Motivation
I had already thought about starting a technical blog while I was pursuing my PhD in New Zealand. I believe that logicians, like people working in computer science, should develop the habit of writing blogs. In computing, a good technical blog often reveals a person’s interests, judgment, and intellectual taste. There is no reason why logicians should not cultivate a similar practice.
My original plan was to start a blog only after obtaining a stable academic position. I imagined it mainly as a place for teaching beyond the classroom. The present academic job market in China, however, is far from encouraging. Researchers with overseas doctorates who work in small disciplines also face significant structural disadvantages. In some cases, the system even seems to create a deadlock: without a position, it is difficult to obtain research resources, while the lack of those resources and projects is then used as a reason not to offer a position.
I may therefore continue for some time without a permanent academic post, or I may eventually continue my research and teaching outside China.
That is precisely why I should not wait any longer.
I need to remain connected with scholars and students in China. I can no longer leave most of my research within papers, conference presentations, and a small circle of private conversations, as I often did during my PhD. I have findings that I would like to share, and I also have problems that are not yet fully developed but may still be worth pursuing. I hope that making them public will generate useful responses.
Topics
The posts here will not normally take the full form of professional journal articles. I will instead try to explain problems in a more direct and accessible way while preserving the necessary technical details, textual evidence, and bibliographical information. The blog will focus on logical concepts, the history of logic in China, logic education, applications of logic, and research notes on related academic questions.
Will there also be academic criticism? I would very much like there to be.
During the two years since returning to China, I have encountered many claims and arguments that I find difficult to understand or accept. Criticism on this blog, however, will be directed at published texts, arguments, and scholarly claims rather than at persons. I do not intend to replace evidence with emotional language. For the time being, I plan to begin with several cases in the international literature for which I already have sufficiently clear textual evidence.
Some of these problems are substantial enough to become journal articles, and a few already form part of my academic work. But journal review is slow, and the process is often opaque. It may therefore be useful to publish preliminary discussions online so that others can examine and discuss them. Blog publication will not replace formal academic publication: questions that require complete proofs or systematic documentation will still be developed into papers.
The blog does not currently have a comment system. Readers are welcome to respond by email, although I may not be able to reply to every message.
I also hope that some of the questions raised here can become starting points for further reading, writing, or research by undergraduate and master’s students. I would be especially pleased if doctoral students found that some of their own research overlapped with topics discussed on the blog. I will try to distinguish clearly between established results, historical judgments, and conjectures that are still being developed.
Citation and revision policy
When discussing particular texts or scholarly claims, I will try to provide primary sources, page numbers, editions, and other relevant bibliographical information.
Posts may continue to be revised after publication. Substantial revisions will be recorded through the updated date and, where necessary, a revision note.
These posts are revisable public research notes; they should not automatically be treated as peer-reviewed journal articles. Anyone citing a post should preferably include both its original publication date and its most recent revision date.
Some posts will also have English or Chinese counterparts. Where the two versions differ substantially, I will indicate which version is the original.
A formula test and a preview
Let me also use this first post to test the display of mathematical notation and to preview one of the subjects I intend to discuss.
Consider the following derivability claim:
According to the materials I have examined so far, Shen Youding appears to have provided what may be the earliest explicit syntactic proof of this result.
This may initially sound like a minor observation. Yet the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on modal logic still remarks:
“It is interesting to note that S5 can be formulated equivalently by adding (B) to S4.”
The entry states the result but does not discuss its early proof history.
During a meal at the LORI conference last year, I specifically told John van Benthem and Fenrong Liu about Shen’s proof. John was visibly surprised. That reaction is not evidence for historical priority, of course, but it does suggest that this episode is not widely known even among leading logicians.
There is also a more interesting story behind the proof. Shen Youding was responding to an incorrect judgment by a follower of Husserl concerning the system generated by . Yet, at least in the secondary literature I have examined, Shen’s contribution has received almost no discussion. Shen himself also seems not to have emphasized it in his later work. Curiously, the result was instead recorded in publications by C. I. Lewis and William T. Parry.
I presented this material at the AWPL conference earlier this year. The slides are available here. A paper based on the same research will also be submitted to the AWPL proceedings later this month. Conference papers normally reach only a limited readership, so I also intend to explain the history in a more direct form on this blog.
Last year, I applied for an opportunity to present this discovery at the history of logic workshop during UNILOG. This year, I also submitted an abstract to History of Logic Naples. I hope that I will eventually have the opportunity to discuss the material with historians of logic in Europe. Perhaps future accounts of this episode in modal logic will then include Shen Youding.
The broader question is also worth asking: why have some early technical contributions by Chinese logicians failed to enter the standard historical narratives of modern logic? That problem may ultimately be more interesting than the priority of any single proof.