Rappe, Sara L. “Socrates and Self- knowledge” .

_Highlights innovative partnership practices that help create educational opportunities for students in rural schools across the United States._ As editors Sara L. Hartman and Bob Klein acknowledge, rural places have long experienced systemic inequities that decrease rural students' access to education, yet many rural schools and communities have found creative means to make up for the dearth of outside resources. _The Middle of Somewhere_ brings to light a wide variety of partnerships that have been forged between K–12 schools, communities, (...) and postsecondary institutions to improve educational access. The book showcases collaborations that address three different areas of need: partnerships that prepare and support teacher candidates and educators who work in rural areas; partnerships that extend the work of rural education networks; and partnerships that promote equity, justice, and inclusion within rural populations. Using case studies of rural educational partnerships from communities across the United States, the book's contributors share their experiences of how strong partnerships have formed both organically and through thoughtful and intentional planning, and they recommend supportive strategies for their development and sustainment. The contributors also explore the many ways in which university–school–community partnerships incubate solutions to challenges common to rural education systems, such as access to STEM education and higher education. The programs featured here may serve as replicable models for practitioners, researchers, and policy makers who want to enrich the experiences of children in their schools and communities. (shrink)

We present Prior's discussion of a puzzle about valditity found in the writings of the fourteenth-century French logician Jean Buridan and show how Prior's study of this puzzle may have provided the conceptual inspiration for his development of hybrid logic.

The struggle to delineate the relationship between theology and logic flourished in the thirteenth century and culminated in two condemnations in early 1277, one in Paris and the other in Oxford. To see how much and what kind of effect ecclesiastical actions such as condemnations and prohibitions to teach had on the development of logic in the Middle Ages, we investigate the events leading up to the 1277 actions, the condemned propositions, and the parts of these condemnations connected to modal (...) and temporal logic specifically. We show that because of the specific motivations late thirteenth-century and fourteenth-century logicians had when working in modal and temporal logic, the effect of the 1277 condemnations on the development of those branches was much smaller than might have been supposed. (shrink)

Temporal logic as a modern discipline is separate from classical logic; it is seen as an addition or expansion of the more basic propositional and predicate logics. This approach is in contrast with logic in the Middle Ages, which was primarily intended as a tool for the analysis of natural language. Because all natural language sentences have tensed verbs, medieval logic is inherently a temporal logic. This fact is most clearly exemplified in medieval theories of supposition. As a case study, (...) we look at the supposition theory of Lambert of Lagny, extracting from it a temporal logic and providing a formalization of that logic. (shrink)

Background Families whose child has unexplained intellectual or developmental differences often hope that a genetic diagnosis will lower barriers to community-based therapeutic and support services. However, there is little known about efforts to mobilize genetic information outside the clinic or how socioeconomic disadvantage shapes and constrains outcomes.Methods We conducted an ethnographic study with predominantly socioeconomically disadvantaged families enrolled in a multi-year genomics research study, including clinic observations and in-depth interviews in English and Spanish at multiple time points. Coding and thematic (...) development were used to collaboratively interpret fieldnotes and transcripts.Results Thirty-two families participated. Themes included familial expectations that a genetic diagnosis could be translated into information, understanding, and assistance to improve the quality of a child’s day-to-day life. After sequencing, however, genetic information was not readily converted into improved access to services beyond the clinic, with families often struggling to use a genetic diagnosis to advocate for their child.Conclusion Families’ ability to use a genetic diagnosis as an effective advocacy tool beyond the clinic was limited by the knowledge and resources available to them, and by the eligibility criteria used by therapeutic service providers’ – which focused on clinical diagnosis and functional criteria more than etiologic information. All families undertaking genomic testing, particularly those who are disadvantaged, need additional support to understand the limits and potential benefits of genetic information beyond the clinic. (shrink)

We are all familiar with the old adage that hard cases make for bad law. This symposium riffs off that idea to inquire whether soft law can make for ethical lawyering? To interrogate this q...

