On Attending Conferences

While I'm on the topic of my Facebook posts on Logic, I thought I'd share a post I wrote on a Second Order Logic paper I heard when attending a logic talk in December 2016 which continued fascinating me afterwards. 

This shows the value of attending talks that are not necessarily relevant to your research field or interests - it gives you a better perspective on your subject and broader field of vision, improving your overall knowledge and skills in the subject, in my case, philosophy. I have attended lots of conferences and talks both during my undergraduate course and subsequently, which greatly enhanced my knowledge of and skills in philosophy beyond my BA degree. They weren't all relevant talks to my study or research but I attended them anyway and I'm pleased I did! In fact my first philosophy conference/talk I attended was a higher order logic Birkbeck project in 2010 (Varieties of Higher-Order Logic [in conjunction with ERC Plurals, Predicates and Paradoxes research project, London June 18-19th June 2010) while I was a 1st year student. The project leader, Oystein Linnebo, was one of the staff in my philosophy department who would go on to teach me metaphysics which included logic, one speaker was my ep/met lecturer, Keith Hossack (who suggested I attend the conference) another was one of  my metaphysics tutors (Simon Hewitt, then PhD/Post-doc student who I'd already previously discussed logic with which helped me to cope with this conference later!). So I was up and running going to talks and conferences after that. Trying to follow and understand a field at post-doc level while still a 1st year stretched my brain and made it hurt! The upside is, you gain confidence early on in logic which feeds back into your philosophy and stays with you. All good! 

However, I did go to many conferences and talks that were relevant eg Spinoza which meant that my input was greater than uni offered which was only about 3 lectures out of 30 Early Modern Philosophy lectures for the 3 compulsory History of Philosophy modules (Ancient Philosophy/Early Modern Philosophy). This wouldn't be nearly enough for me to do research on Spinoza post-degree, and this is despite having a specialist Spinozist on the staff list to lecture on him. If Moses can't come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Moses - so I attended as many talks on Spinoza as I could which means my input was sufficient to feel confident to tackle Spinoza. Many of the Spinoza talks were given by my lecturer on Spinoza, Professor Susan James (who was the only lecturer in my department who was a regular speaker on the conference circuit and the only Spinozist on the staff list) which is a perfectly natural thing to do - you attend extra talks by your lecturer because it is less daunting if you already know at least one of the speakers; it increases your understanding; and is a way for you to maintain continuation with your course in a subject you enjoy at university but under your own steam. It's a case of being self-motivated - universities should be encouraging UG students to attend talks and conferences to further their knowledge and become immersed in their subject. 

I know my mother went to talks and conferences as an UG (encouraged by her lecturers) and thoroughly enjoyed them, found them incredibly helpful so encouraged me to do the same. So I followed her advice!

Susan James wasn't the only Spinozist I heard on Spinoza - I also heard numerous other papers on Spinoza from lecturers, PhD and Post-doc students from around the world and I travelled to various unis in the UK as well as a Post-doc workshop on Spinoza in Ghent. So I was exposed to a variety of interpretations of Spinoza throughout my UG years and beyond to this day. Not all talks or conferences I attended were on Spinoza - eg a week-long Hume conference; Aristotelian Society conferences (fortnightly talks and 2 annual conferences and went to their dinners because I was a member of the AS Society); Royal Institute of Philosophy talks; Roger Woolhouse Memorial Conference; numerous talks on various topics/philosophers in the History of Philosophy and others. 

Another benefit of attending conferences is that when you get a chance to present your research paper yourself, you feel very comfortable and at home, even at a large conference (such as Sheffield Uni, British Society for the History of Philosophy, 2017 where I gave a talk on Mary Shepherd). It is also a great way of meeting a huge number of philosophers/lecturers and getting to know philosophers from around the world. This also brings secondary literature to life because you meet the authors of the books and papers you read as a student or researcher one-to-one in person! I did a vast amount of background reading for every talk, conference, workshop I attended. So I not only learned a great deal, but also was well-prepared and confident to ask questions at Q&A. Asking questions is very important, especially in the early years of your subject (eg UG and roughly 5 years after that). If you don't ask questions early on, then you are not going to be able to follow the speaker's train of thought and frankly, you might as well not be there because it'll all just wash over you.

