Vyplývá z bezvadně provedeného důkazu také závazek počítat ve svém dalším rozvažování a jednání s jeho závěrem? V předložené studii se zabývám Hobbesovým Leviathanem coby „literární technologií“, která čtenáře staví do role autora v Leviathanu rozvíjené argumentace. V tomto smyslu kriticky navazuji jednak na interpretaci Hobbesova vědeckého stylu, kterou nabízejí S. Shapin a S. Schaffer, jednak na výklad Q. Skinnera, který se podrobně zabývá Hobbesovou rétorickou praxí. Nabízím tezi, podle níž se Hobbes v kontaktu se svým publikem nespokojuje s předvedením (...) vědeckého důkazu, nýbrž své čtenáře nechává na vytváření vědecké argumentace a jejím závěru osobně participovat. (shrink)

Chapter One: Constructions. Entities, constructions, and functions When one travels from Los Angeles to New York, going, say, by way of St. Louis, Chicago, ...

2 Popper's Logical Definition of Verisimilitude. 3 Popper's Probabilistic Definition of Verisimilitude. 4 Conclusion.

“Eco-labels” are an increasingly important form of private regulation for sustainability in areas such as carbon emissions, water consumption, ethical sourcing, or organic produce. The growing interest and popularity of eco-labels has also been coupled with growing concerns about their credibility, in part because the standard-setting and conformity assessment practices that eco-labels adopt exhibit striking differences. In this paper, we assess which assurance practices contribute to eco-labels being perceived as better governed, in the eyes of experts as well as the (...) media. Unlike previous studies, which are mostly conceptual, qualitative, or focused on one or few eco-labels, we study a large set of eco-labels, combining data from three different sources. Our findings suggest that experts and media are primarily concerned about “re-assurance” practices, looking for one or preferably multiple layers of “re-assurance” that independent parties are overseeing the eco-label and the firms certified under it. (shrink)

The usual account of Auguste Comte, thinker of the “positive” science, overshadows his attention to the “spectacle of destruction”, to which the metaphysical state of human knowledge and humanity offers the stage. I first illustrate the understanding of this Comtian metaphysical state as both a progressive and self-destructive transformation of “theology”, using an example drawn from the history of astronomy. The broader relevance of this conception is then assessed in the field of social philosophy, so that the realm of natural (...) sciences is finally re-examined with the analysis of Comte’s criticisms of the theory of chemical affinity. (shrink)

Buzaglo (as well as Manders (J Philos LXXXVI(10):553–562, 1989)) shows the way in which it is rational even for a realist to consider ‘development of concepts’, and documents the theory by numerous examples from the area of mathematics. A natural question arises: in which way can the phenomenon of expanding mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? But at the same time a more general question can be formulated: in which way do the mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? What I want to (...) show in the present paper can be described as follows. The problem articulated by Buzaglo deserves some semantic refinements. Following explications are needed: What is meaning? (In particular: What are concepts?) What are questions? (Or, equivalently: Semantics of interrogative sentences.) -/- Further, a useful notion will be the notion of problem. Taking over the notion of conceptual system from Materna (Conceptual Systems. Logos, Berlin, 2004) and using Tichý’s Transparent intensional logic (TIL) I can try to solve the problem of the relation between mathematical and empirical concepts (not only for the case of expanding some mathematical concepts). (shrink)

We prove an exponential lower bound on the length of cutting plane proofs. The proof uses an extension of a lower bound for monotone circuits to circuits which compute with real numbers and use nondecreasing functions as gates. The latter result is of independent interest, since, in particular, it implies an exponential lower bound for some arithmetic circuits.

The article offers a rigorous explication of the intuitive notion of verisimilitude, I.E., Of the distance of a theory from the truth. The proposal is defended against charges of material inadequacy made by popper, Niniluoto, And miller.

The paper deals with the semantics of mathematical notation. In arithmetic, for example, the syntactic shape of a formula represents a particular way of specifying, arriving at, or constructing an arithmetical object (that is, a number, a function, or a truth value). A general definition of this sense of "construction" is proposed and compared with related notions, in particular with Frege's concept of "function" and Carnap's concept of "intensional isomorphism." It is argued that constructions constitute the proper subject matter of (...) both logic and mathematics, and that a coherent semantic account of mathematical formulas cannot be given without assuming that they serve as names of constructions. (shrink)

