Putting Logic In Its Place

Does logic help determine whether beliefs are rational? The author argues that it does - but only once we understand beliefs as coming in degrees. He explains the degree-of-belief approach offers the key to understanding how logical arguments work.

"In much of the theory of meaning, philosophers and linguists have focused on the use of language in conveying information in cooperative informational exchanges. As a result, political uses of speech, of the sort that political propaganda exemplifies, have not been taken to be a central case of language use. In this book, Jason Stanley and David Beaver focus on the political use of speech as a central case, which leads to a foundational rethinking of the theory of meaning. By focusing on the political uses of speech, one arrives at better (and more general) tools to describe speech, as well as a more accurate view of its central functions. More dramatically, it enables us to see the ways in which virtually all speech is political-a fact that is masked by much of the theory of meaning. Stanley and Beaver's topic is speech generally-its function and how best to represent that function. Political propaganda serves as a window into that topic, since its function is not obviously to share information, or even misinformation. They emphasize the importance of understanding how political propaganda works via the topic of the justification of free speech and argue that political propaganda poses a problem for a broad range of justifications of free speech. Stanley and Beaver argue that it is not possible to compartmentalize the political aspects of speech from the non-political aspects of speech, nor is it possible to carve out a neutral deliberative space of evaluating reasons qua reasons. Speech is invariably political"--

This volume honors Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk, the nestor of Polish logicians, on his 85th anniversary. The editors would like to express the respect and sympathy they have for him. His textbook The Outline of Mathematical Logic has been published in many editions and translated into several languages. It was this textbook that introduced many of us into the world of mathematical logic. Professor Grzegorczyk has made fundamental contributions to logic and to philosophy. His results, mainly on hierarchy of primitive recursive functions, known as the Grzegorczyk hierarchy, are of fundamental importance to theoretical computer science. In particular, they were precursory for the computational complexity theory. The editors would like to stress that this special publication celebrates a scientist who is still actively pursuing genuinely innovative directions of research. Quite recently, Andrzej Grzegorczyk gave a new proof of undecidability of the first order functional calculus. His proof does not use the arithmetization of Kurt Gödel. In recognition of his merits, the University of Clermont-Ferrand conferred to Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk the Doctorat Honoris Causa. The work and life of Professor Andrzej Grzegorczyk is presented in the article by Professors Stanislaw Krajewski and Jan Wolenski. The papers in this collection have been submitted on invitational basis.

This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Computational Logic for Multi-Agent Systems, CLIMA VI. The book presents 14 revised full technical papers, 4 contest papers, and 7 invited papers together with 1 invited article are organized in topical sections on foundational aspects of agency, agent programming, agent interaction and normative systems, the first CLIMA contest, and on the project report of the SOCS project.

Inductive Logic is number ten in the 11-volume Handbook of the History of Logic. While there are many examples were a science split from philosophy and became autonomous (such as physics with Newton and biology with Darwin), and while there are, perhaps, topics that are of exclusively philosophical interest, inductive logic — as this handbook attests — is a research field where philosophers and scientists fruitfully and constructively interact. This handbook covers the rich history of scientific turning points in Inductive Logic, including probability theory and decision theory. Written by leading researchers in the field, both this volume and the Handbook as a whole are definitive reference tools for senior undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in the history of logic, the history of philosophy, and any discipline, such as mathematics, computer science, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, for whom the historical background of his or her work is a salient consideration. Chapter on the Port Royal contributions to probability theory and decision theory Serves as a singular contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century Contains the latest scholarly discoveries and interpretative insights

This book defines a logical system called the Protocol-theoretic Logic of Epistemic Norms (PLEN), it develops PLEN into a formal framework for representing and reasoning about epistemic norms, and it shows that PLEN is theoretically interesting and useful with regard to the aims of such a framework. In order to motivate the project, the author defends an account of epistemic norms called epistemic proceduralism. The core of this view is the idea that, in virtue of their indispensable, regulative role in cognitive life, epistemic norms are closely intertwined with procedural rules that restrict epistemic actions, procedures, and processes. The resulting organizing principle of the book is that epistemic norms are protocols for epistemic planning and control. The core of the book is developing PLEN, which is essentially a novel variant of propositional dynamic logic (PDL) distinguished by more or less elaborate revisions of PDL’s syntax and semantics. The syntax encodes the procedural content of epistemic norms by means of the well-known protocol or program constructions of dynamic and epistemic logics. It then provides a novel language of operators on protocols, including a range of unique protocol equivalence relations, syntactic operations on protocols, and various procedural relations among protocols in addition to the standard dynamic (modal) operators of PDL. The semantics of the system then interprets protocol expressions and expressions embedding protocols over a class of directed multigraph-like structures rather than the standard labeled transition systems or modal frames. The intent of the system is to better represent epistemic dynamics, build a logic of protocols atop it, and then show that the resulting logic of protocols is useful as a logical framework for epistemic norms. The resulting theory of epistemic norms centers on notions of norm equivalence derived from theories of process equivalence familiar from the study of dynamic and modal logics. The canonical account of protocol equivalence in PLEN turns out to possess a number of interesting formal features, including satisfaction of important conditions on hyperintensional equivalence, a matter of recently recognized importance in the logic of norms, generally. To show that the system is interesting and useful as a framework for representing and reasoning about epistemic norms, the author applies the logical system to the analysis of epistemic deontic operators, and, partly on the basis of this, establishes representation theorems linking protocols to the action-guiding content of epistemic norms. The protocol-theoretic logic of epistemic norms is then shown to almost immediately validate the main principles of epistemic proceduralism.

This anthology is the first book to give a balanced overview of the competing theories of degrees of belief. It also explicitly relates these debates to more traditional concerns of the philosophy of language and mind and epistemic logic.