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Logic for Philosophy

A draft textbook by Theodore Sider aimed at philsophy graduate students that while not as technical as computer scientists are used to, may be of interest due to the explicit discussion of extensions (e.g., modal operators), deviations (e.g., multi-valued logic) and variations (such as the Sheffer Stroke) on basic propositional logic.

The book includes chapters on counterfactuals and two-dimensional modal logic that may include material new to PLT wonks.

By Ehud Lamm at 2007-11-29 04:08 | Misc Books | other blogs | 12051 reads

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Multi-valued logic...

...seems like it would be applicable in the Comp. Sci. field: an "undefined" truth value could be put into practice within, say, an optimizing compiler's implementation, to determine what can and cannot be determined at compile-time, such as user input situations or what-not. This would also much more effectively allow proofs and models of the more dynamic family of programming languages, and even eliminate some of the "supposedly indeterministic cases" during evaluation in a multi-valued logic.

By Winheim Raulsh at Thu, 2007-11-29 17:14 | login or register to post comments

Fault tolerance

Multi-valued logic (e.g. Roth's 5-valued logic) is and has been useful in hardware design for localizing faults resulting mostly from physical imperfections. With this application being known for quite a while now I would not be terribly surprised if someone had already found a use for multi-valued logic in fault tolerant programming languages and environments.

By Thomas Strathmann at Fri, 2007-12-07 11:40 | login or register to post comments

Damn.

Looking at that Chinese-looking spam I noticed a quite strange (i.e. too regular) distribution of symbols and wondered if anyone here knowing Chinese could tell me that it indeed was gibberish.

By barsoap at Sat, 2007-12-01 12:45 | login or register to post comments

Thinking About Logic

Stephen Read's book covers much of the same ground, and is probably an easier read. Highly recommended introduction to the philosophical side of logic, especially for those who have some sort of grounding in the mathematical aspects. The treatment of conditionals is especially nice.

By Charles Stewart at Fri, 2007-12-07 18:01 | login or register to post comments

Not online, though, as far

Not online, though, as far as I can tell...

By Ehud Lamm at Fri, 2007-12-07 18:29 | login or register to post comments

No, but...

...it's inexpensive. OUP lists it at $16.10, and it had a big print run, so can be picked up second-hand for little money.

By Charles Stewart at Tue, 2007-12-11 12:07 | login or register to post comments

Link broken

Here's the correct link.

By naasking at Sat, 2007-12-15 01:24 | login or register to post comments

It was moved. I fixed the

It was moved. I fixed the link.

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2007-12-15 01:32 | login or register to post comments

There's also Burgess's

There's also Burgess's Philosophical Logic, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. To download as a (large) Word document click here. Additional problems are here.

By Ehud Lamm at Sun, 2008-01-27 23:17 | login or register to post comments

Good call

Looks interesting. John Burgess is a major figure in modal logic.

BTW, that link is broken: that book is available at his preprints page. From that page I see he has a forthcoming collected works, to be titled Mathematics, Modality, and Models: Selected Philosophical Papers: two of those papers are available as preprints, and some others can be had in their original versions through JSTOR.

Postscript: Looks better than interesting: it is very nice indeed. It is much less "zoological" than Sider's book; rather it only treats the topics that Burgess thinks most important, and it treats them very well from what I have seen. I think this might be an essential download for LtUers...

By Charles Stewart at Mon, 2008-01-28 09:20 | login or register to post comments