Peter Smith's Blog, page 122

Book note: Tent and Ziegler’s A Course in Model Theory

The CUP bookshop marked its 20th birthday with a day offering a big discount on top of the usual discounts, so I came away with a small pile of half-price logic books (I wasn’t enticed by anything on the philosophy shelves, but that’s another story).

One of them, the book I’d actually gone in to buy (not knowing about the birthday celebrations), was Katrin Tent and Martin Ziegler’s new contribution to the ASL ‘Lecture Notes in Logic’ series, A Course in Model Theory. To declare an interest, I’ve wondered more than once about writing a book on model theory useful for philosophers. Well, according to the blurb, ‘This concise introduction to model theory begins with standard notions and takes the reader through to more advanced topics such as stability, simplicity and Hrushovski constructions.’ And according to the introduction, ‘This book aims to be an introduction to model theory which can be used without any background in logic. We start from scratch, introducing first-order logic, structures, languages etc. but move on fairly quickly to the fundamental results in model theory and stability theory.’

Well, for ‘fairly quickly’ read ‘very quickly’. In fact, I would have thought that a graduate student mathmo who really did have no background in logic would find this seriously tough going with stuff going by far too fast (what on earth would even a sophisticated such reader get out of the half a page on ultraproducts on p. 13?). And this quite certainly isn’t a book for graduate philosophers who want to learn some model theory. It’s probably best, in fact, to think of it as something to read after having really mastered e.g. Wilfrid Hodges’s classic Shorter Model Theory, by way of consolidation and then extension. Taken in that spirit, it looks useful for mathematicians (though I’m not going to have time to work through it further at the moment), but probably not so much for graduate philosophers, even those of a logical bent.

Postcard from the Bahamas

A visit to family, and a much needed break. As you can see, the beach has been so very crowded, the skies so very gray …

For once, I have been away for the better part of two weeks without a laptop, and haven’t read a word of philosophy or logic, or indeed thought about it much. So it has been novels for me (some ‘serious’, some not so — I’ve become a much entertained fan of the Falco books). I’ve also been a very latecomer to Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes, which — like so very many others — I thought quite wonderful (perhaps at some level, de Waal’s story of generations of his family living through fractured times speaks to our own deep anxieties about what is to come in our troubling times). Read it.

And that in turn put me in the mood to re-read an old favorite, Nabokov’s Speak Memory (by my lights, his best book). Then, having been talking about Tony Judt’s The Memory Chalet, I found myself re-visiting that as well. Read that too if you haven’t. Ah, the joys of traveling with an iPad with books already aboard, and a huge library available at the touch of a button …

It’s Kurt Gödel’s birthday today: back to thinking about him tomorrow.

Another instalment of IGT2 (mostly harmless)

Over three months after the last instalment, here is another helping of the draft version of the second edition of my Gödel book. To keep things simple, I am posting as a single document a corrected version of what are now Chapters 1 to 8, together with five more newly revised chapters, taking us up to the presentation of Peano Arithmetic. Very many warm thanks to those who sent corrections to the previous tranche of chapters: I hope I have at least caught the typos that were pointed out to me, and I've adopted also some helpful suggestions for small clarifications or changes of terminology. But I still have a few more substantive suggestions to further mull over.

This has been slow work. Do you remember that exchange from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

"If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."

"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."

"Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it. … What? Harmless! Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word! … Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to recitify that a bit."

"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."

"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.

"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.

That's rather how it has been at times, working on the second edition! Three days work digging around the literature. Mmm, what I said perhaps wasn't absolutely accurate now I come to think about it again. But the exceptions are too exotic to worry about. What to do? Instead of saying P, say mostly P. And so it goes.

Anyway, rather belatedly, here is the current draft so far. Enjoy! And as always, comments and corrections are most welcome. The previously posted version was downloaded over 450 times, and although it would be too much of a good thing if everyone commented, far fewer do than you might guess. So please don't hesitate to add your two pennyworth. (A table of contents and the biblio can be found here.)

Fun reads for philosophers?

Suppose you want to recommend ten or a dozen philosophy books to students (not complete beginners) for out-of-term-time reading, books that are positively enjoyable to read, even fun, written with a light touch and some zest, though still thought-provoking and instructive. To make things a bit easier, we'll allow books published any time in the last fifty years, and include collections of papers. But — and this makes it much tougher — we'll not allow books on ethics or politics (so no Singer, no Nozick …). And we'll rule out e.g. Kripke's Naming and Necessity since that's already on everyone's reading list. What would you choose?

