To mock a mockinbird: Carnap, Grice, and Smullyan

Speranza

Smullyan shared some passions with Carnap and Grice, if you can believe it.

Smullyan, the author of a very influential, "First-Order Logic" believed, well, in the power of first-order logic.

His education was peripatetic. An MA followed by a PhD from Princeton on "Theory of Formal Systems."

His main contribution was puzzling: it was his puzzles.

He was an admirer of Goedel, and his list of favourite authors should please both a Carnapian and a Griceian: Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), Boole, Cantor, and a few others!

And he had a sense of humour.

When Grice left Oxford, he had to give some reason. He said he moved because he was looking for the assistance of logicians and he couldn't find ONE in Oxford!

This was a bit hyperbolic. He, for one, was one (Strawson credits him in "Introduction to Logical Theory" as the tutor "from whom I have never ceased to learn about logic"). In "Vacuous Names," Grice's convoluted exposition of a System to allow for names like "Marmaduke Bloggs," who refers the hero who climbed Mt. Everest on hands and knees ("the invention of journalists, as it happened," Grice adds), there is a passing reference to Smullyan. With Myro, and others, Smullyan provided Grice with a way to provide a neat exposition of first order predicate logic -- of which Smullyan was an expert.

The fact that both played the piano helped!