This chapter contains sections titled: 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5.

Nominal concepts represent things as tokens of types. Recent research suggests that we represent principled connections between the type of thing something is (e.g., DOG) and some of its properties (k‐properties; e.g., having four legs for dogs) but not other properties (t‐properties; e.g., being brown for dogs). Principled connections differ from logical, statistical, and causal connections. Principled connections license (i) the expectation that tokens of the type will generally possess their k‐properties, (ii) formal explanations (i.e., explanation of the presence (...) of k‐properties in tokens of a type by reference to the type of thing it is), and (iii) normative expectations concerning the presence of k‐properties in tokens of the type. The present paper investigates the hypothesis that representing principled connections requires representing properties as aspects of being the relevant kind of thing (Aspect Hypothesis). Experiment 1 provides a direct test of the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 provide indirect tests of the Aspect Hypothesis. All three experiments provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Experiment 4 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the manner in which formal explanations are licensed by principled connections. Finally, Experiment 5 investigates a prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis concerning the nature of the normative expectations licensed by principled connections. Together these results provide strong evidence for the idea that representing principled connections involves representing a property as being an aspect of being a given kind of thing. The results also help clarify the manner in which formal explanation differs from other modes of explanation. Finally, the results of the experiments are used to motivate a proposal concerning the formal structure of the conceptual representations implicated by principled connections. This structure provides a domain‐general way of structuring our concepts and embodies the perspective we take when we think and talk of things as being instances of a kind. (shrink)

Judaic Logic is an original inquiry into the forms of thought determining Jewish law and belief, from the impartial perspective of a logician. Judaic Logic attempts to honestly estimate the extent to which the logic employed within Judaism fits into the general norms, and whether it has any contributions to make to them. The author ranges far and wide in Jewish lore, finding clear evidence of both inductive and deductive reasoning in the Torah and other books of the Bible, and (...) analyzing the methodology of the Talmud and other Rabbinic literature by means of formal tools which make possible its objective evaluation with reference to scientific logic. The result is a highly innovative work – incisive and open, free of clichés or manipulation. Judaic Logic succeeds in translating vague and confusing interpretative principles and examples into formulas with the clarity and precision of Aristotelean syllogism. Among the positive outcomes, for logic in general, are a thorough listing, analysis and validation of the various forms of a-fortiori argument, as well as a clarification of dialectic logic. However, on the negative side, this demystification of Talmudic/Rabbinic modes of thought (hermeneutic and heuristic) reveals most of them to be, contrary to the boasts of orthodox commentators, far from deductive and certain. They are often, legitimately enough, inductive. But they are also often unnatural and arbitrary constructs, supported by unverifiable claims and fallacious techniques. Many other thought-processes, used but not noticed or discussed by the Rabbis, are identified in this treatise, and subjected to logical review. Various more or less explicit Rabbinic doctrines, which have logical significance, are also examined in it. In particular, this work includes a formal study of the ethical logic (deontology) found in Jewish law, to elicit both its universal aspects and its peculiarities. With regard to Biblical studies, one notable finding is an explicit formulation (which, however, the Rabbis failed to take note of and stress) of the principles of adduction in the Torah, written long before the acknowledgement of these principles in Western philosophy and their assimilation in a developed theory of knowledge. Another surprise is that, in contrast to Midrashic claims, the Tanakh (Jewish Bible) contains a lot more than ten instances of qal vachomer (a-fortiori) reasoning. In sum, Judaic Logic elucidates and evaluates the epistemological assumptions which have generated the Halakhah (Jewish religious jurisprudence) and allied doctrines. Traditional justifications, or rationalizations, concerning Judaic law and belief, are carefully dissected and weighed at the level of logical process and structure, without concern for content. This foundational approach, devoid of any critical or supportive bias, clears the way for a timely reassessment of orthodox Judaism (and incidentally, other religious systems, by means of analogies or contrasts). Judaic Logic ought, therefore, to be read by all Halakhists, as well as Bible and Talmud scholars and students; and also by everyone interested in the theory, practise and history of logic. (shrink)

Revised version of chapter in J. N. Mohanty and W. McKenna (eds.), Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Textbook, Lanham: University Press of America, 1989, 29–67. -/- Logic for Husserl is a science of science, a science of what all sciences have in common in their modes of validation. Thus logic deals with universal laws relating to truth, to deduction, to verification and falsification, and with laws relating to theory as such, and to what makes for theoretical unity, both on the side of (...) the propositions of a theory and on the side of the domain of objects to which these propositions refer. This essay presents a systematic overview of Husserl’s views on these matters as put forward in his Logical Investigations. It shows how Husserl’s theory of linguistic meanings as species of mental acts, his formal ontology of part, whole and dependence, his theory of meaning categories, and his theory of categorial intuition combine with his theory of science to form a single whole. Finally, it explores the ways in which Husserl’s ideas on these matters can be put to use in solving problems in the philosophy of language, logic and mathematics in a way which does justice to the role of mental activity in each of these domains while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of psychologism. (shrink)

In this issue we include contributions from the individuals presiding at the panel All in a Jurnal's Work: A BABEL Wayzgoose, convened at the second Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group. Sadly, the contributions of Daniel Remein, chief rogue at the Organism for Poetic Research as well as editor at Whiskey & Fox , were not able to appear in this version of the proceedings. From the program : 2ND BIENNUAL MEETING OF THE BABEL WORKING GROUP CONFERENCE “CRUISING IN (...) THE RUINS: THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINARITY IN THE POST/MEDIEVAL UNIVERSITY” SEPTEMBER 21ST, 2012: SESSION 13 MCLEOD C.322, CURRY STUDENT CENTER NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA. Traditionally, a wayzgoose was a celebration at the end of a printer’s year, a night off in the late fall before the work began of printing by candlelight. According to the OED, the Master Printer would make for the journeymen “a good Feast, and not only entertains them at his own House, but besides, gives them Money to spend at the Ale-house or Tavern at Night.” Following in this line, continent. proposes in its publication(s) a night out and a good Feast, away from the noxious fumes of the Academy and into a night of revelry which begins, but does not end, at the alehouse or Tavern. continent. proposes that the thinking of the Academy be freed to be thought elsewhere, in the alleys and doorways of the village and cities, encountered not in the strictly defined spaces of the classroom and blackboard (now white) but anticipated and found where thinking occurs. Historically, academic journals have served a different purpose than the Academy itself. Journals (from the Anglo-Fr. jurnal , "a day," from O.Fr. jornel , "day, time; day's work," hence the journalist as writer of the news of the day ) have served as privileged sites for the articulation and concretization of specific modes of knowledge and control (insemination of those ideas has been formalized in the classroom, in seminar). In contrast, the academic journal is post-partum and has been an old-boys club, an insider trading network in which truths are (re)circulated against themselves, forming a Maginot Line against whatever is new, or the distinctly challenging. All in a Jurnal’s Work will discuss (in part) the ramifications of cheap start-up publications that are challenging the traditional ensconced-in-ivory academic journals and their supporting infrastructures. The panel will be seeking a questioning (as a challenging) towards the discipline of knowledge production/fabrication (of truth[s]) and the event of the Academy (and its publications) as it has evolved and continues to (d)evolve. Issues to be discussed will revolve around the power of academic publishing and its origins, hierarchical versus horizontal academic modules (is there a place for the General Assembly in academia?) and the evolving idea of the Multiversity as a site(s) of a (BABELing) multivocality in the wake of the University of Disaster. A CONTINUOUS ACT Nico Jenkins In Pierre Hadot’s extraordinary book, Philosophy as a Way of Life , the practices of philosophy—that is the exercise of what we can term pre-institionalized love of wisdom, what Philo of Alexandria described as a training towards wisdom—are described as, following the Stoics, “a continuous act, permanent and identical with life itself, which had to be renewed at each instant.” This renewal of thinking, this coming to be of being itself —meeting itself on its own ground, concerns the way philosophy is practiced, and more often, taught, or rather not taught. Hadot continues his thinking with a description of what happens to the structure of thought in the medieval ages as it becomes adopted—co-opted— by the university, and by extension, by the institution of the church. Philosophy becomes no longer a way of living, no longer a praxis as such but becomes a condition that is locked in a theoretical construct, one which was literally removed from life (and in life we read then love, wisdom, being etc, also the home, the market, the field, the street) and secured behind the high walls of the monastery (which were shortly replaced by the high walls of the Academy) where thinking unfortunately rests for the most part today. Hadot writes further that this dangerous movement of removal reduces thinking to a theoretical practice akin to the mythical Ouroborous; “education was thus no longer directed toward people who were to be educated with a view to becoming fully developed human beings, but to specialists, in order that they might learn how to train other specialists.” Thought then is trapped behind the walls of the academy, and with the exception of such thinkers as Spinoza, Descartes, and Liebnitz as well as others who think from an outside in, thought remains, in the form of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, a practice reduced or removed from life and restricted to what Schopenhauer will call “mere fencing in front of the mirror.” This is of course the tendency today and philosophy remains, for the most part, a discourse produced and thought inside the academy and disseminated, in seminated through university presses and of course the academic journal. It seems necessary to me that we have to have a place, a return, to a thinking which is closer to the Stoics, closer to the pre-Socratics, to a thinking which is a practice of becoming, a training to think, to live, to die. this is not south romantic than imperative . This thinking is one of a deep ir responsibility because it is not known, it is not figured out. It requires a risk and what Heidegger calls a leap (for there is no bridge to it). I call it irresponsible because for too long sanctioned thought has had as its premise the idea that thinking has a goal, a direction, a telos ; that it is not an activity but a process which gives a product; that the responsibility of thinking in turn demand an answer. In my mind, only freed from that goal can thinking, in contrast, bask in its own thinking, bask in a state in which the unknown can remain unknown, that mystery can rest as mystery. This is not to say that the world needs no answers, or to promote a Whitmanesque “leaning and loafing” as the only valid practice. It is only to say that for too long, thinking has been validated by the academy, by the answerable, by the already decided. To me, this requires—as an answer— the ir responsibility of thought, what Nancy calls, “a world for which all is not already done (played out, finished, enshrined in a destiny), nor entirely still to do (in the future for always future tomorrows).” This is a thinking not sanctified by the academy, made sacred by the church or the palace but rather it takes place on the périphérie , beyond the ring road, in alleyways behind the marketplace, in cafes stained with the syphilitic patina of irresponsible talk, of loose talk, the kind of talk made loose not only by the tankard and the goblet by the practice and training of attuned thinking. continent. was formed as a collective of thinkers coming out of the European Graduate School (also known as the University of Disaster) three years ago, in an effort to combat, or challenge, the dominant paradigm which isolates thinking from the street, from life, from where perhaps wisdom tends to emerge. We feel that not only is the university herself no longer the privileged site of where true thinking takes place—and where only official thought can take place—but that the very artificiality of the academy denies thinking—at times—authentic, thought. Our goal at continent. is to create a media agnostic publication which is rigorous in its intellectual underpinnings but which will remain permanently beyond and out of reach of the academy. Though many of us butter our bread with academic paychecks (maid!) we attempt to keep continent. as a refuge—and a refugee—from the University in ruins, from the University as a site of preformed and institutionalized pre-set dialogues. In concert with other publications-both cyber and print—as well as various blogs we are attempting to re-dialogize the dialogue of thinking. We are attempting both to speak to— as well as with and against —the university as a site of accreted knowledge. We have not been utterly successful and continue to attempt to define what that role of being perpetually beyond is (while still trying to maintain rigorous intellectual standards) but it is just that, a goal, which is perpetually opening, perpetually unanswered, perhaps even by design, perpetually unanswerable. (shrink)

