Does the relation of seeing something as another really differ from seeing the one as resembling the other? Does seeing a cloud as a camel really differ from seeing a resemblance between the cloud and a camel? It is easy to think not, but I claim that the logic of the relation B sees x as resembling y differs markedly from that of B sees x as y and thus that we have two relations, not one. Aspect-perception is nontransitive, (...) nonsymmetric, irreflexive and categorical. Perceived or subjective resemblance is weakly or faintly transitive, symmetric, reflexive and graded. (shrink)

A common reaction to Hegel’s suggestion that we collapse Kant’s distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as (...) Kant conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel’s critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel’s idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant’s dichotomy between form and content or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect—does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre-Critical metaphysics. This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more seriously. (shrink)

Events have beginnings, ends, and often overlap in time. A major question is how perceivers come to parse a stream of multimodal information into meaningful units and how different event boundaries may vary event processing. This work investigates the roles of these three types of event boundaries in constructing event temporal relations. Predictions were made based on how people would err according to the beginning state, end state, and overlap heuristic hypotheses. Participants viewed animated events that include all the (...) logical possibilities of event temporal relations, and then made temporal relation judgments. The results showed that people make use of the overlap between events and take into account the ends and beginnings, but they weight ends more than beginnings. Neural network simulations showed a self‐organized distinction when learning temporal relations between events with overlap versus those without. (shrink)

David Hume and other philosophers doubt that causality can be perceived directly. Instead, observers become aware of it through inference based on the perception of the two events constituting cause and effect of the causal relation. However, Hume and the other philosophers primarily consider causal relations in which one object triggers a motion or change in another. In this paper, I will argue against Hume’s assumption by distinguishing a kind of causal relations in which an agent is controlling (...) the motion or change of an object. I will call this kind of causal relations ‘causation-as-control’. In instances of causation-as-control, the observer does not become aware of the causality through inference based on the perception of two events (cause and effect). Rather, she perceives the two events directly and without further inference as cause and effect of a causal relation, and, therefore, the causality at work. (shrink)

There are two very different ways of thinking about perception. According to the first one, perception is representational: it represents the world as being a certain way. According to the second, perception is a genuine relation between the perceiver and a token object. These two views are thought to be incompatible. My aim is to work out the least problematic version of the representational view of perception that preserves the most important considerations in favor of the relational view. According to (...) this version of representationalism, the properties represented in perception are tropes—abstract particulars that are logically incapable of being present in two distinct individuals at the same time. I call this view ‘trope representationalism’. (shrink)

The Fifth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science was held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada, 27 August to 2 September 1975. The Congress was held under the auspices of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, and was sponsored by the National Research Council of Canada and the University of Western Ontario. As those associated closely with the work of the Division over the years (...) know well, the work undertaken by its members varies greatly and spans a number of fields not always obviously related. In addition, the volume of work done by first rate scholars and scientists in the various fields of the Division has risen enormously. For these and related reasons it seemed to the editors chosen by the Divisional officers that the usual format of publishing the proceedings of the Congress be abandoned in favour of a somewhat more flexible, and hopefully acceptable, method of pre sentation. Accordingly, the work of the invited participants to the Congress has been divided into four volumes appearing in the University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. The volumes are entitled, Logic, Foundations of Mathematics and Computability Theory, Foun dational Problems in the Special Sciences, Basic Problems in Methodol ogy and Linguistics, and Historical and Philosophical Dimensions of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

