front cover of Science Of Synthesis
Science Of Synthesis
Debora Hammond
University Press of Colorado, 2003

front cover of Emergence and Embodiment
Emergence and Embodiment
New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory
Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
Emerging in the 1940s, the first cybernetics—the study of communication and control systems—was mainstreamed under the names artificial intelligence and computer science and taken up by the social sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts. In Emergence and Embodiment, Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen focus on cybernetic developments that stem from the second-order turn in the 1970s, when the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster catalyzed new thinking about the cognitive implications of self-referential systems. The crucial shift he inspired was from first-order cybernetics’ attention to homeostasis as a mode of autonomous self-regulation in mechanical and informatic systems, to second-order concepts of self-organization and autopoiesis in embodied and metabiotic systems. The collection opens with an interview with von Foerster and then traces the lines of neocybernetic thought that have followed from his work.

In response to the apparent dissolution of boundaries at work in the contemporary technosciences of emergence, neocybernetics observes that cognitive systems are operationally bounded, semi-autonomous entities coupled with their environments and other systems. Second-order systems theory stresses the recursive complexities of observation, mediation, and communication. Focused on the neocybernetic contributions of von Foerster, Francisco Varela, and Niklas Luhmann, this collection advances theoretical debates about the cultural, philosophical, and literary uses of their ideas. In addition to the interview with von Foerster, Emergence and Embodiment includes essays by Varela and Luhmann. It engages with Humberto Maturana’s and Varela’s creation of the concept of autopoiesis, Varela’s later work on neurophenomenology, and Luhmann’s adaptations of autopoiesis to social systems theory. Taken together, these essays illuminate the shared commitments uniting the broader discourse of neocybernetics.

Contributors. Linda Brigham, Bruce Clarke, Mark B. N. Hansen, Edgar Landgraf, Ira Livingston, Niklas Luhmann, Hans-Georg Moeller, John Protevi, Michael Schiltz, Evan Thompson, Francisco J. Varela, Cary Wolfe

[more]

front cover of Beautiful Data
Beautiful Data
A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
Orit Halpern
Duke University Press, 2015
Beautiful Data is both a history of big data and interactivity, and a sophisticated meditation on ideas about vision and cognition in the second half of the twentieth century. Contending that our forms of attention, observation, and truth are contingent and contested, Orit Halpern historicizes the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe and analyze the world. Tracing the postwar impact of cybernetics and the communication sciences on the social and human sciences, design, arts, and urban planning, she finds a radical shift in attitudes toward recording and displaying information. These changed attitudes produced what she calls communicative objectivity: new forms of observation, rationality, and economy based on the management and analysis of data. Halpern complicates assumptions about the value of data and visualization, arguing that changes in how we manage and train perception, and define reason and intelligence, are also transformations in governmentality. She also challenges the paradoxical belief that we are experiencing a crisis of attention caused by digital media, a crisis that can be resolved only through intensified media consumption.
[more]

front cover of The Cybernetic Brain
The Cybernetic Brain
Sketches of Another Future
Andrew Pickering
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Cybernetics is often thought of as a grim military or industrial science of control. But as Andrew Pickering reveals in this beguiling book, a much more lively and experimental strain of cybernetics can be traced from the 1940s to the present.

The Cybernetic Brain explores a largely forgotten group of British thinkers, including Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask, and their singular work in a dazzling array of fields. Psychiatry, engineering, management, politics, music, architecture, education, tantric yoga, the Beats, and the sixties counterculture all come into play as Pickering follows the history of cybernetics’ impact on the world, from contemporary robotics and complexity theory to the Chilean economy under Salvador Allende. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.
[more]

front cover of The Freudian Robot
The Freudian Robot
Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious
Lydia H. Liu
University of Chicago Press, 2011

The identity and role of writing has evolved in the age of digital media. But how did writing itself make digital media possible in the first place? Lydia H. Liu offers here the first rigorous study of the political history of digital writing and its fateful entanglement with the Freudian unconscious.

