Saturday, June 27, 2015

Advice on Constructive Modal Logic

This is a picture of Dana Scott when he wrote "Advice on Modal Logic". The paper is fun (it's from 1970, but not freely available, it seems), the subject is fun and there is an awful lot of more fun things to do with it. One of them is constructive or intuitionistic modal logics. Like Modal Type Theory.

But I am feeling tired of trying to force philosophers and computer scientists to collaborate on the subject. If your friends don't want to talk to your other friends, sometimes you just have to let it go.

At least for a while. Mathematical problems can be like wine or cheese, some are better fresh,  you attack them fiercely and win or lose. Some you need to put away,  to mature (or  not), and hope that the process will improve them.

Together with Charles Stewart and Natasha Alechina, I wrote one more note on that. A very preliminary version is here. And I talked about it in Berkeley's Logic Colloquium in March. Slides are available. For my part, I will concentrate on the  'small picture' now, the details that I think I know do work. Instead of trying to think about why it all hangs together, if  indeed it does.

Frank Pfenning has a lovely slide deck, celebrating Scott's 70th birthday here.

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