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The author is attempting to indicate how a nation of logic is »behaving« in various cases. He starts with Aristotle, discusses Kant's transcendental logic and ends with Marx. He singles out three types of logic: content, formal and formalized logic.
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The author speculates on essential phenomena od logic and dialectics. He is primarily interested in problem^ of and in connection of logic and dialectics, and in opposition of metaphysical and dialectical thinking. His ideas are a continuation of some already known attitudes. In agreeing and disagreeing with them, these ideas become new and original, theoretically established and universal. In his way of thinking, in his interpreting Hegel, in explaining agreements of disagreements between Frankfurt and Soviet Marxists, the author is constantly interested in the difference of difference relating to the difference itself, untill he reaches identity and its being. The author is very »Hegelian« in saying that most of dialectics argumentations originate in contradictory consequences of applying »standard» judgement.
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The traditional French dissertation is considered here as an illustration of a discourse challenged by the New Rhetoric. Dissertation’s anti-rhetorical discourse is the outcome of a long tradition summarized by Perelman’s formula: L’honnête homme du XXe siècle. This “Honest Man” is supposed to speak in the name of Logic and Reason. But in Perelman’s terms those discourses can’t be considered logical demonstrations. They can only deemed to be rhetorical argumentations. In other words, dissertation should be, at the same time, a counter-example and an ordinary example of Perelman’s system. It would be a theoretical problem if Perelman’s model of argumentation could not describe the specificities of an exercise which for decades was the first contact with practical argumentation at school. We would like to show that Perelman’s sensitivity to historical relativity enables the system to cope with this challenge: dissertation is not a bad rhetoric but a rhetoric determined by a specific socio-historical situation. Dissertation will be considered here as a mixed genre: beyond its deliberative character, it recalls common values at the beginning of the 20th century in France. It also provides a model of what “good argumentation” should be. This is consistent with Perelman’s conceptions: epideictic (understood in a much broader sense than the Aristotelian genre) should be considered as the foundation of deliberative and forensic discourses. Our proposition is also consistent with the Universal Audience’s definition as a necessarily imperfect representation of the Ideal Audience. In contrast, a social group normally needs a common representation of the Universal Audience, a common representation of what is true and reasonable. Of course, those representations and their rhetorical codifications are doomed to crisis. But it should be possible to analyze those crises in rhetorical terms.
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Back in the Good Old Days of Logical Positivism, theories of meaning were part of a normative project that sought not merely to describe the features of language and its use, but so to speak to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this paper, I side with Herman Cappelen (2013) in thinking that we need to rethink and reintroduce the important distinction between sense and nonsense that was ditched along with other normative aspirations during Logical Positivism’s spectacular demise. Despite this, my delineation of the bounds of sense is different from Cappelen’s. One of my goals in the present paper is to argue that category mistakes are paradigmatic examples of nonsensical sentences. To this end I describe one candidate for what it might be that makes category mistakes nonsensical.
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Conspiracy theories seem to play an increasing role in public political discourse. This development is problematic for a variety of reasons, most importantly because widespread belief in conspiracy theories will undermine the institutions of open societies. One of the central questions that will need to be answered here if we hope to find out why conspirational thought is recently gaining such support and to find out how to respond to it, is the following: what mindset leads to the belief in conspiracy theories? People who believe in conspiracy theories are often ridiculed as nutcases, tinfoil hats, and paranoid crackpots, while they portray themselves as particularly critical, better informed and enlightened responsible citizens. Finding out which of these characterizations is correct is crucial for coming up with the appropriate response to the rise of conspirational thought. In this article, I want to discuss this question and the phenomenon of conspirational thought in two respects. First, I want to explain how philosophy, and epistemology in particular, is essential for understanding the phenomenon and for developing a strategy to deal with the harmful kind of conspirational thought. Secondly, I want to show how epistemology in turn can learn from studying this phenomenon.
