In his choice of texts, the Editor has been faced with the difficult task of selecting, from among the author's more than 600 publications, those of the greatest philosophical interest. It is chiefly the topics of value-rela tivism and the logic of norms that have been kept in view. The selection has also been guided by the endeavour to reprint, so far as possible, texts which have not hitherto appeared in English. At times, however, this aim has had to be discarded, in order to include works of key im portance and also the latest expressions of Kelsen's view. In addition to the two topics...
In his choice of texts, the Editor has been faced with the difficult task of selecting, from among the author's more than 600 publications, those of t...
Many philosophers have considered logical reasoning as an inborn ability of mankind and as a distinctive feature in the human mind; but we all know that the distribution of this capacity, or at any rate its development, is very unequal. Few people are able to set up a cogent argument; others are at least able to follow a logical argument and even to detect logical fallacies. Nevertheless, even among educated persons there are many who do not even attain this relatively modest level of development. According to my personal observations, lack of logical ability may be due to various...
Many philosophers have considered logical reasoning as an inborn ability of mankind and as a distinctive feature in the human mind; but we all know th...
The papers that follow were read and discussed at the first Symposium on Exact Philosophy. This conference was held at Montreal on November 4th and 5th, 1971, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of McGill University and establish the Society for Exact Philosophy. The expression 'exact philosophy' is taken to signify mathematical phi losophy, i.e., philosophy done with the explicit help of mathematical logic and mathematics. So far the expression denotes an attitude rather than a fully blown discipline: it intends to convey the intention to try and pro ceed in as exact a manner as we can in...
The papers that follow were read and discussed at the first Symposium on Exact Philosophy. This conference was held at Montreal on November 4th and 5t...
3 in philosophy, and therefore in metaphilosophy, cannot be based on rules that avoid spending time on pseudo-problems. Of course, this implies that, if one succeeds in demonstrating convincingly the pseudo-character of a problem by giving its 'solution', the time spent on it need not be seen as wasted. We conclude this section with a brief statement of the criteria for concept explication as they have been formulated in several places by Carnap, Hempel and Stegmiiller. Hempel's account ([13J, Chapter 1) is still very adequate for a detailed introduction. The process of explication starts...
3 in philosophy, and therefore in metaphilosophy, cannot be based on rules that avoid spending time on pseudo-problems. Of course, this implies that, ...
The first section of this chapter describes the major goals of this investiga tion and the general strategy of my presentation. The remaining three sections review some requisite background material and introduce some terminology and notation used in the book. Section B contains a brief review of some of the ideas and notation of elementary logic and set theory. Section C contains an introductory discussion of kinds and at tributes. Section D presents some basic ideas about laws and law sentences. A. GENERAL PLAN OF THE BOOK Basic scientific research is directed towards the goals of...
The first section of this chapter describes the major goals of this investiga tion and the general strategy of my presentation. The remaining three se...
Over the past few years, the tree model of time has been widely employed to deal with issues concerning the semantics of tensed discourse. The thought that has motivated its adoption is that the most plausible way to make sense of indeterminism is to conceive of future possibilities as branches that depart from a common trunk, constituted by the past and the present. However, the thought still needs to be further articulated and defended, and several important questions remain open, such as the question of how actuality can be understood and formally represented in a branching framework. The...
Over the past few years, the tree model of time has been widely employed to deal with issues concerning the semantics of tensed discourse. The thought...
This volume offers selected papers exploring issues arising from scientific discovery in the social sciences. It features a range of disciplines including behavioural sciences, computer science, finance, and statistics with an emphasis on philosophy.
The first of the three parts examines methods of social scientific discovery. Chapters investigate the nature of causal analysis, philosophical issues around scale development in behavioural science research, imagination in social scientific practice, and relationships between paradigms of inquiry and scientific fraud. The next...
This volume offers selected papers exploring issues arising from scientific discovery in the social sciences. It features a range of discipl...
This book highlights the existence of a diversity of methods in science, in general, in groups of sciences (natural, social or the artificial), and in individual sciences. This methodological variety is open to a number of consequences, such as the differences in the research according to levels of reality (micro, meso and macro), which leads to multi-scale modelling and to questioning “fundamental” parts in the sciences, understood as the necessary support for the whole discipline. In addition, this volume acknowledges the need to assess the efficacy of...
This book highlights the existence of a diversity of methods in science, in general, in groups of sciences (natural, social or the artificia...
This book presents a new nominalistic philosophy of mathematics: semantic conventionalism. Its central thesis is that mathematics should be founded on the human ability to create language – and specifically, the ability to institute conventions for the truth conditions of sentences.
This philosophical stance leads to an alternative way of practicing mathematics: instead of “building” objects out of sets, a mathematician should introduce new syntactical sentence types, together with their truth conditions, as he or she develops a theory.
Semantic conventionalism is...
This book presents a new nominalistic philosophy of mathematics: semantic conventionalism. Its central thesis is that mathematics should be founded...
This third volume continues Richard Routley's explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse (including joint work with Val Routley, later Val Plumwood). It focuses on the essays 8 to 12 of the original monograph, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond, following on from the material of the first two volumes and further explores aspects and implications of the Noneist position. It begins with a discussion of the value of nonexistent objects championed by noneism, especially as regards theories of...
This third volume continues Richard Routley's explorations of an improved Meinongian account of non-referring and intensional discourse (inc...
