This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, LPNMR 2004, held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA in January 2004. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 8 system descriptions were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation. Among the topics addressed are declarative logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning, knowledge representation, combinatorial search, answer set programming, constraint programming, deduction in ontologies, and planning.

The advances in biotechnology have given rise to a discussion concerning the strong emotional reaction expressed by the public towards biotechnological innovations. This reaction has been named the ‘Yuck-factor’ by several theorists of bioethics. Leon Kass, the former chairman of the President's council on bioethics, has appraised this public reaction as ‘an emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it’.1 Similar arguments have been forwarded by the Catholic Church, several Protestant denominations and the Pro-Life movement. Several (...) bioethicists have, however, opposed the idea of a disgust-based morality.2Recent findings in cognitive science support the view that the strong negative emotions people often experience when faced with biotechnological ideas are not expressions of inner wisdom. The negative emotions may rather be the result of a cognitive violation the biotechnological innovations easily cause.Due to their evolutionary background, people have certain automatic and quick cognitive tendencies routinely used for categorizing and reasoning about nature, usually termed ‘folk biology’. Biotechnological processes like hybridisation and cloning clearly violate several of the cognitive rules people naturally apply for the explanation and categorization of their natural environment.As the cognitive tendencies routinely applied to the explanation of biological world are violated, an emotional response of fear, disgust and of something unnatural being underway is easily provoked. It is suggested in this paper that the reason behind the Yuck-factor is not a deep inner wisdom, but a violation of natural human cognitive tendencies concerning the biological world. (shrink)

The article argues that all disciplines examining human thought could use certain shared analytical categories. This would not mean eradicating all differences between various approaches such as intellectual history and discourse analysis, but acknowledging that they are examining partly the same basic entities. The article argues that ideational entities in human thought could be understood as concepts, beliefs, and their constellations. The article discusses the views of scholars who have theorized similar categories and shows how these can be studied through (...) historical language use. Shared analytical categories would enhance interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of human thought and allow more rigorous debates on issues that truly divide different disciplines, such as the explanatory values of human agency and structures. (shrink)

Ethnomethodology has been torn between scientific and "radical" aspirations insofar as it moves discoursive practices from resources to the topic of the study. Scientific ethnomethodology, such as conversation analysis, studies discoursive praxis as its topic and resource. Standard scientific criteria are accepted to assess the merits of its findings. "Radical" ethnomethodology addresses mundane reasoning exclusively as its topic without recourse to standardized science. I will show that insofar as "radical" ethnomethodology succeeds in bracketing everyday resources, it loses its phenomenon with (...) the very technical skills it uses for this task. This reconsideration enables the development of ethnomethodological social science. Key Words: conversation analysis • discoursive praxis • ethnomethodology • radical ethnomethodology • social studies of science. (shrink)

This book comes to the rescue of scientific realism, showing that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Philosophical realism holds that the aim of a particular discourse is to make true statements about its subject matter. Ilkka Niiniluoto surveys different kinds of realism in various areas of philosophy and then sets out his own critical realist philosophy of science.

Proceedings of the 2016 "one word" colloquium of the The Philosophical Society of Finland. The word was "Possibility".

_ Source: _Page Count 19 The theory of possible worlds has been minimally employed in the field of theory and philosophy of history, even though it has found a place as a tool in other areas of philosophy. Discussion has mostly focused on arguments concerning counterfactual history’s status as either useful or harmful. The theory of possible worlds can, however be used also to analyze historical writing. The concept of textual possible worlds offers an interesting framework to work with for (...) analyzing a historical text’s characteristics and features. However, one of the challenges is that the literary theory’s notion of possible worlds is that they are metaphorical in nature. This in itself is not problematic but while discussing about history, which arguably deals with the real world, the terminology can become muddled. The latest attempt to combine the literary and philosophical notions of possible worlds and apply it to historiography came from Lubomír Doležel in his _Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage_. I offer some criticism to his usage of possible worlds to separate history and fiction, and argue that when historiography is under discussion a more philosophical notion of possible worlds should be prioritized over the metaphorical interpretation of possible worlds. (shrink)

