Putative resolutions of the sorites paradox in which the major premise is declared false or illegitimate, Including max black's treatment in terms of the alleged illegitimacy of vague attributions to borderline cases, Are rejected on semantical grounds. The resort to a non-Bivalent logic of representational "accuracy" with a continuum of accuracy values is shown to resolve the paradox, And the identification of accuracy values as truth values is defended as compatible with the central insight of the correspondence theory of truth (...) and with the practical legitimacy of most applications of ordinary, Bivalent logic to statements involving vague predicates. (shrink)

Numerous philosophers, among them Carl G. Hempel and Wesley C. Salmon, have attempted to explicate the notion of explanatory relevance in terms of the statistical relevance of various properties of an individual to the explanandum property itself (or what is here called narrow statistical relevance). This approach seems plausible if one assumes that to explain an occurrence is to show that it was to be expected or to exhibit its degree of expectability and the factors which influence its expectability. But (...) considerations of narrow statistical relevance do not provide an adequate basis for explanatory classification, and the aforementioned views of explanation are accordingly mistaken. Explanatory classification must provide at least a partial account of the nature of a thing, and such an account will generally go beyond what is required as a basis for correct expectation. (shrink)

One widely recognized difference between laws and accidental generalizations lies in the ability of the former versus the inability of the latter to support certain sorts of related subjunctive conditionals. Nelson Goodman's theory of projectibility is here evaluated on the basis of its implications for the relative acceptability of conflicting subjunctive conditionals or counterfactuals. It is argued that the theory's extensionalistic character precludes its dealing adequately with cases of a certain type in which the difference between two counterfactuals, one acceptable (...) and the other unacceptable, is clearly related to a difference in nomological status between their indicative counterparts. (shrink)

In his article "rigid designation" ("journal of philosophy", Volume lxxii, Pages 363-9) hugh s chandler presents an alleged counterexample to the principles that proper names are rigid designators and that identity statements using proper names as designators are non-Contingent. In the present paper this counterexample is shown to rest on a tacit assumption which the principles' proponents need not accept. Chandler's example is redescribed in a way which is both plausible and compatible with the two principles.

Man an Organic Community - Vol. 1 is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1893. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has (...) become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)