Note: this is the web page for the 2006 program. For the current web page, click here.
Overview
There is a long tradition of fruitful interaction between philosophy and the sciences. Logic and statistics emerged, historically, from combined philosophical and scientific inquiry into the nature of mathematical and scientific inference; and the modern conceptions of psychology, linguistics, and computer science are the results of sustained reflection on the nature of mind, language, and computation. In today's climate of disciplinary specialization, however, foundational reflection is becoming increasingly rare. As a result, developments in the sciences are often conceptually ill-founded, and philosophical debates lack scientific substance.
In 2006, the Department
of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University
will launch a three-week summer school in logic and formal epistemology
for promising undergraduates in philosophy, mathematics, computer science,
linguistics, and other sciences. The goals are to
The summer school will be held from Monday, June 12 to Friday, June 30, 2006. There will be morning and afternoon lectures and daily problem sessions, as well as planned outings and social events.
The summer school is free. That is, we will provide: |
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- full tuition
- dormitory accommodations on the Carnegie Mellon campus
So students need only pay for travel to Pittsburgh and living expenses while here. There are no grades, and the courses do not provide formal course credit.
Please help us spread the word. There is a flyer that is suitable for distributing, framing, or hanging on an office door, and a plain-text announcement.
Topics
This year's topics are:
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Causal Statistical Inference
As forcefully argued by Hume, causal learning poses a distinctive epistemological problem: how do we determine what factors causally influence other factors given that we only observe sequences of events? The problem of causal inference, particularly from statistical data, is a central methodological challenge within most of the sciences. Over the past twenty years, philosophers, statisticians, and computer scientists have developed a formalism -- causal Bayes nets -- for representing causal structures and solving problems of causal statistical inference. In this component of the summer school, we will introduce this formalism, and explore how it can be used to solve various philosophical problems of causal statistical inference, as well as various scientific problems.
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Foundations of Computability
Computability is perhaps the most significant and distinctive notion modern logic has introduced. In the guise of decidability and effective calculability, it has a venerable history in mathematics and philosophy. (Now it is also the basic theoretical concept in computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.) The methodological issues surrounding Church's Thesis prompt a detailed discussion of the evolution of these notions. All of them are relative to the capacities of a human agent, who proceeds "mechanically." That insight and Turing's approach to calculability lead to an axiomatic characterization of computability.
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Philosophical Logic
The traditional branches of philosophical logic include (but are not limited to) various versions of modal, temporal, deontic, and epistemic logic; constructive and sub-classical logics; many-valued logics; conditionals; quantum logic; relevance logic; inductive logic and belief change; and theories of truth and validity. Many of these formalisms have been used in recent years to study issues in the theoretical foundations of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics.
The development of a unified model theory for quantified modal logics has been one of the main open problems in the area since at least the late 1940's. This course introduces students to model-theoretic techniques, deriving from early work by Dana Scott and Richard Montague, that are capable of producing such a unified account. More traditional semantic approaches, deriving from early work by Kripke, Hintikka, and others, are also reviewed as special cases. Various applications to formal epistemology are considered; especially epistemic and conditional logics, and recent decision-theoretic accounts of belief change. |
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How to apply
The summer school is open to undergraduates, as well as to students who will have just received their undergraduate degrees.
- All application materials need to be submitted to the Philosophy Department by March 15, 2006.
- By March 31, 2006, applicants will be informed of the admissions decisions and of other details relating to the Summer School.
- Applicants who are admitted will be asked to confirm their planned attendance by April 15, 2006.
To apply, students must provide us with:
- an application
- a academic transcript from the student's current undergraduate institution
- a letter of recommendation, preferably from a faculty member
- an application fee of $25, which is returned if the application is not accepted
Materials can be sent by e-mail to Jan Puhl (jp10@andrew.cmu.edu), or by mail to
Summer School in Logic and Formal Epistemology
Department of Philosophy
Baker Hall 135
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890
Checks should be made payable to "Carnegie Mellon University."
Additional information
Inquiries may be directed to Jeremy Avigad (avigad@cmu.edu).