This Festschrift is in honour of Professor Marie Duzí, VSB - Technical University of Ostrava. The 16 contributions, authored by 24 colleagues, run the gamut from foundations in logic and theoretical computer science through philosophical logic, multi-agent systems and theory of communication to personal recollections. Marie Duzí is best known for her profound and extensive work on both the foundations and multiple applications of Transparent Intensional Logic, originally developed by Pavel Tichý in the late 1960s. Her work, whether single-authored (...) or co-authored, has appeared in various high-level journals. In 2008 the Rector of her home university granted Marie the award Outstanding Results in the Development of Science and Research. The 2010 monograph Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic earned Marie and her coauthors the prestigious Award for Outstanding Results of Major Scientific Importance from the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The major achievements of Transparent Intensional Logic that Marie has been involved in over the last decade have been compiled into the volume Transparent Intensional Logic: Selected Recent Essays, also published by College Publications. (shrink)

The article offers a rigorous truth condition for subjunctively conditional statements. The theory is framed in the system of transparent intensional logic and takes connections (especially the cause-Effect relation) as basic. Counterexamples are given to rival theories based on the notion of world similarity.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 219-229.

The article analyzes the aesthetic content of the concept of realism in stylistic, genre and ideological aspects. Guided by the comparative method and a comprehensive approach to the study of the problem, the author declares the a priori avant-garde nature of art and, as a result, the groundlessness of confrontation between realists and avant-gardists. The catharsis achieved by the realism of expressive means should be real. Thus, the author's vision of realism presupposes not so much the harmony of art with (...) the displayed epoch, but rather participation, confession of enduring values, which elevates art above the historical and social context. В статье анализируется эстетическое содержание понятия реализма в стилевом, жанровом и мировоззренческом аспектах. Руководствуясь компаративным методом и комплексным подходом к изучению проблемы, автор декларирует априорную авангардность искусства и, как следствие, беспочвенность конфронтации реалистов и авангардистов. Реальным должен быть катарсис, достигаемый реализмом выразительных средств. Таким образом, авторское ви́дение реализма предполагает не столько созвучие искусства отображаемой эпохе, сколько сопричастность, исповедание непреходящих ценностей, что возвышает искусство над историко-социальным контекстом. (shrink)

Aristotle's notion of experience plays an important role in his epistemology as the link between perception and memory on the one side, and higher cognitive capacities on the other side. However, Aristotle does not say much about it, and what he does say seems inconsistent. Notably, some passages suggest that it is a non-rational capacity, others that it is a rational capacity and that it provides the principles of science. This paper presents a unitary account of experience. It explains how (...) experience grows from perception and memory into a rational capacity, and in what way it provides the principles. (shrink)

It is well known that the manner in which a definitely descriptive term contributes to the meaning of a sentence depends on the place the term occupies in the sentence. A distinction is accordingly drawn between ordinary contexts and contexts variously termed non-referential, intensional, oblique, or opaque. The aim of the present article is to offer a general account of the phenomenon, based on transparent intensional logic. It turns out that on this approach there is no need to say (as (...) Frege does) that descriptive terms are referentially ambiguous or to deny (as Russell does) that descriptive terms represent self-contained units of meaning. There is also no need to tolerate (as Montague does) exceptions to the Principle of Functionality. The notion of an ordinary (i.e., non-intensional) context is explicated exclusively in terms of logical structure and it is argued that two aspects of ordinariness (termed hospitality and exposure) must be distinguished. (shrink)

The authors argue that from the perspective of distributive justice, school district fragmentation—meaning both the existing reality of hyper-proliferated school districts and the practice of further breaking larger districts into smaller ones—produces three distinct injustices. First, it undermines racial solidarity and the bonds of community. Second, it violates the demands of procedural justice. And third, it leads to substantively unfair outcomes. Taken together, these concerns suggest that to create a more just educational system we ought to resist further fragmentation and (...) push for larger, more consolidated school districts coupled with progressive redistributive funding. To support this central normative argument, the article provides two justifications for conceptualizing education as a fundamental entitlement and its provision as a form of mutual aid. (shrink)

Ordinary consciousness is viewed as a variety of practically spiritual attitude to life, as an element of socially-transformational activity in its various manifestations as characteristics of life itself as syncretic phenomenon, performing a function of integral reality mastering on a level of everyday life. Direct contact with life, a pragmatic mood and practical orientation of ordinary consciousness clear up its ontological status and make it possible to speak about its eternal role in the social and private life of man; about (...) relative independence concerning specialized forms and levels of social consciousness, which came out of the ordinaryconsciousness and later separated from it. In the XX century the stake of society on pragmatism of ordinary consciousness while increasing the supremacy of utilitarian relations above human relations (a man becomes one of the material things) against a background of globalization and postmodernism led culture to the spiritual crisis, into the oblivion of spiritual values by contemporary man. Of course, globalization brings a number of advantages creating a sense of identity all over the world. It lowers trade barriers, shipping costs, telecommunication and computing costs, improves communication among peoples. However, there is debate about whether the power of international capital and the supposed homogenization of taste worldwide are good things or not. Globalization imposes a common standard of living on states and peoples, which belittles their cultural and national originality. Such a standard of living (mainly founded on principles of practicism) hinders mankind’s and man’s development. For the collective life is dialectical unity of diversity. The world must be smile and multipolar simultaneously. Unstable equilibrium between the whole and its parts leads to spiritual crisis. The social production of «useful» man closed up practically the possibility of bringing up man as the personality. That is why it so important today to recognize the necessity and possibility of moral and spiritually–religioustransformation of ordinary consciousness. The Eastern Wonder of the XX century (the South Korea, China and Japan) in the sphere of economics is based on the synthesis of national and human laws of being. (shrink)

