Bücher der Reihe Synthese Library

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.

he present book and its companion volume The Tenseless 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 of the world is correct.

For some years we have been conducting at the University of Haifa an interdisciplinary seminar on explanation in philosophy and psychology. The objective that we have set for the seminar, attended by students from both departments, Philosophy and Psychology, has been a critical understanding of the concept of explanation, its use and limitations.

And then even if one was thinking, one might not be really thinking of the cat being on the mat, but only that one wishes there was a cat, and wonders whether if there was it would be on the mat, and yet the subjective impression was that one was thinking: "The cat is on the mat" (the same picture might stand for both the thoughts mentioned).

Vision is man's primary cognitive contact with the world around him, and we are vividly reminded of this by Roman Jakobson's autobiographical note, "The Evasive Initial" with which this volume begins. Looking out through our eyes, our brains give us reliable knowledge about the world around us in all it beauty of form, color and movement.

Selected Conributed Papers from the 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Krakow, 1999

Mathematics has stood as a bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences since the days of classical antiquity. In the Critique ofPure Reason, mathematics is one of the transcendental instruments the human mind uses to apprehend nature, and by apprehending to construct it under the universal and necessary lawsofNewtonian mechanics.

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.

Cognitive science, in Howard Gardner's words, has a relatively short history but a very long past.

What is at stake in this debate is a fundamental question of ethics: 'Is there any reason, except self-interest, for considering the interests of other people?' The ethical egoist answers No to this question, thus rejecting the received conception of morality.

The subject of the present inquiry is the approach-to-the-truth research, which started with the publication of Sir Karl Popper's Conjectures and Refutations. Abhorring inductivism for its apprecia tion of logical weakness rather than strength, Popper tried to show that fallibilism could serve the purpose of approach to the truth.

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.

The concepts of compactness and maximal consistency turn out to have important employment, which I have tried to keep self-contained, so that extensive knowledge of meta logical topics is not assumed.

The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at a sym posium held at the University of Pennsylvania in December of 1968. The extensive bibliography that appears at the end of the volume was originally distributed during the symposium and was revised on the basis of many helpful suggestions made by those who participated.

After many years of skating over, skimming through and skirting round this issue in my studies of intertheory relations in science, I decided to take the plunge and make the problem of incommensurability the central and unifying theme of a book.

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.