Liu’s innovative analysis brings the work of theorists and writers back into conversation with one another to document significant meetings of minds and disciplines. She shows how the earlier avant-garde literary experiments with alphabetical writing and the word-association games of psychoanalysis contributed to the mathematical making of digital media. Such intellectual convergence, she argues, completed the transformation of alphabetical writing into the postphonetic, ideographic system of digital media, which not only altered the threshold of sense and nonsense in communication processes but also compelled a new understanding of human-machine interplay at the level of the unconscious.

Ranging across information theory, cybernetics, modernism, literary theory, neurotic machines, and psychoanalysis, The Freudian Robot rewrites the history of digital media and the literary theory of the twentieth century.

[more]

front cover of Self-Organization and Dissipative Structures
Self-Organization and Dissipative Structures
Applications in the Physical and Social Sciences
Edited by William C. Schieve and Peter M. Allen
University of Texas Press, 1982

The contributions to this volume attempt to apply different aspects of Ilya Prigogine's Nobel-prize-winning work on dissipative structures to nonchemical systems as a way of linking the natural and social sciences. They address both the mathematical methods for description of pattern and form as they evolve in biological systems and the mechanisms of the evolution of social systems, containing many variables responding to subjective, qualitative stimuli.

The mathematical modeling of human systems, especially those far from thermodynamic equilibrium, must involve both chance and determinism, aspects both quantitative and qualitative. Such systems (and the physical states of matter which they resemble) are referred to as self-organized or dissipative structures in order to emphasize their dependence on the flows of matter and energy to and from their surroundings. Some such systems evolve along lines of inevitable change, but there occur instances of choice, or bifurcation, when chance is an important factor in the qualitative modification of structure. Such systems suggest that evolution is not a system moving toward equilibrium but instead is one which most aptly evokes the patterns of the living world.

The volume is truly interdisciplinary and should appeal to researchers in both the physical and social sciences. Based on a workshop on dissipative structures held in 1978 at the University of Texas, contributors include Prigogine, A. G. Wilson, Andre de Palma, D. Kahn, J. L. Deneubourgh, J. W. Stucki, Richard N. Adams, and Erick Jantsch.

The papers presented include Allen, "Self-Organization in the Urban System"; Robert Herman, "Remarks on Traffic Flow Theories and the Characterization of Traffic in Cities"; W. H. Zurek and Schieve, "Nucleation Paradigm: Survival Threshold in Population Dynamics"; De Palma et al., "Boolean Equations with Temporal Delays"; Nicholas Georgescu-Roegin, "Energy Analysis and Technology Assessment"; Magoroh Maruyama, "Four Different Causal Meta-types in Biological and Social Sciences"; and Jantsch, "From Self-Reference to Self-Transcendence: The Evolution of Self-Organization Dynamics."

[more]

front cover of The Creativity Code
The Creativity Code
Art and Innovation in the Age of AI
Marcus du Sautoy
Harvard University Press, 2020

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.”
—Jeanette Winterson


What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative?

Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code.

“As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?…In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.”
Financial Times

“Fascinating…If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.”
The Times

[more]

front cover of Foundations of Real World Intelligence
Foundations of Real World Intelligence
Edited by Yoshinori Uesaka, Pentti Kanerva, and Hideki Asoh
CSLI, 2001
Real-world intelligence includes the ability to handle complex, uncertain, dynamic, multi-modal information in real time. In order to pursue the artificial realization of such "human" or "intelligent" information processing, a novel system of representing and interpreting knowledge must first be developed. This book collects the results of ten years of research at six laboratories, focusing on the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of the intelligence we find in the real world.
[more]

front cover of How We Became Posthuman
How We Became Posthuman
Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
N. Katherine Hayles
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age.

Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman."

Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel Limbo by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems.

Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.
[more]

front cover of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do
Erik J. Larson
Harvard University Press, 2021

“Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it.”
—John Horgan


“If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.”
—Peter Thiel

Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake.

AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don’t correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven’t a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence—and what it would take to get there.

“Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity.”
—David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal

“A convincing case that artificial general intelligence—machine-based intelligence that matches our own—is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know.”
—Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

[more]

front cover of Mind Children
Mind Children
The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence
Hans Moravec
Harvard University Press, 1988

Imagine attending a lecture at the turn of the twentieth century in which Orville Wright speculates about the future of transportation, or one in which Alexander Graham Bell envisages satellite communications and global data banks. Mind Children, written by an internationally renowned roboticist, offers a comparable experience—a mind-boggling glimpse of a world we may soon share with our artificial progeny. Filled with fresh ideas and insights, this book is one of the most engaging and controversial visions of the future ever written by a serious scholar.

Hans Moravec convincingly argues that we are approaching a watershed in the history of life—a time when the boundaries between biological and postbiological intelligence will begin to dissolve. Within forty years, Moravec believes, we will achieve human equivalence in our machines, not only in their capacity to reason but also in their ability to perceive, interact with, and change their complex environment. The critical factor is mobility. A computer rooted to one place is doomed to static iterations, whereas a machine on the prowl, like a mobile organism, must evolve a richer fund of knowledge about an ever-changing world upon which to base its actions.

In order to achieve anything near human equivalence, robots will need, at the least, the capacity to perform ten trillion calculations per second. Given the trillion-fold increase in computational power since the end of the nineteenth century, and the promise of exotic technologies far surpassing the now-familiar lasers and even superconductors, Moravec concludes that our hardware will have no trouble meeting this forty-year timetable.

But human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. In the concluding chapters Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.

[more]

front cover of Defending AI Research
Defending AI Research
A Collection of Essays and Reviews
Edited by John McCarthy
CSLI, 1996
John McCarthy's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of LISP and time-sharing to the coining of the term AI and the founding of the AI laboratory at Stanford University. One of the foremost figures in computer sciences, McCarthy has written papers which are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide range of topics. In this collection of reviews, McCarthy staunchly defends the importance of Artificial Intelligence research against its attackers; this book gathers McCarthy's reviews of books which discuss and criticise the future of AI. Here, McCarthy explores the larger questions associated with AI, such as the question of the nature of intelligence, of the acquisition and application of knowledge, and the question of the politics behind this research.
[more]

logo for University of Minnesota Press
Insect Media
An Archaeology of Animals and Technology
Jussi Parikka
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization-swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence-have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.

Through close engagement with the pioneering work of insect ethologists, including Jakob von Uexküll and Karl von Frisch, posthumanist philosophers, media theorists, and contemporary filmmakers and artists, Parikka develops an insect theory of media, one that conceptualizes modern media as more than the products of individual human actors, social interests, or technological determinants. They are, rather, profoundly nonhuman phenomena that both draw on and mimic the alien lifeworlds of insects.
 
Deftly moving from the life sciences to digital technology, from popular culture to avant-garde art and architecture, and from philosophy to cybernetics and game theory, Parikka provides innovative conceptual tools for exploring the phenomena of network society and culture. Challenging anthropocentric approaches to contemporary science and culture, Insect Media reveals the possibilities that insects and other nonhuman animals offer for rethinking media, the conflation of biology and technology, and our understanding of, and interaction with, contemporary digital culture.
[more]

front cover of Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence
Principles, current algorithms and methods, Volume 1
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
[more]

front cover of Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence
Innovation, new algorithms and methods, Volume 2
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
[more]

front cover of Swarm Intelligence
Swarm Intelligence
Applications, Volume 3
Ying Tan
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2018
Swarm Intelligence (SI) is one of the most important and challenging paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. It focuses on the research of collective behaviours of a swarm in nature and/or social phenomenon to solve complicated and difficult problems which cannot be handled by traditional approaches. Thousands of papers are published each year presenting new algorithms, new improvements and numerous real world applications. This makes it hard for researchers and students to share their ideas with other colleagues; follow up the works from other researchers with common interests; and to follow new developments and innovative approaches. This complete and timely collection fills this gap by presenting the latest research systematically and thoroughly to provide readers with a full view of the field of swarm. Students will learn the principles and theories of typical swarm intelligence algorithms; scholars will be inspired with promising research directions; and practitioners will find suitable methods for their applications of interest along with useful instructions.
[more]

front cover of My Mother Was a Computer
My Mother Was a Computer
Digital Subjects and Literary Texts
N. Katherine Hayles
University of Chicago Press, 2005
We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices.

