The inaugural volume of the Pitt-Konstanz series, devoted to the work of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, encompasses the philosophical problems of space, time, and cosmology, the nature of scientific methodology, and the foundations of psychoanalysis.

The paper introduces ten open problems in belief revision theory, related to the representation of the belief state, to different notions of degrees of belief, and to the nature of change operations. It is argued that these problems are all issues in philosopical logic, in the strong sense of requiring inputs from both logic and philosophy for their solution.

The goal of behavioral economics is to improve the explanatory and predictive power of economics. This can be achieved by using theoretical and methodological resources of psychology. Its fundamental idea is that the relationship between psychology and economics cannot be subsumed under standard philosophical accounts of intertheoretical relations. Philosophical Problems of Behavioral Economics argues that behavioral economics is best understood as an attempt to deidealize economic theory guided by psychological research. Behavioral economics deconstructs the model of decision-making (...) by adding different elements. Based on this understanding behavioral economics has a number of tasks: first, it has to identify which economic theory needs to be challenged; second it aims to identify factors which need to be modelled within economic theories of choice and modify the theory accordingly; and finally, it has to create models that explain economic phenomena based on the new theory. This book analyses the different stages of this deconstruction process and shows how the scientific disciplines of economics and psychology are connected by it. This volume develops a new account of intertheoretical relations based on the idea of deidealization and thus contributes to debates within the philosophy of social science. It is suitable for those who are interested in or study economic theory and philosophy, economic psychology and philosophy of social science. (shrink)

The social and technological developments, social movements, scientific discoveries, economic growth or diseconomies give rise to many problems for human beings. Many disciplines such as economics, political science, architecture, sociology and psychology discuss these problems and offer solutions from different perspectives. Philosophy has its own way of dealing with these problems. As opposed to the common belief, philosophy does not only deal with ideals independently of what is going on in real life. The problems of the (...) contemporary philosophy are also the problems of the contemporary world. For this reason, this book aims to present and discuss certain philosophical problems in the contemporary world and to suggest solutions to them. (shrink)

Images, notions, terms, frames of reference for consciousness https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Problems-Consciousness-Reality-I/dp/1872152309/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8.

Volume 1 in the new series, Philosophical Problems Today, contains articles on standard problems in European and American philosophy. Quine writes on truth and discusses various difficulties connected with the clear definition of the correspondence theory of truth. Strawson, in his articles on individuals, disputes the empiricist test for the status of entity of object. Sufficient identity-conditions are satisfied by a much wider range of objects. The concept of meaning is further extended and differentiated in the article (...) by Habermas on speech acts and actions. The notion of communicative action is central to his argument. The study of formalism, by Agazzi, is in an important sense also a study of meaning. Although for the most part developed within mathematics, formal ways of thinking have been a basic tenet within philosophy and science ever since Aristotle. In his article, Ricoeur observes that the present philosophy of history no longer engages in the speculative system building as presented in the philosophy of Hegel, Marx and Toynbee. Our philosophy of history is rather a critical reflection of various issues connected with the transmission of historical meaning. (shrink)

Now, considering the determinism or indeterminism of the world, ... The question of free will, and the mind-body problem, are two that come to mind. ...

The essays in this volume are based on addresses presented during a colloquium on free logic, modal logic and related areas held at the University of California at Irvine, in May of 1968. With the single exception of Dagfinn F011esdal, whose revised address is included in a recent issue of Synthese honoring W. V. Quine, all of the speakers at the Irvine colloquium are contributors to this volume. Thanks are due to Professor A. I. Melden, Chairman of the Department of (...) Philosophy at Irvine, for his enthusiastic support of the colloquium, and to Drs. Gordon Brittan and Daniel Dennett for their help in the administration of the colloquium. Finally. I should also like to thank Professor Ralph W. Gerard, Dean of the Graduate Division of the University of California at Irvine, for the financial support which made the colloquium possible. KAREL LAMBERT Laguna Beach, California, 1969 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE V KAREL LAMBERT and BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN/ Meaning Relations, Possible Objects, and Possible Worlds 1 JAAKKO HINTIKKA / Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions 20 RICHMOND H. THOMASON / Some Completeness Results for Modal Predicate Calculi 56 H. LEBLANC and R. K. MEYER / Truth-Value Semantics for the Theory of Types 77 J. M. VICKERS / Probability and Non Standard Logics 102 PETER W. WOODRUFF / Logic and Truth Value Gaps 121 DANA SCOTT / Advice on Modal Logic 143 INDEX OF NAMES 175 KAREL LAMBER T AND BAS C. (shrink)

Language and Philosophical Problems investigates problems about mind, meaning and mathematics rooted in preconceptions of language. It deals in particular with problems which are connected with our tendency to be misled by certain prevailing views and preconceptions about language. Philosophical claims made by theorists of meaning are scrutinized and shown to be connected with common views about the nature of certain mathematical notions and methods. Drawing in particular on Wittgenstein's ideas, Sren Stenlund demonstrates a strategy (...) for tracing out and resolving conceptual and philosophical problems. By a critical examination of examples from different areas of philosophy, he shows that many problems arise through the transgression of the limits of the use of technical concepts and formal methods. Many prima facie different kinds of problems are shown to have common roots, and should thus be dealt and resolved together. Such an approach is usually prevented by the influence of traditional philosophical terminology and classification. The results of this investigation make it clear that the received ways of subdividing the subject matter of philosophy often conceal the roots of the problem. (shrink)

A philosophical discussion of conceptual and theoretical issues raised by the scientific use of the term ‘fitness’ to describe a property of evolving systems.

