Podcasts about tarskian

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Eliezer's Sequences and Mainstream Academia, published by lukeprog on the LessWrong. Due in part to Eliezer's writing style (e.g. not many citations), and in part to Eliezer's scholarship preferences (e.g. his preference to figure out much of philosophy on his own), Eliezer's Sequences don't accurately reflect the close agreement between the content of The Sequences and work previously done in mainstream academia. I predict several effects from this: Some readers will mistakenly think that common Less Wrong views are more parochial than they really are. Some readers will mistakenly think Eliezer's Sequences are more original than they really are. If readers want to know more about the topic of a given article, it will be more difficult for them to find the related works in academia than if those works had been cited in Eliezer's article. I'd like to counteract these effects by connecting the Sequences to the professional literature. (Note: I sort of doubt it would have been a good idea for Eliezer to spend his time tracking down more references and so on, but I realized a few weeks ago that it wouldn't take me much effort to list some of those references.) I don't mean to minimize the awesomeness of the Sequences. There is much original content in them (edit: probably most of their content is original), they are engagingly written, and they often have a more transformative effect on readers than the corresponding academic literature. I'll break my list of references into sections based on how likely I think it is that a reader will have missed the agreement between Eliezer's articles and mainstream academic work. (This is only a preliminary list of connections.) Obviously connected to mainstream academic work Eliezer's posts on evolution mostly cover material you can find in any good evolutionary biology textbook, e.g. Freeman & Herron (2007). Likewise, much of the Quantum Physics sequence can be found in quantum physics textbooks, e.g. Sakurai & Napolitano (2010). An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem, How Much Evidence Does it Take, Probability is in the Mind, Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence, Conservation of Expected Evidence, Trust in Bayes: see any textbook on Bayesian probability theory, e.g. Jaynes (2003) or Friedman & Koller (2009). What's a Bias, again?, Hindsight Bias, Correspondence Bias; Positive Bias: Look into the Dark, Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased, Rationalization, Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation, We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think, Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People, Asch's Conformity Experiment, The Affect Heuristic, The Halo Effect, Anchoring and Adjustment, Priming and Contamination, Do We Believe Everything We're Told, Scope Insensitivity: see standard works in the heuristics & biases tradition, e.g. Kahneman et al. (1982), Gilovich et al. 2002, Kahneman 2011. According to Eliezer, The Simple Truth is Tarskian and Making Beliefs Pay Rent is Peircian. The notion of Belief in Belief comes from Dennett (2007). Fake Causality and Timeless Causality report on work summarized in Pearl (2000). Fake Selfishness argues that humans aren't purely selfish, a point argued more forcefully in Batson (2011). Less obviously connected to mainstream academic work Eliezer's metaethics sequences includes dozens of lemmas previously discussed by philosophers (see Miller 2003 for an overview), and the resulting metaethical theory shares much in common with the metaethical theories of Jackson (1998) and Railton (2003), and must face some of the same critiques as those theories do (e.g. Sobel 1994). Eliezer's free will mini-sequence includes coverage of topics not usually mentioned when philosophers discuss free will (e.g. Judea Pearl's work on causality), but the conclusion is standard compatibilism. How an Algorithm Feels F...

Douglas Patterson (Universität Leipzig) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium titled "Theory and Concept in Tarski's Philosophy of Language". Abstract: In this talk I will set out some of the background of Tarski's famous work on truth and semantics by looking at important views of his teachers Tadeusz Kotarbinski and Stanislaw Lesniewski in the philosophy of langauge and the "methodology of deductive sciences". With the understanding of the assumed philosophy of language and logic of the important articles set out in this manner, I will look at a number of issues familiar from the literature. I will sort out Tarski's conception of "material adequacy", discuss the relationship between a Tarskian definition of truth and a conceptual analysis of a more familiar sort, and consider the consequences of the views presented for the question of whether Tarski was a deflationist or a correspondence theorist.

Lev Beklemishev (Russian Academy of Sciences Moscow) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (12 November, 2015) titled "Positive Reflection Calculi". Abstract: We deal with the fragment of propositional modal logic consisting of implications of formulas built up from the variables and the constant `true' by conjunction and diamonds only. We call such fragments strictly positive. The interest towards strictly positive modal logics independently emerged around 2010 in two different disciplines: the work on description logic by Zakharyaschev, Kurucz, et al., and the work on proof-theoretic applications of provability logic by myself, Dashkov, et al. The advantages of considering such fragments are twofold. On the one hand, strictly positive fragments of modal logics are usually (and not surprisingly) much simpler than the original logics. Typically, strictly positive fragments of standard modal logics are polytime decidable. On the other hand, the strictly positive language, being weaker than the standard modal language, allows for many more meaningful interpretations. In this talk we review basic results on strictly positive logics, their syntax and semantics. Furthermore, we develop the framework of reflection calculus, that is, a logic in which the diamonds are interpreted as reflection schemata in arithmetic, possibly of unrestricted logical complexity. This framework allows for a natural treatment of extensions of arithmetic by Tarskian truth predicates and the corresponding reflection principles.

This book is a contribution to the flourishing field of formal and philosophical work on truth and the semantic paradoxes. Our aim is to present several theories of truth, to investigate some of their model-theoretic, recursion-theoretic and proof-theoretic aspects, and to evaluate their philosophical significance. In Part I we first outline some motivations for studying formal theories of truth, fix some terminology, provide some background on Tarski’s and Kripke’s theories of truth, and then discuss the prospects of classical type-free truth. In Chapter 4 we discuss some minimal adequacy conditions on a satisfactory theory of truth based on the function that the truth predicate is intended to fulfil on the deflationist account. We cast doubt on the adequacy of some non-classical theories of truth and argue in favor of classical theories of truth. Part II is devoted to grounded truth. In chapter 5 we introduce a game-theoretic semantics for Kripke’s theory of truth. Strategies in these games can be interpreted as reference-graphs (or dependency-graphs) of the sentences in question. Using that framework, we give a graph-theoretic analysis of the Kripke-paradoxical sentences. In chapter 6 we provide simultaneous axiomatizations of groundedness and truth, and analyze the proof-theoretic strength of the resulting theories. These range from conservative extensions of Peano arithmetic to theories that have the full strength of the impredicative system ID1. Part III investigates the relationship between truth and set-theoretic comprehen- sion. In chapter 7 we canonically associate extensions of the truth predicate with Henkin-models of second-order arithmetic. This relationship will be employed to determine the recursion-theoretic complexity of several theories of grounded truth and to show the consistency of the latter with principles of generalized induction. In chapter 8 it is shown that the sets definable over the standard model of the Tarskian hierarchy are exactly the hyperarithmetical sets. Finally, we try to apply a certain solution to the set-theoretic paradoxes to the case of truth, namely Quine’s idea of stratification. This will yield classical disquotational theories that interpret full second-order arithmetic without set parameters, Z2- (chapter 9). We also indicate a method to recover the parameters. An appendix provides some background on ordinal notations, recursion theory and graph theory.

Pierre Wagner (Paris) gives a talk at the MCMP workshop "Carnap on Logic" (3-6 July, 2013) titled "Tarskian and Carnapian Semantics".