Contemporary logic is confined to a few paradigmatic attitudes such as belief, knowledge, desire and intention. My purpose is to present a general modeltheoretical semantics of propositional attitudes of any cognitive or volitive mode. In my view, one can recursively define the set of all psychological modes of attitudes. As Descartes anticipated, the two primitive modes are those of belief and desire. Complex modes are obtained by adding to primitive modes special cognitive and volitive ways or special propositional content (...) or preparatory conditions. According to standard logic of attitudes , human agents are either perfectly rational or totally irrational. I will proceed to a finer analysis of propositional attitudes that accounts for our imperfect but minimal rationality. For that purpose I will use a non standard predicative logic according to which propositions with the same truth conditions can have different cognitive values and I will explicate subjective in addition to objective possibilities. Next I will enumerate valid laws of my general logic of propositional attitudes. At the end I will state principles according to which minimally rational agents dynamically revise attitudes of any mode. (shrink)

This study tried to investigate the type of argumentation found in media discourse data. A case in point was the sport talk show interview. The data included an interview extracted from the Iranian popular sport show, Navad, broadcast every Monday by Channel 3 in Iran. The interview was with the former president of the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Analysis of the data was done within the framework of Toulmin’s conception of argument as a form of (...) conversation. Accordingly, the propositions produced collaboratively by the host and guests were used to reconstruct the argument structure of the interview in terms of Toulminian schemata. The qualitative analysis of the data revealed that: 1) the argument structure of the interview was that of substantial argument rather than the analytic one. 2) Little if any formal validity was found in the skeleton of the argument. 3) The talk seemed to be subjective, and backing and qualifier elements widely used by the guest were not in some parts satisfactory. 4) Warrant, considered as one of the essential components of practical arguments, was not, in some parts, explicitly referred to, but must have been be implicitly inferred by the listeners. (shrink)

Objective: The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties and factorial structure of the Schema Mode Inventory for Eating Disorders (SMI-ED) in a disordered eating population. Method: 573 participants with disordered eating patterns as measured by the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) completed the 190-item adapted version of the Schema Mode Inventory (SMI). The new SMI-ED was developed by clinicians/researchers specializing in the treatment of eating disorders, through combining items from the original SMI with a (...) set of additional questions specifically representative of the eating disorder population. Psychometric testing included Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and internal consistency (Cronbach’s α). Multivariate Analyses of Covariance (MANCOVA) was also run to test statistical differences between the EDE-Q subscales on the SMI-ED modes, while controlling for possible confounding variables. Results: Factorial analysis confirmed an acceptable sixteen-related-factors solution for the SMI-ED, thus providing preliminary evidence for the adequate validity of the new measure based on internal structure. Concurrent validity was also established through moderate to high correlations on the modes most relevant to eating disorders with EDE-Q subscales. This study represents the first step in creating a psychometrically sound instrument for measuring schema modes in eating disorders, and provides greater insight into the relevant schema modes within this population. Conclusion: This research represents an important preliminary step toward understanding and labeling the schema mode model for this clinical group. Findings from the psychometric evaluation of SMI-ED suggest that this is a useful tool which may further assist in the measurement and conceptualization of schema modes in this population. (shrink)

The social sciences playa variety of multifaceted roles in the policymaking process. So varied are these roles, indeed, that it is futile to talk in the singular about the use of social science in policymaking, as if there were one constant relationship between two fixed and stable entities. Instead, to address this issue sensibly one must talk in the plural about uses of dif ferent modes of social scientific inquiry for different kinds of policies under various circumstances. In (...) some cases, the influence of social scientific research is direct and tangible, and the connection between the find ings and the policy is easy to see. In other cases, perhaps most, its influence is indirect-one small piece in a larger mosaic of politics, bargaining, and compromise. Occasionally the findings of social scientific studies are explicitly drawn upon by policymakers in the formation, implementation, or evaluation of particular policies. More often, the categories and theoretical models of social science provide a general background orientation within which policymakers concep tualize problems and frame policy options. At times, the in fluence of social scientific work is cognitive and informational in nature; in other instances, policymakers use social science primarily for symbolic and political purposes in order to le gitimate preestablished goals and strategies. Nonetheless, amid this diversity and variety, troubling general questions persistently arise. (shrink)

The purpose of teaching logic in philosophy is to enable us to evaluate arguments with respect to (formal) validity. Standard logics refer to a concept of validity which allows for the relation of implication to hold between premises and conclusion even in cases where there is no “relevant” connection between the premises and the conclusion. A prominent example for this is the rule “Ex-Falso-Quodlibet” (EFQ), which allows us to infer an arbitrary proposition from a contradiction. The tolerance (...) of irrelevance endorsed by standard logics unfortunately engenders that they cannot adequately fulfill their intended task of analyzing and evaluating philosophical, scientific and everyday-life arguments – instead, their application even gives rise to a multitude of artificial philosophical pseudoproblems (like the problem of the disposition predicates or the problem of counterfactuals). As alternatives to standard logics, there exist non-standard systems called “relevance logics” or “relevant logics” meant to avoid irrelevance. The problem with these systems, however, is that the mainstream relational semantics (“worlds semantics”) available for them is to be considered unintuitive and complex to a degree which is apt to render relevant logics unattractive to the majority of philosophers who are on the lookout not only for adequate, but also simple and efficient technical means for evaluating arguments. Therefore, the main aim of this treatise is to provide an alternative semantics (“rules semantics”) which is comparatively easy to grasp and simple in application. A second aim of the book is to extend the semantics as least as far as it takes to cover more or less all the logical notions philosophers need in their “everyday analyzing”. This includes first order predicate logic, higher order logic (for analyzing talk about “properties” etc.), identity, definite descriptions, abstraction principles and modal logic. This book can be read without having any more background than a good introductory course in classical logic provides. (shrink)

