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Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Our conception of logical space is the set of distinctions we use to navigate the world. In The Construction of Logical Space Agustin Rayo defends the idea that one's conception of logical space is shaped by one's acceptance or rejection of 'just is'-statements: statements like 'to be composed of water just is to be composed of H2O', or 'for the number of the dinosaurs to be zero just is for there to be no dinosaurs'. The resulting picture is used to articulate a conception of metaphysical possibility that does not depend on a reduction of the modal to the non-modal, and to develop a trivialist philosophy of mathematics, according to which the truths of pure mathematics have trivial truth-conditions.
This book presents a mechanist philosophy of mind. I hold that the human mind is a system of computational or recursive rules that are embodied in the nervous system; that the material presence of these rules accounts for perception, conception, speech, belief, desire, intentional acts, and other forms of intelligence. In this edition I have retained the whole of the fIrst edition except for discussion of issues which no longer are relevant in philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology. Earlier reference to disputes of the 1960's and 70's between hard-line empiricists and neorationalists over the psychological status of grammars and language acquisition, for instance, has simply been dropped. In place of such material I have entered some timely or new topics and a few changes. There are brief references to the question of computer versus distributed processing (connectionist) theories. Many of these questions dissolve if one distinguishes as I now do in Chapter II between free and embodied algorithms. I have also added to my comments on artifIcal in telligence some reflections. on Searle's Chinese Translator. The irreducibility of machine functionalist psychology in my version or any other has been exaggerated. Input, output, and state entities are token identical to physical or biological things of some sort, while a machine system as a collection of recursive rules is type identical to representatives of equivalence classes. This nuld technicality emerges in Chapter XI. It entails that so-called "anomalous monism" is right in one sense and wrong in another."
Kawalec's monograph is a novel defence of the programme of inductive logic, developed initially by Rudolf Carnap in the 1950s and Jaakko Hintikka in the 1960s. It revives inductive logic by bringing out the underlying epistemology. The main strength of the work is its link between inductive logic and contemporary discussions of epistemology. Through this perspective the author succeeds to shed new light on the significance of inductive logic. The resulting structural reliabilist theory propounds the view that justification supervenes on syntactic and semantic properties of sentences as justification-bearers. The claim is made that this sets up a genuine alternative to the prevailing theories of justification. Kawalec substantiates this claim by confronting structural reliabilism with a number of epistemological problems. Therefore, the book is interesting for philosophers of science dealing with problems of induction, but it will also appeal to readers working in the theory of knowledge. Kawalec writes in a clear manner, makes his theses and arguments explicit, and gives ample bibliographical references. The book will be a valuable companion to graduate and postgraduate courses on inductive logic.
The philosophical thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein continues to have a profound influence that transcends barriers between philosophical disciplines and reaches beyond philosophy itself. Less than one hundred years after their publication, his early masterpiece 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus' and the posthumously published 'Philosophical Investigations' have emerged as two classic philosophical texts, each of which has elicited widely divergent readings and spawned contesting schools of interpretation. This collection of original essays by leading experts offers deep insights into the forces that shaped and influenced Wittgenstein's thought on a broad variety of topics. It also contains the text - in both the original German and an English translation by Juliet Floyd and Burton Dreben - of letters and cards sent to Wittgenstein by the philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege, which shed light on their interaction during the crucial period when Wittgenstein completed work on the 'Tractatus'. This important record of a philosophical friendship is complemented by a scholarly apparatus and an introduction. Other essays featured in this volume document and discuss Wittgenstein's thinking on music and religion as well as issues that take center stage in the 'Investigations' such as Wittgenstein's account of rule-following. The volume provides an invaluable research tool not only for students of the history of philosophy and for scholars of both Wittgenstein and Frege but also for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the first half of the twentieth century.
