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  <title>wo's weblog</title>
  <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/</link>
  <description>Musings in Analytic Philosophy</description>

  <item>
    <title>Teaching mathematical logic</title>
    <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/829</link>
    <guid>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/829</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
    <description><![CDATA[I taught two courses this year that I haven't taught before. One of
them was our 4th-year undergraduate course on mathematical logic,
"Logic, Computability, and Incompleteness". As usual, I ended up writing
my own textbook. Here it
is as PDF and here as
HTML.
Why yet another textbook? Two reasons mainly. One is that many
existing textbooks are addressed at maths students. This shows up not
only in the examples and illustrations, but also in the fact that
comparatively little time is spent mot...]]></description>
  </item>
    <item>
    <title>The tyranny of the objective</title>
    <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/828</link>
    <guid>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/828</guid>
    <pubDate>Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:39:33 +0000</pubDate>
    <description><![CDATA[A widely held view in philosophy is that ordinary information and
ordinary belief are concerned with "objective" propositions whose
truth-value doesn't vary between perspectives or locations within a
world.
Some hold that all genuine content is objective, and that the
appearance of counterexamples is an illusion that can somehow be
explained away. (See, e.g., Stalnaker 1981, Magidor 2015, or
Cappelen and
Dever 2013.) Even those who accept that there is genuinely
perspectival or self-locating ...]]></description>
  </item>
    <item>
    <title>Are we living in a computer simulation?</title>
    <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/827</link>
    <guid>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/827</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 09 Feb 2026 16:10:17 +0000</pubDate>
    <description><![CDATA[I'm moderately confident that I don't live in a computer simulation.
My reasoning goes like this.

A priori, simulation scenarios are less probable than
non-simulation scenarios.
My evidence is more likely in non-simulation scenarios than in
simulation scenarios.
So: It is highly improbable, given my evidence, that I'm in a
simulation scenario.

By a "simulation scenario", I mean a scenario in which a subject's
experiences of themselves and their environment are generated by a
computer progra...]]></description>
  </item>
    <item>
    <title>Integrating centred information</title>
    <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/826</link>
    <guid>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/826</guid>
    <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:30:37 +0000</pubDate>
    <description><![CDATA[Sensory information is centred. Right now, for example, my visual
system conveys to me that there's a red wall about 1 metre
ahead (among much else); it does not convey that Wolfgang
Schwarz is about 1 metre away from a red wall on 22 January 2026 at
12:04 UTC.
We can quibble over what exactly is part of the sensory information.
We can also quibble over what "sensory information" is even meant to be.
But it should be uncontroversial that we gain information from our
senses. My point is that, ...]]></description>
  </item>
    <item>
    <title>Kripke on empty names</title>
    <link>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/825</link>
    <guid>https://www.umsu.de/blog/2026/825</guid>
    <pubDate>Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:27:25 +0000</pubDate>
    <description><![CDATA[I (somewhat randomly) picked up Kripke 2011 the other day. This
is Kripke's first engagement with the problem of empty names. What
struck me is the biased selection of examples. Most of the paper is
concerned with names of fictional characters like 'Sherlock Holmes', and
Kripke only seems to consider simple utterances in which they figure as
the subject, like (1).
(1)Sherlock Holmes is a detective.
He argues, plausibly enough, that an apparent assertion of (1) should
be understood as a preten...]]></description>
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