FLOC and Urban

I went to FLOC, Federated LOgic Conferences, in Oxford, just for one day, Friday 13th July.  It turned out to be a lucky day.  I did most of a "Summit on Formal Methods meets Machine Learning", without winning any jackpots.  Maybe I missed the best bit, I ducked out towards the end to see "Three Research Vignettes in honour of Mike Gordon".

The only thing which stood out for me, to take away from the "summit", was a little snippet about progress on SAT solvers in the first decade of this century.  That they improved by two orders of magnitude, just from algorithmic improvement (not from hardware acceleration).  With which, in my head I wove a little story about why we should not use neural nets for everything, even if we might, perhaps, in principle.  Why did I need that little story?  Well, because I'm talking  about "Cognitive Architecture", and what I have to say probably needs to sound a lot like GOFAI (good old fashioned AI), even though I do recognise many places in the architecture where neural nets are desirable.  So I want ways of defending a GOFAI/ML/DL hybrid monster.  It shouldn't need a defence, but in some quarters anything with a whiff of GOFAI is non-PC.

After the tribute to Mike Gordon there was a reception.  At the reception I met Josef Urban, whose work I had been aware of, as much to my liking, particularly in direction and breadth of vision.  That was probably the most important thing which happened to me at FLOC 2018.  I can tell that, because I have been reviewing his ideas, and I am now intent on orienting the account I am trying to give of my own ideas so that its relation to Urban's ideas is clear.

In this post I will sketch explicitly some of the connections.

My starting point is dreams and vision.   Urban cites "three semantic dreams".  Semantics is a particular emphasis in his writing, and though I to attach great strategic importance to (formal) semantics, I have not yet well understood the role which semantics plays in Urban's ideas.

The "semantic dreams" are:

 (i) The dream of general Artificial Intelligence, and in particular AI that helps with general scientific reasoning and research.
(ii) The dream of Automated Reasoning, and in particular Automated Theorem Proving that could attack nontrivial mathematical theorems.
(iii) the QED dream, of all of mathematics (and perhaps also programming and all exact sciences backed by mathematics) being done in a form that is fully understandable to computers, verified for correctness by computers, and assisted in various semantic ways by computers.

which might compresses down to AI/AR/QED, noting however that no mention is made of "common sense", the whole endeavour is scientifically oriented.  So as far as AI is concerned it would for most observers fall short of the (present) holy grail of "general Artificial Intelligence", GAI.

Urban's vision is not a mere amalgamation of these.  His describing these as "semantic dreams" adds a perspective or emphasis which I have not previously seen, and he quickly expands out on the dreams in the following way:

 My basic motivation is the dream of scientific AI. I cannot imagine any other future than the one in which computers will to a very large extent semantically understand, assist, and develop not just mathematics and computer science, but also physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering, economics, law, politics, etc.

 In his "dreams" Urban is clearly talking about important ideals rather than visionary people, and it is clear that he does have some distinguished visionaries in mind (notably Leibniz, perhaps John McCarthy) who don't appear because that's not what his list is.

I think of myself as engaged in a contemporary sequel to the ambitious projects of three prior philosophers, Aristotle, Leibniz and Carnap, all of whom I have seen as visionary advocates for deductive reason in its broadest application and the automation of reason.

These two triples of inspiration are complementary.  So it is of interest, looking in greater detail, to see how Urban's ideas and my own fit together, and to consider what kind of synthesis from them might be possible.

Urban uses the words "semantic", "understanding" and "reason".  I like to talk about the "deductive paradigm", and the "deductive/computational paradigm shift" which have a lot to do with semantics and reason.  In my next blog post I will talk about these ideas and see whether they fit together.

"Synthetic Gognitive Architecture"

This is about the title, how the words in it are intended, and how the whole should be taken.

The word "synthetic" here is to be contrasted with "natural".  I am concerned, not with the architecture of some naturally occurring cognitive system (such as the human brain), but rather with articulating and evaluating architectures for artificial cognitive systems.

The word "cognitive" means here "concerned with knowledge", subject to a couple of qualifications.  The cognitive systems of interest are built around a hierarchically organised body of propositions (its knowledge base), and with propositions about those propositions (meta-knowledge) concerning the strength of the evidential support for the propositions.  But which of these propositions would pass the bar to qualify as knowledge in natural English is not our concern.  More generally here, the synthetic philosophy we are engaged in is similar to (but a little less compromising than) some aspects of Rudolf Carnap's philosophy. The concepts we work with are to be construed according to the definitions and descriptions we give for them, they will typically not be the same as ordinary language concepts going by the same name and are not intended to explain, nor even to "explicate" those concepts.

My second caveat distances me from the discipline of Cognitive Science, which seems primarily concerned with human cognition and the human brain, or with artefacts intended to simulate, realise or surpass human intelligence.  In particular, I am not concerned here with cognitive systems which perfectly mimic human cognition.  The systems of interest here might betray their non-humanity in a "Turing test" by their in-humanly high intelligence, and probably won't do or understand a lot of what an intelligent homo sapiens does.

So to "architecture", what is this?  Well, no, I'm not thinking of a detailed account of the physical structure of some building.  Software systems have architectures too, which might be the highest level description of the structure of the system.  I use the term more broadly here, for those considerations which should come first in the process of designing some artefact.  There is a caveat here as well.  What comes first in design is requirements analysis, getting clear on what the system is intended to achieve, which I think precedes architecture rather than being a part of it.  I have to do some of that, so that we can all make our own assessments of whether the architectural proposals are likely to deliver, but strictly speaking, it's not part of the architecture.

