First, the puzzle:
In a certain country there are two Gods, called A and B. One of them (A or
B, you don't know which) only tells the truth, the other one only
falsehoods. One day you meet a God in this country and want to find out
whether it's A or B. You're only allowed to ask a single yes/no question.
Unfortunately, you don't understand the language of the Gods (even though
they understand yours). All you know is that their words for "yes" and
"no" are "qwer" and "poiu", but you don't know which of these means "yes",
and which "no". With what question will you be able to find out whether it's A
or B you're talking to?
I can't really say that I have made up this puzzle. Well, I have made it
up, but I took all the main ingredients from puzzles by George Boolos, who
himself owes them mainly to Raymond Smullyan and a computer scientist whose
name I forgot.
My logfiles show that an alarming number of people (namely more than 10
per day) look at my blogger and diffbot scripts. Don't do that. Don't use them. I
have almost finished programming much better versions of both that might be
worth trying. But since they have been in the "almost finished" state for
quite some time now, I thought I'd better add this note here.
Apologies in advance for another somewhat political entry.
Given the current state of everything, there is little hope that the easily available oil reserves won't be exploited until they are eshausted. There is also little hope that anything like the Kyoto protocol will prevent this from happening rather soon. For well-known reasons this is not good at all. So maybe those governments and institutions that care about the environment should try a different strategy: We could move forward with the exploitation of oil reserves, but instead of burning the oil and blowing all the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it could be bound in plastic.
On a more positive note, Prof. Beckermann found my speculations
convincing: The next edition of his logic book won't contain "incorrect"
quantifier rules any more.
I can't count how often I wished to live in that very close possible
world in which Al Gore won the presidency (very close in terms of Lewis'
similarity standards for counterfactuals, not in terms of overall
similarity, sadly).
What worries me most is how many US Americans seem to back the Bush
administration. I mean, when Clinton, like so many other people, had an
extramarital affair and lied about it, that was a big scandal and
caused an impeachment process. When Bush, quite unlike most people,
violates the UN charta by going to war against a country that doesn't
threaten the US at all, and keeps lying about his alleged knowledge of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Quaeda, Americans just
seem to buy it. Then again, they are renaming French fries. There goes my princple of charity... For now,
I blame it all on the absence of a free press in the US, but I'm not sure
if that's a sufficient reason. I also tried to read blogs of the
war-mongers, but that didn't help much, it just left me very depressed for
the rest of the day. It's like shopping at Kottbusser Tor.
Oh well, I should better be blogging about quantifier rules in axiomatic
systems of predicate logic.
The fact that it turned out so difficult to explain my
question in sci.logic made me have a closer look at common axiomatic
systems of the kind I was critizising. This was a good idea, because I
found out that the systems used by Mendelson and Hodges are not of that
kind after all. The only such system is the one used by Kutschera and
Breitkopf, and as their logic book is German (and post-war), it is
not surprising that nobody understood my problem. It is however
interesting to compare the Kutschera/Breitkopf system with the systems of
Mendelson, Hodges and others:
Posting to newsgroups has some clear advantages over lonesome blogging.
Most notably, when I write something
incomprehensible in a newsgroup, somebody
will tell me that I do. Whereas here in this blog, nobody ever
complains even when I post absolutely unintelligible gibberish.
Maybe adding a comments section would help. But then I don't really have
a lot of readers. Maybe I should just add an "incomprehensible" button
under each entry, which when pressed would send me an email asking for
clarification.
Call for logicians: I have to convince Prof. Beckermann to drop an
incorrect rule of inference from the axiomatic system for predicate
logic used in his logic book. The incorrect rule is that from
A 
B
one may derive
A 
x B(t/x)
provided that t does not occur in A.
Christian has to write an introductory paper on Quine's "Two Dogmas". I
wouldn't like to do this. I think "Two Dogmas" is excessively overrated,
and should only be read in courses on the history of American philosophy.
Unfortunately, Christian seems to agree with most of my misgivings.
Maybe I find some opposition here.
"Two Dogmas" consists of three parts: §§1-4, §5 and §6. In §§1-4 Quine
argues that there is no distinction to be drawn between analytic and
synthetic statements. His argument appears to be as follows:
The world's first brain prothesis is interesting for several reasons:
Firstly, of course, it illustrates that when philosophers disagree about what would happen in a particular thought experiment, it is of very little help to carry out the experiment in reality: Will these rats become zombies?
Secondly, they are creating a hippocampus prosthesis. I guess they will also try what happens if that prosthesis is stimulated from the outside. There is a slight chance that this will have considerable effects on learning. I don't expect that we might one day learn just by stimulating the prosthesis. But we might learn much more easily by doing so.