Can one extend crisp Peano arithmetic PA by a possibly many-valued predicate Tr(x) saying “xis true” and satisfying the “dequotation schema”for all sentences φ? This problem is investigated in the frame of Łukasiewicz infinitely valued logic.

A simple complete axiomatic system is presented for the many-valued propositional logic based on the conjunction interpreted as product, the coresponding implication (Goguen's implication) and the corresponding negation (Gödel's negation). Algebraic proof methods are used. The meaning for fuzzy logic (in the narrow sense) is shortly discussed.

Environmental anxiety is often thought of as a psychopathological condition. Our paper aims to challenge this narrow understanding by offering an existential-phenomenological interpretation of environmental anxiety that posits it as an _existential attunement_ with a transformative potential, capable of opening the anxious individual to a hopeful and meaningful outlook on the future. In the first part of the paper, we provide a conceptual analysis of environmental anxiety, drawing on current interdisciplinary taxonomies of environmental emotions as well as on existential-phenomenological definitions (...) of anxiety. We then proceed to define the two key existential characteristics of environmental anxiety, firstly (i) its ability to reframe the aesthetic perception of nature, and secondly (ii) its impact on the subjective constitution of meaning. In the second part of the paper, drawing on the work of Kierkegaard and contemporary ecopsychological and ecotheological thinkers, a distinction is made between a naïve and a radical form of environmental hope. It is argued that while the former type of hope leads to inactivity, the latter is capable of motivating individuals to pro-environmental action. (shrink)

Drawing on current debates at the frontiers of economics, psychology, and political philosophy, this book explores the challenges that arise for liberal democracies from a confrontation between modern technologies and the bounds of human rationality. With the ongoing transition of democracy's underlying information economy into the digital space, threats of disinformation and runaway political polarization have been gaining prominence. Employing the economic approach informed by behavioral sciences' findings, the book's chief concern is how these challenges can be addressed while preserving (...) a commitment to democratic values and maximizing the epistemic benefits of democratic decision-making. The book has two key strands: it provides a systematic argument for building a behaviorally informed theory of democracy; and explores how scientific knowledge on quirks and bounds of human rationality can inform the design of resilient democratic institutions. Drawing these together, the book explores the centrality of the rationality assumption in the methodological debates surrounding behavioral sciences as exemplified by the dispute between neoclassical and behavioral economics; the role of rationality in democratic social choice; behaviorally informed paternalism as a response to the challenge of irrationality; and non-paternalistic avenues to increase the resilience of the democratic institutions towards political irrationality This book is invaluable reading for anyone interested in behavioral economics and sciences, political philosophy and the future of democracy. (shrink)

Between the zone of certainty beyond all doubt and the zone of incomprehensible uncertainty, the sources of which are nothing but chance, we need to use solid results from a vast interdisciplinarity. We wish to give here a sense of the factors in play and the state of the debate and advance in the territory of how interdisciplinarity may help to solve problems which are common in many areas of knowledge. Chaos and complexity certainly put limits on what we can (...) know. High complexity, asymmetry and/or non-linearity are universal types of imprecision. Can hazard have purpose and direction?The idea is that the more effort we put into project design to cover as many details and possible consequences as possible we can grasp in our in-depth analysis aiming to create the project (in art or science or society), the greater the chances that the random occurrence of the unpredictable event will settle on the project's purpose and direction and not on contrary to them. There is no vicious circle here. This kind of method can explain many good results already obtained in such circumstances. Simplicity, beauty, rationalistic optimism, are features of unshakeable scientific results We may call this feature of scientific theory or art _uniqueness. _Uniqueness is strongly correlated with _essentialization. _Science is working in that sense: to simplify a phenomenon to its essence in order to study it easily without losing anything important in the analysis. That is _essentialization. _Why and how complex systems move to the edge of chaos? And what do they do to stay there? They are in constant struggle to create or keep order in complexity. That is the pattern of self-organization, the specific feature of human nature. That is why our action is meant to build resilience to deal better with unpredictable events and prevent the emergence of a critical threshold. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness, and contradictions appear, not as non-essential substances of debate to be eliminated by explanation, but as everlasting ingredients of our conception of reality. There are compelling reasons to believe that it is impossible to make accurate, nontrivial predictions concerning human behavior. Logic and reason are and remain priority, but unpredictability forces us to imagination and creative thinking. Indeed we are confronted with a new human landscape. The anomalies become the new normal. (shrink)