What are those considerations which should come first in the design of cognitive systems?  I believe there are a number of philosophical issues which need to be resolved, which impact upon what the system is intended to achieve and how it does it.  The first are probably epistemological and foundational, but the full breadth I will leave open.  Of course, it's weird to consider resolving philosophical questions as part of a design process.  These things are debated for millennia and never resolved.  But in practice, this is what cognitive scientists do when they build software for artificial intelligence.  They resolve the issue by making a choice rather than by discovering the truth, though you may need to read between the lines to discover the driving philosophy.  It is this method which I am calling synthetic philosophy, provided that it is explicit and systematic, and the earliest architectural work for cognitive systems should be, I suggest, primarily that kind of philosophy, choosing or constructing the philosophical scaffolding needed to build cognition, a conceptual framework and a set of ground rules for the enterprise.

As to the whole, I don't think I need to say any more today.

Synthetic Cognitive Architecture

This is not my only moribund blog, I have two others.  My unfulfilled aspirations are like London buses.

Well here goes again, I may revive all three for a while, let's see.

My silence of late does not betoken a terminal change of direction on my part, but rather a further deterioration in the tenuous connection between what I am thinking, and what I am writing (mostly nothing), mitigated only by some wiki writing for github "projects" conceived as an alternative approach to my one principle objective (discussed here).
The direction of my intellectual pretensions remains: to add a chapter of my own to the story which began with Aristotle's conception of demonstrative science, and progressed first to Leibniz's idea of a calculus ratiocinator, providing a decision procedure for the whole of science and then to Carnap's ambition, armed with the more adequate modern logics available to him, to facilitate rationality in science through its formalisation.

Carnap pre-dated, and probably did not anticipate, the digital electronic computer, so he conceived of himself as, in some respects, following in the steps of Frege and Russell, rather than Leibniz.  His project for science failed for many reasons, which we need not go into right now.  It would have been sufficient that the complexity of formal proofs makes reasoning so arduous as to prevent its adoption by scientists, even had they felt the need for greater deductive rigour.  The advent of the digital computer changed all that.  Leibniz's project (within the limits which modern theory imposes upon it - at best a partial decision procedure) became more plausible, with the more advanced computational machinery continuously advancing leaps and bounds.  That machinery might make the burden of formality less onerous and its prospective benefits more alluring.

With the advent of the computer, a third centre of academic competence in logic, more vigorous and better funded than philosophy or mathematical logic, took over in its own way the thrust towards formality and its automation.  This new discipline had of necessity to embrace formal notations, and to mechanise their use.  Admittedly, most of these new formal notations were programming languages, suitable for describing algorithms, but not for the formalisation of science.   The complexity and unreliability of the resulting software begat the ambition to formally verify the software, and this lead some computer scientists (and some industrial corporations) into stronger formal systems of more general applicability.  The use of computers for formal deduction has continued to advance throughout almost the entire history of electronic computation, and the capabilities of the resulting systems have advanced considerably.   It nevertheless remains the case that formal reasoning about non-trivial problems, with the best machine assistance, takes considerably more time than traditional Journal style proofs.  The mass of extra detail which characterises formal proofs, in contrast with the extant tradition in mathematics, is easily coped with  by computers.  But finding a viable proof strategy requires mathematical intelligence, of a kind, so far, beyond the achievements of AI.

Hopefully, this defect of intelligence in mathematical software will be remedied, and my own project anticipates that remedy, as well as aspiring to contribute to it.  The stage is set, by these approaching advances, for the realisation, not only of Carnap's logicist project, but of something which eclipses in scope the ambitions of Aristotle, Leibniz and Carnap.

A particular feature of the three precedents I have cited is their breadth of scope, encompassing the whole of science.  Though there is much research in Computer Science which might contribute to such a project, there is nothing which encompasses the whole.   Thinking about that whole is my preoccupation, aspiring to write.  The advance of computer science, and of cognitive science, now make even those broader conceptions too narrow, and my own project embraces and advocates a wholesale paradigm shift from computation of data, to deduction over propositions.  This I now characterise as Synthetic Cognitive Architecture, an enterprise which belongs to a new kind of constructive philosophy which may be seen as a successor to Carnap's Logical Positivism.  This is philosophy as engineering.

At the core of this architecture is a logical system which facilitates inference across huge and diverse propositionally interpretable data.  A first essay at such a system was the ideas I christened X-Logic (the X, as in XML, connoting linguistic pluralism), ostensibly the subject matter of my blog of the same name.  In that same blog I now propose to discuss not only the logical core of the cognitive architecture, but more broadly, the epistemology underpinning the system.

Carnap's corner may be in the game too, where I hope to say something abut the relationship between this embryonic architecture and its distinguished (if ill fated) predecessors.

Ontological Absoluteness

Going back to this topic from long ago, not being myself a fan of Wittgenstein, I would refer all to Carnap, whose position on ontology I think clear and sensible.

It is articulated most concisely perhaps in his paper "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology", though the internal/external distinction for ontological questions which he introduced here was not well-received.

Anyway, its relevance here is that it provides a basis for affirming the objectivity of set theoretic truths (internal) without accepting that questions about what sets exists have any absolute truth value (these would be external questions).

More on this belongs perhaps at Carnap Corner.

Giving up. Or not.

I pretty much gave up.

Not without good cause.  Too many years of wanting but failing to articulate.

A lot of that is down to a taciturn nature.
I don't talk, so naturally, I don't write.

The other factor is lack of audience.  There is no audience which wants to hear the message I want to deliver, and partly for that reason, non that I could hope will even understand it.

I won't delve deeper into the pathology.

So why am I here?

Well, I tried to give up, but failed.
Failed to find an alternative (one must surely do something?).

Ontological Absoluteness

I've been following the EFI project at Harvard.
Its a series of workshops "exploring the frontiers of incompleteness" which is mostly philosophy of set theory.
The next talk is by William Tait, so I had a look at his paper (the papers are made available in advance of the talks), and that paper lead to this post.

