Overview

The Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science offers an interdisciplinary program of study and research leading to the PhD degree. Although the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Philosophy each offers a PhD degree toward which a student may write a dissertation in logic, the interdisciplinary program is designed for students with a broad interest in logic and the methodology of science who wish to explore the subject in both its mathematical and philosophical aspects. Here, methodology of science is understood to mean metascience, the study of the methods of the sciences by logical and mathematical means. The program is administered by an interdepartmental group which cooperates closely with the Computer Science Division, the Department of Mathematics, and the Department of Philosophy.

Tarski Lectures

Following the death of group founder Alfred Tarski in 1983, an endowment fund was established in his memory. Using income from this fund, a series of annual Alfred Tarski Lectures was inaugurated in 1989. Each spring, an outstanding scholar in a field to which Tarski contributed is selected to come to UC Berkeley and meet with faculty and students and to deliver several lectures. To see the schedule of these lectures, visit the group's website.

Undergraduate Program

There is no undergraduate program in Logic and the Methodology of Science.

Graduate Program

Logic and the Methodology of Science: PhD

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Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

Lara Buchak, Associate Professor. Game theory, decision theory, epistemology, philosophy of religion.
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Wesley H. Holliday, Associate Professor. Philosophy, logic.
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John Macfarlane, Professor. Ancient philosophy, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, epistemology.
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Paolo Mancosu, Professor. Philosophy, philosophy of mathematics and its history, philosophy of logic, mathematical logic.
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Antonio Montalban, Associate Professor. Mathematical logic.
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George Necula, Assistant Professor. Software engineering, programming systemsm, security, program analysis.
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Stuart Russell, Professor. Artificial intelligence, computational biology, algorithms, machine learning, real-time decision-making, probabilistic reasoning.
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Thomas Scanlon, Professor. Mathematics, model theory, applications to number theory.
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Sanjit Seshia, Associate Professor. Electronic design automation, theory, computer security, program analysis, dependable computing, computational logic, formal methods.
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Theodore A. Slaman, Professor. Mathematics, recursion theory.
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Hans Sluga, Professor. Political philosophy, recent European philosophy, history of analytic philosophy, Frege, Wittgenstein, Foucault.
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John Steel, Professor. Mathematics, descriptive set theory, set theory, fine structure.
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Umesh Vazirani, Professor. Quantum computation, hamiltonian complexity, analysis of algorithms.
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Seth Yalcin, Associate Professor. Philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, semantics, metaphysics.
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Emeritus Faculty

John W. Addison, Professor Emeritus. Mathematics, theory of definability, descriptive set theory, model theory, recursive function theory.
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Robert Anderson, Professor Emeritus. Finance, probability theory, mathematical economics, nonstandard analysis.
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Charles S. Chihara, Professor Emeritus.

Alan D. Code, Professor Emeritus.

Leo A. Harrington, Professor Emeritus. Mathematics, model theory, recursion theory, set theory.
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+ Richard Karp, Professor Emeritus. Computational molecular biology, genomics, DNA molecules, structure of genetic regulatory networks, combinatorial and statsitical methods.
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Paul Kay, Professor Emeritus. Linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, syntax, semantics, lexicon, grammar, color naming, lexical semantics, grammatical variation, cross-language color naming, the encoding of contextual relations in rules of grammar.
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Ralph N. McKenzie, Professor Emeritus. Mathematics, logic, universal algebra, general algebra, lattice theory.
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W. Hugh Woodin, Professor Emeritus. Mathematics, set theory, large cardinals.
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Lotfi A. Zadeh, Professor Emeritus. Artificial intelligence, linguistics, control theory, logic, fuzzy sets, decision analysis, expert systems neural networks, soft computing, computing with words, computational theory of perceptions and precisiated natural language.
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