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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
The papers in this volume address fundamental, and interrelated, philosophical issues concerning modality and identity, issues that have not only been pivotal to the development of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, but remain a key focus of metaphysical debate in the twenty-first. How are we to understand the concepts of necessity and possibility? Is chance a basic ingredient of reality? How are we to make sense of claims about personal identity? Do numbers require distinctive identity criteria? Does the capacity to identify an object presuppose an ability to bring it under a sortal concept? Rather than presenting a single, partisan perspective, Identity and Modality enriches our understanding of identity and modality by bringing together papers written by leading researchers working in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of mathematics. The resulting variety of perspectives correspondingly reflects both the breadth and depth of contemporary theorizing about identity and modality, each paper addressing a particular issue and advancing our knowledge of the area. This volume will provide essential reading for graduate students in the subject and professional philosophers.
Identity and Discrimination, originally published in 1990 and the first book by respected philosopher Timothy Williamson, is now reissued and updated with the inclusion of significant new material. Williamson here proposes an original and rigorous theory linking identity, a relation central to metaphysics, and indiscriminability, a relation central to epistemology. * Updated and reissued edition of Williamson s first publication, with the inclusion of significant new material * Argues for an original cognitive account of the relation between identity and discrimination that has been influential in the philosophy of perception * Pioneers the use of epistemic logic to solve puzzles about indiscriminability * Develops the application of techniques from mathematical logic to understand issues about identity over time and across possible worlds
This book develops new techniques in formal epistemology and applies them to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. It introduces two formats of epistemic evaluation that should be of interest to epistemologists and philosophers of science: the dual-component format, which evaluates a statement on the basis of its safety and informativeness, and the relative-divergence format, which evaluates a probabilistic model on the basis of its complexity and goodness of fit with data. Tomoji Shogenji shows that the former lends support to Cartesian skepticism, but the latter allows us to defeat Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, Shogenji addresses a number of related issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, including epistemic circularity, epistemic closure, and inductive skepticism.
Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics offers a comprehensive, philologically accurate, and exegetically ambitious developmental account of Peirce's theory of speculative grammar. The book traces the evolution of Peirce's grammatical writings from his early research on the classification of arguments in the 1860s up to the complex semiotic taxonomies elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century. It will be of interest to academic specialists working on Peirce, the history of American philosophy and pragmatism, the philosophy of language, the history of logic, and semiotics.
This book seeks to work out which commitments are minimally sufficient to obtain an ontology of the natural world that matches all of today's well-established physical theories. We propose an ontology of the natural world that is defined only by two axioms: (1) There are distance relations that individuate simple objects, namely matter points. (2) The matter points are permanent, with the distances between them changing. Everything else comes in as a means to represent the change in the distance relations in a manner that is both as simple and as informative as possible. The book works this minimalist ontology out in philosophical as well as mathematical terms and shows how one can understand classical mechanics, quantum field theory and relativistic physics on the basis of this ontology. Along the way, we seek to achieve four subsidiary aims: (a) to make a case for a holistic individuation of the basic objects (ontic structural realism); (b) to work out a new version of Humeanism, dubbed Super-Humeanism, that does without natural properties; (c) to set out an ontology of quantum physics that is an alternative to quantum state realism and that avoids any ontological dualism of particles and fields; (d) to vindicate a relationalist ontology based on point objects also in the domain of relativistic physics.
A Logical Introduction to Probability and Induction is a textbook on the mathematics of the probability calculus and its applications in philosophy. On the mathematical side, the textbook introduces these parts of logic and set theory that are needed for a precise formulation of the probability calculus. On the philosophical side, the main focus is on the problem of induction and its reception in epistemology and the philosophy of science. Particular emphasis is placed on the means-end approach to the justification of inductive inference rules. In addition, the book discusses the major interpretations of probability. These are philosophical accounts of the nature of probability that interpret the mathematical structure of the probability calculus. Besides the classical and logical interpretation, they include the interpretation of probability as chance, degree of belief, and relative frequency. The Bayesian interpretation of probability as degree of belief locates probability in a subject's mind. It raises the question why her degrees of belief ought to obey the probability calculus. In contrast to this, chance and relative frequency belong to the external world. While chance is postulated by theory, relative frequencies can be observed empirically. A Logical Introduction to Probability and Induction aims to equip students with the ability to successfully carry out arguments. It begins with elementary deductive logic and uses it as basis for the material on probability and induction. Throughout the textbook results are carefully proved using the inference rules introduced at the beginning, and students are asked to solve problems in the form of 50 exercises. An instructor's manual contains the solutions to these exercises as well as suggested exam questions. The book does not presuppose any background in mathematics, although sections 10.3-10.9 on statistics are technically sophisticated and optional. The textbook is suitable for lower level undergraduate courses in philosophy and logic.