I have had this problem from time to time. I believe in the objective truth of statements of set theory (once you have specified which set theory you are talking about, by which I mean, once you have fixed the meaning of the language) but I don't consider myself a platonist.
I sometimes come across people who don't understand this.
They think that if you believe in the objective truth of set theory you must be a "Platonist".


So I look at Tait's paper, and he is talking about Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations".  I didn't read it all, so I probably have the wrong end of the stick, but that doesn't matter, because what I'm writing about is some small change in my own thinking which came from it.  What I took him to be doing was arguing against the idea that for the semantics of set theory to be definite there must exist entities, the sets, which the terms in the language denote.  This is what Wittgenstein calls the "Augustinian" theory of language, and the Philosophical Investigations provides a critique of this theory.
Well, this is something which had occurred to me to.  Not that I worked it out in any detail, but it had occurred to me that reference to Wittgenstein would help people to understand that set theory could be quite definite in meaning, and hence that statements in set theory might have definite truth values, without there needing to be absolute truths about what sets there are.

Active Zones

In my grand scheme of things there are at present three books in play, rather remote and implausibly ambitious objectives.

The things I am thinking about and "working on" right now are less grandiose, and possibly less implausible.
I hope that these pieces of the elephants might be more intelligible to others and so I thought I would give a short account here.

The thing which has consumed the greatest portion of my time of late has been my attempts to analyse formally (with ProofPower) the substance of Grice's "Vacuous Names".
This is conceived of as a part of my large projected tome of formal philosophy (which I call "analyses of analysis"), but since it is provoked more by the logic of my dialogue with Speranza than the aims of that tome, my conception of the work has gradually been evolving as I get a better idea of how it may be fitted into the historical themes which dominate the volume.
In that context it is an episode in the development of semantics, and is helping me to get my mind around how to address that topic in the larger context.

The Griceian material is an exemplar of a method of analysis with ProofPower, making use of shallow embeddings, and part of what I am trying to do at the same time as the Grice paper is get this method (and the particular languages and tools I do it with) written up in a form which might conceivably be intelligible to some philosophers. To this end I started a chapter on HOL, in which I would like to give an account of the language and logic closely based on the Church paper on his Simple Theory of Types. There is a place to this (to appear) but I have been struggling to find the right approach to this.

The last active zone is nominally X-Logic, but the first bit of the new formal models for X-Logic needs a bit of lattice theory, and the lattice theory may not strictly need, but is nevertheless serving as an excuse for an excursion into Universal Algebra (to appear), which itself has contributed a little impetus to my recent love affair with the proposition. The interest here is in doing Universal Algebra in a type theory in a way which is actually useful in the development of more concrete algebraic theories such as Lattice theory. The danger with high levels of abstraction is that the cost of using the abstract theory is just as large as the cost of doing the work without it. The first test will be in obtaining a sufficient theory of quotient lattices from a more general theory of algebraic quotients. The connection with the proposition is an aspect of the reuse problem. Universal algebra provides more abstract or more general results which subsume some of the results obtainable in specific algebras. What does this relationship between abstract and concrete theories tell us about the notion of proposition?
This is a conceptually simple sandbox for thinking about such matters, relative to the much greater difficulties in making sense of what happens in category theory.

RBJ

The Proposition

"The proposition" is a concept which has for a long time been growing, by stealth, more important in my scheme of things.

For most of that time, I have regarded the nature of the proposition as being determined only relative to a particular description of the semantics of a particular language, and hence as belonging to semantics rather than to metaphysics.

What I now dimly perceive is that the nature of the proposition probably does become an important problem in metaphysics as soon as you try to come up with something less language specific, and that there are many good reasons for attempting to do that.

An easy way for me to motivate that process, is just from the pragmatics of formalisation, in which there is a problem, shared with software engineering, of maximising re-use.
In the development of formal theories what one wants to make maximum use of is theorems, what one wants to avoid is having to prove essentially the same result many times over.
This is what polymorphism (and Russell's typical ambiguity) is about, it is what good modular structure is about, it is the principle reason why I think about non-well-founded foundation systems, and it is a central influence on the structure of X-Logic.

There are more connections between my other ideas and the concept of proposition, and now that I am become more aware of how important the notion of proposition might become for me, I shall make a place to discuss it.
This will be a broadening of a skeletal document which I started when I briefly paid some attention to Harvey Friedman's concept calculus.
I can broaden that document to deal more generally with propositions and still have a place in there for some discussion of Harvey's ideas.

RBJ

Proving GCH

After a morning disrupted by an early migrain messing up my visual cortex, I ought really to have taken things easy, but something quite entertaining has just happened.

I'll bore you with the chain of events.

First, I have to get my mail fixed, it just stopped yesterday and raising a ticket didn't get it fixed. However, the support guys pointed out that the mail was reaching my mailboxes on the server so it was just the collection which was awry. I found that one account was working, compared its configuration in my client with my main non-working account, noticed a difference and brought them into line. That fixed the problem. Some software which used to accept both ways of configuring the accounts had been upgraded, and no longer supported them both.

So now my mail downloads, and in there is a call for participation in the "Trusted extensions to ITPs" workshop. This reminds me of the last one, in which I had a lengthy disagreement with a logician from MIT (several disagreements, but one in particular) who insisted that it could be proved that all models of set theory have the same structure of ordinals. I insisted they don't all have the same height. After the workshop it occurred to me that he must have been talking about INNER models.
Which do have the same height because its part of the definition that they have "all" the ordinals.
(which is relative to the interpretation of the meta-language).

So the call for participation has got me thinking about set theory.

