Preface for instructors -- Preface for students (you really should read it) -- What is logic about? -- Sentential logic basics -- Sentential logic proofs -- More sentential logic : contradictions, tautologies and assumptions -- Predicate logic basics -- Proofs in predicate logic -- Probability : the basic rules of life -- The theorem of Dr. Bayes -- Probability illusions : why we are so bad at inductive reasoning -- Studies have shown ... or (...) have they? -- Inference to the best explanation -- Rhetoric : the art of persuasion -- Won't get fooled again (fallacies and other foibles) -- Spin, spin, spin (or how not to be a sucker) -- Everything you know is wrong! : pseudoscience and bogus scholarship. (shrink)

A new comprehensive framework for narrative understanding has been developed. Its centerpiece is a new situational logic calledEpisodic Logic, a knowledge and semantic representation well-adapted to the interpretive and inferential needs of general NLU. The most distinctive features of EL is its natural language-like expressiveness. It allows for generalized quantifiers, lambda abstraction, sentence and predicate modifiers, sentence and predicate reification, intensional predicates, unreliable generalizations, and perhaps most importantly, explicit situational variables linked to arbitrary formulas that describe them. These (...) allow episodes to be explicitly related in terms of part-whole, temporal and causal relations. Episodic logical form is easily computed from surface syntax and lends itself to effective inference. (shrink)

We describe the foundations and the systematization of natural logic-like monotonic inference using unscoped episodic logical forms (ULFs) that as reported by Kim et al. (Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA), Groningen, 2021a, b) introduced and first evaluated. In addition to providing a more detailed explanation of the theory and system, we present results from extending the inference manager to address a few of the limitations that as reported by (...) Kim et al. (Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA), Groningen, 2021b) naive system has. Namely, we add mechanisms to incorporate lexical information from the hypothesis (or goal) sentence, enable the inference manager to consider multiple possible scopings for a single sentence, and match against the goal using English rather than the ULF. (shrink)

Francesco Berto proposed a logic for imaginative episodes. The logic establishes certain (in)validities concerning episodic imagination. They are not all equally plausible as principles of episodic imagination. The logic also does not model that the initial input of an imaginative episode is deliberately chosen.Stit-imagination logic models the imagining agent’s deliberate choice of the content of their imagining. However, the logic does not model the episodic nature of imagination. The present paper combines the (...) two logics, thereby modelling imaginative episodes with deliberately chosen initial input. We use a combination ofstit-imagination logic and a content-sensitive variably strict conditional à la Berto, for which we give a Chellas–Segerberg semantics. The proposed semantics has the following advantages over Berto’s: (i) we model thedeliberate choiceof initial input of imaginative episodes (in a multi-agent setting), (ii) we showframe correspondencesfor axiomatic analogues of Berto’s validities, which (iii) allows thepossibility to disregard axiomsthat might be considered not plausible as principles concerning imaginative episodes. We do not take a definite stance on whether theseshouldbe disregarded but give reasons for why one might want to disregard them. Finally, we compare our semantics briefly with recent work, which aims to model voluntary imagination, and argue that our semantics models different aspects. (shrink)

Logical Investigations (notably, The Thought) is one of the works wherein Frege voices his hostility to psychologism in logic, science, and semantics. Such hostility lies, arguably, behind his threefold conceptual distinction between thought (Gedanke), thinking (Denken), and ideas (Vorstellungen). In this essay I investigate, to begin with, Frege’s motivations for drawing the distinction and keeping thinking episodes (one of the meanings of ‘thoughts’ in English) out of the picture. It turns out, or so I argue, that psychologism threatens, on (...) Frege’s view, to destroy the objectivity requirement by which thoughts are defined as answerable contents. I then draw a connection between this feature in Frege’s view and an on-going debate in philosophy of mind and language over the nature of world-directed thoughts and show that the feature lies at the heart of the singularist stance. Finally, I show that, despite Frege’s own hostility to all that bears the mark of the subjective in logic, science, and semantics, a psychological argument can be mounted in support of singularism (i.e. the view that some of our thoughts are about particulars qua particulars) using his disparaged notion of idea (Vorstellung) and that, appearances notwithstanding, the argument is compatible with the objectivity requirement on answerable thought-contents. (shrink)

