Download or read book Outline of a Nominalist Theory of Propositions written by Paul Gochet and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT In 1900, in A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leihniz, Russell made the following assertion: "That all sound philosophy should begin with an analysis of propositions is a truth too evident, perhaps, to demand a proof". 1 Forty years later, the interest aroused by this notion had not decreased. C. J. Ducasse wrote in the Journal of Philosophy: "There is perhaps no question more basic for the theory of knowledge than that of the nature of 2 propositions and their relations to judgments, sentences, facts and inferences". Today, the great number of publications on the subject is proof that it is still of interest. One of the problems raised by propositions, the problem of deter mining whether propositions, statements or sentences are the primary bearers of truth and falsity, is even in the eyes of Bar-Hillel, "one of the major items that the future philosophy oflanguage will have to discuss". 3 gave a correct summary of the situation when he wrote in his Ph. Devaux Russell (1967): Since Peano and Schroder who, in fact, adhered more faithfully to Boole's logic of classes, the logical and epistemological status of the proposition together with its analysis have not ceased to be the object of productive philosophical controversies. And especially so since the establishment of contemporary symbolic logic, the foundations 4 of which have been laid out by Russell and Whitehead. * 2.

Download or read book Outline o a Nominalist Theory of Propositions written by Paul GOCHET and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Shapes of Forms written by L. Albertazzi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: impossible triangle, after apprehension of the perceptively given mode of being of that 'object', the visual system assumes that all three sides touch on all three sides, whereas this happens on only one side. In fact, the sides touch only optically, because they are separate in depth. In Meinong's words, Penrose's triangle has been inserted in an 'objective', or in what we would today call a "cognitive schema". Re-examination of the Graz school's theory, as said, sheds light on several problems concerning the theory of perception, and, as Luccio points out in his contribution to this book, it helps to eliminate a number of over-simplistic commonplaces, such as the identification of the cognitivist notion of 'top down' with Wertheimer's 'von oben unten', and of 'bottom up' with his 'von unten nach oben'. In fact, neither Hochberg's and Gregory's 'concept-driven' perception nor Gibson's 'data-driven' perception coincide with the original conception of the Gestalt.

Download or read book Talking Wolves written by A. Biletzki and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Talking Wolves advances an analysis of Hobbes which takes language seriously (as seriously as Hobbes took it). It presents a reading of Hobbes's view of society at large, and political society in particular, through a comprehensive discussion based on, and intimately linked to, his philosophy of language. This philosophy, in turn, is seen in a new light as being a pragmatic theory of language in use, language in action.

Download or read book The Growth of Mathematical Knowledge written by Emily Grosholz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. For Plato, mathematics was evidence of Being in the midst of Becoming, garden variety evidence apparent even to small children and the unphilosophical, and therefore of the highest educational significance. In the great central similes of The Republic it is the touchstone ofintelligibility for discourse, and in the Timaeus it provides in an oddly literal sense the framework of nature, insuring the intelligibility ofthe material world. For Descartes, mathematical ideas had a clarity and distinctness akin to the idea of God, as the fifth of the Meditations makes especially clear. Cartesian mathematicals are constructions as well as objects envisioned by the soul; in the Principles, the work ofthe physicist who provides a quantified account ofthe machines of nature hovers between description and constitution. For Kant, mathematics reveals the possibility of universal and necessary knowledge that is neither the logical unpacking ofconcepts nor the record of perceptual experience. In the Critique ofPure Reason, mathematics is one of the transcendental instruments the human mind uses to apprehend nature, and by apprehending to construct it under the universal and necessary lawsofNewtonian mechanics.

Download or read book The Dynamics of Thought written by Peter Gardenfors and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-07 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of some of the most important philosophical papers by Peter Gärdenfors. Spanning a period of more than 20 years of his research, they cover a wide ground of topics, from early works on decision theory, belief revision and nonmonotonic logic to more recent work on conceptual spaces, inductive reasoning, semantics and the evolutions of thinking. Many of the papers have only been published in places that are difficult to access. The common theme of all the papers is the dynamics of thought. Several of the papers have become minor classics and the volume bears witness of the wide scope of Gärdenfors’ research and of his crisp and often witty style of writing. The volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy and other cognitive sciences.