Social networks can influence people’s behaviour and therefore it is assumed that central individuals in social networks, also called “opinion leaders”, play a key role in driving change in agricultural and food systems. I analyse the outcomes of an intervention (that encouraged Sulawesi smallholder farmers to take a specific action toward improving the health of their cocoa trees) to assess the impact of engaging opinion leaders in agricultural programs that aim to change farmers’ practices. The intervention has been implemented through (...) (a) 18 opinion leaders identified by interviews and a social network survey of 1885 cocoa farmers; and (b) 18 randomly selected farmers who were not central in local social networks. The obtained social networks and statistical data were quantitatively analysed and the results were interpreted with input from the field staff. Contrary to expectations, the highly socially central opinion leaders were not more effective in promoting the initiative in their communities. On average, randomly selected low-centrality farmers convinced almost twice as many of their peers to take the recommended action as compared to the identified opinion leaders (17.1 versus 8.6) but the variation within the random group was also significantly higher. Importantly, while the identified opinion leaders were mostly senior men, women performed better in influencing others into taking action even when their centrality in local social networks of agricultural advice was lower. I discuss the implications of the conventional selection of perceived opinion leaders as model farmers for achieving sustainable and equitable change at scale in agriculture and propose practical alternatives. (shrink)

In the last few decades many formal systems of fuzzy logics have been developed. Since the main differences between fuzzy and classical logics lie at the propositional level, the fuzzy predicate logics have developed more slowly (compared to the propositional ones). In this text we aim to promote interest in fuzzy predicate logics by contributing to the model theory of fuzzy predicate logics. First, we generalize the completeness theorem, then we use it to get results on conservative extensions of theories (...) and on witnessed models. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) represent the currently most relevant incarnation of artificial intelligence with respect to the future fate of democratic governance. Considering their potential, this paper seeks to answer a pressing question: Could LLMs outperform humans as expert advisors to democratic assemblies? While bearing the promise of enhanced expertise availability and accessibility, they also present challenges of hallucinations, misalignment, or value imposition. Weighing LLMs’ benefits and drawbacks compared to their human counterparts, I argue for their careful integration to augment (...) democracy’s ability to address complex policy issues. The paper posits that time-tested democratic procedures like deliberation and aggregation by voting provide safeguards effective against both human and machine advisor imperfections. Additional protective measures include custom LLM training for the advisory role, boosting representatives’ competencies in query formulation, or implementation of adversarial proceedings in which LLM advisors could debate each other and provide dissenting opinions. These could further mitigate the risks that LLMs present in advisory roles and empower human decision-makers toward increased autonomy and quality of their collective choices. My conceptual exploration offers a roadmap for the co-evolution of AI and democratic institutions, setting the stage for an empirical research agenda to finetune the implementation specifics. (shrink)

An important task for every major philosopher is to offer us an understanding of the nature of mind. The essays in this volume discuss different aspects of the philosophical theories of mind put forward in the century and a half that followed Descartes' Meditations of 1641. These years, often referred to as the 'early-modern' period, are probably unparalleled for originality and diversity in conceiving the mind. The volume not only includes two essays on Descartes' own thinking, but there are also (...) examinations of what Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, Berkeley, Reid, the Cambridge Platonists, and others, have to say about the nature of mind. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the best contemporary research and reflection on mind in early-modern philosophy. The contributors, who teach at a range of universities in mainland Europe, Great Britain and North America, are Margaret Atherton, Miran BozoviÄ, Petr GlombìÄek, Boris Hennig, James Hill, Nicholas Jolley, Jan Palkoska, G. A. J. Rogers, and Anthony Savile. All the essays appear here for the first time. (shrink)