There are logical and empirical grounds that link episodic memory and the ability to imagine future events. In some sense, both episodic memory and episodic foresight may be regarded as two sides of the same capacity to travel mentally in time. After reviewing some of the recent evidence for commonalities, I discuss limits of these parallels. There are fundamental differences between thinking about past and future events that need to be kept in clear view if we are (...) to make progress in understanding the nature of mental time travel. The reviewed evidence suggests that mental time travel is based on a complex system selected not for accuracy about past and future per se, but for fitness benefits. Functional analyses promise to lead to fruitful avenues for future research. (shrink)

I present Ned Markosian's episodic account of identity under a sortal, and then use it to sketch a new model of the Trinity. I show that the model can be used to solve at least three important Trinitarian puzzles: the traditional ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, a less-discussed problem that has been dubbed the ‘problem of triunity’, and a problem about the divine processions that has been enjoying increased attention in the recent literature.

Logical reasoning is not only a component of religious faith (cf., for instance, the "Golden rule"), but, in addition, the religious faith itself can be conceived as a logical pragmatic function applied to sentences and their meanings. Pragmatic role of religious faith is shown on the examples of the analogy of seed and spoken word (e.g., Mt 13:3-23) and on the degrees of faith described in the episode about Nicodemus (John 3). Pragmatics adds (different grades of) perseverance to the correctness (...) of reasoning and to the truth-preservation of the consequence relation. Correspondingly, religious faith is described by formally defined model and satisfaction relation, which are applied to and examined on the text of John 3. (shrink)

We argue that the causal theory of memory and the simulation theory of memory are not as straightforwardly incompatible as they are usually taken to be. Following a brief review of the theories, we describe alternative normative and descriptive perspectives on memory, arguing that the causal theory aligns better with the normative perspective and the simulation theory with the descriptive perspective. Taking explanatory contextualism about perception as our starting point, we then develop a form of explanatory contextualism about memory, arguing (...) that, depending on the context in which we find ourselves, either the normative perspective or the descriptive perspective may be appropriate. It follows that, while the causal theory and the simulation theory cannot both be right with respect to a given perspective, and while it is necessary to choose one perspective or the other in a given context, there an important sense in which we need not choose between causalism and simulationism. We conclude by differentiating our position from and critiquing a related position developed by Craver (2020) and defending our position against objections. (shrink)

Meyer and Mortensen’s Alien Intruder Theorem includes the extraor- dinary observation that the rationals can be extended to a model of the relevant arithmetic R♯, thereby serving as integers themselves. Al- though the mysteriousness of this observation is acknowledged, little is done to explain why such rationals-as-integers exist or how they operate. In this paper, we show that Meyer and Mortensen’s models can be identified with a class of ultraproducts of finite models of R♯, providing insights into some of the (...) more mysterious phenomena of the rational models. (shrink)

A recalled memory is deemed authentic when it accurately represents how one experienced the original event. However, given the convincing research in cognitive science on the constructive nature of memory, this inevitably leads to the question of the ‘bounds of authenticity’. That is, how similar does a memory have to be to the original experience to still count as authentic? In this paper we propose a novel account of ‘Situated Authenticity’ which highlights that the norms of authenticity are context-dependent. In (...) particular, we show that each of the three core functions of episodic memory (self, social and directive) is correlated with patterned changes in levels of conceptualization (e.g., concrete construal versus abstract construal of the event). We support this theoretical account with existing empirical data. We conclude the paper by showing how our account of Situated Authenticity supplements ongoing discussions on memory contextualism, and providing an outline of how our account, which is currently elaborated targeting a phenomenological level, may also be elaborated on a processing level using the concept of representational format. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that experienced events are often mapped to too many episodic states, including those that are logically or experimentally incompatible with one another. For example, episodic over-distribution patterns show that the probability of accepting an item under different mutually exclusive conditions violates the disjunction rule. A related example, called subadditivity, occurs when the probability of accepting an item under mutually exclusive and exhaustive instruction conditions sums to a number >1. Both the over-distribution effect and subadditivity have (...) been widely observed in item and source-memory paradigms. These phenomena are difficult to explain using standard memory frameworks, such as signal-detection theory. A dual-trace model called the over-distribution model can explain the episodic over-distribution effect, but not subadditivity. Our goal is to develop a model that can explain both effects. In this paper, we propose the Generalized Quantum Episodic Memory model, which extends the Quantum Episodic Memory model developed by Brainerd, Wang, and Reyna. We test GQEM by comparing it to the OD model using data from a novel item-memory experiment and a previously published source-memory experiment examining the over-distribution effect. Using the best-fit parameters from the over-distribution experiments, we conclude by showing that the GQEM model can also account for subadditivity. Overall these results add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that quantum probability theory is a valuable tool in modeling recognition memory. (shrink)

Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream narrative is the result of an individual assuming perspectival, but not personal, ownership of content s/he authored (i.e., “The content (...) in my head is not mine. Therefore it must be peripherally perceived”). Situating explanation within a theoretical space designed to address questions pertaining to the experienced origins of conscious content has a number of salutatory consequences. For example, it promotes predictive fecundity by bringing to light empirical generalizations whose presence otherwise might have gone unnoticed (e.g., the severely limited role of mental time travel within the dream narrative). -/- . (shrink)

We propose a logic of imagination, based on simulated belief revision, that intends to uncover the logical patterns governing the development of imagination in pretense. Our system complements the currently prominent logics of imagination in that ours in particular formalises the algorithm that specifies what goes on in between receiving a certain input for an imaginative episode and what is imagined in the resulting imagination, as well as the goal-orientedness of imagination, by allowing the context to determine, what we (...) call, the overall topic of the imaginative episode. To achieve this, we employ well-developed tools and techniques from dynamic epistemic logic and belief revision theory, enriched with a topicality component which has been exploited in the recent literature. As a result, our logic models a great number of cognitive theories of pretense and imagination [cf. Currie and Ravenscroft ; Nichols and Stich ; Byrne ; Williamson ; Langland-Hassan Knowledge through imaginaion, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016]. (shrink)

This book deals with a neglected episode in the history of logic and theories of cognition: the way in which conceptions of inference changed during the seventeenth century. The author focuses on the work of Descartes, contrasting his construal of inference as an instantaneous grasp in accord with the natural light of reason, with the Aristotelian view of inference as a discursive process. Gaukroger offers a new interpretation of Descartes`s contribution to the question, revealing it to be a significant (...) advance over humanist and late Scholastic conceptions. He argues that Descartes's account played a pivotal role in the development of our understanding of the nature of inference. (shrink)

How the concept of proof has enabled the creation of mathematical knowledge. The Story of Proof investigates the evolution of the concept of proof--one of the most significant and defining features of mathematical thought--through critical episodes in its history. From the Pythagorean theorem to modern times, and across all major mathematical disciplines, John Stillwell demonstrates that proof is a mathematically vital concept, inspiring innovation and playing a critical role in generating knowledge. Stillwell begins with Euclid and his influence on the (...) development of geometry and its methods of proof, followed by algebra, which began as a self-contained discipline but later came to rival geometry in its mathematical impact. In particular, the infinite processes of calculus were at first viewed as "infinitesimal algebra," and calculus became an arena for algebraic, computational proofs rather than axiomatic proofs in the style of Euclid. Stillwell proceeds to the areas of number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, topology, and logic, and peers into the deep chasm between natural number arithmetic and the real numbers. In its depths, Cantor, Gödel, Turing, and others found that the concept of proof is ultimately part of arithmetic. This startling fact imposes fundamental limits on what theorems can be proved and what problems can be solved. Shedding light on the workings of mathematics at its most fundamental levels, The Story of Proof offers a compelling new perspective on the field's power and progress. (shrink)