TED Talks are still an unexplored genre of argumentation in which narrative arguments are often used in TED speakers’ strategic maneuvering to support a standpoint. In the present study, I combine the constructs of narrative positioning (NP) and strategic maneuvering (SM) to offer a conceptualization of how narrative is used in pragmatic argumentation as well as provide an exemplary analysis of a specific case of narrative arguments that were used in Winch’s (How to practice emotional first aid. https://www.ted.com/talks/guy_winch_the_case_for_emotional_hygiene.2014, 2014) TED (...) Talk. The proposed integration aims to provide a theoretical framework and empirical tools for reconstructing narrative arguments through connecting the underlying formal structure of narrative with aspects of TED speakers’ strategic maneuvering. Drawing on NP and SM constructs, the critical analysis explores how Winch’s narratives or “small stories” were strategically manipulated to support his stance with regard to the importance of mental health and to examine whether or not the use of narrative arguments as argumentation moves helped to enhance the dialectical reasonableness and rhetorical effectiveness of Winch’s argument. The analysis shows that the macro context and the knowledge gap between TED speakers and the audience makes the use of narrative arguments extremely effective. Although narrative arguments often receive criticism about their validity in providing sufficient evidence for a standpoint, their dialectical power lies in the flexibility of describing events in different fashions to draw pragmatic inferences that support the speaker’s stance. The study fills an important gap in the literature as it integrates recent approaches in narrative theory in the reconstruction and evaluation of narrative arguments in TED Talks. (shrink)

Byrne has demonstrated that although subjects can make deductively valid inferences of the modus ponens and modus tollens forms, these valid inferences can be suppressed by presenting an appropriate additional premise “If R then Q” with the original conditional “If P then Q”. This suppression effect challenges the assumption of all syntactic theories of conditional reasoning that formal rules of inference such as modus ponens is part of mental logic. This paper argues that both the syntactic and the mental (...) model accounts of the suppression effect are inadequate because they fail to give a principled account of the critical interpretive component involved in reasoning. In contrast, the relative salience model proposed in this study emphasized the centrality of the interpretative processes with the critical component being the relative salience of premises as judged by subjects on the basis of their prior knowledge activated in particular problem situations. Using 120 undergraduates and 120 policemen as subjects, predictions from the model were tested and confirmed in a suppression paradigm and evidence of convergent validity for the construct of salience were obtained. The results cannot be reconciled with either the syntactic view or the mental model view that have dominated theories of conditional reasoning. (shrink)

Maybe, before we speak of time, or maybe whilst we are speaking of time, or maybe after we have spoken of time, in the various modes of time’s insistence to exist, one should give time to the talk of time. There are various different modes of time’s insistence to exist, such as quantum physics in conversation with relativity theory where time is constructed as a fourth dimension of space. Or there are the modes of time in history, religion, psychology (...) and philosophy, and each of these modes is composed, and composes its own specific object called time, and a particular subject who understands and interprets time in that particular mode. Yet, before, whilst or after these modes of time’s insistence to exist, one should maybe give time to time’s time. Give time for the various times to articulate themselves in the various modes of existence, thereby creating both a whole plurality of differing subjects, as well as plurality of differing objects, all called ‘time’. Once time has been given time to talk its talk, to articulate itself within the various modes, it will be interrupted by the articulations of time in various modes of time still to come. These disruptions of time by time always still to come opens the door for a theological narrative – a narrative on time, but created by the coming of messianic times, interpreted in the mode of hope but also in the mode of a promise from the past. (shrink)

The traditional picture of logic takes it for granted that "valid arguments have a fundamental epistemic significance", but neither model theory nor traditional proof theory dealing with formal system has been able to give an account of this significance. Since valid arguments as usually understood do not in general have any epistemic significance, the problem is to explain how and why we can nevertheless use them sometimes to acquire knowledge. It is suggested that we should distinguish between arguments and (...) acts of inferences and that we have to reconsider the latter notion to arrive at the desired explanation. More precisely, the notions should be developed so that the following relationship holds: one gets in possession of a ground for a conclusion by inferring it from premisses for which one already has grounds, provided that the inference in question is valid. The paper proposes explications of the concepts of ground and deductively valid inference so that this relationship holds as a conceptual truth. Logical validity of inference is seen as a special case of deductive validity, but does not add anything as far as epistemic significance is concerned—it resides already in the deductively valid inferences. (shrink)

Any theory of truth must find a way around Curry’s paradox, and there are well-known ways to do so. This paper concerns an apparently analogous paradox, about validity rather than truth, which JC Beall and Julien Murzi call the v-Curry. They argue that there are reasons to want a common solution to it and the standard Curry paradox, and that this rules out the solutions to the latter offered by most “naive truth theorists.” To this end they recommend a (...) radical solution to both paradoxes, involving a substructural logic, in particular, one without structural contraction. In this paper I argue that substructuralism is unnecessary. Diagnosing the “v-Curry” is complicated because of a multiplicity of readings of the principles it relies on. But these principles are not analogous to the principles of naive truth, and taken together, there is no reading of them that should have much appeal to anyone who has absorbed the morals of both the ordinary Curry paradox and the second incompleteness theorem. (shrink)

In philosophical contexts, logical formalisms are often resorted to as a means to render the validity and invalidity of informal arguments formally transparent. Since Oliver and Massey , however, it has been recognized in the literature that identifying valid arguments is easier than identifying invalid ones. Still, any viable theory of adequate logical formalization should at least reliably identify valid arguments. This paper argues that accounts of logical formalization as developed by Blau and Brun do not meet that benchmark. (...) The paper ends by suggesting different strategies to remedy the problem. (shrink)

In this book, I deal with some fundamental problems of the Hegelian dialectic. For this purpose, I take a middle course between total scepticism, which considers dialectic as a devastator sophistry with no respect even for the non-contradiction principle, and authoritarian dogmatism, which claims to solve any question with the magic wand of the Hegelian Aufhebung. That is, I decide to be critical, defining concepts anew, bringing out sources, determining conditions of possibility and fields of validity, accepting or rejecting (...) when necessary. Following G. R. G. Mure's thinking, from an inner point of view I examine whether, in carrying out his work, Hegel remains faithful to the different principles he proclaims, and I find substantial deviations. And, following W. Becker's thinking, from an external point of view, that is, from a formal, empirical or existential contemporary angle, I try to determine the extent to which we may legitimately talk about the fruitfulness of Hegelian dialectic. In this way, I reconstruct Hegel's thought so that it may become acceptable to us-readers of the twentieth-century-as intelligible and coherent as possible. I conclude that dialectic, as a logic of human reality, has to be grasped and expressed from the viewpoint of the particular historical individual, in constant interaction with the cultural environment of his or her time. Using this approach, I investigate the questions at issue from Hegel's Logic point of view. (shrink)

Existence as reflected in natural language is not a univocal notion, but divides into different modes of being, such as existence (as, roughly, endurance) and occurrence. One aim of the paper is to distinguish sharply between abstract artifacts and non-existent objects (e.g., plans vs. planned events that fail to occur); another is to argue for validity as a mode of being distinct from existence, as well as for corresponding distinctions among non-being.

