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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
"Intuition" has perhaps been the least understood and the most
abused term in philosophy. It is often the term used when one has
no plausible explanation for the source of a given belief or
opinion. According to some sceptics, it is understood only in terms
of what it is not, and it is not any of the better understood means
for acquiring knowledge. In mathematics the term has also
unfortunately been used in this way. Thus, intuition is sometimes
portrayed as if it were the Third Eye, something only mathematical
"mystics," like Ramanujan, possess. In mathematics the notion has
also been used in a host of other senses: by "intuitive" one might
mean informal, or non-rigourous, or visual, or holistic, or
incomplete, or perhaps even convincing in spite of lack of proof.
My aim in this book is to sweep all of this aside, to argue that
there is a perfectly coherent, philosophically respectable notion
of mathematical intuition according to which intuition is a
condition necessary for mathemati cal knowledge. I shall argue that
mathematical intuition is not any special or mysterious kind of
faculty, and that it is possible to make progress in the
philosophical analysis of this notion. This kind of undertaking has
a precedent in the philosophy of Kant. While I shall be mostly
developing ideas about intuition due to Edmund Husser there will be
a kind of Kantian argument underlying the entire book."
One of the great minds of the English Renaissance, Francis Bacon
was a scholar, politician, and early advocate of scientific
thinking who set no limits on the scope of his enquiries. In these
compact and vibrant essays, Bacon addresses an astonishingly
diverse range of subjects including religion, politics, personal
relationships, morality and even architecture. Evident throughout
the volume is his considerable rhetorical skill, incisive wit, and
an unwavering belief in the power of reason.
Truth is one of the oldest and most central topics in philosophy.
Formal theories explore the connections between truth and logic,
and they address truth-theoretic paradoxes such as the Liar. Three
leading philosopher-logicians now present a concise overview of the
main issues and ideas in formal theories of truth. Beall,
Glanzberg, and Ripley explain key logical techniques on which such
formal theories rely, providing the formal and logical background
needed to develop formal theories of truth. They examine the most
important truth-theoretic paradoxes, including the Liar paradoxes.
They explore approaches that keep principles of truth simple while
relying on nonclassical logic; approaches that preserve classical
logic but do so by complicating the principles of truth; and
approaches based on substructural logics that change the shape of
the target consequence relation itself. Finally, inconsistency and
revision theories are reviewed, and contrasted with the approaches
previously discussed. For any reader who has a basic grounding in
logic, this book offers an ideal guide to formal theories of truth.
Model theory is used in every theoretical branch of analytic
philosophy: in philosophy of mathematics, in philosophy of science,
in philosophy of language, in philosophical logic, and in
metaphysics. But these wide-ranging uses of model theory have
created a highly fragmented literature. On the one hand, many
philosophically significant results are found only in mathematics
textbooks: these are aimed squarely at mathematicians; they
typically presuppose that the reader has a serious background in
mathematics; and little clue is given as to their philosophical
significance. On the other hand, the philosophical applications of
these results are scattered across disconnected pockets of papers.
The first aim of this book, then, is to explore the philosophical
uses of model theory, focusing on the central topics of reference,
realism, and doxology. Its second aim is to address important
questions in the philosophy of model theory, such as: sameness of
theories and structure, the boundaries of logic, and the
classification of mathematical structures. Philosophy and Model
Theory will be accessible to anyone who has completed an
introductory logic course. It does not assume that readers have
encountered model theory before, but starts right at the beginning,
discussing philosophical issues that arise even with conceptually
basic model theory. Moreover, the book is largely self-contained:
model-theoretic notions are defined as and when they are needed for
the philosophical discussion, and many of the most philosophically
significant results are given accessible proofs.
Writing is essential to learning. One cannot be educated and yet
unable to communicate one's ideas in written form. But, learning to
write can occur only through a process of cultivation requiring
intellectual discipline. As with any set of complex skills, there
are fundamentals of writing that must be internalized and then
applied using one's thinking. This guide focuses on the most
important of those fundamentals.
