conceptual

 This year I only made a couple of interviews in English, but these must be included among my "best of..." list for sure:  First of all, the one and only Erick Martin of Mr. Big. A great conversation, full of entertaining anecdotes, including everything you would have wanted to know about that eighties anthem "To be with you", perhaps THE hair metal power ballad: On the other end of the specter in terms of career, indie darling Mehro has been one of the most interesting characters I have had a chance to meet in thirty years behind the microphone.  I had already had the chance to talk with John Ingaramo of Human Drama, but this occasion was special, because their forthcoming concerts were also to be very special. Well made pop is always very welcome in my book. Here is Good Boy Daisy Romero's debut album is chockfull of catchy new wave power pop tunes. Very recommended.

  Haciendo el resumen del año que acaba de terminar, regresamos a las entrevistas en persona, pero también seguí entrevistando por via remota. Aquí algunas de las memorables entrevistas que tuve este año: En el v erano tuve el enorme placer de entrevistar al legendario Sergio Arau y aproveché para hacer un recorrido por su muy original y heterogénea carrera. Una de las artistas mas interesantes trabajando hoy en día en la música independiente es, sin dudas, Zahara y haber podido conocer su trayectoria, su proceso de composición y de donde salen piezas tan sorprendentes fue maravilloso. ¡Uff! Además de su fantástico trabajo con Black Pumas, A drián Quesada lleva un tiempo explorando el bolero psicodélico como solista con colaboradores estelares. De eso y mas hablamos a finales de Abril. Esta es la entrevista en la que discutimos si es posible que José José sea al mismo tiempo, desconocido, y uno de los artistas mas exitosos de todos los tiempos. Hay personajes como JAVIER CORCOBADO...

This Friday, after a long chat with Christian Romero (and some participation of Andrés Villamil), I think I got convinced that there constant-variable distinction leaves room for a third semantic option. The context is the discussion on the nature of propositional terms, but the morals apply to any referential domain. In classic bivalent propositional logic, it is customary to distinguish between propositional constants that have a fixed truth value and propositional variables that can take either. This is just the application of a general distinction between constants that have a fixed value and variables whose reference can range over the whole domain of possible values. It just happens that because the domain in classical logic has only two possible values, there is no room for a third option. However, any even slighter larger domain immediately would suggest at least a third option: referential terms that have neither a fixed semantic value, nor can take any semantic value in ...

¿Porqué decimos cosas falsas? Obviamente, las decimos cuando nos equivocamos, y al mentir, pero t al vez el uso más fascinante y complejo de falsedades ocurre en la ficción. Ya sea que estemos viendo actores interpretar historias fantásticas, le estemos contando historias de terror a nuestros sobrinos a la luz de la hoguera, juguemos a “hacer como” si fuéramos policías o ladrones, o simplemente dejemos volar nuestra imaginación para colocarnos en situaciones imposibles, la ficción aparece una y otra vez en nuestra vida cotidiana. Y en todas estas situaciones, tal parece que gran parte de lo que se busca decir o imaginar no necesita ser verdadero para que cumpla su función, cualquiera que ésta sea. (Ceballos Viro 2021) Es harto difícil decir porqué contamos historias de ficción, pero de lo que no hay duda es que cuando, por ejemplo, contamos relatos de ficción, ya sea que éstos involucran seres ficticios como dragones o hadas o no, no es que lo que queramos sea que la gente se entere ...

We must not forget that variables are a very recent development within modern mathematics (from late XVI century). We are so used to them that it is easy to forget how artificial they are. Natural language does not have variables. How does it manage? Most people respond with “pronouns”. But there are also reference shifting markers. Traditionally, reference shifting markers track whether and how the referents of two related clauses are coordinated. The most basic sort of coordination is plain coreference, but there are reference shifting markers for other sort of relations, like disjointness, simultaneity, etc. In any case, markers are linguistic resources we have not exploited in formal languages, but we could, i.e., we could use them instead of variables.  So, for example, instead of the formula  (P → Q ) → (R → P),  we could just have the sequence  →2 → →   where that 2 is a reference shifting marking that tells us how the arguments of the basic operato...

  Es importante distinguir entre dos sentidos en los que se dice de un estado o proceso que es estable: estable-hacia-atrás y estable-hacia-adelante. Un estado es estable-hacia-atrás si no hubiera sido fácil y/o normal que no hubiera sucedido;   un estado es estable-hacia-adelante si no es fácil y/o normal que deje de suceder. Muchos de los procesos biológicos, incluidos los cognitivos, suelen ser poco estables-hacia-atrás pero muy estables-hacia-adelante. Es muy sencillo, por ejemplo, que hayamos tenido creencias diferentes a las que de hecho tenemos, aun en circunstancias muy similares, y sin embargo, una vez que hemos fijado una creencia en respuesta a ciertos estímulos perceptuales y cognitivos nos es muy difícil abandonarla. Vivarium (2019) Lorcan Finnegan   Es importante mantener esta distinción en mente a la hora de dar cuente de la racionalidad de nuestros procesos cognitivos desde una perspectiva naturalizada. La epistemología tradicional le da mucha importan...

  Giauqinto’s notion of “Aspect Shifting” (2007), which Atsoshi Shimojima develops in (2015), which can probably be traced back to Wittgenstein, is just Danielle Macbeth’s “multiple analysis” (2005), which she takes from Gottlöb Frege and which is central to my account of analysis, but I took mostly from Dummett, and is also Emily Grossholz’s “productive ambiguity” (2007) which itself was originally coined by Earle Brown in 1986, and Joo Shin’s “ multiple carving” from (2002). Not only are they (extensionally and intensionally) equivalent, they also aim for the same philosophical function: to solve the so-called paradox of analysis, i.e., how can the conclusions (of valid deductive arguments) or solutions of constructive problems be at the same time new information, and contained in the premises or problems. Short version of the answer: because there is some sort of ambiguity in the way we represent the given information so that when you see them or analyze them in a certain wa...

One of the main philosophical peeves of mine are philosophers confounding symbols and what they represent, and in particular mistaking features of logical notation with actual logical facts. For example, is d ouble negation  an actual logical rule or is it actually a notational convention of certain logical notations? It seems to be the later, since we can have expressively equivalent logical notations where double negation is not even expressible, for example, if we consider diagrammatic systems where negation is represented by a reversible transformation of diagrammatic elements (Monroy forthcoming). For similar reasons, one might consider the   c ommutativity  (of disjunction or conjunction) not as an actual logical rule but a notational convention of certain logical notations, since we can have expressively equivalent logical notations where commutativity is not even expressible , for example, if we consider expressions that are not sequences but sets of symbol...