This article provides a brief selective overview and discussion of recent research into natural language argumentation that may inform the study of human reasoning on the assumption that an episode of argumentation issues an invitation to accept a corresponding inference. As this research shows, arguers typically seek to establish new consequences based on prior information. And they typically do so vis-à-vis a real or an imagined opponent, or an opponent-position, in ways that remain sensitive to considerations of context, audiences, and (...) goals. Deductively valid inferences remain a limiting case of such reasoning. In view of these insights, it may appear less surprising that allegedly “irrational” behavior can regularly be produced in experimental settings that expose subjects to standardized reasoning tasks. (shrink)

Traditional logical empiricist and more recent historicist positions on the logic of discovery are briefly reviewed and both are found wanting. None have examined the historical detail now available from recent research on Darwin, from which there is evidence for gradual transition in descriptive and explanatory concepts. This episode also shows that revolutionary research can be directed by borrowed metascientific objectives and heuristics from other disciplines. Darwin's own revolutionary research took place within an ontological context borrowed from non evolutionary (...) predecessors with methodological objectives borrowed from and justified by their success in Newton's physics. The logic of discovery is not a special form of inference from observation to theory, but rather a theory of the rationality of research, including principles bearing upon the rational choice of problems, or epistemic objectives, and heuristic, or means to solving the problems. Such choices can be justified only locally in the context of a relatively stable background ontology and substantive epistemology, not globally for all science. (shrink)

This work aims to make tense logic a more robust tool for ontologists, philosophers, knowledge engineers and programmers by outlining a fusion of tense logic and ontology of time. In order to make tense logic better understandable, the central formal primitives of standard tense logic are derived as theorems from an informal and intuitive ontology of time. In order to make formulation of temporal propositions easier, temporal operators that were introduced by Georg Henrik von Wright are (...) developed, and mapped to the ontology of time. (shrink)

It is noted that Popper separates the creation of concepts, conjectures, hypotheses and theories—the context of invention—from the testing thereof—the context of justification—arguing that only the latter is susceptible of rigorous logical analysis. Efforts on the part of others to shift or eradicate the demarcation established by this distinction are discussed and the relationship of these considerations to the claims of “strong artificial intelligence” is pointed out. It is argued that the mode of education of scientists, as well as reports (...) of celebrated scientists, support Popper's judgement in this matter. An historical episode from Faraday's later career is used to illustrate the historiographical strength of Lakatos' “methodology of research programs.”. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects (...) and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance--moral, ethical, political--of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. (shrink)

This commentary is divided into two parts. The first considers a possible role for Gray's predictor plus comparator mechanism in human episodic recognition memory. It draws on the computational specifications of recognition outlined in Humphreys et al. to demonstrate how the logically necessary components of recognition tasks might be mapped onto the mechanism. The second part demonstrates how the mechanism outlined by Gray might be implicated in a form of imitative learning suitable for the acquisition of complex tasks.

In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein said that “turning our whole investigation around” is the only way to shake the illusion of a “preconceived idea of crystalline purity.” Commentators have built sweeping descriptions of Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy out of their interpretations of this slogan. For his own part, Wittgenstein specified a particular subject. “For,” he wrote, “the crystalline purity of logic was…not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.” In asking what Wittgenstein could have meant by reversing (...) the direction of the investigation of logic and of what he called its apparent “hardness,” I propose to follow his own advice: to look around before thinking. Two episodes from logic’s history serve as illustrative examples of concepts being dislodged from their original position as theorems or discoveries and relocated as starting points of an investigation (and vice-versa). The details of the cases showcase how “turning our whole investigation around” has proven its practical utility in the growth and development of logic in the last century. Further, it suggests that Wittgenstein might have intended something at once humbler and, for logic, more important than a grand reconceptualization of the nature of necessity: the science of logic itself relies on a continuous inversion of discoveries and requirements. (shrink)