My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: language and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age.

We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.
[more]

front cover of Formalizing the Dynamics of Information
Formalizing the Dynamics of Information
Edited by Martina Faller, Stefan Kaufmann, and Marc Pauly
CSLI, 2000
The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality.
[more]

front cover of Holographic Reduced Representation
Holographic Reduced Representation
Distributed Representation for Cognitive Structures
Tony A. Plate
CSLI, 2003
While neuroscientists garner success in identifying brain regions and in analyzing individual neurons, ground is still being broken at the intermediate scale of understanding how neurons combine to encode information. This book proposes a method of representing information in a computer that would be suited for modeling the brain's methods of processing information.

Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are introduced here to model how the brain distributes each piece of information among thousands of neurons. It had been previously thought that the grammatical structure of a language cannot be encoded practically in a distributed representation, but HRRs can overcome the problems of earlier proposals. Thus this work has implications for psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, and engineering.
[more]

front cover of Logic and Visual Information
Logic and Visual Information
Eric M. Hammer
CSLI, 1995

front cover of Frege
Frege
Philosophy of Mathematics
Michael Dummett
Harvard University Press, 1991

No one has figured more prominently in the study of the German philosopher Gottlob Frege than Michael Dummett. His magisterial Frege: Philosophy of Language is a sustained, systematic analysis of Frege's thought, omitting only the issues in philosophy of mathematics. In this work Dummett discusses, section by section, Frege's masterpiece The Foundations of Arithmetic and Frege's treatment of real numbers in the second volume of Basic Laws of Arithmetic, establishing what parts of the philosopher's views can be salvaged and employed in new theorizing, and what must be abandoned, either as incorrectly argued or as untenable in the light of technical developments.

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher whose work had enormous impact on Bertrand Russell and later on the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, making Frege one of the central influences on twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophy; he is considered the founder of analytic philosophy. His philosophy of mathematics contains deep insights and remains a useful and necessary point of departure for anyone seriously studying or working in the field.

[more]

front cover of Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics
Berkeley's Philosophy of Mathematics
Douglas M. Jesseph
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In this first modern, critical assessment of the place of mathematics in Berkeley's philosophy and Berkeley's place in the history of mathematics, Douglas M. Jesseph provides a bold reinterpretation of Berkeley's work. Jesseph challenges the prevailing view that Berkeley's mathematical writings are peripheral to his philosophy and argues that mathematics is in fact central to his thought, developing out of his critique of abstraction. Jesseph's argument situates Berkeley's ideas within the larger historical and intellectual context of the Scientific Revolution.

Jesseph begins with Berkeley's radical opposition to the received view of mathematics in the philosophy of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when mathematics was considered a "science of abstractions." Since this view seriously conflicted with Berkeley's critique of abstract ideas, Jesseph contends that he was forced to come up with a nonabstract philosophy of mathematics. Jesseph examines Berkeley's unique treatments of geometry and arithmetic and his famous critique of the calculus in The Analyst.

By putting Berkeley's mathematical writings in the perspective of his larger philosophical project and examining their impact on eighteenth-century British mathematics, Jesseph makes a major contribution to philosophy and to the history and philosophy of science.