What is the logic of entailment? The latter half of the twentieth century has seen, for even the simplest languages, a proliferation of distinct formal entailment systems, each having those willing to defend its status as the answer. Among those defenders, and among the most adamant and mutually critical, are the champions of strict implication and relevance logic. To an outsider, this debate must seem singularly odd. Here we have a group of philosophers who cannot agree on the (...) class='Hi'>validity of a simple, easily comprehensible inference scheme. They seem to think that they are not talking past one another---that there is some reality each seeks to describe---for they continue to write articles declaring that the opposing view is wrong. Yet they cannot seem to convince the other side that their view is even remotely plausible, thus leading some to an instrumentalist dismissal of the whole debate.I argue that the defenders of the two systems are right to suggest that something deeper is at issue between them than mere usefulness in particular applied contexts. Once we see what this is, however, we will see that they are, after all, talking past one another. When we succeed in clarifying the crucial underlying issue, we can then succeed in clarifying the crucial distinction between two dimensions of the underlying concept. Both the classicalist and the relevantist, then, will be seen to have accurately captured one dimension of the root concept. (shrink)

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, (...) the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices. (shrink)

What is the logic of entailment? The latter half of the twentieth century has seen, for even the simplest languages, a proliferation of distinct formal entailment systems, each having those willing to defend its status as the answer. Among those defenders, and among the most adamant and mutually critical, are the champions of strict implication and relevance logic. To an outsider, this debate must seem singularly odd. Here we have a group of philosophers who cannot agree on the (...) class='Hi'>validity of a simple, easily comprehensible inference scheme. They seem to think that they are not talking past one another---that there is some reality each seeks to describe---for they continue to write articles declaring that the opposing view is wrong. Yet they cannot seem to convince the other side that their view is even remotely plausible, thus leading some to an instrumentalist dismissal of the whole debate.I argue that the defenders of the two systems are right to suggest that something deeper is at issue between them than mere usefulness in particular applied contexts. Once we see what this is, however, we will see that they are, after all, talking past one another. When we succeed in clarifying the crucial underlying issue, we can then succeed in clarifying the crucial distinction between two dimensions of the underlying concept. Both the classicalist and the relevantist, then, will be seen to have accurately captured one dimension of the root concept. (shrink)

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, (...) the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices. (shrink)

Kant's famous statement (from the first Critique) that he found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith acknowledges a religious or theological telos to the entire critical project. This article outlines a series of relations of 'knowledge' to 'faith' in the architectonic repetitions with variation that plays from the first Critique through the Religion. Various deployments of 'truth' at each stage presume a kind of 'faith' or trust all the way along. These deployments are shown (...) to follow a pattern which echoes that set out in Northrop Frye's understanding of literary modes descending from myth to romance to high and low mimetic and ending in the ironic. These modes describe realms of possibility and necessity, and their nesting in Frye's explication of literature is shown to be itself an echo of more formal theories of Tarski and Godel. (shrink)

Work on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logical theory countenances depends not only on its stock of logical terms, but also on its range of grammatical categories and modes of composition. Furthermore, there is a sense in which logical terms are unnecessary. Alexandra Zinke has recently pointed out that propositional logic can be done without logical terms. By defining a logical-term-free language with (...) the full expressive power of first-order logic with identity, I show that this is true of logic more generally. Furthermore, having, in a logical theory, non-trivial valid forms that do not involve logical terms is not merely a technical possibility. As the case of adverbs shows, issues about the range of argument forms logic should countenance can quite naturally arise in such a way that they do not turn on whether we countenance certain terms as logical. (shrink)

A formula is (materially) valid iff all its instances are true sentences; and an axiomatic system is called (materially) sound and complete iff it proves all and only valid formulas. These are 'natural' concepts of validity and completeness, which were, however, in the course of the history of modern logic, stealthily replaced by their formal descendants: formal validity and completeness. A formula is formally valid iff it is true under all interpretations in all universes; and an (...) axiomatic system is called formally sound and complete iff it proves all and only formulas valid in this sense. Though the step from material to formal validity and completeness may seem to be merely an unproblematic case of explication, I argue that it is not; and that mistaking the latter concepts for the former ones may lead to serious conceptual confusions. (shrink)