We propose a new modal logic endowed with a simple deductive system to interpret Aristotle's theory of the modal syllogism. While being inspired by standard propositional modal logic, it is also a logic of terms that admits a (sound) extensional semantics involving possible states-of-affairs in a given world. Applied to the analysis of Aristotle's modal syllogistic as found in the Prior Analytics A8-22, it sheds light on various fine-grained distinctions which when made allow us to clarify some ambiguities and obtain (...) a completely consistent system and prove all of the modal syllogisms considered valid by Aristotle. This logic allows us also to make a connection with the axioms of modern propositional modal logic and to perceive to what extent these are implicit in Aristotle's reasoning. Further work will involve addressing the question of the completeness of this logic (or variants thereof) together with an extension of the logic to include a calculus of relations (for instance the relational syllogistic treated in Galen's Introduction to Logic) which Slomkowsky has argued is already found in the Topics. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe’s classic paper Causality and Determination claims that causation can be perceived. It also defends causal singularism, the idea that the causal relation is fundamentally between the particular cause and effect, and does not depend on regularities holding elsewhere in the universe. But does the former furnish an argument for the latter? The present paper analyses a special type of causal experience involving emotional reactions to present stimuli; for instance, being frightened by a spider. It argues that such experiences (...) are strongly local, in the sense that they justify belief in a local causal relation independently of our knowledge about events elsewhere in the universe. If this analysis is correct, Humean regularity theories of causation are false; and all other non-singularist theories of causation face a difficult explanatory challenge. This means that the case for causal singularism comes out considerably strengthened. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 497 interaction and interdependence. Our practice can be governed by that ontological hypothesis. Much of Timpanaro's ranting and raving and name calling rests upon his unhelpful conflation of the epistemological and the ontological and upon a false dichotomy between materialism and idealism that no longer is or ought to be the basic and important issue in Marxism. DONALDC. LEE University of New Mexico Causing, Perceiving and (...) Believing: An Examination of the Philosophy of C. J. Ducasse. By Peter H. Hare and Edward H. Madden. (Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, 1975. Pp. vii + 211. $26.00) Hare and Madden have performed a service to the philosophical community in summarizing and evaluating the contributions to philosophy of C. J. Ducasse. They have distilled from ten books, scores of articles, and some unpublished manuscripts of Ducasse, analyses of causality, sensation, perception, substance, agency, belief, knowledge, mind, beauty, education, and religion that can fairly be regarded as the philosophy of Ducasse. They point out some inconsistencies in Ducasse's views, but they suggest emendations to overcome the difficulties-emendations that Hare and Madden have developed in their own writings, so that the reader is offered, in effect, a composite Ducasse-Hare-Madden system of philosophy. I agree with most of the authors' judgments regarding the defects of Ducasse's views, but I doubt that their proposed improvements succeed in making the overall vision coherent. In the first three chapters the authors explain Ducasse's theories of causality and agency and claim that his account of causality as a necessary but nonlogical connection was a significant advance over Hume. They consider Ducasse to have been wrong in limiting causality to events and in maintaining that it is directly observable. They argue that an effect is deducible from the "nature" of its cause, although not from the nontheoretical description of its cause. This proposed improvement on Ducasse and Hume seems to me either a mere gloss on Hume or a muddle. If Hare and Madden mean that scientific theories establish entailments between concepts such as pressure and volume or mass and acceleration, and that the explanatory and predictive success of such entailments serves as a criterion of causal processes, they are right. But what they have identified is not a relation of nonlogical necessity but rather two relations: a logical relation between two theoretical concepts, and a contingent relation between two classes of events that correspond to the theoretical concepts. If, on the other hand, they mean to agree with Aristotle and the scholastics that the nature of a thing is an entity or process inside it that compels it to behave as it does, then, like their ancient predecessors, they make causal explanation into a "dormative virtue" fallacy; for the nature of a thing is then identical with its causal powers, and the latter follow vacuously from the concept of its nature. They seem to ignore the fact that any conceptual relation between theoretical concepts is only a rough approximation to actual events. It is a logically necessary truth that EMF is proportional to current times resistance, but it is neither logically nor nonlogically necessary that a booster battery will start a recalcitrant car. In brief, theoretical relations are idealizations of real processes in nature. Hare and Madden claim that their conceptual connection analysis of causality blunts the edge of the "logical connection argument" that motives cannot be causes of actions. They fail to realize that the "logical connection argument" applies to the nontheoretical descriptions of motives and actions (there are no theories worth considering), while their own conceptual relation analysis applies only to theoretical descriptions of natural processes. The Hare-Madden emendation produces special difficulties when applied to Ducasse's account of human agency and mind-body interaction. Ducasse defended the dualist conception of voluntary action as bodily movement caused by mental volitions. The possibility of 498 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY such causal intereaction makes some sense on Ducasse's basically Humean view that causality can hold between any two kinds of event but not on the Hare-Madden view that cause and effect must be conceptually related. For we have no well-confirmed theories, nor is it likely that we ever will... (shrink)

Ontology is currently perceived as the solution of first resort for all problems related to biomedical terminology, and the use of description logics is seen as a minimal requirement on adequate ontology-based systems. Contrary to common conceptions, however, description logics alone are not able to prevent incorrect representations; this is because they do not come with a theory indicating what is computed by using them, just as classical arithmetic does not tell us anything about the entities that are added or (...) subtracted. In this paper we shall show that ontology is indeed an essential part of any solution to the problems of medical terminology – but only if it is understood in the right sort of way. Ontological engineering, we shall argue, should in every case go hand in hand with a sound ontological theory. (shrink)

