Russell’s theory of descriptions in “On Denoting” has long been hailed as a paradigm of the sort of analysis that is constitutiue of philosophical understanding. It is not the only model of logical analysis available to us, however. On Frege’s quite different view, analysis provides not a reduction of some problematic notion to other, unproblematic ones -- as Russell’s analysis does -- but instead a deeper, clearer articulation of the very notion with which we began. (...) This difference, I suggest, is grounded in their two very different conceptions of the nature of language / thought; and it grounds in turn two very different conceptions of the nature of philosophical understanding. (shrink)

Any philosophical method that treats the analysis of the meaning of a sentence or expression in terms of a decomposition into a set of conceptually basic constituent parts must do some theoretical work to explain the puzzles of intensionality. This is because intensional phenomena appear to violate the principle of compositionality, and the assumption of compositionality is the principal justification for thinking that an analysis will reveal the real semantical import of a sentence or expression through a method (...) of decomposition. Accordingly, a natural strategy for dealing with intensionality is to argue that it is really just an isolable, aberrant class of linguistic phenomena that poses no general threat to the thesis that meaning is basically compositional. On the other hand, the later Mohists give us good reason to reject this view. What we learn from them is that there may be basic limitations in any analytical technique that presupposes that meaning is perspicuously represented only when it has been fully decomposed into its constituent parts. The purpose of this paper is to (a) explain why the Mohists found the issue of intensionality to be so important in their investigations of language, and (b) defend the view that Mohist insights reveal basic limitations in any technique of analysis that is uncritically applied with a decompositional approach in mind, as are those that are often pursued in the West in the context of more general epistemological and metaphysical programs. (shrink)

Anselm of Cantorbery wrote Proslogion, where is formulated the famous ‘Unum argumentum’ about the existence of God. This argument was been disputed and criticized by numerous logicians from an extensional view point. The classical predicate logic is not able to give a formal frame to develop an adequate analysis of this argument. According to us, this argument is not an ontological proof; it analyses the meaning of the “quo nihil maius cogitari posit”, a characterization of God, and establish, by (...) absurd, that “quod non posit cogitare non esse” by using the hypothesis: “to think in re” is taller than “to think in solo intelectu”. We discuss this relation and the difference between the meanings of the elementary predicates ‘to be in re’, ‘to be in intellectu’ and ‘to be in solo intellectu’. We propose a new logical approach of this ‘Unum argumentum’ of Anselm by using Curry’s Combinatory Logic. Indeed, Combinatory Logic is an abstract applicative formalism of operators applied to operands; in this formalism, the predicates, viewed as specific operators, can be composed and can be transformed, by an intrinsic way, into more complex predicates, by means of abstract operators, called “combinators”, studied by Combinatory Logic. We show that this formalism is a logical frame where it becomes possible to discuss and to formulate cognitive representations of the meanings of predicates used inside of the ‘Unum argumentum’ and to explain how the argument runs. (shrink)

There are two kinds of logical errors. Either you use a non-valid scheme of an argument or your analysis of the premises is mistaken. No extensional or intensional theory can solve the following problem connected with analyzing NL expressions: The Leibniz principle of substituting identical for identical contains the condition a = b. Extensional as well as intensional systems (at least if intensions are defined as functions from possible worlds) analyzing this condition as formulated in natural language are (...) happy if a is contingently or logically or analytically equivalent with b, while this may be insufficient for applying Leibniz. Examples are adduced that show the absurdity of applying Leibniz in such cases. A following remedy is thinkable: one could try to formulate some axioms or perhaps meta-formulated rules that would eliminate the critical cases. This would mean however that a new theory came into being just to shield us from incorrectly applying Leibniz rule. Instead a procedural analysis of NL expressions is offered that makes it possible to unambiguously determine their sense and so their denotation in such a way that the above mentioned critical cases cannot set in. It is shown that the hyperintensional system defined by Transparent intensional logic is able to generally solve the main problems connected with using NL expressions. (shrink)

The mind-body problem is—despite appearances—still the inevitable basic issue of unending discussions in recent philosophy. Various types of epistemologies and metaphysics, European and American, have offered their widely divergent “solutions” of the dreaded Cartesian tangle. Is there any hope of reaching a universally acceptable view?