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, (...) the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 22–28. Jeroen Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene twice. First, in 2005, when he became a strong presence on the nascent Dutch poetry blogosphere overnight as he embarked on his critical project Dichtersalfabet (Poet’s Alphabet). And again in 2011, when to great critical acclaim (and some bafflement) his complete writings were published – almost five years after his far too early death. 2005 was the year in which Dutch poetry blogging exploded. That year saw the foundation (...) of the influential, polemical, and populistically inclined weblog De Contrabas (The Double Bass), which became a strong force for internet poetry in Dutch in the years to follow. In the summer of that year, a lively debate raged in the aftermath of Bas Belleman’s article “ Doet poëzie er nu eindelijk toe ?” (“Does poetry finally matter now?”), on a blog specifically devoted to this question. Up to that point, the poetical debate in the Netherlands had largely been confined to literary reviews (which were often subsidized), having become mostly marginalized in more mainstream media, where poetry could be covered by only a small number of so-called authorities. As a result, literary debate had acquired a rather placid quality. Though a variety of camps with different aesthetics could be discerned, most poetical positions shared a general acceptance of poetry as a form of art somewhat apart from fundamental political concerns. Late modernists would pursue subtlety and density of reference. Others would insist poetry was best understood as a form of entertainment that should ideally be accessible and work well on the stage. Still others would insist that poetry is mostly a play with forms. Linguistically disruptive strategies were valued highly by some, but mostly for their aesthetic effect. Values of disinterested playfulness reigned supreme everywhere. Any idea that poetry could be a field in which one confronts politics and the world was decidedly marginal. This led to a climate in which most attempts at polemics were DOA, often based on far too superficial positioning and analysis. The greatest polemical debates were revolving around the question of whether poetry should be difficult or easy, with both camps defining their ideas of difficulty and accessibility in ways that were so utterly shallow as to make the entire point moot. Debates were performed, rather than engaged with. It was a postmodern hell of underarticulated poetics. Half-consciously, people were yearning for new forms of criticism that could put the oomph back into poetry. Weblogs provided for ways to explore debate directly outside of the clotted older channels of the reviews and the newspapers. Belleman’s essay and the resulting online activity had shown that there was a widespread eagerness to take poetry more seriously as a social art form. It was in this environment that Mettes started his remarkable project Dichtersalfabet . At that moment, Mettes was active mostly in academic circles, having become noted at Leiden University as a particularly gifted student of literary theory. Within the Netherlands, the field of literary theory has a very odd relationship to literature as it is practiced in the country. Academic theory tends to have a mostly international view and engage with international debates of cultural criticism, literary theory, and philosophy, with academics often publishing in English and attending conferences around the world. Literature itself however is much more concerned with domestic traditions. Consequently, in the Netherlands, there exists a language gap between academic theoretical practice (as it is studied in the literary theory departments) and literary practice (which, academically, gets studied in specialized departments of Dutch literature). The Dichtersalfabet can be seen as Mettes’s attempt to close this gap. It is also an attempt to bridge the divide between theory and practice, in which he could apply his theoretical knowledge in a very unorthodox and unacademic critical mode that moreover could reach far beyond the domain of conventional criticism. Mettes’s goal was to trace a diagonal through Dutch poetic culture, to “strangle” what he perceived to be its dominant oppressive traditions of agreeable irrelevance, in order to see whatever might be able to survive his critical assaults. But he could only do so by means of a very serious engagement with poetry itself. To this end, he would go systematically through the poetry bookshelf of the Verwijs bookshop (part of a mainstream chain of booksellers) in The Hague, buying one publication per blog item, starting from A and working his way through the alphabet, reading whatever he might encounter that way in the restaurant of the HEMA store (another big commercial chain in the country). He would subsequently write down his reading experiences, refraining however from trying to write a nuanced book review. Rather, he would write about anything that caught his attention and sparked his critical interest. This way of working would yield vast, at times somewhat rambling, dense, lively, and generally brilliant essays, in which he held no punches. He never hesitated to pull out his entire arsenal of concepts from the international theory traditions, while never degenerating into mere academic exercise and pointless intertextualities. The attempt was rather to live the poetry that he read, and to engage it with the full range of political, academic, cultural, and personal references that he had at his disposal—all that composed the individual named Jeroen Mettes as a reader. Often what he wrote would not be according to the standards of what we usually think of as a critical review of a book of poetry. Sometimes he would even be a little sloppy in his judgments of poets or representations of the books he read, for example by basing an entire essay on the blurb of a book rather than its poetry content. But what he did was always brilliant writing nonetheless—virtuoso riffs on poetic fragments randomly found within capitalist society, exposing an incisive and insistent poetical sensibility. Mettes read poetry for political reasons, to see whether poetry could offer him a way to deal with a political world he detested. The right-wing horrors of the Bush years, the Iraq war, and the turn of Dutch public opinion towards ever more conservative, narrow-minded, and xenophobic views alongside a complete failure of the political left to present any credible alternative, were weighing heavily on the times in which Mettes reported on his reading. Poetry was to measure this world, diagram it, to lay bare its inconsistencies and faults, to indicate where lines of flight might be found. Amid the ruins of a world wrecked by imperialist policies, corporate capitalism, and doctrinal neoliberalism it would have to show the possibility of a new community. And it was, through its rhythmical workings, to release the reading subject from his confinement to ideologically conditioned individuality and lead him into the immanent paradise of reading. The stakes were high. Much higher than anything Dutch poetry had seen for many years. Mettes’s blog was widely read from the start. His posts sparked lively debates. Some of these subsequently led to the publication of extensive essays on a few key poets in some literary journals, particularly Parmentier and the Flemish journal yang , for which Mettes would become a member of the editorial board, a few months after starting the Dichtersalfabet . This could have been the start of a brilliant career, but this was not to be. The initial manic energy that fueled the blog gradually subsided. The Alfabet was updated less and less regularly. Mettes sometimes just disappeared for many weeks, then suddenly returning with a brilliant essay. Until, on September 21, 2006, he posted his final blogpost, consisting of no text whatsoever. That night I learned from his mentor at Leiden University that he had committed suicide. Mettes and I had had some fruitful exchanges on poetry, rhythm, music, and form, mostly on the blogs, but also by email. Three weeks before his death was the last time I heard from him: a very sudden, uncharacteristically curt note saying “My old new sentence epic.” Attached to that message I found a DOC-file of a work so major that I felt intimidated. This was N30 , a text he had been working on for over five years. After his death, it took me a long time before I dared to read it in its entirety. In the meantime, the work of preparing the manuscript for publication was entrusted by his relatives to his colleagues at yang magazine. It took them a few years to brush up the text and to edit the Dichtersalfabet -blog (which, apart from the Alphabet project itself, incorporated many other fragments of political, polemical, and theoretical writing) into book form along with the essays. The result of this labor was finally published in 2011 as a two-book set, and Mettes burst onto the Dutch poetry scene for the second time. The work was widely reviewed, on blogs, in journals, magazines, and newspapers. Many critics who had not followed the blogs in 2005 showed themselves surprised, baffled even, by the intensity of Mettes’s critical writing. But for those who had read the blog, the main surprise was in the poetry. During Mettes’s lifetime, some of his poems had already been published in Parmentier . Although these were strong texts by themselves, in no way did they prepare readers for N30 . Nothing like it had been written in Dutch before. Instead, N30 explicitly follows the American tradition of Language Writing, directly referencing Ron Silliman and his concept of The New Sentence. However, it would seem that much of the poetical thinking around his use of this technique puts him closer to a writer such as Bruce Andrews. For Mettes, using non sequiturs as a unit of poetic construction was not only a way of reinventing formal textual construction, but it was another way of finding the fault lines in the social fabric. From the perspective of the Language tradition, one may put N30 somewhere between Silliman and Andrews. N30 shares an autobiographical element with Silliman’s New Sentence projects, and as in Andrews, there is a concern for mapping out social totality within text—what Mettes refers to as a “textual world civil war.” Again this shows a formal textual strategy for allowing the person “Jeroen Mettes” to be absorbed by the world, which here appears as a whirlwind of demotic and demonic chatter, full of violence, humor, intensity, beauty, disgust, sex, commerce, and strife. Influenced as it may by American precursors, Mettes’s tone and form end up quite different from his American counterparts, consistently referencing a world that is Dutch, all too Dutch, taking on the oppressive orderliness of Dutch society with its endemic penchant for consensus by introducing chaos into its daily life and laying bare its implicit aggressions. The work’s 31 chapters each have a different feel and rhythmical outline, but none of them follow a predetermined pattern. Rather, Mettes would consistently edit and reedit the text, randomly rewriting parts of it, as he explains in his poetical creed Politieke Poëzie (Political Poetry). N30 – referring to the 1999 antiglobalist protest in Seattle – was to be the first text of a trilogy. The work itself was written “in the mode of the present.” A second text was to be written in the mode of the future, and a third one, in the mode of the past, was going to be an epic poem about the Paris Commune, and to form an alternative poetic constitution for the European project. I still deeply regret that Jeroen Mettes never got to complete those projects, just as I would be very keen on knowing what he might have had to say about more recent political developments. Instead, in 2006, he remained stuck in the horrors of the present, that ended up consuming him completely. He left Dutch literature with some of its most piercing criticism and its most profoundly moving, exciting and powerful poetry. Excerpts from N30 Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "N30." In N30+ . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. Chapter 1 1999. A day is a space too. And another man, who had chained himself, had his ribs crushed, and a motor has driven over somebody’s legs. Dutch health care system spends ±145 million guilders per year on worriers. A spiderweb vibrates as I pass by. Randstad renovating. She slaps her bag against her ass: “Hurry up!” OPINION IS TRUE FRIENDSHIP Your skin. It doesn’t express anything. “But the use of the sword, that’s what I learned, and you’ll need nothing more for the moment.” Just try to interrogate a guy like that. Gullit in Sierra Leone. Codes silently lying all around. But that’s simply what belongs to “that it’s just allowed”: that sigh of “world” (a word expressing that the trees are now standing along the water like black men with white bags in their hair); that’s nothing else right? And you see how everything has to move, and first of all what cannot do so. Without Elysium and without savings, barbarians lashing out, horny for an enemy, staring across the water, staring into the air—staring to get out of it. “You’ve never showed me more than the mall,” she said. All those “dreams” in the end—and now? It was lying on the stairway, so I picked it up and took it upstairs. Chapter 3 “You know what?” Telecommunication. For love… I don’t really like that cheap cultural pessimism, but… The holy city is on pilgrimage in the earthly bodies of the faithful until the time of the heavenly kingdom has come. The end of an exhausting autumn day behind the computer, my eyes filled with tears of fatigue. KITCHEN / INSTALLATION / SPECIALIST. Network integration. In the sun, stretched out on a sheet. (…) I don’t believe what I’m reading, because I want to believe something else. An illusion? Suits me. There’s a variety of shapes and tastes… “So what?” you may think. 102 dalmatians can’t be wrong. But I want more, dear… A feel good movie. I’m smashing the burned body. So what? We continue to save the European civilization. What’s there to win? Plato with poets = Stalin without gulag? Ball against the crossbar. No wonder. She comes straight to her point. She’s standing in the kitchen eating an apple. (…) The godless Napoleon had used her as a stable and wanted to have her taken down. “Our” Rutger Hauer. Ready or not here I come. Psst… are you also wearing a string? Nobody understands our desire. Cliffs breaking the waves and shattering the sunset. I used to be a real romantic (as a poet). A typical fantasy used to be the one in which I brutally raped mother and daughter Seaver from the sitcom Growing Pains . Nevertheless you only contain bad words. Eyelashes. Automatic or manual? That your skin always in the afternoon. Integration. The air is empty. Too bad! Hand in hand on their lonely way. Alaska! Chapter 12 May 5, 2001 [10:00-10:30] A dust cloud on a hill. Globe. Indian (British) (tie) / pope. Damascus. Rape. We’re carrying the ayatollah’s portrait through the streets. At the moment the girl is mostly suede jacket with white ribbons on her sleeves. A small explosion flares up/impact. Camouflage. Close up. We’re analyzing the situation. He’s dead right? Dead dead. Dead. Everything without, these, and only with the body. Indices signal death. Dollar bills are printed in factories. Holes. Light patch. Globe in a box. Microphone. What’s the situation? Grey impact on a green hill (field?). The water is blue. He has no lips. Interns on the background with skirts that are too long. This is an example of a sonnet. An Islamic woman pushes against the door of an electronics shop. Arrows (percentages (prices)). Is this what awaits the American? Touch screen interface. The word, an island, can only be a sign in that situation. We pull up a chair, join in on the fun. On the shelves only books about computers. One glance in the distance is enough to lighten up a luna park in the distance. She’s really desperate, especially when she laughs. Click. Ah. Next. And now it’s raining, but that’s ok. Yellow stains sliding over the south. Shallow caves light: clothes, boots, electrical equipment. 45. 22:10. Nothing gives you the right to eat more than people starving to death. The Hague. Slam dunk. Traffic light. Two H’s, one L (standing for the L (little prick)). We’re happy to say something. Clouds, small suns, temperatures, cities. The truth is never an excuse. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow. Green. Green. Yellow. Will you email me? Skeleton: “No.” Ex-nerds in brand-new and brightly red sport cars. $$$. I love. Shihab. Hooves in the sand. Skinny senior with over-sized sunglasses; old jockey (cap, trophy) smiling in slow motion. And there I am again, flashback, crying with my head in between my hands. Sometimes I’ve got the feeling that cannibals. Eyes: blue. Cancer. Why would I wait until tomorrow? Golden beams protruding from the lifted/lit earth. May 5, 2001 [11:30-12:45] You’ll remember this for the rest of your life. Graphs, diagrams. Bu$ine$$. Blue shirt, white collar, no neck (porn star). A name lights up. I’m hysteric. Will you join us? Letters falling in their words. Fingers set up a tent and start to dance. Young entrepreneurs from poor neighborhoods (read: black) guided by Microsoft. Kinda makes me happy, that sort of kitsch. A sense of exhaustion/impotence to see anything but the present. (…) Wouldn’t you like to? Orange explosion in an industrial zone. YOU’RE DOING THIS FOR AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL. Would you. A familiar face. Clouds and blossom. Sunflowers. Supermodels. Mountainous area in a rectangle: shades of brown, from dark to beige, more green toward the south. Tents and next to them (it’s all a blur) people. Plane. Stadium. Geometrical block of people. No, I ain’t crying. I don’t speak no more. I just want. Quote + photo. (Positive:) screaming crowd. Three-piece suit, seen from the back, before entering the arena. On the back: “Daddy abused me.” Oh, bummer. State of emergency has been declared and everyone has to cooperate. She’s cut her wrists. What we do know (…) is that there’s never been a unique word, an imperative name, nor will there ever be. [Click here for work that suits you.] Barefooted children are watching it (coherent pieces revelation of what’s lying below). Who knows how she’s changed during those two years. “Everything used to be better” + sigh. And here we are. An empty field of parquet. A city lying behind it. Explosion. Blue. A rain drop falling in my coffee. May 5, 2001 [14:30-15:30] A young Arafat on video speaking with raised finger. “I’m calling from my convertible.” Names on walls, victims, numbers… Tourists. Yellow. Yellow. “Your own child! Really, what kind of human are you?” I don’t want to hear it no more. A woman jumping out of the water in a yellow bikini against a background of fireworks and the Cheops pyramid. Thy sorrow shall become good fortune, thy complaints laudation. All planets will float and wander. Wo die Welt zum Bild wird, kommt das System (…) zur Herrschaft. It is something, but is it? May 5, 2001 [18:30-19:00] Iris. Leaves. NASDAQ. Open / and white and. For the one who’s doing nothing, just waiting. (…) NO DEFEAT is made entirely up of defeat -- since / the world it opens is always a place / formerly / unsuspected. October 2002. “Jeroen, I’m leaving for the cemetery, byeeee.” The rise of the middle class. My entire oeuvre is an ode to the. My entire head is a fight against the. God always demands what you cannot sacrifice. You may take that the easy way, but… “The state hasn’t made us, but we make the state” (Hitler). A stork exits the elevator. Skeletons of. Moscow. Helsinki. Palermo. Paris. Chapter 30 Like your paradises: nothing. United Desire, as only remaining superpower. And even though the sea is now calmer and the wind is blowing pleasantly in my face… Heart! Who determines whether a tradition is “alive”? The yellow leaf or the white branch? Mars. This sentence is a typical example. Most Dutch people are happy. No consolation. When I see a girl sitting at a table with a book, a notepad, a pen, a bottle of mineral water, her hand writing in the light—then I consider that one thing. “Presents,” “poetry,” “classics.” We are what we cannot make from ourselves. “Left”: mendicant orders, missionaries. Saint-Just: “A republic is founded on the destruction of its enemies.” She crosses the street with a banana peel between her fingers. (…) We chose our own wardens, torturers, it was us who called all this insanity upon ourselves, we created this nightmare… But “no”? Girl (just like a beach ball) talking rapid Spanish (Portuguese?) in a mobile phone. Do I have a chance now that her boyfriend is getting bold? CLIO, horny bitch. What else do you want? An old woman, between the doors of the C1000, is suddenly unable to go on; her husband stretches out his hand, speaking a few encouraging words. Selection from. Der Führer schenkt den Jüden ein Stadt. How can it reach us if we haven’t been already reached somehow? It doesn’t “speak.” No problem. Each word she uses is a small miracle, as if she doesn’t belong to it, to language, but wanders around with a pocket light looking for the exit; she’s never desperate (maybe a little nervous), lighting up heavy words from the inside. But indeed, we’re free. But the predicate is not an attribute, but an event, and the subject is not a subject, but a shell. That’s why also samurai, knights, and warriors raised the blossom as emblem: they knew how to die. Locked up in a baby carriage with a McDonald’s balloon. Blue helicopter, the blue sky. Whether you want to refer? The point is. How / Motherfucker can I sing a sad song / When I remember Zion? You’ll feel so miserable and worthless that you think: “If only I were dead!,” or: “Just put an end to it!” “So you’re an economist?” Her card—two little birds building a nest, her handwriting shaking—is still on the mantelpiece. Guevara: “No, a communist.” A straw fire, such was our life: rapidly it flared up, rapidly it passed. I’m fleeing, coming from nowhere. (…) Eazy-E drinking coffee with the American president. If I’d scream, would that be an event? Drown it: the cleaner it will rise up from the depths. No! The night, so fast… As if there’s something opened up in that face. Come on, we may not curse life. He shows me his methadone: “If you drink that all at once, you’ll die instantly.” The last one dictates how we should behave to deserve happiness. One shine / above the earth. “I want to go to Bosnia,” I said bluntly. I don’t even know the name of the current mayor. Let’s despise our success! “There is no future; this is the future. Hope is a weakness that we've overcome. We have found happiness!” Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I feel like a bomb about to explode at any moment. Makes a difference for the reconstruction right? The decor moves forward. Daughter of Nereus, you nymphs of the sea, and you Thetis, you should have kept his tired head above the waves! Alas! This sentence has been written wearing a green cap. I receive my orders from the future. A frog jumps into it. Her husband has turned the Intifada, which he follows daily on CCN, into his hobby, “to forget that he doesn’t have his driver’s license yet." Suddenly the sun slides over the crosswalk. Her (his?) foot is playing with the slipper under the table. Is this how I’m writing this book now? I’m not a fellow man. I hate you and I want to hurt you. These are my people. Their screaming doesn’t rise above the constantly wailing sirens which we've learned to ignore. My whole body became warm and suddenly started to tremble. Unfortunate is he who is standing on the threshold of the most beautiful time, but awaits a better one. Arafat’s “removal” is contrary to American interests. Jeep drives into boy. What you can do alone, you should do alone. A food gift from the people of the United States of America. Two seagulls. [...]. (shrink)

