|
Showing 1 - 25 of
57 matches in All Departments
IF WITI'GENSTEIN COULD TALK, COULD WE UNDERSTAND HIM? Perusing the
secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have frequently experienced
a perfect Brechtean Entfremdungseffekt. This is interesting, I have
felt like saying when reading books and papers on Wittgenstein, but
who is the writer talking about? Certainly not Ludwig Wittgenstein
the actual person who wrote his books and notebooks and whom I
happened to meet. Why is there this strange gap between the ideas
of the actual philosopher and the musings of his interpreters?
Wittgenstein is talking to us through the posthumous publication of
his writings. Why don't philosophers understand what he is saying?
A partial reason is outlined in the first essay of this volume.
Wittgenstein was far too impatient to explain in his books and book
drafts what his problems were, what it was that he was trying to
get clear about. He was even too impatient to explain in full his
earlier solutions, often merely referring to them casually as it
were in a shorthand notation. For one important instance, in The
Brown Book, Wittgenstein had explained in some detail what
name-object relationships amount to in his view. There he offers
both an explanation of what his problem is and an account of his
own view illustrated by means of specific examples of
language-games. But when he raises the same question again in
Philosophical Investigations I, sec.
Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? In the essays
collected here, Hintikka not only defends an affirmative answer; he
also outlines such a logic. It is the logic of questions and
answers. Thus inquiry in the sense of knowledge-seeking becomes
inquiry in the sense of interrogation. Using this new logic,
Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered
the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual
identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal
deductive strategies. Questions to Nature, of course, must include
observations and experiments. Hintikka shows, in fact, how the
logic of experimental inquiry can be understood from the
interrogative vantage point. Other important topics examined
include induction (in a forgotten sense that has nevertheless
played a role in science), explanation, the incommensurability of
theories, theory-ladenness of observations, and identifiability.
Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are subjected
to critical scrutiny and found wanting, including the concept of
scope, the hegemony of generative syntax, the Frege-Russell claim
that verbs like is' are ambiguous, and the assumptions underlying
the so-called New Theory of Reference. In their stead, new
constructive ideas are proposed.
Discussions of the foundations of mathematics and their history are
frequently restricted to logical issues in a narrow sense, or else
to traditional problems of analytic philosophy. From Dedekind to
GAdel: Essays on the Development of the Foundations of Mathematics
illustrates the much greater variety of the actual developments in
the foundations during the period covered. The viewpoints that
serve this purpose included the foundational ideas of working
mathematicians, such as Kronecker, Dedekind, Borel and the early
Hilbert, and the development of notions like model and modelling,
arbitrary function, completeness, and non-Archimedean structures.
The philosophers discussed include not only the household names in
logic, but also Husserl, Wittgenstein and Ramsey. Needless to say,
such logically-oriented thinkers as Frege, Russell and GAdel are
not entirely neglected, either. Audience: Everybody interested in
the philosophy and/or history of mathematics will find this book
interesting, giving frequently novel insights.
Metaphor is one of the most frequently evoked but at the same time
most poorly understood concepts in philosophy and literary theory.
In recent years, several interesting approaches to metaphor have
been presented or outlined. In this volume, authors of some of the
most important new approaches re-present their views or illustrate
them by means of applications, thus allowing the reader to survey
some of the prominent ongoing developments in this field. These
authors include Robert Fogelin, Susan Haack, Jaakko Hintikka (with
Gabriel Sandu), Bipin Indurkhya and Eva Kittay (with Eric
Steinhart). Their stance is in the main constructive rather than
critical; but frequent comparisons of different views further
facilitate the reader's overview. In the other contributions,
metaphor is related to the problems of visual representation (Noel
Carroll), to the open class test (Avishai Margalit and Naomi
Goldblum) as well as to Wittgenstein's idea of 'a way of life'
(E.M. Zemach).
One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to
the philosophy of mathematics. On the one hand, some philosophers
(and some mathematicians) take the nature and the results of
mathematicians' activities as given, and go on to ask what
philosophical morals one might perhaps find in their story. On the
other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have
tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which
mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny. In
practice this usually means scrutinizing the logical and linguistic
tools mathematicians wield. Such scrutiny can scarcely help relying
on philosophical ideas and principles. In other words it can
scarcely help being literally a study of language, truth and logic
in mathematics, albeit not necessarily in the spirit of AJ. Ayer.
As its title indicates, the essays included in the present volume
represent the latter approach. In most of them one of the
fundamental concepts in the foundations of mathematics and logic is
subjected to a scrutiny from a largely novel point of view.
Typically, it turns out that the concept in question is in need of
a revision or reconsideration or at least can be given a new twist.