For the most part, the papers collected in this volume stern from
presentations given at a conference held in Tucson over the weekend
of May 31 through June 2, 1985. We wish to record our gratitude to
the participants in that conference, as well as to the National
Science Foundation (Grant No. BNS-8418916) and the University of
Arizona SBS Research Institute for their financial support. The
advice we received from Susan Steele on organizational matters
proved invaluable and had many felicitous consequences for the
success of the con ference. We also would like to thank the staff
of the Departments of Linguistics of the University of Arizona and
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for their help, as weIl
as a number of individuals, including Lin Hall, Kathy Todd, and
Jiazhen Hu, Sandra Fulmer, Maria Sandoval, Natsuko Tsujimura,
Stuart Davis, Mark Lewis, Robin Schafer, Shi Zhang, Olivia
Oehrle-Steele, and Paul Saka. Finally, we would like to express our
gratitude to Martin Scrivener, our editor, for his patience and his
encouragement. Vll INTRODUCTION The term 'categorial grammar' was
introduced by Bar-Rillel (1964, page 99) as a handy way of grouping
together some of his own earlier work (1953) and the work of the
Polish logicians and philosophers Lesniewski (1929) and Ajdukiewicz
(1935), in contrast to approaches to linguistic analysis based on
phrase structure grammars."
Klemens Szaniawski was born in Warsaw on March 3, 1925. He began to
study philosophy in the clandestine Warsaw University during World
War II. Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Jan Lukasiewicz, Maria and Stanislaw
Ossowskis, Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, and Henryk Hii: were among his
teachers. Sza- niawski was also a member of the Polish Home Army
(AK), one of the young- est. He was arrested and spent the last
period of the war as a prisoner in Auschwitz. After 1945, he
continued his studies in the University of L6dz; his Master thesis
was devoted to French moral thought of the 17th and 18th cen-
turies. Then he worked in the Department of Ethics in L6dZ. In
1950, he received his Ph. D. on the basis of the dissertation on
the concept of honour in knight groups in the Middle Ages; Maria
Ossowska was the supervisor. In the early fifties he moved to
Warsaw to the Department of Logic, directed by Kotarbinski. He took
his habilitation exams in 1961. In 1969 he became a professor.
Since 1970 he was the head of Department of the Logic at the Warsaw
University. In the sixties Szaniawski was also the Dean of the
Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology. In 1984 he was elected the
Rector Magnificus of the Warsaw University but the Ministry
overruled the autonomous democra- tic vote of the academic
community. He served as the President of the Polish (since 1977)
taking this post after Kotarbinski.
Games, Norms, and Reasons: Logic at the Crossroads provides an
overview of modern logic focusing on its relationships with other
disciplines, including new interfaces with rational choice theory,
epistemology, game theory and informatics. This book continues a
series called "Logic at the Crossroads" whose title reflects a view
that the deep insights from the classical phase of mathematical
logic can form a harmonious mixture with a new, more ambitious
research agenda of understanding and enhancing human reasoning and
intelligent interaction. The editors have gathered together
articles from active authors in this new area that explore dynamic
logical aspects of norms, reasons, preferences and beliefs in human
agency, human interaction and groups. The book pays a special
tribute to Professor Rohit Parikh, a pioneer in this movement.
The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality provides a
wide-ranging survey of topics in a rapidly expanding area of
interdisciplinary research. It consists of 36 chapters, written
exclusively for this volume, by an international team of experts.
What is distinctive about the study of collective intentionality
within the broader study of social interactions and structures is
its focus on the conceptual and psychological features of joint or
shared actions and attitudes, and their implications for the nature
of social groups and their functioning. This Handbook fully
captures this distinctive nature of the field and how it subsumes
the study of collective action, responsibility, reasoning, thought,
intention, emotion, phenomenology, decision-making, knowledge,
trust, rationality, cooperation, competition, and related issues,
as well as how these underpin social practices, organizations,
conventions, institutions and social ontology. Like the field, the
Handbook is interdisciplinary, drawing on research in philosophy,
cognitive science, linguistics, legal theory, anthropology,
sociology, computer science, psychology, economics, and political
science. Finally, the Handbook promotes several specific goals: (1)
it provides an important resource for students and researchers
interested in collective intentionality; (2) it integrates work
across disciplines and areas of research as it helps to define the
shape and scope of an emerging area of research; (3) it advances
the study of collective intentionality.