Now the entertainment. Within minutes I have a "proof" of GCH (the Generalised Continuum Hypothesis)! So it seems.
Must be wrong of course, we know it can't be done don't we?

Well it is a bit of philosophy rather than a bit of mathematics, I know its not provable in any accepted axiomatisation of set theory.

Still, I believe I have a proof, which is really entertaining (if you like that kind of thing), and so I will have to write it up and see what objections people can find to it.
This will be a bit like my proof that V does not exist (if its good).
You post to FOM and some people have a go at trashing it for a while, and fail, and then everything calms down and people carry on as if it had never happened.
Though a convincing proof of GCH would be harder to ignore than one that V does not exist, the consequences of which are more subtle.

So the next stage is to write it up, formalise what can be formalised, and see whether I still believe it.

RBJ

The Rebirth of Metaphysical Positivism

About 12 months ago I departed from Carnap in the following respect.

Carnap construed himself as putting forward proposals for languages and methods.
For example his definitions of analyticity were not intended as revelations of facts about the meaning of the word "analytic" but as pragmatically motivated proposals for its use.

Similarly to Carnap, I sought to articulate a particular formal analytic method, including the use of partiular methods and tools.
This I also construed as a proposal rather than any factual (or logical) claim.

However, this construal was not true to the facts. for my own pluralism meant that I had no expectation that anyone else would use the same methods.
There is a lot of historical accident in the detail, and even in the fundaments, of the methods which I employ.
I could describe these as examples of the kind of method which I encourage, but I would recommend that everyone look around and chose the particular languages, methods, and tools which are best suited for their work on their particular problems.

So I decided that I should not present myself as putting forward methodological proposals, and as being methodologically as well as linguistially pluralistic.
This lead me to attach importance to comparative methodology.
The idea is to replace advocacy of particular methods by comparisons between methods, making these as solid and objective as possible.

Metaphysical Positivism was the name which I then employed for the position in relation to analytic philosophy which I proposed.
It was not till about six months later that it occurred to me that I no longer had a position.
I had reverted to the search for and articulation of truths, albeit comparative rather than absolute truths.

I still had to make the same kind of choices (languages, methods, tools) in order to progress my work, but these were not proposals for anyone else, and insofar as I want to support their choice of methods, it would be by providing hard comparative facts rather than proposals and advocacy.

This now appears as a yin/yang type vanishing dichotomy.
Should I be stating facts or should I be making proposals?
Yes.

Anyway, thinking that I was not making a proposal, I for a while also thought that I had grown out of having a name for my philosophy, and "Metaphysical Positivism" was abandoned.
But now I see that its just a matter of level.
I do have proposals and I do wish to engage in advocacy, but the level at which this occurs is subject to occasional lifting.
Now, instead of advocating particular formal methods, I advocate comparative methodology.

So I may well stick with Metaphysical Positivism.

RBJ

Good News

You might expect that spending three weeks failing to come up with an abstract for a talk I was keen to give would leave me deflated and dispirited.
To this we can add that I have just now passed my last target for publishing the first edition of "the book" (last known as "Evolution, Rationality and Deduction"), and its reasonable to say that I have not even started properly on writing it.

However, I have now had just enough time, since giving up on the abstract, for my ideas on the way forward to come "clear", and the picture is good.

The single most important feature of this is that in all but detail there is NO CHANGE, but that I now have a rather clearer picture of what the whole consists in and hope that I will be able to present that picture, and make my web site begin to make sense.
The thing that really pissed me off over the last 12 years or so since I gave up the day job, is that I kept abandoning projects as ill-conceived or unachievable.
Now its probably fair to say that they just kept re-emerging in a different forms.
It is so good to feel that the structure of my enterprise is beginning to stabilise.

I may as well enumerate some of the things which remain essentially unscathed and which are therefore likely to get sewn into the structure of my enterprise.

First, at the head of the list is the thing which may or may not turn out to be my opus magnum, or the two perhaps:

(1) Evolution, Rationality and Deduction

My conception of this project is unchanged in its essentials, but I now have some new ideas about how to progress it. The gross structure remains stable.

(2) Analyses of Analysis

That is the last known name for the volume of formal materials which is intended to underpin "Evolution, Rationality and Deduction".
It began after my first forays into formal historical exegesis applied to Plato and Aristotle and provoked by Grice/Code as conveyed to me by Speranza.
It is still there on the books and is the home for all formal modelling related to (1) which will include lots of foundational stuff in relation to "X-Logic" (which term is heading for meaninglessness).

(3) A Conversation between Carnap and Grice

Important to mention on my top level menu, because it's being neglected right now and I don't want JL (Speranza) to think I am loosing interest.
It is waiting for me to make enough progress with X-Logic to see how the comparative analysis of Grice and Carnap which is needed here can be structured, possibly as an exemplar of that method.

(4) Practical Philosophy

(1) and (2) both belong to my conception of analytic philosophy, and I might as well admit that analytic philosophy seems to be occupying a larger proportion of my intellectual space than it used to.
Possibly I will never get round to saying anything much in the practical arena (which I tentatively classify as political/economic, ethical, existential), but I hope not.

Here are some substructures, which I am pleased (this morning) to find myself thinking I will write something about.

2.1 Abstract Semantics (formal side)

My technical work on the foundational side belongs here, this includes ruminations about the semantics of well-founded set theory, and about how to compare the alternatives, it includes my material on non-well-founded set theory, and I hope it will come up a layer above that as well (those three layers were mentioned in my talk at Cambridge, and nowhere else probably, somewhere on the web site. From QED to X-Logic, following the lead of Leibniz, page 22.
And other stuff on set theory.

I'm going to stop there and try come up with something more detailed on the web site.
Maybe some more here on each area.