The question whether qualities are metaphysically more fundamental than or mere limiting cases of relations can be addressed in an applied symbolic logic. There exists a logical equivalence between qualitative and relational predications, in which qualities are represented as one-argument-place property predicates, and relations as more-than-one-argument-place predicates. An interpretation is first considered, according to which the logical equivalence of qualitative and relational predications logically permits us ontically to eliminate qualities in favor of relations, or (...) class='Hi'>relations in favor of qualities. If metaphysics is understood at least in part as an exercise in ontic economy, then we may be encouraged to adopt a property ontology of qualities without quality-irreducible relations, or relations without relation-irreducible qualities. If either strategy is followed, the choice of reducing qualities to relations or relations to qualities will need to be justified on extra-logical grounds. These might include a perceived greater intuitiveness, explanatory fecundity, compatibility with cognitive ontogeny or developmental psychology, expressive or explanatory elegance or cumbersomeness, and an open-ended list of philosophical motivations that could reasonably favor the ontic prioritization of qualities over relations or relations over qualities. Despite its intuitive appeal, the thesis that logical equivalence together with extra-logical preferences justifies unidirectional ontic reduction of relations to qualities or qualities to relations is rejected in light of the more defensible proposition that the logical equivalence of qualitative and relational predications actually supports the opposite conclusion, that both qualities and relations are logically indispensable to a complete ontology of properties. The logical equivalence of qualitative and relational predications, insofar as we continue to observe the distinction, makes it logically necessary ontically for both qualities and relations to exist whenever either one exists. That logically equivalent qualitative and relational predications have as their truth-makers the exemplification by objects of both qualities and relations as equi-foundational properties further suggests that there is no deeper logical distinction between qualities and relations, but only two convenient lexical-grammatical designations for property predications involving one- versus more-than-one-argument-place. (shrink)

On Peirce’ view, we can perceive many things commonly thought not to be perceptible—or thought to be ‘abstract’—including but not necessarily limited to (some) generals or universals, habits or law-like properties, modal properties, and semeiotic properties (sign relations). My contention turns on his arguments in ‘Some Consequences’ that ‘no cognition of ours is absolutely determinate’, his mature account of perception, particularly his criteria for what counts as perception and what does not, his analysis of the predication of concepts (i.e. (...) his pragmaticism), his claims in the 1903 Harvard lectures that we directly perceive Thirdness, and his realism about generals, habits, modalities, and sign relations. (shrink)

Suicide attack is the most virulent and horrifying form of terrorism in the world today. The mere rumor of an impending suicide attack can throw thousands of people into panic. This occurred during a Shi‘a procession in Iraq in late August 2005, causing hundreds of deaths. Although suicide attacks account for a minority of all terrorist acts, they are responsible for a majority of all terrorism-related casualties, and the rate of attacks is rising rapidly across the globe. During 2000–2004, there (...) were 472 suicide attacks in 22 countries, killing more than 7,000 and wounding tens of thousands. Most have been carried out by Islamist groups claiming religious motivation, also known as jihadis. Rand Corp. vice president and terrorism analyst Bruce Hoffman has found that 80 percent of suicide attacks since 1968 occurred after the September 11 attacks, with jihadis representing 31 of the 35 responsible groups. More suicide attacks occurred in 2004 than in any previous year, and 2005 has proven even more deadly, with attacks in Iraq alone averaging more than one per day, according to data gathered by the U.S. military. The July 2005 London and Sinai bombings, a second round of bombings at tourist destinations in Bali in October, coordinated hotel bombings in Jordan in November, the arrival of suicide bombings in Bangladesh in December, a record year of attacks in Afghanistan, and daily bombings in Iraq have spurred renewed interest in suicide terrorism, with recent analyses stressing the strategic logic, organizational structure, and rational calculation involved. Whereas they once primarily consisted of organized campaigns by militarily weak forces aiming to end the perceived occupation of their homeland, as argued by University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape in Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, suicide attacks today serve as banner actions for a thoroughly modern, global diaspora inspired by religion and claiming the role of vanguard for a massive, media-driven transnational political awakening. Living mostly in the diaspora and undeterred by the threat of retaliation against original home populations, jihadis, who are frequently middle-class, secularly well educated, but often “born-again” radical Islamists, including converts from Christianity, embrace apocalyptic visions for humanity's violent salvation. In Muslim countries and across western Europe, bright and idealistic Muslim youth, even more than the marginalized and dispossessed, internalize the jihadi story, illustrated on satellite television and the Internet with the ubiquitous images of social injustice and political repression with which much of the Muslim world's bulging immigrant and youth populations intimately identifies. From the suburbs of Paris to the jungles of Indonesia, I have interviewed culturally uprooted and politically restless youth who echo a stunningly simplified and decontextualized message of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life's noblest cause. They are increasingly as willing and even eager to die as they are to kill. The policy implications of this change in the motivation, organization, and calculation of suicide terrorism may be as novel as hitherto neglected. Many analysts continue to claim that jihadism caters to the destitute and depraved, the craven and criminal, or those who “hate freedom.” Politicians and pundits have asserted that jihadism is nihilistic and immoral, with no real program or humanity. Yet, jihadism is none of these things. Do we really understand the causes of today's suicide terrorism? Do suicide attacks stem mainly from a political cause, such as military occupation? Do they need a strong organization, such as Al Qaeda? What else could be done to turn the rising tide of martyrdom? (shrink)

