The use of circumscription for formalizing commonsense knowledge and reasoning requires that a circumscription policy be selected for each particular application: we should specify which predicates are circumscribed, which predicates and functions are allowed to vary, and what priorities between the circumscribed predicates are established. The circumscription policy is usually described either informally or using suitable metamathematical notation. In this paper we propose a simple and general formalism which permits describing circumscription policies by axioms, included in the knowledge base along (...) with the axioms describing the objects of reasoning. The new formalism is illustrated by recasting some of the familiar applications of circumscription in its terms. (shrink)

According to one influential argument put forward by, e.g. Chisholm and Feehan, Pfister, Meibauer, Dynel, Keiser, and Harris, asserting requires intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say (first premise) and, because liars must assert what they believe is false (second premise), liars necessarily intend to cause their hearer to believe as true what the liars believe is false (conclusion). According to this argument, that is, all genuine lies are intended to deceive. ‘Lies’ not intended to (...) deceive are not genuine lies because they do not involve assertions and you need to assert in order to lie. In this paper, I reject this argument by arguing that the first premise is false: intending to give your hearer a reason to believe what you say is not necessary for asserting. (shrink)

The article takes under consideration three versions of the ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics and discusses the interconnection of these interpretations with the philosophy of science. To emphasize the specifics of the problem of interpretation of quantum mechanics in the USSR, the Marxist ideology is taken into account. The present paper continues the author’s previous analysis of ensemble interpretations which emerged in the USA and USSR in the first half of the 20th century. The author emphasizes that the ensemble approach (...) turned out to be a dead end for the development of the interpretation of quantum mechanics in Russia. The article also argues that in Soviet Russia, the classical Copenhagen approach to quantum mechanics was used. The Copenhagen approach was developed by Lev Landau in 1919–1931 and became the basis of the Landau-Lifshitz famous course on quantum mechanics, one of the classics of twentieth-century physics literature. Although Vladimir A. Fock’s approach to the interpretation of quantum mechanics differs from the standard presentation by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz, Fock put forward a very important principle that complementarity is a “firmly established law of nature”. The fundamental writings of Lev Landau, Vladimir Fock and Igor Tamm, the authors of the mid-twentieth century, did a lot to defend the standard point of view such as the popular interpretations by Landau and Lifshitz. This approach can be traced back to Landau’s early writings and to Fock’s criticism of the ensemble approach. (shrink)

Determinism is usually understood as a commonly clear and obvious thesis. In the most of the actual literature a character of determinism is rarely enough explicitly underlined and we believe that it is the reason why common uses of the term often leads to inconsistencies and present a source of misunderstandings of different sorts. Here we will try to show that that there are many forms of determinism; that the concept of determinism has a composite character; and that conceptions of (...) determinism can be mutually discriminated and organized according to particular elements they are consisting of by applying the procedure of classification. (shrink)

In the opening lines of this article it is claimed that history is a discipline taking role as part of unique body of science. The concept of scientific rationality is presented as the criterion of demarcation between science and pseudoscience. From this statement as a starting point, it follows that the methodological grounds for scientific predictions are common for all scientific disciplines. Different aspects of scientific predicting are critically examined: thesis of symmetry, determinism and predictability, indeterminism and predictability, reflexivity of (...) predictions, prediction of novelty and progress, predictions in relation to the time of their uttering, the prediction sketch, truthfulness and regularity in implying prediction, and predictability of human actions. In the concluding section, the author admits of the possibility of constructing the theory of history, opposed to eschatological philosophy of history, as a predictive theory with a scientific basis and a theory whose specifications limit its misuse in practice. (shrink)

Authoritarianism and democracy as forms of power are based not only on political and economic practices, but also on various forms of cultural management. Orientalism has been one of them for a long time. However, as authoritarian and democratic forms of government evolved, a request arose for the creation of a new form of cultural governance, namely, neo-capitalism. The purpose of the study to analyze the features of the practice of culture management as an element of political power. Scientific novelty: (...) an attempt is made to conceptualize the new concept of neo-orientalism, to reveal its main features and differences from classical orientalism. (shrink)

A generic extension L[x]\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathbf{L}[x]}$$\end{document} by a real x is defined, in which the E0\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathsf{E}_0}$$\end{document}-class of x is a lightface Π21\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${{\it \Pi}^1_2}$$\end{document} set containing no ordinal-definable reals.

Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine understanding of language need to be revised. This article critically evaluates the prevailing tendency to regard machine language performance as mere syntactic manipulation and the imitations of understanding, which is only partial and very shallow, without sufficient grounding in the world. The article analyses the views on possible ways (...) of grounding as a condition for successful understanding in LLMs and offers an alternative way in view of the prevailing belief that the success of understanding depends mainly on the referential grounding. An alternative conception seeks to show that semantic fragmentism offers a viable account of natural language understanding and explains how LLMs ground the meanings of linguistic expressions. Uncovering how meanings are grounded allows us to also explain why LLMs’ ability to understand is possible and so remarkably successful. (shrink)

During the late Soviet era, science fiction was one of the first zones of its ideological cosmos, registering the exhaustion of the communist utopia precisely within the literary genre aimed at its representation. In this article I consider the history of the “editing to death” of the Strugatsky brothers’ short novel Roadside Picnic as a representative case of the anti-utopian “uneasiness in civilization” of late actually existing socialism. Simultaneously with the censorship taming of the uneasiness, the Strugatsky’s science fiction dystopia (...) underwent a radical interpretation in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation Stalker as a Hegelian “good music with text”. In comparison to the censored edition, which is barely a timid emendation, ultimately yearning modestly for a good life during the most consumeristic and moderately repressive years of Soviet power, Tarkovsky’s aesthetically singular re-reading is truly a “Zone” of editing to death. (shrink)

The paper focuses its attention on the opacities and ambiguities that concern the meaning of the term “normative attitude” as it is used in two versions of inferentialism – in Brandom’s foundational inferentialist system and in Peregrin’s naturalized version of inferentialism. It suggests that both authors oscillate between viewing normative attitudes as publically accessible affairs and as private states/events hidden from the sight of others. Given the pivotal role of the term and the fact that the relevant private and public (...) sides are not always in harmony, this is quite problematic. The paper suggests that instead of focusing on normative attitudes inferentialists should consider focusing on corrective (re)actions and on the relationships between people that they establish. Such a move might yield a more robust concept of normativity suitable for the theoretical edifice of naturalized inferentialism. (shrink)

Ecological humanism is a new broadened form of human ethics that coming into being as an answer to an ecological crisis and an ideology of total consumption. There are two approaches in basing of ecological humanism. The first of them is founded on traditional human values or on anthropocentrism. Milieu is considered as important living conditions that must be conserved with great care but the number of one is man here. The second approach is more radical. It strives to overcome (...) anthropological egoism and is based on Earth-altruism. Its credo can be presented as general weal for all geobiocoenosis. Good is all that helps to preserve integrity, stability and beauty of Earth-community. Stable development can be defined as safeguarding of human living inharmony with ecological systems. As it is well known, 57-th session of UNO announced that 2005-2014 years will be devoted to a program of education for stable development. The Mongolian Government asseverated a national program of ecological education for Mongolia from 1997. Its main object was a forming of common ecological culture for stable development. This program provided:‐ ecological training for common life‐ laying organizing structures and law grounds‐ co-ordinating tacks of stable development with other national projects‐ including ecological knowledge in educational programs.We think also that there is need to elaborate new human ethics that could provide new common living culture for Mongols. There is ecological ethics or ecological humanism that, above all, will remove a tradition of human predominance over nature and establish equality between human beings and animate nature. (shrink)

This paper analyses two definitions of contingency. Both definitions have been widely accepted and used as to identify contingent events. One of them is primarily of a philosophical character, whereas the other is more commonly used in mathematics. Evidently, these two definitions do not describe the same set of phenomena, and neither of them determines the completely intuitive notion of contingency.Namely, carefully selected examples testify that the first definition is too narrow and the second too wide. These facts have certain (...) epistemological consequences. They must, therefore, serve as a warning for using the definitions only in a restrictive and cautious way when detecting random beliefs – those we cannot identify as knowledge. (shrink)

My dear Aleksandr!I have finally found some quiet time for a slow and attentive read of your article “The Beginning of the Black Notebooks.”1 I very much liked the article, especially for your trul...

This article discusses the connection between the ideas of Fyodor M. Dostoevsky and Vladimir S. Solovyov on the need for cultural and moral transformation of those who would claim to participate in...