RBJ

Brain Retrieved

Having put aside my other intellectual enterprises to do an abstract for the ITP workshop, I came up with nothing, despite being very keen at the outset and spending three weeks tussling with the problem.

I think too much of my thinking in this area is speculative and philosophical, and the small core of relevant technical detail got simpler and less substantial the more I thought about it.

The abstract deadline is today, so I have finally thrown in the towel.
I now need to think a bit before picking up some other threads.

RBJ

Well Founded Set Theoretic Truth

In the course of failing to come up with an abstract for the upcoming ITP workshop in Cambridge, I came across something I think rather nice which is only to be found in the overheads of the last talk I gave on X-Logic.

So I thought I would post it here, to give it a better home.

First just a few words of context.

I am unusual in considering the most important role for set theory to be its role as a foundation for abstract semantics.
From this point of view it is unfortunate that mathematical logic (where set theory belongs) has a negative attitude towards semantics, and tolerates a situation  in which set theory has no definite semantics (or at least, no single generally agreed semantics, there are many possibilities).

Anyway, I came up with a neat semantics for set theory as follows.
This is a definition for the truth conditions of sentences in set theory.
It assumes understood the notion of truth in an interpretation.

• a well-founded set is a definite collection of well-founded sets
  
• an interpretation of set theory is a transitive well-founded set
  
• a sentence is false if the collection of interpretations in which it is true is definite
  
• a sentence is true if the collection of interpretations in which it is false is definite
  

This is what I wrote about this at the time.

This semantics:

• is maximally rich (large cardinal axioms are true)
  
• is definite (CH has a truth value, particular facts about cardinal arithmetic have truth values)
  
• makes ZFC neither true nor false
  
• is not limited to first order languages (will work for infinitary set theory)
  
• is self defining (conjecture)
  

This probably all needs explaining in much greater detail, I will follow up with a bit more explanation.

RBJ

Brain Hijacked

Just at the point when I am trying, almost deperately, to get movement on my X-Logic and an associated informal analytic meta-methodology, an opportunity to engage with the Theorem Proving community comes up which I can't ignore.

Workshop on Trusted Extensions of Interactive Theorem Provers


The workshop is August 11-12 2010, in Cambridge, (England!) and abstracts for contributed talks have to be in by 28 June.
I intend to submit an abstract for a talk on X-Logic.  (I have already talked about X-Logic at the Computer Labs in Cambridge, but things have moved on since then).

At the heart of X-Logic is a system assurance/trust/authority (not sure which words to use) tags which is partly inspired by the problems of trust that arise in interworking between interactive theorem provers and other software (but also by a long list of other related problems).
X-Logic is now at the heart of my thinking about analytic methods appropriate for use in philosophy (and elsewhere). Alternatively, it is a label for the formal side of my methodological thinking.

The timescales are short, so it is likely to hijack my brain between now and the event (if my abstract were accepted, otherwise up to the point of its being declined!).

Though I will be pre-occupied with getting my story straight for the workshop, I hope there will be plenty of room for discussion about the impact of X-Logic on my philosphical projects, including the Carnap/Grice conversation, and my other thing.  I will be posting on this at the X-Logic blog, and probably something at Carnap Corner, The Eternal City, and maybe other places too.

Watch these spaces.

RBJ

Speranza's Provocation

This is a rambling tribute to J.L. Speranza, muddled up with reflections on recent developments in my own philosophical thinking..

The shape of my philosophical preoccupations over the next
few years is beginning to emerge from the mists, and in
thinking of where I am and how I got here I have come to
realise how much my recent development owes to the
provocation, and to the support, which I have had from
J.L.Speranza.
I thought I would dedicate a blog post to explaining
how my dialogue with Speranza over the last 15 months has
contributed to my development.

This recent fragment of the history of my search for
philosophical fulfilment (or mere expression) begins in
January 2009, when I decided to use the hist-analytic
mailing list as a sounding board for an attempt at a
monograph on "the fundamental triple dichotomy".
Speranza and I come from opposite ends of the spectrum of analytic philosophy, and it would be natural enough to expect an unsympathetic response from him to a philosophical enterprise much closer to Logical Positivism and Rudolf Carnap than to the Oxonian ordinary language philosophy, as moderated by Paul Grice, which is dear to his heart.

Surprisingly, the resident empiricist, Bruce Aune, was
wholly unsympathetic to my enterprise, and responded with
criticisms which, if taken seriously, would surely have lead
to an immediate abandonment of the project.
Speranza on the other hand, was unfailingly supportive, and
constantly eager to engage in constructive conversation
(into which he would of course bring always the best of
H.P. Grice).

The two most important dialogues which have helped me along
are the Carnap/Grice conversation and a bit of playing with
Grice/Code on Aristotle, and I will try to explain how these
have contributed to my recent development.

It was because there was a dialogue, between myself and
Speranza, that it occurred to me that there might possibly
have been such a dialogue between Carnap and Grice, and that
exploring how that might have gone, especially if we consider how their philosophies might have developed had
they both lived to the present day, would be an interesting
and useful exercise. Having mooted this idea, we quickly
found our way into Grice's Betes Noires, demons and
perilous places.

Before we could make much progress with this conversation,
Speranza provoked me by producing a version of Code's semi-
formal Aristotelian exegesis, which originated in joint work
with Grice. This sent me scurrying off to my proof tool
(ProofPower) and an entertaining bit of formal modelling of
Aristotle.

By this time my "triple dichotomy" project had already
morphed a little, and the formal modelling set more
developments in its train.
The first change had been to broaden the scope of the
project. I had intended to place the triple-dichotomy in
historical context, and also to do something to show its
importance and significance of that fundamental distinction for the future.
I came to think that by the time the latter had been
properly addressed (without which the point of treating this
topic so seriously would be obscure), I would have an
exposition of my then present "philosophical position"
(which I called "metaphysical positivism"). So the proposed
monograph on "the fundamental triple-dichotomy" morphed into
a concise account of "metaphysical positivism".