Formalizations in first-order logic are standardly used to represent logical forms of sentences and to show the validity of ordinary-language arguments. Since every sentence admits of a variety of formalizations, a challenge arises: why should one valid formalization suffice to show validity even if there are other, invalid, formalizations? This paper suggests an explanation with reference to criteria of adequacy which ensure that formalizations are related in a hierarchy of more or less specific formalizations. This proposal is then (...) compared with stronger criteria and assumptions, especially the idea that sentences essentially have just one logical form. (shrink)

For whatever reason, scholars have recently reapproached the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes with a renewed interest in establishing its validity. Two influential interpretations have emerged, a theistic interpretation and a concep- tualistic interpretation, the former by Howard Warrender in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, and the latter by David Gauthier in tfhe fcogic of leviathan.Both Warrender and Gauthier maintain that Hobbes's egoistic psychology invalidates his moral theory, and undertake to rescue its formal validity by regrounding the (...) theory on his theology, on the one hand, and on his methodological (rather than metaphysical) materialism, on the other. The result in both instances is a piecemeal analysis that dissolves the political realism for which Hobbes was famous, and ignores altogether the comprehensive intentions which he so carefully expressed. Hobbes takes on the appearance of something that might be best described as a pre-Kantian Kant. (shrink)

For his contribution to the general series of Harper Essays in Philosophy, Hilary Putnam selects only one of several philosophical problems in the interrelated fields of logic and/or mathematics that have interested him, viz. the nominalism-realism issue: Are the "abstract entities" spoken of in these sciences, such as classes, number, functions from various kinds of things to real numbers, things that "really exist" or not? He is concerned to present a detailed argument for his own "qualified realism" rather than a (...) survey of current opinions. He argues persuasively that while a nominalist would like to eliminate all talk of logical classes such as S, M and P in favor of such circumlocutions as "The following schema turns out to be true no matter what words or phrases of the appropriate kind one may substitute for the letters S, M and P," etc., such descriptions avoid references to classes only by replacing them with equally nonphysical entities such as "all possible words, strings of letters, formalized languages," etc., and that the notion of truth or validity itself cannot be applied to physical objects or material inscriptions, but to what sentences mean or say, and the things they say are not physical. He rejects Quine's distinction that first order statements or arguments such as "All crows are black; all back things absorb light, therefore," etc., are logical truths, whereas "For all classes S, M and P, if all S is M and all M is P, then all S is P," are mathematical. This runs counter, he says, to the whole logical tradition. The natural intention of the logician in setting down first-order schemata is to assert implicitly their validity and that itself is a second-order assertion. All logic, therefore, including quantification theory, involves references to classes. This also highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between logic and mathematics in terms of first and second order logic, for if only the former is stipulated to be the proper domain of logic, then we must accept the awkward consequence that validity and implication turn out to be notions that belong to mathematics rather than logic. Since the nominalistic position presents the same problems for mathematics as for logic, Putnam sees no point in trying to draw any sharp distinction between the two, which explains his initial broad interpretation of logic as including all of pure mathematics and also the title of the book. To avoid some of the classical objections to a realistic interpretation of sets, he points up the distinction between a predicative and impredicative conception of set. Whereas the latter speaks of all sets of individuals as a well-defined totality, the former defines "set" only for a particular language N or a hierarchic series of languages, N, N', N", etc. in which it is still nonsensical to speak of "all sets" without qualification, though one can speak of "all" up to any given level in the series. While some form of set theory is necessary for all the sciences, both formal and physical, one can get along with predicative set theory. Putnam's basic argument for realism then comes down to this. Quantification over mathematical entities such as things, real numbers and functions is indispensable for logic, mathematics and the physical sciences and this commits one to accept the existence of such entities. In the final stages of the argument he examines and rejects the alternative options to realism, namely that realistic locutions about such entities represent logically deviant forms of speech, or that mathematical truths are "true by pure convention" or that such "entities" are useful fictions. In the closing paragraphs he indicates two other philosophical problems in logic that merit extensive discussion, namely the problem of equivalent constructions which is relevant to the question of whether mathematics needs "foundations" and the problem of whether we may not have to revise logical principles as we have geometrical ones on the grounds that in some sense logic may have empirical foundations.--A. B. W. (shrink)

This account is on the connection between the quest of meaning and the Christian belief from the perspective of Creation. First the most important notions are discussed. Meaning is related to the experience of the conditions of existence: time and space. The question of meaning is summarized by: Who am I within the contours of the existence which forces itself upon me in the shape of time and space? This question belongs to human beings and is as old as human (...) consciousness. It becomes more manifest when we find ourselves in borderline situations. The meaning we attach to such situations is partly determined by the frame of reference one has at its disposal, the perspective, the system of cognitions and feelings which causes us to view reality in a certain way. We talk about a religious perspective when the discrepancies and even absurdities of everything we experience find a point of connection in the end. It is characterized by the conviction that the life the individual leads is a fragment in a larger connection which has its roots in Creation. When we want to sum up the Christian meaning of our existence, we have to look for that meaning within the notion of Creation. Belief in Creation is the very core of all kinds of validation activity emanating from the Christian spatio-temporal orientation. From the perspective of Creation, the world presents itself as a fabric in which separate creatures are connected. According to this viewpoint there are two acting alternatives which make the faithful experience of space and time concrete and communicative: the experience of hospitality and the experience of being fellow-travellers. Christian faith has a rich tradition in both fields, as much in the practical as formal dimensions of its creed. In this account the belief in Creation is used as the point of departure to indicate how meaning may be given concrete form. Exercising hospitality is related to the ordering of space; the experience of being fellow-travellers is related to the ordering of time. (shrink)

On the basis of passages from John Buridan's Summula Suppositionibus and Sophismata, E. Karger has reconstructed what could be called the 'Buridanian theory of inferential relations between doubly quantified propositions', presented in her 1993 article 'A theory of immediate inference contained in Buridan's logic'. In the reconstruction, she focused on the syntactical elements of Buridan's theory of modes of personal supposition to extract patterns of formally valid inferences between members of a certain class of basic categorical propositions. The present study (...) aims at offering semantic corroboration 'a proof of soundness' to the inferential relations syntactically identified by E. Karger, by means of the analysis of Buridan's semantic definitions of the modes of personal supposition. The semantic analysis is done with the help of some modern logical concepts, in particular that of the model. In effect, the relations of inference syntactically established are shown to hold also from a semantic point of view, which means thus that this fragment of Buridan's logic can be said to be sound. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society by Riccardo PozzoRobert R. ClewisPOZZO, Riccardo. History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. vi + 231 pp. Cloth, $94.99In a forward-looking proposal, Pozzo lays out his vision for a multidisciplinary history of philosophy "from a global perspective." This book is "a long position paper, an extended essay dedicated to twenty-first century policies of philosophical research from (...) a global perspective." The chosen format is a Denkschrift, that is, a memorandum in the sense of a document that experts lay out for their government to ponder. Perhaps, Pozzo suggests, the history of philosophy could even have an impact on economic authorities and policymakers. Indeed, the work seems driven by the laudable aim of promoting access and equality around the world. The author reveals a just concern for migrants in particular, since they bring [End Page 156] with them their intellectual traditions and philosophical texts, which can be translated and thereby foster intercultural dialogue.The book consists of an introduction (chapter 1) followed by nine chapters. It has a thirty-page references list as well as subject and name indexes. In part one, Pozzo argues for the need for new narratives in the history of philosophy (chapter 2), in order to establish its role in addressing migration (chapter 3). The second part concerns reflective society (chapter 4). It considers societal readiness (chapter 5) and cultural innovation (chapter 6). Part three explores the paradigm shift from a close reading of texts to a "distant" reading of corpora (chapter 7), a shift Pozzo endorses. It examines implications for the translation of languages (chapter 8) and the translation of studies (knowledge) and competencies (chapter 9). Chapter 10 concludes by briefly reflecting on the notions of the "fluidity" of peoples and their ideas, biodiversity (and food), and spiritual humanism based on dignity.Scholars in the history of philosophy "should be open to the idea of a pluriversum of a history of facts and places, whereby history of philosophy finds its grounding in spatial heterogeneity." Nowadays, when people migrate and transfer competencies at increasing velocity, the "history of philosophy can be usefully reinvented on the basis of its consideration of intercultural dialogue." Pozzo considers the World Digital Library to be "one of the most exciting examples of corpora that talk to each other"—an idea he uses not merely metaphorically. By "corpora" is meant not just the sum of separate books, but XML-accessible complete collections of traditions of texts, with corresponding dictionaries, thesauri, and reference works, which make it possible to analyze a number of original texts as well as transliterations into other alphabets or hanzi characters. The result would be a "data-driven" history of philosophy.Given that history of philosophy is a product of culture, it is influenced by migrating peoples, who bring philosophical ideas and religious traditions with them. Research on migration thus ought to also consider translations of texts and competencies from one to another context, be it linguistic, economic, political, or cultural. The humanities, and a reflective society more generally, might provide a partial basis for intercultural dialogue. The history of philosophy might even thereby improve the quality of life of citizens.Pozzo rightly emphasizes that we need multilingual philosophers and historians of philosophy. History of philosophy ought to also be based on robust lexical and historical considerations, and historians of philosophy should be trained in a number of the world's languages as well as face the challenge of dealing with multilingualism and with validating translations. Pozzo's proposed methodology, informed by computational techniques, relies on tools such as vocabularies, ontologies, concordances, frequencies, or the analysis of texts and corpora, which integrates quantitative and formal methods into the portfolio of the methods of history of philosophy and intellectual history. Since Pozzo has published [End Page 157] widely on Kant, it is fitting that he explores Kant on migration as well as the editorial contexts and translation projects concerning the philosopher's writings.As for aesthetics, Pozzo notes that the history of philosophy can reflect on migrants' cultural and artistic creations. Historians of philosophy should thus start observing and interpreting phenomena created by... (shrink)

Various formally valid counterexamples have been adduced against the Humean dictum that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” There are formal rebuttals—some very sophisticated now (e.g., Charles R. Pigden’s and Gerhard Schurz’s)—to such counterexamples. But what follows is an intuitive and informal argument against them. I maintain that it is better than these sophisticated formal defenses of the Humean dictum and that it also helps us see why it implausible to think that we can be as (...) decisive about the truth or falsity of the dictum as both the formal counterexamples or formal barriers to them purport to be. (shrink)

