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The author discusses the structure and the logic of proofs in trials. He considers various approaches to developing a theory of the law of evidence and proof. He addresses the role of ontology in examining juridical proof in the U.S. He explores the case of humanity writ large and the case of humanity taken singly.

In the style of Lindström's theorem for classical first-order logic, this article characterizes propositional bi-intuitionistic logic as the maximal (with respect to expressive power) abstract logic satisfying a certain form of compactness, the Tarski union property and preservation under bi-asimulations. Since bi-intuitionistic logic introduces new complexities in the intuitionistic setting by adding the analogue of a backwards looking modality, the present paper constitutes a non-trivial modification of the previous work done by the authors for intuitionistic logic (Badia and Olkhovikov, 2020, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic , 61, 11–30). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the paper "The Structure and Logic of Proof in Trials" by Peter Tillers. He claims that Tillers' paper focuses on the path between rationality and irrationality in legal evidence and proof. He argues against Tillers' statement that he does not believe in the radical separation of descriptive inferential theory and normative inferential theory. He considers the risk of errors in human reasoning.

This paper challenges the assumption that reasons are intrinsic to rational action. A great many actions are not best understood as ones in which the agent acted for reasons - and yet they can be understood as rational, and as open to rational criticism. The relative paucity of explicit reason-giving, practical arguments in daily life presents a general philosophical problem. It reflects the existence of a class of ways in which reason can regulate action, which goes far beyond producing reasons or applying principles. Much practical reasoning takes the form of what H. P. Grice called 'thought-transitions'. These are neither in the form of standard practical arguments, nor can they be so reconstructed without distorting the ways in which an agent thinks. Some actions to which one is led by a thought transition are rational, namely when what Grice called a 'propension' towards a given class of actions - a standing inclination to act in certain ways - would itself stand up to rational evaluation. The paper examines two bases for such endorsement, one local and limited, and one much more speculative, due to Grice himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his paper ‘Wang's Paradox’, Michael Dummett provides an argument for why strict finitism in mathematics is internally inconsistent and therefore an untenable position. Dummett's argument proceeds by making two claims: (1) Strict finitism is committed to the claim that there are sets of natural numbers which are closed under the successor operation but nonetheless have an upper bound; (2) Such a commitment is inconsistent, even by finitistic standards. In this paper I claim that Dummett's argument fails. I question both parts of Dummett's argument, but most importantly I claim that Dummett's argument in favour of the second claim crucially relies on an implicit assumption that Dummett does not acknowledge and that the strict finitist need not accept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to Hoeltje I concede the main point of his first section: for each logical truth S of the object language, it is a logical consequence of the Davidsonian theory of meaning I offered in my paper that S is logically true, contrary to what I asserted in the paper. However, I now argue that a Davidsonian theory of meaning may be formulated equally well in such a way that it not a logical consequence of the theory that S is a logical truth. Nonetheless, the revised theory of meaning will still ‘entail’ in a wider sense that S is a logical truth, for we can prove by induction on the consequence class of the revised theory that S is a logical truth. So far, my disagreement with Hoeltje is over the more charitable interpretation of a passage from Davidson. I close by arguing that Davidson was mistaken on one point, a theory of meaning will entail a threefold distinction among the sentences of the object language, not a two- fold distinction as he claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper asks under what conditions deductive reasoning transmits justification from its premises to its conclusion. It argues that both standard externalist and standard internalist accounts of this phenomenon fail. The nature of this failure is taken to indicate the way forward: basic forms of deductive reasoning must justify by being instances of ‘blind but blameless’ reasoning. Finally, the paper explores the suggestion that an inferentialist account of the logical constants can help explain how such reasoning is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background It has been suggested that to meet information needs of multiple stakeholders, evaluation of public health interventions should specify a broader range of outcomes, evaluate a wider range of interventions and use more varied methods, in particular for dealing with complexity. Current outcomes approaches in public policy are potentially fertile ground for addressing these challenges and embedding evaluation in processes for reporting on public health outcomes. This paper describes work by NHS Health Scotland to realize this potential. Methods Development of outcomes frameworks containing logic models which link actions to outcomes and specify outcome indicators for monitoring progress. Group processes to inform and help create shared ownership of models across key stakeholders. Creation of web-based resources to host outcomes frameworks with hyperlinks connecting logic models to evidence and outcome indicators. Results The outcomes frameworks have been used in various ways by policy-makers and practitioners to shape policy, planning and monitoring and evaluation. A range of additional challenges that need to be overcome in developing and using the outcomes frameworks has been identified. Conclusions Logic model-based outcomes frameworks are useful tools for supporting outcome-based planning and evaluation of public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though it is standardly assumed that supervaluationism applied to vagueness is committed to global validity, Achille Varzi (2007) argues that the supervaluationist should take seriously the idea of adopting local validity instead. Varzi’s motivation for the adoption of local validity is largely based on two objections against the global notion: that it brings some counterexamples to classically valid rules of inference and that it is inconsistent with unrestricted higher-order vagueness. In this discussion I review these objections and point out ways to address them not considered in Varzi’s paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