This book is dedicated to Dov Gabbay, one of the most outstanding and most productive researchers in the area of logic, language and reasoning. He has exerted a profound influence in the major fields of logic, linguistics and computer science. Most of the chapters included, therefore, build on his work and present results or summarize areas where Dov has made major contributions. In particular his work on Labelled Deductive Systems is addressed in most of the contributions. The chapters on computational linguistics address logical and deductive aspects of linguistic problems. The papers by van Benthem Lambek and Moortgat investigate categorial considerations and the use of labels within the "parsing as deduction" approach. Analyses of particular linguistic problems are given in the remaining papers by Kamp, Kempson, Moravcsik, Konig and Reyle. They address the logic of generalized quantifiers, the treatment of cross-over phenomena and temporal/aspectual interpretation, as well as applicability of underspecified deduction in linguistic formalisms. The more logic-oriented chapters address philosophical and proof-theoretic problems and give algorithmic solutions for most of them. The spectrum ranges from K. Segerberg's contribution which brings together the two traditions of epistemic and doxastic logics of belief, to M. Finger and M. Reynold's chapter on two-dimensional executable logics with applications to temporal databases. The book demonstrates that a relatively small number of basic techniques and ideas, in particular the idea of labelled deductive systems, can be successfully applied in many different areas.
We are happy to present to the reader the first book of our Applied Logic Series. Walton's book on the fallacies of ambiguity is firmly at the heart of practical reasoning, an important part of applied logic. There is an increasing interest in artifIcial intelligence, philosophy, psychol ogy, software engineering and linguistics, in the analysis and possible mechanisation of human practical reasoning. Continuing the ancient quest that began with Aristotle, computer scientists, logicians, philosophers and linguists are vigorously seeking to deepen our understanding of human reasoning and argumentation. Significant communities of researchers are actively engaged in developing new approaches to logic and argumentation, which are better suited to the urgent needs of today's applications. The author of this book has, over many years, made significant contributions to the detailed analysis of practical reasoning case studies, thus providing solid foundations for new and more applicable formal logical systems. We welcome Doug Walton's new book to our series."
Timothy Williamson is one of the most influential living philosophers working in the areas of logic and metaphysics. His work in these areas has been particularly influential in shaping debates about metaphysical modality, which is the topic of his recent provocative and closely-argued book Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013). This book comprises ten essays by metaphysicians and logicians responding to Williamson's work on metaphysical modality, as well as replies by Williamson to each essay. In addition, it contains an original essay by Williamson, 'Modal science,' concerning the role of modal claims in natural science. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
This comprehensive account of the concept and practices of deduction is the first to bring together perspectives from philosophy, history, psychology and cognitive science, and mathematical practice. Catarina Dutilh Novaes draws on all of these perspectives to argue for an overarching conceptualization of deduction as a dialogical practice: deduction has dialogical roots, and these dialogical roots are still largely present both in theories and in practices of deduction. Dutilh Novaes' account also highlights the deeply human and in fact social nature of deduction, as embedded in actual human practices; as such, it presents a highly innovative account of deduction. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from advanced students to senior scholars, and from philosophers to mathematicians and cognitive scientists.
Philosophers have warned of the perils of a life spent without reflection, but what constitutes reflective inquiry - and why it's necessary in our lives - can be an elusive concept. Synthesizing ideas from minds as diverse as John Dewey and Paulo Freire, theHandbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry presents reflective thought in its most vital aspects, not as a fanciful or nostalgic exercise, but as a powerful means of seeing familiar events anew, encouraging critical thinking and crucial insight, teaching and learning. In its opening pages, two seasoned educators, Maxine Greene and Lee Shulman, discuss reflective inquiry as a form of active attention (Thoreau's "wide-awakeness"), an act of consciousness, and a process by which people can understand themselves, their work (particularly in the form of life projects), and others. Building on this foundation, the Handbook analyzes through the work of 40 internationally oriented authors: - Definitional issues concerning reflection, what it is and is not; - Worldwide social and moral conditions contributing to the growing interest in reflective inquiry in professional education; - Reflection as promoted across professional educational domains, including K-12 education, teacher education, occupational therapy, and the law; - Methods of facilitating and scaffolding reflective engagement; - Current pedagogical and research practices in reflection; - Approaches to assessing reflective inquiry. Educators across the professions as well as adult educators, counselors and psychologists, and curriculum developers concerned with adult learning will find the Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry an invaluable teaching tool for challenging times.
