Jon Barwise

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Kenneth Jon Barwise (

logician who proposed some fundamental revisions to the way that logic
is understood and used.

Education and career

He was born in Independence, Missouri, to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise.

A pupil of

Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He began teaching at Indiana University in 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.[2]

In his last year, Barwise was invited to give the 2000 Gödel Lecture; he died prior to the lecture.[3]

Philosophical and logical work

Barwise contended that, by being explicit about the context in which a proposition is made, the situation, many problems in the application of logic can be eliminated. He sought ... to understand meaning and inference within a general theory of information, one that takes us outside the realm of sentences and relations between sentences of any language, natural or formal. In particular, he claimed that such an approach resolved the liar paradox. He made use of Peter Aczel's non-well-founded set theory in understanding "vicious circles" of reasoning.

Barwise, along with his former colleague at Stanford John Etchemendy, was the author of the popular logic textbook Language, Proof and Logic. Unlike the Handbook of Mathematical Logic, which was a survey of the state of the art of mathematical logic circa 1975, and of which he was the editor, this work targeted elementary logic. The text is notable for including computer-aided homework problems, some of which provide visual representations of logical problems. During his time at Stanford, he was also the first Director of the Symbolic Systems Program, an interdepartmental degree program focusing on the relationships between cognition, language, logic, and computation. The K. Jon Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Symbolic Systems Program has been given periodically since 2001.[4]

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ^ Walsh, Eileen (8 March 2000). "Noted logician K. Jon Barwise dies". Stanford News Service. Archived from the original on 17 June 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2015.
  2. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 20, 2011.
  3. JSTOR 421070
    .
  4. ^ "K. Jon Barwise Award, Symbolic Systerms Program, Stanford University". Archived from the original on 2017-06-15. Retrieved 2015-03-29.
  5. JSTOR 2219775
    .
  6. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1989-15770-4
    .
  7. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-98-00735-6
    .

External links
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