The advantages and disadvantages of formalization in philosophy are summarized. It is concluded that formalized philosophy is an endangered speciality that needs to be revitalized and to increase its interactions with non-formalized philosophy. The enigmatic style that is common in philosophical logic must give way to explicit discussions of the problematic relationship between formal models and the philosophical concepts and issues that motivated their development.

The paper offers a historical survey of the emergence of logical formalization in twentieth-century analytically oriented philosophy of religion. This development is taken to have passed through three main ?stages?: a pioneering stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (led by Frege and Russell), a stage of crisis in the 1920s and early 1930s (occasioned by Wittgenstein, logical positivists such as Carnap, and neo-Thomists such as Maritain), and a stage of rehabilitation in the 1930s, 1940s, and (...) 1950s (led by the Cracow Circle and Quine). (shrink)

This essay addresses the methodology of philosophy of science and illustrates how formal and empirical methods can be fruitfully combined. Special emphasis is given to the application of experimental methods to confirmation theory and to recent work on the conjunction fallacy, a key topic in the rationality debate arising from research in cognitive psychology. Several other issue can be studied in this way. In the concluding section, a brief outline is provided of three further examples.

John Norton’s argument that all formal theories of induction fail raises substantive questions about the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning. What are the criteria of adequacy for philosophical theories of induction, explanation, or theory structure? Is more than one adequate theory possible? Using a generalized version of Norton’s argument, I demonstrate that the competition between formal and material theories in philosophy of science results from adhering to different criteria of adequacy. This situation encourages an interpretation of “formal” and “material” (...) as indicators of divergent criteria that accompany different philosophical methodologies. I characterize another criterion of adequacy associated with material theories, the avoidance of imported problems, and conclude that one way to negotiate between conflicting criteria is to adopt a pluralist stance toward philosophical theories of scientific reasoning. (shrink)

Challenging Formalization in Education and Beyond addresses the effects of today's attempts to organize knowledge, processes, and performance in education, particularly in its ever-growing digital environments. As on-site, blended, and fully online learning become deeply interdependent, secondary and higher education managers and instructors who seek to integrate, apply, and teach within these formats using standardized rules, assessments, algorithms, and accountability structures may be doing unintended harm to their students. Focusing on students' performance, health, cognition, behavior, and learning outcomes, this (...) book analyses how current trends, methods, and policies in formalization can be challenged and corrected to ensure high-quality education. Scholars, educators, administrators, and designers of traditional, asynchronous, precision, automated and micro-learning formats will come away with new insights and pragmatic solutions for engaging students in more active, participatory, and creative activities. (shrink)

The title of this book refers to the tension between formal and informal elements in the ways analytical philosophy is practiced. The authors examine questions of the scopes and limits of both kinds of research methods.

Suppose we have two false hypotheses H1 and H2. Sometimes, we would like to be able to say that H1 is closer to the truth than H2 (e.g., Newton’s hypothesis vs. Ptolemy’s).

Formal ontology combines two ideas, one originating with Husserl, the other with Frege: that of ontology of the formal aspects of all objects, irrespective of their particular nature, and ontology pursued by employing the tools of modern formal disciplines, notably logic and semantics. These two traditions have converged in recent years and this is the first collection to encompass them as a whole in a single volume. It assembles essays from authors around the world already widely known for their work (...) in formal ontology, and illustrates that through the application of formal methods the ancient discipline of ontology may be put on a firm methodological basis. The essays not only illuminate the nature of ontology and its relation to other areas, in language, logic and everyday life, but also demonstrate that common issues from the analytical and phenomenological traditions may be discussed without ideological barriers. Audience: advanced students of and specialists in philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, computer science, database engineering. (shrink)

The tools of logic are used properly or improperly relative to two interrelated purposes. Logic is both a symbolism for the expression of the formal structures of thought and an inference mechanism. Formalization in philosophical logic is justified to the extent that it contributes to our understanding of logical properties and the conceptual problems they may help to state, clarify, or resolve. This view of the value and limits of formalization in logic affords a pragmatic perspective that in (...) principle should selectively support the development of particular formal systems, while excluding others as unjustified. Yet the pragmatic grounds are so liberal as to disallow virtually no exercises in formalization as entirely useless. Logic is abused in another sense, when it is wrongly used, not by violating logical canons generally, but by presupposing that substantive metaphysical, normative, or scientific content can be derived from purely formal logical relations. (shrink)