The results of such a re-examination are not primarily critical,
however, but typically open up new constructive possibilities. The
consequences of such deconstructions and reconstructions are often
quite sweeping, and are explored in the same paper or in others.
The Fourth Scandinavian Logic Symposium and the First
Soviet-Finnish Logic Conference were held in JyvaskyIa, Finland,
June 29-July 6, 1976. The Conferences were organized by a committee
which consisted of the editors of the present volume. The
Conferences were supported financially by the Ministry of Education
of Finland, by the Academy of Finland, and by the Division of
Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science of the International
Union of History of Science. The Philosophical Society of Finland
and the Jyvaskyla Summer Festival gave valuable help in various
practicalities. 35 papers by authors representing 10 countries were
presented at the two meetings. Of those papers 24 appear here. THE
EDITORS v TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE v PART 1/ PROOF THEORY GEORG
KREISEL / Some Facts from the Theory of Proofs and Some Fictions
from General Proof Theory 3 DAG PRAWITZ / Proofs and the Meaning
and Completeness of the Logical Constants 25 v. A. SMIRNOV / Theory
of Quantification and tff-calculi 41 LARS SVENONIUS/Two Kinds of
Extensions of Primitive Recursive Arithmetic 49 DIRK VAN DALEN and
R. STATMAN / Equality in the Presence of Apartness 95 PART II /
INFINITARY LANGUAGES VEIKKO RANTALA / Game-Theoretical Semantics
and Back-and- Forth 119 MAARET KAR TTUNEN / Infinitary Languages N
oo .
The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of
some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material
incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover
does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are
thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has
led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any
list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within
the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest.
They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission,
knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to
mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory
semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed
for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was
thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this
model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul
Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently
and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this
collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of
Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the
semantics of modal logics in general."
It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in
Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback
edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors'
belief in the permanent im portance of Quine's philosophy and in
the value of the papers com menting on it which were collected in
our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one
change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has
been brought up to date. The editors cannot claim any credit for
this improvement, however. We have not tried to imitate the Library
of Living Philosophers volumes and to include Professor Quine's
autobiography in this volume, but we are fortunate to publish here
his brand-new auto bibliography. 1975 THE EDITORS TABLE OF CONTENTS
V PREFACE 1 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 1. 1. C. SMAR T / Quine's
Philosophy of Science 3 GILBERT HARMAN / An Introduction to
'Translation and Meaning', Chapter Two of Word and Object 14 ERIK
STENIUS / Beginning with Ordinary Things 27 NOAM CHOMSKY / Quine's
Empirical Assumptions 53 1AAKKO HINTIKKA / Behavioral Criteria of
Radical Translation 69 BARRY STROUD / Conventionalism and the
Indeterminacy of Translation 82 P. F. STRA WSON / Singular Terms
and Predication 97 118 H. P. GRICE / Vacuous Names P. T."
I n order to appreciate properly what we are doing in this book it
is necessary to realize that our approach to linguistic theorizing
differs from the prevailing views. Our approach can be described by
indicating what distinguishes it from the methodological ideas
current in theoretical linguistics, which I consider seriously
misguided. Linguists typically construe their task in these days as
that of making exceptionless generalizations from particular
examples. This explanatory strategy is wrong in several different
ways. It presupposes that we can have "intuitions" about particular
examples, usually examples invented by the linguist himself or
herself, reliable and sharp enough to serve as a basis of sharp
generalizations. It also presupposes that we cannot have equally
reliable direct access to general linguistic regularities. Both
assumptions appear to me extremely dubious, and the first of them
has in effect been challenged by linguists like Dwight Bol inger.
There is also some evidence that the degree of unanimity among
linguists is fairly low when it comes to less clear cases, even in
connection with such relatively simple questions as grammaticality
(acceptability). For this reason we have tried to rely more on
quotations from contemporary fiction, newspapers and magazines than
on linguists' and philosophers' ad hoc examples. I also find it
strange that some of the same linguists as believe that we all
possess innate ideas about general characteristics of humanly
possible grammars assume that we can have access to them only via
their particular consequences.
Most of the papers appearing in volume 87 numbers, 1-2 are based on
papers presented at the Colloquium on the Philosophy of Ludwig
Wittgenstein held at the Department of Philosophy at Florida State
University on 7-8 April 1989. We owe warm thanks to Florida State
University for generously supporting this colloquium. The English
translation of the chapter entitled 'Philosophie', from
Wittgenstein's typescript number 213 (von Wright), appears here
with permission of Wittgenstein's literary heirs, without affecting
existing copyrights. The original German version of this chapter
was edited by Heikki Nyman and appeared in Revue Internationale de
Philosophie 43 (1989), pp. 175-203. Jaakko Hintikka's article (87,
No.2) first appeared in a shorter form in The Times Literary
Supplement No. 4565 (28 September to 4 October 1990, p. 1030). The
present version appears with the permis sion of The Times Literary
Supplement, which is gratefully acknowl edged. Our thanks are due
to all the participants of the colloquium and the contributors to
these special numbers."
