This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from this (...) form of doxastic conflict if and only if they are acting virtuously. (shrink)

'Correlations without correlata' is an influential way of thinking of quantum entanglement as a form primitive correlation which nonetheless maintains locality of quantum theory. A number of arguments have sought to suggest that such a view leads either to internal inconsistency or to conflict with the empirical predictions of quantum mechanics. Here wew explicate and provide a partial defence of the notion, arguing that these objections import unwarranted conceptions of correlation properties as hidden variables. A more plausible account sees the (...) properties in terms of Everettian relative states. The ontological robustness of entanglement is also defended from recent objections. (shrink)

In the Foundational Life, philosophy is commonly used as a method for choosing and analyzing fundamental concepts, and mathematics is commonly used for rigorous development. The mathematics informs the philosophy and the philosophy informs the mathematics.

Connie Missimer (1990) challenges what she calls the Character View, according to which critical thinking involves both skill and character, and argues for a rival conception-the Skill View-according to which critical thinking is a matter of skill alone. In this paper I criticize the Skill View and defend the Character View from Missimer's critical arguments.

This article considers the way beneficence was treated in an important journal toward the end of the Old Regime. It finds that the Journal de Paris during the years 1783 and 1784 not only publicized acts of beneficence, but also mediated between members of the public who, on their own initiative, contributed to those in need and officials and organizations which in practice cared for the disadvantaged, especially a committee that freed prisoners for debts to wet nurses and the Société (...) philanthropique of Paris. While the notion of beneficence has sometimes been found to offer a secularized version of the traditional value of charity, this article finds that in practice religious and secular people worked together to support those they deemed worthy of aid. The relation of beneficence to self-interest is also considered, and it is suggested that the initiatives of the better-off members of civil society rather than government opened the way toward something approaching a welfare state. (shrink)

Analysis of Emmy Noether's 1918 theorems provides an illuminating method for testing the consequences of coordinate generality, and for exploring what else must be added to this requirement in order to give general covariance its far-reaching physical significance. The discussion takes us through Noether's first and second theorems, and then a third related theorem due originally to F. Klein. Contact will also be made with the contributions of, principally, J.L. Anderson, A. Trautman, P.A.M. Dirac, R. Torretti and the father of (...) the whole business, A. Einstein. (shrink)

Advocates of naturalized epistemology who wish to secure epistemology’s normativity want that normativity to be restricted to instrumental concerns, because these can be understood naturalistically. But epistemic normativity cannot be so limited; a ‘categorical’ sort of normativity must be acknowledged. Naturalism can neither account for nor do away with this sort of normativity. Hence naturalism is at best a seriously incomplete and therefore inadequate meta-epistemological position.

In this review of Christopher Winch's new book, Education, Autonomy and Critical Thinking (2006), I discuss its main theses, supporting some and criticising others. In particular, I take issue with several of Winch's claims and arguments concerning critical thinking and rationality, and deplore his reliance on what I suggest are problematic strains of the later Wittgenstein. But these criticisms are not such as to upend Winch's powerful critique of antiperfectionism and 'strong autonomy' or his defence of 'weak autonomy'. His account (...) of autonomy as an educational aim is important and in several respects compelling. (shrink)

The cognitive and behavioral functions of the frontal lobes have been of great interest to neuroscientists, neurologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. Recent technical advances have made it possible to trace their neuroanatomical connections more precisely and to conduct evoked potential and neuroimaging studies in patients. This book presents a broad and authoritative synthesis of research progress in this field. It encompasses neuroanatomical studies; experiments involving temporal organization and working memory tasks in non-human primates; clinical studies of patients following frontal lobe excisions (...) for intractable epilepsy; metabolic imaging in schizophrenia and affective disorder; neurobehavioral studies of patients with dementia, frontal lobe tumors, and head injuries; magnetic resonance imaging methods for studying human frontal lobe anatomy; theoretical approaches to describing frontal lobe functions; and rehabilitation of patients with frontal lobe damage including their core problem of diminished awareness. Written by a distinguished group of neuroscientists, psychologists and clinicians, Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction provides the best current source of information on this region of the brain and its role in cognition, behavior and clinical disorders. (shrink)

We study the formalization within sybsystems of second-order arithmetic of theorems concerning periodic points in dynamical systems on the real line. We show that Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in WKL0. We show that, with an additional assumption, Sharkovsky's theorem is provable in RCA0. We show that the existence for all n of n-fold iterates of continuous mappings of the closed unit interval into itself is equivalent to the disjunction of Σ02 induction and weak König's lemma.