The present paper argues that ‘mature mathematical formalisms’ play a central role in achieving representation via scientific models. A close discussion of two contemporary accounts of how mathematical models apply—the DDI account (according to which representation depends on the successful interplay of denotation, demonstration and interpretation) and the ‘matching model’ account—reveals shortcomings of each, which, it is argued, suggests that scientific representation may be ineliminably heterogeneous in character. In order to achieve a degree of unification that is compatible with successful (...) representation, scientists often rely on the existence of a ‘mature mathematical formalism’, where the latter refers to a—mathematically formulated and physically interpreted—notational system of locally applicable rules that derive from (but need not be reducible to) fundamental theory. As mathematical formalisms undergo a process of elaboration, enrichment, and entrenchment, they come to embody theoretical, ontological, and methodological commitments and assumptions. Since these are enshrined in the formalism itself, they are no longer readily obvious to either the novice or the proficient user. At the same time as formalisms constrain what may be represented, they also function as inferential and interpretative resources. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Issue containing selected contributions to the conference "Formal Methods and Science in Philosophy IV", Inter-University Center, Dubrovnik, April 11-13, 2019.

Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but the (...) proportion of papers using probabilistic methods was approximately three times higher in the late 2010s than it was in the late 2000s. Further analyses explored this change by looking more closely at specific methods, specific levels of technical engagement, and specific subdisciplines within philosophy. These analyses indicate that the increasing proportion of papers using probabilistic methods was pervasive, not confined to particular probabilistic methods, levels of sophistication, or subdisciplines. (shrink)

Every university student has his or her nemesis. Biology and social science students anticipate with great apprehension their required statistics course, while many philosophy students live in fear of formal logic. Math anxiety is the common thread uniting all of them. This article argues that since formal logic is an algebra requiring similar kinds of symbol-manipulation skills needed to succeed in a basic mathematics course, then if logic students have math anxiety, this can impede their progress. Further, it argues (...) that math anxiety is primarily caused by and exacerbated by poor instruction. Formal logic instructors who employ effective instructional techniques for reducing it can help their students overcome math anxiety to foster learning. Methods of instruction leading to anxiety reduction and evidence supporting their efficacy are discussed, including co-operative learning, the mastery goal approach, and self-paced learning. None of these methods holds back more advanced students. (shrink)

On an ordinary view of the relation of philosophy of science to science, science serves only as a topic for philosophical reflection, reflection that proceeds by its own methods and according to its own standards. This ordinary view suggests a way of writing a global history of philosophy of science that finds substantially the same philosophical projects being pursued across widely divergent scientific eras. While not denying that this view is of some use regarding certain themes of and (...) particular time periods, this essay argues that much of the epistemology and philosophy of science in the early twentieth century in a variety of projects looked to the then current context of the exact sciences, especially geometry and physics, not merely for its topics but also for its conceptual resources and technical tools. This suggests a more variable project of philosophy of science, a deeper connection between early twentieth-century philosophy of science and its contemporary science, and a more interesting and richer history of philosophy of science than is ordinarily offered. (shrink)

This paper examines Heidegger’s account of the proper relation between philosophy and theology, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s critique thereof. Part I outlines Heidegger’s proposal for this relationship in his lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” where he suggests that philosophy might aid theology by means of ‘formal indication.’ In that context Heidegger never articulates what formal indication is, so Part II exposits this obscure notion by looking at its treatment in Heidegger’s early lecture courses, as well as its roots in Husserl. (...) Part III presents Bonhoeffer’s theological response, which challenges Heidegger’s attempt to maintain a neutral ontology that remains unaffected by both sin and faith. (shrink)

The chapter argues that a model‐building methodology like that widespread in contemporary natural and social science already plays a significant role in philosophy. One neglected form of progress in philosophy over the past fifty years has been the development of better and better formal models of significant phenomena. Examples are given from both philosophy of language and epistemology. Philosophy can do still better in the future by applying model‐building methods more systematically and self‐consciously, with consequent readjustments (...) to its methodology. Although it is neither likely nor desirable for model‐building to become the sole or even main philosophical method, its use enhances the power and reliability of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

"Foundations of the Formal Sciences" is a series of interdisciplinary conferences in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and linguistics. The main goal is to reestablish the traditionally strong links between these areas of research that have been lost in the past decades. The second conference in the series had the subtitle "Applications of Mathematical Logic in Philosophy and Linguistics" and brought speakers from all parts of the Formal Sciences together to give a holistic view of how mathematical methods can (...) improve our philosophical and technical understanding of language and scientific discourse, ranging from the theoretical level up to applications in language recognition software. Audience: This volume is of interest to all formal philosophers and theoretical linguists. In addition to that, logicians interested in the applications of their field and logic students in mathematics, computer science, philosophy and linguistics can use the volume to broaden their knowledge of applications of logic. (shrink)

In this article, we reflect on the use of formal methods in the philosophy of science. These are taken to comprise not just methods from logic broadly conceived, but also from other formal disciplines such as probability theory, game theory, and graph theory. We explain how formal modelling in the philosophy of science can shed light on difficult problems in this domain.

