Maverick Philosopher

From the Otago Department of Philosophy website:

Pavel Tichy: Logic and Truth-Likeness

As a very young lecturer at the LSE, Musgrave had been deputised to pick up Quine from the airport for a conference. Meeting the great man he had apologized for the smallness of his car. 'Is there going to be any modal logic at this conference?' demanded Quine. 'No' replied Musgrave. 'Then the car’s fine', said Quine. Musgrave was inclined to share Quine’s anti-modal prejudices, but he knew that Otago needed a logician of some sort and, before he left England for New Zealand, he had hired the Czech Pavel Tichy, a refugee from the suppression of the Prague Spring (and in consequence of its suppression, a virulent anti-Communist). Tichy rapidly proved his worth both as a logician and a philosopher and in 1981 he was appointed to a Personal Chair in Logic. He was a tough, even a ferocious debater, and since he was also supremely clever, it was very difficult to get him to back down about anything. But the slightest suggestion that some view of his might lend some support to paraconsistent logic would cause him to recoil like a vampire threatened with a crucifix. A high point of his career was in 1972 when Sir Karl Popper visited the Department as a William Evans Fellow. Popper had recently proposed a definition of closeness to truth, which was intended to explicate the intuitive idea that one false theory can be closer to the truth than another. Tichy demolished this definition with a proof that on Popper’s account all false theories are equally far from the truth, finishing in a typically downright manner: 'I conclude that Popper’s definition is worthless.' There was a pause as everyone awaited the response of the notoriously temperamental Popper. When it came it was remarkably gracious: 'I disagree with only one word of this paper – its last word. No definition can be worthless, when it provokes such a devastating criticism. I hope that Dr Tichy will join me in this project, and produce a better definition than mine.' This Tichy proceeded to do with the aid of his student Graham Oddie.

After the Velvet Revolution, Tichy was invited to return to his alma mater, Charles University in Prague as Professor of the Department of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. He was honoured by the invitation and accepted, albeit with some misgivings. But his plans were cut short by his tragic death by drowning in 1994. A volume of his Collected Papers edited by Svoboda, Jespersen and Cheyne was published in 2004 by Otago University Press in conjunction with the Institute of Philosophy in the Czech Republic. Tichy's most important and lasting contribution to philosophy by far is his theory of higher-order intensional logic - a brilliant system which yields elegant solutions to most of the problems in the philosophy of language and logic.