Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has posted a list of new Standard Research Grants for 2006. This year’s stats: 85 applications (2005: 96, 2004: 92), 32 grants, for a success rate of 37% (2005: 38%, 2004: 48%). This year, new scholars (≤ 5 years beyond PhD) had a 29% success rate…

Martin Löb has passed away on August 28. Obituary here.

In Prague this past week, David Miller gave a talk in which (among many other interesting things) he distinguished two notions of logical independence. One he credits to Moore (the mathematician, not the philosopher) and Wittgenstein, and that’s the notion of independence at work when we say, e.g., that an axiom system is independent. A…

I am very sorry. There will be more logic blogging very soon, I promise. I’m off to Prague for the Vagueness and Uncertainty workshop, and if the Academy of Sciences also has internet access in the villa they’re putting me up in, I will liveblog it. Rosanna Keefe! Stewart Shapiro (who has a new book,…

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard, of all things, reminded me of another centenary: Nelson Goodman would have turned 100 today.

PhD Student Position in Logic and Cognitive Science, Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol (UK): A newly established research group headed by Hannes Leitgeb at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, has an open position for a PhD student. The group, which will be part of an international EUROCORES Collaborative Research Project on Metacognition,…

Peter Smith’s book on incompleteness is now online in a new version.

Ever tried reading logical texts from the 20s or before (e.g., C. I. Lewis’s Symbolic Logic)? Confused by the absence of parentheses and all the dots and colons? Here’s Carnap’s explanation of the notation (from Abriss der Logistik): 4 c. The Dot Rules The dot symbols (. : :. :: etc.) replace the bracketing of…

50 years ago this summer, McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon organized a summer conference at Dartmouth which turned out to be a milestone in Artificial Intelligence research. For the logically minded, this item in the funding proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation is perhaps most interesting: 4. Theory of the Size of a Calculation If we…

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Computability in Europe conference in the lovely seaside town of Swansea, Wales. Lots of interesting talks on all kinds of aspects of computation, including a number of talks on the (limits of) hypercomputation, a tutorial on proof complexity by Sam Buss, and special sessions on Gödel’s…