Originally published in 1925. If we are to know what intelligence is, how the brain can think, and what place mind holds in the scheme of things, we must first have a science of the sensory basis and structure of knowledge. This book supplies that need; it also serves as a short introduction to the systematic psychology of cognition.

Les architectures médiévales du savoir conçues dans le monde islamique, constituent un cas particulier : elles reflètent parfaitement la compétition entre les différentes traditions et approches intellectuelles. D’une part, certaines des classifications sont centrées sur ce qui était perçu comme sciences indigènes durant leur période de formation, c’est-à-dire ces sciences qui émergent en connexion avec la nouvelle religion qu’est l’Islam et la langue de sa révélation, l’arabe. D’autre part, les savants ont repris avec empressement et adapté les disciplines dérivant de (...) cultures non-arabes et non-musulmanes, principalement la science et la philosophie grecques. Cependant, ces traditions transmettent leurs propres conceptions de la connaissance, en partie en conflit avec les idées arabes/islamiques. Dans cet article, je propose un aperçu des approches diverses puis me concentre sur Fārābī et Avicenne, afin de retracer un développement remarquable : la dissolution graduelle des frontières aussi bien au sein qu’entre les différentes sphères et paradigmes scientifiques et ce sur des bases épistémologiques. (shrink)

It is argued, first, that although Spinoza's early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect does show evidence of a foundationalist approach to the justification of knowledge, there are good reasons to think he came to find such an approach unsatisfactory; and second, that the Ethics notion of certainty as adequate knowledge of one's knowledge is a justificational concept which is holistic in that any instance of such certainty depends on knowledge of the entire basic metaphysical (...) system. Finally it is shown that Spinoza's having come to hold a nonlinear view regarding the justificational structure of knowledge explains why he chose to present his philosophy in the geometric form, and why he never succeeded in formulating a method of discovery. (shrink)

This book argues for an underlying congruity in the epistemological programs of Cornelius Van Til and Alvin Plantinga. Through detailed engagement with their distinctive philosophical contexts, a reading is developed that contributes to the prevailing discourse on the theory of knowledge put forward by both thinkers.

"Originally published in 2010 by University of Queensland Press.".

Arguing against those who situate F.H. Bradley as a skeptic, mystic, or empiricist, this book makes a case for understanding his thought firmly in the tradition of rationalistic idealism.

For a long time philosophers have struggled to reach a definition of knowledge that is fully satisfactory from an intuitive standard. However, what could be so fuzzy about the concept of knowledge that it makes our intuitions to not obviously support a single analysis? One particular approach from a naturalistic perspective treats this question from the point of view of the psychology of concepts. According to it, this failure is explained by the structure of our folk concept (...) of knowledge, which organizes its constitutive information in a much looser way than we assume when we rely on intuitive knowledge ascriptions. I will adopt the same starting point here, but argue against the proposed answer and defend the view that this difficulty is explained not by something related to the specific structure of our concept of knowledge but, on the contrary, by its lack of structure. I claim that our folk concept of knowledge should be understood as a primitive mental state concept. (shrink)