Frontiers in Belief Revision is a unique collection of leading edge
research in Belief Revision. It contains the latest innovative
ideas of highly respected and pioneering experts in the area,
including Isaac Levi, Krister Segerberg, Sven Ove Hansson, Didier
Dubois, and Henri Prade. The book addresses foundational issues of
inductive reasoning and minimal change, generalizations of the
standard belief revision theories, strategies for iterated
revisions, probabilistic beliefs, multiagent environments and a
variety of data structures and mechanisms for implementations. This
book is suitable for students and researchers interested in
knowledge representation and in the state of the art of the theory
and practice of belief revision.
This is a collection of, mostly unpublished, papers on topics surrounding decision theory. It addresses the most important areas in the philosophical study of rationality and knowledge, for example: causal vs. evidential decision theory, game theory, backwards induction, bounded rationality, counterfactual reasoning in games and in general, and analyses of the famous common knowledge assumptions in game theory.
1. The ?rst edition of this book was published in 1977. The text
has been well received and is still used, although it has been out
of print for some time. In the intervening three decades, a lot of
interesting things have happened to mathematical logic: (i) Model
theory has shown that insights acquired in the study of formal
languages could be used fruitfully in solving old problems of
conventional mathematics. (ii) Mathematics has been and is moving
with growing acceleration from the set-theoretic language of
structures to the language and intuition of (higher) categories,
leaving behind old concerns about in?nities: a new view of
foundations is now emerging. (iii) Computer science, a no-nonsense
child of the abstract computability theory, has been creatively
dealing with old challenges and providing new ones, such as the
P/NP problem. Planning additional chapters for this second edition,
I have decided to focus onmodeltheory, the
conspicuousabsenceofwhichinthe ?rsteditionwasnoted in several
reviews, and the theory of computation, including its categorical
and quantum aspects. The whole Part IV: Model Theory, is new. I am
very grateful to Boris I. Zilber, who kindly agreed to write it. It
may be read directly after Chapter II. The contents of the ?rst
edition are basically reproduced here as Chapters I-VIII. Section
IV.7, on the cardinality of the continuum, is completed by Section
IV.7.3, discussing H. Woodin's discovery.
Paris of the year 1900 left two landmarks: the Tour Eiffel, and
David Hilbert's celebrated list of twenty-four mathematical
problems presented at a conference opening the new century. Kurt
Goedel, a logical icon of that time, showed Hilbert's ideal of
complete axiomatization of mathematics to be unattainable. The
result, of 1931, is called Goedel's incompleteness theorem. Goedel
then went on to attack Hilbert's first and second Paris problems,
namely Cantor's continuum problem about the type of infinity of the
real numbers, and the freedom from contradiction of the theory of
real numbers. By 1963, it became clear that Hilbert's first
question could not be answered by any known means, half of the
credit of this seeming faux pas going to Goedel. The second is a
problem still wide open. Goedel worked on it for years, with no
definitive results; The best he could offer was a start with the
arithmetic of the entire numbers. This book, Goedel's lectures at
the famous Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 1941, shows
how far he had come with Hilbert's second problem, namely to a
theory of computable functionals of finite type and a proof of the
consistency of ordinary arithmetic. It offers indispensable reading
for logicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists interested
in foundational questions. It will form a basis for further
investigations into Goedel's vast Nachlass of unpublished notes on
how to extend the results of his lectures to the theory of real
numbers. The book also gives insights into the conceptual and
formal work that is needed for the solution of profound scientific
questions, by one of the central figures of 20th century science
and philosophy.
The issue of a logic foundation for African thought connects well
with the question of method. Do we need new methods for African
philosophy and studies? Or, are the methods of Western thought
adequate for African intellectual space? These questions are not
some of the easiest to answer because they lead straight to the
question of whether or not a logic tradition from African
intellectual space is possible. Thus in charting the course of
future direction in African philosophy and studies, one must be
confronted with this question of logic. The author boldly takes up
this challenge and becomes the first to do so in a book by
introducing new concepts and formulating a new African
culture-inspired system of logic called Ezumezu which he believes
would ground new methods in African philosophy and studies. He
develops this system to rescue African philosophy and, by
extension, sundry fields in African Indigenous Knowledge Systems
from the spell of Plato and the hegemony of Aristotle. African
philosophers can now ground their discourses in Ezumezu logic which
will distinguish their philosophy as a tradition in its own right.
On the whole, the book engages with some of the lingering
controversies in the idea of (an) African logic before unveiling
Ezumezu as a philosophy of logic, methodology and formal system.