The aim of this paper will be to show how significant the logical theories of judgement which were worked out at the end of the nineteenth century have been for the ontological thought during the twentieth century. Against the classical - Aristotelian and Scholastic - analysis of predicative judgement, Franz Brentano on one hand and Gottlob Frege on the other hand have leveled two different criticisms, which then generated two radically divergent ontological paradigms. On one side, despite Brentano’s (...) own nominalistic stands, there was a tremendous extension of the general category of “object” as well as of the notion of “being” with, as a consequence, the exceptionnally luxuriant ontologies of Brentano’s heirs. On the other side, notwithstanding Frege’s own Platonistic affinities, there was a drastic deflation of the realm of objects to the benefit of the realm of concepts taken as classifying functions, and therefore a strong nominalistic trend among Frege’s heirs. The development of quantified modal logics at the middle of twentieth century however forced contemporary ontology to reconsider this simple alternative in order to give place to some hybrid entities such as individual concepts or other kinds of “intensional objects”. (shrink)

The primary aim is the reconstruction of the main argument of the second chapter of Anselm’s Proslogion. To be proved is the statement that God, or something than which nothing greater can be thought, exists in reality. I proceed by a piecemeal analysis of every sentence of the Latin original and its subsequent translation into a formal second-order language with choice operator. Reconstructing Anselm’s reasoning demands interpretative input and additions. For example, the formula ‘quod maius est’ has to be (...) suitably interpreted and expanded. Furthermore, I try to explicate Anselm’s maius predicate in terms of a perfection predicate and to develop a general proof for Anselm’s theorem, i.e. the statement that something/that than which something greater cannot be thought has all greater-making attributes. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 2, Page 107-129, April 2022.

This article proposes the use of temporal logic for an analysis of instrumentality inspired by the work of G.H. von Wright. The first part of the article contains the philosophical foundations. We discuss von Wright’s general theory of agency and his account of instrumentality. Moreover, we propose several refinements to this framework via rigorous definitions of the core notions involved. In the second part, we develop a logical system called Temporal Logic of Action and Expectations (TLAE). The logic (...) is inspired by a fragment of propositional dynamic logic based on indeterministic time. The system is proven to be weakly complete relative to its given semantics. We then employ TLAE to formalise and analyse the instrumentality relations defined in the first part of the paper. Last, we point out philosophical implications and possible extensions of our work. (shrink)

Excerpt from Primer of Logical Analysis: For the Use of Composition Students To be sure, then, that we understand a sentence, we must be able to say, when any new and equally well-understood sentence is put beside the first, whether the new sentence is in meaning equivalent to the first, or consistent with the first, or deducible from the first, or opposed to the first. Yet other questions may be asked about the relative force of two sentences; but (...) these are enough for the present. Let us explain what we mean by them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between commitment and obligation from a logical viewpoint. The principle of commitment implying obligation is proven in a specific logic of action preference which is a generalization of Meyer 's dynamic deontic logic. In the proposed formalism, an agent's commitment to goals is considered as a special kind of action which can change one's deontic preference andone's obligation to take some action is based on the preference and the effects of the action. (...) In this logic, it is shown that an agent has the obligation to take any action which is necessary for achieving as many committed goals as possible. The semantics of our logic is based on the possible world models for the dynamic logic of actions. A binary preference relation between possible worlds is associated with the model. Then the preference between actions are determined by comparing that of their consequences. According to the semantics, while the preference will influence the agent's choice of action, commitment is a kind of action that will change the agent's preference. Thus we can show how obligations arise from commitments via updating of deontic preference. The integrated semantics make it possible to express and reason about the mutual relationship among these mental attitudes in a common logic. (shrink)

