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This book provides comprehensive and accessible coverage of the disciplines of philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of logic. After an introduction, the book begins with a historical section, consisting of a chapter on the modern period, Kant and his intellectual predecessors, a chapter on later empiricism, including Mill and logical positivism, and a chapter on Wittgenstein. The next section of the volume consists of seven chapters on the views that dominated the philosophy and foundations of mathematics in the early decades of the 20th century: logicism, formalism, and intuitionism. They approach their subjects from a variety of historical and philosophical perspectives. The next section of the volume deals with views that dominated in the later twentieth century and beyond: Quine and indispensability, naturalism, nominalism, and structuralism. The next chapter in the volume is a detailed and sympathetic treatment of a predicative approach to both the philosophy and the foundations of mathematics, which is followed by an extensive treatment of the application of mathematics to the sciences. The last six chapters focus on logical matters: two chapters are devoted to the central notion of logical consequence, one on model theory and the other on proof theory; two chapters deal with the so-called paradoxes of relevance, one pro and one contra; and the final two chapters concern second-order logic (or higher-order logic), again one pro and one contra.

The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference investigates the relations of inductive support on the large scale, among the totality of facts comprising a science or science in general. These relations form a massively entangled, non-hierarchical structure which is discovered by making hypotheses provisionally that are later supported by facts drawn from the entirety of the science. What results is a benignly circular, self-supporting inductive structure in which universal rules are not employed, the classical Humean problem cannot be formulated and analogous regress arguments fail. The earlier volume, The Material Theory of Induction, proposed that individual inductive inferences are warranted not by universal rules but by facts particular to each context. This book now investigates how the totality of these inductive inferences interact in a mature science. Each fact that warrants an individual inductive inference is in turn supported inductively by other facts. Numerous case studies in the history of science support, and illustrate further, those claims. This is a novel, thoroughly researched, and sustained remedy to the enduring failures of formal approaches to inductive inference. With The Large-Scale Structure of Inductive Inference, author John D. Norton presents a novel, thoroughly researched, and sustained remedy to the enduring failures of formal approaches of inductive inference.

The term “fuzzy logic” (FL) is a generic one, which stands for a broad variety of logical systems. Their common ground is the rejection of the most fundamental principle of classical logic—the principle of bivalence—according to which each declarative sentence has exactly two possible truth values—true and false. Each logical system subsumed under FL allows for additional, intermediary truth values, which are interpreted as degrees of truth. These systems are distinguished from one another by the set of truth degrees employed, its algebraic structure, truth functions chosen for logical connectives, and other properties. The book examines from the historical perspective two areas of research on fuzzy logic known as fuzzy logic in the narrow sense (FLN) and fuzzy logic in the broad sense (FLB), which have distinct research agendas. The agenda of FLN is the development of propositional, predicate, and other fuzzy logic calculi. The agenda of FLB is to emulate commonsense human reasoning in natural language and other unique capabilities of human beings. In addition to FL, the book also examines mathematics based on FL. One chapter in the book is devoted to overviewing successful applications of FL and the associated mathematics in various areas of human affairs. The principal aim of the book is to assess the significance of FL and especially its significance for mathematics. For this purpose, the notions of paradigms and paradigm shifts in science, mathematics, and other areas are introduced and employed as useful metaphors.

Greg Restall's Logic provides concise introductions to propositional and first-order predicate logic while showing how formal logic intersects with substantial philosophical issues such as vagueness, conditionals, relevance, propositional attitudes, and opaque contents. The author also examines the ideas behind modal logic, free logic, and other non-standard logics and discusses the nature of logic itself. The book covers both natural deduction and tree methods for proving validity. Each chapter includes excellent suggestions for further reading and both elementary and more advanced exercises, with solutions provided on a website. It is flexibly designed to be useable for half or full-year courses, for courses focusing exclusively on formal logic, or for a variety of approaches that would integrate topics in philosophical logic. Restall examines many of the interesting issues raised by basic logical techniques and will undoubtedly stimulate further study in the discipline. This is a logic book designed principally for philosophers but which will also be of interest to students of computer science, cognitive science, and linguistics.

The book is an opinionated survey of philosophical work on paradoxes of truth and of related notions, such as property-instantiation, with occasional forays into related topics such as vagueness, the nature of validity, and the Gödel incompleteness theorems. It advocates a particular approach, according to which the paradoxes are to be resolved by the adoption of a non-classical logic: a logic in which excluded middle is restricted. (The logic is quite different from intuitionist logic, which doesn't avoid the paradoxes and also has many unnatural features; and it is much more powerful than the most familiar logic of the paradoxes, the strong Kleene logic, in that it contains a serious conditional.) The book also provides a systematic and detailed look at the main competing approaches. These include Tarski's theory, Kripke's theories, Lukasiewicz's theory, classical gap theories, classical glut theories, supervaluational theories, revision theories, stratified theories, contextual theories, and dialetheic theories. It attempts to compare the virtues of such theories on a range of issues. It also argues against the view that any solution to the paradoxes is inevitably faced with ‘revenge paradoxes’.

Conditionals are of two basic kinds, often called ‘indicative’ and ‘subjunctive’. This book expounds and evaluates the main literature about each kind. It eventually defends the view of Adams and Edgington that indicatives are devices for expressing subjective probabilities, and the view of Stalnaker and Lewis that subjunctives are statements about close possible worlds. But it also discusses other views, e.g. that indicatives are really material conditionals, and Goodman's approach to subjunctives.

Published in honor of Sergio Galvan, this collection concentrates on the application of logical and mathematical methods for the study of central issues in formal philosophy. The volume is subdivided into four sections, dedicated to logic and philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of religion. The contributions adress, from a logical point of view, some of the main topics in these areas. The first two sections include formal treatments of: truth and paradoxes; definitions by abstraction; the status of abstract objects, such as mathematical objects and universal concepts; and the structure of explicit knowledge. The last two sections include papers on classical problems in philosophy of science, such as the status of subjective probability, the notion of verisimilitude, the notion of approximation, and the theory of mind and mental causation, and specific issues in metaphysics and philosophy of religion, such as the ontology of species, actions, and intelligible worlds, and the logic of religious belonging.

In An Aristotelian Account of Induction Groarke discusses the intellectual process through which we access the \"first principles\" of human thought - the most basic concepts, the laws of logic, the universal claims of science and metaphysics, and the deepest moral truths. Following Aristotle and others, Groarke situates the first stirrings of human understanding in a creative capacity for discernment that precedes knowledge, even logic. Relying on a new historical study of philosophical theories of inductive reasoning from Aristotle to the twenty-first century, Groarke explains how Aristotle offers a viable solution to the so-called problem of induction, while offering new contributions to contemporary accounts of reasoning and argument and challenging the conventional wisdom about induction.

This book advocates and defends the view that there are true contradictions (dialetheism), a view that has flown in the face of orthodoxy in Western philosophy since Aristotle's time. The book has been at the centre of the controversies surrounding dialetheism ever since the first edition was published in 1987. This text contains the second edition of the book. It expands upon the original in various ways, and also contains the author's reflections on developments over the last two decades.

This book introduces readers to the topic of explanation. The insights of Plato, Aristotle, J.S. Mill and Carl Hempel are examined, and are used to argue against the view that explanation is merely a problem for the philosophy of science. Having established its importance for understanding knowledge in general, the book concludes with a bold and original explanation of explanation.