Although seemingly a purely negative position without any implications, scepticism is more often seen to lead to two entirely different prescriptive political and moral conclusions, either liberal or illiberal. This article explains how such opposing conclusions derive from insufficient attention to: the instability of scepticism, its tendency to collapse into varieties of unquestioned belief; its underdetermined character, since it is always expressed as a variable mixture of doubt and beliefs, which are often neither acknowledged nor recognized; and insufficient clarity about (...) the motivational power of social or political theory generally. (shrink)

Originally published in 1944, this book presents a study of the life and work of Roman Catholic priest and scholar Alfred Loisy, written by fellow Modernist Maude Petre. Petre died shortly after completing this short biography, and the text begins with a note on her life by James A. Walker. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in this important figure in the controversial Catholic Modernist movement.

This monograph presents a general theory of weakly implicative logics, a family covering a vast number of non-classical logics studied in the literature, concentrating mainly on the abstract study of the relationship between logics and their algebraic semantics. It can also serve as an introduction to algebraic logic, both propositional and first-order, with special attention paid to the role of implication, lattice and residuated connectives, and generalized disjunctions. Based on their recent work, the authors develop a powerful uniform framework for (...) the study of non-classical logics. In a self-contained and didactic style, starting from very elementary notions, they build a general theory with a substantial number of abstract results. The theory is then applied to obtain numerous results for prominent families of logics and their algebraic counterparts, in particular for superintuitionistic, modal, substructural, fuzzy, and relevant logics. The book may be of interest to a wide audience, especially students and scholars in the fields of mathematics, philosophy, computer science, or related areas, looking for an introduction to a general theory of non-classical logics and their algebraic semantics. (shrink)

Despite their flaws, large language models (LLMs) deserve a fair chance to prove their mettle against human experts, who are often plagued with biases, conflicts of interest, and other frailties. For epistemically unprivileged laypeople struggling to access expert knowledge, the accessibility advantages of LLMs could prove crucial. While complaints about LLMs' inconsistencies and arguments for human superiority are often justified (for now), they distract from the urgent need to prepare for the likely scenario of LLMs' continued ascent. Experimentation with both (...) the capabilities and institutional architecture of LLMs is necessary. Neither tech-bashing nor excessive gatekeeping will suffice. As LLMs are here to stay and they keep improving, it is high time we started thinking about how to navigate the impending wave of their proliferation. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance to determine (...) the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

Humans are remarkably adaptable, and therefore a successful species. There are many speculative answers to the question of why this is so. One of them represents the cultural intelligence hypothesis, which consid-ers cultural learning skills as the key to human success. This work aims to present the hypothesis of cultural intelligence as a viable alternative to more conventional approaches within the debate about the origin of human intelligence, such as the hypothesis of general and improvisational intelligence. Theirmutual comparison shows that (...) cultural intelligence hypothesis must necessarily work with flexible social learning strategies to describe cultural transmission, thus losing part of its explanatory power. As the theory of metacognitive strategies of social learning by cognitive psychologist Cecilia Heyes shows, there is a way to combine the flexibility of human reasoning with the “stupid” process of cultural selection. (shrink)

On the Notion "Type of Language" Petr Sgall It is well known that the high frequency of terminological vagueness and confusion has been a serious obstacle ...

In 1957–58 two large collections of documents relating to the estate of Gressenhall in central Norfolk were deposited in the Norfolk Record Office by Clement Ingleby and by Mills and Reeve, solicitors of Fakenham. These records go back to the late thirteenth century and consist of surveys, rentals, extents, charters, indentures, lists of tenants, and an unusually complete run of court rolls. Together with other records from Gressenhall, including inquisitions post mortem, they provide an exceptionally full picture of the estate (...) in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Their evidence has been thoroughly examined and analyzed in a valuable study by Janet Williamson, first in her thesis of 1976, and then published in briefer form in 1984. (shrink)

