Bob Meyer, Richard Sylvan, John Slaney, Allen Hazen, Graham Priest (again), Zach Weber, Dave Ripley, Shawn Standefer), whose work I admire, and who generously share of their time at whiteboards, in seminars, and in many many conversations. I have also learned a great deal from all of my graduate students, who have sent me in directions I never expected to head. If learning logic is (in part) gaining facility with the concepts you have, as well as acquiring new concepts, then working with others is a very good way to learn. The kinds of knowledge you acquire is not merely knowing that, but it (at least in part) skills to be learned, and they’re learned by practice, and sometimes skilled practice is best acquired when guided by others — explicitly, when the teacher knows she is teaching — or implicitly, when we observe an expert displaying expertise, and we can use their practice to scaffold our own, and learn by imitation.

Possibility (the tenth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 14:38:20 +1100

In the previous entry I explored the connection between proofs and necessity. Here, I want to spend a little time exploring the other side of the logical street, the connection between models and possibility. As I have already explained, one core insight from 20th Century work in logic is the fundamental duality between proof theory and model theory. You can define logical notions like validity by way of proofs (a valid argument is certified by the existence of some proof) or by way of models (an argument is shown to be invalid by the existence of some model which serves as a counterexample). Exploring proofs gives you can account of the different ways that concepts are tied together. (It gives you an account of what is involved in different kinds of necessary connections. The more different proofs you have, the more connections are possible.) Approaching the validity/invalidity boundary on the other side, by way of models, gives you a very different picture of this boundary. Defining more models means having more counterexamples. Model building is one very fruitful way of articulating what is — and more importantly, what isn’t — a part of a theory. Suppose you are interested in some strange new theory.

Necessity (the ninth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 23:55:19 +1100

The next two thoughts are motivated by the two complementary aspects of contemporary research in logic, proof theory and model theory. As I try to emphasise to my students, there are two broad ways you can define logical concepts like validity. Following the way of proofs, an argument is valid if there is some proof leading from the premises to the conclusion. Following the way of models, an argument is valid if there is no model in which the premises are true and the conclusion is not. In proof theory, validity is vouchsafed by the existence of something: a proof, which certifies the claim to validity. Invalidity is the absence of such a certificate. In model theory, invalidity is vouchsafed by the existence of something: a model — a counterexample to the claim of validity. Validity is the absence of any such counterexample. It was a great intellectual advance to understand that these are two very different ways to define logical concepts, such as validity, and it was a further advance to be able to rigorously prove that (on certain understandings of logic, such as classical first order predicate logic), these two different kinds of definitions can coincide to determine the same concept.

Attention (the eighth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 14:01:56 +1100

I’m not totally happy with the word for the next item on the list of twelve things I love about philosophical logic. The word on the list is attention, and it gets at something that I have learned, and which seems to me to be an important distinctive about working in philosophical logic, but I’m not altogether sure that “attention” is the best word for it. Maybe after I’ve explained what I mean, you could suggest a better short label for the phenomenon I’m gesturing towards. Here’s the core idea: when you spend time working with core logical notions such as consequence, consistency, necessity, possibility, model and proof, you notice that you are attending to judgements and thoughts and claims in more than one way. You learn to distinguish between taking a claim to be true, and considering it as possible. You can agree that even though $p$ isn’t true, it is consistent with $q$. You can agree that it’s not true that $p$ while still seriously entertain what it would be like were $p$ to be true. Working with $p$ as an hypothesis is not the same thing as taking it to be true. But even though working under the supposition that $p$ is not the same thing as taking $p$ to be true, it is related intimately to it.

Pragmatics (the seventh of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 12:53:42 +1100

Some of my phrasing in the last two posts about what I love about philosophical logic have emphasised capacities, or abilities. I’ve described the pleasure of the “aha!” moment in terms of the kinds of mastery you acquire in handling the concepts you have, and I described the joys of conceptual expansion in terms of abilities gained. This is to take a pragmatic perspective on logic, to consider the connection to practices and actions. Thinking of things “pragmatically” can be understood in a very crude way, fixing in advance what how you want to measure costs and benefits, and then doing some naïve cost/benefit calculation and then choosing option that somehow maximises benefits and minimises the costs (if that is even possible). This is not what I mean when I consider the connection between logic and pragmatics. I don’t think that the best way to select some logical system or logical theory is on the basis of that kind of cost/benefit analysis. Rather, it’s that there are connections between features of logical systems and the practices of asserting, denying, inferring, questioning, etc. What kind of connections are there? It’s not that the laws of logic are descriptively correct as a theory about how assertion and denial and inference actually work in practice.

Conceptual Expansion (the sixth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 09:26:50 +1100

There are different delights to be found in working with concepts. It is not all a matter of gaining greater mastery of the concepts you have already acquired. There is also a special delight to be found in acquiring new concepts. I love that feeling of progress when you make a conceptual advance. A common way to do this is to disambiguate, to clarify matters by noticing that what you took to be one thing is really two. This is the clarity gained in uncovering a hidden confusion, the moment when ideas are sharpened and distinguished, when you form a new vocabulary and, as a result, you are able to say things you couldn’t express before. This one way to reap the rewards of conceptual expansion. Our repertoire of concepts is larger than it was. Here’s an example of this phenomenon. (It’s not an uncontroversial example, but it’s one that I find quite compelling.) Consider what it means to suppose something. This is something we do regularly when we’re reasoning, when we’re planning, considering options, or discussing something with people who have different views. Often we “try a claim on for size”, suppose it’s the case, and reason from there. (This kind of dialectical move is something we not only do, it’s also at the heart of different accounts of the structure of proof.

The Moment of Recognition (the fifth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 14:29:39 +1100

Here is a more personal reflection on what I love in working in philosophical logic. I love the “aha!” moment of recognition. This is the relief of a proof completed, or a counterexample found. It is the delight of gaining clarity into something that you had only dimly understood, or the dawning realisation that an assumption you had made is in fact false and a whole new vista of possibilities opens up to you. The particular kind of “aha” that I mean is the kind where you’re working out of the consequences of something you already know. This can be understood as a kind of mastery that is gained when you become familiar with the conceptual tools you’re using. It is the acquisition of greater skill. This is the “aha” that students in my second year logic class experienced when they figured out for themselves that not all symmetric and transitive relations must be reflexive. In one sense, they already knew the definitions of these concepts (at least, most of them did) and this fact was implicit in what they already knew, but now they had figured this out for themselves — they saw it for themselves. They understood something new about how these concepts fit together, how they relate.

Interdisciplinarity (the fourth of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 14:27:05 +1100

The multiple realisations of a concept in logic often come from different disciplines. One thing I’ve grown to love in philosophical logic is the way different ideas, disciplines and traditions are connected in the space of the wider generality of formal logic. In my own work over the years in substructural logic, logical pluralism and proof theory (among other things), traditions in computer science, linguistics, mathematics and philosophy have all played distinct roles. Each discipline has its own examples, its own traditions, its own heroes, its own villains—and its own concerns. If you are aware of the distinctive features of different traditions, this allows for the strengths of those disciplines to shine, for the insights and examples of one discipline to be brought to bear on the questions and problems of others. If you’re a philosopher, you should, by nature, be interested in more than your own traditions—or at least you should if you understand philosophy in the way Wilfrid Sellars did: The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. — Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”

Multiple Realisability (the third of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 15:34:51 +1100

Closely connected to the notion of abstraction, I love the way that logical concepts are multiply realisable. An abstract structure can be instantiated in different ways, and often in ways completely unforeseen when the original abstraction was made. The twin moves of abstraction (moving from the particular to the general) and concretisation (going back from the general to the particular—perhaps to a new and different particular) in different domains brings different insights, different models, and new connections. These new connections often bring fresh insight. For example, the simple notion of a Boolean algebra can be instantiated as a power set algebra (think of the subsets of a set and the operations of union, intersection and complementation). But this simple idea of a power set Boolean algebra can then be understood in different domains of application: you can think of the underlying set as a domain of objects and the subsets are extensions of different predicates. Or you can think of them as a set of possible worlds, and the subsets are propositions. And so on. Shifting from one representation to another is often conceptually fruitful when thinking about these different domains, or thinking about the ways that the formal techniques are applied.

Abstraction (the second of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 13:00:03 +1100

As I mentioned in the previous entry, philosophical logic uses the tools and techniques from formal logic, and formal logic is nothing if it is not abstract. It gets its power — as well as its weaknesses, to be sure — by abstracting away from specifics and moving to generalities. We explain the virtues of a particular argument (in part) by looking at its form, the structure which is in common to other arguments of the same shape. This goes back, at least, to Aristotle, who taught us that it isn’t a coincidence that both syllogisms All footballers are bipeds. All bipeds have feet. Therefore all footballers have feet. All wombats are cute. All cute things are popular. Therefore all wombats are popular. have similar virtues. At the very least, they’re both valid. They both have the form: All Fs are Gs. All Gs are Hs. Therefore all Fs are Hs. and any syllogisms with that form are valid. Attending to the shape of the reasoning, and “tuning out” concern about whether the premises are true (are all wombats cute? Are all footballers bipeds? — most likely not) and focussing on the form, we see how the premises and conclusions are connected.

The Dialectic (the first of twelve things I love about philosophical logic)

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 13:36:03 +1100

One thing I noticed when making my way from mathematics (my undergraduate degree was a B.Sc. in Mathematics at the University of Queensland) to philosophy was the different approach when doing research in the two disciplines. To put it very coarsely, in mathematics, you prove theorems. In philosophy, you argue about things. The standards for success are very different in philosophy and in mathematics. Witness Norbert Blum’s recent retraction of his paper which purported to prove that P ≠ NP. While philosophers change their minds about things, I don’t recall anyone going so far as to retract a paper that argued for a position they now reject. That’s just not how philosophers work, and nor should they. One of the joys about working in philosophical logic — especially for someone with a relatively short attention span, like me — is that I get to play on both sides of this street. I spend some time as a technical mathematical logician, playing the theorem-proving game, with all of the satisfaction of knowing that I’ve really proved something solid in its own way: a mathematical result. On the other hand, there’s more to life than theorems, and there’s more to understanding than the making of proofs.

Twelve things I love about philosophical logic

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 20:21:54 +1100

Over this last weekend, I spent some time tidying out one of the electronic “junk drawers” of my writing life, a folder full of thousands upon thousands of little scraps of text, ranging from minutes of meetings, recipes I’ve saved, little ideas I came across which I wanted to save, lists of places to visit when travelling, and many other kinds of digital flotsam and jetsam I’ve collected over around 20 years of being online, reading and writing. There was a lot of junk in that big pile of text that I deleted on sight (though there were a few recipes I’m looking forward to trying out in the next little while) but one thing really surprised me. It was a short list, entitled “12 things I love about philosophical logic”. That scrap of writing was about 200 words—the “12 things” are each elaborated with only a sentence or two. I wrote it about five years ago, and I’d totally forgotten about it until coming across it this weekend. Rereading it, the ideas resonated. (My views haven’t shifted that much over five years.) What resonated wasn’t just that I agreed with my earlier self—but that I found the thoughts helpful, and they struck me as the kind of thing that you don’t often hear.

Conditionals in Closed Set Logic

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 14:23:43 +1100

Over the last couple of days on Twitter, I was involved in a thread, kicked off by Dan Piponi, discussing closed set logic—the natural dual of intuitionistic logic in which the law of the excluded middle holds but the law of non-contradiction fails, and which has models in the closed sets of any topological space, as opposed to the open sets, which model intuitionistic logic.

$\def\ydash{\succ}$This logic also has a nice sequent calculus in which sequents have one premise (or zero) and multiple conclusions. In the thread I made the claim that this is a natural and beautiful sequent calculus (it is!) but that the structure of the sequents means that the logic doesn’t have a natural conditional. The dual to the conditional (subtraction) can be defined, for which $A\ydash B\lor C$ if and only if $A-B\ydash C$. But the traditional conditional rules don’t work so well.

I realised, when I thought about it a bit more, that this fact is something I’ve just believed for the last 20 years or so, but I’ve never seen written down, so now is as good as a time, and here is as good as a place as any to explain what I mean.

Typesetting Flow Graphs with tikz

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 11:17:18 +1100

In a few recent papers and talks, I’ve been using flow graphs to display the flow of information in proofs. These are the kinds of things that are easy to draw, but they’re not so straightforward to typeset.

With Gratitude to Raymond Smullyan

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 22:12:50 +1100

While I was busy writing my most recent paper, “Proof Terms for Classical Derivations”, I heard that Raymond Smullyan had died at the age of 97. I posted a tweet with a photo of a page from the draft of the paper I was writing at the time, expressing loss at hearing of his death and gratitude for his life.

There are many reasons to love Professor Smullyan. I learned combinatory logic from his delightful puzzle book To Mock a Mockingbird, and he was famous for many more puzzle books like that. He was not only bright and sharp, he was also warmly humane. However, the focus of my gratitude was something else. In my tweet, I hinted at one reason why I’m especially grateful for Smullyan’s genius—his deep understanding of proof theory. I am convinced that his analysis of inference rules in the tableaux system for classical logic rewards repeated reflection. (See his First-Order Logic, Chapter 2, Section 1 for details.) I’ll try to explain why it’s important and insightful here.

A New Paper

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 01:32:58 +1100

It’s a new year, and it’s time for a new paper, so here is “Proof Terms for Classical Derivations” I’ve been working on these ideas for about a year, from some rough talks over most of 2016, to many conversations with my colleague Shawn as I attempted to iron out the details, to many more hours in front of whiteboards, I’ve finally got something I’m happy to show in public. The paper still rough, but the ideas are all there, and I think the theorems are all correct. The paper is under 50 pages—but only just! It proposes a new account of proof terms for classical propositional logic. These proof terms give a new account of what it is for one sequent derivation to represent the “same underlying proof” as another. Two derivations represent the same proof if and only if they have the same proof term. In the paper I show that two derivations have the same proof term if and only if one can be permuted into the other, using a natural class of transformations of derivations. Finally, I show that cut elimination for proof terms is confluent and strongly normalising, giving a new account of what it is to evaluate a classical proof, in a way that does not collapse into triviality.

A Puzzle for Brandom's Account of Singular Terms

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 11:22:42 +1100

I’ve been interested in Robert Brandom’s inferentialism since I picked up a copy of Making it Explicit back in 1996. One interesting component of Brandom’s inferentialism is his account of what it is to be a singular term. There are a number of ways to understand inferentialism, but the important point here is the centrality of material inference to semantics. An inference like “Melbourne is south of Sydney, therefore Sydney is north of Melbourne” is a materially good inference. Material inferences, for Brandom, are not to be understood as grounded in a more primitive notion of logical consequence—we shouldn’t explain the inference in terms of the validity of the form “$a$ is south of $b$, for all $x$ and $y$ if $x$ is south of $y$ then $y$ is north of $x$, therefore, $b$ is north of $a$” and the fact that the extra premise is common knowledge or a part of the norms governing the concepts of north and south. No, according the inferentialist, we are to explain those facts in terms of materially good inferences, and not vice versa. Well, one of the distinctive features of Brandom’s inferentialism is that he takes there to be an inferentialist account of what it is for a term to be a singular term—a name or other device that picks out an object, rather than a predicate that describes something, or some other kind of connective or modifier.

Proof Terms are fun

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 17:35:21 +1100

Today, between marking assignments and working through a paper on proof theory for counterfactuals, I’ve been playing around with proof terms. They’re a bucketload of fun. The derivation below generates a proof term for the sequent $\forall xyz(Rxy\land Ryz\supset Rxz),\forall xy(Rxy\supset Ryx),\forall x\exists y Rxy \succ \forall x Rxx$. The playing around is experimenting with different ways to encode the quantifier steps in proof terms. I think I’m getting somewhere with this. (But boy, typesetting these things is not easy.) A whiteboard-to-LaTeX scanner would be really handy right about now. Anybody have one? A photo posted by Greg Restall (@consequently) on Sep 1, 2016 at 4:42pm PDT

First Degree Entailment, Symmetry and Paradox

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:36:40 +1100

Talking to Jc Beall during his recent visit to Australia, I got thinking about first degree entailment again.

Here is a puzzle, which I learned from Terence Parsons in his “True Contradictions”. First Degree Entailment (fde) is a logic which allows for truth value gaps as well as truth value gluts. If you are agnostic between assigning paradoxical sentences gaps and gluts (and there seems to be no very good reason to prefer gaps over gluts or gluts over gaps if you’re happy with fde), then this looks no different, in effect, from assigning them a gap value? After all, on both views you end up with a theory that doesn’t commit you to the paradoxical sentence or its negation. How is the fde theory any different from the theory with gaps alone?

I think I have a clear answer to this puzzle—an answer that explains how being agnostic between gaps and gluts is a genuinely different position than admitting gaps alone. But to explain the answer and show how it works, I need to spell things out in more detail. If you want to see how this answer goes, read on.

I have a campaign poster on my picket fence

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 21:23:20 +1100

For the first time in my home owning career, the picket fence outside my home sports a how-to-vote sign.

This is a change for me. I’m a member of no political party, and I’ve never encouraged my neighbours to vote in any particular way. For almost all of my life, I’ve lived in safe Labor seats, from growing up in working class Brisbane to living in the inner north of Melbourne, my members of Federal Parliament have all been members of the ALP in safe seats. (Only short sojourns in Toowong and Marsfield found me in conservative territory.) My vote in my electorate hasn’t made a difference over the years.

More importantly, I think that there is much more to politics than voting. It’s one thing to distribute a few votes once every few years in to record your voice about how we are governed. There are plenty of other, more effective ways to take part in our common life, both locally, and globally. Broader political action can take many different forms, beyond party politics. Different forms of political action include investigating and exposing injustice or corruption, campaigning for change, making proposals for different ways to do things, protesting, raising awareness, building alternative communities and political structures and resisting injustice—through to covert and overt struggle and revolution. Politics is a complicated business with many different strands.

So, given all of that, why do I have a campaign poster on my fence?

3am Interview on Philosophical Logic

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 17:37:47 +1100

A few weeks ago, Richard Marshall interviewed me for 3am Magazine’s series of interviews with philosophers. If you’re interested in my work on logical pluralism, proof theory and things like that, this interview might be a good place to start. I hope you like it. If you’ve got any questions, please let me know.

Advice from Undergraduate Logic Students

Thu, 12 May 2016 22:49:30 +1100

Prompted by a colleague and friend (thanks Ruth!), I’ve been asking students who took my upper level logic subjects last year what they learned about how to learn logic. This is helpful for me—I get a better understanding of how students are learning. It’s hopefully helpful for them, too, to reflect more explicitly on how they learn. But most of all, I hope that their reflections will help students who come after them. After all, advice from peers is fresh and direct in ways that advice from someone whose first encounter with the material was nearly 30 years isn’t. I’ve been so impressed with the answers students sent me. They’re thoughtful and insightful and I’m sure the advice will useful for future students. I thought I’d share them, in case it helps you to learn logic, or to teach it to others. Here is advice from two students from my subject phil20030: Meaning, Possibility and Paradox. This is a second year introduction to modal and non-classical logic, with a little bit of philosophy of language along the way. It’s taught using video lectures, a weekly two hour seminar, and students work in teams on weekly to prepare for each session, and as a support and study group outside classes.

Models for Compatibility

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 16:57:01 +1100

This morning I received an email from Rachael Briggs, asking me some questions about the notion of compatibility as it appears in my paper “Negation in Relevant Logics.” These questions got me to thinking that there were some ideas in that paper and a much-less-read paper of mine “Modelling Truthmaking”, which might be worth reflecting on some more. So I’ll try to do that here. Here’s the background you need to get up to speed. Relevant logics attempt to make sense of the idea that if an argument from premises $\Sigma$ to conclusion $A$ is valid then the premises must somehow be relevant to the conclusion. If the $A$ is a tautology by itself (say, $p\lor\neg p$) then that fact alone is not enough to ensure that it follows from the unrelated premise $q$. $p\lor\neg p$ follows well enough from $p$ (a disjunction follows from a disjunct), and from $\neg p$ (the other disjunct), but if $q$ has nothing to do with it, we can’t necessarily get to $p\lor\neg p$ from there. The same goes for arguments from contradictory premises. $p\land\neg p$ is inconsistent. Classical logic tells us that the argument from $p\land\neg p$ to $q$ is valid because there’s no interpretation to make $p\land\neg p$ true that makes $q$ false—but that’s not because of any connection between $p\land\neg p$ and $q$.

Congratulations to Bruce French, AO

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:30:47 +1100

I’ve been away from home in Auckland at a conference over the last couple of days, so I’m a bit behind on the news, but tonight I’ve finally found a few moments to write something in honour of my friend and mentor, Bruce French, who was—three days ago—named an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2016 Australia Day Honour’s list. Bruce was awarded this honour because of his many decades of work, learning about tropical food plants throughout the Pacific, Asia and Africa, cataloguing that knowledge and making it freely available to anyone who can use it. Bruce French with a young friend, in 2012 I’ve known Bruce since my second year at university, many years ago. During this time, I was involved in a student Christian group, and Bruce worked there with students, encouraging them to explore both their university studies and their faith in equal measure. Bruce had trained as an agricultural scientist, and as a Baptist pastor, and his enthusiasm for tropical plants, and his passion for loving God and loving his neighbour was infectious. Before coming to work at the University, Bruce had spent time in Papua New Guinea, and he’d seen both the incredible knowledge that indigenous people had for the opportunities for nutrition in the plants around them, and the devastating damage done by well-meaning but ignorant attempts at aid in times of famine, where inappropriate Western foodstuffs would be introduced, when local options were much more appropriate to the climate and the nutritional needs of community.

On Priest on nonmonotonic and inductive logic

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:55:52 +1100

Thanks to a recent visit from Jc Beall, I was reminded of a critical discussion between Jc and our colleague and friend Graham Priest in the pages of Analysis. Jc was puzzled by a claim that Graham made in his reply to Jc’s paper, concerning nonmonotonic consequence relations and failures of truth preservation. Here, I’ll explain the disagreement between Jc and Graham, and why Graham’s claim (that all nonmonotonic logics fail to preserve truth) is wrong.

Update on March 9, 2016: I submitted a version of this note to the journal Thought, and it has been accepted for publication. The prepublication version of the paper is archived here.

Language, Logic and Existential Commitment

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 11:49:21 +1100

In between wrapping up teaching for the end of Semester 2, and getting ready for a short trip to Scotland, I’m spending some time thinking about free logic and quantified modal logic and identity. This is difficult but exciting terrain to cover. There is no obvious way to tie together the logic of quantifiers, the modalities and identity in a way that commands broad appeal—there is no default quantified modal logic that has the same ‘market reach’ as classical first order logic.

This is a shame, because many important arguments involve quantification, identity and possibility and necessity—and claims about existence and nonexistence. Understanding the logic of these arguments better would help us gain some kind of systematic understanding of the positions in play. In the absence of a clear picture of the logic implicit in our concepts, we’re playing the dialectical game in ignorance of the rules.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Logic at Melbourne finally has a presence on the web

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 17:02:04 +1100

I’ve been at the University of Melbourne since 2002, and the Logic Group has been meeting regularly since my arrival there. While it’s changed significantly in its membership over the last 13 years, one thing has remained constant—we’ve been an informal, friendly bunch of people, so hard at work in teaching and research that we’ve not had time to make a website for the group. Well, thanks to the hardworking Shawn Standefer, that’s changed. Point your browsers to http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/logic/ to keep up with Logic at Melbourne.

Cian Dorr on Defining Quantifiers (Verbal Disputes Workshop Report #2)

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 15:27:36 +1100

There’s something very attractive in the idea that meanings of logical concepts—such as conjunction, negation, the quantifiers—can be specified by the role they play in proofs. If I learn the rules for conjunction: $ \def\sem#1{[\![#1]\!]} $ \[ \frac{A\land B}{A} \quad \frac{A\land B}{B} \qquad \frac{A\quad B}{A\land B} \] then I’ve “pinned down” what there is to know about the conjunction connective “$\land$”. The quantifiers are an interesting case. The rules for quantifiers, like $(\exists x)$ prove to be more complex. \[ \frac{A(t)}{(\exists x)A(x)} \qquad \frac{ {{{}\atop{\large }}\atop{\large (\exists x)A(x)}} \quad {{{\LARGE A(n)}\atop{\large \vdots}}\atop{\large C}} } {C} \] (where in the second rule, the name $n$ is not present in $C$ or in the other premises of the subproof from $A(n)$ to $C$). In these rules, we unwrap the quantified expression $(\exists x)A(x)$ into a simpler expression which is an instance of the schema $A(x)$. In the introduction rule, $A(t)$ is an instance formed by substituting any singular term $t$ for $x$, while in the elimination rule, it must be a name (or an eigenvariable). The details can be worked out in many different ways, but one feature remains the same: the semantics of quantifiers is tied closely to the semantics of singular terms. Can we avoid this connection? Is there a way to define the semantics of quantifiers in by way of their rules in proof which do not tie them so closely to the semantics of singular terms.

This was one of the goals of Cian Dorr’s talk “Pinning Down the Meanings of Quantifiers” at the Verbal Disputes conference, and is a central theme in his paper “Quantifier Variance and the Collapse Theorems”. There’s a lot in the paper (it’s 67 pages long!), and I won’t engage with most of it, but I’d like to discuss this central theme of the paper here.

Cian Dorr

Another Day at the Office

Thu, 04 Jun 2015 12:44:46 +1100

The view from my desk. A photo posted by Greg Restall (@consequently) on Jun 3, 2015 at 7:39pm PDT

Adventures in Bi-Intuitionistic Logic

Sat, 30 May 2015 04:04:25 +1100

In yesterday’s Logic Seminar, Tomasz Kowalski introduced some lovely results about analytic cut and interpolation in sequent systems for bi-intuitionistic logic. After the seminar, Lloyd Humberstone, Dave Ripley, Tomasz and I got talking about various features of bi-intuitionistic logic, some of which should be more well known than they are … so I may as well post them here. Read on, if you’re into non-classical logic, algebras and frames.

Verbal Disputes in Oxford (Workshop Report #1)

Wed, 27 May 2015 15:56:45 +1100

I’m back from last week’s quick trip to Oxford for a workshop on Verbal Disputes, just in time to wrap up the last week of teaching in my two undergraduate units as the semester winds up here in Melbourne.

This was an excellent two-day workshop, capably organised by Trevor Teitel, and funded by the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme for the Humanities. There was a lot to think about in the papers presented at the conference, and the informal discussions between talks. In another entry, I’ll comment on Cian Dorr’s talk “Pinning Down the Meanings of Quantifiers.” In this entry I’ll make some general remarks about the workshop and, in particular, about Amie Thomasson’s talk “Metaphysical Disputes and Metalinguistic Negotiation”.

A highlight of a workshop like this is meeting people, maintaining contact with those you’ve met before, and making new connections with new friends and colleagues. While there were lots of different views expressed at the conference, there was enough common ground—and more than enough good will and good humour—to have fruitful and productive conversations. This was a great workshop.