Having said that, I already had experience pre-uni of giving talks on a topic I had researched myself and doing a Q&A afterwards, in front of a group of adults. I enjoyed it and everyone was very sweet! But despite having prior experience, it's still incredibly invaluable to attend talks/conferences in a scholarly environment because it is more challenging and stretches you better when you are faced with experts in your field and you have to keep up with them. 

So, after my long speech, back to my facebook post on the 2016 logic conference: 

(Shorthand below: wrt = with respect to; iif = if and only if)

"Yesterday I went to a logic seminar (Institute of Philosophy Logic, epistemology and metaphysics seminar, Senate House) . The talk was ‘Metalogic and the Overgeneration Argument’ by Salvatore Florio (joint work with Luca Incurvati) and I had a thought I'd like all and any logicians or logic-minded philosophers out there to tell me what they think of my thought.(....) The paper and handout explored the following issues: 

The Overgeneration Argument is a famous argument against 2nd order logic. Paseau claims this argument is a fallacy. This paper explores whether this is plausible. 

A question raised – “Is second-order logic ‘pure logic’?” “Mismatch between validities of SOL and logical truths”       

“formalization” “say that a system is sound wrt logical truth 

S is valid if and only iff S is a logical truth 

Failure of soundness is a form of overgeneration 

Likewise, say that a system is complete wrt logical truth 

S is a logical truth iff S is valid”                                                                 

My thought / question I asked the speaker is: 

Much as these are separate sentences giving definitions, once they are structured as an argument (analysing validity, truths, soundness, possible mismatches and overgeneration) then my worry is that this may introduce circularity. This is because the sentence S is valid iff S is a logical truth is merely reversed in the next sentence so ends up with the circular form A iff B & B iff A. I think the possible importance of this for the second-order logic debates could be that, what some argue is a mismatch between validities of SOL and logical truths may not strictly speaking be a mismatch but rather a slight circularity in the definitions used in the debate because the content of the sentences is too similar and being recycled and merely inverted. So I wonder whether this could be causing the failure of soundness which is important because apparently this is a form of overgeneration which is used as a criticism of second-order logic. So does this criticism still stand if the overgeneration is a product of problematic definitions used and arranged in a somewhat circular way, rather than being a necessary product of second-order logic itself? Is part of the so-called problem that the way we analyse and debate SOL is negatively affected by the way we are defining validity and logical truth?"

My reply to a comment on this post: 

"Hi! Thanks for your thoughts, great questions! Never thought about the idea that there could be such a thing as impure logic and if there could be a criteria for deciding what's pure and impure logic. I just thought of logical truth as a truth in a system of logic as opposed to truth per se. I like your point about whether it should be seen as a problem that we can say more in SOL because that furthers the general SOL debate about 'overgeneration' which amounts to worrying that too many things are deemed valid due to a failure of soundness. It was an excellent paper which Florio put across very understandably and clearly and he put a lot of effort into answering questions. His answer to this question of mine was that these are just definitions he's stating so hoped they weren't circular. I didn't want to give him a hard time by asking again especially since logic isn't my area so I may just be missing the point so I asked on here to learn more about the topic. My question isn't an objection it's an exploration of the famous overgeneration argument I'd never heard of! That's why I think it's good to go to talks on areas of philosophy one doesn't specialise in, especially at my level. I'm surprised so few people attended the seminar and it was a terrible shame because he had put so much thought and effort into his research and he conveyed it in a way that was understandable even if you weren't that conversant with logic. Unfortunately, I can't do his paper justice in just a short post. So there's my endorsement for logic and attending logic talks!"