Online research in philosophy

Contextual type theories are largely explored in their applications to programming languages, but less investigated for knowledge representation purposes. The combination of a constructive language with a modal extension of contexts appears crucial to explore the attractive idea of a type-theoretical calculus of provability from refutable assumptions for non-monotonic reasoning. This paper introduces such a language: the modal operators are meant to internalize two different modes of correctness, respectively with necessity as the standard notion of constructive verification and possibility as provability up to refutation of contextual conditions.

Students of politics cleave to a welter of conflicting conceptions of their subject. We all know that these conceptions shape the questions researchers put to politics, as well as the assumptions on which they make their inquiries. But we lack any attempt to list and classify these conceptions. This research note does just that, listing and classifying 29 1/2 definitions of politics I have found in the scholarly literature. I present the definitions and divide them into seven classes: power-seeking definitions, power-distributing definitions, struggle-and-competition definitions, collective decision and -action definitions, group- and social order-production definitions, authority-asserting definitions, and shaping -values and -arrangements definitions. Among those listed are the Weberian, Marxist, feminist, collective-choice, and conservative definitions of politics.

We introduce and study a natural extension of Marcus external contextual grammars. This mathematically simple mechanism which generates a proper subclass of simple matrix languages, known to be mildly context-sensitive ones, is still mildly context-sensitive. Furthermore, we get an infinite hierarchy of mildly context-sensitive families of languages. Then we attempt to fill a gap regarding the linguistic relevance of these mechanisms which consists in defining a tree structure on the strings generated by many-dimensional external contextual grammars, and investigate some related issues. Several open problems are finally discussed.

In almost all of his writings on ontology, Quine celebrated the discovery of contextual definition as a milestone of the history of philosophy. The philosophical appeal of this tool resides in the hope that it allows us to reduce the ontological commitments of theories in substantial ways. The goal of this paper is to show that contextual definition does not really come up to this hope. It is argued that the material adequacy of such definitions presupposes a very strong context-principle, one implying that theories do not have any ontological commitments at all.

This article treats three aspects of Frege's discussions of definitions. First, I survey Frege's main criticisms of definitions in mathematics. Second, I consider Frege's apparent change of mind on the legitimacy of contextual definitions and its significance for recent neo-Fregean logicism. In the remainder of the article I discuss a critical question about the definitions on which Frege's proofs of the laws of arithmetic depend: do the logical structures of the definientia reflect the understanding of arithmetical terms prevailing prior to Frege's analyses? Unless they do, it is unclear how Frege's proofs demonstrate the analyticity of the arithmetic in use before logicism. Yet, especially in late writings, Frege characterizes definitions as arbitrary stipulations of the senses or references of expressions unrelated to pre-definitional understanding. I conclude by examining some options for conceiving of the status of Frege's logicism in light of this apparent tension, and outline a suggestion for a philosophically fruitful way of resolving this tension.

Trois sortes de définitions sont présentées et discutées: les définitions nominales, les définitions contextuelles et les définitions amplificatrices. On insiste sur le fait que I’elimination des definitions n’est pas forcement un procede automatique en particulier dans le cas de la logique paraconsistante. Finalement on s’int’resse à la théorie des objets de Meinong et l’on montre comment elle peut êrre considéréecomme une théorie des descripteurs.Three kinds of definitions are presented and discussed: nominal definitions, contextual definitions, amplifying definitions. It is emphasized that the elimination of definitions is not necessarily straightforward in particular in the case of paraconsistent logic. Finally we have a look at Meinong’s theory objects and we show how it can be considered as a theory of descriptors.