Posted on Sun 21 November 2010 in News
I am excited to announce that I am joining Carl Dyke, Asher Kay, and John McCreery as a blogger at Dead Voles! I will continue to post here as well. Right now I'm pretty busy with throwing together the pieces of my Master's thesis.
Posted on Thu 04 November 2010 in Rumination • Tagged with cellular automata, flex and slop, game of life, metaphysics, ontology
Many of you are no doubt familiar with cellular automata such as Conway's Game of Life. In Conway's Game of Life a world consists of an two dimensional array of cells. Each cell is in either of two states, live or dead, at any particular moment, and its next state …
Posted on Mon 25 October 2010 in Around the Infonosphere
Philosopher Mandel Cabrera over at Lexilalia discusses the virtual photography of Robert Overweg in connection to Heidegger's distinction between 'the Earth' and 'the World'.
At the International Cognition and Culture Institute Nicolas Baumard blogs about Philippa Foot, the philosopher of ethics famous for the trolley dilemma, writing, "indeed, in anthropology …
Posted on Fri 22 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with situation semantics, situation theory
Situation theory was developed to support situation semantics. Natural language semantics are rich and the topic of how to represent these semantics, in situation theory or otherwise, is too complex to give justice to here. We will give a basic account of situation semantics as a situated relational …
Posted on Sun 17 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with constraints, infon logic, information, situation theory
Devlin develops an infon logic framework to be used either by a theorist or by an agent. The description of this logic is relatively informal. Infon logic combines basic infons to form non-basic compound infons. Conjuction and disjunction of infons may be recursively applied to create larger expressions …
Posted on Tue 12 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with information, situation theory
Situation theory is built on a rich ontology of objects including infons, situations, n-place relations, individuals, spatial and temporal locations, types, parameters, and polarities. We will adopt the account in (Devlin 1991) and assign to each of these a corresponding basic type: INF, SIT, RELn, IND …
Posted on Tue 05 October 2010 in Around the Infonosphere
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with information, situation theory
Situation theory is an information theoretic mathematical ontology developed to support situation semantics, an alternative semantics to the better known possible world semantics originally introduced in the 1950s. Rather than a semantics based on total possible worlds, situation semantics is a relational semantics of partial worlds …
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory tutorial • Tagged with footnotes, information, references, situation theory
These are footnotes and references for the introduction to situation theory series of articles.
*1*The appropriateness of an object is determined in some way by a role associated with the argument.
*2* This is not precisely true. Some situation theorists distinguish between so-called Austinian and Russelian propositions. Infons …
Posted on Sun 03 October 2010 in Situation Theory • Tagged with information, situation theory
I will be presenting a series of articles introducing various forms of situation theory and situation semantics. I open up with an edited collection notes on an important paper by David Israel and John Perry, entitled "What is Information".
David Israel and John Perry introduce a series of working principles …