[more]

front cover of Understanding the Infinite
Understanding the Infinite
Shaughan Lavine
Harvard University Press, 1998
How can the infinite, a subject so remote from our finite experience, be an everyday tool for the working mathematician? Blending history, philosophy, mathematics, and logic, Shaughan Lavine answers this question with exceptional clarity. Making use of the mathematical work of Jan Mycielski, he demonstrates that knowledge of the infinite is possible, even according to strict standards that require some intuitive basis for knowledge.
[more]

front cover of Axiomatics
Axiomatics
Mathematical Thought and High Modernism
Alma Steingart
University of Chicago Press, 2023
The first history of postwar mathematics, offering a new interpretation of the rise of abstraction and axiomatics in the twentieth century.

Why did abstraction dominate American art, social science, and natural science in the mid-twentieth century? Why, despite opposition, did abstraction and theoretical knowledge flourish across a diverse set of intellectual pursuits during the Cold War? In recovering the centrality of abstraction across a range of modernist projects in the United States, Alma Steingart brings mathematics back into the conversation about midcentury American intellectual thought. The expansion of mathematics in the aftermath of World War II, she demonstrates, was characterized by two opposing tendencies: research in pure mathematics became increasingly abstract and rarified, while research in applied mathematics and mathematical applications grew in prominence as new fields like operations research and game theory brought mathematical knowledge to bear on more domains of knowledge. Both were predicated on the same abstractionist conception of mathematics and were rooted in the same approach: modern axiomatics. 

For American mathematicians, the humanities and the sciences did not compete with one another, but instead were two complementary sides of the same epistemological commitment. Steingart further reveals how this mathematical epistemology influenced the sciences and humanities, particularly the postwar social sciences. As mathematics changed, so did the meaning of mathematization. 

Axiomatics focuses on American mathematicians during a transformative time, following a series of controversies among mathematicians about the nature of mathematics as a field of study and as a body of knowledge. The ensuing debates offer a window onto the postwar development of mathematics band Cold War epistemology writ large. As Steingart’s history ably demonstrates, mathematics is the social activity in which styles of truth—here, abstraction—become synonymous with ways of knowing. 
[more]

front cover of Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics
Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics
William Demopoulos
Harvard University Press, 1995

Widespread interest in Frege’s general philosophical writings is, relatively speaking, a fairly recent phenomenon. But it is only very recently that his philosophy of mathematics has begun to attract the attention it now enjoys. This interest has been elicited by the discovery of the remarkable mathematical properties of Frege’s contextual definition of number and of the unique character of his proposals for a theory of the real numbers.

This collection of essays addresses three main developments in recent work on Frege’s philosophy of mathematics: the emerging interest in the intellectual background to his logicism; the rediscovery of Frege’s theorem; and the reevaluation of the mathematical content of The Basic Laws of Arithmetic. Each essay attempts a sympathetic, if not uncritical, reconstruction, evaluation, or extension of a facet of Frege’s theory of arithmetic. Together they form an accessible and authoritative introduction to aspects of Frege’s thought that have, until now, been largely missed by the philosophical community.

[more]

front cover of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939
Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939
Ludwig Wittgenstein
University of Chicago Press, 1989
For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture.

He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were largely conversation.

These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.

The lectures covered such topics as the nature of mathematics, the distinctions between mathematical and everyday languages, the truth of mathematical propositions, consistency and contradiction in formal systems, the logicism of Frege and Russell, Platonism, identity, negation, and necessary truth. The mathematical examples used are nearly always elementary.
[more]

front cover of Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT 7)
Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT 7)
Edited by Giacomo Bonanno, Wiebe van der Hoek, and Michael Wooldridge
Amsterdam University Press, 2008

This volume is a collects papers originally presented at the 7th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT), held at the University of Liverpool in July 2006. LOFT is a key venue for presenting research at the intersection of logic, economics, and computer science, and this collection gives a lively and wide-ranging view of an exciting and rapidly growing area.

