Language as reason represents the unifying theme of this multifaceted reflection on Eddo Rigotti's scientific contribution offered by his students and colleagues on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. Spanning argumentation theory, linguistics, psychology, semiotics and communication sciences, the volume reflects Rigotti's generous personality and his trajectory of semiotician, philosopher, linguist and specialist in argumentation studies. Language as an instrument of communication with semiotic peculiarities is considered at different levels in which it manifests traces of reason at work. This means considering how reality reveals itself by means of language and how the semiotic character of language structures is used by people to enable joint actions and change the natural and social world. Particularly in focus is the realm of argumentation, that is of those joint actions where people exchange reasons in various communities, fora and markets in view of understanding and practical deliberation. To argumentation Eddo Rigotti devoted all his research efforts in recent years, with a keen sense of its intrinsic educational value and a sincere care for fostering the development of the argumentative mind.

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.

Bayesian nets are widely used in artificial intelligence as a calculus for casual reasoning, enabling machines to make predictions, perform diagnoses, take decisions and even to discover casual relationships. But many philosophers have criticized and ultimately rejected the central assumption on which such work is based-the causal Markov Condition. So should Bayesian nets be abandoned? What explains their success in artificial intelligence? This book argues that the Causal Markov Condition holds as a default rule: it often holds but may need to be repealed in the face of counter examples. Thus, Bayesian nets are the right tool to use by default but naively applying them can lead to problems. The book develops a systematic account of causal reasoning and shows how Bayesian nets can be coherently employed to automate the reasoning processes of an artificial agent. The resulting framework for causal reasoning involves not only new algorithms, but also new conceptual foundations. Probability and causality are treated as mental notions - part of an agent's belief state. Yet probability and causality are also objective - different agents with the same background knowledge ought to adopt the same or similar probabilistic and causal beliefs. This book, aimed at researchers and graduate students in computer science, mathematics and philosophy, provides a general introduction to these philosophical views as well as exposition of the computational techniques that they motivate.

Necessary Beings is concerned with two central areas of metaphysics: modality-the theory of necessity, possibility, and other related notions; and ontology-the general study of what kinds of entities there are. Bob Hale's overarching purpose is to develop and defend two quite general theses about what is required for the existence of entities of various kinds: that questions about what kinds of things there are cannot be properly understood or adequately answered without recourse to considerations about possibility and necessity, and that, conversely, questions about the nature and basis of necessity and possibility cannot be satisfactorily tackled without drawing on what might be called the methodology of ontology. Taken together, these two theses claim that ontology and modality are mutually dependent upon one another, neither more fundamental than the other. Hale defends a broadly Fregean approach to metaphysics, according to which ontological distinctions among different kinds of things (objects, properties, and relations) are to be drawn on the basis of prior distinctions between different logical types of expression. The claim that facts about what kinds of things exist depend upon facts about what is possible makes little sense unless one accepts that at least some modal facts are fundamental, and not reducible to facts of some other, non-modal, sort. He argues that facts about what is absolutely necessary or possible have this character, and that they have their source or basis, not in meanings or concepts nor in facts about alternative 'worlds', but in the natures or essences of things.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into total incoherence. Yet for the leading philosophical theories of meaning, these phenomena are an unfathomable mystery. To understand these concepts, we need a metaphysical, logical, and conceptual grasp of situations that could not possibly exist: Impossible Worlds. This book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies the concept to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy. It considers problems in the logic of knowledge, the meaning of alternative logics, models of imagination and mental simulation, the theory of information, truth in fiction, the meaning of conditional statements, and reasoning about the impossible. In all these cases, impossible worlds have an essential role to play.

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.

This book on modal logic is especially designed for philosophy students. It provides an accessible yet technically sound treatment of modal logic and its philosophical applications. Every effort is made to simplify the presentation by using diagrams instead of more complex mathematical apparatus. These and other innovations provide philosophers with easy access to a rich variety of topics in modal logic, including a full coverage of quantified modal logic, non-rigid designators, definite descriptions, and the de-re de-dicto distinction. Discussion of philosophical issues concerning the development of modal logic is woven into the text. The book uses natural deduction systems, which are widely regarded as the easiest to teach and use. It also includes a diagram technique that extends the method of truth trees to modal logic. This provides a foundation for a novel method for showing completeness that is easy to extend to quantifiers. This second edition contains a new chapter on logics of conditionals, an updated and expanded bibliography, and is updated throughout.

This book examines the progress to date in the many facets - conceptual, epistemological and methodological - of the field of legal semiotics. It reflects the fulfilment of the promise of legal semiotics when used to explore the law, its processes and interpretation.

This study in Legal Semiotics brings together the theory, structure and practise of legal semiotics in an accessible style. The book introduces the concepts of legal semiotics and offers an insight in contemporary and future directions which the semiotics of law is going to take.

