Download or read book Assertion and Conditionals written by Anthony Appiah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1985-09-19 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses.
Download or read book A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals written by Jonathan Bennett and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2003-04-03 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language: analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. The literature on conditionals is difficult - needlessly so. Bennett's treatment is meticulously careful and luminously clear. He presents and evaluates in detail various approaches to the understanding of 'indicative' conditionals (like 'If Shakespeare didn't write Hamlet, some aristocrat did') and 'subjunctive' conditionals (like 'If rabbits had not been deliberately introduced into New Zealand, there would be none there today'); and he offers his own view, which will be recognized as a major original contribution to the subject. Journeying through this intellectual territory brings one into contact with the metaphysics of possible worlds, probability and belief-change, probability and logic, the pragmatics of conversation, determinism, ambiguity, vagueness, the law of excluded middle, facts versus events, and more. One might perhaps learn more philosophy from a thorough study of conditionals than from any other kind of work. Bennett's Guide is an ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, and will also be a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate students and professional philosophers.
Download or read book Knowledge and Conditionals written by Robert C. Stalnaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert C. Stalnaker presents a set of essays on the structure of inquiry. In the first part he focuses on the concepts of knowledge, belief, and partial belief, and on the rules and procedures we use - or ought to use - to determine what to believe, and what to claim that we know. In the second part he examines conditional statements and conditional beliefs, their role in epistemology, and their relations to causal and explanatory concepts, such as dispositions, objective chance, relations of dependence, and independence. A central concern of the book is the interaction of different cognitive perspectives - the ways in which the attitudes of rational agents are or should be influenced by critical reflection on their present cognitive situation, on their own cognitive situations at other times, and on the cognitive situations of others with whom they interact. The general picture that is developed is naturalistic, following Hume in rejecting a substantive role for pure reason in the defense of inductive rules, and in giving causal concepts a central role in the description and explanation of our cognitive practices. However, Stalnaker rejects the side of Hume that aims to reduce concepts involving natural necessity to more basic descriptive concepts. Instead, he argues that the development of inductive rules and practices takes place in interaction with the development of concepts for giving a theoretical description of the world.
Download or read book Conditionals written by Michael Woods and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-05-22 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditionals has at its centre an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic, which the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods had been preparing for publication at the time of his death in 1993. Woods discusses the distinction between different kinds of conditionals, and then goes on to cover a range of topics, including assertibility, conditional probability, possible-worlds theories, and conditional commands and questions. He ends up sketching a new theory of counterfactual conditionals. This essay is edited for publication by Wood's friend and colleague David Wiggins, and accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. The masterful and original treatment of conditionals presented in this book will demand the attention of all philosophers working in this area.
Download or read book Suppose and Tell written by Timothy Williamson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does 'if' mean? Timothy Williamson presents a controversial new approach to understanding conditional thinking, which is central to human cognitive life. He argues that in using 'if' we rely on psychological heuristics, fast and frugal methods which can lead us to trust faulty data and prematurely reject simple theories.
Download or read book Conditionals Paradox and Probability written by Lee Walters and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditionals, Paradox, and Probability brings together fifteen original essays by experts in philosophy and linguistics. These specially written chapters draw on themes from the work of Dorothy Edgington, the first woman to hold a chair in philosophy at the University of Oxford. The contributors to this volume focus on the key topics to which Edgington has made many important contributions, including conditionals, vagueness, the paradox of knowability, and probability. Their insights will be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and psychologists working in philosophical logic, natural language semantics, and reasoning.
Download or read book The Meaning of If written by Justin Khoo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its small stature, if occupies a central place both in everyday language and the philosophical lexicon. In allowing us to talk about hypothetical situations, if raises a host of thorny philosophical puzzles about language and logic. Addressing them requires tools from linguistics, logic, probability theory, and metaphysics. Justin Khoo uses these tools to navigate a maze of interconnected issues about conditionals, some of which include: the nature of linguistic communication, the relationship between logical and natural languages, and the relationship between different kinds of modality. According to Khoo's theory, conditionals form a unified class of expressions which share a common semantic core that encodes inferential dispositions. Thus, rather than represent the world, conditionals are devices used to communicate how we are disposed to infer. Khoo shows that this theory can be extended to predict the probabilities of conditionals, as well as how different kinds of conditionals differ both semantically and pragmatically. Khoo's book will make for a significant contribution to the literature on conditionals and should be of interest to philosophers, linguists, and computer scientists.
Download or read book Conditionals written by Renaat Declerck and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-09 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an extremely detailed and comprehensive examination of conditional sentences in English, using many examples from actual language-use. The syntax and semantics of conditionals (including tense and mood options) and the functions of conditionals in discourse are examined in depth, producing an all-round linguistic view of the subject which contains a wealth of original observations and analyses. Not only linguists specializing in grammar but also those interested in pragmatics and the philosophy of language will find this book a rewarding and illuminating source.
Download or read book On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals written by Robert N. McLaughlin and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-07-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Logic of Ordinary Conditionals offers a formal treatment of the logic of a type of conditional found in natural speech which differs substantially from the material conditional of propositional logic and from the conditionals afforded by theories of possible worlds. Conventional and necessary conditionals are studied as well as factual ones.