In this paper I reply to Stefaan Cuypers' explication and critique of my views on rationality and critical thinking (Cuypers, 2004). While Cuypers' discussion is praiseworthy in several respects, I argue that it (1) mistakenly attributes to me a Humean view of (practical) reason, and (2) unsuccessfully argues that my position lacks the resources required to defend the basic claim that critical thinking is a fundamental educational ideal. Cuypers' analysis raises deep issues about the motivational character of reasons; I briefly (...) address this matter as well. (shrink)

Certainty (and the lack thereof) is a major issue in mathematics and computer science. Mathematicians strongly believe in a special kind of certainty for their theorems.

I am most grateful to the editors of Informal Logic for their willingness to publish my absurdly long paper (Siegel 2023a) in its entirety, and for organizing the four commentaries published along with it. I am grateful as well to Bart Garssen, Andrew Aberdein, Paula Olmos and Christoph Lumer for their insightful and challenging discussions. In what follows I respond to their criticisms and suggestions in the order in which they appear in the journal. Résumé: Je suis très reconnaissant aux (...) éditeurs d’Informal Logic pour leur volonté de publier mon article absurdement long (Siegel 2023a) dans son intégralité et pour avoir organisé les quatre commentaires publiés avec lui. Je suis également reconnaissant à Bart Garssen, Andrew Aberdein, Paula Olmos et Christoph Lumer pour leurs discussions perspicaces et stimulantes. Dans ce qui suit, je réponds à leurs critiques et suggestions dans l’ordre dans lequel elles apparaissent dans la revue. (shrink)

The classical conception of rhetoric as the method of reasoned political judgment survived into the Renaissance but was reduced to academic critiques of style and "empty" public rhetoric with the rise of modern science and its representationalist theories of language. Recently, however, rhetoric, textuality, and the "linguistic turn" generally, have become central metaphors in the human sciences. This renewed rhetorical perspective not only fosters a critique of positive philosophy and of scientism in public discourse, it also offers affirmative methods by (...) which persons can construct their civic lives. (shrink)

MARX’s debt to Aristotle is acknowledged in part 1 of Capital, admittedly the most difficult and, as will be argued, the most fundamental part of his principal work. His principal work is the one which establishes that the labor theory of value holds not only in the state of nature, as for Locke, nor only in primitive society, as for Adam Smith, but also in the highest civilized society and, as against Ricardo, in such a way as to prove that (...) the proletariat is and must be exploited but will and can never exploit. With the analysis and reduction of capital into labor, the possibility of freedom in this new meaning, which is merely asserted in the "humanism" of his earlier writings, is proven and secured with the necessity of science. (shrink)

We give a consistency proof within a weak fragment of arithmetic of elementary algebra and geometry. For this purpose, we use EFA (exponential function arithmetic), and various first order theories of algebraically closed fields and real closed fields.

Each of these theorems and concepts arose from very specific considerations of great general interest in the foundations of mathematics (f.o.m.). They each serve well defined purposes in f.o.m. Naturally, the preferred way to formulate them for mathe-matical logicians is in terms that are close to their roots in f.o.m.

We present several selection theorems for Borel relations, involving only Borel sets and functions, all of which can be obtained as consequences of closely related theorems proved in [DSR 96,99,01,01X] involving coanalytic sets. The relevant proofs given there use substantial set theoretic methods, which were also shown to be necessary. We show that none of our Borel consequences can be proved without substantial set theoretic methods. The results are established for Baire space. We give equivalents of some of the main (...) results for the reals. (shrink)

We have been recently engaged in this search, and have announced a long series of successively simpler and more convincing examples. See [Fr09-10].

This is an immediate conse-quence of a more general combinatorial theorem called Ramsey’s theorem, but it is much simpler to state. We call this adjacent Ramsey theory.

