Elaine Pimentel - WLD@DLMPST/IUHPST

On IUHPST/DLMPST conferences

Valeria de Paiva invited me to write about the IUHPST/DLMPST conferences, trying to find "fluffy stories" about them. Well, the first fluffy think that crossed my mind was that, not only I have never been to IUHPST/DLMPST conferences, but I have never even heard about them!

Valeria thinks this is weird, since I am the president of the Brazilian Logic Society (SBL), and these conferences are organized every 4 years from 1960. Also, many great names appear not only in the organization, but also in the contributed talks (for example, the first proceedings were organized by no one else than Ernest Nagel, Patrick Suppes and Alfred Tarski).

So I started digging about the conferences and reflecting why they never appeared in my radar.

First of all, the "soup of letters" (as Samuel Gomes da Silva says) IUHPST/DLMPST stands for: International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology/Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology. It already does not help, right? Too many letters, too much information. On the other hand, such an unusual acronym should also be curious enough for grabbing someone's attention.

Second, looking at the astonishing list of editors and participants, how come I have missed that? In what planet a logician would not make an effort to be part of such events? The only reason I could think of was that IUHPST/DLMPST conferences were not announced in the mailing lists I subscribe... Not sure about that, though.

Finally, although I was not aware of IUHPST, I knew of the existence of DLMPST since two dear friends are Concil Members -- Valeria de Paiva and Andrés Villaveces. And, of course, SBL is an ordinary member of DLMPST, so now we will build stronger bridges!

Now, let's concentrate on some of the fantastic meetings that I've missed: I will try, with blind eyes, find fluffy stories about 3 IUHPST/DLMPST conferences:

1. 2nd International Congress, Jerusalem Israel 1964. Brazil was not a member yet (I am not sure when we joined IUHPST/DLMPST, but the first record of conferences was in 1987, in Moscow -- more about that later). This was the second meeting and, from the report of the general assembly, I discovered that Patrick Suppes was IUHPS/DLMPS's secretary, and that Kleene, Heyting and Tarski participated actively in the assembly. There were some other interesting facts described in the minutes of the general assembly, such as Denmark, Greece, Monaco and Sweden were accepted for membership. But my fluffy moment goes to the fact that it was in 1964 that meetings would move to an odd year, starting from 1967. This means that this was the first and only time where the interval of the conferences was not 4, but 3 years. The reason seems to be the number of international meetings scheduled for 1968, including the International Congress of Philosophy (2 - 9 Sep 1968, Vienna, Austria). Since then, the IUHPS/DLMPS conferences were held every 4 years, in odd years. Regarding the proceedings, edited by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel and published in the Studies in Logic and The Foundations of Mathematics 1965, 440 pages, I also have a fluffy (personal) thing, that would be: I definitely need to read Kleene's paper "Classical extensions of intuitionistic mathematics"!!!

This is my fluffy for extensions! (in the case, hair extension of a cute bunny -- credit: justcuteanimals.com)

2. 8th International Congress, Moscow 1987. Brazil very well represented by Newton da Costa, yay! Newton was the first president of the Brazilian Logic Society, founded in 1979. Hence, my fluffy story could not be other than Newton's contribution to the Proceedings (edited by J. E. Fenstad, I. T. Frolov and R. Hilpinen, Studies in Logic and The Foundations of Mathematics 1989): Logic and Pragmatic Truth. In that paper, Newton shows that there are important connections between the logic of pragmatic truth, modal logic and Jaskowski's discussive logic. As expected, the logic of pragmatic truth turns out to be... paraconsistent!

Here it is my view of paraconsistent and paracomplete modal negations (fluffy enough to me! -- credit: this paper, based on this paper)

3. 16th International Congress, Prague 2019. This was the last meeting, just before the pandemic! So it was still live, with us not knowing what we would have to face... Since this is a quite recent event, it was easier to collect data and understand better the spirit of the IUHPST/DLMPST meetings. First of all, the report of the General Assembly is really rich, many more details than the last two described. On the other side, it is certainly more "bureaucratic", with financial statements, etc. From there, I took my first fluffy story: this was the second meeting after the union and the division added a "T" to their name, for technology! Now, yes, we have a IUHPST/DLMPST :) And the sixteenth congress was the first to be held under the new name of Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (of course... CLMPST!!!). The second fluffy story is that the theme of CLMPST XVI was "bridging across academic cultures", implemented by considering the program structure and its subdivisions as fluid and open in order to allow people from different disciplinary cultures to interact and talk to each other. Moreover, the Program Committee and plenary/invited speakers were gender balanced and with a good geographic representation, yay! Finally, since there seems to be no proceedings yet, I will add as my third fluffy story the announcement of the next CLMPST: it will be held in Argentina, and the PC chair will be Atocha Llera (Institute for Philosophical Research, UNAM), triple yay!

And it is from Argentina our final fluffy image (cute Argentinian teddy bear -- credit: OnBuy.com)