Kotarbi Ski Logic Semantics And Ontology

How should we think about the meaning of the words that make up our language? How does reference of these terms work, and what is their referent when these are connected to abstract objects rather than to concrete ones? Can logic help to address these questions? This collection of papers aims to unify the questions of syntax and semantics of language, which span across the fields of logic, philosophy and ontology of language. The leading motif of the presented selection is the differentiation between linguistic tokens (material, concrete objects) on the one hand and linguistic types (ideal, abstract objects) on the other. Through a promenade among articles that span over all of the Author’s career, this book addresses the complex philosophical question of the ontology of language by following the crystalline conceptual tools offered by logic. At the core of Wybraniec-Skardowska’s scholarship is the idea that language is an ontological being, characterized in compliance with the logical conception of language proposed by Ajdukiewicz. The application throughout the book of tools of classical logic and set theory results fosters the emergence of a general formal logical theory of syntax, semantics and of the pragmatics of language, which takes into account the duality token-type in the understanding of linguistic expressions. Via a functional approach to language itself, logic appears as ontologically neutral with respect to existential assumptions relating to the nature of linguistic expressions and their extra-linguistic counterparts. The book is addressed to readers both at the graduate and undergraduate level, but also to a more general audience interested in getting a firmer grip on the interplay between reality and the language we use to describe and understand it.

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was probably the most influential American philosopher of the twentieth century. In Trading Ontology for Ideology Lieven Decock offers an insightful analysis of the development of Quine's ontological views from his first texts in the early thirties onwards. The importance of Quine's work in logic and set theory for his ontology is highlighted. Decock argues that the tenet of extensionalism is at least as important as naturalism, and assesses the relation between the two. The other focus of the work is the relation between ontology, i.e. what there is, and ideology, i.e. what can be expressed by means of words. Decock shows that the interplay between ontology and ideology is far more complicated and interesting than has generally been assumed.

Ontological modelling today is applied in many areas of science and technology, including the Semantic Web. The W3C standard OWL defines one of the most important ontology languages based on the semantics of description logics. An alternative is to use rule languages in knowledge modelling, as proposed in the W3C s RIF standard. So far, it has often been unclear how to combine both technologies without sacrificing essential computational properties. This book explains this problem and presents new solutions that have recently been proposed. Extensive introductory chapters provide the necessary background for understanding the goals and challenges of this field, whereas advanced chapters discuss novel solutions in full detail. Enriched knowledge representation languages that are introduced include DL Rules, Horn description logics, and DL+safe Rules. In each of these cases, emphasis is put on finding a favourable trade-off between expressiveness and computational complexity. This naturally leads to the light-weight DL rule language ELP which illustrates that expressive ontological modelling and tractable inferencing can indeed go together. Comprehensive references for further reading are provided throughout the book."

Polish Logic 1920-1939

The ancient problem of fatalism, more particularly theological fatalism, has resurfaced with surprising vigour in the second half of the twentieth century. Two questions predominate in the debate: (1) Is divine foreknowledge compatible with human freedom and (2) How can God foreknow future free acts? Having surveyed the historical background of this debate in "The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge" and "Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez" (Brill: 1988), William Lane Craig now attempts to address these issues critically. His wide-ranging discussion brings together a thought- provoking array of related topics such as logical fatalism, multivalent logic, backward causation, precognition, time travel, counterfactual logic, temporal necessity, Newcomb's Problem, middle knowledge, and relativity theory. The present work serves both as a useful survey of the extensive literature on theological fatalism and related fields and as a stimulating assessment of the possibility of divine foreknowledge of future free acts.

Imagine a robot trying to size up a difficult situation, to find a way of responding. Its sensors receive streams of information from which it tries to reach judgements. If it relies on deduction alone, it will not get far, no matter how fast its inference engines; for even the most massive information is still typically incomplete: there are relevant issues that it does not resolve one way or the other. The robot, or human agent for that matter, needs to go beyond these limits. It needs to `go supraclassical', inferring more than is authorised by classical logic alone. But such inferences are inherently uncertain. They are also nonmonotonic, in the sense that the acquisition of further information, even when consistent with the existing stock, may lead us to abondon as well as add conclusions. Nonmonotonic logic is the study of such reasoning and has been the subject of intensive research for more than two decades. But for the newcomer it is still a disconcerting affair, lacking unity with many systems going in different directions. The purpose of this book is to take the mystery out of the subject, giving a clear overall picture of what is going on. It makes the essential ideas and main approaches to nonmonotonic logic accessible, and meaningful, to anyone with a few basic tools of discrete mathematics and a minimal background in classical propositional logic. It is written as a textbook, with detailed explanations, examples, comments, exercises and answers. Students and instructors alike will find it an invaluable guide.

Graham Solomon, to whom this collection is dedicated, went into hospital for antibiotic treatment of pneumonia in Oc- ber, 2001. Three days later, on Nov. 1, he died of a massive stroke, at the age of 44. Solomon was well liked by those who got the chance to know him—it was a revelation to ?nd out, when helping to sort out his a?airs after his death, how many “friends” he had whom he had actually never met, as his email included correspondence with philosophers around the world running sometimes to hundreds of messages. He was well respected in the philosophical community more broadly. He was for several years a member of the editorial board for the Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science. While he was employed at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, several of us at the University of Wat- loo always regarded our own department as a sort of second academic home for him. We therefore decided that it would be appropriate to hold a memorial conference in his honour. Thanks to the generous ?nancial support of the Humphrey Conference Fund, we were able to do so in May 2003. Many of the papers in this volume were presented at that conf- ence.