Download or read book Visualization Explanation and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics written by P. Mancosu and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-03-30 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 20th century philosophy of mathematics has to a great extent been dominated by views developed during the so-called foundational crisis in the beginning of that century. These views have primarily focused on questions pertaining to the logical structure of mathematics and questions regarding the justi?cation and consistency of mathematics. Paradigmatic in this - spect is Hilbert’s program which inherits from Frege and Russell the project to formalize all areas of ordinary mathematics and then adds the requi- ment of a proof, by epistemically privileged means (?nitistic reasoning), of the consistency of such formalized theories. While interest in modi?ed v- sions of the original foundational programs is still thriving, in the second part of the twentieth century several philosophers and historians of mat- matics have questioned whether such foundational programs could exhaust the realm of important philosophical problems to be raised about the nature of mathematics. Some have done so in open confrontation (and hostility) to the logically based analysis of mathematics which characterized the cl- sical foundational programs, while others (and many of the contributors to this book belong to this tradition) have only called for an extension of the range of questions and problems that should be raised in connection with an understanding of mathematics. The focus has turned thus to a consideration of what mathematicians are actually doing when they produce mathematics. Questions concerning concept-formation, understanding, heuristics, changes instyle of reasoning, the role of analogies and diagrams etc.

Download or read book Reference Truth and Conceptual Schemes written by G. Forrai and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History, "Introduction", Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters. The story starts with Kant. Kant thought that the world as we know it, the world of tables, chairs and hippopotami, is constituted in part by the human mind. His cen tral argument relied on an analysis of space and time, and presupposed his famous doctrine that knowledge cannot extend beyond all possible experience. It is a central property of experience - he claimed - that it is structured spatially and temporally. However, for various reasons, space and time cannot be features of the world, as it is independently of our experience. So he concluded that they must be the forms of human sensibility, i. e. necessary ingredients of the way things appear to our senses.

Download or read book Reuniting the Antipodes Constructive and Nonstandard Views of the Continuum written by Peter Schuster and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At first glance, Robinson's original form of nonstandard analysis appears nonconstructive in essence, because it makes a rather unrestricted use of classical logic and set theory and, in particular, of the axiom of choice. Recent developments, however, have given rise to the hope that the distance between constructive and nonstandard mathematics is actually much smaller than it appears. So the time was ripe for the first meeting dedicated simultaneously to both ways of doing mathematics – and to the current and future reunion of these seeming opposites. Consisting of peer-reviewed research and survey articles written on the occasion of such an event, this volume offers views of the continuum from various standpoints. Including historical and philosophical issues, the topics of the contributions range from the foundations, the practice, and the applications of constructive and nonstandard mathematics, to the interplay of these areas and the development of a unified theory.

Download or read book Refined Verisimilitude written by S.D. Zwart and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. In the decade before this publication, Popper fiercely attacked the ideas of Rudolf Carnap about confirmation and induction; and ten years later, in the famous tenth chapter of Conjectures he introduced his own ideas about scientific progress and verisimilitude (cf. the quotation on page 6). Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve the purpose of approach to the truth. To substantiate this idea he formalized the common sense intuition about preferences, that is: B is to be preferred to A if B has more advantages andfewer drawbacks than A. In 1974, however, David Millerand Pavel Tichy proved that Popper's formal explication could not be used to compare false theories. Subsequently, many researchers proposed alternatives or tried to improve Popper's original definition.

Download or read book Internal Logic written by Y. Gauthier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Internal logic is the logic of content. The content is here arithmetic and the emphasis is on a constructive logic of arithmetic (arithmetical logic). Kronecker's general arithmetic of forms (polynomials) together with Fermat's infinite descent is put to use in an internal consistency proof. The view is developed in the context of a radical arithmetization of mathematics and logic and covers the many-faceted heritage of Kronecker's work, which includes not only Hilbert, but also Frege, Cantor, Dedekind, Husserl and Brouwer. The book will be of primary interest to logicians, philosophers and mathematicians interested in the foundations of mathematics and the philosophical implications of constructivist mathematics. It may also be of interest to historians, since it covers a fifty-year period, from 1880 to 1930, which has been crucial in the foundational debates and their repercussions on the contemporary scene.

Download or read book Collected Papers of Stig Kanger with Essays on his Life and Work Volume II written by Ghita Holmström-Hintikka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stig Kanger (1924-1988) made important contributions to logic and formal philosophy. Kanger's dissertation Provability in Logic, 1957, contained significant results in proof theory as well as the first fully worked out model-theoretic interpretation of quantified modal logic. It is generally accepted nowadays that Kanger was one of the originators of possible worlds semantics for modal logic. 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. He also contributed to action theory, preference logic, and the theory of measurement. This is the first of two volumes dedicated to the work of Stig Kanger. The present volume is a complete collection of Kanger's philosophical papers. The second volume contains critical essays on Kanger's work, as well as biographical essays on Kanger written by colleagues and friends.

Download or read book Collected Papers of Stig Kanger with Essays on his Life and Work written by Ghita Holmström-Hintikka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stig Kanger (1924-1988) made important contributions to logic and formal philosophy. Kanger's dissertation Provability in Logic, 1957, contained significant results in proof theory as well as the first fully worked out model-theoretic interpretation of quantified modal logic. It is generally accepted nowadays that Kanger was one of the originators of possible worlds semantics for modal logic. 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. He also contributed to action theory, preference logic, and the theory of measurement. This is the first of two volumes dedicated to the work of Stig Kanger. The present volume is a complete collection of Kanger's philosophical papers. The second volume contains critical essays on Kanger's work, as well as biographical essays on Kanger written by colleagues and friends.

Download or read book The Dawn of Cognitive Science written by L. Albertazzi and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current debate in cognitive science, from robotics to analysis of vision, deals with problems like the perception of form, the structure and formation of mental images and their modelling, the ecological development of artificial intelligence, and cognitive analysis of natural language. It focuses in particular on the presence of a hierarchy of intellectual constructions in different formats of representation. These diverse approaches, which share a common assumption of the inner nature of representation, call for a new epistemology - even a new psychophysics - based on a theory of reference which is intrinsically cognitive. As a contribution to contemporary research, the reading presents the core of theories developed in Central Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by philosophers, physicists, psychologists and semanticists who shared a dynamic approach and a pronounced concern with problems of interaction and dependence. These theories offer innovative solutions to some of the epistemological and philosophical problems currently at the centre of debate, like part-whole, theory of relations, and conceptual and linguistic categorization.

Download or read book Logic Meaning and Computation written by C. Anthony Anderson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume began as a remembrance of Alonzo Church while he was still with us and is now finally complete. It contains papers by many well-known scholars, most of whom have been directly influenced by Church's own work. Often the emphasis is on foundational issues in logic, mathematics, computation, and philosophy - as was the case with Church's contributions, now universally recognized as having been of profound fundamental significance in those areas. The volume will be of interest to logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, and linguists. The contributions concern classical first-order logic, higher-order logic, non-classical theories of implication, set theories with universal sets, the logical and semantical paradoxes, the lambda-calculus, especially as it is used in computation, philosophical issues about meaning and ontology in the abstract sciences and in natural language, and much else. The material will be accessible to specialists in these areas and to advanced graduate students in the respective fields.

Download or read book A Boole Anthology written by James Gasser and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern mathematical logic would not exist without the analytical tools first developed by George Boole in The Mathematical Analysis of Logic and The Laws of Thought. The influence of the Boolean school on the development of logic, always recognised but long underestimated, has recently become a major research topic. This collection is the first anthology of works on Boole. It contains two works published in 1865, the year of Boole's death, but never reprinted, as well as several classic studies of recent decades and ten original contributions appearing here for the first time. From the programme of the English Algebraic School to Boole's use of operator methods, from the problem of interpretability to that of psychologism, a full range of issues is covered. The Boole Anthology is indispensable to Boole studies and will remain so for years to come.

Download or read book A Collection of Polish Works on Philosophical Problems of Time and Spacetime written by Helena Eilstein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of some works of Polish philosophers and physicists on philosophical problems of time and spacetime. Without restricting the thematic scope of the papers, the issue conceming objectivity of time flow runs as a uniting thread through most of them. Partly it is discussed directIy, and partly the authors focus on themes which are of paramount importance for one's attitude to that question. In the first six papers the authors deal with their topics against the background of contemporary physics, its theories, its difficulties and discussed conjectures. For the paper of S. Snihur that background is provided by everyday worId-outlook, and the author discusses the problem of existence and character of the future in the light of basic principles of cIassical logic. The paper of A. P61tawski, about the views of the outstanding polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, enriches the thematic scope of the coIIection introducing into it some questions from philosophical anthropology and ethics. JERZY GOLOSZ MOTION, SPACE, TIME*. Abstract. The paper discusses the properties of spacetime we study by analyzing the phenomenon of motion. Of special interest are the spacetime symmetries. the spacetime structures and the ontological status of spacetime. These problems are considered on the grounds of the c1assical theories of motion contained in Newtonian physics, special and general theory of relativity. The controversy between an absolute and a relational conception of motion and its ontological implications are also analyzed.