The thesis concerns the semantics of proper names in the context of propositional attitude reports. The semantic contribution of names in the scope of attitude verbs famously generates a puzzle, known as Frege’s puzzle. In the thesis, different semantic theories of propositional attitude have been categorized based on their strategy to solve the puzzle. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part (chapters 1-4) critically surveys different solutions of the puzzle in the literature. The discussion of different theories and (...) their shortcomings sets the stage for the second part. The second part (chapters 5-6) provides a new solution to the puzzle. The solution is based on a new theory concerning the mechanism of reference and meaning of proper names. The meaningful use of proper names is argued to require the satisfaction of a competence condition which is used to explain peculiarities of reference found in both their regular contexts, as well as in the context of propositional attitude verbs. (shrink)

Formal models for group knowledge can help philosophers gain additional insight into the ramifications of the philosophical concepts that they propose by clarifying the abstract properties of these concepts and their relationship to alternative proposals. To date, however, formal treatments of group knowledge have remained largely disjointed from the related philosophical discussions and are therefore of minimal interest to philosophers. In this thesis, I attempt to bridge this gap by proposing a formal definition of group knowledge that I call collective (...) knowledge. Collective knowledge is distributed knowledge about common questions and typically lies between common knowledge and full distributed knowledge. It includes two epistemic properties that make it more aligned with philosophical concepts of group knowledge, and that are not modeled by the standard notions from formal epistemology. The first property is that all knowledge is in terms of questions, interpreted as distinctions that define an agent's conceptual framework. The second property is that group knowledge implies an epistemic group, which is a group of agents tied together through mutual interest in each other's knowledge and questions. To model epistemic groups and collective knowledge, I introduce new Kripke models that I refer to as epistemic group models. I then present an axiomatic system for the logic of collective knowledge and prove that it is sound and complete with respect to these new models. As such, I hope to have provided a good first step towards a formal definition of group knowledge that can help advance the philosophical discussion on group knowledge. (shrink)

Whereas social pluralism seems to evoke a lot of educational problems and correspondingly high hopes for philosophical solutions, antifoundationalism - as a contemporary expression of systematic philosophical doubt - raises the question what kind of contribution philosophy of education could make to critical debates on education and society. Can antifoundationalist philosophy of education escape from social relativism, and what possibilities remain for a critical philosophy of education? Though strictly prescriptive ambitions seem not realizable from an antifoundationalist point of view, philosophy (...) of education can still contribute to critical discourse by stimulating its context-sensitive and self-analytical powers. Its results bring to the notice the relevance of paying attention to hidden power-relations in social and educational discourse, and to developing narrative competences in children. (shrink)

We analyzed how philosophers of education received the 'antifoundationalist' turn in epistemology, particularly with respect to its practical relevance. Our main conclusion is, that antifoundationalist philosophers of education discharge the primacy of epistemology, replacing it by a primacy of commitment. Consequently, they no longer understand practical relevance in terms of contributing to 'improved' foundations for educational judgement. Stressing the contextual embedding of any justification, they rather concentrate on demonstrating the restrictive, excluding, implications of any educational judgement. We check the tenability (...) of this position against some critical objections. Finally, we contrast the 'new normativity' that emerges from this contextualist approach with traditional, prescriptive normativity as well as with the non-prescriptive normativity of the Frankfurt School from the nineteen-seventies. (shrink)

How can philosophy exert its critical function in society and in education if any appeal to independent and even relatively 'certain' criteria seems problematic? The epistemological doubts that foundationalist models of justification encounter unavoidably seem to raise this question. In particular, the relativist implications that seem to result from rejecting such models seem to paralyse the critical potential of philosophy of education. In order to explore the possibilities of a conception of educational critique that avoids the pitfalls of foundationalism, I (...) analyse the epistemological dimensions of this much-feared relativism, illustrating this with some characteristic examples. Solving the problems raised will require an interpretation of critique that leaves our daily sense of critique intact, without literally adopting its— foundationalist—basic assumptions. After systematically developing such an alternative interpretation of critical usage, a non-relativist but still non-foundationalist and powerful conception of philosophical critique seems possible. I illustrate results with some examples from philosophy of education. (shrink)

