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The aim of this paper is to survey informal interpretations of relational semantics for relevant logics in terms of the theory of semantic information. Relational semantics for relevant logics introduced a ternary accessibility relation which was often criticized as unintuitive. The paper presents three interpretations of the ternary accessibility relation based on the framework of situation theory.
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The aim of the paper is to present an ontology of scientific laws as a tool for presentation of results extracted from research articles. The way we represent scientific laws is founded on our classification of scientific laws, which is based on the works of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Władysław Krajewski. The classification isdescribed formally and complemented with the specification of requirements for each type of law, in order to obtain an ontology in the sense of ontological engineering. The ontology is used to represent research results from the domain of agri-food science. We give examples of representation of laws taken from scientific papers and reasoning algorithms that lead to automatic generation of new information and identification of conflicts in the literature.
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The aim of this article is to indicate that the ideas of Leonardo Torres y Que- vedo presented in his short Essays on Automatics constitute essential link between early Babbage’s concepts of analytical engine and modern computer science. These ideas include de nition of automatics, classi cation of automa- ta, theoretical basis for robotics, electromechanical engineering, modern con- cept of chatbot, the importance of algorithm and last but not least oating point arithmetic.
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The main aim of this paper is searching the nature of the relation between a personand certain things that constitutes their being good or bad for her, and explainingwhat it is for something to have for us exactly that value and not other.
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Are the properties of communicative acts grounded in the intentions with which they are performed, or in the conventions that govern them? The latest round in this debate has been sparked by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone (2015), who argue that much more of communication is conventional than we thought, and that the rest isn’t really communication after all, but merely the initiation of open-ended imaginative thought. I argue that although Lepore and Stone may be right about many of the specific cases they discuss, their big-picture, conventionalist conclusions don’t follow. My argument focuses on four phenomena that present challenges to conventionalist accounts of communication: ambiguity, indirect communication, communication by wholly unconventional means, and convention acquisition.
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Steven Pinker proposes a game-theoretic framework to help explain the use of veiled speech in contexts where the ultimate aims of the speaker and hearer may diverge—such as cases of bribing a police officer to get out of a ticket and paying a maître d’ to get a table. This is presented as a response to what Pinker sees as the failure in H. P. Grice’s infl uential theory of meaning to recognize that speakers and hearers are not always cooperating. In this paper I argue that Pinker mischaracterizes Grice’s views on cooperation, and use this to refine a positive picture of what sort of cooperation is demanded by Grice’s Cooperative Principle. This positive picture serves to insulate the Gricean framework from objectors— including Pinker—who overstate the obligations entailed by the adoption of the Cooperative Principle. I then argue that the cases Pinker presents are best treated by recognizing that in each instance the utterance is formulated with two intentions towards two different audiences and detail a resulting revision to Pinker’s game-theoretic framework that reflects this proposal. I conclude by demonstrating how this proposed game-theoretic framework of cooperation with multiple audiences can be used to model the costs and benefits of other types of discourse, including political speech.
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Though ignorance is rarely a bliss, awareness of ignorance almost always is. Had we not been able to develop this powerful skill, there would have been no philosophy or science, nor advanced forms of religion, art, and technology. Awareness of ignorance, however, is not a motivator; but when it arouses curiosity that is strong enough, it causes what may be called an “epistemic” desire; a desire to know, to understand, to learn or to gain new experiences, which is a basic motivator for inquiry. This makes the relationship between curiosity and awareness of ignorance all the more important. One can however fi nd very little on this relationship within the philosophical literature. In this essay this is what I wish to explore. After a brief discussion of the question of whether awareness of ignorance is a precondition for curiosity, based on my earlier work (The Philosophy of Curiosity, Routledge, 2012) I attempt to show that corresponding to the two forms of curiosity that I call “objectual” and “propositional”, there are also two forms of ignorance. This will refute the prejudice that awareness of ignorance must always have propositional content and therefore must always be about truth. I further argue that awareness of ignorance that does have propositional content can be of two different varieties: truth-ignorance versus fact-ignorance. One may simply be ignorant of whether a proposition is true or false (truth ignorance); one may, on the other hand, know that a proposition is true but still be ignorant of the fact that makes it true (fact-ignorance). I then show that awareness of ignorance, whether it is objectual or propositional, can always be translated into what I shall call awareness of inostensibility. An important moral to be drawn from this discussion is that reaching truth, even when it is coupled with certainty, does not always eliminate one’s ignorance and therefore cannot be the ultimate goal of inquiry.
