If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

“Trends in Logic XVI: Consistency, Contradiction, Paraconsistency, and Reasoning - 40 years of CLE” is being organized by the Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science at the State University of Campinas (CLEUnicamp) from September 12th to 15th, 2016, with the auspices of the Brazilian Logic Society, Studia Logica and the Polish Academy of Sciences. The conference is intended to celebrate the 40th anniversary of CLE, and is centered around the areas of logic, epistemology, philosophy and history of (...) science, while bringing together scholars in the fields of philosophy, logic, mathematics, computer science and other disciplines who have contributed significantly to what Studia Logica is today and to what CLE has achieved in its four decades of existence. It intends to celebrate CLE’s strong influence in Brazil and Latin America and the tradition of investigating formal methods inspired by, and devoted to, philosophical views, as well as philosophical problems approached by means of formal methods. The title of the event commemorates one of the three main areas of CLE, what has been called the “Brazilian school of paraconsistency”, combining such a pluralist view about logic and reasoning. (shrink)

This paper briefly outlines some advancements in paraconsistent logics for modelling knowledge representation and reasoning. Emphasis is given on the so-called Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFIs), a class of paraconsistent logics that formally internalize the very concept(s) of consistency and inconsistency. A couple of specialized systems based on the LFIs will be reviewed, including belief revision and probabilistic reasoning. Potential applications of those systems in the AI area of KRR are tackled by illustrating some examples that emphasizes the importance of (...) a fine-tuned treatment of consistency in modelling reputation systems, preferences, argumentation, and evidence. (shrink)

The main objective o f this descriptive paper is to present the general notion of translation between logical systems as studied by the GTAL research group, as well as its main results, questions, problems and indagations. Logical systems here are defined in the most general sense, as sets endowed with consequence relations; translations between logical systems are characterized as maps which preserve consequence relations (that is, as continuous functions between those sets). In this sense, logics together with translations form a (...) bicomplete category of which topological spaces with topological continuous functions constitute a full subcategory. We also describe other uses of translations in providing new semantics for non-classical logics and in investigating duality between them. An important subclass of translations, the conservative translations, which strongly preserve consequence relations, is introduced and studied. Some specific new examples of translations involving modal logics, many-valued logics, para- consistent logics, intuitionistic and classical logics are also described. (shrink)

his paper presents a unified treatment of the propositional and first-order many-valued logics through the method of tableaux. It is shown that several important results on the proof theory and model theory of those logics can be obtained in a general way. We obtain, in this direction, abstract versions of the completeness theorem, model existence theorem (using a generalization of the classical analytic consistency properties), compactness theorem and Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. The paper is completely self-contained and includes examples of application to (...) particular many-valued formal systems. (shrink)

This paper introduces new logical systems which axiomatize a formal representation of inconsistency (here taken to be equivalent to contradictoriness) in classical logic. We start from an intuitive semantical account of inconsistent data, fixing some basic requirements, and provide two distinct sound and complete axiomatics for such semantics, LFI1 and LFI2, as well as their first-order extensions, LFI1* and LFI2*, depending on which additional requirements are considered. These formal systems are examples of what we dub Logics of Formal Inconsistency (LFI) (...) and form part of a much larger family of similar logics. We also show that there are translations from classical and paraconsistent first-order logics into LFI1* and LFI2*, and back. Hence, despite their status as subsystems of classical logic, LFI1* and LFI2* can codify any classical or paraconsistent reasoning. (shrink)

After a brief promenade on the several notions of translations that appear in the literature, we concentrate on three paradigms of translations between logics: ( conservative ) translations , transfers and contextual translations . Though independent, such approaches are here compared and assessed against questions about the meaning of a translation and about comparative strength and extensibility of a logic with respect to another.

In this paper we propose a very general de nition of combination of logics by means of the concept of sheaves of logics. We first discuss some properties of this general definition and list some problems, as well as connections to related work. As applications of our abstract setting, we show that the notion of possible-translations semantics, introduced in previous papers by the first author, can be described in categorial terms. Possible-translations semantics constitute illustrative cases, since they provide a new (...) semantical account for abstract logical systems, particularly for many-valued and paraconsistent logics. (shrink)