The role of critique in the Anglophone analytical tradition of philosophy of education is outlined and some of its shortcomings are noted, particularly its apparent claim to methodological objectivity in arriving at what are clearly contestable positions about the normative basis of education. Many of these issues can be seen to have a long history within European, and especially German, philosophy of education. In the light of this the discussion moves on to a consideration of similarities and contrasts between the (...) Anglophone and German-inspired deployment of the concept of critical rationality in philosophy of education. The claims to objectivity of the Anglophone tradition are contrasted with a more self-conscious concern for social justice and improvement in other European traditions, which has been followed more recently by a greater scepticism concerning the potential of critique for delivering social justice and improvement in education. This has parallels with the growing Anglophone disillusion with 'classical' analytic philosophy of education. This in turn has resulted in a greater awareness of the limitations of critique: its ideological character, its rootedness in specific contexts, its own potential dogmatism and its ambiguities. The various contributions to this volume are briefly described and related to each other. (shrink)

Humans always search for a sense of community, in order to transcent their individuality and project themselves as part of a group. This human craving is actually a desire for an absence of community; an "empty place to bury our ineradicable solitude", a form of universal community which is yet to come and in which one doesn't necessarily have to have anything in common with it's other members.

The central point of this thesis is the semi-formal approach to contexualist semantics of knowledge by David Lewis. Lewis introduces a set of rules that allow us to ignore certain parts of the space of all possibilities when we evaluate a knowledge claim. These rules are dependent on the context of utterance of the knowledge claim and therefore give rise to a contextualist notion of knowledge. We focus in particular on the Rule of Attention. The open nature of this rule (...) poses problems for a formalisation in the usual framework of dynamic epistemic logic. We make a distinction between two modelling approaches: open modelling and closed modelling. The latter approach, called finite narrative modelling, is a methodology that relieves us from the duty of using a language that can represent arbitrary facts, since we as modellers know which facts will become relevant when we start with the modelling. We introduce two extensions of dynamic epistemic logic and conclude by considering Lewis' rules as restrictions of this model. (shrink)

This thesis provides an analysis of the existing proof systems for dynamic epistemic logic from the viewpoint of proof-theoretic semantics. After an illustration of the basic principles of proof-theoretic semantics, we review some of the most significant proposals of proof systems for dynamic epistemic logics, and we critically reject on them in the light of proof-theoretic semantic principles. The main original contributions of the present thesis are: (a) a revised version of the display-style calculus D.EAK, which we argue to be (...) more adequate from the proof-theoretic semantic viewpoint; the main feature of this revision is that a smoother proof (so-called Belnap-style) of cut-elimination holds for it, which is problematic for the original version of D.EAK. (b) The intro duction of a novel, multi-type display calculus for dynamic epistemic logic, which we refer to as Dynamic Calculus. The presence of types endows the language of the Dynamic Calculus with additional expressivity, and makes it possible to design rules with an even smoother behavior. We argue that this calculus paves the way towards a general methodology for the design of proof systems for the generality of dynamic logics, and certainly for proof systems beyond dynamic epistemic logic. We prove that the Dynamic Calculus adequately captures Baltag-Moss-Solecki's dynamic epistemic logic, and enjoys Belnap-style cut elimination. (shrink)

The Ultimatum Game (UG) is one of the widely studied games in experimental economics. Past data shows a consistent deviation from the classical game theory prediction, which suggests a self-interested money maximizing rational agent would accept any nonzero offer as a responder. However, in reality, people often reject low offers that are less than 30% and above zero. Research from neuro-economics claims that such behavior is mostly emotion driven. However an important cross-cultural study shows that the results in these small-scaled (...) societies deviate drastically from the industrialized societies. In addition, there is a high correlation between the deviations and the social systems. Economists call for a better understanding of how people apply social rules when they make economic decision. We believe that we need a framework that can show the following: 1. Preferences are constructed on demand. 2. Social rules are numerous and complex, and tend to trigger non-monotonic reasoning. Formally, we developed the Closed-World Reasoning in Games framework (CWRiG) adopted from Closed-World Reasoning framework (CWR) by van Lambalgen and Stenning. We defined what can be considered a monotone game process. More importantly we show how an agent can make a rational decision change through a non-monotonic reasoning process that brings social rules into the game process. Experimentally, we ran a modified ultimatum game. The results confirms that people's general, even ranked, attitudes towards some social matters are not necessarily equivalent to their preferences of the same kind of matter during the game. We also discover many instances of non-monotonic reasoning patterns used during the game. (shrink)