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In this paper I comment on Inan’s notions of propositional and objectual curiosity. Even though Inan offers an interesting and intuitive distinction between propositional and objectual curiosity, I want to question two aspects of his theory of curiosity. One aspect concerns his thesis that propositional curiosity is interdependent on epistemic attitudes such as belief, certainty and interest. Another aspect of his theory that I discuss is his thesis that objectual curiosity is not reducible to propositional curiosity. In more detail, in the first part, I start off by explaining what propositional curiosity is according to Inan and I bring up two worries that I call: (i) over-complexity as a result of subjectivity and (ii) overcomplexity as a result of dynamics for the above mentioned epistemic attitudes. Both worries stress the problem of over-complexity of Inan’s theory of propositional curiosity. In the second part, I argue that objectual curiosity is, contrary to Inan’s hypothesis, reducible to propositional curiosity. I further argue that the object of wh- questions that, according to Inan, express objectual curiosity can either be about the truth value of general or singular proposition. In addition, I suggest that only the reading where wh- questions express curiosity in a form of de re reading and have a singular proposition as their content is the one that is compatible with Inan’s notion of objectual curiosity.
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In this work, the debate between Yuri Balashov and Hud Hudson is reviewed in terms of the views put forward by Tim Maudlin. It seems that Maudlin’s view can shed light on the debate and may ensure new discussions and perspectives. Hudson, posing an interesting thought experiment, says that superluminal motion is possible whereas Balashov argues to the contrary. If we take into account what Tim Maudlin suggests in the first chapter of his book The Metaphysics within Physics, namely, that “laws of nature ought to be accepted as ontologically primitive,” we can interpret Balashov-Hudson debate from a new perspective. It can be said that Balashov would be taking a step forward if we were to take into account Maudlin perspective.
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Keeping within the framework of analytic philosophy, the article examines Anselm of Canterbury‘s “ontological proof for God’s existence”, which, according to prevailing view, most clearly reveals specifics of pre-scholastic speculative thought. In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the question of the logical validity of this proof is a matter of relevance, but this article highlights the aspect of the proof‘s soundness. After all, as it is known, formally correct reasoning can lead to false conclusions, and truth is an absolute value for philosophy, i.e. “love of wisdom”. The article not only attempts to estimate the compliance of “the ontological proof” with today’s standards of rationality, but also aims to clarify to what extent the approaches of an analytical history of philosophy enables us to reveal the intrinsic reason of Medieval thought.
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A standard reading of Anscombe’s “The First Person” takes her to argue, via reductio, that ‘I’ must be radically non-referring. Allegedly, she analogizes ‘I’ to the expletive ‘it’ in ‘It is raining’. Hence nothing need be said about Anscombe’s understanding of “the referential functioning of ‘I’”, there being no such thing. We think that this radical reading is incorrect. Given this, a pressing question arises: How does ‘I’ refer for Anscombe, and what sort of thing do users of ‘I’ refer to? We present a tentative answer which is both consistent with much of what Anscombe says, and is also empirically/philosophically defensible.
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The first part of this paper aims to highlight the analogies between Schutz’s vision of the natural attitude and Wittgenstein’s vision of a phenomenon that concerns the same problematic field, i.e. certainty, the belief of common sense that is free of all doubt, that the world “out there” is as it appears, absolutely real. These certainties form the basis, the foundation of language games and therefore of knowledge in general and in its entirety. This foundation is unfounded and yet indispensable. The second part of the paper examines an important topic analysed by Wittgenstein, related to the aforementioned problem: the language transposition of pre-predicative, pre-reflective and non-propositional certainties, the cornerstones of which are “hinge propositions”, whose hybrid nature can be identified in the shift from empirical propositions to grammatical rules.
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The aim of the paper is to deal with the links between Schutz and Wittgenstein on the centrality of language and intersubjectivity in the structure of meanings. I believe there are similarities between Schutz's proto-trust in the natural attitude and Wittgenstein's animal faith in the basic life form of language games. To this end, Cicourel's analysis of the relationship between language, Verstehen and empirical research methods will be used. Cicourel renders Schutz and Wittgenstein contiguous, by interpreting the different techniques of empirical research as languages that structure the understanding of meanings on the basis of the order of different realities and different language games.