Supporters of the autonomy of higher-level causation (or explanation) often appeal to proportionality, arguing that higher-level causes are more proportional than their lower-level realizers. Recently, measures based on information theory and causal modeling have been proposed that allow one to shed new light on proportionality and the related notion of specificity. In this paper we apply ideas from this literature to the issue of higher vs. lower-level causation (and explanation). Surprisingly, proportionality turns out to be irrelevant for the question of (...) whether higher-level causes (or explanations) can be autonomous; specificity is a much more informative notion for this purpose. (shrink)

Two recent conversation analytical studies draw contrary conclusions from seemingly very similar materials. Hutchby and Barnett ‘show that, far from revolutionizing the organization of telephone conversation, mobile phone talk retains many of the norms associated with landline phone talk’. Arminen and Leinonen, however, state that landline and mobile calls differ systematically from each other. These incommensurate findings raise the question of why the comparisons between landline and mobile call openings have not been able to determine whether social and communicative practices (...) are changing. It is suggested that auxiliary elements in CA allow the emergence of incompatible findings. The auxiliary assumptions enable authors to construct the phenomenon examined from their chosen perspective. Further, it will be shown that unquestioned assumptions materialize into theoretical notions that guide the research. CA studies seem to conceptualize the relationship between sequential order and sequence structure in different ways, which leads to different findings and results. (shrink)

(1994). European dimensions of Finnish culture: A survey of international and European orientation of Finnish intellectuals. World Futures: Vol. 39, The Evolution of European Identity: Surveys of the Growing Edge A Report by the European Culture Impact Research Consortium (EUROCIRCON), pp. 25-46.

The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trich published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...) work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niiniluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period, studies in verisimilitude have been actively continued, and interesting results and applications have been achieved, but not many dramatic novelties. While it is now obsolete to claim that truthlikeness with reasonable properties cannot be defined at all, there is still a lot of controversy about the best and least arbitrary approach to doing this. (shrink)

According to the foundationalist picture, shared by many rationalists and positivist empiricists, science makes cognitive progress by accumulating justified truths. Fallibilists, who point out that complete certainty cannot be achieved in empirical science, can still argue that even successions of false theories may progress toward the truth. This proposal was supported by Karl Popper with his notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Popper’s own technical definition failed, but the idea that scientific progress means increasing truthlikeness can be expressed by defining degrees (...) of truthlikeness in terms of similarities between states of affairs. This paper defends the verisimilitude approach against Alexander Bird who argues that the “semantic” definition is not sufficient to define progress, but the “epistemic” definition referring to justification and knowledge is more adequate. Here Bird ignores the crucial distinction between real progress and estimated progress, explicated by the difference between absolute degrees of truthlikeness and their evidence-relative expected values. Further, it is argued that Bird’s idea of returning to the cumulative model of growth requires an implausible trick of transforming past false theories into true ones. (shrink)

Ambient Intelligence provides the potential for vast and varied applications, bringing with it both promise and peril. The development of Ambient Intelligence applications poses a number of ethical and legal concerns. Mobile devices are increasingly evolving into tools to orientate in and interact with the environment, thus introducing a user-centric approach to Ambient Intelligence. The MINAmI (Micro-Nano integrated platform for transverse Ambient Intelligence applications) FP6 research project aims at creating core technologies for mobile device based Ambient Intelligence services. In this (...) paper we assess five scenarios that demonstrate forthcoming MINAmI-based applications focusing on healthcare, assistive technology, homecare, and everyday life in general. A legal and ethical analysis of the scenarios is conducted, which reveals various conflicting interests. The paper concludes with some thoughts on drafting ethical guidelines for Ambient Intelligence applications. (shrink)