One Quick Trip to Oxford

Sun, 17 May 2015 22:19:26 +1100

I'm here for May 20 and 21

Tomorrow I head off on a flying visit to Oxford for a Workshop on Verbal Disputes and their Philosophical Significance. I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends and making new ones. The lineup for the workshop is fantastic, so it looks like it’ll be a great time. If you’re in the area, please do come along and say “hi”. If you can’t come, I’ve posted the slides and handout for my talk here.

Another View of the Old Quad

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 00:23:10 +1100

Here’s another view of my building at work, in the autumn light.

Old Quad, back entrance

A photo posted by Greg Restall (@consequently) on Mar 31, 2015 at 6:20am PDT

Advocacy on Sydney Road

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 12:49:30 +1100

On the afternoon of Sunday March 1, Sydney Road in Brunswick was transformed by its annual Street Party. Over four blocks of this busy inner north thoroughfare was closed to trams and cars, lined by stalls, punctuated with live bands, and filled with crowds. Everyone was sampling wares, eating, drinking and soaking in the atmosphere. It’s a distinctive slice of multicultural Brunswick life, and an opportunity for everyone to get out and sample that Brunswick experience in all its variety.

Live music at the Sydney Road Street Party

Our Thinking Behind Logic Teaching on Coursera

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 14:46:22 +1100

Just today, I stumbled across a video of an interview with me from 2013, explaining our thinking behind teaching introductory logic on Coursera, and the connections between this and classroom teaching. Come for the ideas, stay for the crazy hand gestures.

Come and work with me on proof theory and philosophy

Fri, 06 Mar 2015 12:28:44 +1100

I’m delighted to finally announce that I have a job to offer on my five year ARC funded research project in philosophical logic and its applications, “Meaning in Action: new techniques for language, logic and information.” It’s a two year postdoctoral research position, with a little bit of teaching on the side. If you’re interested in philosophical logic, and would like to join the logic group at Melbourne, this is the job for you.

Academic Genealogy

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 00:35:19 +1100

I have known about the Mathematical Genealogy Project for quite some time, but, prompted by Richard Zach I notice two new and wonderful things.

First, David Alber has produced in Geneagrapher a neat tool to download genealogy data and save a .dot file, which can be read by Graphviz and displayed as a directed graph.

Here’s a detail from my genealogy. (This image is a link to a pdf file of the entire thing.)

Some of my genealogy

Classes in Semester One

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 23:55:17 +1100

The Power and Limits of Logic

Teaching started for first semester, with the launch of Logic: Language and Information 1 on Coursera. That’s been a lot of fun already, with over 17,000 enrolled. There’s something very exciting about being involved with a large number of students all around the world, choosing to work hard to learn logic for the first time.

Ash Wednesday

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 11:59:50 +1100

Rembember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Remember that you are dust (@consequently) on Feb 18, 2015 at 5:57am PST

Do LNC and LEM suffice to define negation?

Tue, 17 Feb 2015 23:20:25 +1100

What is negation?

One answer you find in the literature is that negation is the operator that makes each instance of the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM) and the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) turn out to be true. That is, every sentence of the form \[ p\lor \neg p \qquad \neg(p\land\neg p) \] is true, no matter what sentence we use in the place of $p$ (where $\neg$ stands for negation, $\lor$ for disjunction, and $\land$ for conjunction).

This is the wrong way to try to define negation. If you read on, I’ll explain why.

Adding Site Search

Fri, 13 Feb 2015 11:19:07 +1100

I’ve added a search feature to the site in the footer of each page. There seems to be enough on the site that search is genuinely useful. I’ve used DuckDuckGo, which has a comprehensive index of this place, and which can be styled to match the visual treatment of the rest of the site. Please let me know if there are any problems with the implementation.

Another Blast From the Past

Sun, 08 Feb 2015 15:02:19 +1100

A blast from the past

While recovering the archives for this site, I came across another blast from the past: the weblog I ran with Jc during the early days of our research on logical pluralism.

Recovering the Past

Sat, 07 Feb 2015 07:20:10 +1100

If you glance at the news archive, you’ll see that once again it stretches back to the dim past of weblog days, the year 2000. Thanks to the wayback machine, I was able to recover entries from my old blog (powered by Blogger, from well before it was acquired by Google), and fulfil a commitment I made in March 2001 to move the old archives over to consequently.org.

Back in the office

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 12:45:04 +1100

It’s good to be back in the office. The Parkville Campus of The University of Melbourne is a delightful place to work.

It’s February, and I’m back in the office.

A photo posted by Greg Restall (@consequently) on Feb 1, 2015 at 4:36pm PST

Why no comment box?

Tue, 03 Feb 2015 09:52:39 +1100

Previous incarnations of this website provided a facility for comments in the usual way for a weblog in the first decade of the 2000s—a comment form on each entry. This one doesn’t. Why not?

What’s the point of a personal website these days?

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 23:05:00 +1100

My last post to consequently.org was in late in 2010, well over four years ago. You’d be justified in thinking that I’d abandoned the place—but you’d also be wrong. I’ve been tinkering with it behind the scenes. The software I’d been using to maintain the website has long since fallen into disrepair, so updating it meant porting everything to another content management system. At least, it would have to mean that, given that I wasn’t really keen to burn the whole thing to the ground and start again from scratch. This required time.

It didn’t require four years, but it did require an uninterrupted stretch of time to tinker with software, experiment with the design, and finally, piece everything back together.

Before getting back into all of this website business, however, I wanted to answer one question. Is the investment of time worth it? What’s the point of a personal website these days, anyway?

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Just testing to see if this thing is on. Yes, it seems to be working. How about that!? It’s pretty rusty, but apparently this site still works. That’s good to see.

Time Flies

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.

If you’ve been following my twitter feed, you’d realise I’m still alive. You wouldn’t think that from the activity – or lack thereof – here. (Though a few papers have appeared – or changed their publication status – on my writing page.)

Here’s where we are: It’s been a busy, eventful semester, and the teaching period is almost done. I’ve had fun teaching proof theory to fourth-year students, tutoring intro philosophy to first years, and supervising graduate students (at last count, I have eight current research students in various stages of the degrees). One of the sadder things to befall us here at Melbourne is the departure of Allen Hazen, who as left our shores for the chillier climes of Edmonton. The Melbourne logic community’s loss is Canada’s gain here.

Live from Hejnice

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Posting has been light, since I’ve been powering through work at the end of the semester, and getting ready for a quick trip west to Europe, for Non-Classical Mathematics 2009 and Logica 2009, preceded by a quick visit to Dresden to see Heinrich Wansing, and to break up the train trip from Frankfurt to Prague.

So, posting here has paused for a bit, but now that I’m settled in Hejnice and that there’s a wireless connection here, I can deal with some of my backlog of things I’ve promised to post. So, here’s a salad of links for you.

Rumfitt on Multiple Conclusions, Part 2

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

This is Part 2 of a series of comments on Ian Rumfitt’s paper “Knowledge by Deduction” (Grazer Philosophische Studien, vol. 77 (2008) pp. 61–84). In Part 1, I focussed on Rumfitt’s direct criticism of my approach in “Multiple Conclusions,” and I tried to show that his criticism missed the mark, and that it missed the mark in an important way. The norms of logical consequence and logical coherence apply not only to occurrent beliefs but to all manner of states of accepting and rejecting (or acts of assertion and denial), whether they express our deep standing beliefs or hypotheses we simply entertain lightly.

In this part, I want to consider the comments on the possibility of genuine proofs with multiple conclusions.

Rumfitt on Multiple Conclusions, Part 1

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Ole Hjortland, I’ve been alerted to Ian Rumfitt’s paper “Knowledge by Deduction” (Grazer Philosophische Studien, vol. 77 (2008) pp. 61–84.). In it, he makes a number of critical comments on multiple conclusion accounts of logical consequence, and in particular, he makes some critical remarks on my paper “Multiple Conclusions.” Now, the criticism of mutiple conclusion consequence isn’t the main point of the paper—the main topic is how one can acquire knowlege by deduction, as the title indicates. On that topic, it’s a really interesting paper, and I hope to comment on those parts at some time.

However, since the paper ends with the sentence

But we have found reason to leave multiple-conclusion logics to the boy racers, and focus on the single-conclusion rules, by following which we can splice together the deliverances of various sources of knowledge to come to know things that we could not know otherwise. (page 83)

I’ve got to respond.

Problems for Naïve Property Theories

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about generalisations of Russell’s paradox, cleaning things up so you can’t get around the problem by changing the logic of connectives. I don’t think that mucking around with negation or implication gets to the heart of the issue. (This view is shared by some very insightful people. I haven’t come to it alone.)

Getting around negation and conditionals is surprisingly easy, once you get the proof theory sorted out. I’ve been noodling about with this issue for a year or so now. I presented on this in a talk at the World Congress of Paraconsistency last year, and a bit of it has appeared in my draft discussion of some themes from Hartry Field’s Saving Truth From Paradox.

There, the paradoxical derivations are done in sequent calculi, and they’re not the most perspicuous presentation. I managed to sharpen it up a bit tonight, and the resulting proof is here. It’s not explained in the text of that note: that gives just the definitions and the proof. I hope to get to that soon. But let me use this site to get the ideas out in a rough and ready form.

Bob Meyer

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier today I received the sad news that Bob Meyer, my former colleague at the ANU, and friend, two-time collaborator, died last night, after a long struggle with cancer.

Bob will be sorely missed by many of us. His warmth and humour, his brilliance, and his willingness to talk logic (and much more) to anyone and everyone, will all be impossible to replace. If I manage to show a small fraction of both his logical insight, and his ability to communicate difficult concepts with good humour and wit, I’ll be a happy philosophical logician.

More on Words

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Allen Hazen pointed me to this nice interview Julian Bagnini conducted with Ernie Lepore, on words. Lepore comes to the same sort of conclusion as Kaplan – that identity conditions for words are tricky. He’s right.

Types, Tokens and Names

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

The quote from yesterday’s quiz was from the inimitable David Kaplan, in the article “Words” (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume, LXIV 1990). As Robbie mentioned in the comments “Words” is such a cool paper. I want to give an example of how cool it is.

It’s tempting to think of words, repeatable things that the are, as the types of token inscriptions, jottings, arrangements of pixels, utterances and all of the other kinds of ways we find to express words. Kaplan argues in “Words” that this isn’t right. I won’t rehearse the argument here, but I’ll tell you about one example he gives along the way.

Quiz for today

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here is today’s quiz question. Which master of exposition said this, and where? After arguing for years, unconvincingly, that semantic value (properly understood) is not affected by substitution, I hit upon a brilliant, new, and completely successful, strategy: argue, instead, that semantic value is affected by substitution. Here’s a hint: the quote occurs after in the context of a discussion of proper names. (Upon reflection, that’s not much of a hint, is it?) Post your guess as to who I’m quoting, in the comments form on this post. (You can post an informed answer too, if you like, but I suspect a guess would be even more fun.) The most interesting answer will receive a prize in the honest-to-goodness snail mail.

Spandrels of Truth

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Whoever thought that teaching in three subjects, chairing one committee, participating in another one with a honking big project to keep on the rails for the next few months, supervising n research students (for a seriously large value of ‘n’) and trying to keep your research ticking over would keep you busy with work? I did think that. But now I know it by acquaintance, and not merely by dispassionate theoretical reflection.

Anyway, I’m not here to moan. I’m here to make you an offer.

Back in the saddle

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I’m back in Melbourne. Z and I have been back for over a week – and I’ve been back at work since the middle of last week, slowly setting up while Z has been settling into school. C returns tomorrow, and the place will feel like home at last. The philosophy blogosphere is all a-flutter with the release of the 2009 Leiter Report. We have known for some time that the troubles here at Melbourne would impact our rating and the result is there for all to see. We’re out of the top ranking in Australia, sinking below Monash in the report’s league tables. Still, it’s nice to recognise that in the discipline rankings we’re notable in Applied Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Mathematical Logic, Philosophy of Mathematics and Philosophical Logic. For a very small core of a department, we do rather well. We have a very nice group from which to rebuild a decent department – the trick will be managing the rebuilding phase. Please wish us luck (or if you can, lend us your support). The trip was wonderful. I needed the break, and I enjoyed visting Pitt, CMU and UConn (thanks Shawn, Anil, Bob, Nuel, Kevin, Steve, Kohei, Horacio, Jc, Katrina, Marcus, Aaron, Colin, Reed, Michael, Scott, and everyone else, for your hospitality), and we had much fun at each stop on the way.

Holiday, in progress

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

We’re having a wonderful time on our holiday, cruising through the southwest of the USA. The sights have been spectacular, varied and unexpected. The highlight so far was Bryce Canyon. The Grand Canyon is grand, and sublime in its own way. Bryce Canyon was totally unexpected: I had no idea erosion could do just that. Z ran around like a madman enjoying the snow, and the awesome view. But the highlight for Z has been throwing snowballs, something doesn’t feature in the average Melbourne kid’s average day. Bigger photos, for those who want to keep up, are accumulating in the gallery. After Zion National Park, we’re off to Las Vegas. There, we’re looking forward to meeting Greg Frost-Arnold in our couple of days there. (As well as the sensory overload of the Strip, of course.)

Holiday!

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:30:40 +1100

We’re going on a holiday! Tomorrow at noon, we’ll be on a Qantas 747 to LA, and at the other end, the three of us will be enjoying four weeks of break. It’s mostly time off for all of us, with a few detours for work talks for me (at Pitt, and at UConn) and for Christine (at Harvard, San Diego, Berkeley and maybe Stanford). It’s our ‘consolation tour’ in place of what was our original plan: a year in the USA, based in Pittsburgh. That fell through—it’s a complicated story, all to do with Melbourne, nothing to do with Pitt, where people have been generous, understanding and gracious. Anyway, I’m not visiting Pitt for a year, but we’re touring the US, having a break, seeing the sights (like the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Las Vegas) and visiting friends. At Pittsburgh, I’ll finally get to meet Shawn whose blog I’ve read for ages, and Anil, whose work I’ve read and learned from for much longer. At UConn, I’ll catch up with Jc, which is always a blast, and Marcus, who’s moved there. I’ve also got the honour of giving the inaugural annual lecture of the UConn Logic Group. I won’t be posting here unless I get web access, and I think that this isn’t a priority on the holiday.

Little Snippets of News

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Here are some random, miscellaneous items of news, concerning what’s been happening around here, around now. It’s exhausting, but lots of fun, to host visitors. Since just before Christmas, we’ve had visits from two good friends (separately) and four family members (one batch of three and one solo), as well as meals with other friends over the Christmas/Summer period. Much fun was had by all. It’s really easy to share good experiences in Melbourne with family and friends. Highlights have included Day 2 of the Boxing Day test, Shane Warne: the musical, and an evening watching (or re-watching) the Sound of Music and singing along. I’ve finally redesigned the site in a way I’m happy to see and to use. Again. There are two causes, one proximate, and one more long-term. The proximate cause was the superabundance of spam to moderate, on my own server. Logging in and cleaning out spam, arriving at the rate of at least one a minute, was depressing. So no more hosted weblog software for me. Instead, this site is now hand crafted on my computer (using Webby—it’s been fun to learn Ruby) and uploaded to the server as a static site. When I want comments on an item, I can implement them using intense debate or some other commenting service.

Merry Christmas, all

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Christmas break here, and I’m taking a break, with visits from family and friends, and then a trip to the USA for a holiday (and for a couple of little side trips to see friends and give a few talks). More about that in a little while. To share the Christmas spirit, I’ll share a favourite carol: The tree of life my soul hath seen, Laden with fruit and always green: The trees of nature fruitless be Compared with Christ the apple tree. His beauty doth all things excel: By faith I know, but ne’er can tell The glory which I now can see In Jesus Christ the apple tree. For happiness I long have sought, And pleasure dearly I have bought: I missed of all; but now I see ’Tis found in Christ the apple tree. I’m weary with my former toil, Here I will sit and rest awhile: Under the shadow I will be, Of Jesus Christ the apple tree. This fruit doth make my soul to thrive, It keeps my dying faith alive; Which makes my soul in haste to be With Jesus Christ the apple tree. The plan is to reboot the blog (and to fix the comment system, which is down for the count just now) for 2009.

Always More...

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

(What follows is a bundle of ideas I’ve been trying to write up for some time. Instead of making it a fully fledged paper, I’ve decided to rough it out first as a blog post. If anything comes of it, I’ll polish it up. Let me know what you think.) Are there any possible worlds? The idea of a point in logical space – at which every proposition is either True or False – seems at the one and the same time compelling and repellant. The notion plays a vital role in the semantics of logics of modality and conditionality, and so, is compelling. It is hard to take modal logic seriously without points in models that play the role of deciding every statement one way other the other. But to take possible worlds seriously as more than a useful fiction has seemed too great a price for many to pay. This squeamishness seems, to many, to have a distinctly ‘ontological’ flavour. Places at which there are blue swans or in which kangaroos have no tails seems to crowd the halls of being with blue swans and tailless kangaroos. We would do better without such things if we can. If we can explain possible worlds away – as propositions, or stories or abstracta or something else relatively tame – then we should.

New Paper: Assertion, Denial and Non-Classical Theories

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’m on a roll with the writing: I’ve managed to get another paper converted from slides-from-a-talk to real, live, words on a page and actual proofs. The paper I’ve worked on over the last couple of days is from my presentation from WCP4 on non-classical theories like non-classical theories of numbers, classes, or truth. I’m very happy with this one, as it’s an application of my recent work – on proof theory – to a topic I’ve been writing about for some time, non-classical theories like naïve theories of classes or of truth. Here’s the abstract. In this paper I urge friends of truth-value gaps and truth-value gluts – proponents of paracomplete and paraconsistent logics – to consider theories not merely as sets of sentences, but as pairs of sets of sentences, or what I call ‘bitheories,’ which keep track not only of what holds according to the theory, but also what fails to hold according to the theory. I explain the connection between bitheories, sequents, and the speech acts of assertion and denial. I illustrate the usefulness of bitheories by showing how they make available a technique for characterising different theories while abstracting away from logical vocabulary such as connectives or quantifiers, thereby making theoretical commitments independent of the choice of this or that particular non-classical logic.

New Paper: Truth Values and Proof Theory

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to get back into writing. Here’s a paper “Truth Values and Proof Theory” that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I presented a research seminar on this material last year – it’s taken me this long to write it up, due to other commitments. Here’s the abstract: In this paper I present an account of truth values for classical logic, intuitionistic logic, and the modal logic S5, in which truth values are not a fundamental category from which the logic is defined, but rather, feature as an idealisation of more fundamental logical features arising out of the proof theory for each system. The result is not a new set of semantic structures, but a new understanding of how the existing semantic structures may be understood in terms of a more fundamental notion of logical consequence. I like these results, as they’re a mix of motivating philosophy, and formal proofs. I think I’m getting a better understanding of the relationship between the [Cut] rule in a sequent calculus and the maximality conditions involved in the behaviour of things like two-valued evaluations, possible worlds and points in model structures for other sorts of logics. It’s not a coincidence that sequents have two sides, and that there are two truth values.

Back! Then off, then back again!

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 15:34:50 +1100

My trip to Guangzhou was super. Thanks, Guoxin, Min and Xuefeng for looking after me and showing me the sights of Guangzhou, and to Professors Ju and Zhu for the invitation. It was a wonderful experience for me, and I look forward to many more visits to China, and to the Institute of Logic and Cognition. Since then, I’ve been off to Canberra for a little workshop on hyperintensionality, organised by David Chalmers. Much fun was had there, too, but I must admit I’m even more confused than I was when I started. It must have been all that talking to Max Cresswell, Lloyd Humberstone and John Bigelow about how semantics works.

Off to Guangzhou

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:13:50 +1100

The primary purpose of this site seems to be travel announcements, so rather than break the trend, I’ll post another travel announcement. On Sunday, I’m off to the Institute of Logic and Cognition at Sun Yat-Sen University, to give three lectures on my research. This is my first trip to China, so I’m more excited (and more nervous) than usual for an overseas trip.

Tartu Pluralism Days #3 and #4

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:12:17 +1100

Phew! What a long rest-of-the conference! I’m now back in Tallinn, after the rest of the conference: 5 talks on Day 3, and one wrapup talk on Day 4. My comments concerning Days 3 and 4 will not be as extensive as those for Days 1 and 2. I liked these as much as the earlier talks – it’s just that my stamina has flagged. Day 3 The day kicked off with Per Martin-Löf presenting ‘Is Logic about Consequence?’ I really enjoyed finally getting the opportunity to hear Per speak, as his view of logical consequence – a particular constructive type theory in which proof objects play a central role – has always fascinated me, but I’ve not looked into it in any depth. Per argued that logic is not primarily about consequence, but must be also about the act of inference, and that distinguishing content and force in the judgement helps us understand the difference. I think that this is clearly right, and in my work since the Logical Pluralism book I’ve started to attend to these issues. In “Multiple Conclusions” I attended to the connection between valid sequents and the acts of assertion and denial. While the account I give there is not one that Per would endorse, the constellation of issues connecting content and force, and the correctness of the steps we make in inferring conclusions from premises, are certainly in the domain of logic.

Tartu Pluralism Day #2

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:46:48 +1100

OK, it’s a short day here today – thankfully, since I’m knackered after Day #1 – with two talks. Last night we dined at an Italian Restaurant, and I learned more about Roger Swyneshed from Stephen Read, than I ever expected to learn. Talks today are: Peter Pagin, on Universalist and Actualist Consequence. Peter connected his work with Kathrin Glüer on relational modality and the semantics of names with considerations concerning the difference between universal validity (truth in all possible worlds whatsoever) and actualist validity (truth in all candidate actual worlds – down the diagonal in a 2D semantics, for example). He indicated that his looks like our distinction, both should count as validity notions which ought to be endorsed. Peter wondered whether this was a problem, and whether there’s a conflict between endorsing universalist validity and actualist validity. This is a good question: I think that this is a good case where being a pluralist makes sense: if we think of validity as classifying deduction steps into those that are valid and those that aren’t, then actualist and universalist validity notions have their place. Take the step from p to actually p. This is OK in one obvious sense (we’d make a mistake to assert p and deny actually p), and bad in another (that step doesn’t work if we are under a counterfactual assumption – we grant that not p, and then consider what would have happened were p the case – we can’t infer from that to actually p).

Tartu Pluralism Day #1

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:57:40 +1100

We’re coming semi-live from Tartu, as long as my computer’s battery lasts, anyway. For live off-the-cuff comments, try my experimental twitter stream, which is profoundly silly, but fun to fiddle with on my phone when my fingers are itchy. The lineup today. Me, giving “Pluralism and Proofs.” I think I went well. Look at Ole’s sneak-preview of what I said, which is pretty-well what I said here. The fact that Dag Prawitz and Per Martin-Löf didn’t eat me alive, but were actually interested, was profoundly reassuring. I’ve only done the slides, not a written version of the paper. Graham Priest on “Logical Pluralism as another application of Chunk-and-Permeate.” This is an interesting project, conceiving of logic’s application to a domain of reasoning as variegated – a domain of discourse can be ‘chunked’ into different bits, where different logics are operative, and then ‘permeation’ relations tell us how facts in one chunk transfer over to facts in another. Graham was using this general setup (which he introduced in earlier work with Bryson Brown, on the infinitesimal calculus – one chunk is where the infinitesimal is zero, another chunk is where it’s nonzero, and you only permeate facts about non-infinitesimals, or something like that).

Tartu

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:19:08 +1100

If this is Thursday, it must be Tartu. The conference starts today, and I’m up first. The nerves have started to jangle just a bit, since the audience is about as high-powered as any in my experience at international conferences. It’s just as well as those who intimidate me the most this time around (due to their all-round awesomeness combined with the fact that this is the first time I’ve met them) – Per Martin-Löf, Dag Prawitz and Johan van Benthem – are uniformly warm and personable. (I can’t help but wonder if that will make it better or worse when the knife gets sunk in to my position.) Depending on time, attention and lots of other factors, I’ll try blogging a bit from the conference, though I won’t promise to keep up through the entire thing. So, if you’re here and I don’t mention your presentation, please don’t hold that against me. It’s hard enough to keep your attention up over an entire conference, let alone write something sensible, meaningful and worth-posting-on-the-internet about each and every talk at a conference. My talk starts in roughly three hours from now. Wish me luck!

Amsterdam!

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:37:56 +1100

I’ve arrived in Amsterdam. Getting here was touch-and-go. My decent wait between my Melbourne → Singapore flight and my Singapore → Amsterdam leg whittled down to around 45 minutes. That involved a trek through the terminal, a tense wait at Transfer Desk C (where people in the queue in front of me were arguing with the staff about visas, and people behind me were concerned that they wouldn’t get on the flight – and were expressing this concern, rather vocally). I got there in the end, but it was a rush. Highlight of the trip? Reading 100 pages of Anil Gupta’s Empricism and Experience. This is very good. It’s (1) logically sharp, (2) applied to philosophical issues of deep concern and most interestingly (3) original and creative, and enlightening. He cuts at deep issues with classical empiricism, at a level of abstraction that – I’m convinced – gets to the heart of the matter in a new and illuminating way. Characterising classical empiricism as the result of a number of theses concerning what is given in experience (that it’s propositional, veridical, and multiply factorisable), and that this combination – rather than the argument from Illusion and the debate surrounding this – that dooms classical empiricism to never explain the epistemic success we have.

Bag packed, let's go!

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:43:42 +1100

Bag packed, ticket & passport at the ready, computer charged, phone charged and synced, books to read located, papers to read/referee/assess all printed or downloaded. I must be going on a flight. The trip takes me from Melbourne to Singapore to Amsterdam to Tallinn to Tartu, and then I retrace my steps to get back here in ten days. That’s too much plane and airport time for my money, but I fully expect that this will be worth the discomfort. Oh, the day-and-a-bit stopover in Amsterdam should be worth it too.

Pain, stress, redundancies, another day at the office

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:35:03 +1100

I had thought that we (the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne) were trying to keep our difficulties an internal affair, but apparently we’re not. Given that this is all public news, I suppose I could comment. The take-home-message from this memo from the Dean: (1) The budget in the Arts Faculty is not yet in the black, though it’s getting better, and (2) The plan is for more voluntary ‘redundancies’ (this is now Round 3), this time with the shadow of involuntary redundancies is we don’t get enough voluntary ones to right the ship. The discipline of Philosophy took an almighty hit at the end of Round 1. At the end of 2007 we had 5 departures out of a full-time teaching staff of 10.5. So we’ve done rather more than our part of the deal in righting the budgetary situation – except for the very real problem of ‘overcorrecting,’ making it rather more difficult to teach a coherent Philosophy major in the BA (with keen, bright students ready to learn), supervise our wonderful graduate students, and get research done. There are so few philosophers left, this round of redundancies is not directed at us, but we feel for our colleagues down the corridors, and across the campus.

Random interesting fact (one in an intermittent series)

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 08:05:55 +1100

Out of the five Australians who were chosen as nominating editors of this year’s Philosophers’ Annual, four are from The University of Melbourne. The lucky 4 are Hazen, Schroeter (François), Schroeter (Laura), and Restall. (The other Australian is David Chalmers.) 4 out of 28 is a good strike rate (that’s 1 in 7, if you’re too lazy to do the mental arithmetic). This is a teensy bit higher than the representation of University of Melbourne Philosophers in the Whole Wide World.

