logicians-from-the-united-states

"… was of the brooding type. He sat when he addressed his handful of students (who turned out afterwards, however, to be a not unimportant handful) and he had all the air, as has been noted by , of the typical philosopher who is engaged, at the moment, in bringing fresh truth by divination out of some inexhaustible well. He got his effect not by anything that could be called an inspiring personality, in the usual sense of the term, but rather by creating the impression that we had before us a profound, original, dispassionate and impassioned seeker of truth. No effort was made to create a connected and not inconsistent whole out of the matter of each lecture. In fact, so devious and unpredictable was his course that he once, to the delight of his students, proposed at the end of his lecture, that we should form (for greater freedom of discussion) a Metaphysical Club, though he had begun the lecture by defining metaphysics to be the “science of unclear thinking.”"

"What gives significance and value to truths is that they permit of interesting predictions."

"The whole field of Deductive Logic, even when thought of merely in the terms of common language, has acquired, for the student of , a symmetry and a completeness and a simplicity which it is, apparently, far from possessing in the minds of its usual exponents. The natural repugnance which the ordinary logician felt, at first, to seeing processes of deductive reasoning made the subject of a great development by a purely mechanical process, has in great part passed away; it would have been hard for it to survive the eloquent persuasiveness of 's Symbolic Logic. It seems, therefore, to be time for the simplified ways of looking at things which prevail in Symbolic Logic to begin to sink into the elementary expositions of the subject."

"I shall adopt the convention by which particular propositions are taken as implying the existence of their subjects, and universal propositions as not implying the existence of their subjects. would infer that the two propositions The sea-serpent is not found in the water, The sea-serpent is not found out of the water, are contradictory; bur , , and would infer that the sea-serpent does not exist. With this convention, contradiction can never exist between universal propositions nor between particular propositions taken by themselves. A universal proportion can be contradicted only by a particular proposition, and a particular only by a universal. The above premises are inconsistent with The sea-serpent has (at least once) has been found. With this convention, hypothetical and categorical propositions receive the same formal treatment. If a, then b = all a is b = a implies b. (Peirce.)"

"In their attempts to get around these artificial barriers and inconsistencies, early women scientists developed a great many strategies. These tended to be of two sorts. One was the idealistic, liberal-to-radical, and often confrontational strategy of demanding that society reject all stereotypes and work for the feminist goal of full equality. This involved writing angry letters and otherwise documenting the "unfairness" of the unequal opportunities open to men and women. The most prominent and successful strategist of this school was Christine Ladd-Franklin, a graduate of the 1860s, would-be physicist turned mathematician, psychologist, and logician, who for fifty years, worked shrewdly and tirelessly for educated women. Her greatest triumph was in opening graduate schools to women in the 1890s, and thus allowing women to earn the same doctorates as men."

"At about the time of the break with Wiener, and arguably because of it, Pitts destroyed his thesis and all of his papers, felt unable to become interested in anything new, and began a long, slow decline. He did not simply begin to drink—as befitting a man of his talents, he synthesized novel analogues of barbituates and opiates in the laboratory and experimented on himself by ingesting long-chain alcohols."

"[Depression is] common to all people with an excessively logical education who work in applied mathematics: It is a kind of pessimism resulting from an inability to believe in what people call the Principle of Induction, or the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Since one cannot prove, or even render probable a priori, that the sun should rise tomorrow, we cannot really believe it shall."

"Dress from the waist up."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"It was apparent to him after we had done the frog’s eye that even if logic played a part, it didn’t play the important or central part that one would have expected. It disappointed him. He would never admit it, but it seemed to add to his despair at the loss of Wiener’s friendship."

"Walter Pitts, who was companion, protege, and friend to Warren, had, for a long time, been convinced that the only way of understanding nature was by logic and logic alone .... Pitts had committed himself to logic as the key to the structure of the world in a way that no other person that [ know had ever done."

"Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you."

"Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all."

"“What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain”... devastated Pitts because it showed that retinal ganglion cells were not simply acting as logical devices, thus appearing to shatter his dream that logic could be used to explain the nervous system."

"The movie Forrest Gump made the point that the greatest, most heroic Americans are people of extraordinary character who flicker briefly into public consciousness and are quickly forgotten... while his contemporaries Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John von Neumann entered the pantheon of fame, Pitts remains a shadowy folk hero. Stories about Pitts have circulated among the cognescenti for years, but almost nothing has been written about him."