An interpretative question Kant's Critique of Pure Reason raises, is how we should understand the relationship between the categories and the so-called 'logical forms of judgment' Kant deduces them from. In her Kant and the Capacity to Judge, B ́eatrice Longuenesse provides an answer to this question. In this thesis, I evaluate Longuenesse's account by considering its application to a specific group of categories: the categories of Quantity. I argue that for these categories, Longuenesse's account is problematic. The same, however, (...) holds for a possible alternative analysis of the categories of Quantity: Manley Thompson's (1989) analysis. I show that Longuenesse and Thompson have both built their analyses on an untenable conception of the role of the categories of Quantity. The relationship between the categories and the logical forms of Quantity seems to be more arbitrary than Longuenesse, Thompson and others have argued. (shrink)

The thesis develops a formal semantics for present necessity deontic modals, such as should, ought to, must, and past necessity deontic modals, such as should have, ought to have, had to. Contrary to the traditional approaches in deontic logic, we concentrate on the prescriptive use of such modals. In analyzing the different behavior of present and past necessity deontic modals in everyday discourse practice, we focus on the contrast that arises when the proposition embedded under those modals is eventive and (...) non-progressive. We distinguish between a “counterfactual” and an “open-past” reading of past necessity deontic modals, and argue that the semantic differences between present and (the two readings of) past necessity deontic modals are ultimately due to two factors: (i) when the embedded proposition is evaluated, and (ii) whether the embedded proposition is an open possibility according to the common ground of the participants in the conversation. We develop a framework from the update semantics’ tradition. The approach we propose, called Temporal Deontic Update Semantics (TDUS), permits us to take into account the two factors (i) and (ii), and to model present and past necessity deontic modals by means of a single deontic operator: Oblige. We conclude our thesis by taking into account some more classical topics in the literature of deontic logic, such as conditional obligations and deontic paradoxes. We show that our considerations regarding present and past necessity deontic modals are also relevant to a solution of the paradoxes. (shrink)

Kinds - also known as 'natural sets' or 'universals' - are a very intuitive assumption about the way the world is put together. As a piece of metaphysical theory, however, they give rise to the Identification Problem: which of all sets are the ones that in fact qualify as kinds? In this thesis an answer is given starting out from the assumption that kindhood always coincides with similarity. From this it follows that similarity must be similarity 'with respect to', and (...) p properties - kinds - must be arranged in 'similarity systems'. To turn this insight into a credible answer to the Identification Problem, however, a wide variety of (physical) objects must be considered, whose common ground is that they are all 'mereologically complex'. Therefore in the second part of the thesis the focus will be on the derivation of 'composite kinds', thus allowing the classification of larger objects in terms of kinds. It will be concluded that classical (Boolean) mereology is sufficient for this purpose. I shall argue that this approach is therefore preferable to that whereby kinds are reified to be (structural) universals. (shrink)

For more than a decade constructing ontologies for legal domains, we, at the Leibniz Center for Law, felt really the need to develop a core ontology for law that would enable us to re-use the common denominator of the various legal domains. In this paper we present two core ontologies for law. The first one was the result of a PhD thesis by [Valente, 1995], called FOLaw. FOLaw speci- fies functional dependencies between types of knowledge involved in legal reasoning. Despite (...) the fact that FOLaw was the starting point for a number of ontologies and legal reasoning systems in various (European) projects, it is rather an epistemological framework than a (core) ontology. We are not the only ones who easily confound epistemology with ontology. In the paper we present some examples and discuss whether this epistemological promiscuity in (core) ontology development is a serious problem. It is to some extent, as it limits the scope of re-use (if not leading to confusion). Therefore, we started about four years ago the development of a 'real' core-ontology for law based upon notions of common sense. The reason for a common-sense foundation is that domain independent concepts of law - the common denominator - are still tainted with a strong common-sense flavor. Moreover, domains of law refer to social activities which are generally governed by common-sense notions. This core ontology, called LRI-Core, consists of five major portions ('worlds'): physical, mental and abstract classes; roles and occurrences. (shrink)