Philosophy Club Meeting Feb. 23
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Meeting Password: Alive CwqT3MBG33 Toll-free call-in number: 1-877-668-4493
Meeting Number (in case calling in): 171 628 0135)
This week, Dr. Clark Sexton of South Dakota will present on the Liar Paradox.
His paper offers a means for getting around the Liar Paradox by providing a principled, independently legitimate, reason for denying that the Liar Sentence expresses a proposition, because it contains a non-terminating semantic component. This is shown to be parallel to recursive functions in programming languages. The overall result is a solution to the Liar Paradox that handles all the main problems that the paradox is thought to present while retaining classical logic and without requiring any complex revisions to our intuitive notion of truth; it also explains why some self-referential sentences are unproblematic.
Dr. Clark Sexton has a doctorate in Computer Science from Kansas State University and a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Kansas. His research in Computer Science was in Artificial Intelligence, and, more specifically, Natural Language Processing. For, this research, he implemented an NLP system that could parse a wide range of syntactic structures of English, perform type checking to determine whether a sentence was meaningful, and disambiguate certain ambiguous expressions.
Dr. Sexton continued his exploration of the relations of meanings in his dissertation in Philosophy, in which he presented a brief history of the analytic/synthetic distinction, replied to Quine's objections, and provided, and presented arguments for his own account of the distinction.
An ongoing weekly tradition at the University since 2001, the University of Hartford Philosophy Club is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Please be a part of us as we continue this great tradition live and online.
Brian D. Skelly, Philosophy
413-273-2273