Miracles are real or imagined events that contradict our intuitive expectations of how entities normally behave. Miracles in the weak sense are unexplained counterintuitive events. Miracles in the strong sense are counterintuitive events we explain by referring to the counterintuitive agents and forces of various religious traditions. Such explanations result from the fact that our minds treat half–understood information by carrying out searches in the memory, trying to connect new information with something already known. This is cognitively the most economical (...) way of dealing with new information: we obtain the maximum of relevance at minimal processing cost. (shrink)

This book examines the philosophical conception of abductive reasoning as developed by Charles S. Peirce, the founder of American pragmatism. It explores the historical and systematic connections of Peirce's original ideas and debates about their interpretations. Abduction is understood in a broad sense which covers the discovery and pursuit of hypotheses and inference to the best explanation. The analysis presents fresh insights into this notion of reasoning, which derives from effects to causes or from surprising observations to explanatory theories. The (...) author outlines some logical and AI approaches to abduction as well as studies various kinds of inverse problems in astronomy, physics, medicine, biology, and human sciences to provide examples of retroductions and abductions. The discussion covers also everyday examples with the implication of this notion in detective stories, one of Peirce’s own favorite themes. The author uses Bayesian probabilities to argue that explanatory abduction is a method of confirmation. He uses his own account of truth approximation to reformulate abduction as inference which leads to the truthlikeness of its conclusion. This allows a powerful abductive defense of scientific realism. This up-to-date survey and defense of the Peircean view of abduction may very well help researchers, students, and philosophers better understand the logic of truth-seeking. (shrink)

Having a sense of dignity is one of the core emotions in human life. Is our dignity, and accordingly also our sense of dignity under threat in elderly care, especially in robotic care? How can robotic care support or challenge human dignity in elderly care? The answer will depend on whether it is robot-based, robot-assisted, or teleoperated care that is at stake. Further, the demands and realizations of human dignity have to be distinguished. The demands to respect humans are based (...) on human dignity and the inalienable high and equal moral standing that everyone has. For human moral agents, these demands take the form of negative and positive duties. For robots, they arguably take the form of corresponding ought-to-be norms. The realizations of dignity consist in variable responses to these demands, by oneself by others, and by society at large. This article examines how robot-based, robot-assisted, and teleoperated care can amount to realizations of dignity. The varieties of robotic care can, in different ways, be responsive to the demands of dignity and recognize humans as vulnerable beings with needs, as autonomous agents, and as rational subjects of experience, emotion, and thought. (shrink)

Religionists often presuppose that “mysticism” aims at somehow emptying the mind. In the light of evidence, however, meditation seems rather to consist of ritualized action without an explicit emphasis on subjective experience. Boyer & Lienard's (B&L's) theory of ritualized action as “swamping” working memory thus might help explain the effects of meditation without postulating experiential goals the “mystics” obviously do not have. (Published Online February 8 2007).

The distinction between such differing approaches to cognition as connectionism and rule-based models is paralleled by a distinction between two basic modes of cognition postulated in the so-called dual-process theories. Integrating these theories with insights from hybrid systems might help solve the dilemma of combining the demands of evolutionary plausibility and computational universality. No single approach alone can achieve this.

In trying to define the difference between conventional and ultimate truth, the Mādhyamika Buddhist author Jñānagarbha ends up in paradoxical formulations. Putnam's discussion of Nietzsche's remark that “as the circle of science grows larger it touches paradox at more places” is presented as an illustration for Jñānagarbha's case. No comparison of Putnam and Jñānagarbha is intended as regards the contents of their presentations, the focus being only on the logical form of their argumentation. The paradoxical nature of Jñānagarbha's doctrinal system (...) is explained to derive from the logical incompleteness of formal systems. The paradox is also explained to work as a direction arrow pointing to what can only be realised in a mystical experience. (shrink)

Bering's findings about the mental representation of dead agents are important, although his opposition between “endemic” and “cultural” concepts is misleading. Endemic and cultural are overlapping, not exclusive categories. It is also diffcult to see why reasoning about the dead would require a specific cognitive mechanism. Bering presents no clear evidence for the claim that the postulated mechanism is an adaptation.