1 Logic in philosophy The century that was Logic has played an important role in modern philosophy, especially, in alliances with philosophical schools such as the Vienna Circle, neopositivism, or formal language variants of analytical philosophy. The original impact was via the work of Frege, Russell, and other pioneers, backed up by the prestige of research into the foundations of mathematics, which was fast bringing to light those amazing insights that still impress us to-day. The Golden Age (...) of the 1930s deeply affected philosophy, and heartened the minority of philosophers with a formalanalytical bent. As Brand Blanshard writes in Reason and Analysis (1964) – I quote from memory here, to avoid the usual disappointment when re-reading an original text. (shrink)

Questions about the relation between identity and discernibility are important both in philosophy and in model theory. We show how a philosophical question about identity and dis- cernibility can be ‘factorized’ into a philosophical question about the adequacy of a formal language to the description of the world, and a mathematical question about discernibility in this language. We provide formal definitions of various notions of discernibility and offer a complete classification of their logical relations. Some new and surprising facts (...) are proved; for instance, that weak dis- cernibility corresponds to discernibility in a language with constants for every object, and that weak discernibility is the most discerning nontrivial discernibility relation. (shrink)

In a free society, it is common to hear the request that one â ~keep an open mind.â Just what exactly is it, however, to keep an open-mind? How does open-mindedness function? How does it square with important personal commitments? These issues are particularly acute when it comes to matters of religious belief in which open-mindedness can sound to the pious a bit too much like doubt. Certainly, in a discipline whose discourse remains rational dialogue, effort should be spent discerning (...) the contours of this virtue, especially in light of its formal role in establishing responsiveness to new inquiries in matters philosophical and religious. This book provides a collection of essays serving to promote conversation about open-mindedness, its virtue, and its role and application in problems in the philosophy of religion in particular. (shrink)

It is sometimes said that questions of form are questions of logic or language. In his "Logical Investigations" Husserl, however, clearly distinguished formal ontology from formal grammar and formal logic. The article attempts to explain Husserl's notion of formal ontology. It investigates the relation between formal and material ontology as well as the relation between epistemic and metaphysical necessity. The article provides an interpretation of Husserl's claim that there are metaphysical necessities which are necessarily recognized by the human mind on (...) the basis of Husserl's well-known distinction between the meanings of mental acts and their objective correlates. (shrink)

Major figures of twentieth-century philosophy were enthralled by the revolution in formal logic, and many of their arguments are based on novel mathematical discoveries. Hilary Putnam claimed that the Löwenheim-Skølem theorem refutes the existence of an objective, observer-independent world; Bas van Fraassen claimed that arguments against empiricism in philosophy of science are ineffective against a semantic approach to scientific theories; W. V. O. Quine claimed that the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is trivialized by the fact that (...) any theory can be reduced to one in which all truths are analytic. This book dissects these and other arguments through in-depth investigation of the mathematical facts undergirding them. It presents a systematic, mathematically rigorous account of the key notions arising from such debates, including theory, equivalence, translation, reduction, and model. The result is a far-reaching reconceptualization of the role of formal methods in answering philosophical questions. (shrink)

J L Austin has left a firm imprint on much contemporary philosophy. Not surprisingly, however, his published papers and lectures have provoked strongly contrasting responses, some seeing in them the refinement of certain philosophical techniques and the introduction of new standards of care, others the final degeneration of linguistic philosophy into verbal hair-splitting. Whatever the response, his writings were bound to attract the attention of formal linguists, and the last decade has seen a significant number of contributions by (...) the latter—notably Ziff, Katz and Fodor—appearing in the philosophical booklists. To these is now added this collection by Vendler, comprising an introductory essay attempting to justify the relevance of structural linguistics to philosophical argument, and six others in which the data of linguistics is applied to major philosophical issues. Their point, however, as Vendler is quick to note, ‘is not to offer impeccable solutions for a few problems, but to show that the more or less sophisticated data provided by structural linguistics can be used in philosophical arguments’. Earlier versions of four of these essays have been published previously, and in the case of the first two of these, before Vendler’s acquaintance with transformational analysis. The remaining three have been written for this volume. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of understanding of language expressions. We argue that understanding of language expressions can be successfully studied within a general approach of formal semantics and pragmatics. We show how three types of meanings of expressions (truth conditional meaning, presuppositional component and implicatures) contribute to our general understanding of what was said and how those meanings can be studied within the formal approach.