Breaking Silence

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:11:34 +1100

I’ve been pretty quiet here, lately. I’ve been busy with things, getting stuff done. I hope to be posting more soon, when various up-in-the-air things are more settled. Still, here are some recent highlights which are worth sharing. WCP4 was a blast. It was very busy, but lots of fun was had: it was good to catch up with many folks I hadn’t seen for ages including (Diderik Batens, Bryson Brown, Francesco Paoli, Ole Hjortland, Jerry Seligman, Gill Russell and especially JC, who I hadn’t seen in an all-too-long period of time) and to make the acquaintance of new folks (Francesco Berto, David Ripley, Andreas Pietz, Ben Burgis, Patrick Girard and many others). It’s been lots of fun to have Andi Pietz, Dave Ripley and Ole Hjortland hang out with us in Melbourne this semester. I think they’re having fun, and I’m having fun talking logic with them. Reasoning & Uncertainty is my new level 2/3 undergraduate subject. I’ve got a class of 60, doing philosophy of probability, decision theory, etc., and we’re having a lot of fun. Having students turn up to class, enthusiastic, despite 9am lectures, is something to behold. Conrad Asmus is my tutor, and working with him makes things very easy.

Logical Pluralism, in Tartu

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:42:39 +1100

I’m off to Tartu in late August, for what looks like a really fun conference on logical pluralism. The list of speakers is extraordinarily high-powered. Having so many smart people talk about logical pluralism is exciting, and not a little bit scary. If you’re interested in coming along, let the organisers know by July 1. If you’re interested in the state of the art on logical pluralism, this conference is the place to be. Thanks, Daniel, Marcus and Peter for organising this. It’s going to be my highlight of the second half of the year.

Informal Logic: now open access

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:09:44 +1100

The journal Informal Logic, on argumentation theory and related issues, is now open access and online, after a 27 year history as a print (closed access) journal. The editors have sent out a request for interested parties to subscribe. Subscription is free: just fill in this form on the site. The editors are aiming get enough subscribers to secure funding from the SSHRC to keep the journal going now that they’re not taking paid subscriptions. This is a worthy goal: the more open access journals, the better! So, if you’re at all interested in argumentation theory and informal logic, please sign up.

We're in the news...

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:03:58 +1100

Alas, we are in the news for not-very-good reasons. Given the recent retirements in Philosophy at Melbourne, it would be worse than surprising if any of the new redundancies hit Philosophy. However, the atmosphere around here not good – what concerns us most is the scope for new hiring when the Faculty as a whole is in the red so much. It is very hard to effectively plan ahead when so much is in flux and you’re not sure whether your efforts will benefit the discipline. I hope to find out more when we hear what the Dean and the Vice Chancellor has to say at a meeting of all Arts Faculty staff this Tuesday. Let’s hope that they can articulate something that goes beyond slashing positions to rectify a budget hole. I’m sorry to start posting on something so grim, but “trouble at t’mill” has been on our minds since mid-2007. I hope to post more about more enjoyable things soon. Meanwhile, take a look at my writing page. There are quite a few new items there.

Sorry...

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:40:20 +1100

This has been a good day. (Here is the video — in three parts.) As PJK said, when you change the government, you change the country…

Melbourne Philosophy Undergraduate Workshop

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:32:02 +1100

Are you an undergraduate student in philosophy, or do you know any undergraduate philosophy students? If so, you might be interested in the Melbourne Philosophy Undergraduate Workshop to be held from September 21 to 23. This will be a chance for Australian and New Zealand undergraduate students who are interested in philosophy, to get together to talk philosophy with the faculty here at the University of Melbourne. Given that we have a broad range of interests, from Continental and Asian Philosophy, through Ethics and Social Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, to Metaphysics and Logic, this will be a fun weekend. The deadline for applying for a grant to come to the workshop is coming up very soon: it’s August 15. For more details of how to be involved, read on… During the weekend of September Friday 21 to Sunday 23, Melbourne University’s School of Philosophy will host the Melbourne Philosophy Undergraduate Workshop, aimed at third and fourth year students who intend to continue in any branch of academic philosophy. Friday evening will begin with a Welcome Meeting followed by dinner on Lygon Street, Carlton. On Saturday, Melbourne faculty members will give presentations and/or lead seminars on a range of topics – from Continental and Asian Philosophy, through Philosophy of Science, to Metaphysics and Logic.

Talk on the Philosopher's Zone

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:26:54 +1100

I gave a talk on Logic in Australia at Monash University’s Arts in Action festival in early June. (This was a part of a long-running project on a History of Australasian Philosophy. The talk is now appearing, in two parts, on the (wonderful) ABC Radio National program, The Philosopher’s Zone. The first part was broadcast this weekend, but the audio can be downloaded from their website for the next four weeks. That was the first half of the talk, on possible worlds. The second half, on paraconsistency, will be broadcast next week. In the talk, I made heavy use of digital projection. I think you can follow the talk without it, but if you want to see the pretty pictures and diagrams, you can download the slides of the talk here: Logic in Australia.mov 22.5MB Quicktime file. (Navigate it by clicking or by using the arrow keys.) Logic in Australia.pdf 3.3MB PDF file. (This does not have all of the fancy transitions in the quicktime file.) Logic in Australia.key.zip 3.8MB compressed keynote file. (This has all the fancy transitions, and is the original document, but it requires Apple’s Keynote presentation program to view.)

... and we're back

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:36:53 +1100

I’ve been back in Melbourne for a while. The trip was very enjoyable, but I’ve returned to Melbourne with a chest bug, which has meant that I’m not quite up to full speed yet. All non-essential activities (and alas, some essential ones, I fear) are progressing much more slowly than usual. Here are some highlights of the trip. Logica 2007 with so many great people, and then exploring Prague, catching up with Richard, and getting to know more Czech logicians. Overdosing on Medieval logic in Bonn, and especially talking over Bradwardine with Stephen Read. Exploring København with Christine and Zachary. It was my second visit there, and Christine’s umpteenth, so it was a lot easier to get around given than we were more familiar with the place. Navigating our way on the trains and buses from Århus to Legoland in Billund with Zachary, and then enjoying all there was to see and do there. Meeting everyone at Logic Colloquium in Wrocław – and especially thinking through – with Pavel Pudlák, Albert Visser, Alasdair Urquhart and Vedran Čačić – a counterexample to a conjecture of Grzegorczyk’s. The result of our thinking is here. Most of the thinking got done in a hike in the hills near Wrocław.

... arrived!

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:19:55 +1100

I’ve arrived in a sunny and summery Prague. The locals tell me they it’s cooler than the unseasonably warm that it’s been in the last few years, but it seems nicely summery for one who has come from a winter. I’m now chatting in the office with Timothy, Jarda and Vladimir, and monopolising Jarda’s computer while the others do work preparing for the conference.

Heading off...

Sun, 17 Jun 2007 14:45:28 +1100

I’m waiting in Gate 9 at the international terminal Melbourne Airport, getting ready to board my first flight on my trip to Europe. It’s not a short hop – Singapore/Frankfurt/Prague, but at least I’ll be in a very nice place for what to all appearances will be a very enjoyable conference. From then, it’s Bonn, and then Denmark (København, and Århus) to meet up with Christine and Zachary, to have a little holiday while Christine does some work. On the way out, it’s Wrocław, where I’ll play a little part in a big conference before heading home with Zachary. Please, let me know if you’re going to be around anywhere in the vicinity during this European trip. I’ll be catching up with some mates, but it’s always fun to meet more friends. (If I owe you an email, that’s because I’ve been ridiculously busy preparing for this trip, teaching courses, looking after the boy, etc… But I’m ploughing through my backlog, and I might just get there in the next few weeks. One can hope!)

Not 'gargoyle' but 'finial'

Thu, 03 May 2007 12:11:54 +1100

You learn something new every day. What we mistakenly called gargoyles are actually finials. (I’ve corrected the caption on the photo – in case you don’t understand what Christine meant.) Christine took that photo on a finial-photographing expedition with Zachary and a friend from his class in school, on Zachary’s birthday a few weeks ago.

Logic Job at Auckland

Thu, 03 May 2007 09:41:45 +1100

As I’ve said before, logic jobs in Philosophy Departments are pretty rare. Well, as Richard mentioned earlier, there’s a logic job in Philosophy at Auckland. A little bird has told me that even though the deadline is close (May 18), they’re keen to get the word out to get as many applicants as possible. So, if you qualify (PhD or equivalent in philosophy, teaching experience, some research publications) then hop to it and apply. The details are here.

Logica 2007 is coming up

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:39:32 +1100

The program for Logica 2007 has been released, and it looks great. It looks like it will be seriously good, and it will be my first ever conference held in a monestery.

Book Launch! Inside Lawyers' Ethics

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 06:51:19 +1100

This Tuesday, I’m going to a party: It’s a launch for Christine’s book Inside Lawyers’ Ethics, which she’s coauthored with Adrian Evans from Monash Law School. The book will be launched by Louise Sylvan, from the ACCC. This party will be held at the Monash University Law Chambers in the city. Congratulations, Christine and Adrian! It seems to be the season for book launches. Simon Holt’s God Next Door is launching on April 19 and Matt Carter’s Minds and Computers is launching on April 23. (Activity here on the site will be quiet as I attempt to plough through a big teaching load and rather too many work commitments…)

In Banff: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday...

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 04:50:12 +1100

Liveblogging talks was a bit beyond me, but I’ve been keeping up with a few notes on the talks here in Banff. They’re not as extensive as my notes on Branden and Delia’s talks, but they’ll give you an idea of the fun we’ve been having here. (After lunch today, there’s a batch of five talks, including mine. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to write up comments on those, since before dinner I have to catch a shuttle to Calgary to catch a plane early tomorrow morning.) So, after the jump, comments on the talks: Monday afternoon JC Beall & Michael Glanzberg Truth and Paradox Apparently, this was a very nice talk, but I wasn’t there! I misread the program, and thought it was at 3pm and not 2pm. So, I missed out on it. At least it gave JC a chance to make some jokes at my expense… I’m looking at the slides to catch up, since I am talking about truth and paradoxes too. Kai Wehmeier: Identity is not a relation Kai’s elegant talk was on Wittgensteinian predicate logic: logic in which distinct variables must denote distinct objects, and in which we do not have an identity predicate.

My talk in Banff

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:23:51 +1100

I’ve finished up the slides for my talk in Banff. If you’re interested, the slides are available here Modal Models for Bradwardine’s Truth [1.3MB pdf] It’s a talk giving a modal logic interpretation for a medieval theory of truth due to Thomas Bradwardine, as it’s reconstructed by Stephen Read. This will hopefully help out Steve’s project, by providing tools for exploring the strength of this kind of theory of truth. I’ll write up an extended paper version of this after getting comments from the audience. Since the audience contains people who know a heck of a lot more than me about truth and about modal logic, I’m a little more on the anxious side than usual for such things. Wish me luck!

In Banff: Delia Graff Fara

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:37:33 +1100

The next Banff talk is Delia Graff Fara, on “Relative identity and de re modality.” She’s defending the thesis that material objects are identical to the matter of which they’re constituted. For example, the statue Goliath (G) is identical to the lump of clay Lumpel (L). She wants to allow that L = G, while having L and G differing in their temporal and modal properties. So, for example, in the future, a some more clay might become a part of the statue G, while not becoming a part of the lump of clay L. The original lump of clay is still present (and is joined by more clay), the original statue is still present, and is now larger. You can see why this is desirable: after the addition of more clay, there’s still only one statue there, and the old statue did not disappear only to be replaced by a new one. Delia wants to preserve the truth of claims that statues don’t have all their parts essentially, while portions of matter do have their parts essentially, while holding that statues are identical to portions of matter. How can we do this? I find this kind of work interesting, but deeply difficult.

In Banff: Branden Fitelson on Formal Epistemology

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 03:22:30 +1100

The first talk in Banff is by Branden Fitelson, who is giving a ‘“Survey” of Formal Epistemology: some propaganda, and an example’. It’s a part of the general movement towards carving out the discipline of ‘formal epistemology’. It’s a partly political talk, recounting the motivation for Formal Epistemology. He recounted Bob Meyer’s manifesto of the “Logicians Liberation League.” It’s worth recounting the section Branden quoted. Do not be deceived, Establishment pigs (this means you too, Establishment dogs). The subservience of past generations of logicians does not mean that we shall bear forever our treatment as animals (you barnyard fowl). We are human beings (you swine). You are living in a day when logicians will not any longer endure your taunts, your slurs, your insults (you filthy vermin). In the name of A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell we gather; in the spirit of R. Carnap and A. Tarski, we march; by the word of W. V. O. Quine, we shall prevail. Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons.

In Banff

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:50:47 +1100

I’m in sunny and wintry Banff at the Mathematical Methods in Philosophy workshop. The program is very full, and I won’t be able to report on everything going on here. (Heck, I haven’t even reported back from our time in India, despite popular demand.) So, please let me give my apologies in advance if youre talk doesn’t get reported here. It’s probably because I was so interested in it I had to think and not blog.

Off to India...

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 22:17:22 +1100

I’ve been having too much fun and doing too much work lately to post anything here. On the work side, our proposal to teach first-year logic in an interdisciplinary way as a “breadth” subject to all students in the “new generation” degrees from 2008, has passed the first hurdle. We have a bucket of money to develop the course over the next year. Lots of work, but lots of fun. On the fun side, we’ve been getting ready to go to India for our family holiday. Landing in Mumbai, we go straight to Pune for Christmas with friends, and then we wend our way down the south-east coast on our way to Trivandrum. We’re off tomorrow, and we’ll be back in Melbourne on January 15. See you in 2007.

Scenes from an afternoon

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 20:31:49 +1100

My son, Z, asks me Dad, what is Kantian freedom? some time later Dad, what is a conceptual repertoire? No, he’s not a philosophical prodigy. He was curious about what I was reading, and I explained that I had an essay written by a student, and I had to figure out how good it was. It happened to be an essay about John McDowell’s Mind and World, primarily on animal perception and cognition. We ended up having a good conversation about whether or not our cat, Erasmus can think (Z thought ‘yes’, and I confessed being to being thoroughly confused on the matter after having read too many McDowell essays). I’m not a McDowell expert, but I’m the second examiner, brushing up on my knowledge by reading a batch of honours essays. On the whole, they’ve been very good. (Before this week I’d never seen a philosophy essay in the form of an extended interview with Andrew Denton. “So, John, tell us how we can get off the seesaw between the Myth of the Given and the frictionless void…”) After this, it’s my logic honours essays, and three honours theses. Could be another long evening.

Horn tooting

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 11:36:20 +1100

Two bits of horn tooting for today: First, from the famous and notorious Philosophical Gourmet Report. Brian Leiter pointed out that the report hit the newspaper here in Australia. The point of the little note in the Higher Education section of The Australian was that the ANU topped the rankings of Australian philosophy departments (as it has in the past), over Sydney and Melbourne. Curiously the article picks out discipline specific areas where Melbourne scored higher than ANU (Applied Ethics) and where ANU scored higher (Metaphysics). You wouldn’t be surprised that Melbourne did well in Applied Ethics, since we have a centre devoted to it, and there are lots of good things going on in the field. We ranked very well internationally in that area (we end up in the cohort of the top 7-18 departments in the survey). What The Australian’s report didn’t mention was that Melbourne also scored respectably well in Philosophical Logic. (Here, we’re in the cohort of the top 5-12.) I suppose one salient difference is that in philosophical logic, we don’t have a named centre: we just a few people who do it. Here’s the second bit of shameless self-promotion concerning logic at Melbourne: You might have heard about the process of institutional change taking place at this University.

A Philosophical Poll: on a priori knowledge of possibilities

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:56:32 +1100

I’d like to guage some philosophical opinions. (I don’t have many of my own. Most of them have been worn down by years of logical abuse.) First, some pre-requisites: Let’s understand ‘possibly’ as a metaphysical sort of possibility. If it helps, think of it as truth in some possible world, no matter how outlandish. Let’s understand a priori knowledge in the way that all of the people who talk about a priori knowledge understand the term. Plausibly, we can’t know that Hesperus is Phosphorus a priori, but, plausibly, we can know the Chinese Remainder Theorem a priori. Here’s the question. Can we have a priori knowledge of any proposition of the form possibly ~p where p is true? (We don’t need to know a priori that p is true.) Speaking rather briskly, do we have a priori knowledge that fatalism is false? (Where ‘fatalism’ is the thesis that everything that is true is metaphysically necessary.) This is fudging a scope distinction, commuting a propositional quantifier under the knowledge operator, but that doesn’t seem like too much of a worry. If you think that there’s a proposition ‘@’ true in the actual world alone (of any of the possible worlds accessible from the actual world) then, the question reduces to this:

Party on Tuesday

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 17:36:51 +1100

You’re all invited to a party on Tuesday, October 17 (5:30pm for 6pm) at the Melbourne University Bookshop to celebrate the publication of five books in Logic and Philosophy here in the Philosophy Department at Melbourne. Here are the books: Models, Truth and Realism, Barry Taylor. Doubt Truth to be a Liar, Graham Priest. In Contradiction, Graham Priest. Logic, Greg Restall Logical Pluralism, JC Beall and Greg Restall. Details of the party are found on this flyer. If you’re planning to come, you need to email the bookshop (the address is on the flyer) to RSVP for catering purposes. I’m really pleased to be a part of such a productive research community, and it’s nice to throw a little party to recognise that. Do come if you can make it: I hope to see you there!

Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 2

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:30:54 +1100

Here’s my (much delayed) answer to the second of Vincent Hendricks and John Symons’ five questions about Formal Philosophy. What example from your work illustrates the role formal methods can play in philosophy? I’ll focus on one example from some of my recent work. In the last few years I have been working on topics in proof theory and connections between the way we can conceive of the structure of proofs and concerns in the theory of meaning. The idea that the meaning of a word or a concept might be usefully explicated by giving an account of its inferential role is a common one – the work of Ned Block, Bob Brandom and Michael Dummett are three very different examples of ways to take this idea seriously. It is a truism that meaning has some sort of connection with use, and use in reasoning and inference is a very important part of any account of use. It has seemed to me that if we are going to take take inferential role as playing its part in a theory of meaning, then we had better use the best available tools for giving an account of proof. The theory of proofs should have something to teach philosophers who have interests in semantics.

An idea...

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 15:43:30 +1100

I just had an Idea today. From here, it seems like a Really Neat Idea. (Having the idea made me remember what it feels like to prove something you’ve been struggling with for a long time: a mix of excitement, wonder, awe, relief, and much else besides. It’s welcome to be reminded of why I like working in logic.) This idea isn’t a new theorem, but what seems to me to be a simpler proof of an already proved theorem. I’ll try writing it up in the next couple of days and I’ll report back. It could dissolve into dust and vapour, but if it survives the writeup process, I’ll be one happy logician. If it doesn’t survive, at least I’ll have learned something new.

Visits

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 09:39:37 +1100

In the Philosophy Department we’re pleased to be hosting some short visits from Gillian Russell, and Jon Cohen. It’s neat to be in a place where smart people come to visit, think and talk to you. Last week we had a couple of logic seminars from neat west-coast of the USA types: Mike Titelbaum from Berkeley and Stanley Peters from Stanford. At drinks after the logic seminar I met Mark Steedman from Edinburgh, and it was nice to have a symmetric reaction “oh, you’re X, I’m Y” for X and Y in {‘MS’,‘GR’}. He was able to fill me in on the very interesting work done on substructrual logics, categorial grammar, and statistical parsing.

Ten Questions about Books

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 22:02:48 +1100

Since Jo asked so nicely, I’ll add my answers to the one book meme that’s going around the place. One book that changed your life Robert C. Roberts, Spirituality and Human Emotion. It’s because of this book that I’m a philosopher, believe it or not. Reading it, I saw that the philosophy needn’t be self-contained, but could be used to say something productive and interesting about matters of human concern. In my undergraduate years I spent a lot of time reading theology, and I learned most from the literature that was philosohpical in technique and in style. One book you’ve read more than once C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My out-and-out favourite of the Narnia Chronicles. One book you’d want on a desert island The Gospel according to John Following Jo’s example, I’ll treat different biblical books as different books. For me it’s a toss-up for different gospels, but John’s the one I’m least ‘at home’ with and I think it bears repeated readings, as is fitting on a desert island. One book that made you laugh Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad. It’s an intellectual laugh mostly, rather than slapstick, but there are laughs on each page of these wise, knowing, sensitive tales of the robot constructors Trurl and Klaupacius.

On the Interview

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 19:24:00 +1100

I’ve listened to the interview, and I’m pretty happy with how it went. The ABC team did a good job with the editing (I think the interview I recorded was a bit over 30 minutes). I never thought that I’d live to hear the day that someone explained the semantics of first degree entailment on national radio, and I was especially grateful that my little plug for Richard Sylvan and Bob Meyer didn’t end up on the cutting-room floor. For your edification, the transcript is of the interview here and the audio is an MP3 file available for the next four weeks. You can subscribe to a podcast of the program if you like to hear this kind of thing more regularly. If you’re visiting my website on following the link from the Philosopher’s Zone page and you want to know more about logic, there are a few things you could do. Download my little introductory article “Logic” in a nice volume called the Fundamentals of Philosophy edited by John Shand. My textbook, also imaginatively entitled Logic is an introduction to the subject, geared to philosophy students. You can order it from Amazon US or Amazon UK. If you’re interested in pluralism about logic, the topic I ended my discussion with Alan on, then you’ll want to have a look at my book Logical Pluralism co-authored with my friend JC Beall from the University of Connecticut.

On Politics

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 20:36:02 +1100

In the car this evening, Z (our five-and-a-bit year-old son) says, unprompted, Dad, I’ve been thinking … I reply “yes …” … why does Kim Beazely want to be Prime Minister? It’s nice to know that he’s keeping up with his world. It’s telling that we found it difficult to answer the question.

Interviewed again

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 14:58:15 +1100

This morning I trooped down to the ABC Melbourne studios in Southbank, to sit in a ‘Tardis’ booth to talk to Alan Saunders of The Philosopher’s Zone on logic, the liar paradox and other stuff I think about. Alan was feeling unwell and suffering from a croaky voice, so the interview that goes to air might be more of a monologue than what took place in the recording. Regardless, it was good fun to do the interview: Alan’s a good interviewer and he knows his stuff. Tune in or download the interview once it airs on July 22. (The ABC keeps these program files online for a month.) If you, like me, are interested in this kind of radio program, you can always subscribe to the podcast to get the latest program when it is released. Last month I was interviewed for The Age, this month, it’s radio. What is coming next?

Assorted Observations

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 23:23:59 +1100

It’s been difficult to get back into the swing of work, but I’m slowly clawing my way through. Jetlag has been much worse on my return than on the European end of the trip. I’ve also been concentrating on my parental duties, as my Significant Other is taking her conference trip. Playing with your son is much more fun than doing niggly administrative tasks. If you’re awaiting an email reply from me, it should be coming in the next few days. The delay is nothing personal – the queue is rather long right now. The promised observations: When you speak to a radio presenter on the telephone, it sounds eerily like you are talking to a radio. If you buy your coffee on campus, pricing varies from place-to-place. Now, despite the fact that Plush Fish (the sushi place), Chill Out (the rice paper rolls and juice place) and Café Suave (the place in the commerce courtyard, near the Ballieu Library) are run by the same people, the price you pay extra for your fairtrade coffee differs from place to-place. This week I have paid a 30 cent premium for faitrade at Plush Fish and Chill Out but only 10 cents at Café Suave.

Back home

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:01:12 +1100

I’m back in Melbourne, after my whirlwind jaunt in Nancy. I was in too much of a rush on Day 4 of the conference to post thoughts on Day 3 or Day 4. I promise I’ll do that once I recover from my jetlag and deal with my growing pile of mail, both snail and electronic. In other news, the nicest thing about reading this article on blogging in this morning’s newspaper was hearing Z’s laugh when he recognised that a picture of me was in the newspaper. “That’s you, Dad!” he chortled when he recognised me.

Here in Nancy, Day 2

Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:29:03 +1100

Nancy Day 2 was a quiet as far as the official program went. Talks were scheduled in the morning leaving the afternoon free. Michael Lynch and I took in the Musée des Beaux-Arts and talked philosophy and much else with Peter van Inwagen, Scott Shalkowski and others into the evening and late in the night. The morning featured a well-put-together talk by Jonathan Lowe on the contrast between his robust essentialism and conceptualism. For Jonathan, conceptualism collapses into a global anti-realism because it really requires a kind of essentialism about concepts and agents themselves. I also attended a helpful presentation by Mathieu Marion on game semantics for logic. (For an introduction to game semantics, try the Stanford Encyclopedia entry by Wilfrid Hodges.) Mathieu contrasted the agonistic conception of game semantics according to which the two players (proponent and opponent, or Abelard and Eloise) are competing against one another. He proposed a cooperative understanding in which the players are building something together, like a proof. This strikes me as plausible. The devil, however, is in the detail. The distinctive feature of game semantics is that the proof is not a play of a game, or something you can look back on as having constructed.

Here in Nancy, Day 1

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:32:42 +1100

I’m conference blogging here in Nancy at the Realism/Anti-Realism conference. It’s been neet, chatching up with people I’ve not seen for a while. Today, after a not-completely-rested-night as I tried to sleep through a rather rowdy French community beeping car horns after their 3-1 victory in the round of 16, I went to five talks. Here’s the quick run-down. Jacques Dubucs talked about his feasible antirealism, according to which feasible computable functions should play a role in meaning theory rather than the computable functions of more traditional constructive logic. Dubucs and Mathieu Marion and Shahid Rahman are interested in the application of substructural logics (and game semantics) to these matters, and I should have a look at this more. There are interesting connections between feasibility and structural rules, worth pursuing. John Cogburn gave a nice paper on Moore’s paradox for anti-realists. The Moorean inference is the step from p to “I believe that p”. This inference is clearly wrong, but on semantically anti-realist lights (at least, for those kinds of constructivists for whom an argument is valid if warrant for the premises can be converted into warrant for the conclusion) then it seems valid enough. If I have warrant for p, then this warrant is the kind of thing that convinces me that p is true — I’ll believe it.

Off to France

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:47:18 +1100

Today I’m flying off to Nancy for (Anti)Réalismes Logique & Métaphysique. It should be an interesting meeting: the program is here. If I get time to edit my paper on the plane, I’ll try posting the text of the paper before I give it, internet access permitting.

Teaching in Semester 2, 2006

Sun, 25 Jun 2006 15:18:25 +1100

In Semester 2, which starts on July 31, I’ll be teaching an honours seminar 161-438 Logic and Philosophy, in which we cover proof theory and its applications to semantics.

Key Ideas in the theory of proofs #1: The Duality of Proofs and Counterexamples

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 11:05:52 +1100

Now that my undergraduate teaching is done for the semester, I can devote more time to research. I’m going to use this place to post some material from my proof theory project. My goal is to present some key ideas in an accessible way. Today’s idea is the duality between proofs and counterexamples. Proofs: You can think of a valid argument as underwritten by a proof. A proof leads from the premises to the conclusions, and shows how the conclusions follow from the premises. An invalid argument from premises P to conclusions C is one for which there is no proof leading from P to C. Different theories of proofs will characterise these in different ways (natural deduction, Hilbert-style axiom systems, Gentzen-style sequent systems, tableaux, etc.) but at heart, a proof is a formal structure that bears witness to a valid argument. Counterexamples: You can think of an invalid argument as witnessed by a counterexample. A counterexample is a way of making the premises true and the conclusions untrue, and it shows how the conclusions say something more than what is present in the premises. A valid argument from premises P to conclusions C is one for which there is no counterexample rendering P true and C not.