"He is the most omniverous of scientists and scholars. He has become an excellent dye chemist, a good mammalogist, he knows the sedges, mushrooms and the birds of New England. He knows neuroanatomy and neurophysiology from their original sources in Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German for he learns any language he needs as soon as he needs it. Things like electrical circuit theory and the practical soldering in of power, lighting, and radio circuits he does himself. In my long life, I have never seen a man so erudite or so really practical."

"The story is told that, at age 12, Pitts ran into the public library to hide from some bullies, found a copy of Principia Mathematica by the 20th-century philosophers Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and proceeded to read it cover to cover in the next few weeks. Pitts experienced a metaphysical insight that logic rules the universe, and as a corollary he felt that ego—and his ego in particular— needed to be erased in order to achieve an understanding of the world."

"[Pitts] was in no uncertain terms the genius of our group. He was absolutely incomparable in the scholarship of chemistry, physics, of everything you could talk about history, botany, etc. When you asked him a question, you would get back a whole textbook … To him, the world was connected in a very complex and wonderful fashion."

"Pitts was married to abstract thought... We never knew anything about his family or his feelings about us. He died mysterious, sad and remote, and not once did I find out, or even want to find out more about how he felt or what he hoped. To be interested in him as a person was to lose him as a friend. One was to be interested only in what he knew."

"We are horrified by the fantasy of a subtle use of violence that could change us without our knowing it. This would be the ultimate weapon of offense or defense. But whether this pure power appears in its positive role as The Method for finding truth, or in its negative role as the Sophistic power of persuasion, the same mistake occurs."

"Today we have techniques of manipulation on a scale that would have done Callicles proud. They are not playful transgressions; we do well to fear the link between such power and what passes for knowledge. If there is only persuasion, Plato warns us, there is no discourse except the confrontation of power and propaganda. If we cannot draw the line, he says, all means of persuasion will be acceptable. Violence may be done to us, in crude or subtle ways and we will not be able to stop it. Even worse, we may not be aware of it."

"The Theory of Relativity is presented, first and foremost, as a theory of the geometry of space-time. Special Relativity is explained in enough detail to solve specific problems about the behavior of clocks and rigid objects in a relativistic world. General Relativity is presented less rigorously. My aim... make the conceptual foundations of these theories absolutely clear..."

"[T]he science of thermodynamics... initially aimed at providing a precise account of how heat spreads through an object and from one object to another. But we can discover... detailed equations governing heat flow and still not have an account of what heat is. ...It is a characteristic of contemporary physics education that much more time is spent learning how to solve the equation and get a practical answer... than in... the nature of heat, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of matter. Physics students... fascinated by these foundational questions can find themselves frustrated by... classes that refuse to address them. This volume is dedicated to them as much as it is to philosophers..."

"Newton's First Law, the... Law of Inertia, refers only to bodies that are subject to no external forces. It is tempting to say that Newton postulates that such bodies "continue in the same state of motion," but such... would miss the revolutionary aspect... the First Law specifies exactly what counts as "the same state of motion." For Aristotle... a piece of aether in uniform circular motion about [earth,] the center of the universe is always in "the same state of motion," and so there would be no reason to seek out external causes... In Aristotle's physics, external causes are responsible for unnatural motion, such as a rock moving upward instead of down. So for Aristotle, the falling of a stone... requires no external cause, and the continued rotation of a sphere of fixed stars requires no external cause: this what these sorts of matter do by nature."

"Fundamental conceptual changes occur, but they are always modifications of a previously existing structure. ...[T]actical adjustments are made in order to render the whole consistent. The ad hoc nature of this procedure may leave us with lingering doubts as to whether the whole really is consistent."

"The Theory of Relativity has overthrown classical presumptions about the structure of space and time. The quantum theory has provided us with intimations of a new conception of physical reality. Classical notions of causality, of actuality, and of the role of the observer... have all come under attack."

"Relativity is commonly taken to prohibit anything from traveling faster than light. ...[H]ow can the particles continue to display the... correlations..? The two pillars of modern physics seem to contradict one other."

"Many... would agree that Relativity prohibits something from going faster than light but disagree over just what something is."

"[T]he need for a completely physical account of "measurement" procedures—are addressed in both volumes..."

"[S]pace and time... do not appear to our senses: they have no color or flavor or sound or smell or tangible shape. ...[They] seem rather to have is a geometrical structure."

