Foundations of the Logical Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Complex Logic)

Foundations of the Logical Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Complex Logic)
Author: A.A. Zinov'ev
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401025010

Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science are devoted to symposia, con gresses, colloquia, monographs and collected papers on the philosophical foundations of the sciences. It is now our pleasure to include A. A. Zi nov'ev's treatise on complex logic among these volumes. Zinov'ev is one of the most creative of modern Soviet logicians, and at the same time an innovative worker on the methodological foundations of science. More over, Zinov'ev, although still a developing scholar, has exerted a sub stantial and stimulating influence upon his colleagues and students in Moscow and within other philosophical and logical circles of the Soviet Union. Hence it may be helpful, in bringing this present work to an English-reading audience, to review briefly some contemporary Soviet investigations into scientific methodology. During the 1950's, a vigorous new research program in logic was under taken, and the initial published work -characteristic of most Soviet pub lications in the logic and methodology of the sciences - was a collection of essays, Logical Investigations (Moscow, 1959). Among the authors, in addition to Zinov'ev himself, were the philosophers A. Kol'man and P. V. Tavanec, and the mathematicians and linguists, S. A. Janovskaja, A. S. Esenin-Vol'pin, S. K. Saumjan, G. N. Povarov.

(Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein

(Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein
Author: A. Biletzki
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 940070822X

This book tells the story of Wittgenstein interpretation during the past eighty years. It provides different interpretations, chronologies, developments, and controversies. It aims to discover the motives and motivations behind the philosophical community's project of interpreting Wittgenstein. It will prove valuable to philosophers, scholars, interpreters, students, and specialists, in both analytic and continental philosophy.

The Dawn of Cognitive Science

The Dawn of Cognitive Science
Author: L. Albertazzi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9401596565

Current debate in cognitive science, from robotics to analysis of vision, deals with problems like the perception of form, the structure and formation of mental images and their modelling, the ecological development of artificial intelligence, and cognitive analysis of natural language. It focuses in particular on the presence of a hierarchy of intellectual constructions in different formats of representation. These diverse approaches, which share a common assumption of the inner nature of representation, call for a new epistemology - even a new psychophysics - based on a theory of reference which is intrinsically cognitive. As a contribution to contemporary research, the reading presents the core of theories developed in Central Europe between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by philosophers, physicists, psychologists and semanticists who shared a dynamic approach and a pronounced concern with problems of interaction and dependence. These theories offer innovative solutions to some of the epistemological and philosophical problems currently at the centre of debate, like part-whole, theory of relations, and conceptual and linguistic categorization.

Visualization, Explanation and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics

Visualization, Explanation and Reasoning Styles in Mathematics
Author: P. Mancosu
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2006-03-30
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1402033354

In the 20th century philosophy of mathematics has to a great extent been dominated by views developed during the so-called foundational crisis in the beginning of that century. These views have primarily focused on questions pertaining to the logical structure of mathematics and questions regarding the justi?cation and consistency of mathematics. Paradigmatic in this - spect is Hilbert’s program which inherits from Frege and Russell the project to formalize all areas of ordinary mathematics and then adds the requi- ment of a proof, by epistemically privileged means (?nitistic reasoning), of the consistency of such formalized theories. While interest in modi?ed v- sions of the original foundational programs is still thriving, in the second part of the twentieth century several philosophers and historians of mat- matics have questioned whether such foundational programs could exhaust the realm of important philosophical problems to be raised about the nature of mathematics. Some have done so in open confrontation (and hostility) to the logically based analysis of mathematics which characterized the cl- sical foundational programs, while others (and many of the contributors to this book belong to this tradition) have only called for an extension of the range of questions and problems that should be raised in connection with an understanding of mathematics. The focus has turned thus to a consideration of what mathematicians are actually doing when they produce mathematics. Questions concerning concept-formation, understanding, heuristics, changes instyle of reasoning, the role of analogies and diagrams etc.

Attitudes and Changing Contexts

Attitudes and Changing Contexts
Author: Robert van Rooij
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2006-01-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9781402041761

In this book, the author defends a unified externalists account of propositional attitudes and reference, and formalizes this view within possible world semantics. He establishes a link between philosophical analyses of intentionality and reference, and formal semantic theories of discourse representation and context change. The relation between belief change and the semantic analyses of conditional sentences and evidential (knowledge) and buletic (desire) propositional attitudes is discussed extensively.

