Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrating Ruth Barcan Marcus

Ruth Barcan Marcus

Ruth Barcan Marcus is a philosopher and logician and pioneering figure in the quantification of modal logic and the theory of direct reference. The Barcan Formula is named after her.

Education

PhD 1946, Yale University


BA 1941, NYU

Academic Appointments

Prior to 1973: Chair of University of Illinois–Chi

cago Philosophy Department, then Professor at Northwestern University.

Since 1973: Halleck Professor at Yale, 1992, and then Senior Research Scholar at Yale and Visiting Distinguished Professor (One term per year) at UC, Irvine

The Barcan Formula is an axiom by Ruth Barcan Marcus, in the first extensions of modal propositional logic to include quantification.

The Barcan Formula is:

The statement reads: If everything is necessarily F, then it is necessary that everything is F. The Barcan formula has generated some controversy because it implies that all objects which exist in every possible world (accessible to the actual world) exist in the actual world. In other words, the domain of any accessible possible world is a subset of the domain of the actual world.

The Converse Barcan Formula is:

If a frame is based on a symmetric accessibility relation, then the Barcan formula will be valid in the frame if, and only if, the converse Barcan formula is valid in the frame.

Personal note: I will never forget the first time I read about Ruth Barcan Marcus' work. It was while I was in graduate school, and was reading an essay by W.V.O. Quine in which he was arguing against modal logic. Quine referred to her as "Miss Barcan" while all the other (male) philosophers were referred to by last names. He had nothing good to say about her views, which seemed to me of a piece with his philosophical program and unsurprising, yet I was bothered. The etiquette seemed completely wrong. Even if, charitably, Ruth Barcan had not yet earned her doctorate, which would explain the reference to her as "Miss," she had nevertheless published work substantial enough that he thought it worth attack in print. Why not just "Barcan"? What did indicating Barcan's unmarried status have to do with intensional logic?

Later on, when I became aware of the controversy surrounding Barcan's work possibly being plagiarized or borrowed from by Kripke, (a controversy described in this article by Jim Holt), it struck me that whatever the reality of the situation, there was a simple fact of the matter at hand. Looking around in the classrooms where I studied philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and logic, women were scarce. Still. It was not true that women were not capable of the rigors of logic. Pioneers like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper (developer of COBOL and pioneer of programming languages) and Ruth Barcan Marcus have been there all along. Under the radar--but why? Under-appreciated? Not any more, not on my watch.

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Political Campaign Finance Reform 2.0

I’m just as pissed off about the recent Supreme Court Decision on corporate financed “free speech” as the next person. (Look, if you aren’t one of the pissed off people, I don’t understand you. Just leave now. Please. Seriously.)

So, what do we do? It doesn’t seem like there’s anything to do. But, maybe, that’s wrong, or not the entire story. There is a looming credibility problem. I could be off about this, but it’s not as though the advertisement industry hasn’t had to jump through stunning amounts of self-reflexive hoops in order to make quotidian sorts of commercials for products even remotely interesting for mass audiences. Now that political campaigns can’t remotely pretend not to be corporate sponsored, the ad-race is going to be on. Think about it. The amount of money that can now be funneled into campaign ads is ghastly, astronomical, beyond the pale. But when all this money gets thrown into the process, it very well may be the undoing of any and all campaign ads. Let political candidates A, B and C advertise exactly like McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s. This will be the precise point at which people generally will become bored in a huge way. Political candidates offering a dollar menu deal, and ever-new catchy “Lovin’ it” songs and hip visuals with giant production values will become just so much noise. Sure, people still, unfortunately, eat at McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy’s, but when was the last time anyone ever took anything seriously about their ads?

What we really need is to put a limitation on candidate’s endorsement of ads. People and corporations can spend as much as they want on ads backing whatever candidates they chose, but none of the candidates can say that they “approve the ad” unless the ad cost less than, say, $300 to make. Steven Spielberg can offer to direct an ad, but he’ll have to do it for free, and the ad would have to appear on PBS, on free-access network time, youtube or a .org website. Corporations can spend as much as they want, but they can’t state that the candidate “approved the ad.” Yeah, this will never happen. But it should. Noise, the unintended consequence of this mess, will make the candidates who use youtube and production values of 0 dollars more viable. Imagine someone just sitting there using their computer to say stuff or having to do interviews, engage in debates in order to get material for their ads and that being the content “approved” by the candidate. You can say I'm a dreamer...

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Unconsidered Third Option: Post on Internet

This one just appeared in my inbox today. I seem to have been selected randomly, addressed as 'teacher'. The author requests a confirmation or refutation of his definition of philosophy. I shall do neither:

Dear Teacher,

As a teacher of philosophy can you please confirm or refute that philosophy is the study of understanding.

Where: Understanding is the bestowing of meaning upon observations.

Meaning is the realisation obtained by applying beliefs to the observations of an understanding -the use of reason.

There are Two Kinds Of Beliefs:

i. Control the Understanding -those bestowed by nature and modified by infancy in the creation of an understanding so are unchangeable: that is, the instincts and infantile experiences, which dictate what the creature should, or should not, do - survive, eat, sleep, multiply, etc.- thus allowing the recognition of right from wrong, and are the morality of the understanding.

ii. Tools of the Understanding - those revealed by the understanding's experience of cause and effect. That is, if you step off a cliff you fall, and these axioms, which are collected and refined throughout the life of the understanding, allow the recognition of true or false and are the knowledge of the understanding.

-this Morality and Knowledge together form the beliefs, or truths, of the understanding. These beliefs, along with its observations, are the understanding. Hence:

Truth is the beliefs, or realisations, of an understanding, and form the reality of an understanding.

Reality is the creation of an understanding as it is the remembered meanings, or experience, of an understanding and consists of:

i.

The nature of the understanding

Its senses

ii.

The position of the understanding

What it can observe

iii.

The experience of the understanding

The meaning it realises.

Wisdom is the habits (traditions) adopted by an understanding to achieve the greatest benefit from its reality.

These beliefs convert Philosophy into a useful tool-a science. This science of philosophy explains not only understanding, reality, and truth, but also language (the medium of understanding) and society (a shared understanding). These explanations allow a better understanding of ourselves by revealing why humanity behaves the way it does in forming a civilization (a dominant society) and why such a society waxes (refines its understanding) then wanes (loses its understanding).

Kind Regards,

[Redacted --person I do not know w/ .com thing]