User talk:Wireless99

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Welcome!

Hello, Wireless99, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Dan Gluck 19:00, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Susan Hurley

Thanks for the message - and yes, I should use this link/information to start a page while it is still there. I am afraid that, like you, I agree that the overall standard of philosophy articles on Wikipedia is terrible. It also seems to take a lot of time to do very little, however. It is good to have help! Anarchia 20:59, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] FOL

Thanks for your comment: I'm back in WPland, after two longish absences.

I've done a bit of editing of the FOL page in the past, and I've never been happy with it, but I thought other articles were more fundamental, especially the core logic article. I've glanced over the page, and it seems to have mostly improved; my knee-jerk criticisms were:

  • The article should provide an intuitive grasp of FOL before giving its normal formalisation, and it should be clear that there are several different approaches to its axiomatisation;
  • The treatment of the generalisation axiom needs tightening; in particular this point was mocked on the Foundations of Mathematics mailing list way back in 2005, and there are still problems...
  • The list of other logics is a bit of a mixed bag, and in particular doesn't distinguish the two sors of way in which a logic may be "higher-order" (one which is multi-sorted FOL in wolf's clothing, the other which is unaxiomatisable);
  • The various places where the limits of FOL are treated are often individually confused, and together don't enlighten. My suggestion back in 2005 was to use the completeness & incompleteness theorems for first-order arithmetic as the simplest and most well-understood example of where the limits of FOL lie: I didn't make time to do this myself, and noone else bothered. This together, maybe, with an account of the send in which modal logic is and is not first-order definable, would actually be instructive.

Had you any other complaints about the page? I have to say that, by the standards of the logic pages in general, I don't think they it is too bad. --- Charles Stewart(talk) 08:25, 18 October 2007 (UTC)