Thinking should be taught in every class, but only children’s philosophy workshops allow learning and the practice of correct thinking without linking them to the acquisition of some other mandatory learning. The reading of stories with veiled philosophical content is one way to conduct philosophical workshops for children. We may give children stories that contain some laws of correct logical reasoning. However, in order to achieve this aim, we must extract the content from the symbolic logic and translate it into (...) everyday language. We must choose areas where the thought process is of interest for children, such as that found in logical games. This method was used by Lewis Carroll in his book The Game of Logic. We attempt to develop further his idea by suggesting games which are used by children in their everyday life. (shrink)

Is modern logic an improvement on Aristotelian logic or is there some other relationship between the two? In which sense is modern logic more advanced than Aristotelian logic? Is logic a cummulative developing discipline or is the progress in the course of the history of logic somehow different from the cumulatively developing processes? Are these logics based on different -- mutually untranslatable -- paradigms? The paper analyzes these questions in connection with some more general problems of the philosophy of science.

Starting with the analysis of cognitive situations which appear in everyday life, and by means of the logical analysis of some games, the author deals with applied logic in the sense of the general methodology of reasoning. The book acquaints the reader with some forms and operations of reasoning which are applied in the process of scientific cognition as well as in daily activities that require thought. As opposed to a number of well-known and unique handbooks and text-books on pure (...) logic this books conveys learning, and in many cases original thoughts, through witty dialogues, in an entertaining way. (shrink)

It is necessary to take into account that every ontology and also every scientific system draws a picture of the World according to the abstractions and presuppositions which were accepted, consciously or unconsciously, during the construction of the system. That is why Aristotle, Hegel, and the paraconsistent logics gave us different world views. On the basis of contemporary logics, including paraconsistent logics, we can better understand what the objects of the Aristotelian logic are, what are the presuppositions used in it, (...) what are the meanings of its terms and how their meaning was changed when used in other theories. (shrink)

SummaryIt is not the inconsistency in the sense of classical logic that we have to tolerate. The dialectical reasoning, described by N. Rescher, is outside the domain where CI is defined. The apparent contradiction between CI and paraconsistent logic can be removed by realizing that PL is a widening of the conceptual framework of classical logic. In this new framework the meaning of some words was changed similarly as, according to N. Bohr, in quantum mechanics the words “particle” and “wave” (...) have changed their meaning. (shrink)

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

On the dust jacket of The Subject's Point of View there is a detail from Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Sitting Woman. It is hard to think of a painter who better captures the inner in his work. From the monochrome colour, to the back that faces us, to the door swung open to reveal yet another doorway, we are led to interiority – to the inner. This is a perfect image for a book whose author wants to persuade us to (...) return to the interior – a Cartesian interior.The Cartesian interior has come in for quite a drubbing in philosophy for some considerable time. In the mid-to-late 1970s, a style of argument emerged, designed to challenge this conception of mind and establish in its place an externalist conception of language and of mind. One version of the argument was due to Hilary Putnam and emerged in the context of considerations concerning linguistic meaning; another was due to Tyler Burge and emerged first in the context of considerations concerning the individual in relation to his/her social environment. In his earliest paper, on this topic, Burge wrote of ‘the elderly Cartesian tradition’ where ‘the spotlight is on what exists or transpires “in” the individual – his secret cognition, his innate cognitive structures, his private perceptions and introspections, his grasping of ideas, concepts or forms’. Farkas wants to defend this ‘elderly tradition’, but she does add to it some interesting twists. First and foremost, she places to one side ideas of privacy, of incorrigibility and infallibility. She also wishes to place the issue of dualism to one side. What Farkas concentrates on is privileged access and argues that this is …. (shrink)

Reader-friendly without compromising the precision of exposition, the book includes many new research results not found in the available literature.