The medieval distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic words is usually given as the distinction between words which have signification or meaning in isolation from other words and those which have signification only when combined with other words . Some words, however, are classified as both categorematic and syncategorematic. One such word is Latin infinita ‘infinite’. Because infinita can be either categorematic or syncategorematic, it is possible to form sophisms using infinita whose solutions turn on the distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic (...) uses of infinita. As a result, medieval logicians were interested in identifying correct logical rules governing the categorematic and syncategorematic uses of the term. In this paper, we look at 13th–15th-century logical discussions of infinita used syncategorematically and categorematically. We also relate the distinction to other medieval distinctions with which it has often been conflated in modern times, and show how and where these conflations go wrong. (shrink)

Many authors argue that middle-class lesbians present themselves as butch or fem less than working-class lesbians and that butch and fem were discouraged by 1970s feminist stigma but are reemerging in postfeminist decades. By analyzing “women seeking women” personal ads, this study provides a longitudinal, quantitative analysis of the validity of these assumptions. The results suggest that middle-class lesbians were less likely to present themselves as butch or fem than working-class lesbians but no less likely to be seeking a butch (...) or fem partner. Also, butch and fem were found to be much more prevalent in the 1990s than in the 1970s or 1980s. Generational cohorts of lesbians based on feminist political ideologies about butch and fem were not found. Prevailing cultural norms within lesbian communities appear to affect all lesbians in an era. (shrink)

The current trend in knowledge revision in the Dynamic Epistemic Logic tradition focuses on the addition of new knowledge, rather than the possibility of losing knowledge. Yet there are natural situations, such as an agent who does not want another agent to know that she knows a certain piece of information, where there is a need to be able to model the retraction of a proposition from a knowledge base. One situation where this is systematically required is the variant of (...) the medieval theory of obligationes known as dubitatio, where one of the agents in the dialogue is obliged to hold the initial proposition, the dubitatum, as doubtful, regardless of what other propositions she may concede or deny during the disputation. In this paper, we use dubitatio as a motivation for studying deceitful agents, and we discuss various ways that an agent can move from a model where f is known to one where f is not known. (shrink)

In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Diodoros Chronos gave a temporal definition of necessity. Because it connects modality and temporality, this definition is of interest to philosophers working within branching time or branching space-time models. This definition of necessity can be formalized and treated within a logical framework. We give a survey of the several known modal and temporal logics of abstract space-time structures based on the real numbers and the integers, considering three different accessibility relations between spatio-temporal (...) points. (shrink)

There has been a long history of tension between feminists and feminist philosophy, on the one hand, and logic, on the other hand. This tension expresses itself in many ways, including claims that logic is a tool of the patriarchy, that logic/rationality/analytical tools in philosophy need to be rejected if women are to fully participate, that women = body and man = mind, that to do feminist philosophy one must do it as a situated, embodied person, not as an impersonal, (...) disembodied mind, that logic is “a masculine subject”. However the tension is expressed, it is women in logic and women logicians who are caught in between. The goal of my paper is to explore a conception of logic that not only is not inconsistent with being a feminist, but is actively welcoming of women as logicians. (shrink)

Although rhetoric is not a category of ancient Indian philosophy, this paper argues that Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla, 2 eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosophers, can nonetheless be seen to embrace a rhetorical conception of rationality. That is, while these thinkers are strong proponents of rational analysis and philosophical argumentation as tools for attaining certainty, they also uphold the contingent nature of all such processes. Drawing on the categories of the New Rhetoric, this paper argues that these Buddhist thinkers understand philosophical argumentation to (...) be directed at a universal audience of rational beings, where this universal audience is not an actual audience but a rhetorical one constructed through the author’s particular and historically contingent conception of what counts as rational. A reception theory of rationality is one that holds that the rationality of an argument depends upon its acceptance by a rational audience. When philosophers recognize the historically contingent nature of what counts as rational, they can embrace a reception theory of rationality that neither reduces the rational to mere opinion nor restricts it to a single, absolute, and timeless standard. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the suitability of modern interval-based temporal logic for modeling John Buridan’s treatment of tensed sentences in his Sophismata. Building on the paper, we develop Buridan’s analysis of temporal logic, paying particular attention to his notions of negation and the absolute/relative nature of the future and the past.We introduce a number of standard modern propositional interval temporal logics to illustrate where Buridan’s interval-based temporal analysis differs from the standard modern approaches. We give formal proofs of (...) some claims in, and sketch how the standard modern systems could be defined in terms of Buridan’s proposals, showing that his logic can be taken as more basic. In diesem Aufsatz betrachten wir das Geeignetsein einer modernen intervallbasierten temporalen Logik für die Modellierung von John Buridans Behandlung zeitabhängiger Sätze in seinen Sophismata. Aufbauend auf den Aufsatz stellen wir Buridans Analyse der temporalen Logik dar, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Begriffe der Negation und der absoluten/relativen Natur der Zukunft und der Vergangenheit. Wir führen einige standardmäßige moderne intervallbasierte temporale Aussagenlogiken ein, um zu illustrieren, wo Buridans intervallbasierte temporale Analyse von den standardmäßigen modernen Zugangsweisen abweicht. Wir geben formale Beweise einiger Behauptungen in an und skizzieren, wie die standardmäßigen modernen Systeme im Sinne der Vorschläge Buridans definiert werden könnten; wir zeigen damit, dass seine Logik als die grundlegendere aufgefasst werden kann. (shrink)