According to the standard story (a) W. V. Quine’s criticisms of the idea that logic is true by convention are directed against, and completely undermine, Rudolf Carnap’s idea that the logical truths of a language L are the sentences of L that are true-in-L solely in virtue of the linguistic conventions for L, and (b) Quine himself had no interest in or use for any notion of truth by convention. This paper argues that (a) and (b) are both false. Carnap did not endorse any truth-by-convention theses that are undermined by Quine’s technical observations. Quine knew this. Quine’s criticisms of the thesis that logic is true by convention are not directed against a truth-by-convention thesis that Carnap actually held, but are part of Quine’s own project of articulating the consequences of his scientific naturalism. Quine found that logic is not true by convention in any naturalistically acceptable sense. But he also observed that in set theory and other highly abstract parts of science we sometimes deliberately adopt postulates with no justification other than that they are elegant and convenient. For Quine such postulations constitute a naturalistically acceptable and fallible sort of truth by convention. It is only when an act of adopting a postulate is not indispensible to natural science that Quine sees it as affording truth by convention ‘unalloyed’. A naturalist who accepts Quine’s notion of truth by convention is therefore not limited (as naturalists are often thought to be) to accepting only those postulates that she regards as indispensible to natural science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion note examines a recent argument for the principle that any counterfactual with true components is itself true. That argument rests upon two widely accepted principles of counterfactual logic to which the paper presents counterexamples. The conclusion speculates briefly upon the wider lessons that philosophers should draw from these examples for the semantics of counterfactuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper tries to spell out a connection between deductive logic and rationality, against Harman's arguments that there is no such connection, and also against the thought that any such connection would preclude rational change in logic. One might not need to connect logic to rationality if one could view logic as the science of what preserves truth by a certain kind of necessity (or by necessity plus logical form); but the paper points out a serious obstacle to any such view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frege holds the distinction between complete (saturated) and incomplete (unsaturated) things to be a basic distinction of logic. Many disagree. In this paper I will argue that one can defend Frege's distinction against criticism if one takes, inspired by Frege, a wh-question to be the paradigm incomplete expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joan Weiner has recently claimed that Frege neither uses, nor has any need to use, a truth-predicate in his justification of the logical laws. She argues that because of the assimilation of sentences to proper names in his system, Frege does not need to make use of the Quinean device of semantic ascent in order to formulate the logical laws, and that the predicate 'is the True' which is used in Frege's justification, is not to be considered as a truth-predicate, because it does not apply to true sentences or true thoughts. The present paper aims to show that Frege needs to use, and does use, a truth-predicate in this context. It is argued, first, that Frege needs to use a truth-predicate in order to show that the truth of the logical laws is evident from the senses of the sentences by means of which they are formulated, and second, that the predicate that he actually uses, 'is the True' must be considered as a truth-predicate in the relevant sense, because it can be used and is actually used by Frege to explain the truth-conditions of thoughts. To defend this interpretation, it is discussed whether the explanatory use of 'is the True' in Frege's system is compatible with his deflationary analysis of 'true'. The paper's conclusion is that there is indeed a conflict here; but, from Frege's point of view, this conflict is due merely to the logical imperfection of natural language and does not affect the proper system but only its propaedeutic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and contrasts two conceivability arguments: the zombie argument (ZA) against physicalism, and the perfect actor argument (AA) against behaviourism. I start the paper by assuming that the arguments are of the same kind, and that AA is sound. On the basis of these two assumptions I criticize the most common philosophical suggestions in the literature today about what is wrong with ZA, and what is right in it. I end the paper by suggesting that the comparison between the two arguments makes plausible an epistemic response to ZA according to which the conceivability of a zombie — that is, someone identical to me in all physical respects but different in some phenomenal respect — is being confused with the conceivability of something else, i.e. someone identical to me in physical respects that are epistemically available, but different in some phenomenal respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ‘Composition and Vagueness’, I argued, among other things, that the Vagueness Argument for unrestricted composition fails. In ‘Vagueness and Arbitrariness: Merricks on Composition’, Elizabeth Barnes objects to my argument. This paper replies to Barnes, and also offers further support for the views defended in my original paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper develops a critical dialectic with respect to the nowadays dominant approach in the theory of vagueness, an approach whose main tenet is that it is in the nature of the vagueness of an expression to present borderline cases of application, conceived of as enjoying some kind of distinctive normative status. Borderlineness is used to explain the basic phenomena of vagueness, such as, for example, our ignorance of the location of cut-offs in a soritical series. Every particular theory of vagueness exemplifying the approach makes use, in the vague object language, of a definiteness operator which, however substantially interpreted, unavoidably inherits the vagueness of the expressions on which it operates (‘higher-order vagueness’). It is first argued that finite soritical series force a surprising collapse result concerning a particular set of expressions involving the definiteness operator. It is then shown that, under two highly plausible assumptions about higher-order vagueness (the existence of ‘absolutely definitely’ positive and negative cases and the ‘radical’ character of higher-order vagueness itself), the collapse result implies the inadequacy of the dominant approach as a theory of vagueness, as its