John Corcoran (logician)
John Corcoran (/ˈkɔːrkərən/ KOR-kər-ən; March 20, 1937 – January 8, 2021) was an American logician, philosopher, mathematician, and historian of logic. He is best known for his philosophical work on concepts such as the nature of inference, relations between conditions, argument-deduction-proof distinctions, the relationship between logic and epistemology, and the place of proof theory and model theory in logic. Nine of Corcoran's papers have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Persian, and Arabic; his 1989 "signature" essay was translated into three languages. Fourteen of his papers have been reprinted; one was reprinted twice.
John Corcoran | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 20, 1937 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Died | January 8, 2021 (aged 83) |
| Alma mater | Johns Hopkins University |
| Known for | Interpretation of Aristotle's Prior Analytics, reconstruction of Boole's original works, work on logic, work on mathematical logic, character-string theory, subregular polyhedra |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Logic, history of logic, philosophy of logic, mathematical logic, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, ontology, linguistics |
| Institutions | University at Buffalo (SUNY) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert McNaughton |
His work on Aristotle's logic of the Prior Analytics is regarded as being highly faithful both to the Greek text and to the historical context. It is the basis for many subsequent investigations.
His mathematical results on definitional equivalence of formal character-string theories, sciences of strings of characters over finite alphabets, are foundational for logic, formal linguistics, and computer science.