On the basis of previous studies in relational biology and the phenomenological calculus, in my contribution I outline the mathematical foundations of biological perception generally, and visual perception specifically. In this approach, the premise is that objects in nature are not directly accessible, and that real manifestations are projections of these invariant objects. The morphology of observables is mathematically entailed by the duality of projections and projectors in a bilinear algebra that is the phenomenological calculus. The relationships between what is (...) not directly accessible (which can be defined as noumena) and phenomena may be explicated in terms of metabolism and repair, whence a geometric theory of the perceived, the visible in particular, may be formulated in the category-theoretic language of relational biology. (shrink)

Drawing on managerial discretion and conflicting institutional logics literature, this study investigates the relation between the personal sustainability behaviors of owner–managers and the corporate sustainability practices of SMEs. The research proposes a contingency model that assesses the moderating effects of perceived economic advantages and environmental hostility on this relationship. Based on linear hierarchical multiple regression analyses of a cross-sectoral sample of French SMEs, the results suggest a positive influence of the manager's PSB on the SME's CS practices that appears to (...) be differently moderated depending on the type of practice considered. The influence on environmental practices is fostered through the perception of economic advantages. The influence on workplace practices is only effective when the business environment is deemed benign and the influence on community practices is dampened by the perception of environmental hostility. Highlighting the trade-off between the manager's personal values and the SME's economic constraints, these findings contribute to a better understanding of the critical antecedents of sustainability in small businesses. (shrink)

The founder of both American pragmatism and semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce is widely regarded as an enormously important and pioneering theorist. In this book, scholars from around the world examine the nature and significance of Peirce’s work on perception, iconicity, and diagrammatic thinking. Abjuring any strict dichotomy between presentational and representational mental activity, Peirce’s theories transform the Aristotelian, Humean, and Kantian paradigms that continue to hold sway today and, in so doing, forge a new path for understanding the centrality of (...) visual thinking in science, education, art, and communication. The essays in this collection cover a wide range of issues related to Peirce’s theories, including the perception of generality; the legacy of ideas being copies of impressions; imagination and its contribution to knowledge; logical graphs, diagrams, and the question of whether their iconicity distinguishes them from other sorts of symbolic notation; how images and diagrams contribute to scientific discovery and make it possible to perceive formal relations; and the importance and danger of using diagrams to convey scientific ideas. This book is a key resource for scholars interested in Perice’s philosophy and its relation to contemporary issues in mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, semiotics, logic, visual thinking, and cognitive science. (shrink)