main tenet can be, at best, not absolutely definitely true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Doris has recently argued that since we do not possess character traits as traditionally conceived, virtue ethics is rooted in a false empirical presupposition. Gopal Sreenivasan has claimed, in a paper in Mind, that Doris has not provided suitable evidence for his empirical claim. But the experiment Sreenivasan focuses on is not one that Doris employs, and neither is it relevantly similar in structure. The confusion arises because both authors use the phrase 'cross-situational consistency' to describe the aspect of character traits that they are concerned with, but neither defines this phrase, and it is ambiguous: Doris uses it in one sense, Sreenivasan in another. Partly for this reason, the objections Sreenivasan raises fail to block the argument Doris provides. In particular, the most reliable data Doris employs, Milgram's famous study of authority, is entirely immune to Sreenivasan's objections. Sreenivasan has not shown, therefore, that Doris provides unsuitable evidence for his claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It might be thought that we could argue for the consistency of a mathematical theory T within T, by giving an inductive argument that all theorems of T are true and inferring consistency. By Gödel's second incompleteness theorem any such argument must break down, but just how it breaks down depends on the kind of theory of truth that is built into T. The paper surveys the possibilities, and suggests that some theories of truth give far more intuitive diagnoses of the breakdown than do others. The paper concludes with some morals about the nature of validity and about a possible alternative to the idea that mathematical theories are indefinitely extensible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fish proposes that we need to elucidate what‘disjunctivism’ stands for, and he also proposes that it stands for the rejection of a principle about the nature of experience that he calls the decisiveness principle. The present paper argues that his first proposal is reasonable, but then argues, in Section II, that his positive suggestion does not draw the line between disjunctivism and non-disjunctivism in the right place. In Section III, it is argued that disjunctivism is a thesis about the special nature of perceptual experience, and the thesis as elucidated here is then distinguished from and related to certain other ideas about perception, namely, direct realism and also McDowell's epistemological disjunctivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the idea of predicate is the history of its emancipation. The lesson of this paper is that there are two more steps to take. The first is to recognize that predicates need not have a fixed degree, the second that they can combine with plural terms. We begin by articulating the notion of a multigrade predicate: one that takes variably many arguments. We counter objections to the very idea posed by Peirce, Dummett's Frege, and Strawson. We show that the arguments of a multigrade predicate must be grouped into places, with perhaps several arguments occupying positions at a place. Variability may relate to places or positions. Russell's multiple judgement predicate turns out to be just one example of a family—‘ is necessarily true of’, ‘is said of’, ‘is instantiated by’ and so on—of predicates with variably many places. Our main concern, however, is lists. Any adequate account of lists must include plural as well as singular terms. On one account, lists are mere strings of separate arguments, which occupy variably many positions within a place of a multigrade predicate. A quite different account takes the list itself to be a compound plural term. We compare these rival conceptions, and reach some surprising conclusions. As a coda, we deploy the conceptual apparatus developed in the paper to assess Morton's pioneer system of multigrade logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impersonality has long been part of modernism's self-definition, it having become a catchword for the reaction on the part of modernists against one kind of prevailing ('romantic') description of the nature of artistic sensibility. This paper attempts, however, to make some distinctions between the logic of impersonality, and what I take to be another sort of logic, equally important to modernism but not as explicitly formulated, which I call the nonhuman. Nietzsche is the best exponent of this other conviction about how modem life ought to be depicted, and so this paper will be an attempt to read him, (1) for his philosophical content and affiliation to modernism, and (2) for what seems to me to be an astoundingly prescient anticipation of the work of the late modernist painter, Jackson Pollock. I use Nietzsche to honour Pollock's own refusal to interpret will in any standard psychological categories, and I situate the concept of will within the technical logic of modernism. If the question of mourning and trauma is very much alive in Pollock's work, I argue that it must be subordinate to all the ways in which aligning ourselves to the nonhuman dimension of will allows for a psychology which transcends or transforms mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is on the formal modelling of reasoning about evidence. The main purpose is to advocate logical approaches as a worthwhile alternative to approaches rooted in probability theory. In particular, the use of logics for defeasible argumentation is investigated. Such logics model reasoning as the construction and comparison of arguments for and against a conclusion; this makes them very suitable for capturing the adversarial aspects that are so typical for legal evidential reasoning. Also, it will be shown that they facilitate the explicit modelling of different kinds of knowledge, such as the distinction between direct vs. ancillary evidence, and the explicit modelling of different types of evidential arguments, such as appeals to witness or expert opinion, applying generalizations, or temporal projections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Frege attempted to provide arithmetic with a foundation in logic. But his attempt to do so was confounded by Russell's discovery of paradox at the heart of Frege's system. The papers collected in this special issue contribute to the on-going investigation into the foundations of mathematics and logic. After sketching the historical background, this introduction provides an overview of the papers collected here, tracing some of the themes that connect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservativeness has been proposed as an important requirement for deflationary truth theories. This in turn gave rise to the so-called ‘conservativeness argument’ against deflationism: a theory of truth which is conservative over its base theory S cannot be adequate, because it