I've been running MacOS 8.6 for more than a year now. Since many programs I like aren't available on MacOS Classic at all (like any reasonable web server), or aren't updated any more (like Mozilla), I finally decided to make the switch, and I switched to Debian Linux. I've never used Debian before and I've never used Linux on a Mac, so I'm not sure what to blame. At any rate, I found the installation rather painful. It took me several days to set up the basic system with a working X server and a working dial-up connection. Then, last week, I tried to install a different kernel in order to get my ethernet card to work. The result is that now the system completely ignores my keyboard. Since I can't even login without the keyboard I don't know what to do next. Maybe I'll read some philosophy.
Luckily, I've put the new system on a new (well, second-hand) hard disk, so for now I'm back to MacOS 8.6.
Suppose we are relativists about moral judgements. That is, we believe that, for example,
"One should not engage in premarital sex"
may be truely asserted by somebody iff according to his moral code (or the moral code of his community, or something like that) one should not engage in premarital sex. The important part here is of course "truely". Noone denies that if you believe that one should not engage in premarital sex then if asked about it, you should say so. That's not relativism. Relativism as I understand it holds that what you said then would be true.
The GAP conference is over. There have been a couple of nice symposia on the a priori: George Bealer and David Papineau discussed the significance of a priori reasoning in philosophy, and Frank Jackson and Brian McLaughlin talked about a priori physicalism. I would like to comment on this, and also on some talks I heard about relativism and contextualism, but at the moment I'm a bit tired of philosophy, and my arms also aren't well. So I decided to do something useful for a change and went to Munich to save the rainforests. I'll be back in Berlin on Monday.
I'm in Bielefeld at the GAP5 conference. The overall quality of the talks so far hasn't been very good, but I'm told it's always like that at philosophy conferences.
One of the most tedious presentations was Manfred Kupffer's discussion of arguments for the claim that we don't know a priori whether Hesperus is Phosphorus. In contrast, it was much more enjoyable to listen to Karl-Georg Niebergall who suggested that all of mathematics is in fact about certain concrete lines (straight ones, triangles, rectangles, and circles, to be precise) infinitely many of which exist somewhere in our universe. The lesson is that arguing for an obvious truth is generally much worse than arguing for something absurd. (I asked Kupffer whether anybody ever denied what he is arguing for, and he said Scott Soames did. If that's true then Soames has learned that lesson.)
Another note on FOL75: In his talk, Wilfried Hodges argued that the logician's conception of logical consequence differs a lot from the ordinary conception. One of his points was that not all valid arguments are valid in any of our technical senses because the latter don't account for conceptual implication. That's of course true. But Hodges also claimed that consultation of Google shows that the ordinary conception of logical consequence is even further away from what most logicians think. For if one excludes results from sites about philosophy and logic the top results (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) all look like this (from 5):
The second edition of Ansgar Beckermann's Einführung in die Logik has just been published. Here are my solutions to all the exercises. I hope there aren't too many errors left (both in the book and in the solutions). If you spot one, please let me know.
To my relief, there have been a few more advanced talks later at the FOL75 conference of which I understood very little. Here I just want to link to a new Gentzen-like deductive system that was presented at the conference by Kai Brünnler and the research on relativity theory several people currently work on in Budapest.
I'll be moving house tonight. In the new flat I don't have telephone/internet connection yet, so I might neither blog nor read emails for until I return from Bielefeld on Friday next week.
Things went not at all according to plan.
The biggest shock was that all presentations so far were fairly easy. Even Dan Willard's discussion of interesting theories in which interesting variants of Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem don't hold was easy for me to follow. I had expected the presentations to be like readings from a JSL volume.
The other surpising thing I noticed was how little most attendants know of what the others are doing. For example, when Hintikka talked about (surprise, surprise) the superiority of IF logic, the participants in the discussion seemed to know very little about it. (In this particular case that might be because those who know more about IF, like Hodges, have already given up arguing with Hintikka long ago.)
In the next 10 days I'll be attending two philosophy conferences. The first, starting tomorrow and ending on Sunday, is the FOL75 logic conference here in Berlin. My plan for this is to sit quitely and nod or frown from time to time so that it doesn't show too much that I don't understand a word of what the speakers say. I'll also look at how some other people behave of whom I know that they also won't understand much. I guess for me this conference will be more like a field study in academic sociology.
The other conference, Monday through Friday next week, is the GAP5 conference at Bielefeld. I haven't really made up my mind on what I'll be doing there, but I hope to do some philosophy. If all goes wrong, I can still spend some time at the excellent library of Bielefeld university, catching up on the literature I'm missing in Berlin.