Many of the philosophical questions raised by Latin American thinkers are problems that have concerned philosophers at different times and in different places throughout the Western tradition. But in fact the issues are not altogether the same-- for they have been adapted to capture problems presented by new circumstances, and Latin Americans have sought resolutions in ways that are indeed novel. This book explains how well-established philosophical traditions gave rise in the "New World" to a distinctive (...) manner of thinking. There was no clean sweep of the past and an attempt to start over: rather, Latin American thinkers mostly welcomed European ideas at whatever pace such traditions happened to arrive. It is then no surprise that, for instance, Scholasticism became the accepted view under Spanish rule, and began to lose its grip only when the rulers did.But what does seem surprising is the radical way in which those traditions were transformed to account for problems that, though familiar, were now seen intake light of new circumstances. A distinctive Latin American way of thinking about such problems emerged from the project of "recycling" European philosophical traditions, some of which were already obsolete in Europe at the time their transplant took place. Thus theories commonly taken to be incompatible within Western traditions in philosophy were absorbed by Latin American thought-- and, in their newly acquired forms, such theories are even now at the basis of proposed solutions to many practical and philosophical problems.The book explores that recycling process. Above all, it aims to determine whether the various cultures that met in the "New World" could now be said to have come to share a common identity. This is in fact an issue which has preoccupied Latin Americans since at least the beginning of the 19th century, when their countries won their independence. But, in connection with this, it is also important to ask how Latin Americans have thought about the relationship between philosophy and rationality, and about other issues belonging to the major areas of philosophy such as epistemology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy, as well their application to vital social issues, including education and the emancipation of women. These are all taken up by the author, who pays special attention to questions of gender discrimination, justice, human rights, reparation for historically dispossessed peoples, and the role of education-- all matters of continuing concern in Latin American thought, from its earliest stirrings to the present day. (shrink)

Four philosophical problems--predication, speech acts, rules, and innate ideas--are discussed in the light of their implications for psychological and linguistic research. The discussion of predication concerns both form and use. With respect to form, it is argued that our lexical memory is organized according to a predicate-argument formula that underlies the subject-predicate form of our sentences. With respect to use, it is argued that the illocutionary force of the sentence as a speech act must be taken into account. (...) Both the formation and the use of such verbal constructions are normally characterized by systems of rules, but there is no clear account of what a rule is or how it might operate to control behavior, and this problem is especially difficult when, as in language, the person's knowledge of the rules is implicit. The innate basis for our human ability to acquire linguistic rules is considered and the problem of innateness is redefined around the conjecture that there are innate, language-specific mechanisms unique to human beings. The problem of investigating such language-specific mechanisms psychologically, however, is quite difficult at the present time. (shrink)

This selection of readings is intended primarily as an introduction to the study of philosophy. The readings deal with the problems of ethics, religion, political philosophy, theory of knowledge and metaphysics.

The present paper presents a philosofical analysis of the concept of control based on a specific characterization of the structure of control systems. The paper is subdivided into four section: in the first and the second sections the control dynamics is described and interpreted, while the last two sections briefly copy with the relationships between control, teleonomy, teleology and freedom.

There is a certain view abroad in the land concerning the philosophical problems raised by Tarskian semantics. This view has it that a Tarskian theory of truth in a language accomplishes nothing of interest beyond the definition of truth in terms of satisfaction, and, further, that what is missing — the only thing that would yield a solution to the philosophical problem of truth when added to Tarskian semantics — is a reduction of satisfaction to a non-semantic (...) relation. It seems to me that this view either misidentifies the philosophical problem altogether, or encourages a seriously misleading picture of the nature of the problem.The view I have in mind is nowhere more persuasively at work than in a recent paper by Hartry Field.1 In this paper Field argues that a Tarskian theory of truth for a natural language is impossible if we insist on Tarski's case-by-case elimination of ‘satisfies'. More fundamentally, however, he argues that a Tarskian theory could provide nothing of philosophical interest beyond the admittedly interesting reduction of truth to satisfaction, and his ground for this claim is, roughly, that a Tarskian theory does not reduce its primitive semantic relation — satisfaction — to a non-semantic relation. (shrink)

The paper discusses one of the central problems of contemporary formal semantics — counterexamples to the predictions of the theory of binding (due to N. Chomsky). In particular, the author addresses cases of the so-called coreferential readings of reflexive pronouns which are standardly predicted to receive only the bound reading. The author examines theories of T. Reinhart and I. Heim and suggests an extension ofthe latter theory in order to enable it to account for the aforementioned readings of reflexive (...) pronouns. (shrink)

Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) is much more philosophically interesting than has in general been recognized. Since it is the only well-developed form of applied consequentialism, it is a testing-ground for consequentialism and for the counterfactual analysis that it requires. Ten classes of philosophical problems that affect the practical performance of cost–benefit analysis are investigated: topic selection, dependence on the decision perspective, dangers of super synopticism and undue centralization, prediction problems, the indeterminateness of our control over future decisions, the (...) need to exclude certain consequences for moral reasons, bias in the delimitation of consequences, incommensurability of consequences, difficulties in defending the essential requirement of transferability across contexts, and the normatively questionable but equally essential assumption of interpersonal compensability. (Published Online July 31 2007). (shrink)

This commentary is an analysis of how Ullin Place's target article relates to the most important questions in the evolution of language, such as: (1) the relation between the evolution of language and that of "theory of mind"; (2) the question of the role of group structure in human evolution; (3) the evolution of representational capacities needed for language; (4) the selective force of the evolution of language. I argue that not only does Place ignore the problems underlying these (...) issues, but in most cases he also assumes different and sometimes contradictory answers to the questions, weakening his otherwise convincing conclusion. (shrink)

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