Logica 2008

The 22nd Logica symposium is taking place this summer, June 16th-20th, in Hejnice. This is an annual event organised by The Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. I'm off to give a revamped version of my paper on proof-theoretic harmony, and I notice to my great satisfaction that it looks like the perfect environment for some of my thoughts. Among the keynote speakers, Arché Professorial Fellow Stewart Shapiro (the most critical side of my supervising committee) joins Bob Brandom, Dag Prawitz and Heinrich Wansing, all outstanding contributers to my field of interest. In addition, there are several talks on inferentialism, proof-theory and related material in the line-up of invited speakers, noticeably two other of the usual suspects of my papers: Peter Milne and Peter Schroeder-Heister. Full programme is here.

I'll post a new version of the paper later when I've had some time to digest input from some of the past events. Now that inferentialist comrade Julien Murzi has joined us as Arché visitor for a couple of months, there will be ample opportunities to experiment with new ideas.

UK PhDs in the US job market

If you are, like me, a PhD student in a UK department, you might want to keep an eye on the comments on this recent Leiter thread. Also, if you yourself have experience with the process, contributions would be very helpful.

Melbourne and WCP4

If things go according to the plan, I'll be heading off to the University of Melbourne in July. I'll be visiting the Philosophy Department for a semester to work with Greg Restall and Graham Priest. Both of them, and my supervisor Stephen Read, will be presenting at the WCP4 (4th World Congress on Paraconsistent Logic), and most likely I'll be there in time to catch these and other great talks.

A very impressive list of participants is online here.

Synthese special issue on Crispin Wright

There is a special issue of Synthese on the philosophy of one of my supervisors, Crispin Wright, coming out on Springer's Online First. The issue is edited by Duncan Pritchard and Jesper Kallstrup, both of whom are St Andrews and Arché familiars. There are contributions on rule-following, alethic minimalism, scepticism, McDowell and Wright on perception, and more. Note that you need a subscription to get access (for example through your university network).

HT: Aidan

Logical consequence and ambiguity

I've been participating in a small discussion over at Obscure and Confused Ideas on JC Beall and Greg Restall's Logical Pluralism. Greg (the blog author, not the book author) has written some interesting posts discussing the use of (semantic) indeterminacy in their pluralism proposal (the so-called V-schema -- see Greg's post or the book pp. 29-31). The idea is roughly that there are different senses in which a conclusion can follow (as a logical consequence) from a set of premises. The different senses are precisifications of the schema, in particular different specifications of what sorts of cases (e.g., worlds, constructions, situations) truth-preservation ranges over.

Greg is trying to check the ambiguity idea with a test from linguistics, the "conjunction reduction" test with some interesting results. A couple remarks of my own can be found in the comments.

I'll return with more on pluralism here later. Meanwhile, check out a couple of other things. Firstly, the much talked about philosophy TV show in Denmark can now be found online (in Danish). Secondly, if you, like me, are interested in discussions about open access journals, check out some recent posts on Crooked Timber and Philosophy etc.

Pitt/CMU Graduate Conference, with observations from the road

After a couple weeks on the road (with only shorter stops at home), I'm now back behind my desk, pen posed and books opened. I want to say thanks to everyone at UPitt (both departments) and CMU for organising a wonderful event, and especially to Mike Tamir, Balázs Gyenis, and Or (Xor) Neeman for housing me, and to my fellow blogger Shawn for excellent comments. Incidentally, Shawn has a report from the conference and his comments online.

In fact, I further expanded my blogosphere network by also meeting fellow blogger and speaker Errol Lord. Errol gave a very insightful talk on rationality, mainly from the perspective of immunity from (rational) criticism. You can check out the full paper here. Unfortunately, in contrast to my luck with Shawn, I had the impression that Errol's respondent wasn't quite appreciating the force of the paper. Granted, the two of them had different perspectives (the respondent more interested in agenthood), but the comments certainly didn't do justice to the originality of Errol's contribution.

Overall, I was very impressed with the Pittsburgh philosophers, both students and faculty. Even the city itself, with its industrial charm and hilly, snowy skyline, felt like home to me. It is certainly better than its reputation.

(Thanks to Edward for mentioning the C&H comic strip.)