Gertrudis Van de Vijver. Seminar of Logic and Epistemology University of Ghent Before being classified under the fashionable denominators of complexity and chaos, self-organization and autonomy were intensely inquired into in the cybernetic tradition. Despite all rejections that cybernetics has gone through in the second half of this century, today its importance is more and more recognized. Its decisive influence for connectionist theories, autopoietic and constructivist theories, for different forms of applied or experimental epistemology, is being more and more understood and generally...

These new papers by distinguished Kant scholars are collected from a conference held in honor of one of the world's foremost authorities on Kant: William H. Werkmeister. The contributors present novel interpretations of the development of Kant's thought up to and beyond the three famous Critiques. Frederick Van De Pitte raises important questions about Kant's theory of concept formation; Paul Guyer and R.M. Hare contribute provocative essays on Kant's ethics; Donald Crawford and Ted Cohen offer valuable accounts of Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment; and two probing studies of the most...

The problem of the choice of prior probabilities for Bayesian inferences is considered, with special reference to the theory of inductive probabilities and the analysis of the multinomial inferences provided by Bayesian statistics. Among other things, it is argued that the choice of prior probabilities in a given empirical inquiry should be suitably restricted by specific contextual constraints' such as the available background knowledge and the cognitive goal of the inquiry, where this goal is assumed to be the achievement of a high degree of verisimilitude. One of the most original features...

At the turn of the century, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl both participated in the discussion concerning the foundations of logic and mathematics. Since the 1960s, comparisons have been made between Frege's semantic views and Husserl's theory of intentional acts. In quite recent years, new approaches to the two philosophers' views have appeared. This collection of articles opens with the first English translation of Dagfinn Follesdal's early classic on Husserl and Frege of 1958. The book brings together a number of new contributions by well-known authors and gives a survey of recent...

l. THE GENERAL PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY There is a philosophical issue that surely precedes all other possible questions. It concerns the very possibility of our thinking about some thing to some purpose. Short of this no philosophy, theory or research would be possible. But it is not immediately clear that we are assured that what purports to be effective thought, and cognition is such in reality. What guarantee is there for instance that when one is under the impression that one is thinking that "the cat is on the mat" it is in fact the case that one is thinking this? One could not be...

This new study is by far the most comprehensive examination yet of a problem that involves us all: the basis of our knowledge that others have minds. It insists, against the received wisdom, that no theory of mind can avoid the problem or make it easier to solve. Nor is there any way to avoid a crucial reliance on the theorist's own experience. Alec Hyslop defends a (modified) version of the traditional analogical inference to other minds and rejects alternatives, but only after subjecting each of them to a sustained, searching examination. Other Minds is a densely argued, original...

This volume contains a collection of research papers centered around the concept of quantifier. Recently this concept has become the central point of research in logic. It is one of the important logical concepts whose exact domain and applications have so far been insufficiently explored, especially in the area of inferential and semantic properties of languages. It should thus remain the central point of research in the future. Moreover, during the last twenty years generalized quantifiers and logical technics based on them have proved their utility in various applications. The example of...

Philosophers of science have produced a variety of definitions for the notion of one sentence, theory or hypothesis being closer to the truth, more verisimilar, or more truthlike than another one. The definitions put forward by philosophers presuppose at least implicitly that the subject matter with which the compared sentences, theories or hypotheses are concerned has been specified,! and the property of closeness to the truth, verisimilitude or truth likeness appearing in such definitions should be understood as closeness to informative truth about that subject matter. This monograph is...

This volume contains original contributions dedicated to Vladimir A. Smirnov by some of the leading scholars in Russia, the United States, Japan, Finland, Brazil, the Netherlands, Poland, and Hungary. Most of the papers deal with topics in which Smirnov has taken a direct interest. These include the problems of non-classical logics, logical semantics, analysis of logical proofs, and applications of logical methods to the methodology of science. The volume contains a selected bibliography of Smirnov's works. It is of interest to all students of philosophical and mathematical logic,...

This is a volume on the concepts, theories, models and social consequences of creativity. It contains articles by well-known cognitive scientists, economists, mathematicians, philosophers and psychologists.