Philosophy and Computing

Philosophical interests

My doctoral dissertation was on Frege’s notion of an incomplete expression. I interpreted unsaturated expressions as being what Geach calls linguistic functions, but not all such functions are incomplete expressions. I devised a criterion for distinguishing pathological linguistic functions from genuine unsaturated expressions. (My work of Frege led me to criticise Rumfitt's theory of predication.)

While working on my thesis, I read some of Popper's works for the first time and was converted to critical rationalism. The main focus of my research for many years was on testimony and I developed an anti-justificationist account of how people respond to other people’s assertions. This led to the formation of the short-lived Electric Monk Research Group. I taught a third-year module at the University of Birmingham for several years on the philosophy of cognitive science which was heavily influenced by my interest in critical rationalism and in which I presented my ideas on testimony and the limitations of artificial intelligence.

Computing interests

I taught Haskell for many years at the University of Birmingham and still write programs in it for my own amusement. I became interested in combinatory logic while working on my doctoral thesis and was surprised to learn many years later that functional programming languages can be implemented by being translated into combinatory logic. The heart of this process is a bracket abstraction algorithm and I developed a new one using iconic combinators which has a number of interesting properties.

I am also a keen user of LaTeX and have even written a book about it.

Further information

I have written about most of the topics mentioned above and you can look at my publications if you are interested in pursuing any of them. Please email me at antoni.dillerREMOVE@cantabREMOVE.net with any comments you may have.