I’m writing this post during the lunchbreak of the first day of Richard Zach‘s Mathematical Methods in Philosophy conference at Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. It promises to be an awesome conference – Kenny is here as well, so maybe he’ll be posting about it too. This morning we kicked off with Branden Fitelson, who read out Bob Meyer’s manifesto:
Do not be deceived, Establishment pigs (this means you too, Establishment dogs). The subservience of past generations of logicians does not mean that we shall bear forever our treatment as animals (you barnyard fowl). We are human beings (you swine). You are living in a day when logicians will not any longer endure your taunts, your slurs, your insults (you filthy vermin). In the name of A. N. Whitehead and B. Russell we gather; in the spirit of R. Carnap and A. Tarski, we march; by the word of W. V. O. Quine, we shall prevail. Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons. Oh, you filterable viruses, we will shake you off and fly once more.
(I’ve just realised – in searching for the text – that Greg Restall is blogging about the conference too. I guess reporting on this one is kind of overdetermined – look out for further posts from Richard Zach too. Greg has his laptop in the sessions, so that might be the place to go for the most up-to-the-minute reporting! I’m pretty amazed that Google had him linked already though – those little Googlebots must be much faster than they used to be.)
Branden also announced that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is widening its “Inductive Logic and Decision Theory” area to “Formal Epistemology”, with Branden Fitelson and Al Hajek joining Briain Skryms and Jim Joyce as editors.
And finally, he also said that Studia Logica is changing its broadening its scope to include “Formal Philosophy”, and there are several new editors with special issues coming up, including:
- Leitgeb: Psychologism in Philosophy
- Douven and Horsten: Applied Logic in Philosophy of Science
- Behounek and Keefe: Vagueness
- Fitelson: Formal Epistemology
According to Branden, the scope of “Formal Epistemology” is everything in formal philosophy that isn’t metaphysics. Except that it also includes the foundations of probability. That doesn’t leave a lot out, so if you have a good formal paper and you were wondering whether it would fit…it probably does.
OK, I’m off to walk through snowy pines before coming back to hot chocolate and JC Beall and Michael Glanzberg talking about paradoxes. (Did I mention that the programme is amazing?) Wish you were here…