cannot prove that all theorems of S are true. In this paper we show that the problems confronting the deflationist are in fact more basic: even the observation that logic is true is beyond his reach. This seems to conflict with the deflationary characterization of the role of the truth predicate in proving generalizations. However, in the final section we propose a way out for the deflationist — a solution that permits him to accept a strong theory, having important truth-theoretical generalizations as its theorems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is sometimes held that rules of inference determine the meaning of the logical constants: the meaning of, say, conjunction is fully determined by either its introduction or its elimination rules, or both; similarly for the other connectives. In a recent paper, Panu Raatikainen argues that this view - call it logical inferentialism - is undermined by some 'very little known' considerations by Carnap (1943) to the effect that 'in a definite sense, it is not true that the standard rules of inference' themselves suffice to 'determine the meanings of [the] logical constants' (Raatikainen 2000: 283). In a nutshell, Carnap showed that the rules allow for non-normal interpretations of negation and disjunction. Raatikainen concludes that 'no ordinary formalization of logic.., is sufficient to "fully formalize" all the essential properties of the logical constants' (2000: 283). We suggest that this is a mistake. Pace Raatikainen, intuitionists like Dummett and Prawit need not worry about Carnap's problem. And although bilateral solutions for classical inferentialists - as proposed by Timothy Smiley and Ian Rumfitt - seem inadequate, it is not excluded that the classical inferentialists may be in a position to address the problem too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the opening to his late essay, 'Der Gedanke', Frege asserts without qualification that the word 'true' 'points the way for logic' But in a short piece from his Nachlass entitled 'My Basic Logical Insights' Frege writes that the word 'true' makes 'an unsuccessful attempt to point to the essence of logic', asserting instead that 'what really pertains to logic lies not in the word "true" but in the assertoric force with which the sentence is uttered'. Properly understanding what Frege takes to be at issue here is crucial for understanding his conception of logic and, in particular, what he takes to be its normative status vis-à-vis judgement, assertion, and inference. In this paper, I focus my attention on clarifying the latter claim and Frege's motivations for making it, exposing what I take to be a fundamental tension in Frege's conception of logic. Finally, I discuss whether Frege's deployment of the horizontal in his mature Begriffsschrift helps to resolve this tension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the two-envelope paradox. Two main formulations of the paradoxical reasoning are distinguished, which differ according to the partition of possibilities employed. We argue that in the first formulation the conditionals required for the utility assignment are problematic; the error is identified as a fallacy of conditional reasoning. We go on to consider the second formulation, where the epistemic status of certain singular propositions becomes relevant; our diagnosis is that the states considered do not exhaust the possibilities. Thus, on our approach to the paradox, the fallacy, in each formulation, is found in the reasoning underlying the relevant utility matrix; in both cases, the paradoxical argument goes astray before one gets to questions of probability or calculations of expected utility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within certain philosophical debates, most notably those concerning the limits of our knowledge, agnosticism seems a plausible, and potentially the right, stance to take. Yet, in order to qualify as a proper stance, and not just the refusal to adopt any, agnosticism must be shown to be in opposition to both endorsement and denial and to be answerable to future evidence. This paper explicates and defends the thesis that agnosticism may indeed define such a third stance that is weaker than scepticism and hence offers a genuine alternative to realism and anti-realism about our cognitive limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Ramsey Test hypothesis the conditional claim that if A then B is credible just in case it is credible that B, on the supposition that A. If true the hypothesis helps explain the way in which we evaluate and use ordinary language conditionals. But impossibility results for the Ramsey Test hypothesis in its various forms suggest that it is untenable. In this paper, I argue that these results do not in fact have this implication, on the grounds that similar results can be proved without recourse to the Ramsey test hypothesis. Instead they show that a number of well entrenched principles of rational belief and belief revision do not apply to conditionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does Frege have a metatheory for his logic? There is an obvious and uncontroversial sense in which he does. Frege introduces and discusses his new logic in natural language; he argues, in response to criticisms of Begriffsschrift, that his logic is superior to Boole's by discussing formal features of both systems, in so far as the enterprise of using natural language to introduce, discuss, and argue about features of a formal system is metatheoretic, there can be no doubt: Frege has a metatheory. There is also an obvious and uncontroversial sense in which Frege does not have a metatheory for his logic. The model theoretic semantics with which we are familiar today are a post Fregean development. The question 1 address in this paper is, does Frege have a metatheory in the following sense: do his justifications of his basic laws and rules of inference employ, or even require, ineliminable use of a truth predicate and metalinguistic variables? My answer is ‘no’ on both counts, I argue that Frege neither uses, nor has any need to use, a truth predicate or metalinguistic variables in his justifications of his basic laws and rules of inference. Quine's famous explanation of the need for semantic ascent simply does not apply to Frege's logic. The purpose of the discussions that are typically understood as constituting Frege's metatheory is, rather, elucidatory. And once we see what the aim of these particular elucidations is, we can explain Frege's otherwise puzzling eschewal of the truth predicate in his discussions of the justification of the laws and rules of inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the idea of Crispin Wright on the transmission of support, using the Bayesian concept of evidential support. Transmission of warrant across entailment; Notion of Wright on independent reason to accept; Association between support and independent reason.

