1. Philosophers tend to talk of belief as a ‘propositional attitude.’ As Fodor says:" The standard story about believing is that it's a two place relation, viz., a relation between a person and a proposition. My story is that believing is never an unmediated relation between a person and a proposition. In particular nobody grasps a proposition except insofar as he is appropriately related to some vehicle that expresses the proposition. " Fodor's story – that belief is a three-place relation (...) between a person, a proposition and a vehicle – is hardly non-standard; by assigning to propositions an essential place in acts of belief, he too is a ‘propositionalist’. My own view is that believing is primarily a relation between a believer and the world . While a great many human beliefs are propositional, many, perhaps most, are mondial and propositionless. As for animals who lack language, it may be that all their beliefs are mondial. In the present article, I show that distinguishing these two very different kinds of belief – de mundo as well as de dicto – enables one to explain phenomena of doxastic dissonance that standard propositionalist accounts cannot adequately explain .The next two sections, §1.1 and §1.2, are about ‘the world’ that is the doxastic object in the primary belief relation, providing needed background for the thesis that mondial belief is more primitive and basic than propositional belief.1.1. The world does not contain itself. Things in the world are …. (shrink)

An Invitation to Formal Reasoning introduces the discipline of formal logic by means of a powerful new system formulated by Fred Sommers. This system, term logic, is different in a number of ways from the standard system employed in modern logic; most striking is its greater simplicity and naturalness. Based on a radically different theory of logical syntax than the one Frege used when initiating modern mathematical logic in the 19th Century, term logic borrows insights from Aristotle's syllogistic, (...) Scholastic logicians, Leibniz, and the 19th century British algebraists. Term logic takes its syntax directly from natural language, construing statements as combinations of pairs of terms, where complex terms are taken to have the same syntax as statements. Whereas standard logic requires extensive 'translation' from natural language to symbolic language, term logic requires only 'transcription' into the symbolic language. Its naturalness is the result of its ability to stay close to the forms of sentences usually found in every day discourse. Written by the founders of the term logic approach, An Invitation to Formal Reasoning is a unique introduction and exploration of this new system, offering numerous exercises and examples throughout the text. Summarising the standard system of mathematical logic to set term logic in context, and showing how the two systems compare, this book presents an alternative approach to standard modern logic for those studying formal logic, philosophy of language or computer theory. Fred Sommers is Professor Emeritus, Brandeis University, USA; George Englebretsen is Professor of Philosophy, Bishop's University, Canada. (shrink)

The purpose Tarski speaks of is "to do justice to our intuitions which adhere to the classical Aristotelian conception of truth." Tarski takes this to be some form of correspondence theory. He has earlier considered and rejected an even less satisfactory formula of this sort: 'a sentence is true if it corresponds to reality'. His own semantic conception of truth is meant to be a more precise variant doing justice to the correspondence standpoint. In this spirit I shall presently suggest (...) a revised version of. (shrink)

" Vice and virtue in everyday life is a bestseller in college ethics because students find the readings both personally engaging and intellectually challenging. Under the guidance of classical and modern writers on morality, students using this textbook come to grips with moral issues of everyday life. They discover that some currently fashionable approaches to morality, such as egoism and relativism, have long histories. They also become aquainted with the debates and criticisms of various moral doctrines, learning central ethical theories (...) and methods for reasoning about moral issues in the process." -- Back cover. (shrink)

VICE AND VIRTUE IN EVERYDAY LIFE has been a popular choice in college ethics course study for more than two decades because it is well-liked by both college instructors and students. Course instructors appreciate it for its philosophical breadth and seriousness while college students and other readers welcome the engaging topics and readings. VICE AND VIRTUE IN EVERYDAY LIFE provides students with a lively selection of classical and contemporary readings on pressing matters of personal and social morality. The text includes (...) an overview of seminal ethical theories, as well as a unique set of stimulating articles on matters of social responsibility, personal integrity and individual virtue. While the readings consistently represent different points of view, the book also challenges readers to go beyond theoretical applications and contingent circumstances, to cultivate virtuous decision-making in their own lives. (shrink)

In the 17th century, Hobbes stated that we reason by addition and subtraction. Historians of logic note that Hobbes thought of reasoning as “a ‘species of computation’” but point out that “his writing contains in fact no attempt to work out such a project.” Though Leibniz mentions the plus/minus character of the positive and negative copulas, neither he nor Hobbes say anything about a plus/minus character of other common logical words that drive our deductive judgments, words like ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘if’, (...) and ‘and’, each of which actually turns out to have an oppositive, character that allows us, “in our silent reasoning,” to ignore its literal meaning and to reckon with it as one reckons with a plus or a minus operator in elementary algebra or arithmetic. These ‘logical constants’ of natural language figure crucially in our everyday reasoning. Because Hobbes and Leibniz did not identify them as the plus and minus words we reason with, their insight into what goes on in ‘ratiocination’ did not provide a guide for a research program that could develop a +/- logic that actually describes how we reason deductively. I will argue that such a +/- logic provides a way back from modern predicate logic—the logic of quantifiers and bound variables that is now ‘standard logic’—to an Aristotelian term logic of natural language that had been the millennial standard logic. (shrink)