[more]

front cover of The Foundations of Arithmetic
The Foundations of Arithmetic
A Logico-Mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number
Gottlob Frege
Northwestern University Press, 1980
The Foundations of Arithmetic is undoubtedly the best introduction to Frege's thought; it is here that Frege expounds the central notions of his philosophy, subjecting the views of his predecessors and contemporaries to devastating analysis. The book represents the first philosophically sound discussion of the concept of number in Western civilization. It profoundly influenced developments in the philosophy of mathematics and in general ontology.
[more]

front cover of Lectures on Linear Logic
Lectures on Linear Logic
A. S. Troelstra
CSLI, 1992
Linear logic is an example of a "resource-sensitive" logic, keeping track of the number of times data of given types are used. Formulas in linear logic represent either the data themselves or data types, whereas in ordinary logic a formula is a proposition. If ordinary logic is a logic of truth, linear logic is a logic of actions. Linear logic and its implications are explored in depth in this volume. Particular attention has been given to the various formalisms for linear logic, embeddings of classical and intuitionistic logic into linear logic, the connection with certain types of categories, the "formulas-as-types" paradigm for linear logic and associated computational interpretations, and Girard's proof nets for classical linear logic as an analogue of natural deduction. It is also shown that linear logic is undecidable. A final section, contributed by D. Roorda, presents a proof of strong normalization for cut elimination in linear logic. Linear logic is of interest to logicians and computer scientists, and shows links with many other topics, such as coherence theorems in category theory, the theory of Petri nets, and abstract computing machines without garbage collection
[more]

front cover of Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century
Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century
Selected Essays
Charles Parsons
Harvard University Press, 2014

In this illuminating collection, Charles Parsons surveys the contributions of philosophers and mathematicians who shaped the philosophy of mathematics over the course of the past century.

Parsons begins with a discussion of the Kantian legacy in the work of L. E. J. Brouwer, David Hilbert, and Paul Bernays, shedding light on how Bernays revised his philosophy after his collaboration with Hilbert. He considers Hermann Weyl’s idea of a “vicious circle” in the foundations of mathematics, a radical claim that elicited many challenges. Turning to Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorem transformed debate on the foundations of mathematics and brought mathematical logic to maturity, Parsons discusses his essay on Bertrand Russell’s mathematical logic—Gödel’s first mature philosophical statement and an avowal of his Platonistic view.

Philosophy of Mathematics in the Twentieth Century insightfully treats the contributions of figures the author knew personally: W. V. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Hao Wang, and William Tait. Quine’s early work on ontology is explored, as is his nominalistic view of predication and his use of the genetic method of explanation in the late work The Roots of Reference. Parsons attempts to tease out Putnam’s views on existence and ontology, especially in relation to logic and mathematics. Wang’s contributions to subjects ranging from the concept of set, minds, and machines to the interpretation of Gödel are examined, as are Tait’s axiomatic conception of mathematics, his minimalist realism, and his thoughts on historical figures.

[more]

front cover of Generalized Galois Logics
Generalized Galois Logics
Relational Semantics of Nonclassical Logical Calculi
Katlin Bimbó and J. Michael Dunn
CSLI, 2008
Nonclassical logics have played an increasing role in recent years in disciplines ranging from mathematics and computer science to linguistics and philosophy. Generalized Galois Logics develops a uniform framework of relational semantics to mediate between logical calculi and their semantics through algebra. This volume addresses normal modal logics such as K and S5, and substructural logics, including relevance logics, linear logic, and Lambek calculi. The authors also treat less-familiar and new logical systems with equal deftness.
 
[more]

front cover of Mathematics of Modality
Mathematics of Modality
Robert Goldblatt
CSLI, 1993
Modal logic is the study of modalities—expressions that qualify assertions about the truth of statements—like some ordinary language phrases and mathematically motivated expressions. The study of modalities dates from antiquity, but has been most actively pursued in the last three decades. This volume collects together a number of Golblatt's papers on modal logic, beginning with his work on the duality between algebraic and set-theoretic models, and including two new articles, one on infinitary rules of inference, and the other about recent results on the relationship between modal logic and first-order logic.
[more]

