Public Biography
D.C. Makinson is a contributing philosophy columnist for The New York Time5, where he writes “The Preface,” an occasional column on logic, belief, and the structural inadequacies of human reasoning. He has written the column since 2025.
Mr. Makinson is an Australian-British logician and philosopher whose career has spanned appointments at the American University of Beirut, King’s College London, and the London School of Economics, among other institutions. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford and has published extensively on the logic of belief revision, nonmonotonic reasoning, and normative systems.
He is best known for his 1965 paper “The Paradox of the Preface,” published in Analysis, which identified a problem that has resisted formal resolution for six decades. The paradox arises when an author believes every individual claim in a book to be true while also believing, in the preface, that the book surely contains errors — holding two positions that are individually rational and jointly incoherent. The paper is four pages long. The literature it has generated is not.
Mr. Makinson has described his relationship to the paradox as “complicated.” In a 2019 interview with the London Review of Books, he said: “I identified it. I did not solve it. I am not sure that distinction has been adequately appreciated by the people who keep inviting me to conferences and asking me to solve it.” He has attended, by his own count, more than seventy conferences at which the paradox was discussed. He has left each one in the same epistemic state in which he arrived.
He is the author of Bridges from Classical to Nonmonotonic Logic (King’s College Publications, 2005) and co-author of Input/Output Logic (2000), a formal framework for reasoning about norms that has been cited in contexts ranging from artificial intelligence to European Union regulatory compliance. He did not anticipate the EU application and has declined to comment on it.
Mr. Makinson resides in London.
Selected Columns
- “The Preface: On Encountering My Own Paradox at a Hardware Store in Duluth” (February 2026)
- “Everyone Is Wrong About Something, Including Me, Which I Also Believe” (January 2026)
- “A Brief Note on the Sixty-Year Anniversary of a Problem I Cannot Fix” (December 2025)