A theoretical and practical oriented synthesis of the historical, contemporary and most recent ideas pertaining to legal semiotics, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and social sciences, as well as those who are interested in the interdisciplinary dynamics of law and semiotics.

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.

Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her discussions of the nature of abilities as different from dispositions, her detailed analysis of the psychological act of reidentifying substances, and her critique of the language of thought for mental representation. In a radical departure from current philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, this book provides the first in-depth discussion on the psychological act of reidentification.

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.

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.

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.

First published in 1985, Practical Inferences describes how practical inferences are used. Starting with relatively simple inference patterns exhibited in everyday prudential decisions, the author extends a basic structural framework to the more complex inferences used in assessing probabilities, and finally to moral inferences. In this way what have been regarded as disparate activities are shown to exhibit fundamental similarities. The author argues that at all levels of decision-making the practical inferences used contain at least one premise expressing the desires or preferences of the agent. This is in opposition to the dominant view in Western philosophy that desires must be regulated or evaluated by means of principles of conduct discovered by rational procedures. By examining the premises implied by holders of this view, the author shows that they are inadequate bases for justifying practical decisions. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, logic and mathematics.

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."

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.

How science can convey a profound sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human condition.
This book makes a compelling case that now more than ever the public at large needs to appreciate the critical-thinking tools that science has to offer and be educated in basic science literacy. The author emphasizes that the methods and facts of science are accessible to everyone, and that, contrary to popular belief, understanding science does not require extraordinary intelligence. He also notes that scientific rationality and critical thinking are not only good for our physical well-being but also are fully in sync with our highest moral codes. He illustrates the many ways in which the scientific worldview offers a profound sense of wonder, connectedness, and optimism about the human condition, an inspiring perspective that satisfies age-old spiritual aspirations.
At a time of daunting environmental challenges and rampant misinformation, this book provides a welcome corrective and reason to hope for the future.

In this book, Daniel Cohen explores the connections between arguments and metaphors most pronounced in philosophy, because philosophical discourse is both thoroughly metaphorical and replete with argumentation. The metaphors we use for arguments, as well as the ways we use metaphors as arguments and in arguments, provides the basis for a tripartite theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating arguments. There are logical, rhetorical, and dialectical dimensions to arguments, each providing norms for conduct, vocabulary for evaluation, and criteria for success. In turn, the identified roles for arguments in general discourse can be applied to metaphors, helping to explain what they mean and how they work. Cohen covers the nature of arguments, their modes and structures, and the principles of their evaluation. He also addresses the nature of metaphors, their place in language and thought, and their connections to arguments, identifying and reconciling arguments' and metaphors' respective roles in philosophy.

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."

When is a reason for doing or believing something a good reason? Over the past century, logic's contribution to answering this question has typically involved finding ''logical forms": that is, using a special notation to bring out logical features more clearly.

The correct identification of logical forms has been held to be important not only to logic but also to philosophy. Bertrand Russell coined the phrase "philosophical logic" to describe an approach to philosophical problems: find the correct logical form of the problematic sentences, and the problems vanish. "Logical Forms" explains both the theoretical underpinnings of the approach and the detailed problems involved in finding logical forms in the languages of propositional logic, classical first order logic, modal logic, and some alternatives such as free logic, binary and substitutional quantifiers.

This revised edition incorporates results of recent work. Chapter 3 on conditionals, and the sections dealing with predicate quantifiers, free logics and subjunctive conditionals have been completely rewritten. The exercises are integrated throughout the book, and each chapter concludes with updated notes to guide further reading. The result is a genuinely interactive introduction which engages the reader in developing the argument.

This book does not presuppose knowledge of deductive methods in formal logic and it will be of immense benefit to those approaching philosophical logic for the first time.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is a concise and readable study of five intertwined themes at the heart of Wittgenstein's thought, written by one of his most eminent interpreters. David Pears offers penetrating investigations and lucid explications of some of the most influential and yet puzzling writings of twentieth-century philosophy. He focuses on the idea of language as a picture of the world; the phenomenon of linguistic regularity; the famous "private language argument"; logical necessity; and ego and the self.

This book is the first part of a comprehensive study of Wittgenstein's conception of language description. Describing language was no pastime occupation for the philosopher. It was hard work and it meant struggle. It made for a philosophy that required Wittgenstein's full attention and half his life. His approach had always been working on himself, on how he saw things. The central claim of this book is that nothing will come of our exegetical efforts to see what Wittgenstein's later philosophy amounts to if his work on describing language is not given the place and concern it deserves. The book shows what his philosophy might begin to look like in the light of critical questions around his interest to see the end of the day with descriptions, and these things only.