Logic, Thought and Action
Logic, Thought and Action

Author: Daniel Vanderveken

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2005-06-23

Total Pages: 547

ISBN-13: 140203167X

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This second volume in the series Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science brings a pragmatic perspective to the discussion of the unity of science. Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science increasingly acknowledge the systematic interrelation of language, thought and action. The principal function of language is to enable speakers to communicate their intentions to others, to respond flexibly in a social context and to act cooperatively in the world. This book will contribute to our understanding of this dynamic process by clearly presenting and discussing the most important hypotheses, issues and theories in philosophical and logical study of language, thought and action. Among the fundamental issues discussed are the rationality and freedom of agents, theoretical and practical reasoning, individual and collective attitudes and actions, the nature of cooperation and communication, the construction and conditions of adequacy of scientific theories, propositional contents and their truth conditions, illocutionary force, time, aspect and presupposition in meaning, speech acts within dialogue, the dialogical approach to logic and the structure of dialogues and other language games, as well as formal methods needed in logic or artificial intelligence to account for choice, paradoxes, uncertainty and imprecision. This volume contains major contributions by leading logicians, analytic philosophers, linguists and computer scientists. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers from philosophy, logic, linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. There is no comparable survey in the existing literature.

Life and Action
Life and Action

Author: Michael Thompson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2012-03-05

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780674016705

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Any sound practical philosophy must be clear on practical concepts—concepts, in particular, of life, action, and practice. This clarity is Michael Thompson’s aim in his ambitious work. In Thompson’s view, failure to comprehend the structures of thought and judgment expressed in these concepts has disfigured modern moral philosophy, rendering it incapable of addressing the larger questions that should be its focus. In three investigations, Thompson considers life, action, and practice successively, attempting to exhibit these interrelated concepts as pure categories of thought, and to show how a proper exposition of them must be Aristotelian in character. He contends that the pure character of these categories, and the Aristotelian forms of reflection necessary to grasp them, are systematically obscured by modern theoretical philosophy, which thus blocks the way to the renewal of practical philosophy. His work recovers the possibility, within the tradition of analytic philosophy, of hazarding powerful generalities, and of focusing on the larger issues—like “life”—that have the power to revive philosophy. As an attempt to relocate crucial concepts from moral philosophy and the theory of action into what might be called the metaphysics of life, this original work promises to reconfigure a whole sector of philosophy. It is a work that any student of contemporary philosophy must grapple with.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow

Author: Daniel Kahneman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2011-10-25

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1429969350

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*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Logic and How it Gets That Way
Logic and How it Gets That Way

Author: Dale Jacquette

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1317546547

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In this challenging and provocative analysis, Dale Jacquette argues that contemporary philosophy labours under a number of historically inherited delusions about the nature of logic and the philosophical significance of certain formal properties of specific types of logical constructions. Exposing some of the key misconceptions about formal symbolic logic and its relation to thought, language and the world, Jacquette clears the ground of some very well-entrenched philosophical doctrines about the nature of logic, including some of the most fundamental seldom-questioned parts of elementary propositional and predicate-quantificational logic. Having presented difficulties for conventional ways of thinking about truth functionality, the metaphysics of reference and predication, the role of a concept of truth in a theory of meaning, among others, Jacquette proceeds to reshape the network of ideas about traditional logic that philosophy has acquired along with modern logic itself. In so doing Jacquette is able to offer a new perspective on a number of existing problems in logic and philosophy of logic.

Foundations of Illocutionary Logic
Foundations of Illocutionary Logic

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1985-04-25

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780521263245

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This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts (1969), Expression and Meaning (1979) and Intentionality (1983). In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic.

The Logic of Action: Applications and criticism from the Austrian School
The Logic of Action: Applications and criticism from the Austrian School

Author: Murray Newton Rothbard

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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The second volume of The Logic of Action, this text is a selection of Rothbard's scholarly articles. It was his ambition to show the scientific status of the Austrian School and, at the same time, demonstrate the theory's radical, free-market implications for government policy.

Facing Up to Scarcity
Facing Up to Scarcity

Author: Barbara H. Fried

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0192587099

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Facing Up to Scarcity offers a powerful critique of the nonconsequentialist approaches that have been dominant in Anglophone moral and political thought over the last fifty years. In these essays Barbara H. Fried examines the leading schools of contemporary nonconsequentialist thought, including Rawlsianism, Kantianism, libertarianism, and social contractarianism. In the realm of moral philosophy, she argues that nonconsequentialist theories grounded in the sanctity of "individual reasons" cannot solve the most important problems taken to be within their domain. Those problems, which arise from irreducible conflicts among legitimate (and often identical) individual interests, can be resolved only through large-scale interpersonal trade-offs of the sort that nonconsequentialism foundationally rejects. In addition to scrutinizing the internal logic of nonconsequentialist thought, Fried considers the disastrous social consequences when nonconsequentialist intuitions are allowed to drive public policy. In the realm of political philosophy, she looks at the treatment of distributive justice in leading nonconsequentialist theories. Here one can design distributive schemes roughly along the lines of the outcomes favoured--but those outcomes are not logically entailed by the normative premises from which they are ostensibly derived, and some are extraordinarily strained interpretations of those premises. Fried concludes, as a result, that contemporary nonconsequentialist political philosophy has to date relied on weak justifications for some very strong conclusions.

The Logical Alien
The Logical Alien

Author: Sofia Miguens

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 1081

ISBN-13: 0674242831

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“A remarkable book capable of reshaping what one takes philosophy to be.” —Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia Could there be a logical alien—a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such? From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien, edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers—Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account. The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.