"Maudlin's book is likely to upset many physicists and metaphysicians, but in a positive, thought provoking way. Moreover, its plain presentation style makes it a good introductory book for students and non-specialists. In short, it is highly recommended for anybody interested in quantum theory, and especially in what "happens in between.""

"[N]o consensus... exists among physicists about how to understand quantum theory. There... is no precise, exact physical theory... Instead there is raging controversy. ...How can the manifest and overwhelming success ...be reconciled with complete uncertainty about what the theory claims about the nature of matter?"

"[P]roblems about the fundamental consistency of our two fundamental physical theories may appear. ...It arises from the remarkable results derived by John Stewart Bell in 1964 ...[C]ertain pairs of particles that are governed by quantum laws... appear to remain "connected" or "in communication" no matter how distantly separated... [T]he connection exists even when the observations carried out occupy positions... which cannot be connected by light rays. The particles communicate faster than light."

"[P]rior to Newton, Galileo sought to specify the "intertial" motion of terrestrial objects—...the motion they would display if subject to no forces—and he concluded that such motion would be uniform circular motion. He arrived at this conclusion from his experimental work with inclined planes."

"I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion... called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin... is "without a doubt an intellectual beast." Maudlin impresses even... Jim Holt... When I asked Holt "What’s your utopia?," he replied "arguing eternally about gauge theory" with Maudlin and a few other pals. ...Maudlin's ..."The Defeat of Reason"... ends by suggesting that we "shorten the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap." Ouch."

"...Maudlin takes up the conceptual and ontological foundations of classical and modern physics and explains in a lucid manner how Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity emerged from Newtonian mechanics and Galilean relativity. ...revealing the foundations of physics to those with more interest in understanding the general philosophical concepts rather than merely understanding how to solve the equations."

"[P]hysical theories are neither realist nor antirealist. That is... a . It is a person's attitude toward a physical theory that is either realist or antirealist. ...[[Copernican heliocentrism|[T]he theory]] toward which Osiander was antirealist and Galileo realist is one and the same theory. The theory itself is neither."

"[T]he experimental verification of Bell's inequality constitutes the most significant event of the last half-century. ...[O]ur basic picture of space, time, and physical reality must change. These results, and the mysteries they engender, should be the common property of all who contemplate with wonder the universe we inhabit."

"The scientific realist maintains that in at least some cases, we have good evidential reasons to accept theories or theoretical claims as true, or approximately true, or on-the-road-to-truth. The scientific antirealist denies this. These attitudes come in degrees... [T]his is a question addressed by epistemology and confirmation theory..."

"Non-locality appears at exactly the point where the "measurement problem" which infects standard quantum theory is resolved."

"Quantum theory... formalism... uses no more than linear algebra and vector spaces. ...A particularly nice and accessible presentation of the requisite mathematics can be found in 's Quantum Mechanics and Experience (1992, Ch. 2)."

"If one resolves the measurement problem by allowing a real physical process of wave collapse, it is the collapse dynamics which manifests the non-locality, and which resists the fully Relativistic formulation."

"Although this book is not the place to thrash out those issues, I have thrashed them... in other places."

"The regrettably widespread opinion that there is no real non-locality inherent in the quantum theory is therefore deeply intertwined with the regrettably widespread opinion that the measurement problem can be painlessly solved without postulating either additional variables or any real collapse process."

"Any book which attempts to deal with quantum theory, Special Relativity and General Relativity courts various forms of disaster."

"It has become almost de rigueur in quantum foundations literature to misuse the terms "realist," "realistic," "antirealist," and "antirealistic." These terms have a precise meaning in the philosophy of science... that seems to be... unfamiliar to most physicists. ...[T]hey simply toss them around with no attached meaning ...[with] terrible consequences in foundations of quantum theory."

"[M]ost clear philosophical ideas can be presented intuitively, shorn of the manifold qualifications, appendices and terminological innovations that grow like weeds in academic soil."

"[A]nother interpretation holds that Relativity requires only thatTheories be Lorentz invarient."

"General Relativity is... completely clear and precise. ...[W]hat the theory says is unambiguous. The more one works with it, the clearer it becomes, and there are no great debates... about how to use it. (The only bit of unclarity... to represent the distribution of matter... using the . Einstein remarked that that part... "is low grade wood," while the part describing the space-time structure... is "fine marble.")"

"At its most fundamental level, physics tells us about what there is, about the categories of being. And modern physics tells us that what there is ain't nothing like what we thought there is."