Are there such things as merely possible people, who would have lived if our ancestors had acted differently? Are there future people, who have not yet been conceived? Questions like those raise deep issues about both the nature of being and its logical relations with contingency and change. In Modal Logic as Metaphysics, Timothy Williamson argues for positive answers to those questions on the basis of an integrated approach to the issues, applying the technical resources of modal logic to provide structural cores for metaphysical theories. He rejects the search for a metaphysically neutral logic as futile. The book contains detailed historical discussion of how the metaphysical issues emerged in the twentieth century development of quantified modal logic, through the work of such figures as Rudolf Carnap, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Arthur Prior, and Saul Kripke. It proposes higher-order modal logic as a new setting in which to resolve such metaphysical questions scientifically, by the construction of systematic logical theories embodying rival answers and their comparison by normal scientific standards. Williamson provides both a rigorous introduction to the technical background needed to understand metaphysical questions in quantified modal logic and an extended argument for controversial, provocative answers to them. He gives original, precise treatments of topics including the relation between logic and metaphysics, the methodology of theory choice in philosophy, the nature of possible worlds and their role in semantics, plural quantification compared to quantification into predicate position, communication across metaphysical disagreement, and problems for truthmaker theory.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.
This book presents a new structural approach to the psychology of the person, inspired by Kenneth Colby's computer-generated simulation, PARRY. The simulation was of a paranoid psychological state, represented in forms of the person's logic and syntax, as these would be evidenced in personal communication. Harwood Fisher uses a Structural View to highlight similarities in the logical form of the linguistic representations of Donald Trump, his avid followers ("Trumpers"), and the paranoid-referred to as "The Trio." He demonstrates how the Structural View forms a series of logical and schematic patterns, similar to the way that content analysis can bring forth associations meanings, and concepts held in the text. Such comparisons, Fisher argues, can be used to shed light on contingencies for presenting, representing, and judging truth. Specifically, Fisher posits that the major syntactic and logical patterns that were used to produce the computer-generated "paranoid" responses in Colby's project can be used to analyze Donald Trump's rhetoric and his followers' reactions to it. Ultimately, Fisher offers a new kind of structural approach for the philosophy of psychology. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of social and cognitive psychology, psychology of personality, psychiatric classification, psycholinguistics, rhetoric, and computer science.
There is a tradition of interpreting Heidegger's remarks on logic as an attempt to flout, revise, or eliminate logic, and of thus characterizing Heidegger as an irrationalist. Heidegger and Logic looks closely at Heidegger's writings on logic in the Being and Time era and argues that Heidegger does not seek to discredit logic, but to determine its scope and explain its foundations. Through a close examination of the relevant texts, Greg Shirley shows that this tradition of interpretation rests on mischaracterizations and false assumptions. What emerges from Heidegger's remarks on logic is an account of intelligibility that is both novel and relevant to issues in contemporary philosophy of logic. Heidegger's views on logic form a coherent whole that is an important part of his larger philosophical project and helps us understand it better, and that constitutes a unique contribution to the philosophy of logic
The importance of Stoicism for Gilles Deleuze's Logic of Sense and Michel Foucault's Hermeneutics of the Subject and The Care of the Self is well known. However, few students of either classics or philosophy are aware of the breadth of French and Italian receptions of Stoicism. This book firstly presents this broad field to readers, and secondly advances it by renewing dialogues with ancient Stoic texts. The authors in this volume, who combine expertise in continental and Hellenistic philosophy, challenge our understanding of both modern and ancient concepts, arguments, exercises, and therapies. It conceives of Stoicism as a vital strand of philosophy which contributes to the life of contemporary thought. Flowing through the sustained, varied engagement with Stoicism by continental thinkers, this volume covers Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Emile Brehier, Barbara Cassin, Giorgio Agamben, and Pierre Hadot. Stoic sources addressed range from doxography and well-known authors like Epictetus and Seneca to more obscure authorites like Musonius Rufus and Cornutus.
This book argues that languages are composed of sets of 'signs', rather than 'strings'. This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky's heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories. Yet the concept of 'compositionality' itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents.
