Download or read book Theory Change Ancient Axiomatics and Galileo s Methodology written by Jaakko Hintikka and published by . This book was released on 1980-12-31 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Theory Change Ancient Axiomatics and Galileo s Methodology written by Jaakko Hintikka and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proceedings of the 1978 Pisa, Italy, September 4-8, 1978 Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science

Download or read book Theory Change Ancient Axiomatics and Galileo s Methodology written by Jaakko Hintikka and published by . This book was released on 1981* with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Representational Ideas written by R. A. Watson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Representational Ideas: From Plato to Patricia Churchland Watson argues that all intelligible theories of representation by ideas are based on likeness between representations and objects. He concludes that 17th century materialist criticisms of `having' mental representations in the mind apply to contemporary material representations in the brain, as proposed by neurophilosophers. The argument begins with Plato, with particular stress on Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld. He then proceeds with an examination of the picture theory developed by Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Goodman, and concludes with an examination of Patricia Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Robert Cummins, and Mark Rollins. The use of the historical development of representationalism to pose a central problem in contemporary cognitive science is unique. For students, scholars and researchers in neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and modern philosophy.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Cybernetics written by G. Vijver and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gertrudis Van de Vijver· Seminar of Logic and Epistemology University of Ghent Before being classified under the fashionable denominators of complexity and chaos, self-organization and autonomy were intensely inquired into in the cybernetic tradition. Despite all rejections that cybernetics has gone through in the second half of this century, today its importance is more and more recognized. Its decisive influence for connectionist theories, autopoietic and constructivist theories, for different forms of applied or experimental epistemology, is being more and more understood and generally accepted. It is mainly due to the success of connectionist models that we observe today a revival of interest for cybernetics. The 1943 article by McCulloch and Pitts is evidently a founding article. Cybernetics has however a much broader interest than the one linked to technical-mathematical details relevant to the construction of networks. For instance, the evolution from first to second order cybernetics, the ways of approaching biological and cognitive phenomena in the latter and the limits that were formulated there, are particularly meaningful to understand current developments and divergences in connectionism. A nuanced picture of cybernetic's history and its present state is therefore clearly epistemologically essential.

Download or read book Quantifiers Logics Models and Computation written by Michal Krynicki and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of research papers centered around the concept of quantifier. Recently this concept has become the central point of research in logic. It is one of the important logical concepts whose exact domain and applications have so far been insufficiently explored, especially in the area of inferential and semantic properties of languages. It should thus remain the central point of research in the future. Moreover, during the last twenty years generalized quantifiers and logical technics based on them have proved their utility in various applications. The example of natu rallanguage semantics has been partcularly striking. For a long time it has been belived that elementary logic also called first-order logic was an ade quate theory of logical forms of natural language sentences. Recently it has been accepted that semantics of many natural language constructions can not be properly represented in elementary logic. It has turned out, however, that they can be described by means of generalized quantifiers. As far as computational applications oflogic are concerned, particulary interesting are semantics restricted to finite models. Under this restriction elementary logic looses several of its advantages such as axiomatizability and compactness. And for various purposes we can use equally well some semantically richer languages of which generalized quantifiers offer the most universal methods of describing extensions of elementary logic. Moreover we can look at generalized quantifiers as an explication of some specific mathematical concepts, e. g.

Download or read book Patrick Suppes Scientific Philosopher written by P. Humphreys and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1994-09-30 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science. He has also been a pioneer in the area of computer assisted instruction. In each of these areas, Suppes has provided seminal ideas that in some cases led to shaping the direction of research in the field. The papers contained in this collection were commissioned with the mandate of advancing research in their respective fields rather than retrospectively surveying the contributions that Suppes himself has made. The authors form an interesting mixture of researchers in both formal philosophy of science and science itself all of whom have been inspired by his ideas. To maintain the spirit of constructive dialogue that characterizes Suppes's intellectual style, he has written individual responses to each article. In Volume 1: Probability and Probabilistic Causality, nineteen distinguished philosophers and scientists focus their attention on probabilistic issues. In Part I the contributors explore axiomatic representations of probability theory including qualitative and interval valued probabilities as well as traditional point valued probabilities. Belief structures and the dynamics of belief are also treated in detail. In Part II the rapidly growing field of probabilistic causation is assessed from both formal and empirical viewpoints. For probability theorists, statisticians, economists, philosophers of science, psychologists and those interested in the foundations of mathematical social science. In Volume 2: Philosophy of Physics, Theory Structure, and Measurement Theory, fifteen distinguished philosophers and scientists cover a wide variety of topics. Part III covers issues in quantum theory, geometry, classical mechanics, and computational physics. Part IV explores Suppes's well known set-theoretic account of scientific theories which has served him well throughout his career. Suppes's contributions to measurement theory have been widely used in mathematical psychology and elsewhere, and this material is the subject of Part V. For physicists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sicence, and philosophers of science. In Volume 3: Philosophy of Language and Logic, Learning and Action Theory, fourteen distinguished philosophers and scientists explore issues in the philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical psychology. Suppes's suggestions that quantum theory requires a rethinking of classical logic form a particularly sharp account of that controversial thesis, and Part VI deals with this issue together with topics in the philosophy of language and logic, including relational grammars and anaphora. Part VII deals with issues in psychology, action theory, and robotics, while Part VIII concludes with a general survey of Suppes's views in the philosophy of science. A comprehensive chronological and topical bibliography of Suppes's writings is included in this volume. For philosophers of language, theoretical linguists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sciences, and philosophers of science.

Download or read book Language Mind and Art written by D. Jamieson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of essays in honor of Paul Ziff written by his col leagues, students, and friends. Many of the authors address topics that Ziff has discussed in his writings: understanding, rules and regularities, proper names, the feelings of machines, expression, and aesthetic experience. Paul Ziff began his professional career as an artist, went on to study painting with J. M. Hanson at Cornell, and then studied for the Ph. D. in philosophy, also at Cornell, with Max Black. Over the next three decades he produced a series of remarkable papers in philosophy of art, culminating in 1984 with the publica tion of Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose. In 1960 he published Semantic Analysis, his masterwork in philosophy of lan guage. Throughout his career he made important contributions to philosophy of mind in such papers as "The Simplicity of Other Minds" (1965) and "About Behaviourism" (1958). In addition to his work in these areas, his lec tures at Harvard on philosophy of religion are an underground classic; and throughout his career he has continued to make art and to search for the meaning of life in the properties of prime numbers. Although his interests are wide and deep, questions about language, art, and mind have dominated his philosophical work, and it is problems in these areas that provide the topics of most of the essays in this volume.

Download or read book A Structuralist Theory of Economics written by Adolfo García de la Sienra and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists have long grappled with the problem of how economic theories relate to empirical evidence: how can abstract mathematized theories be used to produce empirical claims? How are such theories applied to economic phenomena? What does it mean to “test” economic theories? This book introduces, explains, and develops a structural philosophy of economics which addresses these questions and provides a unifying philosophical/logical basis for a general methodology of economics. The book begins by introducing a rigorous view of the logical foundations and structure of scientific theories based upon the work of Alfred Tarski, Patrick Suppes, Karl Marx, and others. Using and combining their methods, the book then goes on to reconstruct important economic theories – including utility theory, game theory, Marxian economics, Sraffian economic theory, and econometrics – proving all the main theorems and discussing the key claims and the empirical applicability of each theory. Through these discussions, this book presents, in a systematic fashion, a general philosophy of economics grounded in the structural view. Offering rigorous formulations of important economic theories, A Structuralist Theory of Economics will be invaluable to all readers interested in the logic, philosophy, and methodology of economics. It will also appeal particularly to those interested in economic theory.

Download or read book Formal Ontology and Conceptual Realism written by Nino B. Cocchiarella and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-09-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theories about the ontological structure of the world have generally been described in informal, intuitive terms. This book offers an account of the general features and methodology of formal ontology. The book defends conceptual realism as the best system to adopt based on a logic of natural kinds. By formally reconstructing an intuitive, informal ontological scheme as a formal ontology we can better determine the consistency and adequacy of that scheme.

Download or read book I Am You written by Daniel Kolak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-03 with total page 679 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us - physical, psychological, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. - merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded them? The central thesis of I Am You is that our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. Variations on this heretical theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroës, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In presenting his arguments, the author relies on detailed analyses of recent formal work on personal identity, especially that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, while incorporating the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His development of the implied moral theory is inspired by, and draws on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and again Parfit. The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity is closed under known individuating and identifying borders - what the author calls Closed Individualism - is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of two new directions: either there are no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood - the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism - or else you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is not closed under known individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the author: - offers a new explanation both of consciousness and of self-consciousness - constructs a new theory of Self - explains psychopathologies (e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia) - shows Open Individualism to be the best competing explanation of who we are - provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics. The book is intended for philosophers and the philosophically inclined - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, economists, and communication theorists. It is accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Download or read book The Dynamics of Thought written by Peter Gardenfors and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a selection from the articles that I have written over a period of more than twenty years. Since the focus of my research interests has shifted several times during this period, it would be difficult to identify a common theme for all the papers in the volume. Following the Swedish tradition, I therefore present this as a smörgåsbord of philosophical and cognitive issues that I have worked on. To create some order, I have organized the sixteen papers into five general sections: (1) Decision theory; (2) belief revision and nonmonotonic logic; (3) induction; (4) semantics and pragmatics; and (5) cognition and evolution. Having said this, I still think that there is a common theme to my work over the years: The dynamics of thought. My academic interests have all the time dealt with aspects of how different kinds of knowledge should be represented, and, in particular, how changes in knowledge will affect thinking. Hence the title of the book.

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 Philosophical Lectures on Probability written by Bruno de Finetti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-05-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruno de Finetti (1906–1985) is the founder of the subjective interpretation of probability, together with the British philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey. His related notion of “exchangeability” revolutionized the statistical methodology. This book (based on a course held in 1979) explains in a language accessible also to non-mathematicians the fundamental tenets and implications of subjectivism, according to which the probability of any well specified fact F refers to the degree of belief actually held by someone, on the ground of her whole knowledge, on the truth of the assertion that F obtains.

Download or read book Explanatory Translation written by V. Rantala and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2002-08-31 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notion of translation investigated here is called explanatory, but it is not a translation in the standard sense of the word since it admits of conceptual change. Such translations can take various degrees of precision, and therefore they can occur in contexts of different kinds: from everyday discourse to literary texts to scientific change. The book generalizes some earlier approaches to translation, especially the one presented in David Pearce's monograph "Roads to Commensurability".

Download or read book Phenomenological Aspects of Wittgenstein s Philosophy written by B.-C. Park and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his writings around 1930, Wittgenstein relates his philosophy in different ways to the idea of phenomenology. He indicates that his main philosophical project had earlier been the construction of a purely phenomenological language, and even after having given up this project he believed that "the world we live in is the world of sense-data,,,l that is, of phenomenological objects. However, a problem is posed by the fact that he does not appear ever to have given a full, explicit account of what he means by his 'phenomenology', 'phenomenological language', or 'phenomenological problems'. In this book, I have tried to unravel the nature of Wittgenstein's phenomenology and to examine its importance for his entire work in philosophy. Phenomenology can be characterized as philosophy whose primary concern is what is immediately given in one's experience. This 'immediately given' is not merely impressions inside one's mind, but includes also the part of objective reality that impinges upon one's consciousness. Thus, an aim of phenomenological enterprise is to grasp this objective reality by attending to immediate experience. Husserl's phenomenology is in fact a case in point.

Download or read book Trading Ontology for Ideology written by L. Decock and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willard VanOrman Quine has probably been the most influential th American philosopher of the 20 century. His work spans over seven decades, and covers many domains in philosophy. He has made major contributions to the fields of logic and set theory, philosophy of logic and mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics. Quine's first work in philosophy was in the field of logic. His major contributions are the two set-theoretic systems NF (1936) and ML (1940). 1 These systems were alternatives to the type theory of Principia Mathematica or Zermelo's set theory, and are still being studied by 2 mathematicians. An indirect contribution to the field of logic is his strong resistance to moda110gic. Quine's objectIons to the notions of necessity and analyticity have influenced the development of moda110gic? Quine has had an enormous influence on philosophy of mathematics. When Quine entered philosophy there was a discussion on the foundations of mathematics between the schools of intuitionism, formalism, and conventionalism. Quine soon took issue with Carnap's conventionalism in "Truth by convention,,4 (1936). Quine has never joined one of the other schools, but has added new elements that are the basic ones of the 5 contemporary schools of nominalism, platonism, and structuralism. Quine has long been in the shadow of Benacerraf and Putnam in this field. At the moment there seems to be a renewed interest in Quine's work, and most philosophers explicitly refer to Quine's work.