Christine Ladd-Franklin is often hailed as a guiding star in the history of women in logic—not only did she study under C. S. Peirce and was one of the first women to receive a PhD from Johns Hopkins, she also, according to many modern commentators, solved a logical problem which had plagued the field of syllogisms since Aristotle. In this paper, we revisit this claim, posing and answering two distinct questions: Which logical problem did Ladd-Franklin solve in her thesis, and (...) which problem did she think she solved? We show that in neither case is the answer “a long-standing problem due to Aristotle.” Instead, what Ladd-Franklin solved was a problem due to Jevons that was first articulated in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In 1672 John Eliot, English Puritan educator and missionary to New England, published The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to initiate the INDIANS in the knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to know how to make use thereof (Eliot 1672) The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof, Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson]. This roughly 80 page pamphlet introduces syllogistic vocabulary and reasoning (...) so that syllogisms can be created from Biblical texts. The use of logic for proselytizing purposes is not distinctive: What is distinctive about Eliot's book is that it is bilingual, written in both English and Massachusett (Wôpanâak), an Algonquian language spoken in eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. It is one of the earliest bilingual logic textbooks and it is the first, and perhaps only, textbook in an indigenous American language.In this paper, we (1) introduce John Eliot and the linguistic context he was working in; (2) introduce the contents of the Logick Primer – vocabulary, inference patterns, and applications; (3) discuss notions of ‘Puritan’ logic that inform this primer; and (4) address the importance of his work in documenting and expanding the Massachusett language and the problems that accompany his colonial approach to this work. (shrink)

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior's research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be (...) familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior's work in ancient and medieval logic. (shrink)

We argue that Kraay's "theistic multiverse" response to the objections to theism [Kraay 2011] is unsuccessful as it simply shifts the problems leveled against theism from the level of possible worlds to the level of possible universes. Furthermore, when we restate the objections at the level of possible universes, we can show how Kraay's conclusion about the uniqueness of the theistic multiverse is undermined.

Recently logic has shifted emphasis from static systems developed for purely theoretical reasons to dynamic systems designed for application to real world situations. The emphasis on the applied aspects of logic and reasoning means that logic has become a pragmatic tool, to be judged against the backdrop of a particular application. This shift in emphasis is, however, not new. A similar shift towards “interactive logic” occurred in the high Middle Ages. We provide a number of different examples of “interactive logic” (...) in the Middle Ages, all species of the disputation game obligatio. These games display a recognition of the importance of interaction in logical contexts and the way that interactive logic differs from single-agent inference. (shrink)

The great Buddhist writer Santaraksita (725-88) was central to the Buddhist traditions spread into Tibet. He and his disciple Kamalasila were among the most influential thinkers in classical India. They debated ideas not only within the Buddhist tradition but also with exegetes of other Indian religions, and they both traveled and nurtured Buddhism in Tibet during its infancy there. Their views, however, have been notoriously hard to classify. The present volume examines Santaraksita's encyclopedic Tattvasamgraha and Kamalasila's detailed commentary on that (...) text in his Panjika, two works that have historically been presented together. The works cover all conceivable problems in Buddhist thought and portray Buddhism as a supremely rational faith. One hotly debated topic of their time was omniscience -- infinite, all-compassing knowledge -- whether it was possible and whether one could defensibly claim it as a quality of the Buddha. (shrink)