This volume brings together those papers of mine which may be of interest not only to various specialists but also to philosophers. Many of my writings in mathematics were motivated by epistemological considerations; some papers originated in the critique of certain views that at one time dominated the discussions of the Vienna Cirele; others grew out of problems in teaching fundamental ideas of mathematics; sti II others were occasioned by personal relations with economists. Hence a wide range of subjects will be discussed: epistemology, logic, basic concepts of pure and applied mathematics, philosophical ideas resulting from geometric studies, mathematical didactics and, finally, economics. The papers also span a period of more than fifty years. What unifies the various parts of the book is the spirit of searching for the elarification of basic concepts and methods and of articulating hidden ideas and tacit procedures. Part 1 ineludes papers published about 1930 which expound an idea that Carnap, after a short period of opposition in the Cirele, fully adopted ; and, under the name "Princip/e of To/erance", he eloquently formulated it in great generality in his book, Logica/ Syntax of Language (1934), through which it was widely disseminated. "The New Logic" in Chapter 1 furthermore ineludes the first report (I932) to a larger public of Godel's epochal discovery presented among the great logic results of ali time. Chapter 2 is a translation of an often quoted 1930 paper presenting a detailed exposition and critique of intuitionism.
This book presents an English translation of a classic Russian text on duality theory for Heyting algebras. Written by Georgian mathematician Leo Esakia, the text proved popular among Russian-speaking logicians. This translation helps make the ideas accessible to a wider audience and pays tribute to an influential mind in mathematical logic. The book discusses the theory of Heyting algebras and closure algebras, as well as the corresponding intuitionistic and modal logics. The author introduces the key notion of a hybrid that "crossbreeds" topology (Stone spaces) and order (Kripke frames), resulting in the structures now known as Esakia spaces. The main theorems include a duality between the categories of closure algebras and of hybrids, and a duality between the categories of Heyting algebras and of so-called strict hybrids. Esakia's book was originally published in 1985. It was the first of a planned two-volume monograph on Heyting algebras. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the publishing house closed and the project died with it. Fortunately, this important work now lives on in this accessible translation. The Appendix of the book discusses the planned contents of the lost second volume.
This wide-ranging book introduces information as a key concept not only in physics, from quantum mechanics to thermodynamics, but also in the neighboring sciences and in the humanities. The central part analyzes dynamical processes as manifestations of information flows between microscopic and macroscopic scales and between systems and their environment. Quantum mechanics is interpreted as a reconstruction of mechanics based on fundamental limitations of information processing on the smallest scales. These become particularly manifest in quantum chaos and in quantum computing. Covering subjects such as causality, prediction, undecidability, chaos, and quantum randomness, the book also provides an information-theoretical view of predictability. More than 180 illustrations visualize the concepts and arguments. The book takes inspiration from the author's graduate-level topical lecture but is also well suited for undergraduate studies and is a valuable resource for researchers and professionals.
1. 1. The Principle of Universalizability-an informal explication This work is concerned with the so-called Principle of Universalizability. As we shall understand it, this principle represents a claim that moral properties of things (persons, actions, state of affairs, situations) are essentially independent of their purely 'individual' or-as one often says -'numerical' aspects. l Thus, if a thing, x, is better than another thing, y, then this fact is not dependent on x's being x nor on y's being y. If a certain person, a, has a duty to help another person, b, then this duty does not arise as a consequence of their being a and b, respectively. And if in a certain situation, W, it ought to be the case that certain goods are transferred from one person to another, then this moral obligation does not depend on the individual identities of the persons involved. The Universalizability Principle may also be expressed in terms of similarities. Instead of saying that the moral properties of x are essentially independent of the individual aspects of x, we may say that any object which is exactly similar to x, which is precisely like x in all non-individual, 'qualitative' respects, must exhibit exactly similar moral properties. Thus, if two persons are exactly similar to each other, (if they are placed in exactly similar circumstances, have exactly similar information, preferences, character, etc. ), then they will have exactly similar rights and duties.
