Jon Barwise

Kenneth Jon Barwise (/ˈbɑːrwaɪz/; June 29, 1942 – March 5, 2000) was an American mathematician, philosopher, and logician. He is known for his contributions to mathematical logic and situation semantics. Together with Robin Cooper, he formulated the conservativity principle for natural-language determiners.

Education and career

He was born in Independence, Missouri, to Kenneth T. and Evelyn Barwise.

A student of Solomon Feferman at Stanford University, Barwise began his research working in infinitary logic. After positions at Yale University and the University of Wisconsin, during which time his interests turned to natural language, he returned to Stanford in 1983 to direct the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He began teaching at Indiana University in 1990. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999.

In his final year, Barwise was invited to give the 2000 Gödel Lecture; he died prior to the lecture.

Philosophical and logical work

Barwise contended that, by being explicit about the context in which a proposition is made, the situation, many problems in the application of logic can be eliminated. He sought "to understand meaning and inference within a general theory of information, one that takes us outside the realm of sentences and relations between sentences of any language, natural or formal." In particular, he claimed that such an approach resolved the liar paradox. He made use of Peter Aczel's non-well-founded set theory in understanding "vicious circles" of reasoning.

Barwise, along with his former colleague at Stanford John Etchemendy, was the author of the popular logic textbook Language, Proof and Logic. The text is notable for including computer-aided homework problems, some of which provide visual representations of logical problems. During his time at Stanford, he was also the first director of the Symbolic Systems Program, an interdepartmental degree program focusing on the relationships between cognition, language, logic, and computation. The K. Jon Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Symbolic Systems Program has been given periodically since 2001. The Barwise Prize was established in 2002 by the American Philosophical Association, awarded for contributions to philosophy and computing.

Selected publications

See also

References

  1. ↑ Walsh, Eileen (8 March 2000). "Noted logician K. Jon Barwise dies". Stanford News Service. Archived from the original on 17 June 2016. Retrieved 29 March 2015.
  2. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780-2017: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. p. 35. Retrieved 2026-09-07.
  3. ↑ "2000 Annual Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic". The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 6 (3): 361–396. 2000. doi:10.2307/421070. ISSN 1079-8986. JSTOR 421070. {{cite journal}}: |url-access= requires |url= (help)
  4. ↑ Barwise, Jon (1986), "The Situation in Logic—I", Studies in Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, vol. 114, Elsevier, pp. 183–203, doi:10.1016/S0049-237X(09)70693-7, ISBN 978-0-444-87656-0{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  5. ↑ "Vicious Circles". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2026-09-07.
  6. ↑ "Barwise Award for Distinguished Contributions to Symbolic Systems". Stanford Symbolic Systems Program. Archived from the original on 2025-11-19. Retrieved 2026-04-28.
  7. ↑ "K. Jon Barwise Prize". The American Philosophical Association.
  8. ↑ Nadel, Mark (March 1978). "Jon Barwise. Admissible sets and structures. An approach to definability theory. Perspectives in mathematical logic. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York, 1975, XIV + 394 pp". Journal of Symbolic Logic. 43 (1): 139–144. doi:10.2307/2271957. ISSN 0022-4812.
  9. ↑ Butterfield, Jerry (April 1986). "Review of Situations and Attitudes by Jon Barwise and John Perry". The Philosophical Quarterly. 36 (143): 292–296. doi:10.2307/2219775. JSTOR 2219775.
  10. ↑ Moss, Lawrence S. (1989). "Review of The Liar: An essay in truth and circularity by Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy" (PDF). Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 20 (2): 216–225. doi:10.1090/S0273-0979-1989-15770-4.
  11. ↑ Rutten, J. J. M. M. (1998). "Review of Vicious circles: On the mathematics of non-wellfounded phenomena by Jon Barwise and Larry Moss" (PDF). Bulletin of the American Math Society. 35 (1): 69–75. doi:10.1090/s0273-0979-98-00735-6.
  12. ↑ Lemon, Oliver (1998). "Review of Information Flow. The Logic of Distributed Systems". Erkenntnis. 49 (3). Springer: 397–401. ISSN 0165-0106. JSTOR 20012891.
  13. ↑ Grim, Patrick (September 2001). "Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy. Language, proof and logic . In collaboration with Gerard Allwein, Dave Barker-Plummer, and Albert Liu. CSLI Publications, Stanford, and Seven Bridges Press, New York and London, 1999, xii + 587 pp. - Gerard Allwein, Dave Barker-Plummer, Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy, and Albert Liu. LPL software manual . CSLI Publications, Stanford, and Seven Bridges Press, New York and London, 1999, vii + 52 pp. + CD-ROM". Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 7 (3): 377–379. doi:10.2307/2687756. ISSN 1079-8986.
  14. ↑ Urquhart, Alasdair (December 1984). "Review of Handbook of Mathematical Logic". Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 14 (4). Taylor & Francis: 675–682. ISSN 0045-5091. JSTOR 40231396.
  15. ↑ Ma, Minghui (June 2010). "Toward Model-Theoretic Modal Logics". Frontiers of Philosophy in China. 5 (2). Brill: 294–311. ISSN 1673-3436. JSTOR 27823331.