Kniha obsahuje články, studie, úvahy a memoárové texty, publikované v různých časopisech a sbornících v letech 1971 až 2010.

The paper deals with the etymology of the personal names Qunï Säŋün and Toŋra Simä appearing in the ninth line of the Old Turkic Tonyukuk inscription. These names are borne by the envoys sent by the kagan of the Tokuz Oghuz to the Chinese and Khitan, respectively, to conclude a military alliance against the Turks. Both names have the same structure, a combination of an ethnonym vs. toŋra), referring to a tribal unit within the Tiele 鐵勒 confederation, and a title (...) of Chinese origin. Based on a thorough analysis of historical and philological data, the authors try to establish possible ethnolinguistic grounds for the Tokuz Oghuz mission, which have so far eluded researchers of the inscription and can be fully restored only in the light of the latest discoveries in the history and philology of Inner Asia of the Old Turkic period, e.g., the decipherment of the famous Khüis Tolgoi inscription from Mongolia. (shrink)

Of two false theories, One can be, Intuitively, Closer to the truth than the other. The purpose of the article is to propose a rigorous explication of this intuitive notion.

In this paper we argue that Aristotle operates with a particular theoretical model in his explanation of animal locomotion, what we call the ‘centralized incoming and outgoing motions’ model. We show how the model accommodates more complex cases of animal motion and how it allows Aristotle to preserve the intuition that animals are self-movers, without jeopardizing his arguments for the eternity of motion and the necessary existence of one eternal unmoved mover in Physics VIII. The CIOM model helps to elucidate (...) Aristotle’s two central yet problematic claims, namely that the soul is the efficient cause of animal motion and that it is the internal supporting-point necessary for animal motion. Moreover, the CIOM model helps us to explain the difference between voluntary, involuntary and non-voluntary motions, and to square Aristotle’s cardiocentrism with his hylomorphism, but also, more generally, it provides an interesting way of thinking about the place of intentionality in the causal structure of the world. (shrink)

We give an exponential lower bound on the number of proof-lines in intuitionistic propositional logic, IL, axiomatised in the usual Frege-style fashion; i.e., we give an example of IL-tautologies A1,A2,… s.t. every IL-proof of Ai must have a number of proof-lines exponential in terms of the size of Ai. We show that the results do not apply to the system of classical logic and we obtain an exponential speed-up between classical and intuitionistic logic.

Traxler, Pickering, and Clifton found that ambiguous sentences are read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. This so-called ambiguity advantage has presented a major challenge to classical theories of human sentence comprehension because its most prominent explanation, in the form of the unrestricted race model, assumes that parsing is non-deterministic. Recently, Swets, Desmet, Clifton, and Ferreira have challenged the URM. They argue that readers strategically underspecify the representation of ambiguous sentences to save time, unless disambiguation is required by task demands. When (...) disambiguation is required, however, readers assign sentences full structure—and Swets et al. provide experimental evidence to this end. On the basis of their findings, they argue against the URM and in favor of a model of task-dependent sentence comprehension. We show through simulations that the Swets et al. data do not constitute evidence for task-dependent parsing because they can be explained by the URM. However, we provide decisive evidence from a German self-paced reading study consistent with Swets et al.'s general claim about task-dependent parsing. Specifically, we show that under certain conditions, ambiguous sentences can be read more slowly than their unambiguous counterparts, suggesting that the parser may create several parses, when required. Finally, we present the first quantitative model of task-driven disambiguation that subsumes the URM, and we show that it can explain both Swets et al.'s results and our findings. (shrink)