Modern thinkers regard logic as a purely formal discipline like number theory, and not to be confused with any empirical discipline such as cognitive psychology, which may seek to characterize how people actually reason. Opposed to this is the traditional view that even a formal logic can be cognitively veridical – descriptive of procedures people actually follow in arriving at their deductive judgments (logic as Laws of Thought). In a cognitively veridical logic, any formal proof that a deductive judgment, intuitively (...) arrived at, is valid should ideally conform to the method the reasoning subject has used to arrive at that judgment. More specifically, it should reveal the actual reckoning process that the reasoning subject more or less consciously carries out when they make a deductive inference. That the common logical words used in everyday reasoning – words such as 'and', 'if,''some', 'is''not,' and 'all'– have fixed positive and negative charges has escaped the notice of modern logic. The present paper shows how, by unconsciously recognizing 'not' and 'all' as 'minus-words', while recognizing 'and', 'some', and 'is' as 'plus words', a child can intuitively reckon, for example, 'not (−) all (−) dogs are (+) friendly' as equivalent to 'some (+) dogs aren't (−) friendly': −(−D+F) = +D−F. (shrink)

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by emotional deficits and a failure to inhibit impulsive behavior and is often subdivided into “primary” and “secondary” psychopathic subtypes. The maladaptive behavior related to primary psychopathy is thought to reflect constitutional “fearlessness,” while the problematic behavior related to secondary psychopathy is motivated by other factors. The fearlessness observed in psychopathy has often been interpreted as reflecting a fundamental deficit in amygdala function, and previous studies have provided support for a low-fear model of psychopathy. (...) However, many of these studies fail to use appropriate screening procedures, use liberal inclusion criteria, or have used unconventional approaches to assay amygdala function. We measured brain activity with BOLD imaging in primary and secondary psychopaths and non-psychopathic control subjects during Pavlovian fear conditioning. In contrast to the low-fear model, we observed normal fear expression in primary psychopaths. Psychopaths also displayed greater differential BOLD activity in the amygdala relative to matched controls. Inverse patterns of activity were observed in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for primary versus secondary psychopaths. Primary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in the dorsal and ventral ACC consistent with enhanced fear expression, while secondary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in these regions consistent with fear inhibition. These results contradict the low-fear model of psychopathy and suggest that the low fear observed for psychopaths in previous studies may be specific to secondary psychopaths. (shrink)

Fred Sommers passed away in October of 2014 in his 92nd year. Having begun his teaching at Columbia University, he eventually became the Harry A. Wolfson Chair in Philosophy at Brandeis University, where he taught from 1963 to 1993. During his long and productive career, Sommers authored or co-authored over 50 books, articles, reviews, etc., presenting his ideas on numerous occasions throughout North America and Europe. His work was characterized by a commitment to the preservation and application (...) of historical insights and to the value of a well-articulated, coherent logical system. He was recognized for his independence and refusal to accept any view on the basis of authority alone. This made him a formidable critic but accounted in part for his many innovative and original ideas. In spite of his general contrariness in logic, Sommers earned the respect of the majority of his contemporaries, including Russell, Quine, van Benthem, Hacking, Suppes, and Strawson. In 2005, he was the subjec... (shrink)

Over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years, philosopher Fred Sommers has taken on the monumental task of reviving the development of Aristotelian (syllogistic) logic after it was supplanted by the predicate logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The enormousness of Sommers's undertaking can be gauged by the fact that most philosophers had come to believe - as David S. Oderberg writes in his preface - that "Aristotelian logic was good but (...) is now as good as dead." A revival of traditional syllogistic logic would involve not only its restatement but its refashioning into a system that could rival the elegance and deductive power of predicate logic. Building on work by medieval scholastic logicians, Leibniz, and nineteenth-century algebraic logicians, Sommers accomplished this renovation and rehabilitation of syllogistic logic with his magnum opus The Logic of Natural Language, published in 1982. In The Old New Logic, essays by a diverse group of contributors show how widely influential Sommers's work has been-not only in logic, but in category theory and other areas. Scholars in psychology, linguistics, and computer science join philosophers and logicians in discussing aspects of Sommers's contributions to philosophy. Sommers himself provides an intellectual autobiography at the beginning and in the final chapter offers comments on the contributions. This collection should help bring to Sommers's work the attention it deserves from the wider philosophical and intellectual community. (shrink)