Wolfgang Schwarz

Amie Thomasson's Fiction and Metaphysics

Brian has made so many puzzling remarks about fictional characters being real but abstract that I've decided to read Amie Thomasson's Fiction and Metaphysics. Here is my little review.

Thomasson's theory, in a nutshell, is that the Sherlock Holmes stories are not really about the adventures of a detective who lives at 221B Baker Street, but rather about the adventures of a ghostly, invisible character who lives at no place in particular and never does anything at all. We don't find this written in the Sherlock Holmes stories because, according to Thomasson's theory, Arthur Conan Doyle simply doesn't tell the truth about Holmes. In fact the only thing he gets right is his name: That ghostly character he is telling wildly false stories about is really called "Sherlock Holmes".

More About Analyticity

Here comes the promised reply to Sam's reply to my previous posting. In that posting, I first suggested that some sentence S (in a given language) is analytic iff you can't understand it unless you believe it. Then I said that, "put slightly differently", S is analytic iff it is impossible to believe that not-S.

As Sam notes, the first definition implies that even very complicated analytic truths have to be believed in order to be understood, which might be somewhat unintuitive. I'm not sure how bad this is for lack of a clear example. Sam uses "the sum of the digits of the first prime number greater than 1 million is even", but this is not analytic, so here I can perfectly well admit that you may understand it without either believing or disbelieving it. He also mentions infinitely long sentences, but I don't believe there are any of those in ordinary languages.

Universalia in rebus and universalia ante res?

Here at Humboldt University, there's a reading group about analytic philosophy (Sam already mentioned it). The flyer advertising this group describes analytic philosophy as a sort of new and fascinating kind of philosophy characterised by its perspicuity and ignorance of philosophical tradition. The funny thing is that the organisers of the reading group decided that we'll be discussing David Wiggins' Sameness and Substance Renewed. I don't want to know how much Hegel one has to read to find Wiggins perspicuous (and ignorant of philosophical tradition).

Explicating Analyticity

Some expression can't be properly understood unless one believes certain things: In some sense you don't understand "irrational number" unless you believe that no natural number is irrational; You don't understand "grandmother" unless you believe that grandmothers are female; Maybe you don't understand "cat" unless you believe that cats are animals.

This is all quite vague because "understanding" and "believing" are vague. I now want to suggest that a sentence is analytic iff you can't understand it unless you believe it. Analyticity is also vague, so the vagueness of the explicans is fine for this purpose.

Logic Programming Slides

I've made some slides about logic programming (PS) for my presentation next week in the logic seminar.

Restrict the Gamma Rule?

The following restriction might be a way out of the problems I mentioned in my last posting:

The gamma rule must not be applied if the result of its previous application has not yet been replaced by the Closure rule.

(The gamma rule deals with and formulae; the Closure rule is the rule that allows to replace dummy constants by real constants iff that leads to the closure of at least one branch.)

Counter-Models and Free-Variable Tableau Systems

I'm half-way into programming a more efficient tree prover, based on free-variable tableaux. But now I'm not sure any more if this is really what I want.

The basic idea in free-variable tableaux is that you use dummy constants to instantiate universally quantified formulas, and only replace these dummy constants by real constants if this allows you to close a branch. In automatised tableaux, this dramatically decreases the steps required for certain proofs. For example, my old tree prover internally creates an 860-node tree to prove xy(Fxy zFzz) x y Fxy x Fxx, whereas a free-variable system only needs 12 nodes.

Oh Dear

I just noticed that my tree prover fails on this simple formula! This is a good opportunity to rewrite the part of the script that does the proving and implement some shortcuts, and maybe some "loop detection".

Keyboard Commands in Postbote

I've added keyboard commands to Postbote: If the focus is on the frame with the mail listing, press "R" to refresh, "A" to select all mails, and "G" to quickly change the listing offset (this is for Hermann, who has 1600 mails in his mailbox...).

How To Define Theoretical Predicates: The Problem

Suppose some theory T(F) implicitly defines the predicate F. If we want to apply the Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis account of theoretical expressions, we first of all have to replace F by an individual constant f, and accordingly change every occurrance of "Fx" in T by "x has f" etc. The empirical content of the resulting theory T'(f) can then be captured by something like its Ramsey sentence f T'(f), and the definition of f by the stipulation that 'f' denote the only x such that T'(x), or nothing if there is no such (unique) x.