The theory of rough sets starts with the notion of an approximation space , which is a pair ( U , R ), U being the domain of discourse, and R an equivalence relation on U . R is taken to represent the knowledge base of an agent, and the induced partition reflects a granularity of U that is the result of a lack of complete information about the objects in U . The focus then is on approximations of concepts (...) on the domain, in the context of the granularity. The present article studies the theory in the situation where information is obtained from different sources. The notion of approximation space is extended to define a multiple-source approximation system with distributed knowledge base , which is a tuple , where N is a set of sources and P ranges over all finite subsets of N . Each R P is an equivalence relation on U satisfying some additional conditions, representing the knowledge base of the group P of sources. Thus each finite group of sources and hence individual source perceives the same domain differently (depending on what information the group/individual source has about the domain), and the same concept may then have approximations that differ with the groups. In order to express the notions and properties related with rough set theory in this multiple-source situation, a quantified modal logic LMSAS D is proposed. In LMSAS D , quantification ranges over modalities, making it different from modal predicate logic and modal logic with propositional quantifiers. Some fragments of LMSAS D are discussed and it is shown that the modal system KTB is embedded in LMSAS D . The epistemic logic is also embedded in LMSAS D , and cannot replace the latter to serve our purpose. The relationship of LMSAS D with first and second-order logics is presented. Issues of expressibility, axiomatization and decidability are addressed. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to develop the concept of perceptual relation and to apply it to digital environments. First, the meaning of perceptual relation is phenomenologically analyzed and defined as the interaction between the whole and its parts, which is theorized by the founders of Gestalt psychology. However, this relation is not considered as an intrinsic, but as an extended one, implying also the relation with the surrounding world (Umwelt). Subsequently, this concept of extended relation is applied to (...) a chosen object (a ball) as it is perceived in four different kinds of digital dimensions (on-screen, virtual, augmented, and hybrid). Through a phenomenological analysis, I argue that, whereas the whole-part configuration remains the same, some modes of appearance of the object (multisensoriality, figure-ground interaction, affordances, and persistence) are different. In order to define this dynamic, I have coined the concept of transdimensional analogy. (shrink)

This study focuses on the value of the logical universal in terms of being universal in the philosophy of Avicenna, and al-Ghazālī’s criticisms of Avicenna in the context of the logical universal. A philosophical analysis of al-Ghazālī’s criticisms of Avicenna is made by mentioning how these two thinkers explained the universal and its types, and by revealing the meaning that the universal corresponds to in their thought system. Accordingly, Avicenna talks about three types of universal. The intercourse between (...) these universals is based on an intrinsic relation. The one that determines this kind of relationship and gives a principle has to be an outsider of the universals. According to Avicenna the concept of being determines the meaning of universals and the personal relationship between universal types. In this respect, the rational universal is the reasonable of the universal; the rational universal may be necessary for the logical universal. Therefore, the concept of universal in Avicenna is related to existence. In al-Ghazālī’s thought, we can talk about three types of the universal. He does not name the types of the universal, but distinguishes them by describing them. In his distinction, the concept of partnership is considered in terms of being actual and potential, and being is divided based on these conceptual distinctions. In this respect, we cannot talk about a random distinction between the meaning attributed to universals by Avicenna and by al-Ghazālī but an inherent difference. Based on this separation, al-Ghazālī’s criticisms of Avicenna are also of a essential nature. One of the clearest signs of al-Ghazālī’s criticism of Avicenna lies in the meaning he attributes to the logical universal and the example he gives in the context of the logical universal. al-Ghazālī considers the logical universal as a meaning that does not accept commonality in terms of potential and actual, and attributes the commonality in it to a reason other than what it is. While Avicenna agrees that the meaning that al-Ghazālī’s attributes to the logical universal, saying that it is outside of approval, clearly emphasizes being the subject of conceptualization. al-Ghazālī, on the other hand, ignored this reference of Avicenna and emphasized that Avicenna would accept this, based on the example of “divine/dieu” he gave in the context of the logical universal. However, in Avicenna's philosophical system, it is not possible for the word "divine" to be the subject of imagination, because the “god” is not conceived, but perceived. According to him, the things which are the subjects of imagination potentially contain multiplicity. But the word "god” is not suitable to be the subject of imagination as it is a necessary being. In this respect, it can be analyzed whether al-Ghazālī’s criticisms are austere or nonsense in terms of the five arts (sophistry). The meaning that al-Ghazālī attributed to the logical universal and the examples he gave for this meaning constitute the inherent quality of his criticisms being of the kind of fallacy. (shrink)

The article aims to show that Peirce, after realizing the appropriation that James and others made of Pragmatism, taking it far from an ideal of justice and keeping it in the service of a “nauseating utility”, whose principle was that only individual utility, including spiritual well-being, would be the ultimate goal of all practice, he sought a philosophy that would keep logic and science united in a realistic manner with laws that could be metaphysically real. In this way, he perceived (...) the necessity to transcend the hypothetical considerations incorporated into the sense of the pragmatic maxim, attempting to distance it from nominalist risk. In this process, he took into account two new normative sciences, esthetics and ethics, in addition to logic, so that Pragmaticism, in intelligent criticism, would investigate whether an admirable end of a subject could be pursued in an indefinite and prolonged course of action, without grounding it solely on individual utility, thus replacing the ideal of justice for the renamed Pragmatism, the Pragmaticism. (shrink)