1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

Hans Reichenbach was a formidable figure in early-twentieth-century philosophy of science. Educated in Germany, he was influential in establishing the so-called Berlin Circle, a companion group to the Vienna Circle founded by his colleague Rudolph Carnap. The movement they founded—usually known as "logical positivism," although it is more precisely known as "scientific philosophy" or "logical empiricism"—was a form of epistemology that privileged scientific over metaphysical truths. Reichenbach, like other young philosophers of the exact sciences of his generation, was deeply impressed (...) by the far-reaching changes in physics brought about by Einstein's special and general theories of relativity. Reichenbach responded to scientific advances by doing fundamental work in space-time theories, in quantum mechanics, in statistical mechanics, and in the development of probability theory—making him the most important philosopher of physics in the first generation of logical empiricism. Forced from his academic position by the Nazi race laws in 1933, Reichenbach wrote _Experience and Prediction_ at the University of Istanbul, where had had fled, expressly to introduce logical positivism to English speakers. In the two decades following World War II, during the explosion of scientific advances in North America, logical positivism was the reigning theory of the philosophy of science and Reichenbach was at the peak of his career. But, inevitably, support for logical positivism began to wane as it became obvious that the justification of scientific theories could not be entirely resolved by relying on strictly formal, technical processes. The growth of the discipline of the history of philosophy of science, which has created an audience of scholars eager for seminal classics in scientific philosophy, and the evidence supporting a historicist paradigm within logical positivism are two important reasons to make _Experience and Prediction_ available once again. "Hans Reichenbach's_ Experience and Prediction_ is one of the most important books in twentieth-century philosophy of science. Its author was, along with Rudolf Carnap, one of the two principal ambassadors to North America of the exciting new European philosophical movement known here under the names 'Logical Positivism' and 'Scientific Philosophy.' In 1938, when the book was published, Reichenbach was an exile from his native Germany, teaching in Istanbul, Turkey, and about to emigrate to the United States to take up a prestigious position at UCLA. He wrote_ Experience and Prediction_ in English as his calling card to his new American colleagues. More than any other single book,_ Experience and Prediction_ set the agenda for the new discipline of the philosophy of science that was to emerge after World War II as, perhaps, the most exciting new area in North American philosophy. Many of the problems still at the focus of discussion were given their classic formulations in this book. Long out of print,_ Experience and Prediction_ appears here in a new edition accompanied by a splendid historical introduction by the noted young philosopher and historian of the philosophy of science, Alan Richardson. A jewel of a book may once again be appreciated in its proper setting." —Don A. Howard, University of Notre Dame. (shrink)

Legal information retrieval is in need of the provision of legal knowledge for the improvement of search strategies. For this purpose, the LOIS project is concerned with the construction of a multilingual WordNet for cross-lingual information retrieval in the legal domain. In this article, we set out how a hybrid approach, featuring lexically and legally grounded conceptual representations, can fit the cross-lingual information retrieval needs of both legal professionals and laymen.

The aim of the study is to contribute to a better understanding of some aspects of the structure of biological knowledge and to make clearer to what extent the methods of reasoning may be useful in this field when only qualitative information is available. A fragment of biological knowledge (theory of cell motility) is analysed from the logico-methodological point of view as a coherent system and the possibility of its formal representation is investigated. The analysis is based (...) on distinguishing the main objects and their features (attributes) of which a given piece of knowledge is composed and on the values which these features may display. The features are interconnected by relations (in which various number of arguments appear) and these relations constitute the main (general, higher level) laws of a given fragment of knowledge (theory). Values of attributes are also mutually connected and these relations correspond to the detailed (lower level) laws. A computer system (in which Prolog language was used) enables to perform inference operations of progressive as well as regressive type. The main categories of reasoning procedures are described and illustrated by examples, namely a) search for conclusions which may be confronted with the actual knowledge in order to verify the system as a whole, b) formation of working hypotheses in the process of their empirical verification and explanation of facts and laws. The problem of development and modification of the system is also discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to substantiate the socio-cultural contexts of the leading role of knowledge in the transformation of power and managerial relations in the knowledge society. The article analyzes the nature of the intellectual overstraat – a new power and management structure that is being formed in the conditions of the Knowledge Society, and identifies the socio-cultural prerequisites for the formation of this phenomenon. New spheres of cultural life, new social strata and strata, (...) as shown in the study, were the result of a" shift", a" shift " of power from the economy to knowledge. The "shift" in the structures of power and management undermines the traditional bureaucratic foundations. The overstraat of intellectuals is presented as embodying the power of knowledge. As a result, the functions of the intellectual overstrate in a knowledge - based society-social, economic, political and state-are identified and analyzed; the socio-cultural context of the leading role of knowledge in the transformation of power and managerial relations of the "Knowledge Society"is substantiated. (shrink)