This is an outstanding contribution to Scotistic scholarship in English. A distinguished array of Scotus and medieval philosophy scholars have served up polished essays to mark this the seventh centenary of the birth of the "Subtle Doctor." Allan Wolter writes on "The Formal Distinction," Timotheus A. Barth on "Being, Univocity, and Analogy According to Duns Scotus," Heiko Oberman on "Duns Scotus, Nominalism, and the Council of Trent," Efrem Bettoni on "The Originality of the Scotistic Synthesis," Bonansea on "Duns Scotus' (...) Voluntarism," Felix Alluntis on Scotus' treatment of "Demonstrability and Demonstration of the Existence of God." There are nine other contributions, most of uniformly high quality, including extended notes by Charles Balic on "The Life and Works of John Duns Scotus" and "The Nature and Value of a Critical Edition of the Complete Works of John Duns Scotus."—E. A. R. (shrink)

1. One sometimes finds, in popular literature, the statement that formal logic is called formal because it studies the forms of thought: concepts, judgments, inferences. To confine the definition in this way would, to say the least, be an inaccuracy. Study of concepts and other forms of thought is generally assumed to be a task of philosophy; and it attains its highest development in dialectical philosophy. The fact is that statements such as the one we have cited are (...) usually followed by the explanation that formal logic studies thoughts — concepts, judgments, inferences — in terms of their formal structure and construction, that is, of various general ways of connecting parts of their concrete content. And it is observed that the logical structure of thought emerges as the result of abstraction, the identification and separation of the general from a multiplicity of individual facts differing in content, and that it is then recorded in terms of formulas. (shrink)

Although Ordinary Language Philosophy is widely believed to have disappeared leaving scarcely a trace in this era of formal semantics, it is very much the formal semantics of ordinary language that dominates the scene. More common ground than one might have supposed proves thus to be available for the unreconstructed ordinary language philosopher, in the present volume, to enter into the thick of current discussion. The prevailing tone of the work is certainly much more formal than anything one recalls (...) from the heyday of ordinary language philosophy, and in its episodic fashion the central topics—e.g., reference, opacity, identity, propositions—are standard enough, though by the end an effort has been made to reinstate synonymy, analyticity, and even verificationism. On the specific side of grammar the nominalization of sentences receives extended attention, and it is in that connection that Bede Rundle queries the postulation of propositions as metaphysical objects for the so-called propositional attitudes. The deepest, most pervasive theme of the book turns out to be that of ontological commitment. In an uncharacteristic, refreshing moment of testiness Rundle confides that serious controversy as to whether there are or are not events "just cannot get going unless our ordinary language is supplanted... by the grandiose but ill-defined jargon of ‘ontology'." The focus of the work tends to be blurred owing to a tacit assimilation of Quine to the formal semanticists of ordinary language. If the Quinean framework of ontological commitment would seem to be almost ubiquitous today, the semantic emphasis on the ontological commitments of ordinary language renders the current fashion almost as alien to Quine as to the later Wittgenstein. Rundle is thus faced with a shifting target. His excellent anti-Fregean, quasi-nominalistic discussion of number brings out some of the difficulty. Sensitive to the difference between the nonreferential and referential uses of number words in ordinary language, Rundle argues that one can only go so far with the former. Accordingly, he will allow that "by ordinary standards there quite clearly are numbers", a thesis that neither Wittgenstein nor Quine—for very different reasons—would accept. At the outset of his book Rundle writes as follows, "We could look more favorably upon the pragmatic approach if there were room for a choice, if the analysis of the meaning of, say, sentences seemingly alluding to certain abstractions, left the question of existence undecided. There are reasons for thinking that this cannot be so, and the arguments to come will, I hope, bear out the general objection in particular cases." The discussion of number fails to connect with Quine who readily concedes ordinary language to the nominalist. It is only when one consults such items as sets, which Quine takes to have scarcely any footing in ordinary language, that his pragmatism comes properly into its own. Are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory analytic or synthetic? Are they perhaps synthetic a priori? Shall we indeed accept them as true? It can hardly be supposed that pre-Quinean approaches, whether empiricist or rationalist, have proved very fruitful here. And what guidance can linguistic analysis provide? (shrink)

