Another paper on mereology. Here is the abstract:
Formal mereologies are axiomatised in a variety of different ways,
with a variety of different primitives. In this paper I distinguish
three such ways, and show that not every way is suitable for every
mereology.
My partner Hannah Burgess has started a blog at blogspot called trompe l'oeil. Check it out!
Updated 9 March 2012. I have uploaded a newer version of the paper, which fixes some typoes in the formal material.
I gave a paper on fuzzy mereology at Otago, Waikato, and Auckland recently. It is in draft form with the conclusion only in bullet points, but I would welcome comments.
Some philosophers have attempted to solve metaphysical problems about
vagueness by understanding objects with vague boundaries as analogous
to fuzzy sets. I formulate such a view and argue that it suffers from
a serious lacuna, which I attempt to fill.
Hannah Clark-Younger and I organised a tele-conference on imperative logic to take place between 9am and 12pm New Zealand time on 16 September 2011. An audio recording of the conference is now available below.
In draft...
An imperative conditional is a conditional in the imperative mood (by analogy with “indicative conditional”, “subjunctive conditional”). What, in general, is the meaning and the illocutionary effect of an imperative conditional? I survey four answers: the answer that imperative conditionals are commands to the effect that an indicative conditional be true; two versions of the answer that imperative conditionals express irreducibly conditional commands; and finally, the answer that imperative conditionals express a kind of hybrid speech act between command and assertion.
Budd Christman is a helicopter pilot who worked for the United States NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) between 1978 and 1999 (he is now retired). The forces that control this dimension have chosen him for a unique mission: to cuddle as many cute Arctic animals as possible.
I have been working feverishly on the AAP 2011 conference programme.
I used some functional programming techniques to generate a programme from the list of registrations, with constraints like "don't schedule students vs. non-students", "don't schedule papers from the same stream opposite each other" etc. Actually the full set of rules is quite complicated.
Hannah and I have discovered hands-free jenga. The rules are the same as regular jenga except that you are allowed to touch the bricks in any way but not with your hands. It helps if the bricks are clean.
Semi-hands-free jenga is bit easier. In it you are allowed to place the bricks on the tower with one hand, but must remove bricks hands-free.
It is illegal in most countries to play any version of jenga while driving. You have been warned.
Read this paper
Audio recording of imperatives workshop