Service failure is almost inevitable with the intensifying competition in the service market and expectation of heterogeneous customers. The customer–firm relationship can significantly influence customers’ subsequent attitudes and behaviors to the service provider when they encounter service failure. This study proposes a theoretical model to examine how customer-perceived dependence affects their forgiveness toward a service failure in attribution logic. According to an experiment with 138 and a survey with 428 commercial bank customers, we used a multivariate approach to validate our (...) model. The results show that relationship-valued dependence leads to external attribution, which is positively related to customer forgiveness. In contrast, switching-cost dependence leads to internal attribution, which is negatively related to customer forgiveness. The relationship length is a relevant contextual factor that acts as a negative moderating factor. Our study contributes to the service recovery literature by elucidating the underlying process of forgiveness with the presence of the customer–firm dependence relationship. (shrink)

The business case for social responsibility is one of the most widely studied topics in the business and society literature that focuses on large firms. This attention is understandable because large firms have an obligation to shareholders who, as commonly assumed, seek to maximize returns on their investments, in turn, pressing corporate managers to show that firms’ expenditures in social engagement would pay off. Small firms, on the other hand, rarely face such pressures, yet the BCSR logic is increasingly applied (...) to small firms as well. Our primary objective in this paper is to examine whether and how much do small firm owners’ perceptions of BCSR affect the firm’s social engagement. In finding a fine-grained answer to those questions, we consider BCSR as a two-dimensional construct consisting of tangible and intangible benefits, and also integrate the BCSR perspective with the slack resource perspective to offer a motivation-capacity lens to examine firm’s social engagement. Drawing on a multi-industry sample of 478 small firms in the US, we find that while small firm owners’ perceptions about potential tangible benefits of social engagement are not related to the firm’s social engagement, perceptions about potential intangible are positively related. Firm's financial performance is also positively related to its social engagement, but there is no interaction between potential benefits and financial performance. This study contributes to an improved understanding about small firms’ social engagement, which still remains an understudied area. Our results are in line with studies which argue that firms’ social engagement is a response to institutional factors. (shrink)

This article demonstrates that Ibn Sīnā’s theory of experience (taǧriba) requires a cross-reference between logic and psychology. Following the Basran linguistic tradition, he paraphrases derived names (ism muštaqq) into the li-x y formula: for example, ʿālim (“knowing”) is paraphrased into lahu ʿilm (“an act of knowing belongs to him”). His theory of experience employs this formula for arranging observed phenomena into a certain form of a syllogism and describing functions of the brain’s inner senses. Ibn Sīnā arranges observed phenomenon into (...) the li-x y formula or the proposition of which a predicate is a derived name of y. Meanwhile, he holds that the sense of recollection is involved in the process of experience. Recollection is an inner sense of the brain, which preserves maʿnā perceived by the sense of estimation. Estimation means to perceive maʿnā (y) that inheres in a subject (x), and to make a judgment about x based on y. Thus, in this process, the analysis of derived names arranges observed phenomena into a rational order, and the inner sense establishes the causation between apprehension and logical assertion. The article concludes by discussing the relation of this philosophy to medicine. (shrink)

This article argues that the notions developed by post-Kleinian object relations psychoanalysis are continuous with a certain British political tradition. British object relations authors think that the healthy personality necessitates a social-democratic political environment. Their ideas follow both historically and logically upon a set of notions about human development that resemble those held by advanced liberals and social democrats since the nineteenth century. Social democracy and advanced liberalism perceive sociability and community as goods that complement traditional liberals? respect (...) for autonomy and individual difference. Much of this outlook evolved from an earlier preoccupation with the exclusive discretion of already-existing individuals over portions of their lives. This concern has been gradually transformed into an interest in enhancing the conditions under which the autonomous personality may form. (shrink)

We are considered to be highly evolved conscious beings, but if we look at ourselves, do we actually feel that we are there; wise men or Homo sapiens as we call ourselves? In today’s world, reward based conditioning forms our contemporary culture that deeply defines how we look at life and how we intuitively perceive our consciousness. Presently, acquisitions are our priority and we behave as narcissistic conditioned puppets and let governments and corporations rule our lives. We are hypocrites that (...) can see, but behave blind; blinded within the realms of our short-termed thrills, joys and beliefs. Augmenting logical questioning and logical conditioning is the only way we can come out of this state that cannot be done individually, it has to be a collective effort. This paper is an attempt to understand our very own evolved consciousness and its relation to the current world with the true meaning of our existence, where we seek to understand it from a logical sense. (shrink)

Nonclassical logics have played an increasing role in recent years in disciplines ranging from mathematics and computer science to linguistics and philosophy. _Generalized Galois Logics_ develops a uniform framework of relational semantics to mediate between logical calculi and their semantics through algebra. This volume addresses normal modal logics such as K and S5, and substructural logics, including relevance logics, linear logic, and Lambek calculi. The authors also treat less-familiar and new logical systems with equal deftness.

