*Wednesday seminar: Josh Parsons (Otago), 3:30 – 5:30 in the Refectory, Main Quad*
"Command and consequence" "Attack at dawn if the weather is fine! The weather is fine. Therefore attack at dawn!" Is this argument valid? Is it an instance of modus ponens? I outline a semantics of the imperative mood that answers yes to both these questions while retaining the traditional view that imperatives are neither truth nor false. *Foundations WIP seminar: Graham Nerlich (Adelaide), 11:30 – 1:00 in the Philosophy Common Room* “Bell’s ‘Lorentzian Pedagogy’ – a bad education”. Merely that JS Bell wrote “How to teach special relativity” ensures an interest in the paper. But it has become an icon of a particular philosophy of special relativity, constructivism, championed mainly by Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley. Brown makes the depth of the issues clear “… a moving rod contracts and a moving clock dilates *because of how it is made up and not because of the nature of its spatio-temporal environment.* Bell was surely right.” [his emphasis]. I claim that Bell was surely wrong for largely philosophical reasons so that Brown, Pooley et al. are confused, too, about utterly basic issues. A bit of actual physics, about acceleration in SR, gets into the act as well. * *
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