Toby Meadows

I don't think it's a refusal to engage so much as a complete mismatch in expectations about what philosophy is supposed to do.

He thinks of acquiring more true propositions as the goal. So given her claim is trivially true there is nothing more she can do that is of philosophical interest.

Can The Classical Ladder Be Kicked Away? The View from One Rung Up - Journal of Philosophical Logic Nonclassical logicians often justify their use of classical logic in their metatheoretic reasoning as, to put things in Bob Meyer’s evocative phrasing, “preaching in Classicalese to the Classicalists”...

"Can The Classical Ladder Be Kicked Away? The View from One Rung Up" by @rohanfrench.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Tbf Michael Dummett did a lot of intuitionistic logic while also doing more than continental philosophers to improve the lives of refugees by simply doing something rather than nothing.

I think I'd find it easier to switch to Dvorak than switch pinkies for latex.

I got used to the UK layout when I lived there ... \ at the bottom left ... and now I have to order keyboards from the UK or I go insane.

Boo!

bsky.app/profile/arxi...

Finally a draft!

bsky.app/profile/arxi...

Any theorem expressible in the language in analysis will be true in an elementary extension of the standard model.

Nonstandard analysis is not my jam, but this is just a logic thing.

It will be if that extension is an elementary extension, which is the usual thing.

Can't remember.

Off the cuff I'd think of Boolos's example, "Some critics only admire each other."

This purportedly requires plural quantification for a natural analysis.

Perhaps this has no obvious translation into Japanese?

You know more linguistics than me so I won't keep embarrassing myself.

My faves in this zone are akaik (which isn't much):

- the definite article (not in Polish, sorry Russell); and

- plural quantification (not in Japanese).

Grateful to those people who explained this to me.

I remain in awe of people who come to academia and can work in English when it isn't their first language. It's mind blowing.

I suppose the thing I'm wondering is if they ever were able to explain their research in their native language.

Philosophy is full of useful jargon we use to make fine distinctions etc. I think we keep acquiring more of this language as we go.

Why expect that to translate back?

This will also happen with bike repair.

Meh ...

Must do better!

An amusing part of this unamusing situation is that the proposed example is about currency.

As such, it makes no use whatsoever of whatever spooky "natural properties" are possessed by gold.

You might as well use fools' gold. Or paper. It doesn't really matter.

Just like metaphysics.

Baire space is a Baire space.

But not every Baire space is Baire space.

... not sure this is a good thing ...

update

I think this is quite interesting.

Still not really sure what to make of the imo surprising results.

Huge thanks to Gabe Goldberg and Pen Maddy for quite different forms of generous assistance.

Jason Chen, Toby Meadows: Teasing apart definitional equivalence https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03956 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.03956 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.03956

Perhaps.

I still think I'm making a very reasonable request.

Can someone recommend an intro to HoTT or MLTT that uses context based proof theory that is very precise (like a proof theorist) in its handling of the basic syntactic items and how they are assembled?

The HoTT book is not great on this. Rijke is much better but is a little too swift imo on this.

What happens at boarding school is supposed to stay at boarding school

It's helpful since then you know not to read the rest of the paper unless it's written by a French person or someone who's been dead for a millenia or two.

Any recs?

Learning a little algebraic topology. Can't get the Beach Boys out of my head.

When I worked in UK academia I recall hearing of a Japanese man who was baffled at how Britain had decided to run its universities like firms. “Why? Your universities are excellent and your firms are terrible.”

The first.

Where does one acquire an artificial duck?

Asking for a friend ...