This football game is pretty tense...

Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:00:51 +1100

When the team are 0–1 down at the eighty-fourth minute, you don’t think they’ll win 3–1. Update: I’m glad I don’t have to detail the match, and can point you to this excellent piece of writing instead. It’s a reflection on the match by Jeremy, a first-year Arts/Engineering student here at the University of Melbourne. He’s one of the contributors at the First_year@UniMelb blog.

Interviewed

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:05:05 +1100

This afternoon I was interviewed by Lisa Mitchell from The Age about academic blogging. She’s writing an article for the education supplement (published on Mondays). It’s a piece with a long lead time. I wonder if I’ll recognise anything I said in the article, and if she’ll quote me. (I blabbed on for 25 minutes. I hope there was some useful raw material there somewhere.)

End of Semester

Wed, 31 May 2006 10:22:50 +1100

We’ve finished lectures for the semester, and I’m officially recovering. It was fun teaching Logic and Non-Classical Logic, but it was also a hard slog. Next semester I have a light teaching load, with my honours logic seminar. The highlight last week was Richard Zach’s visit. He gave two nice talks. One on vagueness and logic – setting out different options for logic and semantics in the light of vagueness – and the other, on the epsilon calculus. (How Richard managed to get through the content of his big paper with Georg Moser in an hour with each of us following everything, I have no idea, but he did.) Now I have to slog through some marking, and some writing. This weekend, however, I’m in Adelaide for a little ``logic axis’’ meeting. I’ll give a talk on fixing up Prawitz’s proof theory for the positive fragment of the relevant logic R. I’m still working on the written version of the paper.

On Regret and Slingshots

Tue, 02 May 2006 23:18:45 +1100

Here’s a silly puzzle for you. Regret seems like a factive emotion. You can’t truly regret that you forgot to feed the cat today if, indeed, you did feed the cat. If you did feed the cat and you forgot that you did, then it seems to you like you’re regretting not feeding the cat, but you’re as mistaken about your regret as you are about feeding the cat. You think you didn’t feed the cat and you’re sorry that you didn’t, but that’s not regret. Or so some people think, anyway. Now, suppose that regret is factive like that. Then it’s plausible to think that the circumstance you’re regretting is in some way a ‘component’ of that regretting. (On this view, that’s why it’s factive: if the circumstance of my not-feeding-the-cat isn’t there, then I can’t be related to that circumstance in “regretful” manner.) If this is the case, then it’s plausible to think that disjunctive regrets are a strange sort of thing. Regretting that p or q might be a relationship to a situation in which p is true (when it’s the truth of p that makes the disjunction true) or one in which q is true (the other case).

On the Cable Guy Paradox

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 20:23:52 +1100

Have you ever waited for a tradesperson to come to your place? Alan Hájek uses this example in an article entitled “The Cable Guy Paradox.” The issue is straightforward. You and I are waiting for the cable guy who has given you a window between 8am and 4pm for his arrival. He will arrive after 8am, and before 4pm. We while away our time with a bet. Before 8am, we bet on whether he’ll come in the morning or the afternoon. It seems that there’s no reason to choose between the interval (8am,12noon) and (12noon,4pm). (Let’s assume, with Hájek that it’s probability zero that the moment of arrival is 12noon exactly.) It’s equally likely that he arrive in the morning and in the afternoon. Now, there seems to be an asymmetry. Hájek cites the ‘Avoid Certain Frustration Principle’: Suppose you now have a choice between two options. You should not choose one of these options if you are certain that a rational future self of yours will prefer that you had chosen the other one – unless both your options have this property. Hájek seems that using this principle, we should bet on the afternoon and not the morning, since whenever the cable guy arrives, it will be after 8am (we specified that in the setup of the problem), so the will be some interval of time (8 am, 8+ε am) during which I will take the probability of the morning arrival to be something smaller than the probability of the afternoon arrival, and I will regret my choice for the bet if I had chosen morning.

Masses of Formal Philosophy: Question 1

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 01:08:06 +1100

As I mentioned before, I’ve been thinking about Vincent Hendricks and John Symons’ five questions about Formal Philosophy. This seems like as good a place as any to answer them. So, today, I’ll have a crack at the most autobiographical of the questions: Why were you initially drawn to formal methods? I suppose the natural way to interpret this question is something like “why do formal methods rather than anything else in philosophy” but in my case I’d rather answer the related question “why, given that you’re interested in formal methods, apply them in philosophy rather than elsewhere.” I started off my academic life as an undergraduate student in mathematics, because I was good at mathematics and studying it more seemed like a good idea at the time. I enjoyed mathematics a great deal. At the University of Queensland, where I was studying, there was a special cohort of “Honours” students right from the first year. You were taught more research-oriented and rigourous subjects than were provided for the “Pass” students. This meant that we had a small cohort of students, who knew each other pretty well, studied together and learned a lot. I could see myself making an academic career in mathematics.

Happy 5 day!

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 11:34:44 +1100

Happy fifth birthday, Z! Today it’s unwrapping presents, a quiet family breakfast and lego-making, talking to grand-dad on the telephone, a little practice on the new bike, some school, and dinner together with more fiddling around with the new presents. The Party is on Saturday. (Wish us luck. We’ve not hosted a fifth birthday party before.)

Well, that was easy...

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 21:33:50 +1100

Sometimes technologies can be use for purposes the inventors didn’t really intend. I’m sure that when the designers of the iTunes music store set the thing up, they didn’t expect that you’d be able to use it to download esoteric papers in philosophical logic. But you can. All I had to do was submit the RSS feed of my papers to the iTunes store on this form, after tweaking it to include the information that the iTunes store is looking for. A day later, there it is. Now you can use iTunes to automatically download any papers I write. (Though, you can’t yet get them automatically downloaded onto your iPod for you to read, as the iPod doesn’t have a pdf reader – at least not yet.) This works since iTunes knows what to do with pdf files: if you buy tracks from the music store with lyrics or booklets, they can come as pdf files, which iTunes can store and hand over to your system to display. My feed that I use to serve up pointers to my recent publications has the same general structure as the feeds used in podcasting. The difference is that my publications feed just contained pointers to webpages on which you could download pdf files, while podcasting feeds contain enclosures of pdf files.

The Shifty Salesman

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 12:16:16 +1100

Su Rogerson has brought to my attention a lovely rendition of Curry’s paradox, due to Peter Geach, in his Reason and Argument (Blackwell, 1976), pages 93–95. The discussion takes place at a car yard. I’ll quote the discussion, interspersed with some commentary. (I’m quoting from a draft of Su Rogerson’s thesis, and not from the text. I’ll check this for correctness when I have access to the volume.) Customer: I’ll buy the car only if, if I buy the car, you’ll guarantee it. You might suspect that this claim of the customer’s is not the best starting point for a car purchase negotiation, and that rather too much is conceded straight away. But that’s not quite right. The customer has only conceded that the guarantee (conditional on the purchase) is necessary for the purchase, not sufficient. (The claim is an ‘only if’ not an ‘if’.) Salesman: But let’s suppose that if you buy the car, then I’ll guarantee it: what then? Customer: Then I’ll buy the car. That’s the crucial concession. It’s all downhill from here. Salesman: Can I hold you to both the things you’ve just said? Customer: Certainly. The customer is going to regret saying that. Salesman: Then you are logically committed to buying the car anyhow, even if I don’t guarantee it.

Enclosures

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 12:59:05 +1100

I’ve finally added enclosures to my RSS feed of papers. This means that if you subscribe to my papers page using that feed, and you’re using an RSS reader that handles enclosures (this feature is primarily used for podcasts), then you can get it to download my papers automatically. This has the side effect that you can subscribe to me in iTunes: That is weird. (I wonder if I should submit this podcast to the iTunes Music Store?)

2006 redesign in progress

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 22:29:33 +1100

I’m trying to neaten up this place a bit, and I need your help and advice. Have a look here and let me know what you think of it. I’m trying to make it easier to see what’s new, what’s changed, etc. In particular, you look down to find links to other new stuff on the site. This opens up the sidebars for four things. The most recent picture, my “recently browsed” linklist, my list of events (which I need to update) and finally, a very modest list of links to friends and colleagues. So, what do you think? Clearer? Simpler? Easier to understand? Or not? Does it break in your browser? Leave a comment and let me know.

AJL Papers

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:44:34 +1100

This morning I uploaded a few new papers to the Australasian Journal of Logic, one of the projects I (mostly!) enjoy working on. It’s an open access, fully refereed, online journal in logic. If you’ve not seen it before, browse around and check it out. Let me know what you think. One thing that an online journals make possible is the freedom from constraints of filling a fixed number of fixed-size volumes a year. Different ejournals do this differently. At the AJL, we publish one volume per year, but papers appear in the volume whenever they complete the refereeing and editing process. We close the volume at the end of the year, and start a new one in the next year. This means that wherever one paper is in the queue doesn’t block the progress of any other paper. We can publish Tony Roy’s massive 146 page Natural Derivations for Priest An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic without worrying that this will delay the other things in the queue until the next volume. Tony’s paper has meant that we’ve well-and-truly broken our pagecount record for the 2006 volume, and we’re only in March.

Spooky coincidence? I think not

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:42:07 +1100

Today in Logic I talked about vagueness and the sorites paradox. Then when I get back to the office, I find that this Saturday, Alan Saunders on The Philosopher’s Zone has a program on – you guessed it – the sorites paradox. Is that a spooky coincidence or what? No, it’s not spooky. It’s just a coincidence. Anyway, from the little outline, it’s clear that Saunders has a more adept journalistic sense of what can get a point across than me. His example (is Bruce Willis bald? Peter Garrett definitely is, and Billy Connolly definately isn’t, but what to say of Bruce?) is much nicer than my boring examples of strips of colour shading from red to yellow, or heaps of grains of sand or the other stock philosophical examples… Regardless, the class had a pretty energetic discussion, from people trying on different responses to the paradox, to other students pushing pretty hard on the “just stop doing logic if it produces problems like this” sort of line. I like these sort of questions – at least if they’re attempts to get to grips with the issues, as they seemed to be to me – because they’re a sign that when you do something like logic, it’s our job to address the philosophical or interpretive issues of what is going on.

Oh, and there's another paper, too

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 20:28:34 +1100

I forgot to mention that I have written another paper recently. It’s a proof theory paper, putting down some thoughts on modal proof theory that I formulated when giving the S5 paper around and about in the last six months or so. In “Comparing Modal Sequent Systems” I look at different ways to understand modal deduction. In particular, I argue that you can understand labelled proof systems – those in which proofs consist of statements annotated with labels, often thought of as denoting ‘possible worlds’ at least in modal proof theory – can be reconceived in such a way as to not really require talk of worlds. When you play close attention to the kind of work done by the labels, it can be understood instead as a different representation of a structural feature of modal deduction. The point in this paper is a technical one, but the moral is broader than that. The view I argue for in the ‘Invention’ paper feeds off this kind of point. Properly modal deduction involves doing new things in the structure of argument – you can do a kind of supposing (say, ‘hypothetical’ supposing), which has its own interesting behaviour. Or so I think, anyway.

Being a logician means sometimes having to say that you're sorry. Or at least, that you're wrong.

Tue, 28 Mar 2006 11:18:51 +1100

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.

Dame Edna at the Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 22:11:01 +1100

This little spot called Melbourne Is the city of my birth It’s not as hot as Brisbane or as far away as Perth, It’s not as small as Adelaide, Compared to Canberra, it’s bliss, And if you’ve been to Melbourne, You can give Sydney a miss… As the world gets scarier, It’s a pretty decent area Melbourne The envy of the world. I think that was a knowing, self-reflective and ironic appropriation of Australian (and Melburnian) parochialism, but I’m not altogether sure about how the irony was received, given the insipid television commentary. Still, anything a 72 year old bloke in drag with purple hair who shot to fame (such fame as it was) knowingly making fun of Melbourne suburban life and other Australian attitudes can’t be all that bad.

Last Night at the MCG

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 08:40:25 +1100

Z and I – together with around 80,000 other people – filled the MCG to watch the track and field portion of Day 9 of the Commonwealth Games here. Some highlights: The completed renovations at the MCG make the huge stadium very easy to navigate. We got there early, so had no long queues to deal with (once we were at the ground itself – it was another matter on the train network). It’s easy to get in and out of the ground, the seats were comfortable, the view was good on Deck 2 of the Olympic Stand, and once the stadium filled up, you understood why the MCG is such a popular venue. It fits so many people, yet you feel very close to the action. The crowd was good-natured. Much alcohol was consumed by some of our neighbours (the trip to the bar was very short, and repeatedly taken), but any drunks were quiet and happy drunks, not loud and angry ones. We were, as a whole, terribly parochially Australian, but not without occasional flashes of appreciation for athletes of other countries. One crowd favourite in the latter category was Sapolai Yao, the 1.52 metre tall distance runner from PNG who earned the appreciation of the crowd by enthusiastically completing the 3km steeplechase, nearly managing to hold off being lapped by the lead Kenyan runners.

Marathon Effort

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 16:39:07 +1100

Z and I went in to the city to have a look at the Women’s and Men’s Marathon held here for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The city was buzzing, the crowds friendly, and it was great to get a glimpse of the lead runners: especially Kerryn McCann and Hellen Cherono Koskei who raced neck-and-neck right into the stadium. No matter how you cut it, 42+ kilometres is a long way to run. I suppose the task is quite literally, a marathon effort. C arrived with lunch when the marathon had finished, and our afternoon was wrapped up with some great live music from Ravi Bandhu Vidyapathy and friends from Sri Lanka, at the Festival site down at Alexandra Gardens. Even for people who have a middling interest in sport, like me, the Commonweath Games has brought its own kind of spark into the city. Watch out for Friday night, when Z and I head down to the athletics at the MCG.

Greg Hjorth coming back to Melbourne

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 10:12:36 +1100

It’s a happy day for us logicians at Melbourne. Greg Hjorth is going to be joining the Department of Mathematics and Statistics later in the year, taking up a five-year, professorial fellowship. He’s a super-smart set theorist and model theorist, and I’m looking forward to having him around on campus.

Masses of Formal Philosophy

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 09:35:09 +1100

Vincent Hendricks and John Symons are working on a sequel to their book Formal Philosophy, in which philosophers who use “formal methods” talked about their work, their motivations, and their take on the state of philosophy. For the sequel, they are opening things up for others to take an “interview” with five questions, to appear in the next book, Masses of Formal Philosophy. I’m not sure what the criteria Vincent and John are using for selecting answers for appearing in the book – but I am thinking about their five questions. Here they are: Why were you initially drawn to formal methods? What example(s) from your work (or the work of others) illustrates the role formal methods can play in philosophy? What is the proper role of philosophy in relation to other disciplines? What do you consider the most neglected topics and/or contributions in late 20th century philosophy? What are the most important open problems in philosophy and what are the prospects for progress? These look like interesting questions to think about. Maybe I’ll post some draft answers here first, for feedback, and if I’m happy with the result, I’ll post it off to Vincent and John for consideration. If you work in this area, you might consider doing the same thing.

Degrees of Truth, Degrees of Falsity

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 08:57:49 +1100

Toby Ord (a former student of mine, now taking Oxford by storm), has written up a nice short essay on degrees of truth and degrees of falsity. It shows how you can get a very nice little algebra if you extend the usual non-classical idea of a 4-valued logic in which truth and falsity are somewhat independent with the “fuzzy” idea of degrees of truth between zero and one. Both ideas have a heritage. The idea of considering the interval [0,1] as a lattice of truth values goes back to Łukasiewicz, and the four-valued algebra, now known as BN4, traces back at least to some early work by Mike Dunn. Toby considers nice properties of this little algebra. It seems to me that a good exercise for someone who likes fiddling with concrete algebras would be this: define a conditional → on the algebra such that when restricted to the fuzzy interval [0,1] it agrees with Łukasiewicz’s conditional. when restricted to the values t, b, n and f agrees with the usual BN4 conditional. has as many natural properties as possible. In particular, defining ‘A fuse B’ as ~(A → ~B) gives an associative and commutative operator, and fusion is connected with the conditional by means of the usual residuation postulates.

Fun with Playlists: Squeezing your music library onto a 2GB iPod

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:06:19 +1100

I’ve finally joined the ranks of the zombies with white earbuds. My trusty 2GB black iPod nano was acquired on the way home from our Sabbatical, in a duty free store at Changi Airport. I’ve had a little while to experiment with it, and so far, it’s been working better than I’d expected. I take it with me on my early morning walks, sometimes listening to spoken word things and sometimes listening to music. My taste in podcasts is pretty conservative – I seem to treat this as time-shifted radio, rather than anything more cutting-edge. However, it’s pretty mind-bending that you can get esoteric seminars off the web, so academic seminars I’m interested in but didn’t go to can be downloaded onto my computer and put on the iPod. I’ve been having even more fun seeing how to get my middling sized (20+GB) music collection into my very svelte (2GB) iPod. If you’re interested in how I do that, read on. It’s a long post, but I don’t feel like doing anything else this evening as I’ve sprained my ankle and I’m lying down giving my foot a rest. It’s just the time to write a long blog post you’ve been ruminating on for a week or so.

Phase Change

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 18:47:20 +1100

Today is the first day of the new phase of our lives – Zachary Luke Parker Restall had his first day of school today. Well done, Zachary!

Assorted crosscultural observations, upon visiting the supermarket

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 13:10:43 +1100

This morning found Z and me in the grocery store, doing yet more re-stocking of the pantry. Here are some hastily selected observations. Organic and fairtrade food has significantly higher market presence in the UK than in Australia. Our nearest Sainsbury’s had many more organic products than can be found in either of the two major chains here in Australia. In our local supermarket, the paltry selection of organic products is filed away in the small “health food” section, than distributed through the relevant parts of the shop. This makes comparison with other products difficult. There’s much more fresh food available in Australia, and correspondingly fewer pre-prepared meals. Don’t even get me started talking about that UK phenomenon Iceland. No, it does not feature Icelandic cuisine… A 2 Litre plastic milk bottle looks very odd once you’ve been buying milk in the UK for a few months.

Teaching in Semester 1, 2006

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:18:38 +1100

I’m back in the teaching saddle for 2006. In Semester 1, I teach two undergraduate courses. 161-115: Logic and 161-212: Non-Classical Logic.

Happy 2006

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 12:08:20 +1100

Happy New Year, my readers! We’ve landed in Melbourne (to a hot 8pm at around 42 degrees Celcius), and are slowly reconstructing our household bit by bit. The internet connection seems to work at least. We’ve managed to change lightbulbs, unpack bags, look at a bit of our large pile of mail, get the boy to bed (and even to sleep) and have some Kaya Toast for a midnight or New Year snack. See you later in 2006.

About to leave Oxford

Fri, 16 Dec 2005 12:22:40 +1100

We’re in the middle of packing up our Oxford home, to start the short trip back. We land in Melbourne on New Year’s Eve, after some stops in Köln (for the Christmas Markets), Augsburg (for Christmas with friends), Frankfurt Airport (to get on the plane), Singapore (to break the journey, and give us some summer in close proximity to air conditioning before landing in the Melbourne summer heat). There’s too much to say in the limited time I’ve got online here, but here’s just a taste of what’s been going on. Academic highlights in the last few weeks have involved: Cambridge. I zipped over to Cambridge on the bus (though Milton Keynes, which is a very strange city, at least when viewed from the window of a bus) for a CAMELEON workshop organised by Tom Forster. It was great to meet Tom, and also Randall Holmes, Michael Rathjen, Allen Mann (who all presented papers), and Martin Hyland, who gave me useful feedback on the paper I presented. Paris. My visit there was wonderful. The IHSPT is a wonderful place, with lots of nice people (a fantastic bunch of students who managed to make me eat my lunch or dinner very slowly by asking Interesting Questions and making me think Very Hard), together with a gorgeous city.

Survived so far...

Fri, 18 Nov 2005 20:59:32 +1100

I’ve given my two talks here in St. Andrews, with really useful discussion in both of the talks. In the philosophy talk, questions ranged from matters of meaning theory, metaphysics and epistemology of possibility and necessity. Thanks especially to Daniel Nolan, Carrie Jenkins, Marcus Rossberg, Ole Thomassen Hjortland, Crispin Wright, Stephen Read and other people whose webpages I haven’t yet found. Then on the next day in my talk in computer science, I had a great discussion with Roy Dyckhoff and Robert Rothenberg on converting the sequent system in my paper on S5 into one with invertible rules, which can then be used as an implementation. It seems to work. (Photographic evidence is here.) Yesterday, I went to three other talks on truth and paradox, by Hartry, Graham and JC. Now that I’m thoroughly over-paradoxed, I’ve got the morning to recover before we attempt to solve the problems of vagueness. (This should be fun because I have no settled opinion on matters of vagueness, so I’ll look at this more dispassionately, and I’ll be free to heckle from the back of the audience.)

Time flies when...

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:57:33 +1100

… you’re on sabbatical. I’m now in St. Andrews visiting Arché for what can only be described as “November Madness.” I’m giving a seminar this afternoon in Arché/Philosophy (in the wonderful Edgecliffe building) and then tomorrow, I’m giving a seminar in computer science tomorrow. This means I’ll miss the Vagueness Seminar and a Philosophy Departmental Colloquium. However, I will be at the Revenge Workshop on Thursday, and the Vagueness Workshop for Friday and Saturday. That should be enough to keep me going.

Week 1

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 19:46:51 +1100

We’re now in the second day of “week 1” of Michaelmas, here in Oxford, and the philosophy faculty library is considerably busier than it was in week 0, let alone the negative weeks. It’s just as well that I’ve got some writing done already. Today I’m heading off to Nottingham to give two talks. The Philosophy Department will get the first outing of my fresh-off-the-presses paper Invention is the Mother of Necessity in which I try out a (new, I hope) semantically anti-realist account of metaphysical necessity and possibility. Have a look at the paper and let me know what you think, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’ll be presenting it also in Bristol, St. Andrews and here in Oxford, so it will probably see signifiant modifications and updates over the next months. The other talk is the formal partner of that one, on proof theory for S5. I’m still writing the notes up for this (we’ll see how much I can get written on the train today), and I’ll upload that when I can. Then, with these papers largely written, I can get back to the book! I’m looking forward to it.

Cut elimination generalised

Sat, 17 Sep 2005 12:04:13 +1100

This post is a change of scene for those of you that have come to expect gentle meditations on matters personal. I’m going to experiment with posting some of my work scribblings as an irregular record of thoughts I’m having while working on sabbatical. It may well confirm the impression that you might have that I’m crazy, but hey, I have tenure, so I won’t worry about that too much. Over the last couple of days I’ve been thinking about cut elimination arguments, and in particular, the general cut elimination argument that you can find in my book (look around here). It struck me last night – as I was trying to find the right mix of generality and clarity – that there’s nothing in Gentzen’s original argument that requires that formulas have just two distinct positions in a sequent (the traditional two positions are antecedent and consequent, or left and right, or if you like, premise and conclusion or input and output). Every presentation of cut elimination that I’m aware of (even for single sided systems which don’t have an explicit left or right to a sequent) has two “positions” in which a formula can reside. (In single sided systems this is represented by the dualising map on formulas).

Reflections on Iona, part 2

Mon, 05 Sep 2005 20:43:02 +1100

Here’s the second part of my reflections on our week on Iona. If you’re interested in that kind of news, read on. I haven’t mentioned the most significant thing about our time on Iona – the week was tempered by an event just before we left for the island. The story started on the Friday before we left Edinburgh on Saturday. It was my last day teaching at ESSLLI, and I was having lunch with Denis Bonnay and Benjamin Simmenauer, talking about logic, and the possibility of me visting Paris – just before giving the last lecture of my course. My phone rings. Inside the restaurant there is terrible reception, but I can see that it’s Christine calling. I apologise to Denis and Ben, and head out of the restaurant to hear Christine. She’s upset. She says “Zachary’s had an accident. We’re in the hospital.” Christine sounds like I feel – frantic and unsettled. She explains that Zachary fell while running down a hill in the Princes Street Gardens in the centre of Edinburgh. He split open his chin, there was a lot of blood, and after help from passers-by and a first aid officer from the Scottish National Gallery, they were in an ambulance to the children’s hospital.

Reflections on Iona, part 1

Sat, 03 Sep 2005 01:41:19 +1100

This is an extended post reflecting on the week in Iona. Read on if you want to find out what we did for a week on a small Hebridean island. It’s not immediately straightforward to get to Iona, when you start from our B&B in North Queensferry. Our day’s journey started early with a taxi ride to Edinburgh Waverley, and then a train to Glasgow Queen Street (not to be confused, as many people do, with Glasgow Central, an altogether different train station in an altogether different place). With our bags piled around us, we had a little while to collect supplies for the next train trip, and to play the game of “who else here is going to Iona.” The late-middle-aged single American women with loud voices and Celtic crosses were very easy to spot. As was John Bell (we’d met him on one of his visits to Australia). We were less sure of others, but it turned out that lots of people on the train were heading to retreat on Iona, like us. The rest of the trip was a long train journey west to Oban, a ferry from Oban to Craignure on Mull, a bus across Mull to Fionnphort and then a ferry to Iona.

…Iona, Glasgow, Oxford.

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 12:25:14 +1100

Phew! We’re back in Oxford, and arrived in our house today. We’re in a cute little 2 bedroom house in the northern outskirts of Oxford, a quick busride down Banbury Road into Wolfson or the centre of town. I’m currently dealing with some of the backlog of email in a Starbucks (of all places!) with a wireless network. The week at Iona was great. I’ll write an extended post about it in a little while. For now I have lots of other things to do to make the cute little house a bit more like a home, and figuring out how to best use my worktime for the best mix of reading, writing, going to seminars, giving talks, etc., etc. (That and figuring out how I’ll live without internet access at home.) More later.

Denmark, Oxford, Edinburgh…

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 22:30:35 +1100

Too many things are happening for me to spend any time posting here until the whirl of activity settles down. Still, people have been wondering what’s going on, so here’s a bit of a run-down. After Logic Colloquium, I went back to Denmark to rejoin the family, to have a holiday in Blokhus with close friends. Much fun was had, involving sand dunes, beaches, rain, driving on the other side of the road, etc. From Blokhus we trained to Copenhagen, where we all had more holiday, involving Tivoli (in the rain), Danish icecream, cathedrals, public transport, and a flash designer hostel. (Photographic evidence of some of this can be found here.) From Copenhagen we flew to Heathrow (let me tell you, flying in to Heathrow from merely one timezone away is qualitatively different from flying in from the antipodes) to catch a bus to Oxford, to spy out the land. Unfortunately, spying out the land involved learning that our college had failed to find us accommodation for our stay, and that we were flung onto the open rental market. From there, a train to Edinburgh, where we’re staying in a B&B in North Queensferry with a wonderful host (thanks, Molly!) and a view over the water.

Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 4

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:11:49 +1100

Today is Day 4 of the colloquium. Yesterday was a day of rest, which for me involved a visit to the Byzantine and Christian Museum, in the morning, a lazy afternoon restructuring the order things in my ESSLLI course while staying in the shade, and visiting the Herakleidon Museum which featured an exhibit of Escher prints (the detail in some of the woodcuts was beyond belief), and then the obligatory visit to the Acroplolis as it got slightly cooler. Photographic evidence is found over there. Today features lots of philosophical logic and proof theory. I’ll post comments as we go, battery life and concentration permitting. First up, Michael Sheard, on “A transactional approach to the logic of truth”. The topic was theories of truth, involving consistent reductions of the class of T biconditionals T<A> iff A. The liar paradox causes problems, so Michael gave a nice overview of the kinds of consistent thoeries of truth that weaken the assumptions to restore consistency. He argued for what he called a “transactional approach,” to thinking about the issue which – sensibly, in my view – focusses on why one might be interested in using the concept of truth, in communication between agents, and in evaluation of what those agents say.

Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 3

Sat, 30 Jul 2005 16:20:50 +1100

It’s another busy day with lots of things to learn. Here’s my impressions so far, updated through the day. 9:20: Phokion Kolaitis is giving his second lecture — he’s good, and it’s been interesting to learn about dichotomy theorems in CSPs. Schaefer’s dichotomy results cast in terms of constraint satisfaction problems, are really interesting. The idea is that we can think of a class of constraints as expressed as the problem of whether or not there’s a homomorphism betwen your structure and another one (which is thought of as expressing the constraints). So, 3-colourability might be expressed as the existence or nonexistence of a homomorphism between your graph and the complete graph K3. If there is such a homomorphism, your graph is 3-colourable, if there isn’t, your graph is. Phokion’s talk yesterday explained why CSPs can be expressed as homomorphism existence fact. The idea is that conjunctive queries (predicate logic expressions using existential quantification and conjunction only) have exactly the right kind of preservation properties to express these homomorphism existence facts on relational structures. Well, Schaefer’s result is that the problem of whether or not (for a given boolean algebra B), the issue of whether or not you’ve got a homomorphism from your structure into B, is either solvable in polynomial time (like 2-colourability) or is NP-complete (like 3-colourability – K3 isn’t a boolean algebra, but 3-colourability apparently can be expressed as CSP(B) for some boolean algebra).

Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 2

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 16:18:47 +1100

9:25: There’s wireless access in the large lecture theatre, so I’ll take notes and upload comments occassionally through the day. At the moment, Phokion Kolaitis is giving his first short course lecture on constraint satisfaction problems. So far he’s talking about examples of CSPs (graph colourings and 3-SAT are his first examples) and he’s just looking now at homomorphisms of relational structures, and the Feder & Vardi claim (1993) that CSPs may be idenified with (or may be represented by) the problem of whether or not there’s a homomorphism between two relational structures. (This bit is new to me, so I’ll listen closely.) 11:20: Sergey Goncharov giving an invited lecture on ‘Isomorphisms and Definable Relations on Computable Models’. It’s always struck me as weird that infinite ordinals have something to do with the characterisation of computable structures (where being computable is an essentially finitary notion in one sense – any computation process can be finitely described), but then, ordinal notations are finite too. Sergey’s talk is about constucting interesting structures (boolean algebras, rings etc.) that are computable, but have the Scott Rank of ω1CK (that’s big). This generalises some earlier results of Makkai (who showed that there were arithmetical structures of that rank) and Knight and Sheard (who showed that there were computable structures with that high a rank).

Logic Colloquium 2005 Day 1

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 07:23:56 +1100

I’ll try this conference blogging thing, to see how it goes. Logic Colloquium has started, with the opening address by Charles Parsons from Harvard. His talk was on Paul Bernay’s later philosophy of mathematics — a subject of which I knew nothing. So I learned a bit. After Bernays’ collaboration with Hilbert at Göttingen, he left Germany because of Nazi persecution, and spent the rest of his working life in Switzerland. His philosophy of mathematics (according to Parsons) post war is characterised by his response to Gödel’s results and the failure of Hilbert’s program. For Bernays, mathematical truth is not necessarily a priori in any strong sense – mathematical claims are verified in the competition of different conflicting mathematical theories, in just the same way that scientific theories are verified in competition with other theories. The category of the a priori is relativised into the weaker catergory of the antecedent. There are always beliefs or theories antecedent to our views, which may be examined, clarified and accepted and rejected. But nothing makes those especially immune from criticism or revision. This might sound like a Quinean holism, but it’s not. It is motivated by a kind of neo Kantianism, and Bernays shares none of Quine’s empiricism.

Legroom

Thu, 28 Jul 2005 21:48:19 +1100

Remind me to check legroom on airlines before I book them for the first time – especially if I’m planning to write on the plane. Maersk Airlines has an interesting policy of offering seats in S/M/L sizes. S seats have a tight pitch of 29 inches (73-and-a-bit centimetres). You can upgrade to a roomier seet for a price–a fact that the stewards make clear repeatedly on the flight itself. I am very pleased that I got a seat in an otherwise empty row of three in an otherwise packed cabin. Another person asked to move into one of them, and between us, we had the middle seat to stretch our legs just a little and open my laptop. (This is also the one occasion in which a 12inch Powerbook has a distinct advantage over my 17inch model.)

Off to Athens...

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 18:57:19 +1100

I’m off to Athens tomorrow. Tonight I catch the train to København, where I stay overnight in a cheap hotel near the airport, to get my 7:30am flight. Logic Colloquium 2005 looks like it will be lots of fun. I’ve been busy writing slides, and I should use the time on the train to put the finishing touches on Day 2. Once they’re done, I’ll post them on the wiki page. If you’re coming to Athens, feel free to post things up on that wiki page.

Keep up with our travels: the map

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 17:49:12 +1100

I’ve been experimenting with a map using plazes, a neat little doodad that keeps track of where you are when you use a computer to access the net (if you explicitly log in yourself—it’s not spying on you without your consent). It powers the map on the main page here, and you can use it to generate a map of where you’ve been. Read on if you want to see our journey. This is the map: It’s kind-of-neat. (That Melbourne to Copenhagen flight is long).

In Århus

Wed, 20 Jul 2005 03:18:12 +1100

We’re settled in Århus now, while Christine does work with a colleague on a research project. This gives Z and me lots of time for lots of fun. Yesterday’s fun was Legoland (Vibeke and Christine wanted to come too, so we all made a day of it). Z loved the rides, and the displays, and the Lego for sale. We bought a set for him to grow into. There’s lots of fiddly pieces, but we’ve already managed to make one of the models together. (He does the putting together and I help find the pieces for him.) More later. I’m going to cook some dinner now.

Up, up and away

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:04:53 +1100

We fly later today! The big study leave adventure starts later this afternoon. The first few weeks alternate holidays and work for Christine and for me, and it gives us lots of time to enjoy the company of our young son. Zachary and I are especially looking forward to Legoland in Billund and exploring the surrounds of Århus. Our apartment apparently has an internet connection (I have no idea what kind, as of yet) so I’ll hopefully be able to post photos and comments here to keep you up to date from time to time.

Loud

Mon, 11 Jul 2005 17:03:52 +1100

Sometimes music is best heard at volume. A case in point? The second movement of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8. I recommend the Fitzwilliam String Quartet recording. (The Emerson Quartet’s recording is available on iTunes, but the Fitzwilliams’ isn’t.) (Apologies to our next door neighbours. I’m enjoying my last bout of loud music at home before we travel and don’t have access to a decent sound system.) That is all.

AJL

Fri, 08 Jul 2005 23:42:31 +1100

The Australasian Journal of Logic is firing on all cylinders again. As the managing editor, there was a period in this last semester where I wasn’t managing very well, and things piled up and got the better of me for quite some time. To speak overly frankly for a moment, I got quite depressed over the state that things were in and over my own disorganisation. Unfortunately, being depressed is not a good condition in which to be motivated to do anything about that which you’re depressed about. Anyway, after a few solid days of working at it, sending things off, writing reports, collating information, copy-editing, typesetting, emailing, coding HTML, uploading, etc., I have something to show for it. And I’m feeling much better about it all, too. So, without further ado: Here’s the start of Volume 3: 2005. I’m quite proud of it. Thanks to the authors, and to my referees and readers. There are currently eighteen other papers in various stages of the submission pipeline, so you should expect us to be much more productive over the last half of 2005, when compared to the first.

On applescript and php, and an archive page

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 20:24:30 +1100

A half hour of php hacking has finally produced a working archive page for the photos I’ve been posting from my phonecam. My little Sony Ericsson T630 phone has a terribly lo-res camera, but it’s fun to take shots now and then when you wouldn’t normally take photos. Now, instead of sliding off the front page when I upload another one, you can see the old photos on the archive page. What makes the thing fun is that the process of uploading them is so easy. The camera has a bluetooth connection to the computer, so I can get photos from the camera while the camera is still in my pocket. (That’s easy.) Then I drag a photo to an icon on the dock on my computer and the little applescript I wrote pops up a dialogue box to enter a title, and the thing scales the image (the camera takes pictures at 288x352 and I scale them to 180x220 to fit in the sidebar) and uploads the result to the /phonecam directory on consequently.org. The next bit of magic is two php scripts. One on the main page takes the latest jpg file out of the /phonecam directory and puts it in the right sidebar.

Logic Colloquium 2005 and ESSLLI 2005

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 21:55:01 +1100

I’m teaching some classes on proof theory at Logic Colloquium 2005 and ESSLLI 2005 soon. Spurred on a little bit by discussion of commentary at conferences, I’ve wondered a little bit about how I can get interesting feedback going during/after the presentations. (The material I’ll be teaching is from the book, which is a Work very-much-in Progress so I’m keen to get feedback on how it comes across.) Obviously, I’ll point everyone to the wiki, and set up spaces for people to write comments after the talk. (That’s a given.) But I’m sure that lots of people will have wireless-equipped laptops on the scene when I’m there. Wikis aren’t the best for group communication in real-time, or joint simultaneous writing/editing of a document. It strikes me now (after only thinking about it for a teensy bit) that I could host a document in SubEthaEdit for all of the mac users to take notes together. That’s fine for collaborative notetaking. People could use that as a way to take notes, write up questions, etc. If you’re coming to LC2005 or to ESSLLI2005, do you think that would be useful? If so, bring your computer along! Do you have anything else to recommend?

Rearranging

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 01:02:48 +1100

I’m rearranging stuff around here, in preparation for the Big Trip. Let me know if anything broke in the transition.

The Flight of the Balloon

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 10:28:55 +1100

This Queen’s birthday holiday moning, cool and clear, was a perfect time for Zachary and me to fly our hot-air balloon. The flight was short but glorious. Flying a balloon like this is not completely straightforward. You need to unfurl the balloon carefully, and make sure no bit touches the little burner on the ground (fuelled with cotton wool soaked in Methylated Spirits). Zachary held the balloon carefully like so: Notice the building in the background. We’re in the middle of a park in Brunswick, and the air is still. The balloon inflated quite rapidly. I held the base steady, and Zachary held the top, letting go when it was obvious that the air was warm enough to keep the balloon inflated. The air inside warmed very quickly: We let go, and it was away – It gained altitude remarkably quickly. (It was tricky to get the shots I did with the camera while we figured out which way it was going.) The wind picked up and it drifted westwards as it gained height: It got further west than we expected, given the still air at ground level. Notice the building it’s near. It made a gentle landing: on the roof of the factory of “Valve Tech Engineering.

Teaching in Semester 2

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 22:52:09 +1100

Since I’m on study leave from July, I’m not doing any teaching in Semester 2 this year. Hooray! (I need a break.)

Skype

Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:28:19 +1100

Next travel thing: I’ve signed up at skype.com and I have an account to make super-cheap voice calls home and almost anywhere else from the computer while overseas at least, when I’m connected to the internet. It looks very well executed. There are clients for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux, and at 1.7 euro cents a minute for calls to any landline (it’s a bit more expensive to call mobiles) in Western Europe, North America and Aus/NZ, it is a very good deal. Then there’s the fact that it’s free if you’re making a Skype-to-Skype call. If I were a telecommunications company making money from traditional telephony, I think I’d be worried. Anyway, if you’ve got a Skype account, let me know. Look me up in the Skype directory to get my username.

We're off in almost a month: I've got to get ready!

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:44:04 +1100

I’ve taught my last classes for 2005. I’m officially on study leave from July 1, until December 31. We’re off on our journey from July 13. First, Denmark, where I’ll be looking after Z, while Christine works with a colleague. (Z and I plan to have some fun in our time there.) Then I’m off to the Logic Colloquium 2005, in Athens, and ESSLLI2005 in Edinburgh, and a week’s retreat on the island of Iona, before heading down to Oxford, where we’ll both be Visiting Scholars at Wolfson. (You can keep track of our travels in the “Events” sidebar on this site.) It’s very exciting, but there’s heaps to do, and if I need advice on travel, I’ll post questions here. Here’s my first: I’m visiting the U.K. and Europe for six months, and I’ll want to use a mobile. Should I buy a prepaid sim card for my (triband) phone that I’ll be bringing with me? What should I do if I wanted to use my phone through Europe without paying too much in roaming fees? Keep in mind that I’ll be arriving first on the continent, and then going the UK. Do you have any advice? If you do, post in the comments on this entry.

Searching in Mac OS X Tiger

Sun, 01 May 2005 12:09:46 +1100

Like almost everyone else, I’ve installed Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and it’s a really very good upgrade to the operating system. The system-wide search will be really handy. It’s indexed all of my documents (which includes a 2.3GB library of PDF files of other people’s papers), so being able to find the 29 papers that mention hypersequents (together with the 18 emails in my mail client) is just something special. I’m having even more fun, however, with organising my files using tagging. I’ll talk about that one later.

Seminars at Otago

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 13:56:36 +1100

Tomorrow I’m presenting a paper at the staff seminar in the Philosophy Department at the University of Otago. Given Charles Pigden’s delightful account of seminars at Otago, I’m not quite sure what to expect. Wish me luck!

Logic Books at print.google.com

Tue, 22 Mar 2005 23:42:32 +1100

I think that Google’s new search-inside-the-book service will prove to be quite handy to a researcher like me. It’s not satisfactory to read through a book like that on the screen (especially when copyright restrictions do not permit you to keep going after a couple of pages of continuous reading), but it will be a boon to research to be able to search inside the book for everywhere lattices are mentioned. I like the idea so much I’m setting up a list of logic-related books on my wiki. Feel free to browse the list, and to add to it any other logic-related works you find on print.google.com.

University Library Proxy Bookmarklet

Sat, 12 Mar 2005 21:02:43 +1100

If you’re like me, you do research on the web, and you browse around different sites for journals, seeing what’s been published, and what you should read. Our library has online subscriptions for lots of these journals, so I can download the papers, file them, read them, etc. It’s all very nice. But it’s not always easy to get from the site to actually download the paper. Recently, our university introduced a proxy server as the means to keep track of whether someone attempting to download material under the banner of a University of Melbourne subscription is actually authorised to do so (i. e., is a member of staff or a student). So, if I’m at a page for a journal like this http://mind.oupjournals.org/current.dtl and I want to download a paper like this http://mind.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/114/453/1 I need to manually edit the address, by sticking “.mate.lib.unimelb.edu.au” at the end of the hostname, before the path. (Between “.org” and “/cgi” here). I am lazy and I don’t like having to type “.mate.lib.unimelb.edu.au” time and again when browsing the journals. So, I use a little link I made – ‘+mate.lib’ – in the bookmarks bar of my browser, and whenever I’m on a site, it takes me directly to the relevant page viewed through proxy site, and I can download at will.

Please Help Us #1: On Self-Saucing Pudding

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 19:16:53 +1100

Here’s one thing I find comments on a website really good for: trawling for information. My spouse and I were talking over dessert this evening, over some lemon delcious pudding that she had made. She asked the question she asks every couple of years (when a self saucing pudding is made): How do self-saucing puddings work? They really are miraculous, and we haven’t got much of an idea of how the chemistry of these things makes them work. A cursory Googling reveals nothing, and neither does a quick flick through On Food and Cooking. Can you help us?

Comments on Weblogs

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:27:50 +1100

At logicandlanguage.net the author talks a little bit about comments on weblogs. On why one might allow them, or do without them. As you can see, I leave comments open here. (Behind the scenes there is a hardworking comment spam filter. Without that, this place would be deluged with spam.) I can understand why one would want the place to yourself and do without comments. However, if you do, and if you want your readers to email you (as the author of logicandlanguage.net does) then please let the reader know your email address.

Get your kicks on Route 55

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 20:18:47 +1100

I sometimes catch the tram to get to or from the office, and usually it’s a not unpleasant experience. This evening was not one of the usual reasonably relaxing fifteen minute trips down Flemington Road and through Royal Park. It’s remarkable how a violent scuffle between passengers can change the feeling throughout the tram. There was pushing, shoving, curses and epithets, clutching at throats, and a tense standoff from the protagonists. Shocked stares, shy glances away, pleas of “calm down!”, “watch out!”, and “cool it!” from the onlookers. After the protagonists got off there were relieved sighs, a few tears, and a tram full of not-quite-returning-to-nomal people.

Wikis are fun

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 22:28:24 +1100

The wiki is lots of fun. Being able to edit the page you’re on, and freely create new pages by making new links, does seem to foster a new way of writing. It’ll be fun to see if any of my students catch on. If you’re interested in typesetting manuscripts in LaTeX, you might be interested in the notes I wrote up this evening. One on page layout, and the other on proof trees. If you’re interested in playing around on the wiki, feel free. Start by looking at the recommendations on how to participate.

I've been writing

Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:34:40 +1100

I’ve been pretty busy getting courses up and running for Semester 1. Some of this has involved starting writing my book, and setting up a wiki as a place to encourage feedback on the book and other things. Go and play there… (I’ll be interested to see how this goes.)

Happiness is...

Fri, 21 Jan 2005 12:44:59 +1100

… when you fiddle with your book draft and manage to get it to compile with no overfull \hboxes and no underfull \vboxes.

Darren Blogging for Tsunami Relief

Wed, 19 Jan 2005 22:47:06 +1100

Our friend Darren Rowse is blogging for tsunami relief over a 24 hour period. To make things interesting for him, we’re sponsoring him with a small amount for each different top level domain he uses in a post. It should make his posting nice and eclectic.

Matt and Nick talk Dialetheism

Mon, 10 Jan 2005 21:57:09 +1100

Matt Carter and Nick Trakakis are arguing over dialetheism. What’s dialetheism? It’s the view that some contradictory pairs of statements are true. It’s interesting that Nick is trying the line that contradictions (conjunctions of the form ‘p and not-p’) are meaningless. I always find it hard to judge claims of meaninglessness (since I don’t have on hand a general theory of meaningfulness), but I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for that line of argument. I would have thought that it was because we understood the meaning the statement ‘p and not-p’ that we could see that it couldn’t be true. But Nick’s in good company here. His view that contradictions (and tautologies) has proponents like the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.

Work, work, work, work...

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 21:15:17 +1100

I’m enjoying being back at work, but I seem to be procrastinating rather badly. Instead of writing my grant application and getting through my growing pile of emails, I’m doing research. I blame this on three things: I just don’t want to deal with my emails and my grant application. I’ve recently purchased two black-cover 100 page A4 spiral bound notebooks with nice blank white paper to scribble in, and cheap disposable fountain pens to scribble in them. One notepad is for writing notes on my draft book, and the other is for general scribbles and ideas. The move from A5 (my old notebooks) to A4 is astonishing for getting ideas down. A5 didn’t work for me at all well, compared to the A4 notebooks. (I will resist the obvious extrapolation that an A3, or – heaven forbid – A2 or A1 size notebook would be spectacularly good.) The ideas seem to be coming thicker and faster. I recommend both the pen and the notebook. The ideas themselves, at the moment, simply fun to think about. Yesterday and today I managed to sort through some ideas for Gentzen-style sequent calculi for normal modal logics. The result is superficially like existing hypersequent calculi, but in fact it is much closer to Display Logic (as you might expect, given my background and interests), and Calculus of Structures.

Back to work tomorrow

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 23:28:51 +1100

Tomorrow I’m back in the office, and back at work after my short Christmas/New Year break. It’ll be time to plough through that 45-email inbox, and see what else is waiting for me. I’ve started converting the news item archive pages to the new template. Expect more fiddling as I try to get them looking clearer. (They seem a bit too busy right now.) There are changes under the hood to commenting too: I now use the TypeKey registration for comments. If you have a TypeKey identity, use it. If not, you can either sign up there, or wait for your comments to be vetted by me before they show up on the site. This measure seems necessary to avoid all of the unsolicited comment spam this site has been suffering over the last months. Please let me know if anything isn’t working for you.

Teaching in Semester 1

Sun, 02 Jan 2005 14:45:12 +1100

This semester I am teaching the first-year subject Introduction to Formal Logic and an honours (fourth-year) seminar Logic and Philosophy. I’ll teach the honours class from draft material from my (as yet only in scribbles in my notebooks) draft book.

2005 Redesign

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 22:46:45 +1100

My redesign for 2005 is in progress now. After some problems (I managed to delete the writing page in a fit of cutting-and-pasting) I have some things on the way. There are lots of changes behind the scene. The linklist in the right column is now powered by del.icio.us, which is wonderful. The sidebars (left and right) contain other information, such as recent comments, recent udates on the writing page, and a little diary of events, past and present. Figuring out what goes where is all done automatically by the weblog software I use. I hope you find the new design of the front page useful. Unfortunately, I’ve only got the front page working as of tonight, and it’s time for me to get to bed. The rest will come soon. Please let me know if the front page has any bugs when viewed in your browser. Leave a message in the comments. I do hope that your 2005 is a fruitful one. If there’s something you can do to respond to the crisis in the wake of the tsunami crisis, then do it. It seems like the best thing that anyone could be doing with money right now.

What's going on around here

Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:52:25 +1100

I’ve been rather busy for the last little while, as the absence from the website might indicate. Here is a list of what’s been happening, which involves not a little bit of trumpet-blowing, because a lot of the news has been good and it’s time for me to share. Last week I spent an enjoyable (if rather wet) week in Canberra, touring the sights with Zachary in the mornings, and teaching at Logic Summer School in the afternoons. Going through a rapid-fire course covering Turing machines, register machines, recursive functions, the halting problem, diagonalisation, formal arithmetic, representability, and Gödel’s incompleteness results in 5 hours flat was a challenge. I learned something setting it up and I hope the students learned something in the listening. (They laughed at my jokes, which was very polite.) While I was looking after Z, C was at a conference, at which her most recent book had its Australian launch. Z and I crashed the launch party at University House, which was great fun. Immediately upon our return to Melbourne, we went to some friends’ wedding up near Marysville. The drive through Black Spur would have been nice in and of itself. The touching wedding ceremony and socialising with friends out in attractive country was almost an excellent bonus.

Take these shoes...

Sun, 21 Nov 2004 22:21:33 +1100

Take these shoes Click clacking down some dead end street Take these shoes And make them fit Take this shirt Polyester white trash made in nowhere Take this shirt And make it clean, clean Take this soul Stranded in some skin and bones Take this soul And make it sing. That’s not a bad album, and not a bad song.

Sheet Music

Mon, 08 Nov 2004 22:16:21 +1100

I’ve just bought some sheet music for the first time in 18 years or so. Let’s hope my violin technique is up to this. I know I can play the notes (or close approximations to them). It’s sustaining the technique for 10 minutes that I’m not so sure about.

Travel Plans 2005

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 22:49:22 +1100

In the second half of 2005 we’re planning to travel, on sabbatical. The C, G and Z show will be based in Oxford for Michaelmas. Before arriving in Oxford, we’ll be doing some European touring. C will be visiting a colleague in Denmark. I’ll hopefully be presenting at Logic Colloquium 2005 in Athens (July 28 to August 3), and ESSLLI2005 in Edinburgh (I should be on in the second week, August 15 to 19).

Headphones

Fri, 15 Oct 2004 21:04:18 +1100

One stroke of good fortune today. In a shopping trip with Z this afternoon, while looking for a Super Secret Present at JB Hi-Fi I found a set of Sennheiser HD 497s on sale. Picking these sweet headphones up for $15 was very very nice. Especially considering that this was approximately 80% off the list price. Oh, and they’re very nice headphones.

Well, that didn't go as I'd hoped

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 22:52:01 +1100

Oh well. Sad news tonight, with the conservatives returned with an increased majority here in Australia. Most worrying is the fact that their representation is increased in the Senate. We’re going to have an interesting few years ahead. (Let’s see how the forces for succession develop: Costello, Abbott, Turnbull…)

In case you were wondering

Tue, 07 Sep 2004 15:08:31 +1100

In case you were wondering where this site was over the last couple of days: it turns out that both of the domain name servers that were registered for this site are in Florida. Not the best place to be over the last few days. I’ve now got three DNS machines registered for this domain, and they’re not all in the same continent, so hopefully it’s more reliable now.

October 9 Election

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 20:46:26 +1100

Our Federal Election is to be held on October 9. Our current Prime Minister says that this election is about trust. Well, I’m glad that the unannounced election campaign is over and the announced one is on its way. I don’t think that we’ll get a government that we can, or should trust in the result of this election, and I think that trust is rather a silly attitude to hold towards our elected representatives. No, we should keep a keen eye on them, and get very worried if we find that we start trusting them. That’s about the time that they’ll abuse it. It’s not that policians are any worse than the rest of us. It’s that the position of power brings with it so many opportunities for abuse of that power. As to the coming election, I can’t make a sensible prediction. It seems like it will be close. What worries me is that if the Howard/Costello Government is returned, then they will take this as an endorsement of the way that they have treated the public service as an arm of the party in power, inflaming insecurity and scapegoating asylum seekers assiduously ensuring that we do not understand the plight of those locked up without trial on our shores (and off them), mangled relations between government and our indigenous people, and cynically throwing buckets of money around in order to bribe voters in the leadup to this election.

Itchy to redesign (a bit)

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 20:37:29 +1100

I’ve been feeling like redesigning this site, yet again. There’s a lot about the design here I like, yet it’s not quite right for some of what I want to do. If you have any likes or dislikes about this place, please leave a comment here. I’ve got some ideas of what the redesign might feature, but I don’t want to get rid of anything that my three regular readers appreciate.

What's been happening around here

Thu, 26 Aug 2004 11:03:31 +1100

I suppose I should post something, even though the urge to post seems to have gone for a while over the last months. Let me fill you in on what’s been happening around here. I’ve been doing work with Mark Lance, who’s been visiting the Philosophy Department for a couple of months to do research with me. This has been immensely productive. We seem to have a new story to tell about how to get semantics out of pragmatics. Once you get a general story about the normative significance of acts right, it’s much easier to tell a general story about the normative significiance of speech acts. Or so it appears to us. Expect to see a paper draft over in the writing area before too long. If all goes well, it seems like we’ll be committed to a book length project on this in the next few years. I’ve been loving my teaching. Just doing intro logic has been a dream, and the students seem to be keen and bright, and the lectures have been fun. That they manage to (1) laugh at my jokes, (2) listen to the content, (3) engage and ask smart questions, makes teaching very easy.