I've been looking along my shelves for inspiration: but since I've recently given away a lot of my books, keeping what's now a mostly rather austere logical collection, that's not a great deal of help. Here, however, are a few things that come to mind:

Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (OUP, 2005) [Blackburn always writes enviably well, and can be very funny (try his Lust): this is serious, wide-ranging, philosophy done very readably.]
Daniel Dennett, Elbow Room (OUP, 1984)  [Dennett is always worth reading: what to choose? This is short, full of ideas, and perhaps these days less well-known than it should be.]
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (NLB, 1975). [Still a provocation.]
Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (CUP, 1976). [Maybe it's not clear where this leads, but the journey is fun! Maybe more philosophy could be written as this kind of dialogue.]
David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Blackwell, 1986) [David Lewis writes so well that almost anything of his will be worth reading: but experience shows that students can get particularly caught up in the madness of this book! Perhaps I'm cheating by having this on the list, though, as -- like Naming and Necessity -- it is already such a staple of reading lists. But don't miss out if you haven't read it.]
Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality (CUP, 1975). [Another oldie. Does it count as fun? Well, I certainly remember the excitement of  reading the papers in the first two volumes of Putnam's Philosophical Papers when they came out: this is the second of those volumes. There is much here that is still very worth reading for its own sake, and which will illuminate later debates too. Dip into it!]
R. M. Sainsbury, Paradoxes (CUP, 3rd edn 2009) [OK, this is more like a conventional student text than others on the list -- but these are fun topics, well handled.]
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (Profile Books, 1998) [Sokal famously wrote a parody of post-modernist abuse of scientic terminology, a farrago of nonsense which was accepted and published in a pomo journal. His book with Bricmont explores the misuse of science, and contains some sane philosophy along with way.]

And now what? Surely some Fodor: but which? Add Quine's Quiddities perhaps? I gulped down Eric Olson's The Human Animal when it came out and admire it a lot. In a quite different vein, Edward Craig's The Mind of God and the Works of Man is wonderful.

But what would you put on your list? (Or if you are still a student, what off-piste reading have you found particularly enjoyable/illuminating?)

Two more book reviews

Here are late drafts of two more book reviews.

On Matthias Baaz et al., eds, Kurt Gödel and the Foundations of Mathematics: Horizons of Truth (CUP, 2011), in Philosophia Mathematica
(With Luca Incurvati) on Penelope Maddy, Defending the Axioms (OUP, 2011) forthcoming in Mind.

The first is a terse summary of comments already posted here on the blog. The second will probably be of more interest.

Schubert, remixed

BBC Radio 3 is playing Schubert, Schubert and yet more Schubert over the next few days. You can see the schedule here. Two highlights for me so far. The first half of the Imogen Cooper's concert, playing the Allegretto in C minor D.915 and the

Impromptus D.899. I always admire her immensely, but I thought she was utterly wonderful last night. For a few days, you can listen here. And then, in 'Schubert remixed', the veena player Hari Sivanesan (pictured in the sound check) gave a rather remarkable rendition of 'Ständchen': do listen to that too (starting at 28.30).

Schubert, straight and remixed

BBC Radio 3 is playing Schubert, Schubert and yet more Schubert over the next few days. You can see the schedule here. Two highlights so far. The first half of the Imogen Cooper's concert, playing the Allegretto in C minor D.915 and the

Impromptus D.899. I always admire her immensely, but I thought she was utterly wonderful last night. For a few days, you can listen here. And then, in 'Schubert remixed', the veena player Hari Sivanesan (pictured in the sound check) gave a rather remarkable rendition of 'Ständchen': do listen to that too (starting at 28.30).

What do you think has been unmissable in the Spirit of Schubert season? Share recommendations in the comments below!

LaTeX for Logicians spring cleaned

The LaTeX for Logicians pages have been a bit unloved over the last year or more. But recently, a lot of links got broken when I eventually wound up what was left of my old university web pages. And that has at last prompted the much-needed spring clean.

So over the last couple of days, I have checked and repaired (I hope!) all the external and internal links, removed a few defunct links, and added a number of new ones. I have added a new page of links to other relevant LaTeX sites. The LaTeX for Logicians Guide to Sam Buss's bussproofs.sty has also been updated.  And there have been some aesthetic improvements.

Now it's over to you. Let me know (in the comments below) about any links which are still broken and do please suggest new ones. Please also spread the word, especially among your graduate students. And if you have a webpage which links to the LaTeX pages make sure your link still works. Note, by the way, the pages have their own permanent URL: www.latexforlogicians.net

Co-partial functions again

Back in October I gave a talk — prompted by (re)reading some excellent papers of Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley's — on the Really Exciting Question whether there are co-partial functions (functions that map nothing to something). Afterwards, I wrote the talk up in a more conventional form and expanded it a little, but then put the resulting note aside and got on with other things. The whole issue is probably too narrow for it to be worth troubling a journal: but re-reading the note, it still seems right to me. So, after a bit more tinkering today, for what it is worth, here it is.

In another bit of constructive procrastination, for I really should be getting on with IGT2, I've put a front page on the whole Logic Matters site (nicer icons to follow). This will make navigation easier for the many visitors who don't come for the blog.

Two short papers

I've just noticed that my forthcoming Analysis paper (co-authored with Luca Incurvati) is available online:

Is 'no' a force-indicator? Sometimes, possibly

And my Philosophia Mathematica paper (co-authored with Tim Button) is now also out:

The philosophical significance of Tennenbaum's Theorem

At least both papers have the virtue of brevity!