Jon Michael Dunn

Dunn was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1941. He went to high school in Lafayette, Indiana, where he worked in Purdue Biology laboratories after school and summers. He was the first in his family to go to college.

He has an A.B. in Philosophy from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Logic) from the University of Pittsburgh, where he wrote his dissertation, The Algebra of Intensional Logics.[1]

He taught at Wayne State University and at Yale University as a visitor before coming to Indiana University Bloomington in 1969, from which he retired in 2007.

He received grants from NSF, NEH, ACLS, and has visited, among other places, at the Australian National University, University of Oxford, and the University of Melbourne. In 2014 he was a visiting professor at his Ph.D. alma mater the University of Pittsburgh. In 2002 he accepted on behalf of the School of Informatics the Techpoint (Indiana Information Technology association) Mira for Outstanding Education Contribution to Information Technology. In 2007 he was awarded the Indiana University Bloomington Provost’s Medal, and was made a Sagamore of the Wabash by the Governor of Indiana.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been President of the Society for Exact Philosophy, and on the Executive Committee of the Association for Symbolic Logic. He has been an editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic and chief editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic. He has published 6 books and over 100 papers, and has directed or co-directed 17 Ph. D. dissertations (Philosophy, Computer Science, Mathematics).

After he retired, he served for ten years on the board of HealthLINC, the regional health information exchange, and was President there for three years. Since 2010 he has been affiliated with the Info-Metrics Institute, American University, and is a member of its Advisory Board (co-chair 2017- ).

Dunn's research focuses on information based logics, particularly relevance logics and other so-called "substructural" logics. He has an algebraic approach to these under the heading of "gaggle theory" (for generalized galois logics), which he has developed in articles, his book with G. Hardgree Algebraic Methods in Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 2001) [2], and a book with K. Bimbó, Generalized Galois Logics: Relational Semantics of Nonclassical Logical Calculi. (CSLI Publications, 2008).[3]

In his work on relevance logic, he was fortunate to study as a graduate student with the two major figures in relevance logic, Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap, Jr.  He was a contributing author to their book Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Entailment Vol. 1,[4] and a full co-author with them to Vol. 2. [5]

He has also worked on quantum logic and quantum computation, subjective probability in the context of incomplete and conflicting information, and with Katalin Bimbό recently proved the decidability of Ticket Entailment (a problem open since 1960).[6] Dunn has recently been honored by the book J. Michael Dunn on Information Based Logic, edited by Katalin Bimbó [7] and appearing in Springer's series Outstanding Contributions to Logic.[8]