Scientific realists use the “no miracle argument” to show that the empirical and pragmatic success of science is an indicator of the ability of scientific theories to give true or truthlike representations of unobservable reality. While antirealists define scientific progress in terms of empirical success or practical problem-solving, realists characterize progress by using some truth-related criteria. This paper defends the definition of scientific progress as increasing truthlikeness or verisimilitude. Antirealists have tried to rebut realism with the “pessimistic metainduction”, but critical (...) realists turn this argument into an optimistic view about progressive science. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 91 Heft: 2 Seiten: 295-340.

The modern history of verisimilitude can be divided into three periods. The first began in 1960, when Karl Popper proposed his qualitative definition of what it is for one theory to be more truthlike than another theory, and lasted until 1974, when David Miller and Pavel Trichý published their refutation of Popper's definition. The second period started immediately with the attempt to explicate truthlikeness by means of relations of similarity or resemblance between states of affairs (or their linguistic representations); the (...) work within this similarity approach was summarized in the books of Graham Oddie [1986] and Ilkka Niiniluoto [1987]. During the subsequent third period, studies in verisimilitude have been actively continued, and interesting results and applications have been achieved, but not many dramatic novelties. While it is now obsolete to claim that truthlikeness with reasonable properties cannot be defined at all, there is still a lot of controversy about the best and least arbitrary approach to doing this. (shrink)

The notion of truthlikeness or verisimilitude has been a topic of intensive discussion ever since the definition proposed by Karl Popper was refuted in 1974. This paper gives an analysis of old and new debates about this notion. There is a fairly large agreement about the truthlikeness ordering of conjunctive theories, but the main rival approaches differ especially about false disjunctive theories. Continuing the debate between Niiniluoto’s min-sum measure and Schurz’s relevant consequence measure, the paper also gives a critical assessment (...) of Oddie’s new defense of the average measure and Kuipers’ refined definition of truth approximation. (shrink)

Conceptual change and its connection to the development of new seien tific theories has reeently beeome an intensively discussed topic in philo sophieal literature. Even if the inductive aspects related to conceptual change have already been discussed to some extent, there has so far existed no systematic treatment of inductive change due to conceptual enrichment. This is what we attempt to accomplish in this work, al though most of our technical results are restricted to the framework of monadic languages. We (...) extend Hintikka's system of inductive logic to apply to situations in which new concepts are introduced to the original language. By interpreting them as theoretica1 concepts, it is possible to discuss a number of currently debated philosophical and methodological problems which have previously escaped systematic and exact treatment. For instance, the role which seientific theories employing theoretical con cepts may play within inductive inference can be studied within this framework. From the viewpoint of seientific realism, sueh a study gives outlines for a theory of what we call hypothetico-induetive inference. Some parts of this work which are based on Hintikka's system of in ductive logic are fairly technical. However, no previous knowledge of this system is required, but, in general, acquaintance with the basic ideas of elementary logic and probability theory is suffieient. This work is part of a project, originated by Professors Jaakko Hintikka and Raimo Tuomela, concerning the role of theoretical concepts in science. (shrink)

The levels of selection debate is generally taken to be a debate about how natural selection can occur at the various levels of biological organization. In this paper, we argue that questions about levels of selection should be analyzed separately from questions about levels of organization. In the deflationary proposal we defend, all that is necessary for multilevel selection is that there are cases in which particles are nested in collectives, and that both the collectives and the particles that compose (...) them each separately undergo natural selection. We argue that adopting this deflationary account helps to disentangle the levels of selection and the levels of organization, and thereby contributes to advancing the levels of selection debate. (shrink)