There is a sense in which antidepressants are feminist drugs, liberating and empowering …A lot of things have been said about Prozac.1 We have been instructed both to "listen" and to "talk back" to Prozac (Kramer 1993; Breggin 1994), Prozac has been called a wonder drug (Schumer 1989; Cowley 1990), it has been described as capable of dramatically changing selves and dramatically changing our conception of what a self is (Kramer 1993), it has been accused of dulling our artistic drive (...) (Berlin 2008), of diminishing our authenticity (Elliott 2000) and has been called a modern-day Soma, à la Brave New World (Weisberger 1995, 72; PCBE 2003, 258). It has also been called a "feminist drug." It is this last claim that we .. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper discusses how to define logics as deductive limits of sequences of other logics. The case of da Costa's hierarchy of increasingly weaker paraconsistent calculi, known as $ \mathcal {C}$n, 1 $ \leq$ n $ \leq$ $ \omega$, is carefully studied. The calculus $ \mathcal {C}$$\scriptstyle \omega$, in particular, constitutes no more than a lower deductive bound to this hierarchy and differs considerably from its companions. A long standing problem in the literature (open for more than 35 years) is (...) to define the deductive limit to this hierarchy, that is, its greatest lower deductive bound. The calculus $ \mathcal {C}$min, stronger than $ \mathcal {C}$$\scriptstyle \omega$, is first presented as a step toward this limit. As an alternative to the bivaluation semantics of $ \mathcal {C}$min presented thereupon, possible-translations semantics are then introduced and suggested as the standard technique both to give this calculus a more reasonable semantics and to derive some interesting properties about it. Possible-translations semantics are then used to provide both a semantics and a decision procedure for $ \mathcal {C}$Lim, the real deductive limit of da Costa's hierarchy. Possible-translations semantics also make it possible to characterize a precise sense of duality: as an example, $ \mathcal {D}$min is proposed as the dual to $ \mathcal {C}$min. (shrink)

Climate change mitigation has become a paradigm case both for externalities in general and for the game-theoretic model of the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in particular. This situation is worrying, as we have reasons to suspect that some models in the social sciences are apt to be performative to the extent that they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. Framing climate change mitigation as a hardly solvable coordination problem may force us into a worse situation, by changing real-world behaviour to fit (...) our model, rather than the other way around. But while this problem of the performativity of the ToC has been noted in a recent paper in this journal by Matthew Kopec, his proposed strategies for dealing with their self-fulfilling nature fall short of providing an adequate solution. Instead of relying on the idea that modelling assumptions are always strictly speaking false, this paper shows that the problem may be better framed as a problem of underdetermination between competing explanations. Our goal here is to provide a framework for choosing between this set of competing models that allows us to avoid a ‘Russian Roulette’-like situation in which we gamble with existential risk. (shrink)

First published in 1969, this was a new assessment of Freud’s most creative years and the formative period in psychoanalysis and was the first book to attempt a systematic presentation of Freud’s early ideas, relating them to his later work and to contemporary psychoanalysis. During the years 1888-1898 Freud published 15 papers and one book. In addition many of his ideas were formulated in a series of letters and drafts that he wrote to Dr Wilhelm Fliess. This material provided new (...) insights into the nature of Freud’s creative genius and gave new meaning to his published works. Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years reviews these early papers, drafts and letters, and describes tentative formulations that, in spite of their value, were not developed further because of lack of time or a shift in interest. As Dr Stewart observes, ‘the study of this aspect of Freud’s work is perhaps the most exciting. Freud’s creativity in these years was remarkable. The ideas he _discarded_ in this short period of time would, for a less gifted person, have been a full life’s work of which he could have been proud.’ There is a good deal of historical and literary interest in his account of Freud’s relationships with Fliess, Breuer and others, but the core of the book is the critical assessment and systematic presentation of Freud’s early major insights, which dramatically reveal a creative genius in the process of discovery. (shrink)

We propose in this paper a family of algebraic models of ZFC based on the three-valued paraconsistent logic LPT0, a linguistic variant of da Costa and D’Ottaviano’s logic J3. The semantics is given by twist structures defined over complete Boolean agebras. The Boolean-valued models of ZFC are adapted to twist-valued models of an expansion of ZFC by adding a paraconsistent negation. This allows for inconsistent sets w satisfying ‘not (w = w)’, where ‘not’ stands for the paraconsistent negation. Finally, our (...) framework is adapted to provide a class of twist-valued models generalizing Löwe and Tarafder’s model based on logic (PS 3,∗), showing that they are paraconsistent models of ZFC. The present approach offers more options for investigating independence results in paraconsistent set theory. (shrink)