Jan Patočka’s philosophical development was varied. Over the course of fifty years of philosophizing, he gradually, and to varying degrees, developed close to a dozen systematic projects, whose ambition was, at least initially, to present what he called a “unified philosophy.” However, the dynamism with which he changed his philosophical plans and incessantly embarked on new projects invites the question of how to approach the various and often mutually “contradictory” transformations of his philosophical thinking, if neither the continuity and integrity (...) of Patočka’s thought nor the essential specificity of any of these positions is to be lost. Through the notion of the “personal a priori” found in one of Jan Patočka’s early texts, and in a critical, “overcoming-preserving” reference to two antagonistic conceptions of Patočka’s philosophical development, the article attempts to sketch a solution to this general interpretative problem. In the context of the search for Patočka’s “basic position of seeing” as the integrating framework of his diverse philosophical attempts, it simultaneously reconstructs the early question about the meaning of philosophy in general, which Patočka developed in a series of texts from the 1930s, some of which are still available only in the Czech language. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thomas G. Pavel INCOMPLETE WORLDS, RITUAL EMOTIONS' IN recent years, the notion of "fictional world" has enjoyed a considerable rise in fortune. The expression, however, is not entirely new. To refer to the world of a literary work, of a novel or of a play, has always been a favorite way of speaking for literary critics and aestheticians. In most cases, these were informal worlds. A discussion of (...) the world of Balzac, Dostoyevsky, HenryJames, or Proust often amounts to a description of each author's preferences in die selection and rearrangement of his material. Such discussion primarily fits authors who purposefully attempt to build comprehensive representational artifacts. One speaks quite naturally about l'univers balzacien, or about the universe of Musil. But is one entitled to refer with equal ease to the world ofBenjamin Constant, meagerly perceptible in his Adolphe, a short novel built in the spirit of economy, displaying just a few characters and a minimum of worldly information? Perhaps density and comprehensiveness are not indispensable characteristics of literary worlds. Aestheticians and narratologists using the "fictional worlds" terminology seem to believe mat any kind of artistic text projects a world, be it rich or poor. Such worlds are imagined in the fashion of modern philosophy of logic as states of affairs, more or less comprehensive. Some writers believe that the states of affairs comprised in fictional worlds must be fairly sizable, since diey should include "not only what the author indicates, but also whatever is required (entailed) by that which he indicates." 1 The laws of nature which are not specifically contradicted by the text would belong to its world. Thus, a few notorious cases aside, there is no reason to doubt that every child born in fiction has been engendered by a human fadier as long as the text does not report an exception. And if it does? Then, assuming that the laws of logic still govern if not fiction itself at least our understanding of it, we may appeal to what "possible world" philosophers have called "small miracles." * Editor's note: This article, as well as the contributions by Gerald Prince, Peter van Inwagen, and Kendall Walton which follow it, grew out ofa symposium on "Styles ofFictionality," organized by Professor Pavel and held at Harvard University in 1981. The Fall, 1983 issue of PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE will contain additional papers presented at the symposium. 48 Thomas G. Pavel49 Imagine, for instance, the world in which Notre Dame de Paris would be covered with blue paint. While everything else would preserve the properties it possesses in the actual world, with the laws of nature and the caused chains maintained, a small local change, somewhat miraculous, would modify only the color of the venerable building. Similarly, the world of Balzac may be understood as the world of early and mid-nineteenth-century France, slightly modified by the addition of a few hundred imagined characters. That diese conform surprisingly well to the general laws of French society of the time is so much the goal of Balzac's successful project, that for the sociologically-minded reader die' actual nonexistence of Rastignac, Rubempré, Vautrin, or Birotteau may appear a mere accident. These characters, one may surmise, display every trait that actual counterparts of theirs would possess, except existence. Hence, why would Rastignac's or Vautrin's emergence in a world omerwise identical to nineteenth-century France amount to anydiing more than a "small miracle"? On the other hand, Balzac's world being blessed wim hundreds of such miracles, the very magnitude of the project vindicates the attribute of "visionary," ascribed to Balzac by Béguin, or, if metaphorically undercut, mat of"God the Father" given him by Thibaudet. For, would not such magnitude entail more than just local changes in an otherwise faithful representation of the "actual" nineteenthcentury France? Similarly, would we interpret a fictional world in which a child has been engendered not by a human father, but by a divinity, as identical in all respects to the actual world, except for the limited modification attributed to a small miracle? 2 If we grant for a moment the improbable assumption that nineteenth-century France was a given and that Balzac... (shrink)

We give an exponential lower bound on number of proof-lines in the proof system K of modal logic, i.e., we give an example of K-tautologies ψ₁, ψ₂,... s.t. every K-proof of ψi must have a number of proof-lines exponential in terms of the size of ψi. The result extends, for the same sequence of K-tautologies, to the systems K4, Gödel—Löb's logic, S and S4. We also determine some speed-up relations between different systems of modal logic on formulas of modal-depth one.