This paper gives a critical evaluation of the philosophical presuppositions and implications of two current schools in the sociology of knowledge: the Strong Programme of Bloor and Barnes; and the Constructivism of Latour and Knorr-Cetina. Bloor's arguments for his externalist symmetry thesis (i.e., scientific beliefs must always be explained by social factors) are found to be incoherent or inconclusive. At best, they suggest a Weak Programme of the sociology of science: when theoretical preferences in a scientific community, SC, are first (...) internally explained by appealing to the evidence, e, and the standards or values, V, accepted in SC, then a sociologist may sometimes step in to explain why e and V were accepted in SC. Latour's story about the social construction of facts in scientific laboratories is found to be misleading or incredible. The idea that scientific reality is an artifact turns out to have some interesting affinities with classical pragmatism, instrumentalism, phenomenology, and internal realism. However, the constructivist account of theoretical entities in terms of negotiation and social consensus is less plausible than the alternative realist story which explains consensus by the preexistence of mind-independent real entities. The author concludes that critical scientific realism, developed with the concept of truthlikeness, is compatible with the thesis that scientific beliefs or knowledge claims may be relative to various types of cognitive and practical interests. However, the realist denies, with good reasons, the stronger type of relativism which takes reality and truth to be relative to persons, groups, or social interests. (shrink)

We start this article from Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between propositional knowledge, ‘knowing-that’, and procedural knowledge, ‘knowing-how’, and investigate how participants in interaction display orientation to the latter in various settings. As the knowledge of how things are done, know-how can be analyzed in terms of its relevance and consequentiality for parties in interaction. Similarly, as participants adjust their actions and understandings according to their sense of what they know and assume others to know, their know-how and its distribution may form (...) the basis for adjusting and reshaping their actions, forms of participation and identities. In this sense, we aim at opening an investigation of know-how, and its conventionalized form, expertise, in interaction. In as much as it forms a distinct domain, a new research object – expertise in interaction – is formulated. Methodological issues of how to study expertise in interaction are discussed. The data are in English and Finnish. (shrink)

Belief revision (BR) and truthlikeness (TL) emerged independently as two research programmes in formal methodology in the 1970s. A natural way of connecting BR and TL is to ask under what conditions the revision of a belief system by new input information leads the system towards the truth. It turns out that, for the AGM model of belief revision, the only safe case is the expansion of true beliefs by true input, but this is not very interesting or realistic as (...) a model of theory change in science. The new accounts of non-prioritized belief revision do not seem more promising in this respect, and the alternative BR account of updating by imaging leads to other problems. Still, positive results about increasing truthlikeness by belief revision may be sought by restricting attention to special kinds of theories. Another approach is to link truthlikeness to epistemic matters by an estimation function which calculates expected degrees of truthlikeness relative to evidence. Then we can study how the expected truthlikeness of a theory changes when probabilities are revised by conditionalization or imaging. Again, we can ask under what conditions such changes lead our best theories towards the truth. (shrink)

The modern discussion on the concept of truthlikeness was started in 1960. In his influential Word and Object, W. V. O. Quine argued that Charles Peirce's definition of truth as the limit of inquiry is faulty for the reason that the notion 'nearer than' is only "defined for numbers and not for theories". In his contribution to the 1960 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science at Stan­ ford, Karl Popper defended the opposite view by defining a compara­tive (...) notion of verisimilitude for theories. The concept of verisimilitude was originally introduced by the Ancient sceptics to moderate their radical thesis of the inaccessibility of truth. But soon verisimilitudo, indicating likeness to the truth, was confused with probabilitas, which expresses an opiniotative attitude weaker than full certainty. The idea of truthlikeness fell in disrepute also as a result of the careless, often confused and metaphysically loaded way in which many philosophers used - and still use - such concepts as 'degree of truth', 'approximate truth', 'partial truth', and 'approach to the truth'. Popper's great achievement was his insight that the criticism against truthlikeness - by those who urge that it is meaningless to speak about 'closeness to truth' - is more based on prejudice than argument. (shrink)