The fregean theory of meaning says how the meaningful parts of a meaningful expression contribute to that expression's sense and reference. But frege overlooks the fact that logical expressions play dual roles. The contributions of sentential connectives, For example, Are well described for contexts in which they connect sentences, But not for larger quantificational contexts. An obvious modification of the theory which might fill the abyss is considered, And it is maintained that it produces two difficulties: a replication of frege's (...) concept 'horse' troubles and an infinite proliferation of logical vocabulary. The seriousness of these difficulties is briefly discussed. (shrink)

This book introduces the reader to relevant logic and provides the subject with a philosophical interpretation. The defining feature of relevant logic is that it forces the premises of an argument to be really used in deriving its conclusion. The logic is placed in the context of possible world semantics and situation semantics, which are then applied to provide an understanding of the various logical particles and natural language conditionals. The book ends by examining various applications of relevant logic and (...) presenting some interesting open problems. It will be of interest to a range of readers including advanced students of logic, philosophical and mathematical logicians, and computer scientists. (shrink)

Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition.

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION (A) Historical Problem Suggested by the Nature of Modern Thought How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about ...

This Element looks at two projects that relate logic and information: the project of using logic to integrate, manipulate and interpret information and the proect of using the notion of information to provide interpretations of logical systems. The Element defines 'information' in a manner that includes misinformation and disinformation and uses this general concept of information to provide an interpretation of various paraconsistent and relevant logics. It also integrates these logics into contemporary theories of informational updating, probability theory and (rather (...) informally) some ideas from the theory of the complexity of proofs. The Element assumes some prior knowledge of modal logic and its possible world semantics, but all the other necessary background is provided. (shrink)

This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza's collected works. Based on three lectures delivered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1984, the work provides a useful focal point for continued discussion of the relationship between Descartes and Spinoza, while also serving as a readable and relatively brief but substantial introduction to the Ethics for students. Behind the Geometrical Method is actually (...) two books in one. The first is Edwin Curley's text, which explains Spinoza's masterwork to readers who have little background in philosophy. This text will prove a boon to those who have tried to read the Ethics, but have been baffled by the geometrical style in which it is written. Here Professor Curley undertakes to show how the central claims of the Ethics arose out of critical reflection on the philosophies of Spinoza's two great predecessors, Descartes and Hobbes. The second book, whose argument is conducted in the notes to the text, attempts to support further the often controversial interpretations offered in the text and to carry on a dialogue with recent commentators on Spinoza. The author aligns himself with those who interpret Spinoza naturalistically and materialistically. (shrink)

Collaboration on the First Edition of Spacetime Physics began in the mid-1960s when Edwin Taylor took a junior faculty sabbatical at Princeton University where John Wheeler was a professor. The resulting text emphasized the unity of spacetime and those quantities (such as proper time, proper distance, mass) that are invariant, the same for all observers, rather than those quantities (such as space and time separations) that are relative, different for different observers. The book has become a standard introduction to (...) relativity. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics embodies what the authors have learned during an additional quarter century of teaching and research. They have updated the text to reflect the immense strides in physics during the same period and modernized and increased the number of exercises, for which the First Edition was famous. Enrichment boxes provide expanded coverage of intriguing topics. An enlarged final chapter on general relativity includes new material on gravity waves, black holes, and cosmology. The Second Edition of Spacetime Physics provides a new generation of readers with a deep and simple overview of the principles of relativity. (shrink)

To the medieval thinker, man was the center of creation and all of nature existed purely for his benefit. The shift from the philosophy of the Middle Ages to the modern view of humanity's less central place in the universe ranks as the greatest revolution in the history of Western thought, and this classic in the philosophy of science describes and analyzes how the profound change occurred. A fascinating analysis of the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, Gilbert, Boyle, (...) and Newton, it not only establishes the reasons for the triumph of the modern perspective but also accounts for certain limitations that characterize contemporary scientific thought. (shrink)

This book is the fruit of twenty-five years of study of Spinoza by the editor and translator of a new and widely acclaimed edition of Spinoza's collected works.

In this article, we offer an approach of how participative stakeholder innovation can be evaluated in complex multistakeholder settings that address wicked issues. Based on the principle of mutual value creation, we present an evaluation framework that accounts for the social interaction process during which stakeholders integrate their resources and capabilities to develop innovative products and services. To assess this evaluation framework, we collected multiple data from the case study of the Swiss Cardiovascular Network, which represents a multistakeholder setting related (...) to the prevention of cardiovascular disease. Our findings indicate that the evaluation dimensions of the stakeholders’ mindsets, the process and context of the stakeholder interactions, as well as the outcomes are useful concepts to account for a cooperative process of innovation in a multistakeholder setting. We discuss both the theoretical and practical insights of our analysis for participative stakeholder innovation. (shrink)