English has plural terms (e.g., 'Oliver and Smiley', 'the co-authors of this paper') as well as singular terms. But our standard formal languages, e.g., the predicate calculus, feature only singular terms. How can the plural idiom be formalized? 'Changing the subject' is by far the most common plurals strategy among both philosophers and linguists: a plural term is replaced by a singular term standing for some complex object (a set or an aggregate) that 'contains' the individuals to which the plural term alludes. For example, one might simply replace 'A, B imply [plural] C' with '{A, B} implies [singular] C'. We uncover a surprising variety of ways to change the subject, of ever-increasing complexity and ingenuity. Our question is whether any can made to work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three problems: the problem of formulating a coherent relativism, the Sorites paradox and a seldom noticed difficulty in the best intuitionistic case for the revision of classical logic. A response to the latter is proposed which, generalised, contributes towards the solution of the other two. The key to this response is a generalised conception of indeterminacy as a specific kind of intellectual bafflement - Quandary. Intuitionistic revisions of classical logic are merited wherever a subject matter is conceived both as liable to generate Quandary and as subject to a broad form of evidential constraint. So motivated, the distinctions enshrined in intuitionistic logic provide both for a satisfying resolution of the Sorites paradox and a coherent outlet for relativistic views about, e.g., matters of taste and morals. An important corollary of the discussion is that an epistemic conception of vagueness can be prised apart from the strong metaphysical realism with which its principal supporters have associated it, and acknowledged to harbour an independent insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines an argument on logical necessity given by Ian McFetridge in his posthumously published paper `Logical Necessity: Some Issues.' Argument that some propositions are logically necessary; Deductive validity as the central topic of logic; Contrast between natural and logical laws; Limitations of relevance; Proposal of a falsificationist methodology; Quinean epistemological holism.