An implication relation between pictures is defined, it is then shown how conjunctions, disjunctions, negations, and hypotheticals of pictures can be formed on the basis of this. It is argued that these logical operations on pictures correspond to natural cognitive operations employed when thinking about pictures.

In this paper we study some logics related to the logic of place introduced by von Wright and studied by Segerberg. For every we study the logic of the class of frames whose accessibility relation R satisfies the following condition: if then there is such that . For a fixed the logic is the one axiomatized by K , which we call Kn.4B, where . We prove that these logics are canonical and hence complete, and that they have the finite (...) model property, being thus decidable. We also characterize their classes of frames. In the way of studying them we also study the logics , called Kn.4, and , called Kn.B. A translation between these logics and S5 is also presented, and the relation among them all is established. (shrink)

Cooperative relations steeped in honesty and good faith are a necessity for any viable society. This is especially relevant to the police institution because the police are entrusted to promote justice and security. Despite the necessity of societal honesty and good faith, the police institution has embraced deception, dishonesty, and bad faith as tools of the trade for providing security. In fact, it seems that providing security is impossible without using deception and dishonesty during interrogations, undercover operations, pretextual detentions, (...) and other common scenarios. This presents a paradox related to the erosion of public faith in the police institution and the weakening of the police's legitimacy. -/- The book seeks to solve this puzzle by showing that many of our assumptions about policing and security are unjustified. Specifically, they are unjustified in the way many of our assumptions about security were unjustified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when state institutions embraced a variety of brutal rules and tactics in pursuit of perceived security enhancements. The police are likewise unjustified in their pursuit of many supposed security enhancements that rely on proactive deception, dishonesty, and bad faith. -/- There are compelling reasons to think that the police's widespread use of proactive deception and dishonesty is inconsistent with fundamental norms of political morality regarding fraud and the rule of law. Although there are times and places for such tactics in policing, those times and places should be much more limited than current practices suggest. (shrink)

In this paper the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance is discussed and it is argued why it is of relevance for epistemic logic and social psychology. Roughly put, pluralistic ignorance is the case when a group of interacting agents all experience a discrepancy between their private opinions and the perceived opinions of the others. After introducing the phenomenon, numerous features of pluralistic ignorance that are of interest for epistemic logic and social epistemology, are discussed. This discussion serves two purposes: It recaps (...) the existing research on pluralistic ignorance within epistemic logic and social epistemology, while at the same time stating open problems for social epistemology and epistemic logic that pertains to the study of pluralistic ignorance. Finally, it is argued that the features of pluralistic ignorance of interest to epistemic logic and social epistemology relate to general features of information dynamics in situations of social interaction. (shrink)

The mass media is a major source of health information for the public, and as such the quality and independence of health news reporting is an important concern. Concerns have been expressed that journalists reporting on health are increasingly dependent on their sources—including representatives of industries responsible for manufacturing health-related products—for story ideas and content. Many critics perceive an imbalance of power between journalists and industry sources, with industry being in a position of relative power, however the empirical evidence to (...) support this view is limited. The analysis presented here—which is part of a larger study of industry-journalist relationships—draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with representatives of health-related industries in Australia to inductively examine their perceptions of power relations between industry and journalists. Participants painted a picture in which journalists, rather than themselves, were in a position to control the nature, extent, and outcome of their interactions with industry sources. Our results resonate with the concept of “mediatisation” as it has been applied in the domain of political reporting. It appears that, from the perspective of industry representatives, the imposition of media logic on health-related industries may inappropriately influence the information that the public receives about health-related products. (shrink)

This paper presents the progicnet programme. It proposes a general framework for probabilistic logic that can guide inference based on both logical and probabilistic input. After an introduction to the framework as such, it is illustrated by means of a toy example from psychometrics. It is shown that the framework can accommodate a number of approaches to probabilistic reasoning: Bayesian statistical inference, evidential probability, probabilistic argumentation, and objective Bayesianism. The framework thus provides insight into the relations between these (...) approaches, it illustrates how the results of different approaches can be combined, and it provides a basis for doing efficient inference in each of the approaches. (shrink)