In theology, by W.L. Rowe.--Divine foreknowledge and human freedom, by A. Kenny.--Some puzzles concerning omnipotence, by G.I. Mavrodes.--The paradox of the stone, by C.W. Savage.--Creation ex nihilo, by J. Donnelly.--The miraculous, by R.F. Holland.--On miracles, by P.J. Dietl.--The tacit structure of religious knowing, by J.H. Gill.--On the observability of the self, by R.M. Chisholm.--Re-examining Kierkegaard's "Teleological suspension of the ethical," by J. Donnelly.

This article offers a logical analysis of Slippery Slope Arguments. Such arguments claim that adopting a certain act or policy would take us down a slippery slope to an undesirable bottom and infer from this that we should refrain from this act or policy. Even though a logical assessment of such arguments has not received much careful attention, it is of vital importance to their overall assessment because if the premises fail to support the conclusion an argument (...) is worthless. I partition slippery slope reasoning by means of two dichotomies (reasoning under certainty vs. uncertainty and one-step vs. multiple-step reasoning) into four general categories and evaluate these in turn. The analysis reveals that slippery slope arguments are logically fallacious. (shrink)

Cognitive, or knowledge, agents, who are in some way aware of describing their own view of the world (based on their mental concepts), need to become concerned with the expressions of their own conceptions. My main supposition is that agents’ conceptions are mainly expressed in the form of linguistic expressions that are spoken, written, and represented based on e.g. letters, numbers, or symbols. This research especially focuses on symbolic conceptions (that are agents’ conceptions that are manifested in the form of (...) their symbols). I attempt to logically (and using ????LSYM) analyse symbolic conceptions in terminological systems. ????LSYM is an assertional fragment of my developed Conception Language (????L), which is utilised as a formal-logical system for representing and explicating agents’ conceptions of the world. Keywords: assertional logic; cognitive agent; knowledge agent; conception language; conception; symbol; symbolic conception. (shrink)

The present article proposes an Informational-Theoretic interpretation of logical analysis applied to natural language in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Natural language is characterized by descriptive definitions in order to compress information according to empirical regularities. However, notations fitted to empirical patterns do not explicitly reflect the logical structure of language that enables it to represent those very patterns. I argue that logical analysis is the process of obtaining incompressible and uniformly distributed codes, best fitted to express the (...) possible combinations of facts instead of eventual empirical regularities. That implies mutual translatability between different representations of the same facts, which justifies the possibility to decompose natural language and to rebuild it in mathematized ideographical languages, such as physics. Logical analysis decomposition process, then, results in a reductionism that sets the basis for conceptions of logic and language not only in Tractatus, but also in Some Remarks on Logical Form, which, in turn, is shown to be unattainable in Philosophical Remarks. That posterior book introduces a fragmentation of linguistic systems and analytical methods that can no longer be interpreted under computation theory alone. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive account of logic that addresses fundamental issues concerning the nature and foundations of the discipline. The authors claim that these foundations can not only be established without the need for strong metaphysical assumptions, but also without hypostasizing logical forms as specific entities. They present a systematic argument that the primary subject matter of logic is our linguistic interaction rather than our private reasoning and it is thus misleading to see logic as revealing "the laws (...) of thought". In this sense, fundamental logical laws are implicit to our "language games" and are thus more similar to social norms than to the laws of nature. Peregrin and Svoboda also show that logical theories, despite the fact that they rely on rules implicit to our actual linguistic practice, firm up these rules and make them explicit. By carefully scrutinizing the project of logical analysis, the authors demonstrate that logical rules can be best seen as products of the so called reflective equilibrium. They suggest that we can profit from viewing languages as "inferential landscapes" and logicians as "geographers" who map them and try to pave safe routes through them. This book is an essential resource for scholars and researchers engaged with the foundations of logical theories and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Husserl and Frege on the analysis of the concept of number and primitive logical concepts.