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We belong to the era that has razed the importance of humanistic education to the ground. Before hundred years or so, young people were still proud to study philosophy in their own pursuit for education. It was said that they were directed toward noble sciences, disciplines that strengthen and refine the personality of man. Contemporary, mostly globalized world has, however, sucked all its phenomena into the vortex of economic dynamics and reification. Knowledge has become a commodity and the only education that is valued is the one that ravages trails of mind, that offers technical and operational knowledge. In such a constellation of education, all actors have changed roles, players and spoilsports have swapped places. If one of the actors of the education process argues that education should encourage thinking in man, they become renegades, because that place has been already filled by instrumental thinking focused on the problem. In a struggle against passive, reproductive knowledge, what has been also forgotten is thinking and asking about thinking itself, it has been forgotten to ask questions about humaneness of our existence – basically, it has been forgotten to ask questions. The very question: what is humanistic education still for? – has, therefore, a strong flavor of times long gone, it awakens archaic motives, but also gathers and keeps in itself concerns about the future of mankind.
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The dispute over Hegel’s understanding of language is set through the implicit polemical relation towards Heidegger’s conception of language, the analytic tradition of understanding of language, as well as towards de Saussure’s linguistic understanding of language. Hegel speculatively – completely different from the tradition of philosophical thinking of language (Hamann, Herder, Kant, Humboldt and Fichte), and from the later history of understanding of language within the conception of philosophy of language and contemporary linguistics – understands language as the speculative intellectual structure. The ontological origin of language is not in transcendence, but in human immanence, in the evolution of a productive imagination into a productive memory. The author comprehends Hegel’s concept of language by the anthropological, phenomenological and psychological question concerning language.
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The authors are proceeding from the one-sided viewpoint as a result of absolutization of the analytic way of thinking in contemporaty philosophy. In four theses they present the weak spots of the official Analytic Philosophy (absolutization of the logical moment, disregard for alternative media, one-dimensionality of the favored ordinary language, »softening« of the rigorous assertive claims). In order to overcome these shortcomings but also acknowledging the achievements of the analytic way of thinking (such as ideal of clarity, unified method, self-criticism by critique of language) at the end of their paper the authors make out a case for an integrative understanding of language which is including new aspects of the phenomenon of language (effective, expressive, creative aspect) not only the aspects figured out by language analysis (logical-semantic and pragmatic aspect of language).
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Plato is a thinker who puts the concept of justice into the very center of philosophical discussion. His concept of dikaiosyne, as a virtue which is in essence related to the essence of the state, is elaborately defined in the dialogue The Republic, although in other works (Charmides, Protagoras, Gorgias, Symposium) we can also see views related to its philosophical understanding. Plato particularly emphasizes the universality and permanence of the concept of justice, its substantial significance for the proper state of the human soul and the alignment of three distinct parts of the soul, as well as the connection to the threefold social rank basis of the best politeia, and differentiated forms of the rule, developed, in addition to the Republic, in Statesman and Laws. The most commonly noted concept of justice, which sublimes its concept “in general”, is presented in Δ book of The Republic: “This, then, I said, my friend, if taken in a certain sense appears to be justice, this principle of doing one’s own business.” Plato advocates Sophocracy, i.e. the political rule of the philosophers, being of the opinion that only in such a form of constitution it is possible to realize a complete harmony, the agreement of spheres of practical life, but also the adequacy and the equivalence of giving and taking on behalf of free citizens of a polis and the very polis. The justice in the Kingship i.e. in Aristocracy should be applied, primarily based on the principle of geometrical equality, while arithmetical equality would be only an auxiliary means to mitigate increased tensions in the classical polis of Plato’s times.
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The review of: “Colour as Mathematics: An Approach on Wittgenstein’s “Remarks on Colour”” Remarks on Colour (Bemerkungen über die Farben), (ed. G.E.M. Anscombe), UK/ USA/ Australia, Blackwell Publishing, 1977
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In this paper the author at first describes basic parameters of Pythagorean doctrine, expressed primarily with Aristotle, more precisely the part of which states that “things are numbers”, or that they “imitate” or “represent” numbers, even that Italian thinkers “supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number”. Bearing in mind the fact that according to Pythagoreans the number is the substance of all things the segment of diverse Pythagorean learning of numbers in regard to their view of justice is particularly being considered. Two definitions of justice are in the focus of the author’s investigation: in the first place the one which was negatively formulated from Magna Moralia (1182a11-14), which states that justice is not a square number. Then the segment of Nicomachean Ethics (1132b21-23) is quoted according to which the justice is some sort of reciprocity i.e. they defined justice simply as requital to another. The numerical expression of such definitions later became the subject of confrontation for the commentators, however the analysis has shown that the justice was expressed with at least five numbers. Most frequently the numbers were 4 and 9, but in the literature the numbers 8, 5, and 3 are also being mentioned. The paper, eventually, lists the deficiencies of such identifications, particularly in reference to Hegel’s objections to such determination and emphasizing that, in his opinion, mathematics can not grasp the reality which postulates itself and which exists in its own concept since its relation to the reality is external and nonconceptual.
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