Another semester done

Abstract: Suppose we have a language involving non-denoting singular terms. (The language of everyday mathematics provides one example. Terms like \(\frac{n}{m}\) and \(\lim_{x\to\infty} f(x)\) do not denote, for appropriate choices of \(m\) and of \(f\).) It is not too difficult to define inference rules for an appropriately free logic that...

This month’s reading was mostly nonfiction, featuring Kevin Hart’s Contemplation (The Movements of the Soul), Haruki Murakami’s essay collection Novelist as a Vocation, the harrowing Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck by Tim Lane and Elliot Cartledge, Drew Neil’s Practical Vim (I’m trying to brush up my text editing skills), and...

In this paper, I defend contingentism, the natural idea that some things exist contingently. Had my parents not met, I would not have existed. It is perhaps surprising that an everyday idea like contingentism needs defence, but natural reasoning principles concerning possibility and necessity on the one hand, and the existential and universal...

Happy New Year, everyone! As 2024 draws to a close, I’ve finished another month of reading, so let’s close out my log of books read over 2024 with a short description of December’s reading. First up, I enjoyed reading the second entry in Dan Moren’s Galactic Cold War series: The Bayern Agenda. As with the previous entry, this was a fun spy...

Abstract: What does the semantically anti-realist revisionary programme of Michael Dummett have to do with contemporary work on proof assistants? What are mathematicians doing when they encode their proofs in these proof assistants, based on constructive type theory? What does all this have to do with the(?) norms of assertion? (And are these...