scholarly journals Why classical logic is privileged: justification of logics based on translatability

Synthese ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerhard Schurz

AbstractIn Sect. 1 it is argued that systems of logic are exceptional, but not a priori necessary. Logics are exceptional because they can neither be demonstrated as valid nor be confirmed by observation without entering a circle, and their motivation based on intuition is unreliable. On the other hand, logics do not express a priori necessities of thinking because alternative non-classical logics have been developed. Section 2 reflects the controversies about four major kinds of non-classical logics—multi-valued, intuitionistic, paraconsistent and quantum logics. Its purpose is to show that there is no particular domain or reason that demands the use of a non-classical logic; the particular reasons given for the non-classical logic can also be handled within classical logic. The result of Sect. 2 is substantiated in Sect. 3, where it is shown (referring to other work) that all four kinds of non-classical logics can be translated into classical logic in a meaning-preserving way. Based on this fact a justification of classical logic is developed in Sect. 4 that is based on its representational optimality. It is pointed out that not many but a few non-classical logics can be likewise representationally optimal. However, the situation is not symmetric: classical logic has ceteris paribus advantages as a unifying metalogic, while non-classical logics can have local simplicity advantages.

Open Theology ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 430-450
Author(s):  
Kristóf Oltvai

Abstract Karl Barth’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s theories of revelation, though prominent and popular, are often criticized by both theologians and philosophers for effacing the human subject’s epistemic integrity. I argue here that, in fact, both Barth and Marion appeal to revelation in an attempt to respond to a tendency within philosophy to coerce thought. Philosophy, when it claims to be able to access a universal, absolute truth within history, degenerates into ideology. By making conceptually possible some ‚evental’ phenomena that always evade a priori epistemic conditions, Barth’s and Marion’s theories of revelation relativize all philosophical knowledge, rendering any ideological claim to absolute truth impossible. The difference between their two theories, then, lies in how they understand the relationship between philosophy and theology. For Barth, philosophy’s attempts to make itself absolute is a produce of sinful human vanity; its corrective is thus an authentic revealed theology, which Barth articulates in Christian, dogmatic terms. Marion, on the other hand, equipped with Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, highlights one specific kind of philosophizing—metaphysics—as generative of ideology. To counter metaphysics, Marion draws heavily on Barth’s account of revelation but secularizes it, reinterpreting the ‚event’ as the saturated phenomenon. Revelation’s unpredictability is thus preserved within Marion’s philosophy, but is no longer restricted to the appearing of God. Both understandings of revelation achieve the same epistemological result, however. Reality can never be rendered transparent to thought; within history, all truth is provisional. A concept of revelation drawn originally from Christian theology thus, counterintuitively, is what secures philosophy’s right to challenge and critique the pre-given, a hermeneutic freedom I suggest is the meaning of sola scriptura.


2009 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-147
Author(s):  
Marie Allard ◽  
Camille Bronsard ◽  
Gilles McDougall

ABSTRACT While the meaningful theorems of neo-classical theory of the producer are well known, the neo-keynesian counterparts are not. Therefore, this paper will present those new meaningful theorems and their relations with neo-classical theory. On the one hand, this paper is of interest to the theoretician who would want to use the properties of comparative statics of the producer with quantitative rationing. On the other hand, since a neo-keynesian structural form is presented, the econometrician will be interested in imposing the meaningful theorems of this theory as a priori restrictions.


Author(s):  
Audrey Murfin

This chapter considers Robert Louis Stevenson’s collaborations in the context of criticism on literary collaboration. In order to define collaboration, we must consider four essential questions: is it acknowledged? is it mutual? is it equal? and is it separable? All authors receive advice from others, making all creative practice in a sense collaborative, but this chapter proposes that texts in which the collaboration is mutually undertaken and overtly acknowledged differ fundamentally from traditionally authored texts. On the other hand, criticism of collaboration has been hampered by the assumption that true collaboration must be evenly divided (all of Stevenson’s collaborations were, in one way or another, unequal ones), and that the business of the critic is to solve the “problem” of who has written what, a project which shows an a priori scepticism about the possibility of collaboration at all.


