J. Michael Dunn (June 19, 1941 – April 5, 2021) was Oscar Ewing Professor
Emeritus of Philosophy, Professor Emeritus of Informatics and Computer Science, was twice chair of the Philosophy Department, was Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and was founding dean of the
School of Informatics (now the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering) at
Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
*Indiana Universi ...
.
Early life and education
Dunn was born in
Fort Wayne, Indiana
Fort Wayne is a city in and the county seat of Allen County, Indiana, United States. Located in northeastern Indiana, the city is west of the Ohio border and south of the Michigan border. The city's population was 263,886 as of the 2020 Censu ...
. He went to high school in
Lafayette, Indiana
Lafayette ( , ) is a city in and the county seat of Tippecanoe County, Indiana, United States, located northwest of Indianapolis and southeast of Chicago. West Lafayette, on the other side of the Wabash River, is home to Purdue University, whi ...
, where he worked in
Purdue Biology laboratories after school and summers. He was the first in his family to go to college.
He obtained an
A.B.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
in Philosophy from
Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Logic) from the
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
, where he wrote his dissertation, ''The Algebra of Intensional Logics.''
Career
He taught at
Wayne State University
Wayne State University (WSU) is a public research university in Detroit, Michigan. It is Michigan's third-largest university. Founded in 1868, Wayne State consists of 13 schools and colleges offering approximately 350 programs to nearly 25,000 ...
and at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
before coming to
Indiana University Bloomington
Indiana University Bloomington (IU Bloomington, Indiana University, IU, or simply Indiana) is a public research university in Bloomington, Indiana. It is the flagship campus of Indiana University and, with over 40,000 students, its largest ca ...
in 1969, from which he retired in 2007.
He received grants from NSF, NEH, ACLS, and was a visiting scholar at, among other places, the
Australian National University
The Australian National University (ANU) is a public research university located in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Its main campus in Acton encompasses seven teaching and research colleges, in addition to several national academies an ...
,
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
, and the
University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Its main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb no ...
. In 2014 he was a visiting professor at his Ph.D. alma mater the
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...
. In 2002 he accepted on behalf of the School of Informatics the Techpoint (Indiana Information Technology association) Mira for Outstanding Education Contribution to Information Technology. In 2007 he was awarded the Indiana University Bloomington Provost’s Medal, and was made a
Sagamore of the Wabash
The Sagamore of the Wabash is an honorary award created by the U.S. state of Indiana during the term of Governor Ralph F. Gates, who served from 1945 to 1949. A tri-state meeting was to be held in Louisville with officials from Indiana, Ohio ...
by the Governor of Indiana.
He was a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
. He served as President of the Society for Exact Philosophy, and on the Executive Committee of the
Association for Symbolic Logic
The Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL) is an international organization of specialists in mathematical logic and philosophical logic. The ASL was founded in 1936, and its first president was Alonzo Church. The current president of the ASL is ...
. He was also an editor of the
Journal of Symbolic Logic
The '' Journal of Symbolic Logic'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Association for Symbolic Logic. It was established in 1936 and covers mathematical logic. The journal is indexed by ''Mathematical Reviews'', Zentralb ...
and chief editor of the
Journal of Philosophical Logic. He published 6 books and over 100 papers, and directed or co-directed 17 Ph. D. dissertations (Philosophy, Computer Science, Mathematics).
After he retired, he served for ten years on the board of HealthLINC, the regional health information exchange, and was President there for three years. From 2010 he was affiliated with the Info-Metrics Institute,
American University, and was a member of its Advisory Board (co-chair 2017-2021).
Work
Dunn's research focuses on information based logics, particularly
relevance logic Relevance logic, also called relevant logic, is a kind of non-classical logic requiring the antecedent and consequent of implications to be relevantly related. They may be viewed as a family of substructural or modal logics. It is generally, but ...
s and other so-called
"substructural" logics. He has an algebraic approach to these under the heading of "gaggle theory" (for generalized galois logics), which he has developed in articles, his book with G. Hardgree ''Algebraic Methods in Philosophical Logic'' (Oxford, 2001), and a book with
Katalin Bimbó, ''Generalized Galois Logics: Relational Semantics of Nonclassical Logical Calculi''. (CSLI Publications, 2008).
He studied as a graduate student with the two major figures in relevance logic,
Alan Ross Anderson
Alan Ross Anderson (1925–1973) was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh.
A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance l ...
and
Nuel Belnap
Nuel Dinsmore Belnap Jr. (; born 1930) is an American logician and philosopher who has made contributions to the philosophy of logic, temporal logic, and structural proof theory. He taught at the University of Pittsburgh from 1963 until his reti ...
He was a contributing author to their book ''Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Entailment Vol. 1,'' and a full co-author with them to ''Vol. 2.''
He also worked on
quantum logic
In the mathematical study of logic and the physical analysis of quantum foundations, quantum logic is a set of rules for manipulation of propositions inspired by the structure of quantum theory. The field takes as its starting point an observ ...
and
quantum computation,
subjective probability in the context of incomplete and conflicting information, and with Katalin Bimbό proved the decidability of Ticket Entailment (a problem open since 1960). Dunn was honored in 2016 by the book ''J. Michael Dunn on Information Based Logic'', edited by Katalin Bimbó, part of the
Springer
Springer or springers may refer to:
Publishers
* Springer Science+Business Media, aka Springer International Publishing, a worldwide publishing group founded in 1842 in Germany formerly known as Springer-Verlag.
** Springer Nature, a multinationa ...
series ''Outstanding Contributions to Logic''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dunn, Jon Michael
1941 births
2021 deaths
Writers from Fort Wayne, Indiana
Indiana University Bloomington faculty
Oberlin College alumni
University of Pittsburgh alumni
American philosophers