This development was taking place at about the same time as
the venture into Aristotelian exegesis which Speranza had
provoked, and the interaction between the two had important
consequences for my philosophical outlook.
Metaphysical positivism as I then conceived it was broadly
along the lines of Carnap's philosophy in the following
respects. Carnap conceived of himself, in the
methodological work which began with his Logical Syntax and
then moved into his various more semantic works, as putting
forward "proposals", for languages (or terminology) and for
methods (for defining formal languages and their semantics
and deductive systems, and for their application in
science). Carnap was explicitly pluralistic in respect of
language, but was more of a serial monist in relation to
methods (i.e. he had an evolving conception of what methods
are appropriate, but was not as explicitly pluralistic about
the methods).

The "success" as I saw it, of the formal Aristotelian
modelling (though it is a mere foray, not close to any kind
of completeness), made me think in a different way about the
scope for application of formality in analytic philosophy,
and I though then in terms of a series of formal models
broadly parallel to the historical aspects of the
presentation of "metaphysical positivism". In this some
interesting issues arose, about how to handle the difficulty
of interpreting historical works using modern methods.
How could one avoid contamination of the analysis by the
views of the present? One of the possibilities I was
considering at that time was some modelling of Leibniz, and
in reading Russell's book on Leibniz, I was particularly
aware of how Russell's own philosophical views lead to
questionable analyses of the philosophical views of Leibniz.

The Aristotelian models show how logical systems quite
different from the logic supported by my proof tool (a
"classical!" higher order logic based on Church's simple
theory of types) could be modelled with precision using that
more modern and much more powerful system. There was here
the beginning of an idea that a strong logical system might
nevertheless have a kind of logical and metaphysical
neutrality, and might be capable of correctly modelling much
weaker logical or metaphysical systems. This is illustrated
by the Aristotelian models, in which by choice of model we
can consider the syllogism with and without the existential
fallacy and not draw incorrect conclusions arising from the
extra strength of the deductive context.

Even though I was developing there a way of working in a
strong logical system which does not interfere with the
analysis of much weaker systems, and am "proposing"
languages and methods which support this process, I was
still not happy with this device which I borrowed from
Carnap to explain the status of the languages and methods
(not facts to be established but proposals to be evaluated
pragmatically). The fact is that people with different
purposes and background will often find some alternative
system more congenial, and I have no desire to persuade them
otherwise. I use myself the languages and tools which are convenient and effective for my own work, but others must judge for themselves whether they should apply them to their own problems.

At this point, mid 2009, I decided that there was a third
alternative (what were the first two you ask?). Rather than propose particular languages and methods, on could "retreat" to analysis of their relative merits. And this is the point at which the idea of "epistemic retreat" first appears, though it now covers a broader scope than in this initial conception.
Analytic philosophy, as a whole, is, it now seems to me, an
exercise in epistemic retreat. This is certainly
conspicuous in Carnap, for he is very definite about the
scope of philosophy (at least until fairly late), Following Russell Carnap regarded philosophers as engaged in the application of logic, and any definite claims they seek to establish must be analytic, truths of logic (broadly conceived).

A second way of viewing this shift in my position is as
involving the extension of Carnap's pluralism from a
pluralism about languages (broadly conceived) to one about
methods. I also considered this to bring into philosophical
play something which I devised mainly for non-philosophical
purposes about a decade ago, "X-Logic", a bit of logical
superstructure intended to support linguistic and
methodological pluralism on the WWW in a logically coherent
way.

At this point, with the abandonment of "proposals" in favour
of more analysis, "Metaphysical Positivism" which was a
philosophical position mainly consisting of a "proposal" on
philosophical methods, is quietly dissolving,
though it didn't occur to me that it had for another six
months.

These steps, ideas for the use of logical methods for
comparative historical exegesis, methodological pluralism,
epistemic retreat, and the desire to systematise all these
in a new version of "X-Logic", have all been provoked by
considering the Grice/Code semi-formal approach to Plato and
Aristotle introduced to me by Speranza. Meanwhile the
Carnap/Grice conversation is dormant (scarcely more than
mooted), and I am spending the autumn in deep cogitation
absorbing what seemed to me quite a big change in the way in
which I think about analytic philosophy.

Come spring, I rehash my ideas on how to get this material
into words. The volume on Metaphysical Positivism is
displaced by one (not altogether dissimilar) briefly called
"HOT philosophy" (which is what happens to a book on
Metaphysical Positivism when that "system" is melting away
before your eyes). My other projected supporting large
volume(s) of formal historical exegesis go on the back
burner. Speranza and I agree to collaborate in writing
something, a short book, on the Carnap/Grice conversation.

Speranza had started The Grice Club, which is a good vehicle
for his effusive Griceeanship (?), and the Carnap/Grice
conversation begins to move forward a little. Firstly by
Speranza inventing another blog "The eternal city of truth"
which is where the Carnap/Grice conversation is leading us
we hope. For the sake of symmetry, I threw in Carnap
Corner, so the conversation is now in three blogs, and
appears in early sketch, alongside the Grice Companion (I
like to call it, Speranza prefers "appendix to the
conversation"), on a new web page for Speranza at
jls.rbjones,com.