Author(s):  
Diego Liberati

In many fields of research, as well as in everyday life, it often turns out that one has to face a huge amount of data, without an immediate grasp of an underlying simple structure, often existing. A typical example is the growing field of bio-informatics, where new technologies, like the so-called Micro-arrays, provide thousands of gene expressions data on a single cell in a simple and fast integrated way. On the other hand, the everyday consumer is involved in a process not so different from a logical point of view, when the data associated to his fidelity badge contribute to the large data base of many customers, whose underlying consuming trends are of interest to the distribution market. After collecting so many variables (say gene expressions, or goods) for so many records (say patients, or customers), possibly with the help of wrapping or warehousing approaches, in order to mediate among different repositories, the problem arise of reconstructing a synthetic mathematical model capturing the most important relations between variables. To this purpose, two critical problems must be solved: 1 To select the most salient variables, in order to reduce the dimensionality of the problem, thus simplifying the understanding of the solution 2 To extract underlying rules implying conjunctions and/or disjunctions between such variables, in order to have a first idea of their even non linear relations, as a first step to design a representative model, whose variables will be the selected ones When the candidate variables are selected, a mathematical model of the dynamics of the underlying generating framework is still to be produced. A first hypothesis of linearity may be investigated, usually being only a very rough approximation when the values of the variables are not close to the functioning point around which the linear approximation is computed. On the other hand, to build a non linear model is far from being easy: the structure of the non linearity needs to be a priori known, which is not usually the case. A typical approach consists in exploiting a priori knowledge to define a tentative structure, and then to refine and modify it on the training subset of data, finally retaining the structure that best fits a cross-validation on the testing subset of data. The problem is even more complex when the collected data exhibit hybrid dynamics, i.e. their evolution in time is a sequence of smooth behaviors and abrupt changes.


1999 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 99-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Larrimore

Wir dürfen aber den Untergang eines Weltgebäudes nicht als einen wahren Verlust der Natur bedauren. Sie beweiset ihren Reichthum in einer Art von Verschwendung … Der Mensch, der das Meisterstück der Schöpfung zu sein scheint, ist selbst von diesem Gesetze nicht ausgenommen.Immanuel Kant was an early and influential theorist on race. What place a theory of race could have within his system is, however, far from clear. Empirical knowledge about human diversity seems not to be the kind of thing that may find its way into morally acceptable maxims. Kant's understanding of the a priori nature of the moral seems to prevent any account or theory of human difference from leading to prejudice or discrimination. On the other hand, Kant defends race it-self as an a priori concept, and the specific content of his anthropology seems to justify the exclusion of non-whites from moral concern in a new and dangerous way.


1912 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isaac Levin

The analysis of the experiments described above indicates that tumors of the white rat or white mouse inoculated into parenchymatous organs acquire a different biological character from those inoculated subcutaneously. The latter are a great deal more benign in their behavior than human cancer or spontaneous tumors in the same species of animals. Tumors inoculated into organs, on the other hand, are quite identical in their biological behavior with the malignant tumors of animal and man. A conclusion must then be drawn, even a priori, that the method of inoculation into organs is a very important aid in the experimental investigation of cancer. It is true that the method is a great deal more complicated and time-consuming than the ordinary subcutaneous inoculation. The subcutaneous method is satisfactory for a number of cancer problems. One of these is the study of general susceptibility and resistance of the organism of the host to the inoculation of the tumors, and this is a subject of paramount importance in cancer research. On the other hand, the investigations of the writer (10) have shown that an animal may be susceptible to a subcutaneous inoculation of a certain tumor and resist the inoculation of the same tumor into the testicle. Undoubtedly this method of inoculation will reveal the existence of a number of other phenomena. The discovery of specific therapeutic measures is certainly the greatest problem in cancer research. A great deal of work has been done already on the subject, and the latest investigations of Wassermann on the chemotherapy of experimental tumors seem to be of great promise. But here also the therapeutic methods must be tried on animals in which the inoculations of tumor cells have been made into parenchymatous organs before the growths thus treated will have any analogy to human cancer. In this connection one must bear in mind the fact that all the empirical so-called specific cancer remedies, which are continually being devised, are usually successful in treating localized skin cancers and fail utterly in the malignant growths of the internal organs. It is comparatively easy to produce a localized necrosis and softening in a circumscribed growth of the skin and subcutaneous tissue, but whether the same result will be produced on a diffuse and better nourished tumor growing inside of a parenchymatous organ cannot be decided a priori. To determine this it is necessary to have experimental proof on animals in which the tumor was inoculated into organs.


