Apparently I should write in this more often. I’ve sort of been waiting to post until I can put together some really good ones, à la City of Sound, but it might also be worthwhile to mention what I’ve been doing, and what I will be doing in the near future.
Most of you know I’m applying to grad schools right now, because I finally decided that what I want to do with my life is to learn and teach philosophical logic. This has been taking up most of my time. The final list of schools:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Columbia University
- University of California, Berkeley
- Carnegie Mellon University
- City University of New York, Graduate Center
I’m applying directly to doctoral programs at the four that are not CMU (many of them don’t even have master’s-level programs), and a M.S. program at CMU as a backup. A professor suggested that I do that in case I do not gain admission to anywhere, since I do not have a peer-reviewed publication on my CV. In that case, I’ll work with him over the next year and publish a paper while I work on the M.S., and have a stronger application for Ph.D. programs in the following year.
What I intend to study is going to be a part of philosophical logic, as noted. I’m most interested in modal logic, nonmonotonic logic, and belief revision. (All of these topics also have excellent introductory articles at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I linked to Wikipedia since its articles assume less prior knowledge.)
I’m mostly done with the applications, I mostly need to finish my writing sample, which I intend to do over the weekend. I’m not completely certain about what it’s going to be on. Primarily, though, it’ll be about the Levi identity (which essentially says that any change in an agent’s beliefs can be thought of as a series of additions of new beliefs and losses of old beliefs) and Levi contractions (a particular method of losing old beliefs). I might also cover coherentist theories of belief (in which beliefs may justify each other).
I’m looking forward to next semester, too. Unfortunately, the seminar in philosophy of mathematics I was going to take was apparently cancelled since I was the only person who registered for it. This leaves me with a course schedule of:
- 15312 Foundations of Programming Languages
- 21805 Lambda Calculus
- 80511 Thesis Seminar
- 80818 Seminar on Epistemology
So I’ll be designing programming languages, higher-order functions, and learning about knowledge. Also, writing a thesis. Currently I am thinking that I want to find an axiomatization for a class of belief revision operators which does not have one (though this might be hard…), but a professor has been doing interesting work on what happens if you permit the relation that generates a Levi contraction operator to be a partial order (as opposed to a total order).
Hopefully this is enough of a window into what I’m doing. I’ll try to write more (and actually about topics other than myself) in the future. I thought about writing a short primer to logic in this space for my friends who don’t know it, though I’m doubting I’ll ever actually do it. Maybe over summer.