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Dr. O. T. Tandberg
Royal Swedish Academy
Box 50005
S-10405
Stockholm, SWEDEN

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Dear Dr. Tandberg:

	This letter is to follow up on my phone call, provide the
information you requested and ask some questions about what ICSU
is likely to do to assure that my colleagues can attend the Moscow
meeting, what ICSU has done in the past with what result, and what
ICSU and its constituent societies do when their efforts fail.
I need this information in order to determine whether ICSU can
be relied on or whether independent effort is needed to put
pressure on the Soviets.

	The meeting is the Eighth International Congress of Logic,
Methodology and Philosophy of Science which will be held in Moscow, August
17-22, 1987.  My colleague Vladimir Lifschitz and I plan to submit a paper
with the approximate title ``Causality and Non-Monotonic Reasoning''.
Dana Scott knows something of our work in this new area of logic and will
tell you that it is entirely appropriate for the Congress.

	Lifschitz was educated in Leningrad as a mathematical logician and
legally emigrated in 1976.  He is now a U.S. citizen.  In the
U.S. he has had academic jobs including a tenured associate professorship
at the University of Texas at El Paso, but now he is Senior Research
Associate in Computer Science at Stanford.  I believe he will eventually
become a professor in the Stanford Computer Science Department.  He has
recently become well known in the field of artificial intelligence for his
work in formalizing non-monotonic reasoning and is an editor of the
journal {\it Artificial Intelligence}.

	Besides Lifschitz we know that Professor Yuri Gurevich of the
Computer Science Department, University of Michigan, has applied for
information about the Moscow meeting and intends to submit a paper.
Gurevich also emigrated legally from the Soviet Union and is now an
Israeli citizen.

	Incidentally, the head of the Soviet organizing committee, Ivan
Timofeyevich Frolov, is the editor of {\it Kommunist}, the main
theoretical journal of the Communist Party as well as a Corresponding
Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.  He is thus an important enough
person to be able to obtain prompt answers to questions that may arise.
On the other hand, he might have some commitments as to who are
non-persons.

	As I mentioned, I have had some previous experience with similar
issues, and I enclose a copy of a report about some problems that were
encountered in 1975.  I hope that eleven years more experience has
resulted in the ability of ICSU to handle such problems effectively.

\closing
Sincerely,       

John McCarthy    
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cc:
Vladimir Lifschitz
Yuri Gurevich
Patrick Suppes
Dana Scott,
Walter Rosenblith
Jens Erik Fenstad
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Enclosure
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JMC/ra 
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\end

cc: Vladimir Lifschitz, Yuri Gurevich, Patrick Suppes, Dana Scott,
Walter Rosenblith