David Makinson

{{Short description|Australian logician}}

{{for|the English cricketer|David Makinson (cricketer)}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2016}}

{{Use Australian English|date=October 2016}}David Clement Makinson (born 27 August 1941) is an Australian logician living in France.{{Citation needed|date=September 2024}}

Career

Makinson began his studies at the University of Sydney in 1958 and completed them at Oxford University in 1965, with a D.Phil on modal logic under Michael Dummett. He worked in the American University of Beirut (1965-1982), UNESC0 (1980-2001), King’s College London (2002-2006), the London School of Economics (LSE) (2006-2019),{{citation

| last = Makinson | first = David

| editor-last = Hansson | editor-first = Sven Ove

| contribution = A Tale of Five Cities

| date = December 2014

| doi = 10.1007/978-94-007-7759-0_3

| isbn = 9789400777590

| pages = 19–32

| publisher = Springer Netherlands

| series = Outstanding Contributions to Logic

| title = David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems| volume = 3

}} and currently holds a position of Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Queensland.{{citation|url=https://about.uq.edu.au/experts/37370|title=Dr David Makinson|work=UQ Experts|publisher=University of Queensland|access-date=2024-09-28}}

Contributions

David Makinson works across a number of areas of logic, including modal logic, deontic logic, belief revision, uncertain reasoning, relevance-sensitive logic and, more recently, topics in the history of logic. Among his contributions: in 1965, as a graduate student, he identified the preface paradox{{citation

| last = Lacey | first = A. R.

| doi = 10.1093/mind/lxxix.316.614

| issue = 316

| journal = Mind

| pages = 614–615

| title = The paradox of the preface

| volume = 79

| year = 1970}} and adapted the method of maximal consistent sets for proving completeness results in modal logic{{Citation needed|date=September 2024}}; in 1969 he discovered the first simple and natural propositional logic lacking the finite model property{{Citation needed|date=September 2024}}; in the 1980s, with Carlos Alchourrón and Peter Gärdenfors, he created the AGM account of belief change{{Citation needed|date=September 2024}}; in the early 2000s, with Leon van der Torre, he created input/output logic; in 2017 he adapted the method of truth-trees to relevance-sensitive logic. {{Citation needed|date=September 2024}}

References

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