Reality And Representation

The author, one of the first philosophers to advance the notion that the computer is an apt model for the mind, takes a radical view of his own theory of functionalism in this book.

This book is an important collection of new essays on various topics relating to realism and its rivals in metaphysics, logic, metaethics, and epistemology. The contributors are some of the leading authors in these fields and include discussions of philosophy from the Middle Ages to the present day, from Aquinas to Wittgenstein.

A contemporary examination of what information is represented, how that information is presented, and who gets to participate (and serve as gatekeeper) in the world's largest online repository for information, Wikipedia. Bridging contemporary education research that addresses the 'experiential epistemology' of learning to use Wikipedia with an understanding of how the inception and design of the platform assists this, the book explores the complex disconnect between the encyclopedia's formalized policy and the often unspoken norms that govern its knowledge-making processes. At times both laudatory and critical, this book illustrates Wikipedia's struggle to combat systemic biases and lack of representation of marginalized topics as it becomes the standard bearer for equitable and accessible representation of reality in an age of digital disinformation and fake news. Being an important and timely contribution to the field of media and communication studies, this book will appeal to academics and researchers interested in digital disinformation, information literacy, and representation on the Internet, as well as students studying these topics.

This book enriches our views on representation and deepens our understanding of its different aspects. It arises out of several years of dialog between the editors and the authors, an interdisciplinary team of highly experienced researchers, and it reflects the best contemporary view of representation and reality in humans, other living beings, and intelligent machines. Structured into parts on the cognitive, computational, natural sciences, philosophical, logical, and machine perspectives, a theme of the field and the book is building and presenting networks, and the editors hope that the contributed chapters will spur understanding and collaboration between researchers in domains such as computer science, philosophy, logic, systems theory, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and synthetic biology.

José L. Zalabardo puts forward a new interpretation of central ideas in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning the structure of reality and our representations of it in thought and language. He shows the origins of Wittgenstein's picture theory of propositional representation in Russell's theories of judgment, arguing that the picture theory is Wittgenstein's solution to some of the problems that he found in Russell's position. Zalabardo defends the view that, for Wittgenstein, facts in general, and the facts that play the role of propositions in particular, are not composite items, arising from the combination of their constituents. They are ultimate, irreducible units, and what we think of as their constituents are features that facts have in common with one another. These common features have built into them their possibilities of combination with other features into possible situations. This is the source of the Tractarian account of non-actual possibilities. It is also the source of the idea that it is not possible to produce propositions answering to certain descriptions, including those that would give rise to Russell's paradox. Zalabardo then considers Wittgenstein's view that every proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions. He argues that this view is motivated by Wittgenstein's epistemology of logic, according to which we should be able to see logical relations by inspecting the structures of propositions. Finally, Zalabardo considers the problems that we face if we try to extend the application of the picture theory from elementary propositions to truth functions of these.