I am thinking about this conversation in several ways,
firstly progressing a Carnap bio, mostly stolen from his
Schilpp volume, in which I try to draw even more concisely
than he does, the central thrust of his philosophy (which is
neither the Aufbau nor the verification principle, but the
logic of science).
Secondly in trying to get a grip on the
areas of concord and those of potential conflict (between
Carnap and Grice).
Thirdly, in terms of architecture, approach and method, in
considering how a conversation could possibly result in a
coherent consensus. I have to have this, partly because
these methodological questions are the ones which most
interest me (in analysis) and because I need a framework in
which to place the detail (so much that I may never get
beyond the framework into the detail, just as Austin will
never get beyond clarification of language into the tasks for
which this clarification is prerequisite).

This third item has taken a dominant position, because of my
feeling it prerequisite to the main business, and a little
history can be traced from the point of origin of the
conversation in Grice's demons. These demons were construed
as minimalisations, but interpreted as an opposition to any
kind of minimalisation they would represent a big obstacle
to the conversation, for Carnap's philosophy, possibly even
science as a whole, is minimalistic, is the search for
simplest models of reality (either because the simpler is
thought to be more likely to be true, or because it is more
readily applicable).

So we need to dig below the surface and be sure that Grice's
antagonism is quite that simplistic. And we find that he
objects to the prohibitions which the minimalisations
represent, and conclude that Grice's intolerance is an
intolerance only of dogmatic minimalisations.
This provides a route forward, for with this clarification
the demons are less obviously essential to Carnap, his
pluralism indicating tolerance and flexibility rather than
dogmatic proscription. Carnap's philosophy is ambivalent in
many of these matters, he adopts general principles and
methods (such as the principle of tolerance) which are anti-
dogmatic, but engages in many lines of investigation which
can easily slip into or be read as dogmatic. Of these the
most central is perhaps the unity of science and
physicalistic reduction (though he is more famous for the
phenomenalistic reduction, and his engagement in the unity
of science was of a more academic and less political
character than that of its principle enthusiasts).

The commutation of Grice's demons from intolerance of
minimalisations to intolerance of dogmatic minimalisations
is the first step on a slope which I have rapidly slipped down to find myself wishing to incorporate into "the conversation" my own new ideas about analytic method, in terms of epistemic retreat and X-Logic.
Whether this is feasible, or whether some kind of compromise might work, will take a while to work out.
Meanwhile my own attention, which sways gently between the Carnap/Grice conversation and my other principle project on Rationality and Deduction (which will include an exposition of epistemic retreat and X-Logic) is now mostly on the latter, and on X-Logic.

Going back to Speranza's provocation and support, which I hope I have shown to have been a big deal for me, I should say that these projects are subordinate to a kind of existential project for me, which involves arriving at a way of doing philosophy. It is this which caused me to think about "HOT philosophy", which remains unrealised, and in which Speranza's provocation has been particularly important. It is partly about "opening up", and Speranza's encouragement ought to have done the trick.
That is hasn't yet, is down to pre-requisites which noone but myself can supply. It is down to me getting clear about what kind of philosophy I want to do, and how I want to do it. I think this is all sufficiently clear in my mind, but still I am not quite there. I am looking for a process of philosophising, which ultimately, indeed steadily, delivers philosophical books and which does so in the kind of open process which one can now expect, in which the new ideas which go into the books are first exposed, and ideally discussed, immediately as they are formulated, in blogs and mailing lists. Speranza has provoked me into blogging, but discovering how to incorporate this into the book-writing process remains for me to establish.

So there you go.

Thankyou, J.L. Speranza.

RBJ

Evolution and Rationality

Another nocturnal replan and "Hot Philosophy", at least as a
book title, is gone. The new title, probably to contain the
two words "evolution" and "rationality", I need to check out
what is already out there before the final decision.
.
I was struggling yesterday to make the last plan work, and
this morning I have a new title and a new plan.
The book is now in four parts, and is one long historical
narrative with the emphasis on analysis now muted.
.
Part I Evolution as far as deduction
.
(which I take, and argue, to be
coeval with descriptive language)
.
Part II Aspects of cultural evolution to 1900
.
(not sure what to call this)
This is mostly western philosophy, logic and mathematics
with a bit of Tao.
All hanging around the concept of rationality.
.
Part III 20th century
.
Analytic Philosophy, Mathematical Logic, Computer Science.
We see the evolution of techniques and technology
for formal modelling and inference alongside some of
the most conspicuously irrational episodes in the history
of philosophy,
.
Part IV 21st century
.
This includes X-Logic but I now have a more open conception
of what I might say here.
A forward projection on the evolution of Rationality
.
Though these are all historical or futuristic, the history
is intended to be extremely selective and relates to the
development of rationality.
.
All this in a slim volume, in a short timescale, if I can
once get going.
.
RBJ

HOT philosophy warms up

I did a lot of tossing and turning last night before
eventually getting to sleep, and this morning (in a deep
frost which reminds my of Gellner's story about twigs in
salt mines), I have a new plan for my HOT Philosophy
project.
.
The changes are two.
.
The first change concerns Part I of the book, which I had
intended to be a story based around my own philosophical
odyssey covering the last 15-20 years (this possibly not a
good description, perhaps there is a better one in my last
message here?).
It is now to be a brief account of the history of analytic
philosophy in the 20th century, giving my most brutally
honest (but often highly tendentious) opinions about what
was going on, and in particular, exposing and providing the
best possible explanations for my belief that the entire
progression was highly irrational. The purpose of this part
is unchanged, only the way I intend to realise that purpose
is altered.
.
The second change is in publication timescales, on which I
had nothing definite in mind, but had thought of "HOT
philosophy" loosely as about a 1 year project.
The new plan is to make a slim first edition of the book (as
slim as it takes) which will be published on (or by) 31st
June, 2010. The expectation would then be that quite
substantial amounts of new material would be expected in
subsequent editions.
.
These two changes will both help me to raise the temperature
somewhere closer to where I want it to be, and also increase
the synergy between this an my Carnap/Grice collusion with
Speranza, which in theory is supposed to appear even faster
than that.
.
The changes will also allow me to expose (through Blogs and
mailing lists and RBJones.com) some of the most inflammatory
parts, pretty soon.
.
RBJ

What's it all about?