Hintikka and Sandu’s independence-friendly logic is a conservative extension of first-order logic that allows one to consider semantic games with imperfect information. In the present article, we first show how several variants of the Monty Hall problem can be modeled as semantic games for IF sentences. In the process, we extend IF logic to include semantic games with chance moves and dub this extension stochastic IF logic. Finally, we use stochastic IF logic to analyze the Sleeping Beauty problem, leading to (...) the conclusion that the thirders are correct while identifying the main error in the halfers’ argument. (shrink)

SummaryCarnap tried to overcome metaphysics through a distinction between empirical and conceptual truths. The distinction has since been challenged, but not on the basis of a systematic logical analysis of language. It is suggested here that the logical theory of identifiability based on the author's interrogative model will provide the tools for such a systematic analysis. As an example of what the model can do, a criticism is offered of Quine's and Chomsky's implicit assumption that language (...) learning is based on atomistic “answers” .RésuméCarnap a essayé de dépasser la métaphysique par une distinction entre des vérités empiriques et des vérités conceptuelles. Cette distinction a ensuite été contestée, mais non sur la base ?une analyse systematique du langage. On suggére ici que la théorie logique de ľidentifiabilité basée sur le modéle interrogatif de ľauteur fournira les outils ?une telle analyse systématique. Comme exemple de ce que peut faire ce modéle, on présente une critique de la supposition implicite de Quine et de Chomsky selon laquelle ľapprentissage du langage repose sur des ≫réponses≪ atomiques .ZusammenfassungCarnap versuchte Metaphysik durch eine Unterscheidung zwischen empirischen und konzep‐tuellen Wahrheiten zu iiberwinden. Seither wurde die Unterscheidung immer wieder angegriffen, jedoch nicht auf der Basis einer systematischen logischen Analyse der Sprache. In vorliegendem Artikel wird vorgeschlagen, dass eine logische Theorie der Identifizierbarkeit, welche auf dem Frage‐Antwort‐Modell des Autors grilndet, die Instrumente fur eine solche logische Analyse bereitstellt. Als Beispiel dafiir, was das Modell leisten kann, dient eine Kritik an Quines und Chomskys impliziter Voraussetzung, dass das Erlernen von Sprache auf atomaren ≫Antworten≪ aufbaut. (shrink)

Peirce considered the principal business of logic to be the analysis of reasoning. He argued that the diagrammatic system of Existential Graphs, which he had invented in 1896, carries the logical analysis of reasoning to the furthest point possible. The present paper investigates the analytic virtues of the Alpha part of the system, which corresponds to the sentential calculus. We examine Peirce’s proposal that the relation of illation is the primitive relation of logic and defend the view (...) that this idea constitutes the fundamental motive of philosophy of notation both in algebraic and graphical logic. We explain how in his algebras and graphs Peirce arrived at a unifying notation for logical constants that represent both truth-function and scope. Finally, we show that Shin’s argument for multiple readings of Alpha graphs is circular. (shrink)

The debate between Zhuangzi and Huizi has profound epistemological significance, however, the main body of their debate comprises logical inferences and refutations. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the logical aspects of the debate. Some scholars have suggested that Huizi’s argument is self-contradictory; however, in fact, based on such evaluations of Huizi’s argument, we can conclude that Zhuangzi’s logic is also self-contradictory. By utilizing modern logical analysis tools, this study reveals what and how the propositions and (...) inferences contained in the language of the debate are articulated accurately and strictly. Moreover, by elaborating on the implicit premises omitted by Zhuangzi and Huizi, the actual logical process of the debate can be restored, and the logical fallacy of clandestine change of argumentative issue are revealed. This study presents clear modern logic analysis of the debate; it can also provide a more reliable logical basis for the discussions of Zhuangzi and Huizi’s related philosophical thoughts. (shrink)