I. WKL0 is a conservative extension of PRA for ’-0-2 sentences. II. ACA0 is a conservative extension of PA for arithmetic sentences. III. ATR0 is a conservative extension of IR for arithmetic sentences. IV. ’-1-1-CA0 is a conservative extension of ID(

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The goal is to show that various exotic prefix classes can be "tamed by large cardinals". I.e., every statement in the class is either provable or refutable using presently formulated large cardinals. Some of these exotic prefix classes consist entirely of explicitly P01 sentences.

New Work on Critical Thinking: Comments on Frímannsson, Holma and Ritola.

Health literacy is a contemporary term used in health services, often used to describe individuals requiring additional support to access, understand and implement health service information. It is used as a measure of self‐efficacy in chronic disease models of care such as the nurse navigator service. The aim of the research was to investigate the concept of health literacy in the nurse navigator service, particularly in relation to the defined role objective of person‐centred care. Fairclough's critical discourse analysis was used (...) to analyse the experiential, relational and expressive elements of texts, investigating the hidden truths which are represented in discourse. Texts from a variety of health service micro‐, meso‐ and macro‐hierarchical sources were selected for analysis using the nurse navigator evaluation data set and other associated texts. Health literacy in the nurse navigator service is a technology of government used to increase participation of individuals in their own health and well‐being. The discourse suggests that health literacy responsibilises both individuals and nurses and is discursively formed within a matrix of rational choice. In this context, health literacy contributes to structural vulnerability. (shrink)

We present some new set and class theoretic independence results from ZFC and NBGC that are particularly simple and close to the primitives of membership and equality. They are shown to be equivalent to familiar small large cardinal hypotheses. We modify these independendent statements in order to give an example of a sentence in set theory with 5 quantifiers which is independent of ZFC. It is known that all 3 quantifier sentences are decided in a weak fragment of ZF without (...) power set. (shrink)

All axiomatizations in sections 1,2,4-8 are in the language L(Î,W) with just Î and the constant symbol W standing for a Subworld. Think of W as yesterday's world, and think of the quantifiers in the theory as ranging over today's world. The philosophy is that since the universe cannot be completed, every time we reflect on the universe and what we have reflected on previously, we obtain a larger universe.

Extrapolating from the work of Mahlo , one can prove that given any pair of countable closed totally bounded subsets of complete separable metric spaces, one subset can be homeomorphically embedded in the other. This sort of topological comparability is reminiscent of the statements concerning comparability of well orderings which Friedman has shown to be equivalent to ATR0 over the weak base system RCA0. The main result of this paper states that topological comparability is also equivalent to ATR0. In Section (...) 1, the pertinent subsystems of second-order arithmetic and results on well orderings are reviewed. Sections 2 and 3 overview the encoding of metric spaces and homeomorphisms in second-order arithmetic. Section 4 contains a proof of the topological comparability result in ATR0. Section 5 contains the reversal, a derivation of ATR0 from the topological comparability result. In Section 6, additional information about the structure of the embeddings is obtained, culminating in an application to closed subsets of the real numbers. (shrink)

Recent studies have characterized R. Hayyim of Volozhin as actively preparing for the messianic redemption. Contrary to this, I maintain that R. Hayyim was concerned with the immediate potential of the world in the context of historical time , rather than with a world-to-come, in the context of messianic time . To R. Hayyim, the existence of the cosmos and the stability of a dynamic life-giving universe are fraught with contingency because of the interdependent organic naturality shared by man and (...) world. This contingency is constant, placing man's conduct as the central determinant of the world's future. R. Hayyim's theory and practice attest to a concern for the immanent and transcendent aspects of this world and for the meanings of our everyday experienced relationship to its variegated pragmata. (shrink)

In a language for arithmetic with a predicate T, intended to mean “ x is the Gödel number of a true sentence”, a set S of axioms and rules of inference has the truth disjunction property if whenever S ⊢ T ∨ T, either S ⊢ T or S ⊢ T. Similarly, S has the truth existence property if whenever S ⊢ ∃χ T ), there is some n such that S ⊢ T ). Continuing previous work, we establish whether (...) these properties hold or fail for a large collection of possible axiomatic systems. (shrink)