Many democratic countries have failed to stand up to the challenge presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that the collective response to the pandemic has been incapacitated by an ‘epistemic crisis’, (i.e., a breakdown in the social division of epistemic labor) that led to a failure of citizens’ beliefs to converge towards a shared perception of the situation. Neither a paucity of relevant expert knowledge nor democratic citizens’ irrationality is required for the crisis to emerge. In particular, I highlight (...) three obstacles capable of preventing relevant expert testimony from gaining democratic legitimacy necessary for an effective policy response: 1) the proper domain of expertise is uncertain; 2) regular citizens’ meta-expertise – (i.e., ability to discriminate among the putative experts based on their relative epistemic merit) – is not efficacious enough to trigger truth-convergence of the public opinion; 3) the prominent sources of third-party meta-expertise lack credibility due to their conflicts of interest. Since the first two problems appear irresolvable, I propose that the search for a path towards preclusion of future epistemic crises concentrates on upgrading the institutional fundament for meta-expertise provision. Social epistemology plays a vital role in this search, but its close cooperation with other disciplines is a must. (shrink)

The possibility of performing germline modifications on currently living individuals targets future generations’ health and well-being by reducing the diversity of the human gene pool. This can have two negative repercussions: reduction of heterozygosity, the latter being associated with a health or performance advantage; uniformization of the genes involved in reproductive recombination, which may lead to the health risks involved in asexual reproduction. I argue that germline interventions aimed at modifying the genomes of future people cannot be ethically justifiable if (...) there is no possibility of controlling the intervention either by reversing or altering it, whenever need demands it. This argument is challenged on six different grounds: safety, population versus individual focus, spontaneous mutations, exceptionalism, the intentional pursuit of genetic diversity through germline interventions, and harm reduction potential. (shrink)

We prove that Standardization fails in every nontrivial universe definable in the nonstandard set theory BST, and that a natural characterization of the standard universe is both consistent with and independent of BST. As a consequence we obtain a formulation of nonstandard class theory in the ∈-language.

This paper addresses the ontological status of the body in the context of bodily practices in body-oriented disciplines, such as sport training, dance, and physiotherapy. Following Descartes’, Huss...

L'auteur a essayé de démontrer le positionnement de Jean-Paul Sartre sous la bannière de l'ontologie dès sa création de jeunesse, sans laquelle il est difficile de comprendre la place du philosophe français dans l'histoire de la phénoménologie. La nouvelle formule créée par Jean-Paul Sartre, à savoir "l'ontologie phénoménologique" est une forme spécifique de l'ontologie moderne de l'humain comprenant également des questions fondamentales caractéristiques de n'importe quelle pensée philosophique. u u.

The theological program of Archpriest Georges Florovsky is understood as a conception of the neopatristic synthesis that he developed. From the beginning, its appearance was associated with the participation of its creator in a public discussion about the historical ways of Russia within the framework of the Eurasian movement, then, with his scientific investigations into the history of Russian Orthodoxy and ancient Christian thought and later with his activity in the ecumenical movement. It is noteworthy that the positive content of (...) the program for modern Orthodox theology turned out to be an indirect response to broader challenges of historical and social order. The focus of attention in this case are some peculiarities in the reception of the program in international and Russian contexts, which in turn requires the clarification of the content of its main points, such as a question about a true fatherland or the sense and meaning of Christian Hellenism. The conclusion notes the significant relevance and openness of Florovsky’s ideas for modern Orthodox theology. (shrink)

While there has been considerable interest in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, both of whom are considered seminal existential thinkers, relatively little has been said about similarities in their thought. In this paper, I propose to read their philosophical and literary works together as texts that offer an elaborate model of an existential religious transformation. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky sketch a path leading from the inauthentic, internally fragmented and egotistic self to the authentically Christian, humble and loving (...) individual. By examining the underlying structure of this transformative process, I try to show that its portrayal is in many ways similar in the account of both writers. Furthermore, I maintain that they set out not only to describe the inner workings of the existential religious transformation, but that their effort constitutes a direct appeal to the reader to initiate the transformative process herself or himself. (shrink)

Uniform infinite bases are defined for the single-conclusion and multiple-conclusion admissible rules of the implication–negation fragments of intuitionistic logic and its consistent axiomatic extensions . A Kripke semantics characterization is given for the structurally complete implication–negation fragments of intermediate logics, and it is shown that the admissible rules of this fragment of form a PSPACE-complete set and have no finite basis.