Bücher der Reihe Synthese Library

This text can be read by specialists working in philosophy of science or formal semantics, by logicians working on the structure of theories, and by students in philosophy of science - this text offers a thorough introduction to non-statement accounts of sciences as well as a discussion of the traditional statement account of science.

Optic flow provides all the information necessary to guide a walking human or a mobile robot to its target. Over the past 50 years, a body of research on optic flow spanning the disciplines of neurophysiology, psychophysics, experimental psychology, brain imaging and computational modelling has accumulated.

It has been argued with increasing frequency in recent years that the vocabulary of social science is to a large extent an action vocabulary and that any attempt to systematize concepts and establish bases for understanding in the field cannot, therefore, succeed unless it is firmly built on action theory.

Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science.

Intentionality is one of the most frequently discussed topics in contemporary phenomenology and analytic philosophy. This book investigates intentionality from the point of view of intentional objects. On the one hand, M-logic is used as a tool for investigating formal features of intentional objects.

Aims to explore the philosophical problems regarding the logical status of empty (singular) terms such as 'Pegasus', 'Batman', 'The impossible staircase departs in Escher's painting 'Ascending-Descending'+ etc, and regarding sentences which deny the existence of singled-out fictional entities.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839--1914) has often been referred to as one of the most important North American philosophers, but the real extent of his philosophical importance is only now beginning to emerge.

Deals with the debate over the origins of the New Theory of Reference. This book discusses who was responsible for the ideas that Saul Kripke presented in his "Naming and Necessity". It also discusses the contributions of philosophers such as Follesdal, Geach, Hintikka, Plantinga, and Stig Kanger to the development of modal semantics.

x I wish to express my thanks to all contributors to this volume for their collaboration, and especially to Professor laakko Hintikka, Editor of Synthese Library, for his help in editing this book. THE EDITOR INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND IMPRESSION The articles included in this collection represent what may be called the standard modal approach to deontic logic (the logic of normative concepts), in which deontic logic is treated as a branch of modal logic, and the normative concepts of obligation, permission (permissibility) and prohibi­ tion are regarded as analogous to the 'alethic' modalities necessity, possi­ bility and impossibility. In his recent paper [16] Simo Knuuttila has shown that this approach can be traced back to late medieval philosophy. Several 14th century philosophers observed the analogies between deontic and alethic modalities and 4iscussed the deontic interpretations of various laws of modal logic. A relatively simple deontic system of this kind (called the system D or K D; cf. Lemmon and Scott [17], pp. 50-51, Chellas [10], p. 131) is obtained by adding to propositional logic two deontic axioms (or axiom schemata), (K) O(A :::J B) :::J (OA :::J OB) and (D) OA :::J ~ 0 ~ A, where '0' is the obligation operator, and the deontic variant of the 'rule of necessitation' (0) From A, to infer ~A.

The twenty-three papers collected in tbis volume represent an important part of my published work up to the date of this volume.

In this book I discuss the justification of scientific change and argue that it rests on different sorts of invariance. I argue that the proposed arguments for radical observational variance, for radical meaning variance, and for radical variance of regulative standards with respect to scientific transitions all fail.

Selected Contributed Papers of the Tenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Florence, August 1995

Even the idea of the 'reasonable' becomes foreign to logic and such expres sions as 'reasonable decisions', 'reasonable choice' or 'reasonable hypotheses' would be put aside as meaningless.

The central question in the philosophy of time is whether time is tensed or tenseless, viz., whether the moments of time are objectively past, present or future, or whether they are ordered merely by the tenseless temporal relations earlier than, simultaneous with, and later than.

This edited work presents contemporary mathematical practice in the foundational mathematical theories, in particular set theory and the univalent foundations.

The concepts of model world and of logical space, together with those of homomorphism and isomorphism be tween model worlds and between logical spaces, form the conceptual basis of the reconstruction.

Years ago, prompted by Grize, Apostel and Papert, we undertook the study of functions, but until now we did not properly understand the relations between functions and operations, and their increasing interactions at the level of 'constituted functions'.

he present book and its companion volume The Tensed Theory of Time: a T Critical Examination are an attempt to adjudicate what one recent discussant has called "the most fundamental question in the philosophy of time," namely, "whether a static or a dynamic conception ofthe world is correct.

Constructive mathematics is based on the thesis that the meaning of a mathematical formula is given, not by its truth-conditions, but in terms of what constructions count as a proof of it.

This is a volume on the concepts, theories, models and social consequences of creativity. It contains articles by well-known cognitive scientists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers and psychologists.

Smirnov played an important role at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences being the Head of Department of Epistemology, Logic and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and the Head of Section of Logic. At the Department of Philosophy of Moscow State University and at the Institute of Philosophy V.

I wish to thank Mr. Mooij and Mrs. Barth most cordially for the care with which they have acquitted themselves of this delicate task and for the speed with which they have brought it to completion.

This book has arisen out of lectures I gave in recent years at the Uni versities of Munich and Regensburg, and it is intended to serve as a textbook for courses in the Philosophy of Language. Some knowledge of logic will also be helpful in studying this book - as it is almost everywhere else in philosophy -, especially in Section 3.

Typically, an anthropologist's work on relativism offers rich examples of cultural diversity, but lacks philosophical rigor, while a philosopher's work on relativism offers rigorous argumentation, but lacks rich anthropological examples.

This volume offers readers a coherent look at the past, present and anticipated future of the Axiomatic Method. It presents a hypothetical New Axiomatic Method, which establishes closer relationships between mathematics and physics.