PLClub Discussion Group

Action-based reasoning and Tlön model

This Friday, I want to share with you my ongoing work, whose tentative title is Action-based reasoning and Tlön model. In this work, I want to distinguish two styles of reasoning: value-based reasoning and action-based reasoning—you will learn more about what I mean by them on Friday. My conjecture is that action-based reasoning is more useful than people think, and this work is about my exploration to find out if that is true.

Your homework is: Learn about the least fixpoint operator. I recommend reading this draft by Philip Wadler, from the beginning to “LEAST FIXPOINTS AS INITIAL ALGEBRAS”: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/free-rectypes/free-rectypes.txt Read the introduction of the paper Data types à la carte (it’s very short). A possible link: http://www.cs.ru.nl/~W.Swierstra/Publications/DataTypesALaCarte.pdf See you on Friday!

PS: If you are curious about the title: the word “Tlön” comes from Jorge Luis Borges’ novel Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Tlön is a fictional world where its people perceive the world not as “a concourse of objects in space”, but as “a heterogeneous series of independent acts”.