Logic Matters

This won’t be of interest to too many, but for NZ foodies …

We were beginning to lose hope. The quality of ingredients available here in NZ can be amazing: even our local New World supermarket (think Tesco’s) has local cheese and fish of just stunning quality (and some of the best steak we’ve ever tasted). The local farmers’ markets have more wonderful cheeses, home-cured bacon and the like.  So why, we were wondering, are the local restaurants so very, very average (or, mostly, worse)? But we’ve now had two terrific meals in three days.

In Wellington we dined on the waterfront at Shed 5 (wonderful fish, great ambience and service); in Auckland we dined, out on Princes Wharf, at White (even better fish, upscale but still very comfortable ambience, and almost ludicrously attentive and charming service). Both ridiculously cheap by UK standards. Vaut le voyage as Michelin would say.

Lunch the next day at Soul wasn’t at all bad either, and once again looking over the waterfront on a beautifully sunny day — as in the photo. This is the life …

The first nine episodes of the revised Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears are now online here. (Two more to come next week, and a closing review in a twelfth episode thereafter.)

But my plan to work through Parsons again here has unfortunately had to be shelved as a result of other New Zealand excitements. Though I do still hope to have something more useful to say about Parsons’s claims about induction and impredicativity in particular.

And, prompted by a couple of emails, I’m vividly aware that I’ve promised for ages to seriously update LaTeX for Logicians and move it to a new home here. I will get round to that when I get back to the UK in April.

Took the train trip from Dunedin up the Tiaeri Gorge to Middlemarch and back. Simply beautiful as you can see.

Of the town, however, we only really saw central Dunedin. Some rather splendid early buildings mixed in with too much later grot in a rather depressing way: and even the good buildings tend to have appalling street level shop frontages pasted on. The central Octagon is awful. Why on earth don’t they thoroughly pedestrianize it and then get rid of the shabby fourth rate bars and pubs that clutter what could be a great urban space (with the cathedral, town hall, art gallery and theatre, and a fine view central down to splendid railway station)? Unimpressed.

But the countryside around we saw on our two trips out, on the train, and along the Otago peninsula, was absolutely wonderful like so much of the South Island.

In Dunedin to read a paper at the University of Otago philosophy department. I was rehashing the line about Church’s Thesis taken in the last chapter from my Gödel book (and I don’t feel too guilty about talking about something published a few years ago now, as comments can still affect how I treat matters in the second edition of the book). I’d worried a bit in advance of giving this talk in Christchurch and Otago that the first half — about the general idea of a squeezing argument and Kreisel’s squeezing argument in particular — would be otiose. But not so. It turned out, a bit surprisingly, that no one in either audience had heard of the idea. Maybe I’ll write a stand alone note here (quite separate from the more contentious stuff about Church’s Thesis) to spread the word.

Another, and this time really lovely, surprise here was to discover that the Public Art Gallery has a quite stunning Florentine masterwork by Zanobi Machiavelli (proudly displayed as the most important old art work in New Zealand). The model for the Madonna is believed to be Lucrezia Buti who was the model for Fra’ Filippo Lippi and bore him his son Filippino. The painting is surely a reason to visit Dunedin all by itself.

Keith Frankish — via his eminently followable twitterings — got me reading Brian Fiala, Adam Arico and Shaun Nichols: “On the psychological origins of dualism: Dual-process cognition and the explanatory gap.”

Highly interesting, enjoyably written, and — on an admittedly quick and casual read — pretty persuasive. But the question whether they are exactly right  is in some ways less interesting  for me than the question “Is this a good sort of approach to diagnosing what is going on with some seemingly intractable philosophical problems about consciousness”.

I’m inclined to give an emphatic “yes, this sort of line must be worth exploring!”. Some more aprioiristically minded philosophers will I guess think Fiala, Arico  and Nichols are somehow missing the real philosophical questions.

Maybe your reaction to this paper — are they looking in the right sort of place or are they horribly misguided? —  will a nice litmus test for how thoroughgoing your philosophical naturalism is!

Talking about this result at a maths seminar, I realized my previous effort at this in the book is less pretty than it should be. In effect, I stupidly embedded (i) a proof that  not every partial recursive function is potentially recursive in Church’s sense into (ii) the proof of incompleteness. They should of course be neatly separated. So here (in under two pages) is how.

And comments or notes of typos/thinkos will be welcome!

Some wonderful late summer weather. So much New Zealand, so little time to explore.

The second instalment of my revised comments on Parsons is here.

And the first five episodes of the revised Gödel Without (Too Many) Tears are now online here.

So it isn’t all sun, scenery, and Pinot Noir for me in NZ!

Brian Leiter’s estimable blog has already posted Iain Pears’s terrific essay on the KCL cuts as a sign of the times: The palaeographer and the managers. But if you haven’t read it, do. It is the best single thing I’ve read on the subject. (I was much struck by the reference to Djilas when discussing the rise of the new class of university managers, who have expropriated an extraordinarily rapidly inflating amount of public cash into their own pockets. A blast from the past there for those of us who remember discussing Djilas in left circles decades ago.)