The first edition of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), edited by Richard Kraut, shaped scholarly research and guided new students for thirty years. This new edition introduces students to fresh approaches to Platonic dialogues while advancing the next generation of research. Of its seventeen chapters, nine are entirely new, written by a new generation of scholars. Six others have been thoroughly revised and updated by their original authors. The volume covers the full range of Plato's interests, including ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, mathematics, and psychology. Plato's dialogues are approached as unified works and considered within their intellectual context, and the revised introduction suggests a way of reading the dialogues that attends to the differences between them while also tracing their interrelations. The result is a rich and wide-ranging volume which will be valuable for all students and scholars of Plato.
Is reality logical and is logic real? What is the origin of logical intuitions? What is the role of logical structures in the operations of an intelligent mind and in communication? Is the function of logical structure regulative or constitutive or both in concept formation? This volume provides analyses of the logic-reality relationship from different approaches and perspectives. The point of convergence lies in the exploration of the connections between reality - social, natural or ideal - and logical structures employed in describing or discovering it. Moreover, the book connects logical theory with more concrete issues of rationality, normativity and understanding, thus pointing to a wide range of potential applications. The papers collected in this volume address cutting-edge topics in contemporary discussions amongst specialists. Some essays focus on the role of indispensability considerations in the justification of logical competence, and the wide range of challenges within the philosophy of mathematics. Others present advances in dynamic logical analysis such as extension of game semantics to non-logical part of vocabulary and development of models of contractive speech act."
This collection presents the first sustained examination of the nature and status of the idea of principles in early modern thought. Principles are almost ubiquitous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the term appears in famous book titles, such as Newton's Principia; the notion plays a central role in the thought of many leading philosophers, such as Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason; and many of the great discoveries of the period, such as the Law of Gravitational Attraction, were described as principles. Ranging from mathematics and law to chemistry, from natural and moral philosophy to natural theology, and covering some of the leading thinkers of the period, this volume presents ten compelling new essays that illustrate the centrality and importance of the idea of principles in early modern thought. It contains chapters by leading scholars in the field, including the Leibniz scholar Daniel Garber and the historian of chemistry William R. Newman, as well as exciting, emerging scholars, such as the Newton scholar Kirsten Walsh and a leading expert on experimental philosophy, Alberto Vanzo. The Idea of Principles in Early Modern Thought: Interdisciplinary Perspectives charts the terrain of one of the period's central concepts for the first time, and opens up new lines for further research.
The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce's work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce's theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce's theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice's philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science.
This publication will introduce how two different countries promote high quality learning with technology in very different educational systems. The book opens inspiring scenarios how new technological tools and services can be used for promoting students' learning in schools and higher education, enhancing collaboration in educational communities and supporting teachers' professional development. The publication focuses on three major themes: Students as knowledge and art creators in playful learning systems, personalized learning supported by mobiles and intelligent tutoring systems with games and new web-based tools identifying learning difficulties, and technology in digitalized learning environments. The book is based on systematic research work in universities.
This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language.
In this book, Lorraine Besser-Jones develops a eudaimonistic virtue ethics based on a psychological account of human nature. While her project maintains the fundamental features of the eudaimonistic virtue ethical framework-virtue, character, and well-being-she constructs these concepts from an empirical basis, drawing support from the psychological fields of self-determination and self-regulation theory. Besser-Jones's resulting account of "eudaimonic ethics" presents a compelling normative theory and offers insight into what is involved in being a virtuous person and "acting well." This original contribution to contemporary ethics and moral psychology puts forward a provocative hypothesis of what an empirically-based moral theory would look like.