In the present manuscript, we comment upon a paper that strongly criticized an expert report written by the consultants of the defense in a case of pedophilia, in which clinical and neuro-scientific data were used to establish the causal link between brain alterations and onset of criminal behavior. These critiques appear to be based mainly on wrong pieces of information and on a misinterpretation of the logical reasoning adopted by defense consultants. Here we provide a point-by-point reply to the issues (...) raised in the above paper and also discuss the potential role that neuroscience may contribute in the forensic context. Did the forensic neuroscience defense consultants claim the existence of a deterministic relationship between brain structure or function and behavior? How did the neuroscientific logic work in this specific case? How may the classic psychiatric/neurologic examination and neuroscientific evidence work side by side? Does the rarity of a disease impact on the causal relationship between the disease and the crime? Do neuroscientific data need to be interpreted? We address the above questions and conclude that neuroscience may strengthen the results of psychiatric evaluations, thus reducing uncertainty in the forensic settings. (shrink)

Preface. Almost fifty years ago, in 1948, when I was an undergraduate at Queens College in New York and a student of Carl G. Hempel's, I received from his hands an offprint of his now-classic but then just-published paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, written in collaboration with Paul Oppenheim and then just published in Philosophy of Science.1 This paper greatly impressed me—and I was not alone. We have here one of those unusual publications that sets the agenda (...) for a whole generation of investigators. It set in train an enormous body of discussions and publications which shaped the course of deliberations about scientific explanation over the next decades—an effort to which my own work also made some contributions. However my present aim is not to consider what came out of the Hempel-Oppenheim paper but what went into it. I want, in sum, to consider the prehistory of that era of scientific explanation studies—and to look more closely at the background ramifications of this paper that launched a thousand others. (shrink)

The concept of infinity has a long and troubled history. Thus it is a promising concept with which to explore rejection, disagreement, controversy and acceptance in mathematical practice. This paper briefly considers four cases from the history of infinity, drawing on social constructionism as the background social theory. The unit of analysis of social constructionism is conversation. This is the social mechanism whereby new mathematical claims are proposed, scrutinised and critiqued. Minimally, conversation is based on the two roles of proponent (...) and critic. The proponent puts forward a proposal, which is reacted to and evaluated by those in the role of critic. There is a continuum of contexts in which such conversations take place from inner conversations the mathematician has within themselves, and casual face-to face interactions between mathematicians at the chalkboard, all the way to the formal responses of referees and editors to submitted journal papers. Such responses vary from unconditional acceptance, partial acceptance through to outright rejection. There may be disagreements between proponents and critics, among those in the joint role of critic, and broader, community-wide disagreements and controversies, according to specific mathematical proposal and the critical judgements of it. (shrink)

Preface. Almost fifty years ago, in 1948, when I was an undergraduate at Queens College in New York and a student of Carl G. Hempel's, I received from his hands an offprint of his now-classic but then just-published paper “Studies in the Logic of Explanation”, written in collaboration with Paul Oppenheim and then just published in Philosophy of Science.1 This paper greatly impressed me—and I was not alone. We have here one of those unusual publications that sets the agenda (...) for a whole generation of investigators. It set in train an enormous body of discussions and publications which shaped the course of deliberations about scientific explanation over the next decades—an effort to which my own work also made some contributions. However my present aim is not to consider what came out of the Hempel-Oppenheim paper but what went into it. I want, in sum, to consider the prehistory of that era of scientific explanation studies—and to look more closely at the background ramifications of this paper that launched a thousand others. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that scientific method is to be thought of as a complex many-leveled regulatory hierarchy of principles, interacting with theory also viewed as a complex many-leveled hierarchy. This conception of method is illustrated in particular through one episode in the contemporary development of plasma physics, and related to others. It provides for method-theory interaction and for the development of method itself as science develops.

It is not usual to think of Fichte as a logician, nor indeed to think of him as leaving a legacy that shaped the subsequent history of symbolic logic. But I argue here that there is such a legacy, and that Fichte formulated an agenda in formal logic that his students (and their students in turn) used to spark a logical revolution. That revolution arguably reached its culmination in the logical writings of Franz Brentano, better known as a (...) founding figure of the phenomenological movement. In logical writings that were published only posthumously, but that were fully elaborated in the decade prior to the publication of Frege’s Begriffschrift, Brentano (together with his collaborator Anton Marty) developed a radically innovative logical calculus that was explicitly designed to overthrow the orthodox logical analysis of judgment and inference. At the center of this revolution was the notion of thetic judgment [thetische Urteil], a form of judgment upon which Fichte had insisted in the first published version of the Wissenschaftslehre, and which his students subsequently set out to accommodate within the framework provided by Kant’s general logic. But thetic judgment proved resistant to such assimilation, and it was left to Brentano to use the analysis of thetic judgment in his attempt to topple a long-standing logical tradition. In what follows I reconstruct the main episodes in this century-long drama in the logical theory of judgment. My discussion is divided into four sections. I begin with a review of Fichte’s most explicit call for logical revolution, together with his introduction of the notion of thetic judgment, set against the backdrop of an anomaly. (shrink)

