Here is a cool documentary on Claude Shannon. As I became familiar with Shannon’s work, I always got the feeling that generally speaking he is an underrated figure and his contributions and influence are deserving of more acknowledgement.
Archive for April, 2010
A New Introduction to Modal Logic erratum
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Just noticed a significant and potentially confusion causing error regarding multiply modal logics in this nonetheless excellent text. On pages 217-218 in my 1996 edition Hughes and Cresswell write:
For instance we might have a necessity operator
, say, which is stronger than
in the sense that
. The canonical model for such a system would obey the restriction that for all
if
then
Now, that should be for all if 
then .
A Question About Belief
Friday, April 9th, 2010If one believes that they believe that p, then do they believe that p (
)?
I was recently thinking about this property and its absence from standard systems of doxastic logic. Systems of doxastic logic rightly do not validate the property 
. Since they omit this axiom (commonly called the T axiom), cannot be simply derived. But although the T axiom should not be valid in a doxastic logic, it is fair to say that the axiom should be valid; if one believes that they believe that p, then they do believe that p.
This type of agent is apparently termed a stable reasoner by Raymond Smullyan:
A list of doxastic reasoner types can be found here
Knowledge and Its Value: Some Suggestions as To Why Knowledge Is More Valuable Than True Belief
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010Now for something with an epistemological and value theoretical flavour, a paper I have been working on titled ‘Knowledge and Its Value: Some Suggestions as To Why Knowledge Is More Valuable Than True Belief’
I have just come across a paper by Christian Piller titled ‘Valuing Knowledge: A Deontological Approach’, which explores my last idea in depth.