Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Here’s where I channel Brian Leiter: Distinguished logician and computer scientist Georg Gottlob, former chair of the Department of Information Systems at the University of Technology, Vienna, moves to Oxford University. This is a great loss for the TU Wien and the Viennese logic community. It is to be hoped that Gottlob will continue to…

A new logic blog, from Ole Hjortland, St. Andrews: Nothing of Consequence. (I collect logic blogs. If you have one and it’s not on my blogroll, tell me!)

Gödel would have turned 100 years old today. Happy Birthday, Kurtele! Merry Gödelmas, everyone else! I’m going to report on today’s sessions (well, on Hajek’s and Putnam’s) at the Gödel Centennial conference tomorrow, since I have to get ready now for the fancy Gala Dinner at the Belvedere Palace. (“Black Tie Optional”. I guess I’ll…

Dana Scott just told this joke, which he heard from Ray Smullyan: Two professors at a math conference stand in front of a blackboard, on which is written the sentence “Only an idiot would believe a sentence like this!” The first professor asks the second, “Do you believe that?” The second answers, “Of course not!…

I’m in Vienna for the Gödel Centennial conference, Horizons of Truth. Day 1 featured talks by: Angus MacIntyre, How much has mathematics been affected by Gödel’s work? His answer: not much (yet). He surveyed the developments arising from Gödel’s work (recursion theory, definability theory, results on noncomputability of classical problems such as the undecidability of…

The February issue of Synthese is a special issue on proof-theoretic semantics, edited by Reinhard Kahle and Peter Schröder-Heister. It’s papers from a conference in Tübingen in 1999. Dag Prawitz, Meaning Approached Via Proofs Peter Schroeder-Heister, Validity Concepts in Proof-theoretic Semantics Patrizio Contu, The Justification of the Logical Laws Revisited Lars Hallnäs, On the Proof-theoretic…

Call for Papers: Uncertainty: Reasoning about probability and vagueness September 5 to 8, Prague Uncertainty is a ubiquitous phenomenon in everyday life, but it is also a topic of fundamental significance to many scientific disciplines. Uncertainty taken here in a broad sense, has many facets – among them probability and vagueness, including possibility, confidence, fuzziness…

Sad news: Torkel Franzén has died yesterday. I’ve known Torkel since my undergraduate days, when he was tirelessly setting people straight on logical and philosophical matters in the newsgroup sci.logic. He wrote two wonderful books, a technical book on incompleteness (Inexhaustibility: A Non-Exhaustive Treatment) and one on misconceptions and misuses of Gödel’s Theorems. He will…

One of the corollaries that easily follow from Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem for arithmetic is the incompleteness of second-order logic: there can be no proof system that generates all and only the validities of second-order logic. It follows from the incompleteness of arithmetic because for any sentences φ of first-order arithmetic, there is a sentence…

A whole bunch of conference announcements came in over the Proof Theory and FOM lists the other day: Logic Colloquium. July 27-August 2, Nijmegen, Netherlands. Submission deadline: April 17. Workshop on Hybrid Logics. August 11, Seattle (part of FLoC). Submission deadline: May 26. Computer Science Logic. September 25-29, Szeged, Hungary. Submission deadline: abstracts April 24,…