front cover of Partiality, Modality and Nonmonotonicity
Partiality, Modality and Nonmonotonicity
Patrick Doherty
CSLI, 1996
This edited volume of articles provides a state-of-the-art description of research in logic-based approaches to knowledge representation which combines approaches to reasoning with incomplete information that include partial, modal, and nonmonotonic logics. The collection contains two parts: foundations and case studies. The foundations section provides a general overview of partiality, multi-valued logics, use of modal logic to model partiality and resource-limited inference, and an integration of partial and modal logics. The case studies section provides specific studies of issues raised in the foundations section. Several of the case studies integrate modal and partial modal logics with nonmonotonic logics. Both theoretical and practical aspects of such integration are considered. Knowledge representation issues such as default reasoning, theories of action and change, reason maintenance, awareness, and automation of nonmonotonic reasoning are covered.
[more]

front cover of Language and the Rise of the Algorithm
Language and the Rise of the Algorithm
Jeffrey M. Binder
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A wide-ranging history of the algorithm.

Bringing together the histories of mathematics, computer science, and linguistic thought, Language and the Rise of the Algorithm reveals how recent developments in artificial intelligence are reopening an issue that troubled mathematicians well before the computer age: How do you draw the line between computational rules and the complexities of making systems comprehensible to people? By attending to this question, we come to see that the modern idea of the algorithm is implicated in a long history of attempts to maintain a disciplinary boundary separating technical knowledge from the languages people speak day to day.
 
Here Jeffrey M. Binder offers a compelling tour of four visions of universal computation that addressed this issue in very different ways: G. W. Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator; a universal algebra scheme Nicolas de Condorcet designed during the French Revolution; George Boole’s nineteenth-century logic system; and the early programming language ALGOL, short for algorithmic language. These episodes show that symbolic computation has repeatedly become entangled in debates about the nature of communication. Machine learning, in its increasing dependence on words, erodes the line between technical and everyday language, revealing the urgent stakes underlying this boundary.
 
The idea of the algorithm is a levee holding back the social complexity of language, and it is about to break. This book is about the flood that inspired its construction.
[more]

front cover of Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms
Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms
Donald E. Knuth
CSLI, 2000
Analysis of Algorithms is the fourth in a series of collected works by world-renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth. This volume is devoted to an important subfield of Computer Science that Knuth founded in the 1960s and still considers his main life's work. This field, to which he gave the name Analysis of Algorithms, deals with quantitative studies of computer techniques, leading to methods for understanding and predicting the efficiency of computer programs. Analysis of Algorithms, which has grown to be a thriving international discipline, is the unifying theme underlying Knuth's well known book The Art of Computer Programming. More than 30 of the fundamental papers that helped to shape this field are reprinted and updated in the present collection, together with historical material that has not previously been published. Although many ideas come and go in the rapidly changing world of computer science, the basic concepts and techniques of algorithmic analysis will remain important as long as computers are used.
[more]

front cover of A Primer of Probability Logic
A Primer of Probability Logic
Ernest W. Adams
CSLI, 1996

This book is meant to be a primer, that is, an introduction, to probability logic, a subject that appears to be in its infancy. Probability logic is a subject envisioned by Hans Reichenbach and largely created by Adams. It treats conditionals as bearers of conditional probabilities and discusses an appropriate sense of validity for arguments such conditionals, as well as ordinary statements as premisses.

This is a clear well-written text on the subject of probability logic, suitable for advanced undergraduates or graduates, but also of interest to professional philosophers. There are well-thought-out exercises, and a number of advanced topics treated in appendices, while some are brought up in exercises and some are alluded to only in footnotes. By this means, it is hoped that the reader will at least be made aware of most of the important ramifications of the subject and its tie-ins with current research, and will have some indications concerning recent and relevant literature.