"This personification of wisdom with golden hair and a radiant aura echoes both the eternal feminine and the world soul. Rooted in Christian and Jewish mysticism, Eastern Orthodox iconography, Greek philosophy, and European romanticism, the Sophiology that suffuses Solovyov's philosophical and artistic works is both intellectually sophisticated and profoundly inspiring. Judith Deutsch Kornblatt brings together key texts from Solovyov's writings about Sophia: poetry, fiction, drama, and philosophy, all extensively annotated and some available in English for the first time (with assistance (...) from the translators Boris Jakim and Laury Magnus)."--Amazon website. (shrink)

Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style. Originally published in 1967, Le Pardon, or Forgiveness, is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the (...) perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust. Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, Forgiveness transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. Forgiveness is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Disparate theoretical viewpoints construe hypnotic suggestibility either as a stable trait, largely determined by underlying cognitive aptitude, or as a flexible skill amenable to attitudinal factors including beliefs and expectations. Circumscribed findings support both views. The present study attempted to consolidate these orthogonal perspectives through the lens of expectancy modification. We surreptitiously controlled light and sound stimuli to convince participants that they were responding strongly to hypnotic suggestions for visual and auditory hallucinations. Extending our previous findings, we indexed hypnotic suggestibility (...) by de-automatizing an involuntary audiovisual phenomenon—the McGurk effect. Here we show that, regardless of expectancy modification, the experimental procedure led to heightened expectations concerning future hypnotic response. We found little effect of expectation, however, on actual response to suggestion. Our findings intimate that, at least in the present experimental context, expectation hardly correlates with—and is unlikely to be a primary determinant of—high hypnotic suggestibility. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to present the fundamental theoretical results concerning inference rules in deductive formal systems. Primary attention is focused on: admissible or permissible inference rules the derivability of the admissible inference rules the structural completeness of logics the bases for admissible and valid inference rules. There is particular emphasis on propositional non-standard logics (primary, superintuitionistic and modal logics) but general logical consequence relations and classical first-order theories are also considered. The book is basically self-contained and special (...) attention has been made to present the material in a convenient manner for the reader. Proofs of results, many of which are not readily available elsewhere, are also included. The book is written at a level appropriate for first-year graduate students in mathematics or computer science. Although some knowledge of elementary logic and universal algebra are necessary, the first chapter includes all the results from universal algebra and logic that the reader needs. For graduate students in mathematics and computer science the book is an excellent textbook. (shrink)

In their paper published in 2017 in Philosophical Psychology, Ronja Rutschmann and Alex Wiegmann introduce a novel kind of lies, the indifferent lies. According to them, these lies are not intended to deceive simply because the liars do not care whether their audience is going to believe them or not. It seems as if indifferent lies avoid the objections raised against other kinds of lies supposedly not intended to deceive. I argue that this is not correct. Indifferent lies, too, are (...) either intended to deceive or are not lies at all, since they do not involve genuine assertions. (shrink)

Recently, psychologists have explored moral concepts including obligation, blame, and ability. While little empirical work has studied the relationships among these concepts, philosophers have widely assumed such a relationship in the principle that “ought” implies “can,” which states that if someone ought to do something, then they must be able to do it. The cognitive underpinnings of these concepts are tested in the three experiments reported here. In Experiment 1, most participants judge that an agent ought to keep a promise (...) that he is unable to keep, but only when he is to blame for the inability. Experiment 2 shows that such “ought” judgments correlate with judgments of blame, rather than with judgments of the agent’s ability. Experiment 3 replicates these findings for moral “ought” judgments and finds that they do not hold for nonmoral “ought” judgments, such as what someone ought to do to fulfill their desires. These results together show that folk moral judgments do not conform to a widely assumed philosophical principle that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, judgments of blame play a modulatory role in some judgments of obligation. (shrink)

In his 2018 AJP paper, Shlomo Cohen hints that deception could be a distinct subset of manipulation. We pursue this thought further, but by arguing that Cohen’s accounts of deception and manipulation are incorrect. Deception under uncertainty need not involve adding false premises to the victim’s reasoning but it must involve manipulating her response, and cases of manipulation that do not interfere with the victim’s reasoning, but rather utilize it, also exist. Therefore, deception under uncertainty must be constituted by covert (...) manipulation. (shrink)

We prove, in ZFC,the existence of a definable, countably saturated elementary extension of the reals.

An algorithm recognizing admissibility of inference rules in generalized form (rules of inference with parameters or metavariables) in the intuitionistic calculus H and, in particular, also in the usual form without parameters, is presented. This algorithm is obtained by means of special intuitionistic Kripke models, which are constructed for a given inference rule. Thus, in particular, the direct solution by intuitionistic techniques of Friedman's problem is found. As a corollary an algorithm for the recognition of the solvability of logical equations (...) in H and for constructing some solutions for solvable equations is obtained. A semantic criterion for admissibility in H is constructed. (shrink)