News

Logic Group’s Statement on Black Lives Matter

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The UConn Logic Group, as a founding and principal member of the Logic Supergroup, is a co-signatory on the Supergroup’s recent Statement on Black Lives Matter. The full statement appears below.

Statement from the Logic Supergroup organizers on Black Lives Matter

The killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police have resulted in deep sadness and outrage worldwide. This sadness and outrage has swept through academic communities as well. We members of the Logic Supergroup join our colleagues throughout academia in denouncing anti-Black violence in North America specifically, and systemic racism affecting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color generally. We are committed to working with our BIPOC colleagues in logic and with our colleagues in other fields to speak out against injustice and to work to make logic an inclusive community. Black Lives Matter.

In early 2020, logic groups around the world began to combine their meetings into an online Logic Supergroup as a reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. As part of #ShutDownSTEM, the Supergroup held 24 hours of Inclusive Logic on June 10, 2020 to build concrete actions against racism in logic.

Here are four concrete actions that we identified as important and have committed ourselves to immediately, and which we encourage our member groups to commit themselves to as well:

We commit to doing our small part to increase the diversity in logic, as a discipline, by first increasing the diversity represented in our speaker series. We acknowledge that we have, to this point, failed in this regard. We acknowledge, in fact, that we have failed to have a speaker series that even manages to be representative of the diversity that is present in logic, let alone one that contributes to increasing this diversity.Second, we commit to seeking funding from a broad range of sources in order to overcome barriers to participation in the supergroup, and in logic meetings and seminars more broadly. Such funding could be used, for example, in order to allow for graduate student travel stipends if the supergroup holds in-person events in the future, or to aid researchers who need equipment in order to participate in our virtual events now. This will remove some of the barriers faced by BIPOC students to entering and participating in the logic community.

Third, we commit to hosting periodic events to discuss, evaluate, and develop resources for logic education that are inclusive and that encourage participation in logic from a diverse audience. This includes setting regular Logic Supergroup meeting times to discuss further actions in support of inclusion. We recognize that addressing issues of inclusiveness and working in support of anti-racism within individuals and within academia require continued commitment and ongoing, sustained effort.

Fourth, we commit to developing, promoting, and enunciating guidelines and codes of conduct for our conferences, workshops and other events, as well as other events associated with our constituent organizations.

Logic Group videos and new Logic Supergroup channel

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There are number of new recordings of UConn Logic Group colloquium talks on our youtube channel: www.youtube.com/c/UConnLogicGroup. We are also introducing playlists: for example, for last year’s “If” by any other name workshop here, or the keynote lectures of the SEP 2018 conference (which was hosted by the UConn Logic Group) here.

We’re also happy to announce that the Logic Supergroup also has a youtube channel now, where many of the talks that are given in Supergroup online talks series will be available: www.youtube.com/c/LogicSupergroup/.

2019 Workshop: “If” by any other name

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UConn Logic Group Workshop, April 6-7, 2019

“If” by any other name

It is a relatively recent development that research on conditionals is taking a deep and sustained interest in the full range of linguistic markers, their interactions with each other and with other linguistic categories, and the ways in which they drive and constrain the interpretation of the sentences they occur in. Tense and aspect is an area where such attention has already borne fruit; to a lesser extent, we may mention conditional connectives and pro-forms (especially thanks to works like Iatridou 2000 and Iatridou & Embick 1993). More recently, there seems to be a growing interest in two things: on the one hand, more varied aspects of formal marking of conditionals and the ways in which different grammatical categories may be recruited to encode conditional meaning (including aspect, different types of connectives, conjunctions, etc.); on the other hand, the appearance of these markers in other linguistic contexts (like optatives, complement clauses, temporal clauses, interrogatives, etc.).

Program

Saturday, April 6

12:00-2:00: Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou (MIT) “Prolegomena to a Theory of X-Marking”

2:30-3:15: Muyi Yang (UConn) “Explaining negative counterfactuals”
3:15-4:00: Teruyuki Mizuno (UConn) “The structure of might-counterfactuals: a view from Japanese”

4:30-5:30: Paolo Santorio (UC San Diego) “The Double Life of Antecedent Strengthening”

Sunday, April 7

10:00-11:00: Una Stojnić (Columbia): t.b.a.

11:15-12:00: Hiromune Oda (UConn): t.b.a.

1:30-2:30: Will Starr (Cornell) “Indicative Conditionals, Strictly”
After 2:30: coffee & discussion as desired

UConn Logic Group Launches New Certificate Program

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The Logic Group is pleased to announce that the Graduate Certificate in Logic is now accredited—which means that we can start awarding it!

A website explaining the certificate in detail is in the works. We hope to have this up by the time the new semester starts.

In the meantime, here is a rough summary:

Any UConn graduate student can get the Graduate Certificate in Logic as an additional qualification.  There are barely any requirements in addition to what graduate student members of the Logic Group are doing already:  participate in the Logic Colloquium, 12 credits from any graduate course in logic, broadly construed, from any department, and these courses must be from at least two different departments (it’s an interdisciplinary certificate, after all).  These courses are not in addition to the courses you’re taking already for MA or PhD, but the very same courses you’re taking anyway.  You can find a list of logic course below, but other courses might qualify—just ask.

The participation in the Logic Colloquium needs to be made official by way of taking a one-credit independent study with one of the logic certificate directors (or any other Logic Group faculty member who is willing), with the Logic Colloquium as “course content”.  Please contact any of the three logic certificate directors, Magda, Damir, or Marcus, if you have any questions about any of this or to apply for a having the logic certificate awarded.

Graduate Courses in Logic (examples):

  • CSE 5102 – Advances Programming Languages
  • CSE 5506 – Computational Complexity
  • LING 5410 – Semantics I
  • LING 5420 – Semantics II
  • LING 6410 – Semantics Seminar
  • LING 6420 – Topics in Semantics
  • MATH 5026 – Topics in Mathematical Logic
  • MATH 5260 – Mathematical Logic I
  • PHIL 5307 – Logic
  • PHIL 5311 – Properties of Formal Systems
  • PHIL 5344 – Seminar in Philosophical Logic