2000 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 86-103
Author(s):  
Dieter Wandschneider

AbstractThe Cartesian concept of nature, which has determined modem thinking until the present time, has become obsolete. It shall be shown that Hegel's objective-idealistic conception of nature discloses, in comparison to that of Descartes, new perspectives for the comprehension of nature and that this, in turn, results in possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.If the argumentation concerning philosophy of nature is intended to catch up with the concrete Being-of-nature and to meet it in its concretion, then this is impossible for the finite spirit in a strictly a priori sense — this is the thesis supported here which is not at all close to Hegel. As the argumentation rather has to consider the conditions of realization concerning the Being-of-nature, too, it is compelled to take up empirical elements — concerning the organism, for instance, system-theoretical aspects, physical and chemical features of the nervous system, etc. With that, on the one hand, empirical-scientific premises are assumed (e.g. the lawlikeness of nature), which on the other hand become (now close to Hegel) possibly able to be founded in the frame of a Hegelian-idealistic conception. In this sense, a double strategy of empirical-scientific concretization and objective-idealistic foundation is followed up, which represents the methodical basic principle of the developed considerations.In the course of the undertaking, the main aspects of the whole Hegelian design concerning the philosophy of nature are considered — space and time, mass and motion, force and law of nature, the organism, the problem of evolution, psychic being — as well as Hegel's basic thesis concerning the philosophy of nature, that therein a tendency towards coherence and idealization manifests itself in the sense of a (categorically) gradually rising succession of nature: from the separateness of space to the ideality of sensation. In the sense of the double strategy of concretization and foundation it is shown that on the one hand possibilities of philosophical penetration concerning actual empirical-scientific results are opened, and on the other hand — in tum — a re-interpretation of Hegel's theorem on the basis of physical, evolution-theoretical and system-theoretical argumentation also becomes possible. In this mutual crossing-over and elucidation of empirical and Hegelian argumentation not only do perspectives of a new comprehension of nature become visible, but also, at the same time — as an essential consequence of this methodical principle — thoughts on the possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 129-152
Author(s):  
Helton Adverse

This paper’s aim is to elucidate the meaning of the paradoxical expression “ontology of the present”, utilized by Foucault in his latest works. To achieve this goal, I adopted a twofold strategy: on the one hand, it was useful to recall that this was not the first time Foucault used a deranging expression. In the 1960’s, in the period he developed his “archeology of knowledge”, we can find in some of his major works the husserlian term “historical a priori”. On the other hand, I had to analyze some aspects of his interpretation of the modernity that we can find in his last articles, interviews and lessons in the Collège de France. In these occasions, Kant’s philosophy was the main theoretical influence.


1963 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-130
Author(s):  
R. Sri Pathmanathan

Having been associated with a recent production of Euripides' Cyclops in the original Greek at Ibadan, I feel prompted to reply to Peter Arnott's charges against Euripides' adaptation of the well-known episode in Homer's Odyssey, ix. We know very little about the origin and nature of satyric drama, and it seems unfair to discuss the structure of the Cyclops on a priori grounds or to compare it with the form of Greek tragedy. We do not subject Old Comedy to this kind of treatment because we are aware in this case of the dissimilar elements which came together to produce the disjointed articulation that Old Comedy displays. It may well be that ‘the pattern of decline’ in the composition of the choruses and episodes noted by Arnott is not the result of hasty composition and overwork but is merely indicative of a looser structure allowed by the conventions of the satyr play. On the other hand, the intervention of the chorus in the Cyclops is always eminently dramatic— not too long-drawn-out or too brief—and gives a life and impetus to the play which modern audiences, unfamiliar with the choral tradition of Greek tragedy, miss in more regularly constructed plays. The ‘miserable couplet’ which serves as exodos is not unparalleled even in tragedy, although the iambics in place of the more usual anapaests are certainly unexpected. In general, the choral odes are admirably suited to the grotesque personalities of the satyrs; they include two haunting lyrics, lines 495–502 and 511–18 (unfortunately somewhat mutilated) which rank in rhythm and imagery with some of the best of Euripides, and at the moment of greatest tension, in the third and fourth stasima, are commendably brief and onomatopoeic.


Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrone

This chapter examines the debate between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger over the question “What is man?”—and thus, indirectly, the authentic meaning of Immanuel Kant's philosophy—and relates it to Pope Benedict XVI's views on the complex relationship between Christianity and Enlightenment culture. What was at stake in the Cassirer–Heidegger debate was the very existence of the Enlightenment and the legitimacy of its epistemological foundation. Cassirer accepted the need to redefine the relationship between the a priori and experience, in view of an idealistic conception of Kantian transcendentalism that was both more complex and problematic. His position remained firmly within the universalistic tradition of Enlightenment humanism. Heidegger, on the other hand, saw the Enlightenment as the final phase of the vilified trajectory of Western metaphysics that had resulted in the enthronement of man. The chapter also considers the Catholic Church's anti-Enlightenment positions.


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