In the last 25 years, the concept of information has played a
crucial role in communication theory, so much so that the terms
information theory and communication theory are sometimes used
almost interchangeably. It seems to us, however, that the notion of
information is also destined to render valuable services to the
student of induction and probability, of learning and
reinforcement, of semantic meaning and deductive inference, as well
as of scientific method in general. The present volume is an
attempt to illustrate some of these uses of information concepts.
In 'On Semantic Information' Hintikka summarizes some of his and
his associates' recent work on information and induction, and
comments briefly on its philosophical suggestions. Jamison surveys
from the sub jectivistic point of view some recent results in
'Bayesian Information Usage'. Rosenkrantz analyzes the information
obtained by experimen tation from the Bayesian and Neyman-Pearson
standpoints, and also from the standpoint of entropy and related
concepts. The much-debated principle of total evidence prompts
Hilpinen to examine the problem of measuring the information yield
of observations in his paper 'On the Information Provided by
Observations'. Pietarinen addresses himself to the more general
task of evaluating the systematizing ('explanatory') power of
hypotheses and theories, a task which quickly leads him to
information concepts. Domotor develops a qualitative theory of
information and entropy. His paper gives what is probably the first
axiomatization of a general qualitative theory of information
adequate to guarantee a numerical representation of the standard
sort."
somewhat like Henkin's nonstandard interpretation of higher-order
logics, while the right semantics [or logical modalities is an
analogue to the standard of type theory in Henkin's sense.
interpretation Another possibility would be to follow W.V. Quine's
advice to give up logi- cal modalities as being beyond repair. Or
we could also try to develop a logic of conceptual possibility,
restricting the range of our "possible worlds" to those compatible
with the transcendental presuppositions of our own conceptual sys-
tem. This looks in fact like one of the most interesting possible
theories I have dreamt of developing but undoubtedly never will.
Its kinship with Kant's way of thinking should be obvious. Besides
putting the entire enterprise of possible-worlds semantics into a
perspective, we can also see that the actual history of
possible-worlds seman- tics is more complicated than it might first
appear to be. For the standard in- terpretation of modal logics has
reared its beautiful head repeatedly in the writings of Stig
Kanger, Richard Montague the pre-Montague-semantics theorist, and
Nino Cocchiarella.
This volume contains papers on truth, logic, semantics, and
history of logic and philosophy. These papers are dedicated to Jan
Wolenski to honor his 60th birthday. Jan Wolenski is professor of
philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian
University in Cracow, Poland. He is likely to be the most
well-known Polish philosopher of this time, best known for his work
on the history of the philosophy and logic of the Lvov-Warsaw
School.
The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western
Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The
Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of
History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology
and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National
Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario.
As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the
years know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly
and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In
addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and
scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen
enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors
chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of
publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour
of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of
pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to
the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the
University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The
volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and
Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special
Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and
Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science."
As official sponsors of the First International Conference in the
History and Philosophy of Science, the two Divisions of the
International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science owe a
great deal to the University of Jyvliskyla and the 1973 Jyvliskylli
Summer Festival for the extra ordinarily generous hospitality they
provided. But there is an additional debt owed, not simply for the
locale but for the very substance of the Conference, to the two
Finnish scholars who have jointly authored the present volume. For
this volume represents not only the first part of the published
proceedings of this First International Conference in the History
and Philosophy of Science, but also, most fittingly, the paper that
opened the Conference itself. Yet the appropriateness of the paper
from which this book has resulted opening the Conference lies far
less in the fact that it was a contribution by two Finnish authors
to a meeting hosted in Finland than it does to the fact that this
paper, and now the present book, comes to grips in an extreme ly
direct way with the very problem the whole Conference was from the
outset designed to treat. Generally put, this problem was to bring
to gether a number of historians and philosophers of science whose
contrib uted papers would bear witness to the ways in which the two
disciplines can be, and are, of value to each other."
cake, even though it is typically given the pride of place in
expositions in Frege's semantics. As a part of this attempted
reversal of emphasis, Jaakko Hintikka has also called attention to
the role Frege played in convincing almost everyone that verbs for
being had to be treated as multiply ambiguous between the "is" of
identity, the "is" of predication, the "is" of existence, and the
"is" of class-inclusion - a view that had been embraced by few
major figures (if any) before Frege, with the exception of John
Stuart Mill and Augustus De Morgan. Hintikka has gone on to
challenge this ambiguity thesis. At the same time, Frege's role in
the genesis of another major twentieth-century philosophical
movement, the phenomenological one, has become an important issue.
