Ray Jennings, Professor of Philosophy

Email: jennings at sfu.ca

Phone: 778.782.3329
Fax: 778.782.4443

Office: WMX 5650

Education

B.A. (Queen's) 1959-62
M.A. (Queen's) 1964-65
Ph.D. (London) 1965-67

Areas of Interest

Logic (modal, deontic, conditional, diagnostic, inferential, applied, formal semantics), History of Logic
Also: Philosophy of Language (logicalization), Philosophy of Mind (inference, belief)

Current Research Projects

Everything I do is connected with everything else I do. I try to do things that I think might conceivably be useful for something.

Logic

I actively research in all the areas listed. My particular interest in modal logic is in its applications to the problems of information extraction from inconsistent data; in deontic logic to representations of consequentialist policy determination strategies; in conditional logic to applications in medical and industrial diagnosis.

Philosophy of Language

Here I am particularly interested in studying the forces of evolution of the (logical) connective vocabulary of natural language with a view to understanding the diversity of natural uses of that vocabulary, and, since all connective vocabulary is descendent from physical vocabulary, how that evolution shapes inference and our conception of what inference is. This work has influenced my views about conditional semantics and the design of diagnostic systems.

Philosophy of Mind

As may be guessed, here the subject of interest is inference, and language processing and production, particularly information storage and syntactic understanding. I know next to nothing, but my other work is beginning to suggest useful directions.

Publications

The Genealogy of Disjunction . Oxford University Press 1994.
"Generalised Inference and Inferential Modelling" (with C. Chan and M.J. Dowad) Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Sydney, Australia. 24-30 August, pp. 1046-1051, 1991.
The Or of Free Choice permission" Topoi 13: 3-10, 1994.
Propositional n-Traces: Visualizing a Problem in Philosophical Logic" (with N. Pvost, L. Jorgenson, and F. David Fraachia.) Proceedings of Visualization, 1995 pp. 338-341.
"Visualization in Propositional Logic." (with Nathalie Pvost, Loki Jorgenson, and F. David Fraachia. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 16(2):6-8, March 1996.