I submitted "The Moving Topic"

I could not hold off any longer on submitting this article. It is my life's work - in so far as I started observing the behavior or "or" and "and" in college; spent time in graduate school inventing little notations; gave it all up to get a Ph.D. and a job. Over the years of working on applied math and algorithms I ended up doing a lot more user interface design than you would expect from a mathematician. So I have some skill in simplifying ideas. 

Then, in the 11th hour, these ideas were re-invigorated by a technical challenge of automatic text processing, at Dentsply. So I pulled out my love of inventing little languages, and put together "narrative notation", as a way to describe natural language expressions. User interface design skill has something to do with the narrative "elements" I settled on. I got focused on topic-specific language processing, and ended up building Narwhal which is a chatbot development platform. The ideas work pretty well but the approach is is labor intensive. 

When I started retirement, I focused on finishing Narwhal so I could be sure to have a working platform to demonstrate the ideas. When it was pretty much in place, I kept a couple pages of typed notes about the truisms. When I finished Narwhal, I was looking around for something else to work on. I mentioned to an older lady that I planned to write an archaeology book "later". She told me I better get going asap. So writing "A Shadow Under the Rock" became my main task. Which filled in the early years of the pandemic, then got self-published on Amazon. I have sold about 100 copies so far, with one or two new orders per month. This, again, left me with nothing to do. 

So I pulled out the two pages of notes on truisms and with a vague desire to give them a theoretical basis. I thought: Maybe if I start writing down what I know about truisms, some kind of result or mathematics will emerge. Miraculously that is what happened. 

I was focused on "narrative continuity"  - what makes language hold together and avoid non-sequiturs. The truisms play a key role in that definition. So what with one thing and another, I tightened the definitions and the ideas, as I wrote. And by the time I got to defining "continuity" clearly, I was starting to describe narrative equivalence and was able to make an almost casual observation: that continuous narrative "path" equivalence  - in any of a variety of ways -  gives the basic definition of truth. An amazingly simple idea, everyone understands intuitively, that never was clearly defined. This was the "content" I was hoping for. In the 11th hour I created a new branch of logic, a new approach to AI, and a wonderful collection of ideas.

I could not be happier with my intellectual activity during retirement . So, today I submitted the article to an "Oxford Journal" called (a bit pretentiously) Pbilosophia Mathematica. I have been polishing the article and the cover letter for months. It was time to submit it. 

And now, I have to figure out what to think about next.

I would not want to close out this discussion of history, without being clear that my insecurity has always been present. I was insecure to go to BU rather than MIT or Harvard. But I learned phenomenology in Boston - while the opponent theory was being promoted across the river in Cambridge, MA. When I submitted "The Moving Topic" to a journal, I made sure it was Oxford and not Cambridge. Because that other Cambridge, the one in Britain, was the original home of people like Russell and Wittgenstein who I both revere and hold in contempt. Brilliant guys who never figured it out - mainly cuz they were in too big a hurry to get to the math.

Update:  Of course it was rejected because the reviewer already knew all about Narrative.