Parent/Teacher Interview

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 09:25:25 +1100

This morning I had my first ever “parent/teacher interview,” with Z’s carers at childcare. They seem to like him, and he generally likes them (though Z is choosy when it comes to who counts as his friend: the select group is pretty small at the moment). So now I know how they take him to be going on emotional, social, cognitive and motor development. And according to the carers (who have scales and developmental criteria and all of that kind of stuff) he’s going pretty darn well. So, I suppose we have passed this “test.”

I'm so not here

Tue, 13 Jul 2004 09:20:01 +1100

I’m not here, because I’m elsewhere. Elsewhere is lots of fun, and 1/3 of the way through, we seem to be having a very good time. I’ll report back with some highlights later. But now I’m off to another talk.

Off North

Fri, 02 Jul 2004 09:41:14 +1100

This last couple of weeks has been super-busy-hectic. Z and I fly up north this afternoon for a family visit. On Sunday I go off to the AAP Conference at South Molle, and Z stays with his Granddad for a couple of days, to be joined by his mum who returns from her little Europe conference trip. One piece of advice: If you’re preparing a conference presentation with simple dot-and-line pictures, and you’d like them to be presented dynamically, then the LaTeX packages beamer and pgf are your friends.

GMail

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 12:35:51 +1100

Is there anyone who wants a GMail account that doesn’t have one by now? If you do, let me know in the comments. I have a few invitations I can burn. Update: This batch of invitations are gone.

Organising Academic Papers

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:12:46 +1100

Now this is a question which is much more sensible to ask than you might otherwise think: “Why can’t I manage academic papers like MP3s?” (the link is to a pdf of a paper by James Howison and Abby Goodrum). My “paper archive” is a fairly large 2GB (not as big as my “music archive”, I suppose) with about 6000 papers, and it’s catergorised under author (approx 2000 of those). If anyone can produce a way that enables me to sort, label, filter, slice and dice these just as smoothly as iTunes does my mp3s, I’ll be a very happy academic.

Slow Period

Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:00:14 +1100

It’s going to be a slow period on the ’net for me in the next little while. My creaky powerbook seems to have developed yet another fault (now its AirPort connection is completely bung, so I’m only online at home when I directly plug in to the ADSL modem, which boots off the other users of the connection). This, together with the wonky right hinge and the intermittent backlight might mean that it’s time to put the poor thing in for a service to see what can be done. I’ll try to shoehorn as many files as possible into our family’s surplus-to-requirements iBook (though the step down to the small screen, the slow processor and the cramped memory will not be good), but I have rather too many things to do, and I’m not looking forward to the experience. I can’t be out of computer action while my powerbook is in for a service, but I can’t really afford the time to do the brain transplant. That means I definitely can’t afford the time to be posting here.

Musical Taste

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:37:36 +1100

There’s no accounting for musical taste. This morning Z was a little upset. I decided to put on some music for him. First selection: Big Red Car. A little voice responds, with a tremor. “Dad.” I ask, “Zack, what is it?” “I don’t want this on. I want your music.” “OK.” Takes CD out. Replaces it. “Is this any better?” He sounds much brighter. “Good!”

No writing implements?

Mon, 14 Jun 2004 19:47:36 +1100

I never thought I’d comment on Big Brother, but when I learned that the inmates aren’t even allowed writing implements inside, I am convinced that the place is completely inhumane. I can’t imagine a life where I can’t write, whether on paper or on the computer. I suppose that the restriction serves a couple of goals of the producer. (1) no passing notes from inmate to inmate: all communication must be picked up by the microphones. (2) no writing of diaries (and all that that entails). Oh, hey, Merlin Luck’s protest was great. Good on him.

The Twelve Apostles

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:14:48 +1100

Great Ocean Road, May 29, 2004. [Larger Version]

Assertion, Denial, Paradox...

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 01:35:06 +1100

Assertion, Denial, Accepting, Rejecting, Symmetry, Paradox, and all that (the paper with the ridiculously long name) has been given a few more paragraphs in preparation for an outing. Comments, as always are welcome.

The Geometry of Non-Distributive Logics

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 13:13:37 +1100

Here is my favourite paper of the last few years. At last, I’ve finished wrestling with the diagrams in the paper and “The Geometry of Non-Distributive Logics” can now see light of day. My superb and long-suffering co-author Francesco Paoli and I have been working on this on-and-off since we met and talked about this material in the middle of 2001. Francesco provided a great draft, which sat in my pile of things to do for altogether too long as I tried to get the diagrams to look legible. Anyway, after some gentle reminding from Francesco, and after a few late nights and debugging MetaPost code, we’ve finished a draft of the paper. It’s the first completed technical work in the proof project, to go alongside some of the other stuff I’ve been working on. Comments are, as always, most welcome.

Ancestors

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 13:58:53 +1100

If you browse my academic genealogy, you’ll notice that my ancestry goes back to Hardy (a great-great-great-great-great grandfather: hereafter a great^5 grandfather), Schur (another great^5 grandfather), Cayley (a great^8 grandfather), Frobenius (a great^6 grandfather), Weierstrass (a great^7 grandfather) and Gauss (a great^9 grandfather). I just miss out on Zermelo who was a student of Fuchs (a great^6 grandfather), and Cantor, who was a student of Weierstrass and Kummer (both great^7 grandfathers of mine). (I learned of this just now through my academic father who learned it from his father.)

Tree Totaller

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 11:44:07 +1100

Greenfleet’s Tree Totaller is a simple way to estimate your annual greenhouse emissions from your use of a car, your household and your air travel. As a household, we’re running at an annual rate somewhere between 30 and 40 tonnes. (The indeterminacy here is chiefly due to my ignorance about the number of flights we’re making this year.) Our car useage is a pretty skimpy 1.8 tonnes.

Grading

Thu, 27 May 2004 06:58:13 +1100

Oh, and you’re wondering where I am? This is the last teaching week of semester, and I’m busy teaching, organising a couple of conferences, writing papers and doing a bundle of other stuff. Expect to see some more things in the pipeline very soon.

Who are Boole, Fitch and Tarski?

Thu, 27 May 2004 06:53:49 +1100

Who are Boole, Fitch, and Tarski? That’s Richard Zach’s short story about the history of logic. His long (and interesting) story is here. It looks very good.

Inference & Meaning

Tue, 18 May 2004 22:18:08 +1100

Doing anything from July 12 to July 14? No? Well, why not come to my little conference. It should be lots of fun, if you like philosophy, meaning theory, logic and that kind of thing.

What He Said

Fri, 14 May 2004 21:06:40 +1100

I haven’t been able to write about the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, and the brutal murder of Nicholas Berg. However I do wish that I had written what Toby has. (See his entry for May 8.)

Knowability 4

Wed, 12 May 2004 21:48:11 +1100

“Not Every Truth Can Be Known” is now up to version 0.9, and it’s having its first public beta test on Friday morning in the local logic seminar. Come along (Cussonia Court Room 1, University of Melbourne, Friday 11am) and enjoy the ride if you like that kind of thing. Christine reminded me that when talking about epistemic logic one should, of course, cite Donald Rumsfeld’s famous (or infamous?) remarks about the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. (Does the fact that he didn’t mention the unknown knowns mean that he implicitly endorses the KK thesis? Who can tell?) Anyway, take a look at the paper (the changes from 0.85 to 0.9 are mainly bugfixes and exposition changes, no pictures yet, though I promise they will come someday) and let me know what you think.

Haskell and Logic

Mon, 10 May 2004 22:04:06 +1100

This looks very nice indeed: The Haskell Road is a textbook on elementary logic, mathematics and programming, based around my favourite programming language Haskell. I’m glad that this wasn’t the textbook in my introductory computer science course, long ago in 1986. If it were, I may have fallen in love with computing and never become a philosopher. Parenthetical remark 1: How a textbook based on Haskell, a computer programming language that wasn’t even defined in 1986 is a matter for counterfactual speculation. Parenthetical remark 2: I did do a section on Miranda in a Declarative Programming course in my second year, in 1987. I see now that this was pretty cutting-edge stuff. By this time, however, the mystique of late night (and all night) debugging sessions had well-and-truly worn off, and I’ve become a philosopher, after a brief stint trying to become a mathematician instead.

NAD C521BEE

Sat, 08 May 2004 19:57:24 +1100

Christine received an early Mother’s Day present. The NAD C521BEE sounds gorgeous. A weclome bonus is that it plays every CD we feed it, unlike our dearly departed Yamaha CD player, which served us well for the last 10 years or so, but it started giving up the ghost (being very picky about what CDs it felt like playing) over the last couple of years. Now if only our receiver would actually show us the frequency it’s tuned to on its front panel!

Knowability 3

Tue, 04 May 2004 12:42:39 +1100

“Not Every Truth Can Be Known” has been updated with some brand spanking new theorems for your delectation. Comments are, of course, welcome over there.

Great Moments in Logic

Sat, 01 May 2004 22:55:50 +1100

A long time ago, I wrote about a logician a day for a whole month. The old location is a broken link now, and it’s hard to retrieve it from there, so I’ve reposted it. Some of the old links (those to xrefer.com) don’t work any more. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions, don’t hesitate to post them there.

Winter Stylesheet

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 15:58:57 +1100

I’ve fiddled with the colours for winter. Let me know if in mucking around I’ve made anything worse for you.

Max Cresswell at the AJL

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 14:38:41 +1100

I’m pleased to point you to the next article published in our little ejournal. Max Cresswell’s paper “Possibility Semantics for Intuitionistic Logic” was uploaded earlier today.

Knowability 2

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:31:46 +1100

Well, it’s taken me longer than I wanted to, from conception to first rough draft, but here it is: ``Not Every Truth Can Be Known: at least, not all at once.’’ Comments are most welcome over there.

The AJL is on the Register

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:41:33 +1100

I’ve just heard that the AJL will soon appear in the DEST Register of Refereed Journals. This makes me happy. If you are an editor of a refereed journal, please take the time to get your journal registered on this list. (It’s not difficult. The submission process is straightforward.) If you are on this list, then Australians who publish in your journal will not have to bug you for a letter indicating that your journal peer-referees its articles. (Why? Because peer review makes an article count in DEST’s scheme assigning brownie points for research output, which means more money for your institution, hence the need to prove it.) So, being on the register saves you, the journal editor (or your admin staff if you’re lucky enough to have any, I suppose) time. Being on the register will also make you attractive to Australian authors. I note that precious few philosophy or journals are yet on the register. Consider this a plea to get more on that list.

Help Wanted

Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:15:22 +1100

Do you want to come to the Melbourne Philosophy Department and teach my Reasoning and Uncertainty course for me for Semester 2, 2004? I’ve got some research money, and I’m using it to buy out some teaching to give me more time to write. Check the details if you’re interested in applying for the position. If you’ve got any questions, contact me. There will also be tutoring positions in my Intro Logic course too, though current postgraduates in the department are a high priority for these tutoring positions, and I think we’ve got enough candidates to fill every slot for the next time it’s taught.

Busy/Quiet Period 2, and email

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 19:42:39 +1100

Now that Christine’s back from overseas, I seem to have entered another busy/quiet period. In the last week we have had Z’s birthday (he’s now a precocious three-year-old), Easter, our midsemester break, various small house renovation things, and catching up on previously unattended email. (The inbox is down to two items as of this afternoon, both of which came in today, so that’s going fairly well.) On the topic of email, it’s been interesting to see how the topic of email filing practices is in the aether, now that Gmail is there, tempting you to archive all of your email and use search to get at it, instead of filing it away in different folders. My own email folder hieararchy is slowly spiralling out of control: the act of asking “where should I file this?” (and answering it) is becoming stressful, and burrowing through folders to find things (did I put it in the Teaching folder orthe Admin folder or…?) is tedious. I am tempted to ditch the folder hierarchy completely and stick everything in an archive folder and let the pretty competent search box in my mail client dig up what I need. But I won’t do that yet. I’d like two features I currently don’t have in my mail client.

Knowability

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 14:13:37 +1100

In between teaching, looking after Zack, keeping a house in order and occasionally getting some sleep, I am thinking about Fitch’s Knowability Paradox. This thinking seems to be turning into a little paper entitled “Not Every Truth Can Be Known: at least, not all at once.” I’ll post the thing on this site as soon as it’s a rough draft.

Funding Changes at the University of Melbourne

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 22:46:09 +1100

The University administration made some decisions today on funding and access changes for 2005. There were student protests on campus today, over the decision. The University’s council chambers are in our building, and the building was locked down from 11:30 this morning, in preparation for the protests. (We were asked to leave the building for the rest of the day.) The council met this afternoon, but, despite the security guards and police presence ringing the building, council met elsewhere.

Technical 'Support'

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 10:07:52 +1100

Are computer technical “support” positions staffed by robots? Or are they simply underqualified, underpaid people in call/email centres? Probably the latter, as far as my experience (limited to just one case, of course) is concerned. Let me cast my support request out to cyberspace to see if I receive a more useful response. I have just purchased an HP PSC 1350, a little all-in-one inkjet printer, scanner and copier. It’s very nice. It prints, it scans, it copies, it’s very small and fits snugly on my bookshelf near my desk at home. It’s a bit loud, but that’s OK by me. Now, I’m using it with my Powerbook G4, running Mac OS X 10.3.3. All of the information I have received indicates that it comes with OCR software. However, none seems to have been installed with the HP installer. Have I been deceived? Was my box missing some software? The first response from HP tech support was what you might have expected from a simple pattern matching algorithm. I described my problem as I did above, indicating how I’d installed the software, and saying that I couldn’t find the ReadIRIS OCR software, and that in the HP scanner software there was no “send this to a text editor” option available (contrary to the printed and online manuals).

Hedge

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 23:08:30 +1100

Castlemaine, January 2004. [Larger Version]

Shootings

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 07:14:41 +1100

Once the “underworld shootings” started in Rathdowne Street it felt close to home. But when it occurs just a few blocks down the road …

Research Project

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 20:52:11 +1100

Here’s a research project for you. Look at the physical interpretation of intuitionistic logic in the Markopoulou and Bell papers I mentioned yesterday, mix in Nuel Belnap’s really interesting account of an indeterministic relativistic universe in “Branching Space-time” and the Thomason point/history semantics for temporal logic motivated and justified in Belnap and Green’s wonderful Indeterminism and The Thin Red Line, and stir thoroughly. Let me know what you cook up. I think it could be really interesting. In fact, you could come here as a graduate student and do a project just like this one. This would be a great M.A. or Ph.D. thesis topic.

What the universe looks like from the inside

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 11:31:41 +1100

The mathematically/logically/physically minded among you should take a look at “The internal description of a causal set: What the universe looks like from the inside” by Fotini Markopoulou. (Found from a reference to in two papers by John Bell, which was found in turn by way of Brian Weatherson.) This is interesting, deep material at the intersection between the semantics for non-classical logics and difficult physics. Some handwritten slides are available for a talk she gave on the topic. Handwritten slides from talks given by mathematicians or physicists are often very revealing: they present the flavour of the material succinctly and often with flair and character. Will this survive the transition to digital production of slides? [This was a snippets entry, but by the time I got to paragraph 2, I realised it was time for it to move left.]

Busy/Quiet Period

Tue, 30 Mar 2004 09:16:51 +1100

If I post anything here between now and Easter, consider yourself lucky. Christine (my omnicompetent spouse) is enjoying well-earned time away from the house while taking a research/conference/catch-up-with-friends trip to London, Oxford and Glasgow. I, therefore, am enjoying even more time with my son. It follows that any posts here are either the result of sheer good fortune or a sign of excessive procrastination.

Brandom on Philosophy and the University

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 22:02:53 +1100

Robert Brandom recently addressed the trustees at the University of Pittsburgh (where he works). His talk addressed different issues, including the history of the Pitt philosophy department, the role of a research university, and how we ought to conceive of the relationship between the university and its students. Go read this extract of the speech and then come back here. You’re back? Good. Here are some thoughts of mine. Use the comments section to add thoughts of your own (or to express disagreement with mine). Does anyone have any idea how I could go about convincing my university that every undergraduate student should take at least one philosophy subject? That would certainly change things here to a considerable degree. We teach nowhere near that fraction of the undergraduate student body, despite having a very wide range of introductory subjects. Melbourne prides itself on giving its students a liberal education, but we don’t do that well at it. It’s interesting to note Brandom’s claim that the fact that each senior academic teaches one intro course each year (of two hours contact a week) gives these senior philosophers the heaviest load among cognate disciplines in the university. Here, our undergraduate (including honours) teaching load has been 2+2 (two courses a semester, both semesters).

Research Quantification

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 10:34:55 +1100

Today I received offprints of “Paraconsistency Everywhere,” an article I wrote quite some time ago (it was essentially finished in 2001). It appears in the 2002 issue of the Journal, yet it has only just appeared on my desk. This comical state of affairs continues when you look at the bottom of the published article where it indicates that the paper was “Received February 13, 2002; accepted February 5, 2003; printed December 19, 2003,” yet at the top of the page it says “Volume 43, Number 3, 2002.” I received the offprints of the article today. Clearly, the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic (a very fine journal indeed) is fighting a severe backlog. This would be a matter only for tea-room (and weblog) conversation and nothing more were it not for one thing. Australian academics publish under the shadow of a stringent data collection regime according to which everything we get published in a year is collected early in the following year, categorised, and the resulting figures help determine the amount of research funding your university will receive. Funding is always tight, and you want to ensure that your publications pull their weight and your institution receives its proper “reward.

Zachary with a chocolate moustache

Tue, 23 Mar 2004 23:40:31 +1100

Canberra, January 2004. [Larger Version]

Monday comments

Mon, 22 Mar 2004 12:39:36 +1100

On Saturday night I went to see Fog of War with my brother-in-law, who is visiting Melbourne for a few days. I was absolutely knackered (must have been something to do with staying up until 1:30 that morning getting the book away to the publisher), but I managed to stay conscious for 95% of the movie. It was a striking movie in a number of different ways. One I haven’t seen mentioned in any of the reviews I read before the movie was the beautiful Philip Glass soundtrack. It suited the movie down to the ground. It’s nice to see discussion on book publishing continuing. I have 11 comments, over half of whom are written by people who are not me. I like having smart readers who have opinions and are able to articulate them. At Toby’s prompting, I’ve been stuffing around with the stylesheet for this page. He thought (and I’m inclined to agree) that the background colour between the different content rectangles was too “white.” I’ve changed it, but I don’t like the result either. As of today it’s #eff8d1. Any takers for a better background colour? A corridor discussion with Allen Hazen this morning about permission statements, prompted by the well-known observation that when we say “you can do X or Y” we really mean “you can do X and you can do Y”, led me to show that (under certain assumptions) there is a two-place connective (call it ’erk’) such that “you can do X erk Y” is equivalent to “you can do X and you can do Y.

Kai on Book Publishing

Fri, 19 Mar 2004 06:57:48 +1100

Kai von Fintel has plans like mine on academic book publishing. Maybe we can kick the revolution along just a little.

Zachary Scribbling

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:06:33 +1100

Home, February, 2004. [Larger Version]

Publishing a Book

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 21:33:24 +1100

On and off, I've been thinking about what I'm going to do with my next book. I mean, I'm planning to write the thing, and to see to it that it is published by a decent publisher. So much is required for it to get the kind of institutional recognition that is necessary for people in a position like mine. However, I'm looking for something more than that. I'm looking for my book to be read. Getting read is more difficult than getting published, given the avalanche of academic material published each year. I'm hoping for this book to be read, for it to be assigned as a textbook, for it to corrupt the minds of the youth, and for it to shape the field for years to come. (I may as well aim high.) I have come to the conclusion that one very good way for me to do this is for me to give the book away for free: I plan to post the book chapters, as they're written, online here, to have them indexed by search engines, to get people like you linking to it on your website, glancing through it, giving me feedback, helping me to improve it, etc.

The Wind is Blowing

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 23:38:26 +1100

My iTunes library filtered on the word “wind”: Messenger Wind: Bruce Cockburn (You’ve Never Seen Everything). Child Of The Wind: Bruce Cockburn (Nothing But A Burning Light). The Wind: Keith Jarrett (Paris Concert). A Cool Wind Is Blowing: Kronos Quartet (Released 1985-1995). I Envy The Wind: Lucinda Williams (Essence). An interesting collection. Bruce Cockburn is over-represented considering that he’s only 609.4MB out of 14.57GB, but perhaps he has a thing for the wind. [Note added on March 17: In the original post I had the albums of the two Bruce Cockburn songs around the wrong way. Not that any of us noticed, or anything.]

Revisiting the past

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 10:24:27 +1100

Entries for both the news and snippets section from my pre-hiatus website have now appeared in the new design. You can browse through the recent past here and here.

Study Window

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 10:15:19 +1100

Home, February, 2004

Are God's Hands Tied By Logic?

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 12:12:44 +1100

Reading the paper with this title at an online journal got me thinking ... The author concludes: The consequence for philosophy of religion is quite simple--that if God is an agent, his hands must be bound by logic. To many, this might seem to be a conclusion which is so trivial as to be scarcely worth stating--apart from Descartes, and a few other exceptions, have not most philosophers of religion always held that God's omnipotence does not include the ability to do illogical things? I don't want to question this conclusion, but I do want to give it a bit of a shake. It strikes me that there's a much more general point lurking around here somewhere, that it says little interesting about God (after all, we're "bound by logic" just as much as God is), and, maybe more surprisingly, it says little interesting about logic either. The idea is this: how do we conclude that God's hands are tied by logic? We conclude that it's logically impossible for God to do something which is prohibited by logic. God can't square a circle, or make a tautology untrue, or do anything else like that. Why is this? It's because it's logically necessary that if something is logically necessary, it's true.

AJL Volume 2

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:16:59 +1100

The Australasian Journal of Logic's Volume 2 is beginning its gradual release into the wider world. We have some other interesting papers in the pipeline for 2004, so stay tuned.

Black Mountain Tower

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 22:26:52 +1100

Canberra, February, 2004

Teaching, teaching, teaching

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:35:22 +1100

Teaching for 2004 Semester 1 is now well underway. My classes for this term have been enjoyable in different ways: Non-Classical Logic is a second/third level logic class. I've decided to follow Graham Priest's book An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic rather closely, which means I don't need to make too many further decisions. (It's designed to fit into an Australian academic semester, and to follow an intro logic course just like mine.) The book doesn't take quite the line I'd follow, but it's much better than a merely "good enough" book that I'd use through gritted teeth. My differences with Graham's view of things are two. Graham structures the course around the search for a good semantics for the conditional of natural language. I think that that question is both easier (for many purposes -- think of mathematical reasoning -- the "material conditional" is just fine and dandy, thankyou very much) and more difficult (there's all sorts of context sensitivity in conditional constructions which a sensible look at would take you very very far away from a second-level undergraduate course) than Graham concedes, so I don't get as much out of the central theme as Graham does. I think that there is more mileage you can get out of the idea of a normal modal logic than Graham manages to express in his Chapter 3.

Zachary at Hanging Rock

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 22:04:57 +1100

October, 2003

Reboot

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 20:05:54 +1100

This site has been sitting fallow for eleven months. That's far too long in short-attention web land, so no doubt I've lost my vast readership. It's time to reboot it, so here we go. There are a few changes that have been on my mind for some time. The look. Tired of white, tired of websafe colours, I've gone to earth tones for a change. Sterility be gone! I've only checked in a couple of different browsers, so let me know if there are any bugs. I've succumbed to weblog-ism just a little. I've swapped the news section with one of the sidebars, mainly so that I can post more photos in the "News" section of the site without the restriction to a 250 pixel width in the right column. Now I have more options, and I might just post more pictures here. It should also give me room to post more philosophy here, like all the cool kids are doing. I've upgraded to the latest version of Movable Type to run this thing. I've also decided to turn on comments on the News section of the site and one other part ... ... which is the major change around here. I've recoded the publications section of the site: consequently.

Happy Birthday #2!

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 14:45:21 +1100

Zachary and Erasmus facing off: April 2003. Happy second birthday, Zachary! Here’s to many more happy years of growing up.

Learning Negation

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 20:38:32 +1100

Having a young child gives you lots of new examples about language learning and concept acquisition. (It also provides you with many opportunities for experimentation, but I will set that to one side, for the moment.) Here is one such example: On Friday morning, I was changing Z’s nappy and getting him dressed. He was in a happy mood, and I asked him if he would like me to tickle him. He said no, no tickle. Not to be deterred, I asked him again, and he responded again in kind. There is no doubt that children learn to deny and refuse very early in their development. Children also learn opposites quite quickly too. Z has mastered vary many pairs of opposites, and he knows how to use them to his own advantage. But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. I asked Z again, rephrasing the question: would you like a little tickle? Z knew that he wanted to deny this, and so he went for what he took to be the relevant opposite. No, no, no! Big tickle! With the tickling that followed, another lesson was learned.

Clouds of War

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 14:53:57 +1100

I have refrained from making any public comment about the coming war with Iraq that Australia is about to enter. Partly out of general reticence, partly because the whole matter is very depressing, and partly because my own thoughts and feelings are inarticulate. However, one way to deal with inarticulate thoughts and feelings is to attempt to articulate them, so here I go. Along with most people, I agree that the Hussein regime is terrible and Iraq would be better off without him. Along with most people, I agree that a full-scale invasion, with cruise missiles, bombs, tanks, infantry, chemical and biological weapons and the consequent death, carnage and destruction is a terrible outcome. But none of this is what depresses me most. What depresses me most is what could have been and how much more sane what could have been compares with what is coming. Had things gone differently, we would have had stronger international institutions. Instead of the blunt instrument of war and occupation, with all of the historical connotation of western invasions in the region, we would be able to deal with this regime differently. Not just the UN Security Council: that’s clearly a blunt instrument too. What we need is an operative, experienced and powerful international criminal court and an international criminal justice system.

“Tantrum”

Wed, 12 Mar 2003 23:39:47 +1100

Zachary helping Christine in the Kitchen. March 2002. Zachary had a difficult day today, missing his afternoon sleep, and getting a bit cranky as a result. This evening, as I was cooking dinner for Christine and myself, and supervising Zachary eating his dinner, he decided he’d had enough of his meal (i.e., he had fingered it a bit, no more), which he had specifically requested (chicken + vegetable rissole and toast, please), and would much prefer grapes. The scene continued something like this: Zachary: “Grapes. Grapes. More grapes.” Approaches the refrigerator and opens the door. Daddy: “No grapes, Zachary, until you’ve had some more of your dinner. You asked for the chicken, and I think you should eat some more.” Gently shuts the fridge door. Zachary: “No chicken. Grapes.” Opens fridge door. Daddy: “No grapes yet, Zachary. Not until you have had some more chicken. You asked for the chicken, and I made it for you.” (Speaking not quite truthfully, as I had simply reheated the rissole, and toasted and buttered the toast. Zachary and Christine had done the lions share of making the rissoles a couple of days before.) Shuts fridge door again. Zachary: Falls face down on floor (classic tantrum position), and says in a clear, calm voice, “Tantrum.

