John Etchemendy

John W. Etchemendy (born 1952 in Reno, Nevada) was Stanford University's twelfth Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000 and stepped down on January 31, 2017.

John Etchemendy received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Nevada, Reno before earning his PhD in philosophy at Stanford in 1982.

He has been a faculty member in Stanford's Department of Philosophy since 1983, prior to which he was a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. He is also a faculty member of Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford.

Etchemendy's research interests include logic, semantics and the philosophy of language. He has challenged orthodox views on the central notions of truth, logical consequence and logical truth. His most well-known book, The Concept of Logical Consequence (1990, 1999), criticizes Alfred Tarski's widely accepted analysis of logical consequence. The Liar: An essay on truth and circularity (1987, 1992), co-authored with the late Jon Barwise, develops a formal account of the liar paradox modelled using a version of set theory incorporating the so-called Anti-Foundation Axiom.

Etchemendy's recent work has focused on the role of diagrams and other nonlinguistic forms of representation in reasoning. His latest book, written with Jon Barwise and Dave Barker-Plummer, is Language, Proof and Logic (2000, 2006), a popular introductory logic textbook. He has also developed numerous pieces of instructional software, including Turing's World, Tarski's World, Fitch, and Hyperproof, software that allows computers to support the reasoning process.

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