Greg Restall

@MartinEscardo @julesh Yes, as someone with a mathematics background, an awareness of λs, and a passing acquaintance with Haskell, Lambek and Scott hit the spot for me in the early 1990s.

A clear glass filled with cold black coffee, ice, and containing a green straw, to the right of an iPad, with two windows open, one a Vim session, editing a latex file, and the other, the pdf of the compiled output. A parse tree of the sentence “John seeks a unicorn” is visible in both views.

A man seeks an iced black coffee, while John seeks a unicorn.

#EH9 #coffee #Dundee #montaguesemantics

A rectangular black sticker, with yellow writing, saying “the only good system is a type system” with a centred lower case lambda in a circle.

The anarchist type theorists are in evidence along Riverside Walk in Dundee.

#typetheory #dundee

@victorgijsbers I enjoyed reading it (some bits deeply, skimming others), but then, lately I’ve been neck deep in metasemantics, and I was primed to think about some of the issues he’s tracking. I agree that his prose style is an acquired taste.

His 1978 review of early work in the formal […]

It is a familiar idea that (to be) a good inference is (to be) truth preserving: where what S stated is inferred from what given other statements did, the inference is good if the truth of those others guarantees the truth of S—wherever they were true, S would be. One might think of the laws of truth as deciding when that is so. Since the notion 'guarantee,’ and, likewise, the notion 'wherever,’ are open to negotiation, perhaps we should say that this characterizes a family of notions of good inference (corresponding, perhaps, to a family of notions of entailment).

Charles Travis, logical pluralist.

This is an extract from his *Unshadowed Thought,* Harvard University Press, 2000.

The recordings from #TYPES2025 are beginning to appear on @mspstrath’s youtube channel. There is a lot of good stuff there already, and I plan to re-watch some talks I enjoyed in the days ahead.

Here is the recording of my talk on some of the connections between type theory and issues in […]

"We sent the student's draft of his dissertation to an expert in the field, who said the main theorem was too trivial. In fact, it turned out to be incorrect". Fred Richman

https://web.archive.org/web/20230204213103/http://math.fau.edu/richman/docs/confess.pdf

The recordings from #TYPES2025 are beginning to appear on @mspstrath’s youtube channel. There is a lot of good stuff there already, and I plan to re-watch some talks I enjoyed in the days ahead.

Here is the recording of my talk on some of the connections between type theory and issues in […]

Last week was all type theory, all the time. *This* week I get to change gears, and take part in the 50th Annual Conference of the Society for Exact Philosophy. I’m especially looking forward to Day 2, which is devoted to the work of our sorely-missed colleague, Aldo Antonelli, who passed away […]

I’ll be giving a talk on the methodology of formal philosophy.

If you want to get a sense of what I’m talking about, details of the talk can be found here: https://consequently.org/presentation/2025/must-do-mdb-better-sep/

Three men, seated on a bench, in front of a brick wall. From left to right, Albert Visser, in a blue jacket over yellow shirt and trousers, Aldo Antonelli, in a grey shirt and jeans, holding a camera, and to the right, Greg Restall, in a paisley shirt and dark jeans.

Aldo and I served on the editorial board of the Journal of Philosophical Logic, and then the Review of Symbolic Logic. I learned a great deal from him, and from my co-editors, and it will be good to remember him with friends, old and new.

Last week was all type theory, all the time. *This* week I get to change gears, and take part in the 50th Annual Conference of the Society for Exact Philosophy. I’m especially looking forward to Day 2, which is devoted to the work of our sorely-missed colleague, Aldo Antonelli, who passed away […]

@pjw I’ve been happy with hcommons.social. I don’t browse the local feed much and am not a heavy poster, but the moderation and federation policies of hcommons.social seem sane, and the server is as reliable as I need it to be.

Hi all!
My server, fediphilosophy, is sadly shutting down. So I have to migrate. Any server suggestions?
I'm a philosopher, academic, leftist, living in Israel/Palestine (but American)

I post a lot of Israel/Palestine politics from a left/not-anarchist-but-adjacent angle, but also some academic […]

@abuseofnotation Well, the font is my handwriting, and that is about as good as I can do given the time available. The abstract contains a more legible version of the content (together with heaps of references) for anyone who need more clarity.

