Category: Mathematics
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) “A B C It's easy as, 1 2 3 As simple as, do re mi A B C, 1 2 3 Baby, you and me girl” 45 years ago, Michael Jackson and his troupe of brothers famously claimed that counting is easy peasy. But how easy is it really? (We’ll…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the second and final part of my 'brief introduction' to formal methods in philosophy to appear in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Philosophical Methodology Reader, being edited by Joachim Horvath. (Part I is here.) In this part I present in more detail the four papers included in the formal methods section,…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the final post in my series on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, here is Part IV, and here is Part V. I now return to the issues raised in the earlier posts equipped with the dialogical account of…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the fifth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, and here is Part IV. In this post I discuss a closely related argumentative strategy, namely dialectical refutation, and argue that it can…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the fourth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, and here is Part III. In this post I offer a précis of the dialogical account of deduction which I have been…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the third installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, and here is Part II. In this post I discuss issues pertaining specifically to the last step in a reductio argument, namely that of going from…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is a series of posts with sections of the paper on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective that I am working on right now. This is Part II, here is Part I. In this post I discuss issues in connection with the first step in a reductio…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) As some readers may recall, I ran a couple of posts on reductio proofs from a dialogical perspective quite some time ago (here and here). I am now *finally* writing the paper where I systematize the account. In the coming days I'll be posting sections of the paper; as always,…
-
By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) Here's a short piece by the New Scientist on the status of Mochizuki's purported proof of the ABC conjecture. More than 2 years after the 500-page proof has been made public, the mathematical community still hasn't been able to decide whether it's correct or not. (Recall my post on this from May 2013;…
-
The great historian of logic and mathematics Ivor Grattan-Guinness passed away about a month ago, aged 73. I only heard it yesterday, when Stephen Read posted a link to the Guardian obituary on Facebook. From the obituary: He rescued the moribund journal Annals of Science, founded the journal History and Philosophy of Logic, and was on the board of Historia Mathematica from…
New APPS 