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The paper focuses on the logical path from information acquiring to theory elaborating. To this end, the entire chain from signal – sign – information– knowledge – theory is examined and clarified from a logical point of view. Mainly, the passing from one to another of the chain components is analyzed in order to get the general mechanisms of theories emerging. The paper has a strong general and abstract character, so its results can be applied both to natural sciences and to social sciences like economics.
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The thesis that the two-valued system of classical logic is insufficient to explanation the various intermediate situations in the entity, has led to the development of many-valued and fuzzy logic systems. These systems suggest that this limitation is incorrect. They oppose the law of excluded middle (tertium non datur) which is one of the basic principles of classical logic, and even principle of non-contradiction and argue that is not an obstacle for things both to exist and to not exist at the same time. However, contrary to these claims, there is no inadequacy in the two-valued system of classical logic in explanation the intermediate situations in existence. The law of exclusion and the intermediate situations in the external world are separate things. The law of excluded middle has been inevitably accepted by other logic systems which are considered to reject this principle. The many-valued and the fuzzy logic systems do not transcend the classical logic. Misconceptions from incomplete information and incomplete research are effective in these criticisms. In addition, it is also effective to move the discussion about the intellectual conception (tasawwur) into the field of judgmental assent (tasdiq) and confusion of the mawhum (imaginable) with the ma‘kûl (intellegible).
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Cogency is the central normative concept of informal logic. But it is a loose evaluative concept and I argue that a generic notion covering all of the qualities of a well-reasoned argument is the most plausible conception. It is best captured by the standard RSA criterion: in a good argument acceptable (A) and relevant (R) premises provide sufficient (S) grounds for the conclusion. Logical qualities in a broad sense are affected by the epistemic qualities of the premises and “consequence” in a broad sense exhibits an interplay of form and content. There are four proposals for the premise—conclusion relation: (i) no strictly logical connection (“non-logical” consequence); (ii) one type of connection only (deductivism); (iii) a few types of connection (deduction, induction, perhaps conduction and analogical reasoning); (iv) many types of connection (argumentation schemes). Deductivism is a serious option but in its strong version, as the discussion about petitio shows, it fails to establish that arguments which are not cogent are thereby invalid. And weak deductivism, very attractive from the pedagogical point of view, has some deficiencies (implausible hidden premises; preservation of truth, not probability). I argue that the idea of a counterexample, when we regard certain components of the argument as fixed and others as variable, is the best approach to the analysis of the illative core of every-day arguments (the approach of David Hitchcock on material consequence).
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Dealing with deductive reasoning, performed by ‘real-life’ reasoners and expressed in natural language, the paper confronts Harman’s denying of normative relevance of logic to reasoning with a logicist thesis, a principle that is supposed to contribute for solving the problem of incongruence between descriptive nature of logic and normativity of reasoning. The paper discusses in detail John MacFarlane’s (2004) and Hartry Field’s (2009) variants of “bridge principle”. Taking both variants of bridge principles as its starting point, the paper proceeds arguing that there is more than one logical formalism that can be normatively suitable for deductive reasoning, due to the fact that reasoning can assume different forms that are guided by different goals. A particular reasoning processing can be modelled by specific formalism that can be shown to be actually used by a real human agent in a real reasoning context.
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Exegetical method of interpretation is based on the will of the legislature. According to this theory, the law is only a command of the legislature. The only task of the interpreter is to find the meaning of the text granted by the legislature when creating the law. As techniques of interpretation, exegesis makes use mainly of grammatical and logical interpretation.
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The decisions of different subjectscan be influenced using two different communicational techniques: a) through persuasion,using propositions in order to modify the opinions and attitudes of a public; b) throughconstraint, using dispositions when the subjects should act no matter what their beliefsare, sometimes even against their opinions or attitudes. In the last case, the source of themessage is a deontic authority relative to an organization. The deontic modalities are,in turn, conditioned dispositions.
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In this paper, we bring up the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic. One way ofavoiding the problem is through Rantala models, where non-normal worlds are introduced. Suchmodels are vulnerable to criticism, as we show. One of many issues that occur is the Bjerring result,which states that incorporating non-normal worlds makes the agent logically incompetent. For this reason, we propose a different solution based on positional logics.
