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Now I'm in a friend's flat, where a lot of books and a TV set have consipred to distract me. Yesterday I've read Szpilman's "The Pianist" and watched "The Matrix". I found the latter rather silly and unoriginal, but maybe I've entirely missed the point. I'll try to find out what's supposed to be the point as soon as I get a chance to access the net without increasing other people's telephone bill.
The Frege paper is finished, by the way. And yes, it's in German.
I've just moved out of my flat. Next I have to find a flat to move into. This time I've even managed to throw away most of the notes and copies of papers I used to carry with me each time I moved. I've also thrown away some other stuff, like two of my three pairs of trousers, so I feel like quickly approaching my dream lifestyle.
In the meantime, the new semester has begun. I'll probably visit just one seminar, which is supposed to be about classical logic, though I'm not sure if e.g. Dov Gabbay's fibring logics should really be called "classical". Well, maybe I've missed the new era while reading Frege.
If nothing goes terribly wrong, I will finish the Frege paper tomorrow. Though I'm not sure if it's really the same Frege paper I mentioned previously. Initially I just wanted to put together all the comments on Fregean thoughts and Rieger's paradox that I had already posted to this weblog. That looked like a cheap way to get a termpaper. For some reason however the paper has now evolved into a discussion about the prospects and dangers of developing a semantics that can be applied to its own metalanguage.
I'm still working on the Frege paper. Obviously, so far this weblog hasn't cured my perfectionism, which I hoped it would.
Apropos perfectionism: That new (and not very informative) entry on Turing Machines in the Stanford Encyclopedia reminds me of a Turing Machine simlulation I've worked on back in 2000. Here is the rather unusable latest version of that attempt. I've stopped working on it mainly because I wanted the page to automatically draw a flow chart for any machine table that is specified. But I couldn't find an algorithm that prevents overlapping arrows wherever it is possible. (Here is an example of the latest, somewhat funny looking version.)
Magdalena told me that Jay Wallace will offer a seminar next semester here in Berlin. In this respect I fully support the "love it or leave it" messages from the American right, as long as they bring good philosophers to Old Europe...
Battleground God says that there are three contradictions in my views about God. Of course I don't believe my views are contradictory. Here are the alleged contradictions:
First, I accepted both of the following as true:
4. Any being which it is right to call God must want there to be as little suffering in the word as is possible.
12. If God exists she could make it so that everything now considered sinful becomes morally acceptable and everything that is now considered morally good becomes sinful.
Is this a contradiction? I'm not quite sure whether (12) is an indicative or a subjunctive conditional, but I think if it was subjunctive it would have to go "If God existed ..." or "If God would exist ...". So I think it's meant to be indicative (in the sense of "If God exists, then it is the case that: She could ..."). Like most people, I find it difficult to evaluate indicative conditionals with false antecedents, but at least for today I felt like embracing the Grice-Jackson-Lewis view that they are true. The website complained that I "say that God could make it so that everything now considered sinful becomes morally acceptable". But that's not what I said!
I've fixed a couple of (five, to be precise) problems in Postbote.
On Friday, I wrote:
Conclusion 2: If we want to avoid Bradley's regress, there is no reasonable way to defend the principle that every meaningful expression of our language has a semantic value. (Russell's paradox is an independent argument for the same conclusion.)
Today, I was trying to prove the statement in brackets. This is more difficult than I had thought.
Semantic paradoxes usually (always?) arise out of an unrestricted application of schemas like
Friends who know English better than I often tell me that when I write English, my sentences get too long and complicated. So I noticed with considerable relief this resolution from the University at Buffalo on open source software.
Frege believes that predicate expressions have semantic values (Sinne and Bedeutungen) which can't be denoted by singular terms. Hence "the Bedeutung of 'is a horse'" does not denote the Bedeutung of 'is a horse'. Before the discovery of Russell's paradox, the only reason he ever gave for this view -- apart from claiming that it is a fundamental logical fact that just has to be accepted -- is that otherwise the semantic values of a sentence's constituents wouldn't "stick together". The more I think about this reason, the less convincing I find it.
That new Whitespace programming language looks fun. It uses only three different whitespace characters. So I've been thinking about a possible language with just a single character. The only information contained in the source code of such a program would be the code's string length. The compiler would have to read all instructions from the properties of this number, e.g. its digits, its prime factors, etc. I couldn't come up with anything that looks even remotely feasible though. (The cheap trick of course is to interpret the string length as the Gödel number of some C code.)
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