Formal dialogue systems model rule-based interaction between agents and as such have multiple applications in multi-agent systems and AI more generally. Their conceptual roots are in formal theories of natural argumentation, of which Hamblin’s formal systems of argumentation in Hamblin (Fallacies. Methuen, London, 1970, Theoria 37:130–135, 1971) are some of the earliest examples. Hamblin cites the medieval theory of obligationes as inspiration for his development of formal argumentation. In an obligatio, two agents, the Opponent and the Respondent, engage in an (...) alternating-move dialogue, where the Respondent’s actions are governed by certain rules, and the goal of the dialogue is establishing the consistency of a proposition. We implement obligationes in the formal dialogue system framework of Prakken (Knowl Eng Rev 21(2):163–188, 2006) using Dynamic Epistemic Logic (van Ditmarsch et al. in Dynamic epistemic logic, Synthese Library Series. Springer, Berlin, 2007). The result is a new type of inter-agent dialogue, for consistency-checking, and analyzing obligationes in this way also sheds light on interpretational and historical questions concerning their use and purpose in medieval academia. (shrink)

In ‘Logical Consequence (Slight Return)’, Gillian Russell asks ‘What is logical consequence?’, a question which has vexed logicians since at least the twelfth century, when people first began to wonder what it meant for one sentence (or proposition) to follow from another sentence (or proposition, or set of sentences, or set of propositions), or whether it was possible to put down rules determining when the relation of ‘follows from’ (or ‘is antecedent to’) holds. Her aim is threefold: (1) to explain (...) what an answer to the question ‘What is logical consequence?’ would need to be able to do in order to be a satisfying answer; (2) to identify previous answers to the question; and (3) to demonstrate why these previous answers are inadequate to do what the answer needs to be able to do, and to offer a new answer. In the present paper, I respond to these aims in two ways. The first is to say something about where Russell’s central question even comes from, because this is not a topic that is often discussed by twentieth- and twenty-first-century logicians, and even historians of logic tend to not have had much to say about when—and why—this question even comes about in the first place. The second is to evaluate the accounts proposed and discussed by Russell, including her new proposal. In the end, I will argue that she has reached the right account of the nature of logical consequence, but not necessarily for the right reasons. (shrink)

In 1672 John Eliot, English Puritan educator and missionary to New England, published The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to initiate the INDIANS in the knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to know how to make use thereof (Eliot 1672) The Logick Primer: Some Logical Notions to Initiate the INDIANS in the Knowledge of the Rule of Reason; and to Know How to Make Use Thereof, Cambridge, MA: Marmaduke Johnson]. This roughly 80 page pamphlet introduces syllogistic vocabulary and reasoning (...) so that syllogisms can be created from Biblical texts. The use of logic for proselytizing purposes is not distinctive: What is distinctive about Eliot's book is that it is bilingual, written in both English and Massachusett (Wôpanâak), an Algonquian language spoken in eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. It is one of the earliest bilingual logic textbooks and it is the first, and perhaps only, textbook in an indigenous American language.In this paper, we (1) introduce John Eliot and the linguistic context he was working in; (2) introduce the contents of the Logick Primer – vocabulary, inference patterns, and applications; (3) discuss notions of ‘Puritan’ logic that inform this primer; and (4) address the importance of his work in documenting and expanding the Massachusett language and the problems that accompany his colonial approach to this work. (shrink)

In, Kosterec attempts to provide ``model-theoretic proofs'' of certain theses involving the normal modal operators $\Diamond$ and $\square$ and the truth-in-fiction operator $F$ which he then goes on to show have counterexamples in Kripke models. He concludes from this that the embedding of modal logic under the truth-in-fiction operator is unsound. We show instead that it is the ``model-theoretic proofs'' that are themselves unsound, involving illicit substitution, a subtle error that nevertheless allows us to draw an important conclusion about intensional (...) contexts and semantic equivalences. (shrink)

Dialogue semantics for logic are two-player logic games between a Proponent who puts forward a logical formula φ as valid or true and an Opponent who disputes this. An advantage of the dialogical approach is that it is a uniform framework from which different logics can be obtained through only small variations of the basic rules. We introduce the composition problem for dialogue games as the problem of resolving, for a set S of rules for dialogue games, whether the set (...) of S-dialogically valid formulas is closed under modus ponens. Solving the composition problem is fundamental for the dialogical approach to logic; despite its simplicity, it often requires an indirect solution with the help of significant logical machinery such as cut-elimination. Direct solutions to the composition problem can, however, sometimes be had. As an example, we give a set N of dialogue rules which is well-justified from the dialogical point of view, but whose set N of dialogically valid formulas is both non-trivial and non-standard. We prove that the composition problem for N can be solved directly, and introduce a tableaux system for N. (shrink)