Stig Kanger (1924-1988) made important contributions to logic and formal philosophy. Kanger's most original achievements were in the areas of general proof theory, the semantics of modal and deontic logic, and the logical analysis of the concept of rights. But he contributed significantly to action theory, preference logic and the theory of measurement as well. This is the second of two volumes dedicated to the work of Stig Kanger. The first volume is a complete collection of Kanger's philosophical papers. The present volume contains critical essays on the various aspects of Kanger's work as well as some biographical sketches. Lennart A...qvist, Jan Berg, Brian Chellas, Anatoli Degtyarev, Lars Gustafsson, SAren HalldA(c)n, Kaj BA, rge Hansen, Sven Ove Hansson, Risto Hilpinen, Jaakko Hintikka, Ghita HolmstrAm-Hintikka, Lars Lindahl, Sten LindstrAm, Ingmar PArn, Dag Prawitz, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Krister Segerberg, Amartya Sen, SAren Stenlund, GAran Sundholm, and Andrei Voronkov have contributed to this volume.
Concept and Judgment in Brentano's Logic Lectures is concerned with a crucial aspect of Brentano's philosophy as it was developed in his logic lectures from c. 1870 to c. 1885. The first part of the volume is an analysis of his theory of concept and judgment. The second part consists of materials, including a German edition and English translation of notes that a student took from a lecture course that Brentano gave. A short book by this student on Brentano is also translated in the materials. The access to Brentano's philosophy is enhanced by this volume not only with regard to his logic as a theory of deductive inference, but also to his descriptive psychology, metaphysics, and philosophy of language.
Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939) was one of the leading Polish logicians and founders of the Warsaw School of Logic whose membership included, beside himself, Jan Lukasiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbinski, Alfred Tarski, and many others. In his lifetime LeSniewski published only a few hundred pages. He produced many important results in many areas of mathematics; these stood in various relations to each other, and to materials produced by others, and, in time, created more and more editorial problems. Very many were left unpublished at the time of his death. Then in 1944 in the fire of Warsaw the whole of this material was burned and lost -a considerable loss since a great deal of what is important could have been reconstructed from these notes. The present publication aims at presenting unique Lesniewski's materials from alternative sources comprising lecture notes taken during some of Lesniewski's lectures and seminars delivered at the University of Warsaw be tween the two world wars. The editors are aware of the limitations of student notes which cannot compensate for the loss of the original materials. However, they are unique in reflecting Lesniewski's ideas as he himself presented them. Already at the time of his death it was realized that these notes would provide a unique access to Lesniewski's own thought as well as a valuable record of some of the activities of the Warsaw School of Logic."
Find out what connects logic and humor in this alternative guide to logical reasoning. Combining jokes, stories, and ironic situations, Stan Baronett shows how it is possible to ground the language of logic in everyday experience. Each chapter introduces a basic logical reasoning concept based on happenings in daily life. Using jokes as his examples, Baronett reveals the inner workings of logic. After all an effective joke often relies on an unanticipated assumption that leads to an unexpected result. The assumption changes the normal context of an everyday situation, so we are surprised by the ending. A complex mind that learns from experience, and builds a storehouse of regularly recurring patterns, is a great survival tool. But for a joke to work, the punch line has to be something our minds don't logically anticipate. The ending jolts our minds for a split second while we grasp the absurdity of the situation. This is how logic works: one part of your mind determines whether the information you are receiving is true or false, while another part of your mind deals with logical consequences. Injecting a sense of humor into logical language, Baronett helps us understand how to analyze basic logical reasoning and provides light relief for anyone daunted by the complex world of logic.