Nor W arf Numb E

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 14:51:53 +1100

A sign on the docks on the Yarra. December 2002. It’s time for a new picture. This picture was taken last December on the infamous Williamstown Ferry trip. Classes start next week, and I’m looking forward to them, even though preparation has been a bit tight. I am especially interested to see how my fourth year honours class enjoy what I have in store for them. Hopefully by the time I am done, the students will know a whole lot more, and I will have written the literature review for my next book.

Spots

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 12:11:21 +1100

Zachary with spots. February 2002. Zachary’s chicken-pox spots are fading now, so he is probably past the most infectious stage. This photo is from the first seriously full-on day of spots, last Thursday.

February Pictures

Wed, 19 Feb 2003 16:07:21 +1100

February pictures of Zachary are here. They were taken on our day trip to the Dandenongs with Uncle Martin. Zachary was pretty keen on that straw. Unfortunately for him, and for us, Zack’s come down with chicken-pox. The photos are all pre-pox, so there are no pictures of spots. Or of fots as he calls them.

Thoughts

Tue, 18 Feb 2003 11:59:37 +1100

Sometimes it seems like there are too many thoughts to think and too little time in which to think them. Here’s an example: I really ought to think of a detailed response to Brian Weatherson’s comments on my two envelopes paper co-authored with Graham, but that detailed response will have to wait a little while. However, let me write a little enigmatic response while it’s on my mind: There is an ambiguity in asking whether one ‘ought to switch’ or not. One answer will depend on which action maximises expected utility, given the process which places money in each envelope. Another will depend on which action maximises expected utility, given what I know about the process placing money in each envelope. If the circumstance is as Brian describes (I have envelope A, and the process has resulted $n in A and either $(0.5)n or $2n in envelope B with equal likelihood), then switching will maximise utility expected in sense 2. If I don’t know whether I have envelope A or envelope B, and I do know that I have equal probability of having envelope A or having envelope B (and the rest of the process is as Brian describes), then we are indifferent between switching and keeping.

Zachary and Straw

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 20:51:11 +1100

Zachary, at a café in Sassafras. February 2002.

2003 Brunswick Music Festival

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 14:57:59 +1100

Details are out for the Brunswick Music Festival for 2003. Looks like it will be fun. The Sensitive New Age Cowpersons (gig details, their own site) are good for a laugh.

News Feed

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 22:55:10 +1100

Both News and Snippets sections have corresponding RSS feeds, which you can use with feedreaders like NetNewsWire or AmphetaDesk. (Some of the five readers of this site already use these tools, but I never publicised the links. Now you can all know they’re there.)

2003 Redesign

Sat, 15 Feb 2003 22:50:42 +1100

Butterfly, at the Zoo, December 2002. Here’s the 2003 redesign for the site. It’s late, if you count calendar years, but it’s early, if you count our teaching year. Classes don’t start for a couple of weeks. The design includes the ‘Snippets’ section, which will include links I find in day-to-day browsing. This news section will contain photos and longer items of interest.

Meteorologist

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 10:55:10 +1100

Mac OS X users might be interested in Meteorologist, a menubar or dock thingy which tells you current weather and forecasts for the locations you suggest. Just the thing for me, as I'll be off in Dunedin at a conference next week. At least I'll be prepared for the wet and cool weather.

Don Burrows and Nina Ferro

Sat, 11 Jan 2003 21:10:30 +1100

Jazz at the Zoo. January 11, 2002. The place was packed with easily more than 4000 people crowded in to the Zoo grounds to hear Don Burrows and Nina Ferro in the Zoo Twilights music program. They were in good form, and a fine night was had by all.

A Crackpot Index

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 16:31:48 +1100

John Baez’s Crackpot Index seems to me to be a pretty good measure of the difficult to define phenomenon of crackpottedness. Notice the relatively low cost of outright inconsistency compared to nearly everything else. That warms my heart.

Beables and Changeables

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 15:31:57 +1100

Quantum mechanics is just plain weird. I don’t really understand it at all, partly because of the strange nature of the probabilities in QM. They certainly seem to fit observation (so physicists say), but what do they mean? Well, it just might be that they are traditional probabilities after all. That is, Gerard ’t Hooft has proposed a new deterministic interpretation of QM which makes sense of all of the numbers. Nature has an elementary article about it, and the preprint is available for the hard-core physicists among you. It looks neat from here, but as I have said, I don’t really understand the details. Those of you who do, let me know: does this account avoid the usual objections to “hidden variables”?

Brett Lee in Action

Fri, 27 Dec 2002 19:37:27 +1100

Brett Lee in delivery stride at the MCG today. Today was spent at the MCG, on the second day of the Boxing Day Test. My brother, my nephew and I spent a delightful day soaking up the atmosphere, enjoying some fine batting (especially Justin Langer and Martin Love) and some fine bowling (each of McGrath, Gillespie, MacGill and Lee were in dangerous form). The fact that all of the good performances were from the one team meant that the competition was not as balanced as you would like, but you can’t ask for everything. Going to the cricket live is a very different activity to simply watching it on TV or listening to the radio. It’s more of an activity for one thing. You get to choose what you’ll focus your attention on, and, in some ways, there is much more information available to you than when watching it on the box – despite the manifold graphs and charts and tables you find on the TV. In the crowd you hear the reactions of the rest of the crowd. You feel just how fast the bowling is (at least, Brett Lee at 150km/h) and how skilled the reactions of the batsmen are.

Yellow and Blue

Mon, 23 Dec 2002 14:54:42 +1100

Chairs on the Williamstown Ferry. December 2002.

Solaris 2.0

Wed, 18 Dec 2002 08:19:55 +1100

The Wired article on the upcoming movie adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel, Solaris is surprisingly good. It doesn’t encourage me to go and see the movie, but it does make me want to go back and reread my Lem novels and short stories.

His Dark Materials and Third Way

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 19:31:42 +1100

I just found a very insightful interview with Philip Pullman, the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy. I haven't read the trilogy yet, but I probably will before I get to Harry Potter. Third Way, the mob who published the interview, produce some of the best (Christian) theologically informed social comment around. Sadly, that's not saying very much, given the quality of most Christian writing, but Third Way is still very good. Their site is worth a browse. P.S. Third Way predates New Labour, the rise of Tony Blair and the articulation of "Third Way" Politics by Anthony Giddens by many years. The magazine was launched in 1977, significantly predating the reformation of the British Labour Party.

The High Court of Australia

Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:56:44 +1100

I love the way the BBC news report about the High Court of Australia's interesting decision on defamation and internet sites leads with a really nice picture of the National Library of Australia. The library is next door to the High Court, which is a very different building.

I hate marking

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 22:51:20 +1100

I have to let you know that I really don't enjoy marking first year logic exams. I love teaching the subject, but the marking is just a hard slog. And it's depressing in the cases of failures. The bright spots are the cases of really excellent work. But the tedium is pretty tedious.

Richard Jeffrey Dies

Wed, 13 Nov 2002 08:04:24 +1100

Richard Jeffrey died on November 9. Now both authors of my favourite text on Gödel’s theorem and computability theory have left us. (After November, the link to this story on the Princeton news page will expire. The archived news item should appear here, with any luck.)

Cricket Writing

Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:12:15 +1100

More reason to be thankful that The Age publishes Peter Roebuck’s commentary on the cricket too. It makes breakfast newspaper reading enjoyable. Here is one example: Lehmann will be popular with spectators because he is an antidote to the prevailing fashion, a throwback to the days of blue-collar cricketers. As far as this column knows, he spends his evenings reading long-winded novels, eating carrots and sipping fizzy water but he does manage to create the impression of a man with a more colourful range of recreational interests. More’s the pity that the cricket itself may not be able to sustain so much interest, with contest so uneven. I’m glad that my tickets for the MCG test are for the second day, and not the fourth or fifth.

Grade Inflation?

Thu, 07 Nov 2002 17:49:59 +1100

I sometimes complain about grade inflation, the phenomenon of too many students being given high grades. According to Alfie Kohn (whose work I respect) maybe I shouldn’t worry so much.

Apposite Text

Mon, 04 Nov 2002 08:21:59 +1100

Strangely apposite text at church yesterday. Matthew 6:19ff: “Do not accumulate for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal...”

No photos for a while

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 09:59:18 +1100

There'll be no new photos here for a little while. Our house got broken into yesterday, and a few things -- including the camera -- were nicked. Everyone's OK, however. A little bit shaken, but OK.

Flower Boy

Tue, 29 Oct 2002 19:09:31 +1100

Zachary playing in the back garden today. October 2002.

Monash Shooting

Mon, 21 Oct 2002 18:38:13 +1100

The terrible shooting at Monash University took place in the building housing the Philosophy Department, and at which I gave a seminar in one month ago. No-one I know was physically hurt, but I'm sure everyone who works in that building will find it hard to go back to work tomorrow.

Graph Theory

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 21:42:59 +1100

I was searching for the current bibliographic reference for Reinhardt Diestel's canonical text Graph Theory, and lo and behold, the entire text available online for my perusal.

What colour is that?

Fri, 27 Sep 2002 10:48:37 +1100

Be sure to gaze at the amazing checkershadow illusion. Go now, then come back here. A cursory check with a little computer program I have (Digital Color Meter in /Applications/Utilities/ for those of you with MacOS X) verifies that the two squares which look so different are, in fact, the same 42% grey. But the surely don't look the same. The explanation is helpful.

Logic Seminars

Wed, 18 Sep 2002 08:39:22 +1100

The bugs aren't ironed out yet, but I've enjoyed playing around with iCal, and Movable Type in order to automatically send my calendar of logic seminars (maintained locally on my own computer in my diary) to a web page which announces them to the world. It's not quite finished yet, but it gives you an idea of what we're doing.

A Smile

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 22:22:47 +1100

A happy boy. September 2002.

GNU Prolog

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 19:03:31 +1100

There's a robust, freely available implementation of Prolog available for lots of platforms: GNU Prolog. It looks like it might be quite useful to me.

The Zoo

Fri, 06 Sep 2002 10:35:12 +1100

We went to the Zoo on Sunday afternoon. It was very busy, dodging all of the other prams and strollers. The zoo is only a couple of minutes (drive) away from our place: it’s halfway between our house and the university. So, we’ve become “Friends of the Zoo”. It’s great to visit during the week, when it’s much quieter.

Wireless Network

Wed, 04 Sep 2002 14:51:20 +1100

If I stand really close to a window of my office, I can just get a tiny signal from my Campus wireless network.

Instant Messaging

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 20:42:45 +1100

With the arrival of iChat, I now have an instant messaging client. My AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) username is cutelimination. If you have a chat client and you want to contact me that way, you could always check if I'm online. I'm not online that often, but you can try your luck.

Zero to Three

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 20:31:53 +1100

zerotothree.org is a helpful resource for people like us, with little kids. I especially like the mix of information for parents and early childhood ‘professionals’.

Settling In

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 11:02:01 +1100

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. We've been slowly settling in to Melbourne. Zack loves his childcare, but settling in has meant a range of new infections in quick succession. (Conjunctivitis, a severe ear infection and gastroenteritis.) The latter, he managed to give to me, and this has meant that I now have new insight into the etymology of the term “wretched.” Still, here are a few highlights of recent weeks. First, my logic students (they're bright and enthusiastic), the logic seminars we've run each Friday for the last few weeks (it's great to be in a place where we have the critical mass to sustain a regular seminar), the Bell Shakespeare production of The Comedy of Errors (in the pre-play warmup when the magician Pinch was doing a range of tricks, he used my jacket for one---the ubiquitous “I’ll make you think I’ve put this knife through your nice jacket” trick), and today's Father's Day extravaganza, featuring nice presents (things to read) and a wonderful breakfast, and a Zachary who slept in until 7:30am! Things are OK.

Primes is in P

Sun, 11 Aug 2002 11:09:10 +1100

This is seriously elegant: Apparently, three Indian mathematicians have shown that you can test primality (deterministically) in polynomial time. That's incredible. More incredible, I seem to understand the paper. (The authors seem proud as punch, as you'd expect, cracking a centuries old problem.)

'I Guess I Get A Little Emotional Sometimes'

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 13:39:16 +1100

Paul Kelly has written a song I Guess I Get A Little Emotional Sometimes in response to the plight of the refugees in detention in Australia.

New Archbishop of Canterbury

Mon, 05 Aug 2002 22:14:14 +1100

I'd heard that the new Archbishop of Canterbury was about to be appointed, but I hadn't heard the result: Rowan Atkinson has been appointed the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury.

Busy, busy, busy

Tue, 30 Jul 2002 19:37:39 +1100

Campus is a whole lot more crowded now that classes have started.

Sanity about the ABC

Mon, 29 Jul 2002 20:48:22 +1100

As Australians are only too aware, the ABC, our national broadcaster, is a political football. Liked by neither of the major parties in the Federal Parliament, it suffers regular funding cuts. Tim Bowden's analysis of the situation is the best I've read for a long time.

Email Address

Mon, 15 Jul 2002 16:07:12 +1100

It's come to my attention that my old Macquarie Uni email address is bouncing. If you want to email me about personal things, use my consequently.org email address: greg@consequently.org. If you want to email me about work things, use my University of Melbourne email address "restall at unimelb.edu.au". (Convert that text into the obvious email adddress. This is an attempt to reduce the amount of spam I get delivered to my work address, at the very least!)

Eat and drink your way down Sydney road

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 13:42:18 +1100

This looks like the course for me: Visit Sydney Road (warning, it's a PDF file). The Centre for Adult Education offers a one-day course on the main road just near my place. Looks like a nice way to spend 11 to 2 on Saturday.

Brunswick

Tue, 09 Jul 2002 14:09:53 +1100

Here is a helpful short history of Brunswick, our new home.

Arrival

Fri, 05 Jul 2002 12:17:19 +1100

Moving house is tiring. Moving house with a young child is exciting, but very tiring. Moving house to a new city, and rewiring your brain to cope with the changes in weather, shopping, driving, childcare, work, and the innumerable other habits which need to be unlearned and relearned, is very very tiring. Moving house and waiting five days for your personal effects to catch up with you is not so much tiring as extremely frustrating. But we're here in Melbourne, we're happy, and we're settling in.

Trouble in Lygon Street

Wed, 19 Jun 2002 11:18:10 +1100

South Korea's victory did not go down too well in Lygon Street in Melbourne. Next week we'll be living a stone's throw from there.

Stranger Building

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 19:16:33 +1100

Even more strangely, some parts of the building seem to be on the M2 Motorway, and others are in Epping. Space warps strangely in Building W6A. I will miss it.

Strange Building

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 11:15:50 +1100

According to my new mobile phone, different floors of my office building here at Macquarie are respectively in Denistone, North Ryde and Marsfield.

Zachary's Car

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 14:26:51 +1100

Zack loves his car, which he gets to drive at playgroup. Alas, next Wednesday is his last time at playgroup before we move to Melbourne.

Don on God

Mon, 17 Jun 2002 12:42:48 +1100

Don Mannison's Notes on the Existence of God. It is to my eternal dismay that Don passed away before I was a postgraduate student in Philosophy at Queensland, because I would have loved talking with him about this material.

Househunting Results

Wed, 12 Jun 2002 15:42:27 +1100

Success! We'll soon be signing a lease to live in this house: It's a sweet three bedroom cottage, with a little backyard and front garden. Room enough for visitors, so come and visit sometime. We move in when we arrive in Melbourne: in around two week's time. (I never thought I'd live in a house with a picket fence, but there you go.)

Househunting by remote

Wed, 05 Jun 2002 19:12:52 +1100

I'm spending most of my time and emotional energy finding a place to live in Melbourne. It's now possible to do a fair bit of this at a distance, due to websites listing available properties, but of course you have to be there to inspect properties. Timing, as usual, is almost everything. In this business money is also almost everything. It follows that timing overlaps a great deal with money—which has been noticed before. Anyway, I'm flying down to Melbourne this weekend to take a personal look at a few rental properties, and hopefully to place a bond on a suitable one. Given that we move in 3 weeks' time, I'll be spending less time online until we're up and settled in our new home.

What does biography (of philosophers) have to do with philosophy

Wed, 05 Jun 2002 11:43:16 +1100

A helpful summary article in the Chronicle on the proliferation of biographies of philosophers. The central question is whether biography of philosophers illuminates the philosophy itself. Lots of people say there's nothing one can say about there other. Others say that all philosophy is biography. Here's one case where I steer a middle path. I'm beginning to see the value of philosophical biography, as a part of a larger enterprise: the history of philosophy. History of philosophy is beginning a resurgance, and with good reason. Often by looking back to see the context in which an idea/concept/argument/trope was introduced, you see more clearly how it operates and how it is currently used. Philosophical biography is an important component of the history of philosophy itself.

God Music

Tue, 04 Jun 2002 11:27:19 +1100

Today's listening: those tracks in my playlist featuring God: Rejoice in God O Ye Tongues [Benjamin Britten] ¶ God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen [Bruce Cockburn] ¶ Play God [Chagall Guevara] ¶ God's tender mercy knows no bounds (solo soprano) [George Frederic Handel] ¶ That God is great (solo baixo) [George Frederic Handel] ¶ God's Dub [John Daly and U2] ¶ Black Angel (God Music) [Kronos Quartet] ¶ Get Right With God [Lucinda Williams] ¶ Godchild [Miles Davis] ¶ God Moving [Moby] ¶ God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen [T-Bone Burnett] ¶ God Part II [U2] ¶ If God Will Send His Angels [U2]

Ups & downs

Mon, 03 Jun 2002 12:04:38 +1100

For some reason, I seem to pay attention to news reports like this one. Real estate worrying is silly, but strangely compelling.

Geography

Sun, 02 Jun 2002 18:54:46 +1100

For future reference.

Self-Annihilating Sentences

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 11:23:20 +1100

The famous obfuscated put-down "this book fills a much needed gap in the literature" has many, many friends.

lowercase audio

Thu, 30 May 2002 12:44:30 +1100

not only is the bremsstrahlung ∑ lowercase audio site a blast from the past with its early macintosh system appearance -- lowercase audio provides for a challenging and rewarding listening experience. try it for yourself.

Spain in August 2003!

Tue, 28 May 2002 21:43:27 +1100

I've just been invited to give a lecture at the 12th International Congress of Logic Methodology and Philosophy of Science in Oveido, in August, 2003. This is Very Nice. The first really big international conference I ever attended to was the 10th LMPS Congress in Florence in 1995 (I was a postdoc then), and I had a truly wonderful time. I gave an early version of my "Negation in Relevant Logic" as a "contributed paper". It's a great honour to be one of the invited lecturers (not least because invited lectures get a slot of around an hour, and contributed ones go for around 15 minutes!) and I'm delighted to get the opportunity.

RSPAS International Relations Publications

Mon, 27 May 2002 10:45:49 +1100

The Department of International Relations at the Australian National University's Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies publishes a lot of interesting material. Their "keynotes series" are intended for the general public. Keynote 1 is The Day the World Changed? Terrorism and the World Order, and Keynote 2 is Refugees and the Myth of the Borderless World.

epitonic.com

Mon, 27 May 2002 09:06:30 +1100

Epitonic.com advertises itself as providing "Hi Quality Free MP3 Music." The quality is variable, but the range provides hours of aural exploration. My music player now has a clutch of math rock songs.

Back to the...

Fri, 24 May 2002 20:50:25 +1100

The Drawing Board is, as it advertises, an Australian Review of Public Affairs. It contains accessible interesting articles on instituitions in Australian public life.

boat-people.org

Tue, 21 May 2002 11:44:46 +1100

We are all boat people. Strategic information about the asylum-seeker issue, here in Australia.

Stephen Jay Gould

Tue, 21 May 2002 09:07:50 +1100

Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60.

Two changes

Mon, 20 May 2002 09:09:33 +1100

East Timor becomes independent; Sir John Gorton dies.

A preliminary move

Sat, 18 May 2002 21:51:50 +1100

Consequently.org now has a new home. It's no longer hosted from my desk at work. It's now hosted by professionals. This way, it will continue to exist even when I'm "between desks" in late June. Hopefully the transition has been unnoticed by you. (It was relatively painless here.)

Seagull at Manly

Tue, 14 May 2002 21:42:35 +1100

Manly, January 2002

Budget

Tue, 14 May 2002 20:32:53 +1100

Here's the details of the Federal Budget, handed down just now. (Notice how the Treasurer likes talking about the "fiscal surplus" rather than the "cash defecit".) And here's the Sydney Morning Herald's commentary. For changes in Higher Education, we must wait for the currrent minister to come down with his grand plan.

Job at Auckland

Tue, 14 May 2002 10:49:24 +1100

Jobs in logic are pretty rare. So now that Auckland is advertising, you should hop to it and apply. Auckland has one of the largest and most diverse philosophy departments in Australasia, and it's a good place to be. Auckland University, New Zealand, Department of Philosophy. Lecturer (=USA Assistant Professor), tenure track; semester system, 1.5 - 2 courses per semester, undergraduate and graduate; thesis supervision; standard non-teaching duties. AOS: logic, AOC: open; significant teaching experience strongly preferred. Closing date for applications, 4th Nov. 2002. Preferred start date Feb. 1st 2003. The Department aims to bring shortlisted candidates to Auckland for interview in late November/early December and to offer by the end of December. The University of Auckland is an Equal Opportunities Employer. For further information, see the Department's website or contact Professor Rosalind Hursthouse.

Ratbots

Mon, 13 May 2002 10:25:36 +1100

This makes me queasy.

About The Internet

Mon, 13 May 2002 10:12:10 +1100

... the Internet radically redefines a person's psychological relationship to time and space. Attention is rivetted on what is tangible, useful, instantly available; the stimulus for deeper thought and reflection may be lacking. Yet human beings have a vital need for time and inner quiet to ponder and examine life and its mysteries, and to grow gradually into a mature dominion of themselves and of the world around them. [*] That was from the Pope, in a message urging the Church to get into the internet (but to also beware of its limitations). David Weinberger has an interesting response, highlighting the difference between seeing proclaiming a message and engaging in conversation. The Holy Father seems keen on the former, without showing much enthusiasm for the latter. What is it with the "parchment" background image on Papal pages on the net? It looks kitsch.

How to Mark a Book

Fri, 10 May 2002 22:27:31 +1100

Here's how to mark a book.

'Aussie Chardonnay'?

Fri, 10 May 2002 22:15:45 +1100

I like that flag, and I don't think that Australian white wines had anything to do with it.

Peru and Free Software

Fri, 03 May 2002 13:07:00 +1100

This letter is an excellent piece of reasoning and rhetoric. It will be fun to see how Peru goes with Bill Number 1609, and what the other Bill does about it.

ASIO Bill

Thu, 02 May 2002 09:50:58 +1100

The current ASIO bill before federal parliament is a very big worry. No-one should be allowed to arbitrarily detain people on suspicion of having contact with a member of an what has simply been designated by the Attorney General as a terrorist organisation. As an academic who regularly comes into contact with hundreds of students on a daily basis, it follows that I could be detained at the whim of the security organisation, if this bill were to pass. Why do ASIO want such powers? Or rather, why do the current government want to give these powers to them? The proximate explanation for this power is so that people in contact with "suspected terrorists" may be detained so as to not inform them of a possible attempt at arrest. Clearly such draconian and undemocratic powers aren't necessary for that outcome. This ought to make us worry about what the actual reason might be.

Blue Mountains

Thu, 02 May 2002 09:41:04 +1100

Zachary, Martin, Christine and me. Blue Mountains, April 2002

Microsoft

Wed, 01 May 2002 21:37:29 +1100

I don't normally spend my time worrying about the monopolistic practices of that software company, but this case is too bizarre to go unremarked. In a nutshell, at this site Microsoft explain that if a computer is donated to a school, it's a legal requirement that the original software installed on the computer be donated with it. Notice that they agree that the school can upgrade the software on the computer to another version of Windows. Why, then, should the school not accept computers which have been previously upgraded with another operating system? When is an upgrade allowed, and when is it not? [Thanks to Rory for the pointer.]

Now in three flavours

Tue, 30 Apr 2002 15:13:28 +1100

Not only do neutrinos have mass, they also come in vanilla, chocolate and raspberry.

Firefly Press

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 15:18:35 +1100

Do you have bandwidth and a love of fine typography? If so, download this delightful movie about Firefly Press, and see the difference letterpress makes.

Higher Education Rumblings

Mon, 29 Apr 2002 13:27:01 +1100

There are more rumblings about higher education and its funding here in Australia. Everyone agrees that universities are underfunded, but there is not a whole lot of agreement about what to do about it. The recent discussion paper, flagging increased deregulation for public universities, has sparked some debate. I notice a change in my own reaction to these things, as I move from a middle-ranking university to one set to benefit from any deregulation.

Sydney Aquarium

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 15:10:35 +1100

Zachary admiring the fish, April 2002

Play with combinators

Wed, 24 Apr 2002 09:53:23 +1100

It's fun for all the family at John's Combinatory Logic Playground.

The Politics of Science

Tue, 23 Apr 2002 09:51:56 +1100

A review of three books on the intersection of politics and science, from Richard Lewontin, published in the NYRB.

Cataclysme politique en France

Mon, 22 Apr 2002 20:12:24 +1100

It is not an exaggeration to say that many in Europe are in shock tonight...

One more mystery solved

Sun, 21 Apr 2002 20:24:51 +1100

Now you know what would happen if the Moon were made of Green Cheese.

Fisticuffs in real estate

Thu, 18 Apr 2002 22:33:45 +1100

The real estate market here in Sydney is insane.

The Golden Grove Ferry

Thu, 18 Apr 2002 10:33:55 +1100

Circular Quay, March 2002

Sic Transit Gloria

Thu, 18 Apr 2002 10:30:46 +1100

In which a man is imprisoned for working on the subway in New York.

Is that God singing?

Tue, 16 Apr 2002 11:17:17 +1100

She said ‘Mommy, is that God singing?’ I said, ‘Simone, why would you think that?’ And she said, ‘Because his voice is funny, but it doesn’t make me laugh.’

Down through the ages...

Mon, 15 Apr 2002 10:39:48 +1100

James Pryor's guidlines on writing a philosophy paper: "Don't begin with a sentence like "Down through the ages, mankind has pondered the problem of...'" That's right. Please don't begin your essay like that.

You are here & Brouwer

Mon, 15 Apr 2002 10:28:22 +1100

You Are Here: public art inspired by algebraic topology. The algebraic topology of Brouwer's fixed point theorem is profound. The artists' explanation of the theorem isn't so inspired, but they're artists not mathematicians. The art is inspired. You are here. No, that's not right. I'm here, you're there...

Go to Australia

Fri, 12 Apr 2002 14:22:52 +1100

Guess the context for this: "Personally, I would say 'Go to Australia'. At that stage anything else seems pointless." Now go here to find it. Surprised?

Pascal's Wagering

Fri, 12 Apr 2002 11:31:13 +1100

Scott Raymond points me to Pascal’s Wagering: the perils of a life of gambling. Banned from the casinos, Blaise rolled up huge debts with illegal existentialists, who set arbitrary odds and paid off arguments on a whim. After losing three times in a week to the idea that all of human consciousness is the precocious hallucination of a disembodied llama brain in a mad sorcerer's laboratory, Blaise began to despair, and I knew I had to help him. Just beautiful.