Dialogic spaces for kindness in higher education, located in the ‘critical corridor talk’ of informal leaders positioned quietly in the background in many universities, are a form of moral Resistance in an era excessively dominated by the values of some of the harsher exponents of economic rationalism. This is a secret language of dialogic resistance, to be found under the radar, tucked away in the blindspots of formally recognised Communication. It stoically challenges an arguably unhealthy obsession with efficient management, (...) Market/marketisation and economic proficiency at any cost that is, in some institutions, promoted by the harder managerial taskmasters symbolically represented in the concept of ‘homo economicus’. This chapter argues that such ‘understage’ dialogic spaces for kindness are emerging slowly but with progressively firm resistance to challenge unhealthy forms of managerial Instrumental/instrumentalism in some low Trust/trustworthiness/self-trust situations in a stratified UK higher education system. The accumulation of such spaces is occurring almost invisibly, in a subtle, persistent manner, like a soft, repetitive reminder of the need for human values, gently but relentlessly aiming to compensate for and wash away the mistakes, confusion and suffering bound up in poor management. This theoretical chapter, informed by empirical data, discusses the need to recognise this quiet form of understated kindness as a pre-eminent but under-recognised quality, currently marginalised in a higher education system more overtly focused on self-promotion, targets, outputs and League tables than on the Well-being of staff and students. Drawing from leadership data and Autoethnography observations, I argue that this informal, resistant academic critique is gradually questioning economically-driven ‘command and control’ Managerialism. The Critical Corridor Talk model proposed here and elsewhere builds on Barnett’s concept of ‘critical being’, to theorise the ways in which academic staff find relief from hard-nosed forms of management by sharing moments of truthful dialogic Communication, kindness and Empathy for colleagues in the ‘critical corridor talk’ of informal distributed leadership networks. ‘NegativeNegative capability’ is a form of self-reflexive Resistance against the ‘false necessity’ of performative goals demanded by neoliberalist economic management. Resistant informal leadership challenges the manufactured performativity of higher education environments where some in power overstep the acceptable roles of good management. Yet to foster Trust/trustworthiness/self-trust, such resistant leadership needs to ensure it continually practises both kindness and correct moral principles itself. (shrink)

Within professional higher education, the construct of assessment validity is used to make assumptions about the extent to which students are able to replicate in professional practice what...

The purpose of this paper is to show how the degree of experimental validity of scientific procedures is crucially involved in determining two typical pragmatic modes in science, namely, the preservation of useful procedures and the disposal of useless ideas. The term 'pragmatic' will here be used following Schurz's characterisation of being internally pragmatic, as referring to that which proves useful for scientific or epistemic goals. The first part of the paper consists in a characterisation of the notion of (...) experimental validity. The second part is focused on several historical examples illustrating how the above pragmatic modes relate to the question of experimental validity. The Michelson-Morley experiment is presented as a case of a highly valid and useful experiment preserved through the development of different theories (like, on the one hand, the ether theory, upheld by Fitzgerald and Lorentz, and, on the other hand, Einstein's special theory of relativity). The concept of caloric will be discussed as an example of an idea that was discarded once it became useless, after heat was understood as a form of energy within the new frame provided by the kinetic theory of heat towards the middle of the 19th century. (shrink)

By a valid inference is here understood an inference that succeeds in its aim to justify its conclusion given that its premisses are already justified. For an inference to be valid it is thus not enough that the sentence asserted in the conclusion is a logical consequence of the sentences asserted in the premisses. A proof is understood as a succession of valid inferences that is closed (i.e. all its assumptions are discharged and all its free variables are bound by (...) some of the inferences). On the other hand, in mathematics the justification of an assertion has traditionally been taken to consist in a proof of it, which gives rise to an explanatory circle.In an attempt to avoid this circle, I have in previous works tried to explain the notion of ground for an assertion without referring to valid inferences. However, it turns out that the resulting notion of ground has unwanted consequences like the notion of proof in the so-called BHK-interpretation of intuitionistic logic. For instance, one is guaranteed a ground or a proof of an implication A → B as soon as there is in fact no ground or proof of A, regardless of whether one really knows this fact, and hence without having a real justification of the assertion of the implication.In the absence of a non-circular explanation of the notions of valid inference and proof, I suggest that we should try to formulate a number of principles of how these two epistemic notions depend on each other. A more careful explanation of the validity of an inference results in what I call a heuristic idea about the validity of inference, which is used as a guide to formulate precise principles. One such principle generalizes Gentzen’s idea that his introduction rules define the meaning of the logical constants. Another principle generalizes a previously noted property of Gentzen’s elimination rules that I have called that of satisfying the inversion principle. It results in a notion that I call non-creativity, which implies validity. (shrink)

In this talk, I propose a new account of ontological form, formal ontological relations, modes of being and hence of specifying the subject matter of metaphysics.

This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or (...) task as connected and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit. (shrink)

Over the past decade, there has been an extensive debate about whether researchers have an obligation to disclose genetic research findings, including primary and secondary findings. There appears to be an emerging (but disputed) view that researchers have some obligation to disclose some genetic findings to some research participants. The contours of this obligation, however, remain unclear. -/- As this paper will explore, much of this confusion is definitional or conceptual in nature. The extent of a researcher’s obligation to return (...) secondary and other research findings is often limited by reference to terms and concepts like “incidental,” “analytic validity,” “clinical validity,” “clinical relevance,” “clinical utility,” “clinical significance,” “actionability,” and “desirability.” These terms are used in different ways by different writers to describe obligations in different sorts of cases. -/- Underneath this definitional confusion is a general notion, supported by much of the literature, that findings only need to be disclosed when they surpass certain presumably objective or measureable thresholds, such as medical importance or scientific reproducibility. The problem is that there is significant variability in the way that these terms and concepts are used in the literature and, as such, in defining the scope of an obligation to return findings that surpasses the relevant thresholds. -/- The goal of this paper is to analyze the definitional muddle underlying the debate about returning genetic research findings, with the hope of answering a few questions. First, what is the range of definitions being used in this debate? Based on an extensive literature review, Part 1 will lay out a range of articulated definitions for each relevant term, with the goal of categorizing them into a handful of distinct types. Part 2 explains the definitional redundancy and confusion in the current literature, and, drawing from the terminological patterns identified in Part 1, outlines more cohesive building blocks to inform the development of future disclosure frameworks.Our minimum goal in articulating these conceptual building blocks is to promote clearer articulations of, and distinctions between, future disclosure frameworks. More ambitiously, we suggest which definitions and conceptualizations we consider most appropriate to use in future disclosure frameworks. Here, we seek to balance benefits to participants through the disclosure of important information with the minimization of undue burdens on individual researchers and the research enterprise more generally. -/- Our analysis builds upon the central philosophical distinction between concepts and conceptions. The basic idea is that the “concept” of X refers to the general (and relatively uncontroversial) structure/shape of X, while various “conceptions” of X are more particular, filled out, and controversial elaborations of the concept. In other words, “concepts” of X will be formal representations of X, while “conceptions” of X will be substantive interpretations of the key elements and relationships operating within that formal framework. (Implicit in this distinction is an important point about the nature of disagreement – namely, that in order for two or more parties to “disagree” about X as opposed to simply talk past one another, there must be at least enough shared agreement about X to know that the parties are referring to the same thing. A concept of X provides this point of common agreement, while competing conceptions of X mark the areas where disagreement arises.) In this paper, we will employ this distinction in a fundamental way to clarify exactly where the primary disagreements arise in the debate over disclosing genetic research findings. -/- We propose that, underlying all the seeming confusion and disagreement, there are three central and widely agreed upon concepts at work in this debate—validity, value, and volition. The first two concepts concern the nature of the information itself. An obligation to disclose only exists when findings are valid and have value but there are competing conceptions of how to determine or define validity and valuableness. The third concept—volition—pertains not to the information but rather to the person to whom it will be disclosed. Does that person want or not want the information, and what is the best way of determining this? Here, too, competing conceptions arise. Our key point, though, is that almost all of the ethical disagreement arises because of competing conceptions of these three concepts. Understanding and appreciating this key point can help to refocus the substantive debate by providing some common ground to start from in determining how best to interpret these shared concepts. This refocusing can, ideally, produce more productive debate and facilitate some progress in resolving it. (shrink)