My PhD dissertation showed “why logic works,” gave a pattern for creating new techniques for building models of consequence, and developed ways of comparing the relative power of different modeling techniques. It showed how to understand logic as a tool we use for the construction of knowledge, and how design choices in the construction of the semantic model lead to different properties of the resulting system. A new set of techniques, ones more appropriate for modeling the meaning of object-oriented data, were created and analyzed.

My adviser Jon Barwise was a world-famous logician, a founder of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford, a professor of Mathematics, Philosophy, and Computer Science, and editor of the Handbook of Mathematical Logic. He wrote: “I think what you have done in your dissertation is quite interesting and makes a real contribution to the program of understanding what we mean by logical consequence.”