nas in your area

From his demo.

university of michigan homepage

In the spirit of procrastination, I finally got around to putting up an academic homepage. See here.

There’s not very much in the way of content at the moment. The only draft I’ve posted is my behemoth qualifying paper, on the semantics of imperatives. I will be adding some less ridiculous material as I tidy up some drafts this summer.

brainwaves

summers in the city

epistemology bloggingheads

Featuring Clayton and Juan Comesaña, here. So cool.

ahahahahah

Instalanche!

Funniest shit ever.

Although there is almost no substance to respond to, Glenn Reynolds, miserable repellent sociopath par excellence, expresses disapproval of thuggery by inciting more thuggery. So he’s a thug. He is also tenured at UT Knoxville. You can fill in the rest.

state of this blog

Taking a little break, as you can see.

A paper based on this post is in the works, which I may post. A digestable version of the work I’ve done on imperatives too (no one wants to read a 40,000 word piece of formal semantics), which I haven’t posted, but which my brother has been circulating, kind of like I’m one of those people who’s too brilliant/eccentric to publish (which if you substitute “dumb and so intradisciplinary interdisciplinary that he’s wholly extradisciplinary” for “brilliant/eccentric” might come close to expressing a truth). Beyond that, I have no plans to write here until the fall.

See you then xo.

glenn reynolds, tenured thug

Wow. Just wow.

do that c-s-s-s-s-s-s up right

truth to (deposed, disgraced, discredited) power

I carry no water for Chris Matthews, but this dressing down of Ari Fleischer sends a thrill up my leg.

cream, get the money

Basking, for the moment, in the glow of a post-dossier fellowship term. You’ll be on your own for a little while.

the plantinga liveblogger

I personally don’t care what your religion is and don’t think that it has anything whatever to do with your philosophical competence, and I suspect the same holds true for nearly everyone in our field. So I get a little irritated when I see random conservative know-nothings citing the anonymous Plantinga/Dennett liveblogger’s paranoia about anti-religious antipathy among academic philosophers as evidence for how we actually treat people of faith. Whoever you are: I think you should know better than to allow yourself to be a useful idiot for people like that.

chef raekwon

Happy “Spring” break.

note on a quasi-temporal deontic logic of action

Say you’re trying to do some deontic logic in a language capable of talking about actions and their impact on the world — e.g., a propositional dynamic logic, with a language of action-terms built by letting (read: the seeing to it that ) be an action-term, when is a formula of the language, and deontic take action-terms (rather than formulas) as complements. Actions get typed as relations on states of the world, while is interpreted as a universal quantifier over deontically accessible transitions between states. A model for this language is a universe , an accessibility relation , a valuation , and an interpretation function mapping an action term into a subset of (i.e., the doing of designates a set of transitions whose terminal state is a state satisfying ). Satisfaction conditions for deontic formulas are given thus:

google earth nas, i got flats in other continents

Great song.

midnight morrissey

petition

Please sign.

sad situation

ht to Simon. On repeat, along with this.

fast life

I miss posting videos here. So… I’m going to start again. This one’s not even Morrissey.

fruitless formalism?

Maria Aloni (”Free Choice, Modals and Imperatives,” Natural Language Semantics 15) gives a semantic account of free choice effects when possibility modals scope over disjunctions in terms of salient alternatives. She defines an alternative function mapping from a higher-order extension of a first-order modal language into sets of formulas. Free choice and no-choice interpretations of may(φ or ψ) are assigned these intermediate logical forms, respectively.