The General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution on December 11, 1987, designating the 1990s as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction. This resolution has served as a catalyst in promotion of international cooperation in the field of natural disaster reduction; in initiation of wide-ranging research activities on natural and man-made disasters; in development of tech nologies for assessment, prediction, prevention, and mitigation through technical assistance, technology transfer, demonstration projects, and education and training; and in dissemination of...

One can distinguish, roughly speaking, two different approaches to the philosophy of mathematics. On the one hand, some philosophers (and some mathematicians) take the nature and the results of mathematicians' activities as given, and go on to ask what philosophical morals one might perhaps find in their story. On the other hand, some philosophers, logicians and mathematicians have tried or are trying to subject the very concepts which mathematicians are using in their work to critical scrutiny. In practice this usually means scrutinizing the logical and linguistic tools mathematicians wield....

Several central concepts and ideas of language theory are analyzed, criticized and developed in the essays contained in this volume. They include the concept of quantifier and in particular a liberalization of the rules governing the interaction of quantifiers, the ambiguities of the concept of scope, the alleged Frege-Russell ambiguity of words for being, the notion of reference which turns out to be misunderstood by the so-called new theorists of reference, different modes of identification, the hegemony of generative syntax, recent theories of demonstratives, the relation of...

Is a genuine logic of scientific discovery possible? In the essays collected here, Hintikka not only defends an affirmative answer; he also outlines such a logic. It is the logic of questions and answers. Thus inquiry in the sense of knowledge-seeking becomes inquiry in the sense of interrogation. Using this new logic, Hintikka establishes a result that will undoubtedly be considered the fundamental theorem of all epistemology, viz., the virtual identity of optimal strategies of pure discovery with optimal deductive strategies. Questions to Nature, of course, must include...

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an...

Twentieth-century philosophy has tacitly been dominated by a deep contrast between universalist and model-theoretical visions of language. The role of this contrast is studied here in Peirce, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Husserl, Heidegger and in the development of logical theory. Hintikka also develops a new approach to truth-definitions which strongly supports the model-theoretical view.

The foundations of mathematics are examined by reference to such crucial concepts as the informational independence of quantifiers, the standard-nonstandard distinction, completeness, computability, parallel processing and the extremality of models.

Several of the basic ideas of current language theory are subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting, including the concept of scope, the hegemony of generative syntax, the Frege-Russell claim that verbs like is' are ambiguous, and the assumptions underlying the so-called New Theory of Reference. In their stead, new constructive ideas are proposed.

Aristotle thought of his logic and methodology as applications of the Socratic questioning method. In particular, logic was originally a study of answers necessitated by earlier answers. For Aristotle, thought-experiments were real experiments in the sense that by realizing forms in one's mind, one can read off their properties and interrelations. Treating forms as independent entities, knowable one by one, committed Aristotle to his mode of syllogistic explanation. He did not think of existence, predication and identity as separate senses of estin. Aristotle thus serves as an...