We are happy to present the first volume of the Handbook of Defeasible Reasoning and Uncertainty Management Systems. Uncertainty pervades the real world and must therefore be addressed by every system that attempts to represent reality. The representation of uncertainty is a ma jor concern of philosophers, logicians, artificial intelligence researchers and com puter sciencists, psychologists, statisticians, economists and engineers. The present Handbook volumes provide frontline coverage of this area. This Handbook was produced in the style of previous handbook series like the Handbook of Philosoph ical Logic, the Handbook of Logic in Computer Science, the Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, and can be seen as a companion to them in covering the wide applications of logic and reasoning. We hope it will answer the needs for adequate representations of uncertainty. This Handbook series grew out of the ESPRIT Basic Research Project DRUMS II, where the acronym is made out of the Handbook series title. This project was financially supported by the European Union and regroups 20 major European research teams working in the general domain of uncertainty. As a fringe benefit of the DRUMS project, the research community was able to create this Hand book series, relying on the DRUMS participants as the core of the authors for the Handbook together with external international experts."
Moral Inferences is the first volume to thoroughly explore the relationship between morality and reasoning. Drawing on the expertise of world-leading researchers, this text provides ground-breaking insight into the importance of studying these distinct fields together. The volume integrates the latest research into morality with current theories in reasoning to consider the prominent role reasoning plays in everyday moral judgements. Featuring contributions on topics such as moral arguments, causal models, and dual process theory, this text provides a new perspectives on previous studies, encouraging researchers to adopt a more integrated approach in the future. Moral Inferences will be essential reading for students and researchers of moral psychology, specifically those interested in reasoning, rationality and decision-making.
Moral Inferences is the first volume to thoroughly explore the relationship between morality and reasoning. Drawing on the expertise of world-leading researchers, this text provides ground-breaking insight into the importance of studying these distinct fields together. The volume integrates the latest research into morality with current theories in reasoning to consider the prominent role reasoning plays in everyday moral judgements. Featuring contributions on topics such as moral arguments, causal models, and dual process theory, this text provides a new perspectives on previous studies, encouraging researchers to adopt a more integrated approach in the future. Moral Inferences will be essential reading for students and researchers of moral psychology, specifically those interested in reasoning, rationality and decision-making.
Were the most serious philosophers of the millennium 200 A.D. to 1200 A.D. just confused mystics? This book shows otherwise. John Martin rehabilitates Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine. The Neoplatonists devise ranking predicates like good, excellent, perfect to divide the Chain of Being, and use the predicate intensifier hyper so that it becomes a valid logical argument to reason from God is not (merely) good to God is hyper-good. In this way the relational facts underlying reality find expression in Aristotle's subject-predicate statements, and the Platonic tradition proves able to subsume Aristotle's logic while at the same time rejecting his metaphysics. In the Middle Ages when Aristotle's larger philosophy was recovered and joined again to the Neoplatonic tradition which was never lost, Neoplatonic logic lived along side Aristotle's metaphysics in a sometime confusing and unsettled way. Showing Neoplatonism to be significantly richer in its logical and philosophical ideas than it is usually given credit for, this book will be of interest not just to historians of logic, but to philosophers, logicians, linguists, and theologians.
Epistemic Principles: A Primer of the Theory of Knowledge presents a compact account of the basic principles of the theory of knowledge. In doing this, Nicholas Rescher aims to fill the current gap in contemporary philosophical theory of knowledge with a comprehensive analysis of epistemological fundamentals. The book is not a mere inventory of such rules and principles, but rather interweaves them into a continuous exposition of basic issues. Written at a user-friendly and accessible level, Epistemic Principles is an essential addition for both advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in epistemology.
It is with great pleasure that we are presenting to the community the second edition of this extraordinary handbook. It has been over 15 years since the publication of the first edition and there have been great changes in the landscape of philosophical logic since then. The first edition has proved invaluable to generations of students and researchers in formal philosophy and language, as well as to consumers of logic in many applied areas. The main logic article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1999 has described the first edition as 'the best starting point for exploring any of the topics in logic'. We are confident that the second edition will prove to be just as good The first edition was the second handbook published for the logic commu nity. It followed the North Holland one volume Handbook of Mathematical Logic, published in 1977, edited by the late Jon Barwise. The four volume Handbook of Philosophical Logic, published 1983-1989 came at a fortunate temporal junction at the evolution of logic. This was the time when logic was gaining ground in computer science and artificial intelligence circles. These areas were under increasing commercial pressure to provide devices which help and/or replace the human in his daily activity. This pressure required the use of logic in the modelling of human activity and organisa tion on the one hand and to provide the theoretical basis for the computer program constructs on the other." |
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