Can We Handle the Truth?

Course Leaders: Tom Naps and Brian Tebbitt
Course Assistant: John Fredell

Welcome to the course home page for the spring term OLLI course Can We Handle the Truth?. The course will meet in Magrath 8 for six Fridays, 12:30-2:00, starting April 11. Feel to contact Tom or Brian anytime you have questions or concerns about the course.

Course description from OLLI catalog: In A Few Good Men, when Tom Cruise famously demands of Jack Nicholson “I want the truth”, he is thunderously rebuked by Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” What is this thing we call truth? We live in an age surrounded by information and seem increasingly incapable of deciding whether any of it is true. In this co-taught course, we will examine truth, logic, and semantics from two perspectives: philosopher/cognitive scientist (Brian) and mathematician and computer scientist (Tom). Will we reach a consensus or just come away with more questions?

Course outline

• Week 1 (Tom): Mathematics as the “art” of making elegant logical arguments, that is, proofs. What kinds of truths can we learn from those proofs? Although not necessary, before class I encourage you to watch this lighthearted and enlightening interview of renowned mathematician Edward Frenkel on the old Colbert Report. (Apologies for its quality – copyright issues forced me to splice together segments I found on the Internet Archive.)
  • Week 1 slides
  • In the first week’s class, we talked about a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem that was created by two high school students in New Orleans. Here is a link to a Scientific American report about them and what makes their new proof unique.
• Week 2 (Brian): The modern philosophical discussion of truth has its roots in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. A tour through various theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, redundance, deflationary, and pragmatic. We will also take a look at the so-called “Liar’s Paradox”. Week2 slides
• Week 3 (Tom): Gödel and Turing reveal the truth about proof. Two fundamental truths in a realm of paradoxes. Are their results a glass half full or half empty? Before class, try to watch this Numberfile talk by Marcus duSautoy. Week 3 slides
• Week 4 (Brian): Metalogical discussion of general logical inference: deduction, induction, and abduction. The “problem of induction” will also be discussed. Week4 slides
• Week 5 (Tom): Truth as crowd-sourcing. Smoke and mirrors done with probabilistic reasoning. Before class, try to watch this video on Lewis Carroll’s Pillow Problem. Week 5 slides
• Week 6 (Brian): Welcome to the Philosophy of Language! And particularly the philosophical study of linguistic meaning. Do words ‘have’ meanings. If so, how? From where is the meaning of our spoken and written words derived? Week 6 slides

Slides for each week will be posted as soon as they are finalized. Both Brian and Tom adhere to the “just in time” teaching strategy, tinkering with the minutiae until we walk in the door. So the truth is that getting the slides posted early is unlikely. 😀

Helpful Books to “go deeper” than we can in class

Tom’s Picks Organized by Weeks

• Week 1
  • Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel
  • Proof and the Art of Mathematics by Joel David Hamkins
  • Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics by Joel David Hamkins Chapter 1 expands on our discussion of axioms for arithmetic in Week 1. Chapters 5, 6, 7 are exceptional for getting to the heart of the arguments of Gödel and Turing in Week 2.
• Week 3
  • When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt
  • Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel by Stephen Budiansky
  • The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold
  • A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
  • Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel by Rebecca Goldstein
  • Gödel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman
  • I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
  • An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems (Cambridge Philosophy Series) by Peter Smith
  • Simply Gödel by Richard Tieszen
• Week 5
  • Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark
  • Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam : A Life in Physics by John Archibald Wheeler with Kenneth Ford
  • Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything by Amanda Gefter
    
  • Quantum Computing Since Democritus by Scott Aaronson
  • Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away by Rebecca Goldstein
  • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
  • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’ Gieblyn
  • Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by David Enrich
  • The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Brian Christian
  • The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World by Christine Rosen

Brian’s picks

• Week 2
  • F.C.S. Schiller - Logic For Use (1929)
  • G. Englebretsen - Bare Facts and Naked Truths (2006)
  • AJ Ayer - Language, Truth and Logic (1936)
  • Paul Horwich - Truth (1998)
  • Hartry Field - The Deflationary Conception of Truth (1986)
  • Alfred Tarski - The Semantic Theory of Truth
  • Grover, Belnap, Camp - The Prosentential Theory of Truth — 1975
  • Frank Ramsey - The Redundancy Theory of Truth
  • WVO Quine - The Disquotational Theory of Truth
• Week 4
  • Rudolph Carnap - The Logical Syntax of Language (1937)
  • Karl Popper - Conjectures and Refutations (1962)
  • Thomas Kuhn - Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (1970)
  • J.S. Mill - A System of Logic (1895)
  • Antonio Demasio - Descartes’ Error
  • John Burgess - Philosophical Logic
  • Gerd Gigerenzer - The Intelligence of Intuition
  • Erik Larsen - The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
  • Siu-Fan Lee - Logic: A Complete Introduction
• Week 6
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Culture and Value
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein - The Blue and Brown Books
  • Friedrich Waismann - Voices of Wittgenstein
  • Gottlieb Frege - Foundations of Mathematics
  • Gottlieb Frege - Sense and Reference (essay)
  • W.V.A. Quine - Word and Object
  • W.V.A. Quine - Pursuit of Truth
  • Christiansen and Chater - The Language Game

Accommodations

OLLI is committed to making our courses accessible for members, and we expect our course leaders to help us make that happen. OLLI recommends that Course leaders teaching in classrooms wear voice amplifiers, and we set up our Zoom courses so that live captioning is an option. The OLLI office may contact you to make additional accommodations on a case by case basis. If you require additional accommodations, please contact OLLI@umn.edu and we will do our best to support your needs.

Disability statement

The University of Minnesota is committed to providing equitable access to learning opportunities for all students. If you have, or think you have, a disability in any area such as, mental health, attention, learning, chronic health, sensory, or physical, please contact the DRC office on your campus (UM Twin Cities - 612.626.1333) to arrange a confidential discussion regarding equitable access and reasonable accommodations. Additional information is available on the DRC website: https://disability.umn.edu or email drc@umn.edu.