We present an algorithm for concept combination inspired and informed by the research in cognitive and experimental psychology. Dealing with concept combination requires, from a symbolic AI perspective, to cope with competitive needs: the need for compositionality and the need to account for typicality effects. Building on our previous work on weighted logic, the proposed algorithm can be seen as a step towards the management of both these needs. More precisely, following a proposal of Hampton [1], it combines two (...) weighted Description Logic formulas, each defining a concept, using the following general strategy. First it selects all the features needed for the combination, based on the logical distinc- tion between necessary and impossible features. Second, it determines the threshold and assigns new weights to the features of the combined concept trying to preserve the relevance and the necessity of the features. We illustrate how the algorithm works exploiting some paradigmatic examples discussed in the cognitive literature. (shrink)

The middle years of the nineteenth century saw two crucial develop ments in the history of modern logic: George Boole's algebraic treat ment of logic and Augustus De Morgan's formulation of the logic of relations. The former episode has been studied extensively; the latter, hardly at all. This is a pity, for the most central feature of modern logic may well be its ability to handle relational inferences. De Morgan was the first person to work out (...) an extensive logic of relations, and the purpose of this book is to study this attempt in detail. Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871) was a British mathematician and logician who was Professor of Mathematics at the University of London (now, University College) from 1828 to 1866. A prolific but not highly original mathematician, De Morgan devoted much of his energies to the rather different field of logic. In his Formal Logic (1847) and a series of papers "On the Syllogism" (1846-1862), he attempted with great ingenuity to reformulate and extend the tradi tional syllogism and to systematize modes of reasoning that lie outside its boundaries. Chief among these is the logic of relations. De Mor gan's interest in relations culminated in his important memoir, "On the Syllogism: IV and on the Logic of Relations," read in 1860. (shrink)

Based on an analysis of the reports of twenty-eight national-level public commission inquiries into events involving ethno-national violence—drawn from five national contexts and arrayed over the course of the twentieth century—this article demonstrates the strikingly transnational character of these investigatory bodies’ attempts to authoritatively explain episodes of collective violence and to thereby restore governing legitimacy in the wake of violent crises. One of four distinct “logics,” or core explanatory frameworks, each associated with a particular mode of “racial power,” characterized a (...) diverse cross-national pool of violence commission reports during defined periods of the twentieth century. In revealing globally encompassing logics to what has often been framed as a national or case-specific phenomenon, the author shows how global ideational currents compose a key dimension of national political dynamics. (shrink)

Despite the growing research and theoretical formulations tied to memory storage within the brain, the role of cortical columns has received relatively little attention. The current paper presents a theoretical formulation based on cortical columns as the binary units that contain all cortical information, and how memory and learning may occur based on the interaction patterns of columns. The described model is an extension of Lurian views, and suggests higher functions to result from the interaction of five systems. Specific mechanisms (...) by which the thalamus and cortex interact to create long term memory formation are delineated. There is the suggestion of two distinct, but interactive, sensory–cortical memory systems, one for factual/generic memories and the other for episodic/personal memories. Hemispheric lateralization of function is explained on the basis of speed and quantity of columnar activation. Conclusions focus on recent technological advances that may allow cortical models to be testable in the near future. (shrink)

The Force of Reason and the Logic of Force investigates the concept of force through various "episodes" in the history of philosophy. The author argues that force arises on the basis of the distinction of reality and mere appearance. The book looks at figures who reduce force to something other than itself as well as figures who develop a "logic of force" that allows them to trace the operation of force without such a reduction.