The article presents information on various papers published in several periodicals. Some of the papers published in the vol. xx, No. 3, 1986 issue of "Chaucer Review," include "Ethos, Pathos and Logos in Troilus and Chriseyde," by E.F. Dyck; Chaucer's Last Dream Vision: The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women," by M.D. Cherniss; "The Link Mechanism in the Canterbury Tales," by S. Schuman; "The Darker Side to Abosolon's Dawn Visit," by R.P. Tripp; and Nominalism: The Difference of Chaucer and Boccacio," by H.W. Boucher.

Presents the author's comments on Gideon Rosen's 'fictionalist' analysis of modality, and how it seems to have surmounted the problems which Rosen and others have thrown at it. The author's argument that further reflection on a problem that Rosen himself raises in his original paper points to a difficulty which undermines the merits of the analysis; Other theories on the subject, including the plurality of worlds; Conclusions.

Contends that Hegel's reconstruction of valid logic leads to a conception of indirect proof and syllogisms. Clarification of the concept of indirect proof; Reference to previous papers on the subject; Indirect proof as the natural form of deduction.

Examines the criticisms made by Paul Benacerraf on the paper, "Frege: The Last Logicist," highlighting Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege's philosophy on mathematics and related concepts. Absence of a formal theory of extensions of concepts; Definition of number; Elementary propositions of arithmetic; Laws of logic; Lack of accounts of provability and definability.

The symbols 0 and P are well established in the literature of deontic logic as signifying respectively the operators `obligatory' and `permissible'. There is not, however, agreement on theft syntactic function in deontic wffs. For though there is general agreement in treating them as sentence-forming operators, several suggestions have been made concerning the kinds of expression upon which they may operate. In his pioneering 1951 paper author G. H. von Wright treats them as operating on what be calls "names of acts", such expressions as `theft' and `murder', though not on names of instances of these. Thus OA symbolises. "The act named by A is obligatory'.

This article discusses what a biologist does, how he does it, and why he does so. For successful communication, a short vocabulary is suggested: information, idea, model, inference, and analogy. The principal idea is the organization and transmission of information. Organization is achieved through models. The complexity of biological models is emphasized, and the idea of levels of organization of matter has been selected as an example of a comprehensive biological model. While the symbols of other disciplines such as mathematics and formal logic may be valuable within the complex biological context, it is asserted that the ultimate value of biological models is consistency, and that biologists themselves must make and judge their models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author examines philosopher Tom Stoneham's argument with coherentists. The author refutes Stoneham's argument, showing where his logic leads and how it is not consistent with coherentists' beliefs and what they actually hold to be true. The author briefly discusses how the logic of coherentists differs from what Stoneham set forth in his paper.

Knowledge of the basic rules of logic is often thought to be distinctive, for it seems to be a case of non-inferential a priori knowledge. Many philosophers take its source to be different from those of other types of knowledge, such as knowledge of empirical facts. The most prominent account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic takes this source to be the understanding of logical expressions or concepts. On this account, what explains why such knowledge is distinctive is that it is grounded in semantic or conceptual understanding. However, I show that this cannot be the correct account of knowledge of the basic rules of logic, because it is open to Gettier-style counter-examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on Fitch's paradox. The author argues that the resolution of the paradox cannot result from typology, with the effect of demonstrating that verificationism is methodologically invalid. The author shows how the epistemic paradox of diagonalization threatens epistemological concepts and how typology is the standard philosophical response to the threat. The author applies types to the paradox in order to show their inadequacy and demonstrate the fallacy of verificationism.

D.M. Armstrong has objected that the dispositionalist theory of laws and properties is modally inverted, for it entails that properties are constituted by relations to non-actual possibilia. I contend that if this objection succeeds against dispositionalism, then Armstrong's nomic necessitation relation is also modally inverted. This shows that at least one of Armstrong's reasons for preferring a nomic necessitation theory is specious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article distinguishes two issues that are often run together in discussions about physicalism. The first issue concerns levels as to how entities picked out by non-physical terminology, such as biological or psychological terminology, relate to physical entities; and whether the former are identical to, or metaphysically supervenient on the latter. The second issue concerns physical parts and wholes as to how macroscopic physical entities relate to their microscopic parts; and whether the latter generally determines the former. The article argues that views on these two issues are independent of one another and should not be conflated.