[more]

front cover of Duel at Dawn
Duel at Dawn
Heroes, Martyrs, and the Rise of Modern Mathematics
Amir Alexander
Harvard University Press, 2011
In the fog of a Paris dawn in 1832, Évariste Galois, the 20-year-old founder of modern algebra, was shot and killed in a duel. That gunshot, suggests Amir Alexander, marked the end of one era in mathematics and the beginning of another.Arguing that not even the purest mathematics can be separated from its cultural background, Alexander shows how popular stories about mathematicians are really morality tales about their craft as it relates to the world. In the eighteenth century, Alexander says, mathematicians were idealized as child-like, eternally curious, and uniquely suited to reveal the hidden harmonies of the world. But in the nineteenth century, brilliant mathematicians like Galois became Romantic heroes like poets, artists, and musicians. The ideal mathematician was now an alienated loner, driven to despondency by an uncomprehending world. A field that had been focused on the natural world now sought to create its own reality. Higher mathematics became a world unto itself—pure and governed solely by the laws of reason.In this strikingly original book that takes us from Paris to St. Petersburg, Norway to Transylvania, Alexander introduces us to national heroes and outcasts, innocents, swindlers, and martyrs–all uncommonly gifted creators of modern mathematics.
[more]

front cover of Fear Of Math
Fear Of Math
How to Get Over It and Get on With Your Life!
Zaslavsky, Claudia
Rutgers University Press, 1994

Claudia Zaslavsky has helped thousands of men and women understand why math made them miserable. Let her introduce you to real people who, like you, fled from anything to do with math. All of them--White, African American, Asian American, Latino, artist, homemaker, manager, teacher, teenager, or grandparent--came to see that their math troubles were not their fault. Social stereotypes, poor schools, and well-meaning parents had convinced them that they couldnÕt, or shouldnÕt, do math.       

Claudia Zaslavsky shows you how the school math you dreaded is a far cry from the math you really need in life (and probably know better than you ever suspected)! She gives a host of reassuring methods, drawn from many cultures, for tackling real-world math problems. She explodes the myth that women and minorities are not good at math. With Claudia Zaslavsky’s help, you can see why math matters and how to get over the math barrier that has been holding you back from your goals in life.

[more]

front cover of Performing Math
Performing Math
A History of Communication and Anxiety in the American Mathematics Classroom
Andrew Fiss
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Performing Math tells the history of expectations for math communication—and the conversations about math hatred and math anxiety that occurred in response. Focusing on nineteenth-century American colleges, this book analyzes foundational tools and techniques of math communication: the textbooks that supported reading aloud, the burnings that mimicked pedagogical speech, the blackboards that accompanied oral presentations, the plays that proclaimed performers’ identities as math students, and the written tests that redefined “student performance.” Math communication and math anxiety went hand in hand as new rules for oral communication at the blackboard inspired student revolt and as frameworks for testing student performance inspired performance anxiety. With unusual primary sources from over a dozen educational archives, Performing Math argues for a new, performance-oriented history of American math education, one that can explain contemporary math attitudes and provide a way forward to reframing the problem of math anxiety.
[more]

front cover of Galileo in Pittsburgh
Galileo in Pittsburgh
Clark Glymour
Harvard University Press, 2010
What did the trial of Galileo share with the trial for fraud of the foremost investigator of the effects of lead exposure on children’s intelligence? In the title essay of this rollicking collection on science and education, Clark Glymour argues that fundamentally both were disputes over what methods are legitimate and authoritative. From testing the expertise of NASA scientists to discovering where software goes to die to turning educational research upside down, Glymour’s reports from the front lines of science and education read like a blend of Rachel Carson and Hunter S. Thompson. Contrarian and original, he criticizes the statistical arguments against Teach for America, argues for teaching the fallacies of Intelligent Design in high school science, places contemporary psychological research in a Platonic cave dug by Freud, and gives (and rejects) a fair argument for a self-interested, nationalist response to climate change.One of the creators of influential new statistical methods, Glymour has been involved in scientific investigations on such diverse topics as wildfire prediction, planetary science, genomics, climate studies, psychology, and educational research. Now he provides personal reports of the funny, the absurd, and the appalling in contemporary science and education. More bemused than indignant, Galileo in Pittsburgh is an ever-engaging call to rethink how we do science and how we teach it.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter