Download or read book The Propositional Logic of Avicenna written by Avicenna and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main purpose of this work is to provide an English translation of and commentary on a recently published Arabic text dealing with con ditional propositions and syllogisms. The text is that of A vicenna (Abu represents his views on the subject as they were held throughout his life.

Download or read book The Intuitive Sources of Probabilistic Thinking in Children written by H. Fischbein and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: About a year ago I promised my friend Fischbein a preface to his book of which I knew the French manuscript. Now with the printer's proofs under my eyes I like the book even better than I did then, because of, and influenced by, new experiences in the meantime, and fresh thoughts that crossed my mind. Have I been influenced by what I remembered from the manuscript? If so, it must have happened unconsciously. But of course, what struck me in this work a year ago, struck a responsive chord in my own mind. In the past, mathematics teaching theory has strongly been influenced by a view on mathematics as a heap of concepts, and on learning mathematics as concepts attainment. Mathematics teaching practice has been jeopardised by this theoretical approach, which in its most dangerous form expresses itself as a radical atomism. To concepts attainment Fischbein opposes acquisition of intuitions. In my own publications I avoided the word "intuition" because of the variety of its meanings across languages. For some time I have used the term "constitution of mathematical objects", which I think means the same as Fischbein's "acquisition of intuitions" - indeed as I view it, constituting a mental object precedes its conceptualising, and under this viewpoint I tried to observe mathematical activities of young children.

Download or read book Essays on Explanation and Understanding written by Juha Manninen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Belief and Probability written by J.M. Vickers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1. A WORD ABOUT PRESUPPOSITIONS This book is addressed to philosophers, and not necessarily to those philosophers whose interests and competence are largely mathematical or logical in the formal sense. It deals for the most part with problems in the theory of partial judgment. These problems are naturally formulated in numerical and logical terms, and it is often not easy to formulate them precisely otherwise. Indeed, the involvement of arithmetical and logical concepts seems essential to the philosophies of mind and action at just the point where they become concerned with partial judgment and" belief. I have tried throughout to use no mathematics that is not quite elementary, for the most part no more than ordinary arithmetic and algebra. There is some rudimentary and philosophically important employment of limits, but no use is made of integrals or differentials. Mathematical induction is rarely and inessentially employed in the text, but is more frequent and important in the apP'endix on set theory and Boolean algebra. • As far as logic is concerned, the book assumes a fair acquaintance with predicate logic and its techniques. The concepts of compactness and maximal consistency turn out to have important employment, which I have tried to keep self-contained, so that extensive knowledge of meta logical topics is not assumed. In a word, the book presupposes no more logical facility than is customary among working philosophers and graduate students, though it may call for unaccustomed vigor in its application.

Download or read book Epistemology and Psychology of Functions written by J. Piaget and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Years ago, prompted by Grize, Apostel and Papert, we undertook the study of functions, but until now we did not properly understand the relations between functions and operations, and their increasing interactions at the level of 'constituted functions'. By contrast, certain recent studies on 'constitutive functions', or preoperatory functional schemes, have convinced us of the existence of a sort of logic of functions (springing from the schemes of actions) which is prior to the logic of operations (drawn from the general and reversible coordinations between actions). This preoperatory 'logic' accounts for the very general, and until now unexplained, primacy of order relations between 4 and 7 years of age, which is natural since functions are ordered dependences and result from oriented 'applications'. And while this 'logic' ends up in a positive manner in formalizable structures, it has gaps or limitations. Psychologically, we are interested in understanding the system atic errors due to this primacy of order, such ·as the undifferentiation of 'longer' and 'farther', or the non-conservations caused by ordinal estimations (of levels, etc. ), as opposed to extensive or metric evaluations. In a sense which is psychologically very real, this preoperatory logic of constitutive functions represents only the first half of operatory logic, if this can be said, and it is reversibility which allows the construction of the other half by completing the initial one-way structures.

Download or read book Understanding and Prediction written by S. Nowak and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the more characteristic features of contemporary sociology is an increasing interest in theories. More and more theories are being developed in various areas of social investigation; we observe also an increasing number of verificational studies aimed primarily toward the verification of various theories. The essays presented in this volume deal with theories too, but they approach this problem from a methodological perspective. There fore it seems worthwhile in the preface to this volume to make a kind of general declaration about the author's aims and his approach to the subject of his interest, and about his view of the role of methodological reflection in the development of sciences. First let me say what methodology cannot do. It cannot be a substitute for the formulation of substantive theories, nor can it substitute for the empirical studies which confirm or reject such theories. Therefore its impact upon the development of any science, including the social sciences, is only indirect, by its undertaking the analysis of research tools and rules of scientific procedures. It can also propose certain standards for scientific procedures, but the application of these standards is the domain of substan tive researchers, and it is the substantive researchers who ultimately develop any science. Nevertheless the potential impact-of methodological reflection, even if only indirect, should not be underestimated.

Download or read book The Concepts of Space and Time written by M. Capek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-11-14 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Dispositions written by R. Tuomela and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology consists of a collection of papers on the nature of dis positions and the role of disposition concepts in scientific theories. I have tried to make the collection as representative as possible, except that problems specifically connected with dispositions in various special sciences are relatively little discussed. Most of these articles have been previously published. The papers by Mackie, Essler and Trapp, Fetzer (in Section 11), Levi, and Tuomela appear here for the first time, and are simultaneously published in Synthese 34, No. 4, which is a special issue on dispositions. Of the previously published material it should be emphasized that the papers by Hempel and Fisk have been extensively revised specially for this anthology. The papers are grouped in four sections, partlyon the basis of their content. However, due to the complexity of the issues involved, there is considerable overlap in content between the different sections, especially between Sections land 11. I wish to thank Professors James Fetzer and Carl G. Hempel for helpful advicc in compiling this anthology.

Download or read book Action Theory and Social Science written by I. Pörn and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is intended as a contribution to the foundations of the sciences of man, especially the social sciences. It has been argued with increasing frequency in recent years that the vocabulary of social science is to a large extent an action vocabulary and that any attempt to systematize concepts and establish bases for understanding in the field cannot, therefore, succeed unless it is firmly built on action theory. I think that these claims are sub stantially correct, but at the same time it seems to me that action theory, as it is relevant to social science, still awaits vital contributions from logic and philosophy. For example, it has often been said, rightly I believe, that situa tions in which two or more agents interact constitute the subject-matter of social science. But have we got an action theory which is rich enough or com prehensive enough to allow us to characterize the interaction situation? I think not. Once we have such a theory, however, we should be able to give an accurate account of central social phenomena and to articulate our concep tions about the nature of social reality. The conceptual scheme advanced in this book consists, in the first instance, of solutions to a number of characterization problems, i. e. problems which may be expressed by questions of the form "What is the nature of . . .

Download or read book Studies in Inductive Probability and Rational Expectation written by Theo A.F. Kuipers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 3 in philosophy, and therefore in metaphilosophy, cannot be based on rules that avoid spending time on pseudo-problems. Of course, this implies that, if one succeeds in demonstrating convincingly the pseudo-character of a problem by giving its 'solution', the time spent on it need not be seen as wasted. We conclude this section with a brief statement of the criteria for concept explication as they have been formulated in several places by Carnap, Hempel and Stegmiiller. Hempel's account ([13J, Chapter 1) is still very adequate for a detailed introduction. The process of explication starts with the identification of one or more vague and, perhaps, ambiguous concepts, the so-called explicanda. Next, one tries to disentangle the ambiguities. This, however, need not be possible at once. Ultimately the explicanda are to be replaced (not necessarily one by one) by certain counterparts, the so-called explicata, which have to conform to four requirements. They have to be as precise as possible and as simple as possible. In addition, they have to be useful in the sense that they give rise to the formulation of theories and the solution of problems. The three requirements of preciseness, simplicity and usefulness. have of course to be pursued in all concept formation.

Download or read book Local Induction written by R. Bogdan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The local justification of beliefs and hypotheses has recently become a major concern for epistemologists and philosophers of induction. As such, the problem of local justification is not entirely new. Most pragmatists had addressed themselves to it, and so did, to some extent, many classical inductivists in the Bacon-Whewell-Mill tradition. In the last few decades, however, the use of logic and semantics, probability calculus, statistical methods, and decision-theoretic concepts in the reconstruction of in ductive inference has revealed some important technical respects in which inductive justification can be local: the choice of a language, with its syntactic and semantic features, the relativity of probabilistic evalua tions to an initial body of evidence or background knowledge and to an agent's utilities and preferences, etc. Some paradoxes and difficulties encountered by purely formal accounts of inductive justification, the erosion of the once dominant empiricist position, which most approaches to induction took for granted, and the increasing challenge of noninduc tivist epistemolgies have underscored the need of accounting for the methodological problems of applying inductive logic to real life contexts, particularly in science. As a result, in the late fifties and sixties, several related developments pointed to a new, local approach to inductive justification.

Download or read book Persons and Minds written by Joseph Margolis and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Persons and Minds is an inquiry into the possibilities of materialism. Professor Margolis starts his investigation, however, with a critique of the range of contemporary materialist theories, and does not find them viable. None of them, he argues, "can accommodate in a convincing way the most distinctive features of the mental life of men and oflower creatures and the imaginative possibilities of discovery and technology" (p. 8). In an extraordinarily rich analysis, Margolis carefully considers and criticizes mind-body identity theories, physicalism, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, as inadequate precisely in that they are reductive. He argues, then, for ramified concepts of emergence, and embodiment which will sustain a philosophically coherent account both of the distinctive non-natural character of persons and of their being naturally embodied. But Margolis provokes us to ask, what is an em bodied mind? The crucial context for him is not the plain physical body as such, but culture. "Persons", he writes, "are in a sense not natural entities: they exist only in cultural contexts and are identifiable as such only by refer ence to their mastery of language and of whatever further abilities presuppose such mastery" (p. 245). The hallmark of persons, in Margolis's account, is their capacity for freedom, as well as their physical endowment. Thus he writes, " . . . their characteristic powers - in effect, their freedom - must inform the order of purely physical causes in a distinctive way" (p. 246).

Download or read book Avicenna written by Jon McGinnis and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ibn Sina -- Avicenna in Latin -- (980-1037) played a considerable role in the development of both eastern and western philosophy and science. This book provides a general introduction to Avicenna's intellectual system and offer a careful philosophical analysis of most of the major aspects of his thought, presented in such a way as to be accessible to students as well as serving as a resource for specialists in Islamic studies, philosophers, and historians of science.

Download or read book The Nicomachean Ethics written by and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principles used in the translation of the Ethics are the same as those in the translations of the Physics and the Metaphysics, and their main function is to help the reader get Aristotle's meaning as accurately as possible. Briefly, they are principles of terminology and of thought, some of which will be repeated here. English terms common to all three translations have the same mean ings, with a few exceptions, and many terms proper to ethics are added. Many of the terms in the Glossary are defined or are made known dia lectically or in some other way. For the term 1tpOUiPEcrt~ the term 'inten tion' or the expression 'deliberate choice' will be used instead of the term 'choice', but the definition will be the same as that given in the Physics and the Metaphysics. Difficulties arise from some allied terms or terms close in meaning, e. g. , the terms UUAOC;, KUKOC;, ~OXeT\PO~, and 1tovT\p0C;, for the exact differences of their meanings are not ascertainable from the extant works. Each of these terms, however, seems to be used consistently, and we shall assume such consistency. The choice of the corresponding English terms can only be suggested by the usage of the Greek terms and by induction.

Download or read book The Logic of the Articles in Traditional Philosophy written by E.M. Barth and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the original Dutch version of this book was presented in 1971 to the University of Leiden as a thesis for the Doctorate in philosophy, I was prevented by the academic mores of that university from expressing my sincere thanks to three members of the Philosophical Faculty for their support of and interest in my pursuits. I take the liberty of doing so now, two and a half years later. First and foremost I want to thank Professor G. Nuchelmans warmly for his expert guidance of my research. A number of my most im portant sources were brought to my attention by him. During the whole process of composing this book his criticism and encouragement were carried out in a truly academic spirit. He thereby provided working conditions that are a sine qua non for every author who is attempting to approach controversial matters in a scientific manner, conditions which, however, were not easily available at that time. In a later phase I also came into contact with Professors L. M. de Rijk and J. B. Ubbink, with both of whom I had highly stimulating discussions and exchanges of ideas. The present edition contains some entirely new sections, viz. 1-9, IV-29, V-9, V-20, VII-14 (iii), (iv), VII-17 (i), VIII-22, IX-17, IX-19, X-9 and XI-8. Section X-9 was inspired by a remark made by Professor A.

Download or read book Course of Mathematical Logic written by R. Fraïssé and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is addressed primarily to researchers specializing in mathemat ical logic. It may also be of interest to students completing a Masters Degree in mathematics and desiring to embark on research in logic, as well as to teachers at universities and high schools, mathematicians in general, or philosophers wishing to gain a more rigorous conception of deductive reasoning. The material stems from lectures read from 1962 to 1968 at the Faculte des Sciences de Paris and since 1969 at the Universities of Provence and Paris-VI. The only prerequisites demanded of the reader are elementary combinatorial theory and set theory. We lay emphasis on the semantic aspect of logic rather than on syntax; in other words, we are concerned with the connection between formulas and the multirelations, or models, which satisfy them. In this context considerable importance attaches to the theory of relations, which yields a novel approach and algebraization of many concepts of logic. The present two-volume edition considerably widens the scope of the original [French] one-volume edition (1967: Relation, Formule logique, Compacite, Completude). The new Volume 1 (1971: Relation et Formule logique) reproduces the old Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 8, redivided as follows: Word, formula (Chapter 1), Connection (Chapter 2), Relation, operator (Chapter 3), Free formula (Chapter 4), Logicalformula,denumer able-model theorem (L6wenheim-Skolem) (Chapter 5), Completeness theorem (G6del-Herbrand) and Interpolation theorem (Craig-Lyndon) (Chapter 6), Interpretability of relations (Chapter 7).

Download or read book Language and Logic in the Post Medieval Period written by E.J. Ashworth and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keckermann remarked of the sixteenth century, "never from the begin ning of the world was there a period so keen on logic, or in which more books on logic were produced and studies oflogic flourished more abun dantly than the period-in which we live. " 1 But despite the great profusion of books to which he refers, and despite the dominant position occupied by logic in the educational system of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seven teenth centuries, very little work has been done on the logic of the post medieval period. The only complete study is that of Risse, whose account, while historically exhaustive, pays little attention to the actual logical 2 doctrines discussed. Otherwise, one can tum to Vasoli for a study of humanism, to Munoz Delgado for scholastic logic in Spain, and to Gilbert and Randall for scientific method, but this still leaves vast areas untouched. In this book I cannot hope to remedy all the deficiencies of previous studies, for to survey the literature alone would take a life-time. As a result I have limited myself in various ways. In the first place, I con centrate only on those matters which are of particular interest to me, namely theories of meaning and reference, and formal logic.