I argue that there is a cognition condition on intention and intentional action. If an agent is doing A intentionally, she has knowledge in intention that he is doing A. If an agent intends to do A, she has knowledge in intention that she is going to do A. In both cases, the agent has knowledge of eventual success, in this sense: she knows that it will be no accident if she ends up having done A. In (...) both cases, the agent’s knowledge is of what is happening, or what is going to happen, in the world; it is not knowledge merely of her state of mind. This knowledge is practical: it the cause of what it understands; without it what is happening, or what is going to happen, is not an intentional action, and any practical thought of the agent’s about what is happening, or what is going to happen, does not hit the heights of intention. I demonstrate that famous examples (from Davidson and Bratman) purporting to show that the cognition condition should be rejected (or its content or scope weakened) are ineffective, because they trade on confusions about the different kinds of failure to which intentional action may be susceptible, confusions remedied via reflection on the structure of intentional action. I show that the cognition condition is grounded not in reflection about the directions of fit and guidance of different kinds of mental states, nor in the indicative content of linguistic expressions of intention, but in the calculative and temporal structure of intentional action itself. (shrink)

The fourth industrial revolution will be ushered in by future high technology, and as a result, the world will face new difficulties relating to people, the environment, and profitability. Accordingly, the competitive edge and long-term viability of businesses would depend on the knowledge workers who could overcome these excruciatingly difficult obstacles and have the knowledge and competency to influence the overall performance of any type of company. But managing knowledge workers falls under the purview of human resources, (...) and only effective human resources tools, plans, and procedures can ensure the success of this task. One such tool, which has the capacity and capability to change the whole scenario in an organization's favor, is the human resource information system. The purpose of this structured review is to provide insight into a field of HRM that has largely been neglected by other reviews of the literature and has only been briefly discussed by a small number of publications published in reputable, top-tier journals. A customized HRIS framework is the result of this structured literature review for managing knowledge and competence. The study presents the content analysis of 48 articles, systematically and purposefully selected for this literature review, published during the past three decades. The study has several implications for policymakers and HR practitioners. (shrink)

This book aims to synthesize different directions in knowledge studies into a unified theory of knowledge and knowledge processes. It explicates important relations between knowledge and information. It provides the readers with understanding of the essence and structure of knowledge, explicating operations and process that are based on knowledge and vital for society. The book also highlights how the theory of knowledge paves the way for more advanced design and utilization of computers (...) and networks. (shrink)

We begin with a theory of thought as a biocognition not precisely situated in the individual, and still less in the brain alone, but deriving from a shared field of bioinformation. The structure of associations among elements of speech may reflect the structure of this field. Then we demonstrate that the analysis of the structure of the scientific discourse applied within this logic shows the fractal structure of the field of bioinformation. We also show that scientific (...) culture can be interpreted as a cultural model. So, scientific culture would be the elaboration of a cultural scenario in which each human being is another "myself" according to circumstances, an identification making a relationship of aid possible. This aid relationship is governed by an energy equilibrium defined by the cultural scenario, and may be calculated according to fractal theory. The result is a fractal model of consciousness and of the energies at work, whose equilibrium is necessary for the correct functioning of the human being. The consequences are determined concerning the reinsertion of the logic of the culture within the purely objective logic of medicine, in particular that of "giving-receiving" inherent in all cultures, even at the levels of giving birth in the context of modern medicine. We thank R. Ruiz-Banos for a long-time fruitful collaboration in the field of scientometrics. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how conflicts of perspective are resolved in the field of the human sciences. Examples of such conflicts are the duality between the actor and spectator standpoints, or the duality of participancy between a form of social life and a socio-anthropological study of it. This type of duality look irreducible, because the conflicting positions express incompatible interests. Yet, the claim of incommensurability is excessive. There exists a level of mental activity at which dialogue and resolution are possible. Reaching (...) this level only implies that one comes back to a state of undetermination between situations and interests whose best model is a superposition of states in generalized quantum theory. Some applications of this strategy of going back below the point of state reduction , from the psychology of perception to the history of civilization, are presented. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship that has emerged in the (...) last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley’s careful argument and wry wit have made him the permanent favorite among British idealists. However, he is also an enigma, for he insisted that reality is such a close unity that everything we say about it must be in some way false—and yet he wanted to say a lot about it.