Philosophy and science employ abstract hypothetical scenarios- thought experiments - to illustrate, defend, and dispute theoretical claims. Since thought experiments furnish no new empirical observations, the method prompts two epistemological questions: whether anything may be learnt from the merely hypothetical, and, if so, how. Various sceptical arguments against the use of thought experiments in philosophy are discussed and criticized. The thesis that thought experiments in science provide a priori knowledge through non-sensory grasping of abstract entities is discussed and (...) rejected. The thesis that thought experimentation consists in manipulations of mental models is examined and found to be of limited epistemological relevance. It is argued that thought experiments are associated with characteristic arguments in a manner similar to ordinary experiments. It is further argued that thought experiments function in the same way as experiments in general: by providing premises for their associated arguments. Like other experiments, a thought experiment is successful when the premises it provides are true. This holds both for philosophical and scientific thought experiments. An argument schema is proposed and shown to be a formal analogue to that associated with ordinary experiments; similar in being subject to epistemological holism; but differing in being modal: in employing statements about possibility and necessity. The evaluation of thought experiments thus depends on how modal statements may be justified. Intuition and conceivability are discussed as sources of modal justification and found problematic. Instead it is suggested that evaluation proceed by accommodation of the statements describing the experiment's hypothetical scenario. The method of accommodation is developed and applied to five influential thought experiments in philosophy: the brain in a vat; Putnam's Twin Earth; Burge's arthritis example; Searle's Chinese Room; and Newcomb's problem. Its application shows some of these to be failed, others to be successful only relative to controversial philosophical doctrines. (shrink)

In this article I issue a challenge to philosophers engaged in constructing logical languages. Formal languages that have had a great influence on various areas of philosophy have ineffable statements that arise from metaphysical assumptions, thus limiting what we can do with them. I deal with two cases. The case of Frege known as “The paradox of the concept horse”, and that of Kripke that is not as famous as the Fregean problem, which I call “The necessary bearing of (...) the name.” I briefly develop each case and show that together they give us sufficient evidence of the limits of what we can do with logic when the formal systems employ unexamined metaphysical assumptions. (shrink)

There is a long philosophical tradition of addressing questions in philosophy of science and epistemology by means of the tools of Bayesian probability theory (see Earman (1992) and Howson and Urbach (1993)). In the late '70s, an axiomatic approach to conditional independence was developed within a Bayesian framework. This approach in conjunction with developments in graph theory are the two pillars of the theory of Bayesian Networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. The theory has (...) been very successful over the last two decades and has found a wide array of applications ranging from medical diagnosis to safety systems for hazardous industries. Aside from some excellent work in the theory of causation (see Pearl (2000) and Spirtes et al. (2001)), philosophers have been sadly absent in reaping the fruits from these new developments in artificial intelligence. This is unfortunate, since there are some long-standing questions in philosophy of science and epistemology in which the route to progress has been blocked by a type of complexity that is precisely the type of complexity that Bayesian Networks are designed to deal with: questions in which there are multiple variables in play and the conditional independences between these variables can be clearly identified. Integrating Bayesian Networks into philosophical research leads to theoretical advances on long-standing questions in philosophy and has a potential for practical applications. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the development of philosophy of science in the 1970s. The explanatory framework is the picture of two fundamental split-offs: the controversial establishment of history and sociology of science and of formal philosophy of science as independent disciplines, against the background of more traditional “conceptual” varieties of philosophy of science. I illustrate these developments, which finally led to somewhat “purified” versions of the respective accounts, by examining a case study, namely, that of the (...) structuralist school, which emerged in the 1970s as an attempt to reconcile historical and formal approaches in philosophy of science. I try to explain the failure of this initial program of “Kuhn Sneedified” and its transition to a more purified formalist version, on the basis of the fact that the former attempt was caught somewhere amid the purism of conceptual, historical, and formal accounts of philosophy of science. (shrink)

A central problem within an influential strand of recent philosophy of mind has been to explain the “conformity of mind to thing” that characterizes knowledge. John Haldane has argued that this problem can be best addressed by a development of Thomas Aquinas’s account of the “formal identity” of the knowing subject with the object known. However, such a development is difficult to present in a manner perspicuous to a contemporary audience. This paper seeks to present a persuasive account of (...) formal identity, taking sensory cognition of the individual object as the primary case for examination. Formal identity is initially explored usingthe notion of encoding, or the systematic transfer of information reflecting efficient and formal causal processes. The mathematical notion of “isomorphism” is thenemployed to describe precisely the features of encoding needed for formal identity. Forms are defined as formally identical if and only if they are isomorphic. (shrink)

In Other Logics: Alternatives to Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy , edited by Admir Skodo, an array of historical and philosophical chapters decenter the idea of formal logic as the most accurate, timeless, and abstract description of all thought and reasoning.