…oh, and if you’re here at #types2025 and I haven’t yet introduced myself to you and you’d like to say hi, please do. I’m here to get to know folks.

TYPES 2025 has been lots of fun so far—I’ve been learning heaps, and I’m seeing unexpected connections between recent work in type theory and other issues I’m curious about.

I have no idea how I (or my audience) will cope with a 20 minute timeslot straight after lunch, but my talk is more of a […]

Wellington's statue, adorned with a traffic cone (actually three) outside the Gallery of Modern Art.

I seem to be back in Glasgow, with its refreshing attitude to authority.

A pile of stapled handouts, with the title “Must Do “Must Do Better” Better”

Coming up today, the first outing of my talk on Tim Williamson’s philosophical methodology and what we can learn from it.

(Featuring order types, natural deduction proofs, epistemic logic, sudoku puzzles, Nuel Belnap on pre-semantics, and more. What’s not to […]

[Original post on hcommons.social]

I've been using Bitbucket's free plan to sync my work in progress—mostly TeX documents and ancillaries—between my home and office Macs and my on-the-go iPad, with everything in a couple of git repositories for version control (and for sharing with a couple of co-authors). After years of […]

It’s a new month, and I have a couple of new presentations to give in the coming weeks.

First, a philosophy talk on methodology, aimed at my philosophy colleagues, and second, a talk on the connections I see between type theory and research on philosophical logic, for type theorists.

I’m […]

It’s a new month, and I have a couple of new presentations to give in the coming weeks.

First, a philosophy talk on methodology, aimed at my philosophy colleagues, and second, a talk on the connections I see between type theory and research on philosophical logic, for type theorists.

I’m […]

A sudoku puzzle with a blank square highlighted.

I'm running the risk of distracting my audience by including a sudoku puzzle in a handout for an upcoming talk, to make a point about epistemic logic and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions.

(Well, even though the webpage says the ebook is available from May 13, if you pre-order, you get the book now. Perhaps it’s May 13 somewhere.)

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy Analytic philosophy is the leading form of philosophy in the English-speaking world. What explains its continued success? Christoph Schuringa argues that its enduring power can only be understood by examining its social history. Analytic philosophy tends to think of itself as concerned with eternal questions, transcend

After having a few conversations with Christoph Schuringa about analytic philosophy and its history, I’m very much looking forward to reading his social history, and it’s not too long to wait, now.

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3018-a-social-history-of-analytic-philosophy

Big Bird (a Sesame Street character that is a large, yellow bird) sitting at one end of a conference table, drawing with crayons on a pad of paper, surrounded by a group of young human (not bird) comedy writers, all with laptops open in front of them.

Finding myself on this selection of accepted papers for TYPES 2025 gives me the “Big Bird turning up to a meeting to which he isn’t qualified” vibe, but regardless, I’m really looking forward to hanging out in Glasgow next month and learning lots of type […]

[Original post on hcommons.social]

@abuseofnotation oh, my opinion about myself is thoroughly context sensitive. I'm happy to be a fish out of water (to mix the metaphor) in *this* particular context. I rarely attend academic conferences so far outside my own core areas of expertise, and I'm looking forward to it.

Big Bird (a Sesame Street character that is a large, yellow bird) sitting at one end of a conference table, drawing with crayons on a pad of paper, surrounded by a group of young human (not bird) comedy writers, all with laptops open in front of them.

Finding myself on this selection of accepted papers for TYPES 2025 gives me the “Big Bird turning up to a meeting to which he isn’t qualified” vibe, but regardless, I’m really looking forward to hanging out in Glasgow next month and learning lots of type […]

[Original post on hcommons.social]

A view across a broad canal in central Amsterdam, with canal boats moored to the right, and a series of terrace buildings on view behind them.

A smaller Amsterdam canal viewed from a brick bridge overpass.

I’m in Amsterdam, about to give a talk about proof theory for modal predicate logic at the ILLC, the home base of the modal industrial complex. I have no idea how this is going to go over, but it should be a fun ride, however it turns out […]

[Original post on hcommons.social]

I'm pleased to say that I'm helping to organise the #ANU #LogicSummerSchool , which will be running in its 33rd straight year! The website https://comp.anu.edu.au/lss/ is mostly TBA notices at the moment, of course, but we do have the dates: 1-12 December. This is an international event and we […]