Logic in general philosophy of science: old things and new things

This is a personal, incomplete, and very informal take on the role of logic in general philosophy of science, which is aimed at a broader audience. We defend and advertise the application of logical methods in philosophy of science, starting with the beginnings in the Vienna Circle and ending with some more recent logical developments.     

Correction to: HYPE: A System of Hyperintensional Logic (with an Application to Semantic Paradoxes)

Journal of Philosophical Logic - The original version of the article unfortunately contained a mistake. The author missed to mention the support by a EU-funded research network that he is involved...     

Theories of Truth Which Have No Standard Models

This papers deals with the class of axiomatic theories of truth for semantically closed languages, where the theories do not allow for standard models; i.e., those theories cannot be interpreted as referring to the natural number codes of sentences only (for an overview of axiomatic theories of truth in general, see Halbach[6]). We are going to give new proofs for two well-known results in this area, and we also prove a new theorem on the nonstandardness of a certain theory of truth. The results indicate that the proof strategies for all the theorems on the nonstandardness of such theories are "essentially" of the same kind of structure.     

Truth as Translation – Part B

This is the second part of a paper dealing with truth and translation. In Part A a revised version of Tarski's Convention T has been presented, which explicitly refers to a translation mapping from the object language to the metalanguage; the vague notion of a translation has been replaced by a precise definition. At the end of Part A it has been shown that interpreted languages exist, which allow for vicious self-reference but which nevertheless contain their own truth predicate – this is possible if truth is based on a nonstandard translation mapping. However, this result has only been proved for languages without quantifiers. In Part B we now extend the result to first-order languages, and we show that this can be done in three different ways. In each case, the addition of a truth predicate to an interpreted language with a high degree of expressiveness leads to changes in the ontology of the language.     

A New Analysis of Quasianalysis

We investigate the conditions under which quasianalysis, i.e., Carnap's method of abstraction in his Aufbau, yields adequate results. In particular, we state both necessary and sufficient conditions for the so-called faithfulness and fullness of quasianalysis, and analyze adequacy as the conjunction of faithfulness and fullness. It is shown that there is no method of (re-)constructing properties from similarity that delivers adequate results in all possible cases, if the same set of individuals is presupposed for properties and for similarity, and if similarity is a relation of finite arity. The theory is applied to various examples, including Russell's construction of temporal instants and Carnap's constitution of the phenomenal counterparts to quality spheres. Our results explain why the former is adequate while the latter is bound to fail.     

The Relationship of Cognitive Tempo to Psychological Differentiation and Locus of Control

In this study, we investigated the relationship of cognitive tempo to psychological differentiation and locus of control. The 103 male and female undergraduate students who participated in this study were administered the adolescent and adult version of the Matching Familiar Figures Test, the Group Embedded Figures Test, and the Adult Nowicki-Strickland Internal-External Scale. Using multiple regression analyses, we found that field dependence and independence were significantly related to both cognitive tempo latency and cognitive tempo errors. Contrary to expectation, no relationship was found between locus of control and cognitive tempo. We concluded that psychological differentiation is highly useful in the direct prediction of cognitive tempo, although locus of control is not. Overall, the value of examining cognitive tempo latency and errors separately was upheld. The importance of these relationships is discussed.     

New life for Carnap’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Aufbau</Emphasis>?

This is a personal, incomplete, and very informal take on the role of logic in general philosophy of science, which is aimed at a broader audience. We defend and advertise the application of logical methods in philosophy of science, starting with the beginnings in the Vienna Circle and ending with some more recent logical developments.     

Probability for the Revision Theory of Truth

Journal of Philosophical Logic - We investigate how to assign probabilities to sentences that contain a type-free truth predicate. These probability values track how often a sentence is satisfied...     

A Lottery Paradox for Counterfactuals Without Agglomeration

We will present a new lottery‐style paradox on counterfactuals and chance. The upshot will be: combining natural assumptions on (i) the truth values of ordinary counterfactuals, (ii) the conditional chances of possible but non‐actual events, (iii) the manner in which (i) and (ii) relate to each other, and (iv) a fragment of the logic of counterfactuals leads to disaster. In contrast with the usual lottery‐style paradoxes, logical closure under conjunction—that is, in this case, the rule of Agglomeration of (consequents of) counterfactuals—will not play a role in the derivation and will not be entailed by our premises either. We will sketch four obvious but problematic ways out of the dilemma, and we will end up with a new resolution strategy that is non‐obvious but (as we hope) less problematic: contextualism about what counts as a proposition. This proposal will not just save us from the paradox, it will also save each premise in at least some context, and it will be motivated by independent considerations from measure theory and probability theory.