Saul Kripke’s work on the semantics of modal logics is well known, unlike his work on Anderson and Belnap’s system E of Entailment (a modal relevance logic), which included his proof of the decidability of its implicational fragment E_>, and also a counterexample to the conjecture of Belnap that E_> is the intersection of the implicational fragments of the relevance logic R and the modal logic S4. This led to Storrs McCall’s suggesting that the “mingle” axiom might be added to (...) E_>, and that this system might be used instead of S4_>. We give a counterexample to this conjecture. We also disprove the conjecture Anderson and Belnap attribute to McCall, in which “restricted mingle” is added to E_>. We use a modal extension of the lattice M_0 and follow ideas of Meyer. In the 1970s, Dunn showed that RM (R with the mingle axiom) can be modeled using a binary accessibility relation, like the accessibility relation in Kripke’s semantics for normal modal logics and his semantics for intuitionistic logic. Dunn also gave a variant interpretation for EM (E with the mingle axiom). We explore some other variations of these binary relational semantics. (shrink)

Nonclassical logics have played an increasing role in recent years in disciplines ranging from mathematics and computer science to linguistics and philosophy. _Generalized Galois Logics_ develops a uniform framework of relational semantics to mediate between logical calculi and their semantics through algebra. This volume addresses normal modal logics such as K and S5, and substructural logics, including relevance logics, linear logic, and Lambek calculi. The authors also treat less-familiar and new logical systems with equal deftness.

In this provocative book, Randall Havas articulates an approach to Nietzsche which demonstrates that the authentic individual need not stand apart from his or her culture in order to resist the demands of conformism. On Havas's reading, the task of the Nietzschean individual is instead to replace the illusion of culture - "herd morality" - with real community, and in this way to avoid nihilism. It is such community that Nietzsche aspires to establish with his readers - a (...) claim that, in the author's view, suggests that Nietzsche's conception of the nature of community and, hence, of individuality must be understood in terms of his theory of reading and interpretation. Nietzsche holds that the category of the individual is itself a historical construct. Havas's interpretation of this view dissolves the threat it appears to pose to individualism. By treating genealogical method as a response to this threat, he shows how Nietzsche's defense of individualism, his conception of history, and his commitment to truth reinforce one another. On this reading, Nietzsche's more properly ethical concerns lie at the heart of his understanding of the will to knowledge. Havas argues that, for Nietzsche, ostensibly epistemological questions can be assessed only in the light of an understanding of the interdependence between individual and community. (shrink)

It is an integral part of the phenomenology of mature perceptual experience that it seems to present to us an experience-independent world. I shall call this feature 'perceptual intentionality'. In this paper, I argue that perceptual intentionality is constructed by the structure of more basic sensory features, features that are not intentional themselves. This theory can explain why the same sensory feature can figure both in presentational and non-presentational experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the intentionality of sensory experiences (...) and the intentionality of thoughts: unlike the former, the latter is not constructed. (shrink)

Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

The implicational fragment of the logic of relevant implication, $R_\to$ is known to be decidable. We show that the implicational fragment of the logic of ticket entailment, $T_\to$ is decidable. Our proof is based on the consecution calculus that we introduced specifically to solve this 50-year old open problem. We reduce the decidability problem of $T_\to$ to the decidability problem of $R_\to$. The decidability of $T_\to$ is equivalent to the decidability of the inhabitation problem of implicational types by combinators over (...) the base $\{\textsf{B},\textsf{B}',\textsf{I},\textsf{W}\}$. (shrink)

Hallucinations occur in a wide range of organic and psychological disorders, as well as in a small percentage of the normal population According to usual definitions in psychology and psychiatry, hallucinations are sensory experiences which present things that are not there, but are nonetheless accompanied by a powerful sense of reality. As Richard Bentall puts it, “the illusion of reality ... is the sine qua non of all hallucinatory experiences” (Bentall 1990: 82). The aim of this paper is to find (...) out what lends an experience ‘a sense of reality’: what features are required for an experience to feel ‘real’, in the relevant sense? I will investigate the claim that phenomenological features are largely responsible for a sense of reality, and will find this claim wanting. My suggestion is that a sense of reality is created and sustained by the larger nexus of the subject's beliefs. (shrink)

Urquhart works in several areas of logic where he has proved important results. Our paper outlines his topological lattice representation and attempts to relate it to other lattice representations. We show that there are different ways to generalize Priestley’s representation of distributive lattices—Urquhart’s being one of them, which tries to keep prime filters in the representation. Along the way, we also mention how semi-lattices and lattices figured into Urquhart’s work.