The book also provides fresh arguments and insights on the themes
of decolonisation and Africanisation for the intellectual
transformation of scholarship in Africa. It will appeal to
philosophers and logicians-undergraduates and post graduate
researchers-as well as those in various areas of African studies.
Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a natural point of entry to
what for most readers will be a new subject. Plural logic deals
with plural terms ('Whitehead and Russell', 'Henry VIII's wives',
'the real numbers', 'the square root of -1', 'they'), plural
predicates ('surrounded the fort', 'are prime', 'are consistent',
'imply'), and plural quantification ('some things', 'any things').
Current logic is singularist: its terms stand for at most one
thing. By contrast, the foundational thesis of this book is that a
particular term may legitimately stand for several things at once;
in other words, there is such a thing as genuinely plural
denotation. The authors argue that plural phenomena need to be
taken seriously and that the only viable response is to adopt a
plural logic, a logic based on plural denotation. They expound a
framework of ideas that includes the distinction between
distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural
descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists. A formal system of
plural logic is presented in three stages, before being applied to
Cantorian set theory as an illustration. Technicalities have been
kept to a minimum, and anyone who is familiar with the classical
predicate calculus should be able to follow it. The authors'
approach is an attractive blend of no-nonsense argumentative
directness and open-minded liberalism, and they convey the exciting
and unexpected richness of their subject. Mathematicians and
linguists, as well as logicians and philosophers, will find
surprises in this book. This second edition includes a greatly
expanded treatment of the paradigm empty term zilch, a much
strengthened treatment of Cantorian set theory, and a new chapter
on higher-level plural logic.
This book provides an epistemological study of the great Islamic
scholar of Banjarese origin, Syeikh Muhammad Arsyad al-Banjari
(1710-1812) who contributed to the development of Islam in
Indonesia and, in general, Southeast Asia. The work focuses on
Arsyad al-Banjari's dialectical use and understanding of qiyas or
correlational inference as a model of parallel reasoning or analogy
in Islamic jurisprudence. This constituted the most prominent
instrument he applied in his effort of integrating Islamic law into
the Banjarese society.This work studies how Arsyad al-Banjari
integrates jadal theory or dialectic in Islamic jurisprudence,
within his application of qiyas. The author develops a framework
for qiyas which acts as the interface between jadal, dialogical
logic, and Per Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory (CTT). One of
the epistemological results emerging from the present study is that
the different forms of qiyas applied by Arsyad al-Banjari represent
an innovative and sophisticated form of reasoning. The volume is
divided into three parts that discuss the types of qiyas as well
their dialectical and argumentative aspects, historical background
and context of Banjar, and demonstrates how the theory of qiyas
comes quite close to the contemporary model of parallel reasoning
for sciences and mathematics developed by Paul Bartha (2010). This
volume will be of interest to historians and philosophers in
general, and logicians and historians of philosophy in particular.
The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our
thinking. The quality of our thinking, in turn, is determined by
the quality of our questions, for questions are the engine, the
driving force behind thinking. Without questions, we have nothing
to think about. Without essential questions, we often fail to focus
our thinking on the significant and substantive. When we ask
essential questions, we deal with what is necessary, relevant, and
indispensable to a matter at hand. We recognize what is at the
heart of the matter. Our thinking is grounded and disciplined. We
are ready to learn. We are intellectually able to find our way
about. To be successful in life, one needs to ask essential
questions: essential questions when reading, writing, and speaking;
when shopping, working, and parenting; when forming friendships,
choosing life-partners, and interacting with the mass media and the
Internet. Yet few people are masters of the art of asking essential
questions. Most have never thought about why some questions are
crucial and others peripheral. Essential questions are rarely
studied in school. They are rarely modeled at home. Most people
question according to their psychological associations. Their
questions are haphazard and scattered. The ideas we provide are
useful only to the extent that they are employed daily to ask
essential questions. Practice in asking essential questions
eventually leads to the habit of asking essential questions. But we
can never practice asking essential questions if we have no
conception of them. This mini-guide is a starting place for
understanding concepts that, when applied, lead to essential
questions. We introduce essential questions as indispensable
intellectual tools. We focus on principles essential to
formulating, analyzing, assessing, and settling primary questions.
You will notice that our categories of question types are not
exclusive. There is a great deal of overlap
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