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The State of Modus Ponens and of Rational Discussion
A bit of intellectual biography, prompted by a couple of days’ free time leading me to a paper written 27 years ago by a pal, which I have just read. I say a little of what’s in the paper, to encourage others to read it. And then I comment on a couple of disappointing aspects…
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Michael
Michael. Everyone knew him as Michael. I was a freshman at Oxford in mathematics, interested in logic. I had been reading Chomsky in my first quarter because I had been told Chomsky had mathematised language. My tutor in algebra, Ian Macdonald (same jacket as in the picture!), an algebraic geometer, suggested I could look at…
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John McCarthy
John McCarthy has died. The great John McCarthy. Brilliant and entertaining, fun to be around, accessible unlike many of his stature, who carried an aura about him which blessed you with the feeling, if you came within it, that you were doing the Thinking That Really Mattered. Even if you were just flapping around at…
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Screwy Reasoning and Its Study
Those of us interested in commercial aviation accidents have to deal with a lot of what I shall call screwy reasoning. Last week, I read a September 2 article in The Times on the crash of AF447 and its aftermath which I felt was somewhat screwy. It suggested that Air France’s attempt to introduce specialised…
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The Provenance of Intelligent Design Creationism
As I pointed out yesterday when considering a critique of Swinburne, a lot of popular science blogging is concerned with the arguments for intelligent-design creationism: the argument that the nature and complexity of the world yields empirical evidence for the existence of a god, an “intelligent designer” who designed the world. Such arguments have a…
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Swinburne’s Bayesian Arguments
I recently looked through Nature’s List of Top 50 Science Blogs and ended up reading quite a lot of the Good Math, Bad Math Weblog of Mark Chu-Carroll, a computer scientist at a major industry research center who is enamoured of mathematics. The Science Top 50 Weblogs seems to be heavy on biology and the…