This paper offers an analysis of the effect of the identity combinators in dual systems. The result is based on an easy technical trick, namely, that the identity combinators collapse all the combinators which are dual with respect to them. After reviewing dual combinators I consider the possible combinatory systems and l-calculi in which the functions and/or the application operation are bidirectional. The last section of the paper shows the devastating effect the identity combinators have for a dual system: they (...) half trivialize simple combinatory bases, although they are not sufficient to cause real triviality for what cancellative combinators are needed. (shrink)

This paper investigates set-theoretical semantics for logics that contain unary connectives, which can be viewed as modalities. Indeed, some of the logics we consider are closely related to linear logic. We use insights from the relational semantics of relevance logics together with a new version of the squeeze lemma in our semantics for logics with disjunction. The ideal-based semantics, which takes co-theories to be situations, dualizes the theory-based semantics for logics with conjunction.

The paper begins with the account of a focus group discussion of Hungarian female managers who demonstrated high level of trust. Drawing on the discussion the author explores the nature of trust and looks at works and research findings in different disciplines. In psychology Erikson’s findings on human growth and development are discussed. Representatives of Eastern and Western philosophy are quoted to highlight the underlying differences of thinking in relation to trust. The impact of cultural heritage and the influence of (...) the environment on trust add further dimensions to the argument. In conclusion it is suggested that management education could be a platform for further research and exploration of trust in individuals and organisations. (shrink)

``Neural computing'' is a research field based on perceiving the human brain as an information system. This system reads its input continuously via the different senses, encodes data into various biophysical variables such as membrane potentials or neural firing rates, stores information using different kinds of memories (e.g., short-term memory, long-term memory, associative memory), performs some operations called ``computation'', and outputs onto various channels, including motor control commands, decisions, thoughts, and feelings. We show a natural model of neural computing that (...) gives rise to hyper-computation. Rigorous mathematical analysis is applied, explicating our model's exact computational power and how it changes with the change of parameters. Our analog neural network allows for supra-Turing power while keeping track of computational constraints, and thus embeds a possible answer to the superiority of the biological intelligence within the framework of classical computer science. We further propose it as standard in the field of analog computation, functioning in a role similar to that of the universal Turing machine in digital computation. In particular an analog of the Church-Turing thesis of digital computation is stated where the neural network takes place of the Turing machine. (shrink)

Most discussions in epistemology assume that believing that p is a necessary condition for knowing that p. In this paper, I will present some considerations that put this view into doubt. The candidate cases for knowledge without belief are the kind of cases that are usually used to argue for the so-called ‘extended mind’ thesis.

Sequent calculi constitute an interesting and important category of proof systems. They are much less known than axiomatic systems or natural deduction systems are, and they are much less known than they should be. Sequent calculi were designed as a theoretical framework for investigations of logical consequence, and they live up to the expectations completely as an abundant source of meta-logical results. The goal of this book is to provide a fairly comprehensive view of sequent calculi -- including a wide (...) range of variations. The focus is on sequent calculi for various non-classical logics, from intuitionistic logic to relevance logic, through linear and modal logics. A particular version of sequent calculi, the so-called consecution calculi, have seen important new developments in the last decade or so. The invention of new consecution calculi for various relevance logics allowed the last major open problem in the area of relevance logic to be solved positively: pure ticket entailment is decidable. An exposition of this result is included in chapter 9 together with further new decidability results (for less famous systems). A series of other results that were obtained by J. M. Dunn and me, or by me in the last decade or so, are also presented in various places in the book. Some of these results are slightly improved in their current presentation. Obviously, many calculi and several important theorems are not new. They are included here to ensure the completeness of the picture; their original formulations may be found in the referenced publications. This book contains very little about semantics, in general, and about the semantics of non-classical logic in particular. (shrink)

Frankish positions his view, illusionism about qualia (a.k.a. eliminativist physicalism), in opposition to what he calls radical realism (dualism and neutral monism) and conservative realism (a.k.a. non-eliminativist physicalism). Against radical realism, he upholds physicalism. But he goes along with key premises of the Gap Arguments for radical realism, namely, 1) that epistemic/explanatory gaps exist between the physical and the phenomenal, and 2) that every truth should be perspicuously explicable from the fundamental truth about the world; and he concludes that because (...) physicalism is true, there could be no phenomenal truths, and no qualia. I think he is wrong to accept 2); and even if he was right to accept it, the more plausible response would be not to deny the existence of qualia but to deny physicalism. In either case, denying the existence of qualia is the wrong answer. I present a physicalist realist alterative that refutes premise 2 of the Gap Argument; I also make a general case against the scientism that accompanies Frankish’s metaphysics. (shrink)