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The relationship between discovery and justification is not clear. According to a standard twentieth-century opinion, in the philosophy of science these two are understood as separate problems: how to recognize and conceptualize the object of study and how to find the justification for the conceptualized belief. How to study the logic of discovery? What kind of logic might such a logic be? The basic observation is that discoveries do not take place in a vacuum. They have to be localized into scientific inquiry processes: a discovery is a discovery only in the context of a scientific inquiry process. To do this we use a systematic logico-philosophical model called the interrogative model of inquiry, which was developed by Jaakko Hintikka. The interrogative model of inquiry allows us to consider the scientific inquiry process as a strategic, goal-tracking process which gives justification for the discovery. The model allows us to formulate a systematic logic of scientific discovery and justification.
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The study aims to be an application of the neutral-neutrosophic theory of Florentin Smarandache on the fundamental nucleus of Aesthetics: Beauty-Ugly. If a history of Beauty may resort to a long series of theoretical proofs (of which one can deduce the taste of a certain age), a history of Ugliness can at most to look its documents through visual or verbal representations of certain things or beings perceived somehow as "ugly". But if from a point of view one is Beauty and subsequently in time and space this is Ugly, then we can say that we are in a neutrosophical situation. In all ages, “philosophers and artists have proposed definitions of Beauty; thanks to their testimonies can thus reconstruct a history of aesthetic ideas over the time. But other things were with the idea of Ugly. Most often, Ugly was defined in opposition to the Beauty, but almost never have been dedicated ample studies, but some hints in parenthesis or some marginal notes” as U. Eco asserts (Eco, 2005).
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The aim of the article is to show how thinking and acting are closely interrelated, and because of that, methodological disabilities in practicing any science, and social sciences and humanities in particular, have enormous practical effects. According to this thesis, both the science which wants to be directly related to the practice understood as multiplying the profit, as well as the one that programmatically separates from such an activity, have certain practical consequences. The main question that is ignored by both ways of practicing science concerns ethical effects of all human activities, especially scientific and economic ones. It causes excessive influence of emotional people –mainly those who are greedy and prone to aggression – on the functioning of societies. Science cannot change them, it can only be used by them. The inability to change their negative impact on societies was already ascertained by Plato. The only solution to the situation is to return to the historical principle of limiting the political influence of people who are guided by passions and to create an alternative economy that takes into account the knowledge of human nature, based on reasonableness and not greed.
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The question of the possibilities of certain knowledge forms the basis of discussions on knowledge in traditional epistemology. Some have been instrumental in sceptical discussions in epistemology, with the idea that certain information is possible and impossible. However, the condition of knowledge in contemporary epistemology is linked to faith, truth and justification. Gettier argues that certain knowledge cannot be obtained from these conditions. According to him, justification is insufficient for knowledge and there may be fallibility even in justified cases. Then the central problem of contemporary epistemology is the idea that how the right belief is transformed into knowledge and the justification methods cannot remove the possibility of misinformation from all sides for all possible situations. Our aim is to discuss the adequacy of epistemic justification in Gettier's thinking and the possibility of eliminating the fallibility in knowledge for all possible situations.
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The logic of understanding is “the theory of the forms of shaping (outlining and representing) of the states of affaires”. It is identifiable in the so-called symbolic or mathematical logic, and employs a symbolic language at the linguistic level. The logic of reason is “the theory of the abstract and generalized forms of reflection of perceivable objects, psychologically realized through contemplation and reflection”. It makes use of a notional language, being recognizable in the classical, or traditional, logic. The logic of speculative thinking is a formal theory whose logical forms are categories in various oppositional relations.
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The paper deals with the paradox that rationality demands rational substantiation which can’t be given in principle. Thus it is argued that only intuition can prevail against skepticism and subjectivism. But intuition is „transcendent“ to rationality and therefore its acceptance as the substantiation of rationality implies existence of transcendental reality. In itself it has infinite regress qua infinite reiteration of reality levels without any qualitative ontological alteration, therefore only infinite transcendence is able to ground a finite immanence.
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