Some kind of update

Yeah, we're in the end-of-the-quarter crunch here. Pretty much, yup.
Just a few quick notes: I added another comment to the "Kung-fu argument" thing. I think there are some interesting issues left to discuss about it.
The Wittgenstein group met last Wednesday to discuss the rest of the 5s, but only made it up to 5.55. Probably next time we'll read through the first half of the 6s and just see how far we get in discussion.
The Guerrilla Radio Show had another re-run due to us not having time to prep for a new show. We're hoping to prevent this somewhat frequent occurrence next year by pre-recording some shows to play during busy periods.
I'm going to run a modal logic group during the summer. I don't have a book in mind yet, but we may use some of Hughes & Cresswell, and probably a few papers or excerpts from other books (e.g., Kripke's "Semantical Considerations..."). I may try to collect some "homework problems" for those of us who want to do some, though this will not be required of the group participants. We'll probably do classical modal propositional and first-order logic, semantics (model theory) and perhaps a little metalogic for both of those, and then perhaps some related things like "conditional logic" (sometimes called "counterfactual logic") and who knows what else.
Oh, and surprise, surprise, we're going to have another colloquium here on Monday June 12th (first day of finals week?!) with Ben Caplan!
That's it for now. Come on, Megalon, rise up!

More kung-fu

Here's a question that popped into my head today. Consider the following argument:
1. Maybe I know kung-fu.
2. I don't know kung-fu.
---
3. Maybe I know kung-fu.

Is this argument valid? It strikes me as invalid, when I ignore my logical indoctrination. But it looks like 3 is just a reiteration of 1, and reiteration is a valid rule of inference if anything is. My options seem to be to explain how/why it's really invalid by explaining what rules of valid inference are being broken, or to say that it's valid and explain away my impression that it's not. This second option will probably require that we flesh out the situation in which the argument is made, but I'm not sure what kinds of details would be relevant. Do all-y'alls have any thoughts about this?

Who will teach the robots to love?

Hi folks. We're past the halfway point in the quarter and I'm finally grading midterms. Woo! That's part of the reason I'm behind on the philosophy blotter. To catch you up since the last episode:

• The bowling photos are up


• We had a cool colloquium with Thomas Hofweber, talking about "Logicism Without Logic"


• Tomorrow (Friday, May 12) we're going to have another colloquium (the last one this year) with Sam Rickless, talking about "Berkeley's Argument for Idealism"


• The Guerrilla Radio Show had that second show about paradoxes and puzzles, with special guest star Dylan Dodd on which we discussed the Ship of Theseus (briefly) and the Lottery Paradox (also somewhat briefly) and played a recorded interview with Nathan Salmon about Kripke's Puzzle About Belief.


• The GRS then took a break this past Tuesday; we'll likely come back next week to talk about skepticism. Ooh, spooky!


• The Wittgenstein group met and then took off this week; most likely next week we'll discuss roughly the first half of section 5.


• Somewhat recently, two of our beloved philgrads received awards! Carl Barnes for his teaching, and Jonny Way for an excellent paper. Show me up, will you? [Diabolical laughter]


• From the rumor mine (we don't have a mill yet): The philosophy of mind reading group may reconvene this summer, after it's golden slumbers.

Ok, that's enough <li> tags for me. Thanks to Huiyuhl for posting and generating discussion. I hope I have time to read through it and perhaps add something (though I'm not up on that literature). And on a random note, if you've ever watched the tv show Wonder Showzen, see if you can catch the "diversity" episode (the one where the letters and numbers are fighting) for a funny presentation of the problem of evil. Best of all possible worlds, my ass. :)