Download or read book Logica Magna written by George Edward Hughes and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascicule Paul examines conditional propositions and inferences. Detailed notes make Paul's terminology and background ideas and assumptions more accessible to the modern reader, and an appendix contains substantial extracts from the writings of two fourteenth-century logicians, Ralph Strode and John Venator, both of whose works Paul makes extensive use of in this part of the Logica Magna.
Download or read book Reasoning with Attitude written by Luca Incurvati and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Certain combinations of sounds or signs on paper are meaningful. What makes it the case that, unlike most combinations of sounds or signs, they have meaning? What is this meaning that they have? And what is it to understand this meaning? The traditional answers to these questions are based on the idea that words stand for something, but it is difficult to say what words such as good, if, or probable stand for. This book advances novel answers based on the idea that words get their meaning from the way they are used to express states of mind and what follows from them. It articulates a precise version of this idea, at a time when the shortcomings of the traditional answers are hotly discussed.
Download or read book Conditional Reasoning written by Raymond S. Nickerson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conditional reasoning is reasoning that involves statements of the sort If A (Antecedent) then C (Consequent). This type of reasoning is ubiquitous; everyone engages in it. Indeed, the ability to do so may be considered a defining human characteristic. Without this ability, human cognition would be greatly impoverished. "What-if" thinking could not occur. There would be no retrospective efforts to understand history by imagining how it could have taken a different course. Decisions that take possible contingencies into account could not be made; there could be no attempts to influence the future by selecting actions on the basis of their expected effects. Despite the commonness and importance of conditional reasoning and the considerable attention it has received from scholars, it remains the subject of much continuing debate. Unsettled questions, both normative and empirical, continue to be asked. What constitutes normative conditional reasoning? How do people engage in it? Does what people do match what would be expected of a rational agent with the abilities and limitations of human beings? If not, how does it deviate and how might people's ability to engage in it be improved? This book reviews the work of prominent psychologists and philosophers on conditional reasoning. It describes empirical research on how people deal with conditional arguments and on how conditional statements are used and interpreted in everyday communication. It examines philosophical and theoretical treatments of the mental processes that support conditional reasoning. Its extensive coverage of the subject makes it an ideal resource for students, teachers, and researchers with a focus on cognition across disciplines.
Download or read book Cognition and Conditionals written by Mike Oaksford and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conditional, if...then, is probably the most important term in natural language and forms the core of systems of logic and mental representation. Cognition and Conditionals is the first volume for over 20 years that brings together recent developments in the cognitive science and psychology of conditional reasoning.
Download or read book Conditionals Information and Inference written by Gabriele Kern-Isberner and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-05-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the International Workshop on Conditionals, Information, and Inference, WCII 2002, held in Hagen, Germany in May 2002. The 9 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers by leading researchers in the area were carefully selected during iterated rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers address all current issues of research on conditionals, ranging from foundational, theoretical, and methodological aspects to applications in various contexts of knowledge representation.
Download or read book Saving Truth From Paradox written by Hartry Field and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saving Truth from Paradox is an ambitious investigation into paradoxes of truth and related issues, with occasional forays into notions such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. Hartry Field presents a new approach to the paradoxes and provides a systematic and detailed account of the main competing approaches. Part One examines Tarski's, Kripke’s, and Lukasiewicz’s theories of truth, and discusses validity and soundness, and vagueness. Part Two considers a wide range of attempts to resolve the paradoxes within classical logic. In Part Three Field turns to non-classical theories of truth that that restrict excluded middle. He shows that there are theories of this sort in which the conditionals obey many of the classical laws, and that all the semantic paradoxes (not just the simplest ones) can be handled consistently with the naive theory of truth. In Part Four, these theories are extended to the property-theoretic paradoxes and to various other paradoxes, and some issues about the understanding of the notion of validity are addressed. Extended paradoxes, involving the notion of determinate truth, are treated very thoroughly, and a number of different arguments that the theories lead to "revenge problems" are addressed. Finally, Part Five deals with dialetheic approaches to the paradoxes: approaches which, instead of restricting excluded middle, accept certain contradictions but alter classical logic so as to keep them confined to a relatively remote part of the language. Advocates of dialetheic theories have argued them to be better than theories that restrict excluded middle, for instance over issues related to the incompleteness theorems and in avoiding revenge problems. Field argues that dialetheists’ claims on behalf of their theories are quite unfounded, and indeed that on some of these issues all current versions of dialetheism do substantially worse than the best theories that restrict excluded middle.
Download or read book Conditionals written by Frank Jackson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of readings introduces the reader to the most interesting current work on conditionals. Particular attention is paid to possible worlds semantics for conditionals; the role of conditional probability in helping us to understand conditionals; implicature and the materialconditional; and subjective versus indicative conditionals. The volume brings together important papers by Frank Jackson, V. H. Dudman, Dorothy Edgington, Nelson Goodman, H. P. Grice, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker. Oxford Readings in Philosophy is a series designed to bring together important recent writings in major areas of philosophical inquiry, selected from a variety of sources, mostly periodicals, which may not be conveniently available to the university student or the general reader. The editor ofeach volume contributes an introductory essay on the items chosen and on the questions with which they deal. A selective bibliography is appended as a guide to further reading.
Download or read book Mind Method and Conditionals written by Frank Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