The Brain from 25,000 Feet

The Brain from 25,000 Feet
Author: Mark A. Changizi
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401702934

In The Brain from 25,000 Feet, Mark A. Changizi defends a non-reductionist philosophy and applies it to a variety of problems in the brain sciences. Some of the key questions answered are as follows. Why do we see visual illusions, and why are illusions inevitable for any finite-speed vision machine? Why aren't brains universal learning machines, and what does the riddle of induction and its solution have to do with human learning and innateness? The author tackles such questions as why the brain is folded, and why animals have as many limbs as they do, explaining how these relate to principles of network optimality. He describes how most natural language words are vague and then goes on to explain the connection to the ultimate computational limits on machines. There is also a fascinating discussion of how animals accommodate greater behavioral complexity. This book is a must-read for researchers interested in taking a high-level, non-mechanistic approach to answering age-old fundamental questions in the brain sciences.

A Collection of Polish Works on Philosophical Problems of Time and Spacetime

A Collection of Polish Works on Philosophical Problems of Time and Spacetime
Author: Helena Eilstein
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2013-04-17
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9401700974

This is a collection of some works of Polish philosophers and physicists on philosophical problems of time and spacetime. Without restricting the thematic scope of the papers, the issue conceming objectivity of time flow runs as a uniting thread through most of them. Partly it is discussed directIy, and partly the authors focus on themes which are of paramount importance for one's attitude to that question. In the first six papers the authors deal with their topics against the background of contemporary physics, its theories, its difficulties and discussed conjectures. For the paper of S. Snihur that background is provided by everyday worId-outlook, and the author discusses the problem of existence and character of the future in the light of basic principles of cIassical logic. The paper of A. P61tawski, about the views of the outstanding polish philosopher Roman Ingarden, enriches the thematic scope of the coIIection introducing into it some questions from philosophical anthropology and ethics. JERZY GOLOSZ MOTION, SPACE, TIME*. Abstract. The paper discusses the properties of spacetime we study by analyzing the phenomenon of motion. Of special interest are the spacetime symmetries. the spacetime structures and the ontological status of spacetime. These problems are considered on the grounds of the c1assical theories of motion contained in Newtonian physics, special and general theory of relativity. The controversy between an absolute and a relational conception of motion and its ontological implications are also analyzed.

Philosophical Lectures on Probability

Philosophical Lectures on Probability
Author: Bruno de Finetti
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2008-05-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1402082010

Bruno de Finetti (1906–1985) is the founder of the subjective interpretation of probability, together with the British philosopher Frank Plumpton Ramsey. His related notion of “exchangeability” revolutionized the statistical methodology. This book (based on a course held in 1979) explains in a language accessible also to non-mathematicians the fundamental tenets and implications of subjectivism, according to which the probability of any well specified fact F refers to the degree of belief actually held by someone, on the ground of her whole knowledge, on the truth of the assertion that F obtains.

Through Measurement to Knowledge

Through Measurement to Knowledge
Author: Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 687
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9400920792

"Tile; D'apC:Tile; l. DpWTa ()coi 7rpo7rapod)w £ D'T}K,mi'. "between us and Goodness the gods have placed the sweat of our brows". This quote from Isiodos, the first lyrical poet, is jotted on a sheet of paper found among the papers of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at the Boerhaave Museum, Leiden. On this same sheet, one can also read quotes from Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Homer, Pindar and Dante. Each quote is for somebody or something. It appears to have been a game played at least by Ehrenfest and Crommelin -an unmistakable sign of these two physicists's deep culture. This particular quote was for the "Werkplaats", the Physical Laboratory of the University of Leiden. Our purpose in putting together the Selected Papers of its first Director, Kamerlingh Onnes (1853-1926), is to try and articulate the dominant trends of a different type of culture at Leiden: its physics culture during the years that established low temperature physics as a distinct branch of physics. Our aims in choosing the particular papers are threefold. First, we wish to present the interconnectedness among the different research programs of Kamerlingh Onnes and to bring out the decisive role of the work initiated by van der Waals in determining the direction of nearly all of these research programs.