Since this is the first real post to my not-so-new blog I
thought I would say a few words about what I now have in
mind for it.
.
I'm trying to construct a philosophical sausage machine.
This machine will have fed in at one end philosophical ideas
and discussions from this and other blogs and internet fora,
and out of the other end will from time to time drop
perfectly formed masterpieces of insightful philosophical
prose, ready-to-publish through the amazing amazon POD
publishing machine.
.
How to achieve this is not so easy to see, but I shall give
it a go.
.
The proximate provocation (one of my favourite phrases) has
been J.L,Speranza, who lured me back to contemplating blogs
by sucking me into his Grice Club.
It was my own fault of course, because I suggested that our
conversations about the connections (or lack of them)
between the philosophies of Carnap and Grice should be
upgraded into a collaborative project to produce a small
book to try out this POD thing.
.
So Speranza made another blog for it ("The City of Eternal
Truth" which I think is a bit of Bunyon quoted by Grice in
PGRICE), and I made another "Carnap Corner" so that the
eternal city could be symmetrically flanked by the two
philosophers who would secure it.
.
A Tornado from Speranza ensued and I have yet to assimilate
the content of the dozens of messages he sent me almost
instantly as contributions to our project.
In my world things don't move quite that fast.
I like to have plenty of wide open space for deep thought.
.
That project was an ostensibly small addition to an already
inflated collection of ambitions which I was incubating
(at rbjones.com). but the new ways of working which it
brings are rather badly needed for the main project I was at
that time (and still) trying to get moving.
I had that called the "HOT philosophy" project, because I
wanted a book to pop out of the end and read as if its
writing had been an exhilarating philosophical adventure.
.
Though I had wanted the HOT philosophy project to be an open
enterprise, the process exposed to all who cared to see, I
wasn't convinced that my method of exposure would make it
easy enough to see or to get involved in.
A blog may be the answer.
.
But why stop at one?
HOT philosophy, the book, is intended to fall into three
parts. The first provides some background and clears some
ground. The ground to be cleared is primarily Quine and
Kripke so there will be some entertainment there. This is
in the search for a manner of philosophising which will suit
me (and perhaps some others). We may think of a tenuous
analogy with Hume to hint at the structure of the book.
The first part corresponds to Hume's scepticism.
What Hume then does is to offer, instead of a remedy for our
credulity, a diagnosis for it. He says its all just a bad
habit that we constantly infer from inadequate evidence
unjustified conclusions about things like material objects
and causal connections. He then proposes to model phlosophy
on the empirical sciences (something of a non-sequitur I
feel) and to undertake an enquiry into human nature.
.
In my HOT philosophy project, the discovery of the first part
is not the credulity of simple folk, but the irrationality,
particularly, of philosophers, especially when they gather
together into academic institutions. Now when this was
causing me some difficulty, I obtained my relief from an odd
place, from a book by Howard Bloom called Global Brain.
Putting aside the headline theme of the book, what it told
me about the social behaviour of life throughout the entire
history of its evolution on this planet helped me (I
imagined) to understand and come to terms with the belief
that that academic discipline which prided itself most of
all on its rationality (analytic philosophy) should be
nothing of the sort.
.
The purpose of the second part of my book is to examine the
supposed insights which came to me from Bloom (and on which
I elaborated on my own account in the years which followed).
The aim is to subject these ideas to philosophical analysis
and to see what can be made of them. So this is the
diagnostic phase of HOT philosophy, dressed up in
philosophical analysis to give it a bit more meat than
Hume's rather bald conclusion.
.
The third part is then to be more forward looking.
Whereas Hume looked forward to a philosophy undertaken after
the manner of Newtonian empirical science, I, like Rusell
and Carnap prefer a philosophy closer to Aristotle's
demonstrative science, as augmented by modern advances and
technologies. The third part addresses analytic method and
how it can be made as rigorous as can be bearing in mind
that as philosophers we habitually address just those
problems which are most difficult to pin down with the
requisite precision for formal analysis. The ideas here are
to be a melding of ideas which come from thinking about the
architecture of cognitive agents (things which know), and
ideas which come from a new approach to the resolution of
sceptical doubts. A synthesis of elements of cognitive
engineering with epistemological ideas forged in the furnace
of pyrrhonean scepticism. This is Philosophy as
Engineering, the architectural analysis of cognitive agents.
The third part of the HOT philosophy book will address this
topic in prose, but the project as a whole will include a
formal component as a project hosted by Google code and
called X-Logic. This will develop formal models and
undertake formal reasoning about these models, using modern
interactive proof tools.
.
Now back to the blogs.
The plan is that this blog will be top cover for all my
projects, but that some projects will have separate blogs.
All the blogs will be have secondary archives and discussion
lists at RBJblogs@rbjones.com.
The HOT philosophy project has such disparate parts that I
will not make one new blog for it.
The first part will be covered here, and the second and third
parts will probably each have a blog of their own,
.
The blogs are just one end of the sausage machine.
The later stages in the process will also be fully
accessible at rbjones.com and at the hosting site for
"x-logic" (http://code.google.com/p/x-logic, though you
won't find much there yet).
.
Another project is one which I once called "A Formal History
of Philosophical Logic" (and sundry variations on that
theme), but have most recently billed as "Analyses of
Analysis". This was the principle home for my attempts at
philosophically oriented formal modelling.
This I am tempted to turn into another open source project,
but will leave fallow for a while.
.
RBJ

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