Logic Matters

I intended to return from Perugia full of renewed energy, imagination, and zest. It hasn’t quite worked out like that. We have Covid. So far, it’s largely a matter of massive fatigue. Let’s hope that’s the worst it gets. So perhaps not much here on logical matters for a week or two.

It’s the blog’s birthday! Let’s party!!

The very first post was back on March 9th, 2006 (and I have just restored the link there to a short talk on Gödel’s theorem for mathematicians which I’d quite forgotten about ). Since then there have been — rather astonishingly — 1630 posts.

Of course, many of these were of merely passing interest (if that). But over the years, there have been some blog posts, or series of posts, of perhaps less ephemeral interest. So I’ve decided to rework the webpage that used to be unhelpfully labelled ‘Varia’ to become more of an ‘Archive’. I plan over the coming weeks not only link to a few papers, book reviews, and other pieces, but also to ‘best bits’ from the blog. It will take a while to organize this; but I’ll hopefully enjoy finding out what earlier time-slices of me thought!

Heavens: I’ve just realized that if I start the clock when I got my first job, the blog has been going for about a third of my academic life. Doesn’t time fly when you are having fun.

Long ago, I posted a piece here under the mournful title “Logic disappearing over the horizon ….”.

I’ve just had an invitation to give a talk at the University of X, a distinguished place, with a philosophy graduate community of about fifty (according to their website). So I checked out how much logic/phil maths is going on, what I could reasonably take as given. Zilch. Apart from a first year course perhaps approaching the level of my intro logic book, nothing at all, as far as I can tell. Which leaves me a bit bereft of anything to go to talk about. But more to the point, it means that for students at X a central swathe of the work of lasting value from the last hundred years has disappeared over the horizon. Which is, shall we say, a pity.

My sense is that this is happening more and more in UK universities. I’d be delighted to learn that I’m wrong.

There was some discussion on the blog at the time, not very cheering. And my current sense is that the situation is getting worse and worse. How many logic-orientated posts in philosophy departments have been advertised and filled in the UK in the last dozen years? Very few, as far as I know.

And things are just as grim, if not more so, with the philosophy of mathematics. Here is Jeremy Avigad, in a recent essay which I’ve just noticed:

A recent analysis of tenure-track positions advertised in Jobs for Philosophers in the 2021–2022 academic year doesn’t even mention philosophy of mathematics in its categorization. Digging into the data shows that the phrase “philosophy of mathematics” occurs in only three of the 201 advertisements, in each case listed among multiple areas of potential interest. Surely this is an indication that the field is no longer viewed as important. It is sad that a discipline that was so central to the philosophical tradition from ancient times to the middle of the twentieth century now barely registers a pulse.

An Avigad now would, it seems, have a pretty hard time getting an academic post in philosophy. Sad indeed.

Is it always the fate of those in their declining years to think important bits of their world are falling apart? Probably so. But we’re not always wrong to thing so ….

I thought that this piece on chatbots from New York magazine was worth reading and thought-provoking.

I was amused/alarmed by one Christopher Manning who seems to think we are stochastic parrots, and “the meaning of a word is simply a description of the contexts in which it appears.” Really? Apparently, the idea that meaning has anything to do with how words hook up to the world and to our interactions with the world and each other is antiquated, the “sort of standard 20th-century philosophy-of-language position.” Well, that’s us told.

I was pointed to this piece by a post on Mastodon. I still occasionally look at the old bird site because that’s where posts about music and other cultural stuff still are mostly to be found. But these days, quite apart from not wanting to have too much to do with Musk Enterprises Inc., the more genial atmosphere of Mastodon, on my instance anyway, suits me fine.