The mathematical proof is the most important form of justification in mathematics. It is not, however, the only kind of justification for mathematical propositions. The existence of other forms, some of very significant strength, places a question mark over the prominence given to proof within mathematics. This collection of essays, by leading figures working within the philosophy of mathematics, is a response to the challenge of understanding the nature and role of the proof.

This volume concludes a series dedicated to the understanding of nature by philosophers, scientists, and technicians from antiquity to today. This understanding is an issue largely debated today by philosophers as well as nonphilosophers. Being the fourth and the last, this volume includes also an index rerum of the items dealt with in this as well as in the preceding three volumes. The seven essays it presents are primarily concerned with the positions of Newton, Kant, and Einstein. In fact, the (...) volume begins with a paper by Andreas Bartels on the understanding of nature according to the theory of relativity. Basing his essay on Michael’s Friedman interpretation of Kant’s reconstruction of Newtonian physics, Bartels points out that it is not correct to see in Einstein the accomplishment of the relational theory of space. Such an interpretation would require the following two assumptions: first, that Leibniz’s theory of space is the expression of a physical principle of relativity; second, that Einstein’s relativity implies the most complete form of relativity of movement. According to Bartels, one can debate about Leibniz, but the second assumption is surely false because Einstein’s theory does not imply a complete relativity of movement. On the contrary, Einstein maintains that it is matter, as a whole, that is in motion; and this is not far from what Aristotle said about matter’s essential, natural tendency to move. The Copernican cosmos was governed by fundamental laws, Newton transformed it into a contingent world of gravitational islands, and Einstein pushed further the transformation into a wider frame of possible spacetime experience. Manfred Stöckler’s paper deals with quantum theory. With regard to the debate on realism, that is, on the scope and validity of physical theories, Stöckler remarks that it is not true that quantum physics would give any further reason against realism that is not already given by classical physics and by everyday life. Michael Drieschner refers himself first to Kant’s concepts of “nature in material significance” and “nature in formal significance,” the former for the whole of the object in reality and the latter for the essences of things, and shows that in today’s physics the rigor of this distinction has faded. In fact, today’s science declares it impossible to identify anything like a whole of all objects. The ontology of classical physics has to give place to flexible concepts such as mesocosmos, that is, something between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. In fact, scientists like Franco Selleri have recently advocated a new form of realism with regard to quantum theory, according to which the validity of quantum physics rests upon a very defined scope of local reciprocal actions, so that everything going beyond that must be doubted. Alfred Gierer turns to biology and especially to the question of biology’s reduction to physics. Against the reductionists, Gierer proves that, on the contrary, biology is founding not only all social behaviors, but also all forms of consciousness, that is, all forms of awareness of limits, therefore also man’s answer to the ecological crisis. Elisabeth Ströcker writes on nuclear scission as possibly inaugurating a new age of nature dominance, pointing out that the evaluation of the consequences of technical application proves rather the contrary. In the concluding paper, Lothar Schäfer sketches a new idea of nature as something to be taken care of. Referring himself to Husserlian phenomenology, Schäfer invites us to reconsider the standpoint of corporeity. What eventually counts for man’s understanding of nature is its physiological relevance. (shrink)

In the formal semantics based on modern type theories, common nouns are interpreted as types, rather than as predicates of entities as in Montague’s semantics. This brings about important advantages in linguistic interpretations but also leads to a limitation of expressive power because there are fewer operations on types as compared with those on predicates. The theory of coercive subtyping adequately extends the modern type theories and, as shown in this paper, plays a very useful role in making type theories (...) more expressive for formal semantics. It not only gives a satisfactory solution to the basic problem of ‘multiple categorisation’ caused by interpreting common nouns as types, but provides a powerful formal framework to model interesting linguistic phenomena such as copredication, whose formal treatment has been found difficult in a Montagovian setting. In particular, we show how to formally introduce dot-types in a type theory with coercive subtyping and study some type-theoretic constructs that provide useful representational tools for reference transfers and multiple word meanings in formal lexical semantics. (shrink)