Happy Birthday!

Thu, 11 Apr 2002 09:18:28 +1100

Happy Birthday, Zachary! You're the picture of a happy one-year-old.

New Design

Wed, 10 Apr 2002 12:01:26 +1100

The new design is online. Go to the archive page for past entries. If you have any comments on the new design post them on consequently.org/discuss.

Object Permanence

Wed, 10 Apr 2002 10:20:13 +1100

Zack is learning object permanence. Just now he’s spent a couple of delightful minutes putting Shaun the Sheep on a cupboard shelf, closing the door. Waiting a while, opening the door, smiling, picking up Shaun, closing the door, then opening it again and repeating the process. Ad infinitum. I think he's getting the point that Shaun is still there, even if the door is closed. Now that this is done, he's taking my black pen, putting it up on the desk out of his sight, but in his reach, waiting a while, then picking it up again and repeating the process.

Philosophical Reading on Race

Tue, 09 Apr 2002 13:27:49 +1100

Bijan Parsia is reading Appiah's In My Father's House. From monkeyfist.com.

No Sugar

Tue, 09 Apr 2002 10:08:36 +1100

No Sugar: Greg Egan on asylum-seekers.

SF for social change

Mon, 08 Apr 2002 11:59:25 +1100

Do you like your science fiction with a social conscience? If you do, try these: Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read.

The Russian Avant-Garde Book

Sun, 07 Apr 2002 14:53:09 +1100

Browse the MoMA exhibit The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934 online. Makes me wish I were there myself.

Bembo's Zoo

Fri, 05 Apr 2002 07:40:28 +1100

Spend a few minutes exploring Bembo's Zoo. I love the giraffe, rhinoceros and octopus. (The koala is less than perfect, with that odd tail.)

Font style and book design

Thu, 04 Apr 2002 11:47:58 +1100

Linotype have posted an excellent feature on Jan Tschichold for the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Zack enjoys sitting in my chair

Wed, 03 Apr 2002 13:43:13 +1100

Kind Words

Wed, 03 Apr 2002 08:27:53 +1100

"The text is wonderfully clear and avoids the tedium of many introductory logic texts. The examples, exercises, and suggestions for further reading are all good. This is the only introductory text I know of that introduces students to some of the philosophical problems logic pertains to and intersects with. It is the type of book I would like to use for an introductory course and recommend it enthusiastically." — Michael Hallett, Philosophy Department, McGill University. Thanks!

News from March 2002

Sun, 31 Mar 2002 00:00:01 +1100

2002/03/21 I seem to be the 10th search result on AltaVista for "unthinking unmanned criticized submarine teletype." What on earth could this mean? 2002/03/20 Who wrote this? Theories of new types of inference, ignored or misunderstood by the traditional logic, have at the same time been discovered and worked out with true mathematical elegance. No one can debar mathematicians from staking claims to all that can be treated in terms of mathematical form and method. Only if one is ignorant of the modern science of mathematics, particularly of formal mathematics, and measures it by the standards of Euclid or Adam Riese, can one remain stuck in the common prejudice that the essence of mathematics lies in number and quantity. It is not the mathematician, but the philosopher, who oversteps his legitimate sphere when he attacks the `mathematicizing' theories of logic, and refuses to hand over his temporary foster-children to their natural parents. The scorn with which philosophical logicians like to speak of mathematical theories of inference, does not alter the fact that the mathematical form of treatment is in their case (as in the case of all strictly developed theories in the proper sense of this word) the only scientific one, the only one that offers us systematic closure and completeness, and a survey of all possible questions together with the possible forms of their answers.

News from February 2002

Wed, 27 Feb 2002 00:00:01 +1100

2002/02/27 A two week absence from this site is pretty large, at least when its unannounced. As you can probably tell, I'm snowed under. Slowly digging through that inbox and the pile of administrative work which requires doing. You might even get a link recommendation or two from me in the next few days. But I'm not promising anything. First, I must get back to that email. 2002/02/13 It seems that the discussion group has formed a life of its own. Here, as elsewhere, the action is below the surface. 2002/02/07 Quite a lot about the structure of the universe (well, at least the relationship between wishes and choices) can be inferred from folk wisdom. Here is an example. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So, if wishes were choices, beggars would be choosers. But beggars can't be choosers. Therefore, wishes can't be choices. 2002/02/02 This is something I really love. (Warning, it's a dvi file. If you don't know what a dvi file is, it's almost certain that you won't have the software to deal with it. Sorry.) Anyway, this paper "A nonstandard proof of the Jordan curve theorem" by Vladimir Kanovei and Michael Reeken, is a beautiful piece of mathematics.

News from January 2002

Thu, 31 Jan 2002 00:00:01 +1100

2002/01/31 Dave Scarratt sent me a link to the Ethical Philosophy Selector. Find out which philosopher you best match, when it comes to ethics. I managed to match Augustine, which struck me as not-quite-right, but then I don't think I match too many other people on the list anyway. Who do you match? ~ Zachary and I enjoyed a swimming lesson at Leichhardt Pool yesterday. Very exciting, and lots of fun. He was the oldest baby there, and the month or two he had on the other babies really made a difference. He was completely unfazed and relaxed in the water. (It might have been the previous times we've been swimming together, too, I suppose.) 2002/01/30 I think I'm glad that RateMyProfessors.com has not made it to Australia. I'm also glad that you can't seem to browse the archive by discipline. It's just too prurient to browse a list of philosophers to see who's popular and who's not, among undergraduates. 2002/01/29 Comments are back. They're different, and hopefully better. Visit consequently.org/discuss. 2002/01/28 I'm preparing for my move to Melbourne. Christine gave me the great Lonely Planet guide to Victoria, for my birthday, and I've been planning enough little and big excursions to keep us occupied for the next few years.

News from December 2001

Mon, 31 Dec 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/12/18 Zack reclining, by the pool (Fremantle, November 2001) Tomorrow, we pile into the car, and start the drive up to Brisbane to spend Christmas with family. We're looking forward to a relaxing and refreshing Christmas break, and I hope you have something similar to that too. See you sometime in 2002. 2001/12/13 Thanks to Robert King, I'm listening to the first radio series of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I first read the first book in 1981, and listened to the radio series soon after. It's been a long time since I've read or listened to them, and as you'd expect, it sounds pretty different, given the years of elapsed. I now notice how repetitive the dramatic devices become. It would be nice if some of the dramatic tension did not involve Our Heroes facing certain (if only apparent) death, only to be rescued by a wildly improbable occurence. But then, the plot is not the most important or interesting thing about the series. It's merely a skeleton on which to hang the humour: both the jokes and the tone. Douglas Adams' tone is fundamentally sympathetic. He really does appear to have genuine affection for his characters and their silly beliefs, customs or habits.

News from November 2001

Fri, 30 Nov 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/11/30 Jon Barwise (1942-2000) Jon Barwise was a renaissance logician. He didn't know everything but his contributions ranged so widely that he approximated omniscience quite well. His work ranges from infinitary logic (an extension of Frege-style predicate logic to deal with infinitely long sentences, and infinitary quantifiers), the model theory of first-order logic (continuing on from Tarski's work), generalsed quantifiers (quantifiers other than "for all" and "for some"), admissible sets and generalised recursion theory (the connections between sets and computation), situation semantics and the philosophy of language (using situations, restricted parts of the world as bearers of information, rather than just entire possible worlds), information theory (an account of how information flows and is transmitted), and the logic of diagrams (examining visual representation and inference, as well as linguistic representation). Barwise's work, in all of 35 years, has covered a huge range of disciplines, and it gives you some idea of the breadth of work available in contemporary logic. Barwise's approach of regularly moving into new fields, to keep fresh and active, is a helpful antidote in the current age of increasing specialisation and narrowing. If work like this is possible at the end of the 20th Century, it will be our job to see what might be done in the 21st.

News from October 2001

Wed, 31 Oct 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/10/31 I have a change in store for you for next month. Instead of ceaseless worry about Federal elections, asylum seekers or a war on terrorism, I bid you to enjoy some solace in abstraction. For all of November, this site will be taken up with Great Moments In Logic. I hope to serve up one insight per day for thirty days, from thirty great philosopher/logicians. (The alternative --- detailed reflection on the world around us --- is too much to bear.) 2001/10/30 Are you interested in the theory of programming languages and related areas? If so, this collection of resources is a good place to start. It's a collection of online texts. 2001/10/29 Interesting thoughts can be found in the NYRB: There's an article on the end of the Golden Age in U.S. tertiary education. The thoughts apply more generally, and the author has interesting things to say about relevance. The catch-cry be relevant is not necessarily something we philosophers must worry about: as the article says at the end, we need to search for how to be relevant in a new way. 2001/10/28 On the Liberal Party Campaign Launch today: Margo Kingston's reactions seem on the money, and frightening.

News from September 2001

Sun, 30 Sep 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/09/30 2001/09/28 Ballot '01: With the CHOGM postponed, we'll almost certainly have an early federal election. It's going to be messy, with the "war" on terrorism, the collapse and possible resurrection of Ansett, and asylum seekers all as hot issues here. The polls give the conservatives a huge lead. Let's see how this short election campaign plays out. Interesting comment and analysis, as ever, will be found on the SMH webdiary. ~ The thought for today comes from Nuel Belnap (specifically, from his syllabus for PHIL1500). “Everyone should join a study group. The great ideal provided by the Vienna Circle should live: Although a lonely genius can be a marvelous sloppy thinker, rigorous thinking is done best in public.” 2001/09/27 You wonder how a satirical magazine like The Onion might respond to the Current Situation. Wisely, they took a week's hiatus. Even more wisely, they responded with satire like this. You get theological insight in the strangest of places. 2001/09/26 2001/09/25 I am a person of such little faith! Upon reading in the Newspaper's joke page yesterday of the National Public Toilet Map, I doubted their veracity! I had no idea of the detailed glories to be found. Indeed, hard at work on the National Continence Strategy, our Federal Government have produced an internet resource to rival all others.

News from August 2001

Fri, 31 Aug 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/08/31 Last Monday, my last surviving grandparent, Johanna de Vries, my maternal Grandmother, passed away at 1:30am. Today I fly up to Brisbane to attend her funeral, and to grieve with my family. 2001/08/29 2001/08/27 Discussions like these, on the uniquely internet discussion phenomenon of flaming make me wish I knew more about rhetoric than I do. That, and the perceived "dumbing down" of public culture (particularly of discussion about politics). You'd think that a philosopher with more than a passing knowledge of logic would have something sensible and productive to say about what makes public discussion good. But I don't have much to say. I'd like to, one day. Does anyone have any ideas of what other things would be good to read to get up to speed in the area? If so, please let me know. 2001/08/25 2001/08/24 To help Roberta celebrate my arrival, our chivalrous and irreproachably well-mannered landlord had bestowed upon her two hard-to-come-by tickets to the Bolshoi. We went the following evening. Gisele was on the program, the same ballet I'd seen performed five years ago during my first visit to Moscow. At that time the theater had been shabby, with grimy scaffolding from ongoing renovations concealing its fissured neo-Romanesque façade.

News from July 2001

Tue, 31 Jul 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/07/31 From: yapasdequoi (yapasdequoi@excite.ca) Subject: Open Letter to Professor Levitt, Professor Sokal and Professor Bricmont Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy, sci.logic, sci.philosophy.meta, sci.math, alt.postmodern Date: 2001-07-28 10:48:02 PST Dear Science Warriors, Isn't "paraconsistent logic" as far removed from reality as the most far-fetched of post-modernist hokum? If so, why have you kept silent regardng those who allow that a proposition may be both true and false (at the same time and in the same respect)? Is this irrational doctrine any the less to be deplored because it issues from the mouths of influential logicians? If not, why haven't you censured those responsible for this irrationalist hype? Could it be because their backers include the Association of Symbolic Logic and the editors of _Mind_ and _Logique et Analyse_? O warriors of science: what will you do, now that the dialethic disease has taken root in mathematical logic? Will you recognise that the apostles of inconsistency are the vilest of charlatans? Will you indict your own kind for mathematical decadence, for having gotten in bed (many for grants) with the henchmen of this nefast movement? Or will you find some pretext for justifying an intellectual licentiousness that you would have lost no time in repudiating had it been indulged by post-modernists?

News from June 2001

Sat, 30 Jun 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/06/31 2001/06/30 Creative energy is a crazy thing. It took me a while to hit my stride with my research back when I was starting, and it feels like a transition has come with Zachary's birth too. Now, time to think and write is more concentrated. More focussed. I can't tolerate timewasting to anywhere near the same extent as before. (Actually, this reminds me of the time I moved from my postdoc at ANU to a teaching position at Macquarie. The concentration of time in regular teaching commitments at Macquarie meant that I couldn't waste time to the extent that I did at ANU when I had a research only 2.5 years. Now I can't waste time to even the extent that I did when childless. (What did I do with all the time I now spend with him? I have no idea where it all went. Some of it was spent on this site, no doubt.) The creative energy is still there, not squelched by the squeeze in available time. Let's see if it will continue. 2001/06/29 The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and derivations from a few things already known; not in the number of axioms.

News from May 2001

Thu, 31 May 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/05/31 Some advice: If you're an undergraduate attempting to take the short-cut to a good grade on an essay, by plagiarising. For your own sake, attempt to plagiarise from someone writes no better than you do. There is something thoroughly disconcerting about the jump from turgid, knotted, ungrammatical prose to smooth, well written text. It's dead easy for us to spot. Of course, if you can't tell the difference yourself, it's rather hard for you to follow this advice. Learning to read well goes hand-in-hand with learning to write well. Learning how to plagiarise well should hopefully go hand-in-hand with not needing to plagiarise. ~ As life is rather hectic at the moment, updates here from next month will be rather less frequent. Enjoy the quality, not the quantity. 2001/05/30 2001/05/29 Thinking, thinking, thinking. Not just about work, but about our future. There's some decisions which need making. Big decisions. Really big decisions. Anyone got any advice? How do you approach life-direction-changing decisions? 2001/05/28 2001/05/26 2001/05/25 Once upon a time them was a universe. In this universe there was a planet. On this planet there was virtually no laughter. Nothing like ``humor'' was really known. People never laughed, nor jested, nor kidded, nor joked, nor anything like that.

News from April 2001

Mon, 30 Apr 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/04/30 The wall of a terrace house in Dulwich Hill. (February 2001) 2001/04/29 Interesting things are to be found at xrefer, a compendium of decent reference materials cross-referenced and freely searchable here on the net. For example, here is Steve Read's article (from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy) on relevant logic which explains just a little of what I do. 2001/04/28The old Waratah mill at dusk, in Dulwich Hill. (February 2001) Some items about Zachary. I never expected that starting your digestive system was so much fun and bother at the very same time. It's a little known fact that children do actually have instruction manuals. Zack and his dad know how to sleep. For a short time only, photos of Zack are available up at www.metrophoto.com.au/grestall/ for your perusal, and for printing. (Don't you want a picture of Zack and me adorning a mousepad, or a mug? I know I do.) The fact that I don't add daily posts about him on this website means that I'm actually spending time with him, rather than writing about him. . 2001/04/27 [Richard] Rorty sympathizes with those—like Thomas Kuhn, to take a prominent example—who have pleaded with him not to characterize their work in ways they find distorting or misleading.

More News from March 2001

Sat, 31 Mar 2001 00:00:01 +1100

2001/03/31 2001/03/30Hmmm. The Mac OS X implementation of PDF allows you to print PDF files which have been marked as "for viewing and not for printing" by Adobe Acrobat. That's one part of the specification that I think I'm glad they didn't implement correctly. I doubt that Adobe will be happy about that, though. ~ Those of you who are following the story of my life will be pleased to know that today, the floor sander & polisher has finally arrived. If this will not bring on an early labour, I don't know what will. ~ Happy National Head Lice Awareness Day.2001/03/29Further on Mac OS X, Omniweb is now a useful browser alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Mac OS X version of IE5.1 can't cut & paste in browser edit windows (or anywhere else, it seems), which makes it useless for a web-logger. Omniweb not only handles text nicely, it uses Apple's own spell-checker in edit windows. That's handy. ~ This picture, which I first mentioned a few days ago, was from a collection my uncle digitised for my brother and me. It was disconcerting to see so many pictures I hadn't seen for years. Apparently, I squinted in photos 31 years ago, just as I do now.

News from March 2001

Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:01 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Thursday, March 1 The action is no longer at http://www.phil.mq.edu.au/staff/grestall/log. It is now all happening at consequently.org. The archives of this site remain here (see the list of dates above), but eventually these will be moved over to the new site too. See you there.

News from February 2001

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Wednesday, February 28, 2001 3:23 PM ~ That's all folks! This is my last post here using blogger. Tomorrow, I'll be somewhere else entirely. I'll let you know then. The year from March 2000 to February 2001 has been one thing. The year from March 2001 onward will be another thing entirely. Join me there. 12:29 PM ~ Just in case you needed to restock your supply of musical instrument jokes. 8:38 AM ~ This Friday, some friends and I will be doing this. I hear that the view is rather special. Tuesday, February 27, 2001 3:47 PM ~ Neale is back. But note what the man says: it's not a blog. No date! No links! No daily update! It's good to have him back, though. 8:48 AM ~ Here's some more Tim Winton to add to last month's selection. Here his his essay Kiss no bum, tug no forelock on the music of Midnight Oil. Monday, February 26, 2001 9:34 PM ~ Lots of fun things about mathematics in the public domain at John Allen Paulos's page.

News from January 2001

Wed, 31 Jan 2001 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Wednesday, January 31, 2001 3:19 PM ~ keaggy.com/30/ is another regular photography project, this time from Bill Keaggy. He's posting a photo of himself for each day of his 30th year. (His birthday is one day after mine, curiously enough.) 9:58 AM ~ It's been pouring since 2am, with only an occasional break of 10 minutes or so. Erasmus woke me up, moaning about the rain, and asking me why it was so noisy on the corrugated iron roof. She then took a look out the front door, decided that it didn't look inviting out there, and decided to check if it was fine if she exited out the back door instead. Strangely enough, it was raining there too. Keeping up the Phil Agre theme from yesterday, his Networking on the Network is a mine of useful information for anyone working in academia. It's geared for graduate students, starting off in the wild and exciting prospect of finding their own voice and creating their own projects.

News from December 2000

Sun, 31 Dec 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Friday, December 22, 2000 1:47 PM ~ Here's a parting gift. Spend those lazy summer Christmas days reading wonderful expository articles from the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. This is a parting gift, because I'll be taking a week or two's sabbatical from surfing the web over this Christmas break. Less time web browsing means more time reading and listening to music, cooking and entertaining, melting in front of the cricket, in the heat, and generally enjoying being with friends and family. I hope your Christmas/Solstice/Hannukah/whatever else is just as refreshing. See you in 2001. 12:46 PM ~ Our university's name is often misspelled. 9:01 AM ~ Wisdom, from Brenda: Good mathematics, like good cinema, must leave something to the imagination. This is handy to know, as I'm meant to be spending this week rewriting my unit notes for this. And yes, Brenda's statement is relevant, because about 50% of this unit is straight mathematics, despite the philosophy tag the units get.

News from November 2000

Thu, 30 Nov 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Thursday, November 30, 2000 8:51 PM ~ I'd like to see that. 5:02 PM ~ If I thought T-Bone Burnett sounded good on those speakers, I had no idea what they could do with the Isle of the Dead. Of course, the massive thunderstorm, combined with the alarms going off all over campus and the faint sounds of sirens in the distance could have had something to do with the general tenor of the afternoon. 3:10 PM ~ My rather expensive stereo has arrived. The sound is absolutely amazing. (I had no idea that those teensy speakers could sound so round and textured.) One day, when the network people recognise its hardware address, I might use it to browse the web, and once it gets upgraded in memory from its currently poky 64MB to something useable in this day and age, it will get a decent operating system and it will become my desktop computer at work. But for now, it makes a gorgeous desktop stereo.

News from October 2000

Tue, 31 Oct 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Tuesday, October 31, 2000 10:33 AM ~ Meditate on this interesting snippet: Sun's chief scientist John Gage told us back in June that he thought one of the biggest headaches in computing in fifty years would be disappearance of the canonical text. He didn't just mean bit-flipping, as any regular Napster user will confirm. Faced with several dozen versions of Heartbreak Hotel, many of different lengths, recorded at different bitrates, how do you know which version is the definitive recording? Which one drops the start, and adds dead space at the end? At least the central server model ought to guarantee some redundancy. The redundancy in the Napster model is really a redundancy of incompleteness. Then think about what is meant by definitive in this context. (Or perhaps more usefully, think about what we ought to mean by "definitive" here.) 9:16 AM ~ Happy Birthday wrongwaygoback. Congratulations, Neale. I never had any idea that you'd be so famous when you were in my metaphysics class.

News from September 2000

Sat, 30 Sep 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Tuesday, September 19, 2000 5:45 PM ~ Christine and I are heading off to Toronto tomorrow. This log is going on hiatus for a couple of weeks. Expect some pictures when I get back. (Can you tell that I have a digital camera? We're only minding it for our trip overseas. It goes back to its owner when we get back, alas.) 4:51 PM ~ I think that I'm not really allowed to post this picture, as I'm not an Olympic broadcaster or journalist. But, what the heck, I'll live dangerously. I'm back from the Women's Team Epee quarter- and semi-finals: Russia and Switzerland are off into the Gold medal round tonight, and Hungary play China. I think the Chinese were the surprise package -- they whipped France, and the French looked rather shocked about it. Similarly, the Russians beat the Germans, and then rounded it off with a 46-45 win over the Hungarians (who were going in as the favourites).

News from August 2000

Thu, 31 Aug 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Thursday, August 31, 2000 10:14 PM ~ I was delighted to find that someone had trawled through pages of search engine entries to find this one. What was the search for? It was procrastination. This was on the tenth page of results. Our searcher might procrastinate, but she/he surely is persistent about it. 6:19 PM ~ I think I'd like to know more about Tibor Kalman. He seems to send people interesting presents. 11:13 AM ~ Today's Listening: Tie Me At The Crossroads. It's more blessed to give than it is to receive Except when it comes to free advice I believe Go explore the new Cockburn Project website for juicy Bruce Cockburn goodness. 9:58 AM ~ Hmm. Does this mean that if I'm going to drink coffee, I ought to make a habit of it? In another study of fifteen healthy volunteers, Dr. Georg Noll and colleagues at the University Hospital of Zurich, Switzerland, showed for the first time that coffee drinking result in a pronounced blood pressure increase in non-habitual coffee drinkers, but did not apparently have the same effect in regular coffee drinkers.

News from July 2000

Mon, 31 Jul 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Monday, July 31, 2000 4:31 PM ~ The PJ Harvey & Björk rendition of Satisfaction is the most menacing piece of music I've heard for a while. (Why is it that this is the only version of the song which doesn't sound infantile?) 8:54 AM ~ It's rare to find ethics in real estate, but that site seems to have a reasonably comprehensive account of the ethical concerns raised in real estate. Saturday, July 29, 2000 10:30 PM ~ By the way, my student numbers have grown to 518. 10:29 PM ~ My bank has decided that it wants to provide me with a portal. Why? Why do that with the brand? Friday, July 28, 2000 5:18 PM ~ The Flying Inkpot has a great Classical Music Review section. (Link found at the delightfully eclectic Apathy.) 10:15 AM ~ Phil's email reminded me too of the Background Briefing program on University quality in Australia. The transcript of that saddening program is now available.

News from June 2000

Fri, 30 Jun 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Thursday, June 29, 2000 11:59 AM ~ Do you have a Macintosh? Download this, the Alias|Wavefront paint effects demo. 11:54 AM ~ Just about to get on the train to the airport, and I want to check my bank details on the web. Oddly, the domain name servers are screwy today. I can access some websites at without their "www" prefixes (such as weblogs.com) but not with them (like www.weblogs.com). I can get to my bank website OK, but through a nonstandard domain name, and this means that the security certificate isn't accepted by my browser, and the connection isn't secure. Does anyone know what DNS problems could cause this? Wednesday, June 28, 2000 11:26 PM ~ Celera, HUGO and the US-NHGRI. You'll here more from these folks in the near future when they get to understand what you can do with those 3.12 billion base pairs. If you want to get some sequencing done for yourself, you don't need to get all the tricky equipment.

News from May 2000

Wed, 31 May 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Wednesday, May 31, 2000 6:06 PM ~ Sometimes the whole is much better than the sum of its parts. Megnut supplies eminenya.mpg, which is very much more than the sum of its consistuents. 5:45 PM ~ There's a helpful discussion over at Metafilter on answering email. The question at issue is: What's a reasonable amount of time, for you, to expect someone to reply to an email? Good question. It really depends on the person, I think. But knowing what other people's expectations are helps me know how to treat the emails I get. But remember: it's a person at the other end. It's a Good Thing to treat people with respect. (This is why I feel so bad when I'm such a Bad email correspondent sometimes. The emails languishing in my To Do boxes burn a hole in my conscience too.) 9:48 AM ~ Hmmm. Light might go faster than light through some substances. Three hundred times faster. Now to figure out what that experiment actually means.

News from April 2000

Sun, 30 Apr 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Saturday, April 29, 2000 11:52 PM ~ The Coffee FAQ. Know what you ingest. You might like a t-shirt to go with that coffee. 9:12 PM ~ I really ought to know more about this sort of thing: Universities in the Digital Age. That's an excellent paper by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Their book The Social Life of Information looks good too. It gives a sociologically informed reading of information technology. 8:44 PM ~ Luc Devroye has done some interesting work on fonts. His work on random trees is beautiful (both visually and mathematically). 1:21 PM ~ What a wonderful universe. 9:55 AM ~ Wow. An email from the folks at Nature, the premiere general science journal. I'm pleased to announce that beginning this week the latest issue of nature will be posted to our website, www.nature.com, as early as 19:01 GMT every Wednesday. Browse away. Friday, April 28, 2000 6:15 PM ~ For you, when you think that the net is just the best: Modern life is rubbish.

News from March 2000

Fri, 31 Mar 2000 23:59:59 +1100

(These are entries from my blog from 2000 and early 2001. They were originally hosted on a small server at Macquarie University. Most of the links are dead now, but I have kept them as they are here, for nostalgia’s sake.) Friday, March 31, 2000 10:03 AM ~ OK. Just a little browsing while the cake is baking. Hermenaut is an interesting browse: philosophers outside academia. 9:03 AM ~ Quiet day today. Baking a cake, writing a paper, and having people over for dinner & supper. No more blogging today. Thursday, March 30, 2000 3:37 PM ~ This afternoon's listening is The Planet with Lucky Oceans. Certainly my favourite voice on radio. Rich and mellow. 11:08 AM ~ This morning's listening: Alina. Arvo Pärt is my composer of choice at present. Divine simplicity. 9:01 AM ~ I have been enjoying taking pictures more on my last trip, but I don't particularly like my camera. Some people have been pointing to the idiosyncratic lomo camera. But then there are those digital things. Who knows. Wednesday, March 29, 2000 11:48 PM ~ Backup Brain provides the new blogger Blog This! bookmarklet for IE5/Mac. This makes me actually use the favourites bar on IE5.