The thirteen essays in this Modern Library edition comprise a complete survey of the golden age of English philosophy. The anthology begins in the early seventeenth century with Francis Bacon's comprehensive program for the total reorganization of all knowledge; it culminates, some two hundred and fifty years later, with John Stuart Mill. The thinkers represented here are the creators of the twentieth-century world. Indebted to them is a long line of economists, sociologists, and political leaders whose work has profoundly influenced (...) the life and thought of our own time. Included are the excerpts from Francis Bacon's The Great Instauration , Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan , Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . The complete texts are provided for Locke's second "Treatise of Government", George Berkeley's "Treatise Concerning the Principle's of Human Knowledge", David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", John Gay's "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality", James Mill's "Government", and John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" and "On Liberty". With an introduction as well as nine biographical prefaces by Edwin A. Burtt. (shrink)

Everybody knows that humans are cultural animals. Although this fact is universally acknowledged, many opportunities to exploit it are overlooked. In this article, I propose shifting our attention from local examples of extended mind to the cultural-cognitive ecosystems within which human cognition is embedded. I conclude by offering a set of conjectures about the features of cultural-cognitive ecosystems.

Excerpt from The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness The author of the following pages has thought in his modesty that, since his name is as yet unknown to fame, his book might gain a prompter recognition if it were prefaced by a word of recommendation from some more hardened writer. Believing the book to be valuable, I am glad to be able to write such a preface. Many years ago Dr Starbuck, then a (...) student in Harvard University, tried to enlist my sympathies in his statistical inquiry into the religious ideas and experiences of the circumambient population. I fear that to his mind I rather damned the whole project with my words of faint praise. The question-circular method of collecting information had already, in America, reached the proportions of an incipient nuisance in psychological and pedagogical matters. Dr Starbuck's questions were of a peculiarly searching and intimate nature, to which it seemed possible that an undue number of answers from egotists lacking in sincerity might come. Moreover, so few minds have the least spark of originality that answers to questions scattered broadcast would be likely to show a purely conventional content. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The history of yoga -- Yoga prior to Patañjali -- The Vdic period -- Yoga in the Upanisads -- Yoga in the Mahabharata -- Yoga and Sankhya -- Patañjali's yoga -- Patañjali and the six schools of Indian philosophy -- The Yoga sutras as a text -- The commentaries on the Yoga sutras -- The subject matter of the Yoga sutras -- The dualism of yoga -- The Sankhya metaphysics of the text -- The goals of yoga -- The eight (...) limbs of yoga -- The present translation and commentary -- Meditative absorption -- Practice -- Mystic powers -- Absolute independence. (shrink)

Many statistical problems, including some of the most important for physical applications, have long been regarded as underdetermined from the standpoint of a strict frequency definition of probability; yet they may appear wellposed or even overdetermined by the principles of maximum entropy and transformation groups. Furthermore, the distributions found by these methods turn out to have a definite frequency correspondence; the distribution obtained by invariance under a transformation group is by far the most likely to be observed experimentally, in the (...) sense that it requires by far the least “skill.” These properties are illustrated by analyzing the famous Bertrand paradox. On the viewpoint advocated here, Bertrand's problem turns out to be well posed after all, and the unique solution has been verified experimentally. We conclude that probability theory has a wider range of useful applications than would be supposed from the standpoint of the usual frequency definitions. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Cognitive science normally takes the individual agent as its unit of analysis. In many human endeavors, however, the outcomes of interest are not determined entirely by the information processing properties of individuals. Nor can they be inferred from the properties of the individual agents, alone, no matter how detailed the knowledge of the properties of those individuals may be. In commercial aviation, for example, the successful completion of a flight is produced by a system that typically includes two or more (...) pilots interacting with each other and with a suite of technological devices. This article presents a theoretical framework that takes a distributed, socio‐technical system rather than an individual mind as its primary unit of analysis. This framework is explicitly cognitive in that it is concerned with how information is represented and how representations are transformed and propagated in the performance of tasks. An analysis of a memory task in the cockpit of a commercial airliner shows how the cognitive properties of such distributed systems can differ radically from the cognitive properties of the individuals who inhabit them. (shrink)

THE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS CHAPTER I THE RENAISSANCE OF LOGIC WITHIN the last two decades the scholarly world has witnessed a revival of interest in logic ...

Many authors have posited an “object file” system, which underlies perceptual selection and tracking of objects. Several have proposed that this system internalizes principles specifying what counts as an object and relies on them during tracking. Here I consider a popular view on which the object file system is tuned to entities that satisfy principles of three-dimensionality, cohesion, and boundedness. I argue that the evidence gathered in support of this view is consistent with a more permissive view on which object (...) files select and track according to well-known perceptual organization criteria. Further evidence supplies positive support for the permissive view. (shrink)

Participants were given 3 ethical dilemmas, asked to generate their own solutions, and asked to make judgments about a number of provided alternatives. Students were asked either to make decisions after seeking consultation or to make decisions independently of consultation. There were few significant between-group differences along a number of dimensions including participants' ratings of acceptability of provided alternatives and levels of certainty, justification, and satisfaction with personally generated solutions. For one of the vignettes, individuals using consultation, when compared with (...) the control group, were significantly more likely to prefer their own solution to that of provided alternatives. The study was viewed as a needed first step in investigating a cherished assumption in clinical practice. (shrink)