Summary By introducing the concept of “invariants”, Koffka endowed perceptual psychology with a flexible theoretical tool, which is suitable for representing vision situations in which a definite part of the stimulus pattern is relevant but not sufficient to determine a corresponding part of the perceived scene. He characterised his “invariance principle” as a principle conclusively breaking free from the “old constancy hypothesis”, which rigidly surmised point-to-point relations between stimulus and perceptual properties. In this paper, we explain the basic terms (...) and assumptions implicit in Koffka’s concept, by representing them in a set-theoretic framework. Then, we highlight various aspects and implications of the concept in terms of answers to six separate questions: forms of invariants, heuristic paths to them, what is invariant in an invariant, roots of conditional indeterminacy, variability vs. indeterminacy, and overcoming of the indeterminacy. Lastly, we illustrate the lasting value and theoretical power of the concept, by showing that Koffka’s insights relating to it do occur in modern perceptual psychology and by highlighting its role in a model of perceptual transparency. (shrink)

Though scholarship has explored Karin Costelloe-Stephen’s contributions to the history of psychoanalysis, as well as her relations to the Bloomsbury Group, her philosophical work has been almost completely ignored. This paper will examine her debate with Bertrand Russell over his criticism of Bergson. Costelloe-Stephen had employed the terminology of early analytic philosophy in presenting a number of arguments in defence of Bergson’s views. Costelloe-Stephen would object, among other things, to Russell’s use of an experiment which, as she points out, (...) was first conducted by Carl Stumpf. Russell appeals to Stumpf's experiment in his attempt to prove that sense data are terms in logical relations, a thesis presupposed by the project of logical analysis outlined in Our Knowledge of the External World. A reformulated version of Costelloe-Stephen's argument put forth by this paper shows that Russell's argument fails to provide adequate proof for his thesis. Further modifications of the argument can also address a reconstruction (based on contemporary reports) of Russell's reply to Costelloe-Stephen. In his reply, Russell would use, already in 1914, the term ‘analytic philosophy’ in contrasting his and Moore’s approach to a continental one, exemplified by Bergson and Costelloe-Stephen. (shrink)

According to traditional logical expressivism, logical operators allow speakers to explicitly endorse claims that are already implicitly endorsed in their discursive practice — endorsed in virtue of that practice’s having instituted certain logical relations. Here, I propose a different version of logical expressivism, according to which the expressive role of logical operators is explained without invoking logical relations at all, but instead in terms of the expression of discursive-practical attitudes. In defense of (...) this alternative, I present a deflationary account of the expressive role of vocabulary by which we ascribe logical relations. (shrink)

After some generalities about connections between functions and relations in Sections 1 and 2 recalls the possibility of taking the semantic values of ‐ary Boolean connectives as ‐ary relations among truth‐values rather than as ‐ary truth functions. Section 3, the bulk of the paper, looks at correlates of these truth‐value relations as applied to formulas, and explores in a preliminary way how their properties are related to the properties of “logical relations” among formulas such as (...) equivalence, implication (entailment) and contrariety (logical incompatibility), concentrating for illustrative purposes on binary logical relations such as those just listed. To avoid an excess of footnotes, some points have been deferred to an Appendix as “Longer Notes”. (shrink)

Van Fraassen, like Popper before him, assumes that confirmation and disconfirmation relations are logical relations and thus hold only among abstract items. This raises a problem about how experience, for Popper, and observables, for van Fraassen, enter into epistemic evaluations. Each philosopher offers a drastic proposal: Popper holds that basic statements are accepted by convention; van Fraassen introduces his “pragmatic tautology.” Another alternative is to reject the claim that all evaluative relations are logical relations. (...) Ayer proposed this option in responding to Popper, as did Sosa in a different context. I argue that this option should be pursued and propose a line of research that the option suggests.Keywords: Popper; van Fraassen; Representation; Confirmation; Logic; Cognitive abilities. (shrink)

Implicational tonoid logics and their relational semantics have been introduced by Yang and Dunn. This paper extends this investigation to implicational partial Galois logics. For this, we first define some implicational partial gaggle logics as special kinds of implicational tonoid logics called “implicational partial Galois logics.” Next, we provide Routley–Meyer-style relational semantics for finitary those logics.

This note gives a new proof of the 'operational extensionality' property of Abramsky's lazy lambda calculus-namely the coincidence of contextual equivalence with a co-inductively defined notion of 'applicative bisimilarity'. This purely syntactic results is here proved using a logical relation between the syntax and its denotational semantics. The proof exploits a mixed inductive/coinductive characterisation of the logical relation recently discovered by the author.