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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
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.
Critical and Creative Thinking is a vital resource that expands how
we think and employ the basic skills involved in the identification
and evaluation of an argument. It provides a basic foundation for
teaching and learning critical and creative thinking. The text
provides readers with the fundamental skills they need to approach
ideas and opinions on current social issues. The selected readings
have been carefully chosen for their ability to bring a wide range
of perspectives and importance to the critical and creative
thinking approach in the text. The first section explores
approaches to critical and creative thinking, followed by readings
for application, and then additional learning activities and
resources. Specific topics include gender, education, race and
immigration, inequality, and family. This new edition includes
updated content and activities, as well as new and relevant
readings that deal with current day issues (e.g., online learning
and microaggressions). Critical and Creative Thinking is an ideal
primary text for courses in critical thinking, social problems,
social work, and sociology. It can also serve as a supplementary
text for English courses, especially those with emphasis on
critical and creative thinking.
This is a collection of, mostly unpublished, papers on topics surrounding decision theory.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.
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.
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.
This book offers readers a collection of 50 short chapter entries
on topics in the philosophy of language. Each entry addresses a
paradox, a longstanding puzzle, or a major theme that has emerged
in the field from the last 150 years, tracing overlap with issues
in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, ethics, political
philosophy, and literature. Each of the 50 entries is written as a
piece that can stand on its own, though useful connections to other
entries are mentioned throughout the text. Readers can open the
book and start with almost any of the entries, following themes of
greatest interest to them. Each entry includes recommendations for
further reading on the topic. Philosophy of Language: 50 Puzzles,
Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is useful as a standalone
textbook, or can be supplemented by additional readings that
instructors choose. The accessible style makes it suitable for
introductory level through intermediate undergraduate courses, as
well as for independent learners, or even as a reference for more
advanced students and researchers. Key Features: Uses a
problem-centered approach to philosophy of language (rather than
author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to
first-time students of the subject. Offers stand-alone chapters,
allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving
instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes
of the course. Provides up-to-date recommended readings at the end
of each chapter, or about 500 sources in total, amounting to an
extensive review of the literature on each topic.
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.
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.
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.
This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of
motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological
principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of
motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain
control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea
of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th
century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing
together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion
of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides,
the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and
logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be
present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who
also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible.
With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental
framework with which we conceptualise motion today.
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.
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.
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
Of the four chapters in this book, the first two discuss (albeit in
consider ably modified form) matters previously discussed in my
papers 'On the Logic of Conditionals' [1] and 'Probability and the
Logic of Conditionals' [2], while the last two present essentially
new material. Chapter I is relatively informal and roughly
parallels the first of the above papers in discussing the basic
ideas of a probabilistic approach to the logic of the indicative
conditional, according to which these constructions do not have
truth values, but they do have probabilities (equal to conditional
probabilities), and the appropriate criterion of soundness for
inferences involving them is that it should not be possible for all
premises of the inference to be probable while the conclusion is
improbable. Applying this criterion is shown to have radically
different consequences from the orthodox 'material conditional'
theory, not only in application to the standard 'fallacies' of the
material conditional, but to many forms (e. g. , Contraposition)
which have hitherto been regarded as above suspi cion. Many more
applications are considered in Chapter I, as well as certain
related theoretical matters. The chief of these, which is the most
important new topic treated in Chapter I (i. e.
This volume offers English translations of three early works by
Ernst Schroeder (1841-1902), a mathematician and logician whose
philosophical ruminations and pathbreaking contributions to
algebraic logic attracted the admiration and ire of figures such as
Dedekind, Frege, Husserl, and C. S. Peirce. Today he still engages
the sympathetic interest of logicians and philosophers. The works
translated record Schroeder's journey out of algebra into algebraic
logic and document his transformation of George Boole's opaque and
unwieldy logical calculus into what we now recognize as Boolean
algebra. Readers interested in algebraic logic and abstract algebra
can look forward to a tour of the early history of those fields
with a guide who was exceptionally thorough, unfailingly honest,
and deeply reflective.
This volume examines the role of logic in cognitive psychology in
light of recent developments. Gonzalo Reyes's new semantic theory
has brought the fields of cognitive psychology and logic closer
together, and has shed light on how children master proper names
and count nouns, and thus acquire knowledge. The chapters highlight
the inadequacies of classical logic in its handling of ordinary
language and reveal the prospects of applying these new theories to
cognitive psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, the
philosophy of language and logic.
This volume deals with formal, mechanizable reasoning in modal
logics, that is, logics of necessity, possibility, belief, time
computations etc. It is therefore of immense interest for various
interrelated disciplines such as philosophy, AI, computer science,
logic, cognitive science and linguistics. The book consists of 15
original research papers, divided into three parts. The first part
contains papers which give a profound description of powerful
proof-theoretic methods as applied to the normal modal logic S4.
Part II is concerned with a number of generalizations of the
standard proof-theoretic formats, while the third part presents new
and important results on semantics-based proof systems for modal
logic.
Offering a bold new vision on the history of modern logic, Lukas M.
Verburgt and Matteo Cosci focus on the lasting impact of
Aristotle's syllogism between the 1820s and 1930s. For over two
millennia, deductive logic was the syllogism and syllogism was the
yardstick of sound human reasoning. During the 19th century, this
hegemony fell apart and logicians, including Boole, Frege and
Peirce, took deductive logic far beyond its Aristotelian borders.
However, contrary to common wisdom, reflections on syllogism were
also instrumental to the creation of new logical developments, such
as first-order logic and early set theory. This volume presents the
period under discussion as one of both tradition and innovation,
both continuity and discontinuity. Modern logic broke away from the
syllogistic tradition, but without Aristotle's syllogism, modern
logic would not have been born. A vital follow up to The Aftermath
of Syllogism, this book traces the longue duree history of
syllogism from Richard Whately's revival of formal logic in the
1820s through the work of David Hilbert and the Goettingen school
up to the 1930s. Bringing together a group of major international
experts, it sheds crucial new light on the emergence of modern
logic and the roots of analytic philosophy in the 19th and early
20th centuries.
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