This book focuses on the problem of responsibility voids: these are cases where responsibility for a morally undesirable outcome cannot be attributed to any of the involved agents. Responsibility voids are thought to occur in collective decision-making and in the context of artificial intelligent systems. In these cases, philosophers worry that there is a shortfall of moral responsibility. In particular, such voids are often assumed to justify a notion of collective responsibility that cannot be reduced to individual responsibility. One of the aims of the book is to study how collective responsibility and joint action relate to individual responsibility and individual actions. The book offers a unifying framework for modelling moral responsibility by drawing from modal logic and game theory. The book investigates the possibility and scope of the problem of responsibility voids. One of its characteristics is its pluralistic perspective on moral responsibility: in contrast to giving a unique and all-encompassing definition of it, the book makes progress by spelling out and modelling several conceptions of moral responsibility. One of the appealing features of the book is that a relatively small range of models is used to investigate a variety of conceptions of moral responsibility. The unifying framework can thus be used to characterize the conditions under which responsibility voids are ruled out.
Jaakko Hintikka is one of the most creative figures in contemporary philosophy. He has made significant contributions to virtually all areas of the discipline, from epistemology and the philosophy of logic to the history of philosophy and the philosophy of science. Part of the fruitfulness of Hintikka 's work is due to its opening important new lines of investigation and new approaches to traditional philosophical problems. This volume gathers together essays from some of Hintikka 's colleagues and former students exploring his influence on their work and pursuing some of the insights that we have found in his work. This book includes a comprehensive overview of Hintikka 's philosophy by Dan Kolak and John Symons and an annotated bibliography of Hintikka 's work.
This volume collects selected papers presented at the Second Chinese Conference on Logic and Argumentation in 2018 held in Hangzhou, China. The papers presented reflect recent advances in logic and argumentation, as well as the connections between the two, and also include invited papers contributed by leading experts in these fields. The book covers a wide variety of topics related to dynamics, uncertainty and reasoning. It continues discussions on the interplay between logic and argumentation which has a long history from Aristotle's ancient logic to very recent formal argumentation in AI.
This book is dedicated to V.A. Yankov's seminal contributions to the theory of propositional logics. His papers, published in the 1960s, are highly cited even today. The Yankov characteristic formulas have become a very useful tool in propositional, modal and algebraic logic. The papers contributed to this book provide the new results on different generalizations and applications of characteristic formulas in propositional, modal and algebraic logics. In particular, an exposition of Yankov's results and their applications in algebraic logic, the theory of admissible rules and refutation systems is included in the book. In addition, the reader can find the studies on splitting and join-splitting in intermediate propositional logics that are based on Yankov-type formulas which are closely related to canonical formulas, and the study of properties of predicate extensions of non-classical propositional logics. The book also contains an exposition of Yankov's revolutionary approach to constructive proof theory. The editors also include Yankov's contributions to history and philosophy of mathematics and foundations of mathematics, as well as an examination of his original interpretation of history of Greek philosophy and mathematics.
The book presents a thoroughly elaborated logical theory of generalized truth-values understood as subsets of some established set of (basic) truth values. After elucidating the importance of the very notion of a truth value in logic and philosophy, we examine some possible ways of generalizing this notion. The useful four-valued logic of first-degree entailment by Nuel Belnap and the notion of a bilattice (a lattice of truth values with two ordering relations) constitute the basis for further generalizations. By doing so we elaborate the idea of a multilattice, and most notably, a trilattice of truth values - a specific algebraic structure with information ordering and two distinct logical orderings, one for truth and another for falsity. Each logical order not only induces its own logical vocabulary, but determines also its own entailment relation. We consider both semantic and syntactic ways of formalizing these relations and construct various logical calculi.
Today's instantaneous and ever-present news stream frequently presents a sensationalized or otherwise distorted view of the world, demanding constant critical engagement on the part of everyday citizens. The Critical Thinker's Guide to Bias, Lies, and Politics in the News reveals the power of critical thinking to make sense of overwhelming and often subjective media by detecting ideology, slant, and spin at work. Building off the Richard Paul and Linda Elder framework for critical thinking, Elder focuses on the internal logic of the news as well as societal influences on the media while illustrating essential elements of trustworthy journalism. With up-to-date discussions of social media, digital journalism, and political maneuvering inside and outside the fourth estate, Fact or Fake is an essential handbook for those who want to stay informed but not influenced by our modern news reporting systems. |
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