Even the translation of Frege's key term "Bedeutung" as "reference"
has become controversial. The interpretation of Frege is thus
thrown largely back in the melting pot. In editing this volume, we
have not tried to publish the last word on Frege. Even though we
may harbor such ambitions ourselves, they are not what has led to
the present editorial enterprise. What we have tried to do is to
bring together some of the best ongoing work on Frege. Even though
the ultimate judgment on our success lies with out readers, we want
to register our satisfaction with all the contributions.
The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western
Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The
Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of
History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology
and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National
Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario.
As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the
years know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly
and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In
addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and
scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen
enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors
chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of
publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour
of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of
pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to
the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the
University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The
volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and
Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special
Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and
Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and
Philosophy of Science."
The two volumes to which this is apreface consist of the
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History and
Philosophy of Science. The Conference was organized by the Joint
Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of
Science (IUHPS) under the auspices of the IUHPS, the Italian
Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the Domus
Galilaeana of Pisa, headed by Professor Vincenzo Cappelletti. Domus
Galilaeana also served as the host institution, with some help from
the University of Pisa. The Conference took place in Pisa, Italy,
on September 4-8, 1978. The editors of these two volumes of the
Proceedings of the Pisa Conference acknowledge with gratitude the
help by the different sponsoring organizations, and in the first
place that by both Divisions of the IUHPS, which made the
Conference possible. A special recognition is due to Professor
Evandro Agazzi, President of the Italian Society for Logic and
Philosophy of Science, who was co opted as an additional member of
the Organizing Committee. This committee was otherwise identical
with the Joint Commission, whose members were initially John
Murdoch, John North, Arpad Szab6, Robert Butts, Jaakko Hintikka,
and Vadim Sadovsky. Later, Erwin Hiebert and Lubos Novy were
appointed as additional members."
The two volumes to which this is a preface consist of the
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on History and
Philosophy of Science. The Conference was organized by the Joint
Commission of the International Union of History and Philosophy of
Science (IUHPS) of the IUHPS, the Italian Society for Logic and
under the auspices Philosophy of Science, and the Domus Galilaeana
of Pisa, headed by Professor Vincenzo Cappelletti. Domus GaIilaeana
also served as the host institution, with some help from the
University of Pisa. The Conference took place in Pisa, Italy, on
September 4-8, 1978. The editors of these two volumes of the
Proceedings of the Pisa Conference acknowledge with gratitude the
help by the different sponsoring organizations, and in the first
place that by both, Divisions of the IUHPS, which made the
Conference possible.' A special recognition is due to Professor
Evandro Agazzi, President of the Italian Society for Logic and
Philosophy of Science, who was co opted as an additional member of
the Organizing Committee. This committee was otherwise identical
with the Joint Commission, whose members were initially John
Murdoch, John North, Arpad Szab6, Robert Butts, Jaakko Hintikka,
and Vadim Sadovsky. Later, Erwin Hiebert and Lubos Novy were
appointed as additional members."
Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of
the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was
originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For
Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense
that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their
properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent
entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of
syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication
and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as
an example of a thinker who did not rely on the distinction between
the allegedly different Fregean senses, thereby shedding new light
on our own conceptual presuppositions.
This collection comprises several striking interpretations that
Jaakko Hintikka has put forward over the years, constituting a
challenge not only to Aristotelian scholars and historians of
ideas, but to everyone interested in logic, epistemology or
metaphysics and in their history.
R. G. Collingwood saw one of the main tasks of philosophers and of
historians of human thought in uncovering what he called the
ultimate presuppositions of different thinkers, of different
philosophical movements and of entire eras of intellectual history.
He also noted that such ultimate presuppositions usually remain
tacit at first, and are discovered only by subsequent reflection.
Collingwood would have been delighted by the contrast that
constitutes the overall theme of the essays collected in this
volume. Not only has this dichotomy ofviews been one ofthe
mostcrucial watersheds in the entire twentieth-century
philosophical thought. Not only has it remained largely implicit in
the writings of the philosophers for whom it mattered most. It is a
truly Collingwoodian presupposition also in that it is not apremise
assumed by different thinkers in their argumentation. It is the
presupposition of a question, an assumption to the effect that a
certain general question can be raised and answered. Its role is
not belied by the fact that several philosophers who answered it
one way or the other seem to be largely unaware that the other
answer also makes sense - if it does. This Collingwoodian question
can be formulated in a first rough approximation by asking whether
language - our actual working language, Tarski's
"colloquiallanguage" - is universal in the sense of being
inescapable. This formulation needs all sorts of explanations,
however.
|
|