[Alta-Logic] Talk tomorrow: Michael Dunn (Indiana), Logics as Tools

[Richard Zach]

  Philosophy Speakers: Logics as Tools, or Humans as Rational Tool
  Making Animals

*Date & Time: *
April 6, 2018 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
*Location: *
1253 SS
*Speaker: *
Michael Dunn, Indiana University

*About the Talk*

A human has been defined in the Aristotelean tradition as a "rational 
animal." Benjamin Franklin defined a human as a “tool-making animal." 
Therefore, it follows, by logic, that a human is a rational tool-making 
animal.  The purpose of this talk is to argue that this last can be 
regrouped to read "rational-tool making animals," and that logics 
(plural) are among these rational tools.  In this talk I will explain a 
pragmatic approach towards a foundation of logic. By the middle of the 
last century we already had classical logic as the “one true logic” of 
truth, many-valued logic as the logic of degrees of truth, and 
intuitionistic logic as the logic of constructive proof.   And since 
then there has been a proliferation of logics.   I will examine this 
proliferation of logics, and then focus on substructural logics as 
“logics of information,” i.e., as information tools. This talk is based 
on my paper “Humans as Rational Tool Making Animals,” its Russian 
translation a chapter//in /Современная логика: Основания, предмет и 
перспективы развития. /(/Modern logic: Its Subject Matter, Foundations 
and Prospects/), ed. D. Zaitsev, Moscow: Forum, 2018.

*About the Speaker*

J. Michael Dunn, Indiana University Bloomington

Oscar Ewing Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Professor Emeritus of 
Computer Science
Professor Emeritus of Informatics, University Dean Emeritus — School of 
Informatics

He attended Oberlin College, A.B. 1963, and the University of 
Pittsburgh, Ph.D. 1966. He has been awarded grants from NSF, NEH, ACLS, 
and has visited, among other places, at the Australian National 
University, Oxford University, the University of Melbourne, and the 
University of Massachusetts Amherst.  He is a winner of the Techpoint 
(Indiana Information Technology Association) Mira Award for Outstanding 
Information Technology Educator.  He was awarded the IUB Provost’s 
Medal, and was made a Sagamore of the Wabash by the Governor of Indiana. 
  He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dunn's research focuses on information based logics and relations 
between logic and computer science. He is particularly interested in 
so-called "sub-structural logics" including intuitionistic logic, 
relevance logic, linear logic, BCK-logic, and the Lambek Calculus. He 
has developed an algebraic approach to these and many other logics under 
the heading of "gaggle theory" (for generalized galois logics), which is 
contained in a series of papers, his book with Gary Hardegree /Algebraic 
Methods in Philosophical Logic /(Oxford, 2001), and a book with Katalin 
Bimbó /Generalized Galois Logics: Relational Semantics of Nonclassical 
Logical Calculi./ (CSLI Publications, 2008).  He has done work on the 
relationship of quantum logic to quantum computation and on subjective 
probability in the context of incomplete and conflicting information.  
He has a general interest in the philosophy of mind and cognitive 
science. This has led him recently to think about the nature of logic.

-- 
Richard Zach ......http://www.ucalgary.ca/rzach/
Professor,             Department  of  Philosophy
University of Calgary, Calgary AB T2N 1N4, Canada

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