String theory promises to be able to provide us with a working theory of quantum gravity and a unified description of all fundamental forces. In string theory there are so called ‘dualities’; i.e. different theoretical formulations that are physically equivalent. In this article these dualities are investigated from a philosophical point of view. Semantic and epistemic questions relating to the problem of underdetermination of theories by data and the debate on realism concerning scientific theories are discussed. Depending on ones views (...) on semantic issues and realism different interpretations are possible of the dualities. (shrink)

We show that there is a simple derivation of triviality with very few assumptions involving the formula that the negated conditional entails the antecedent of the conditional.

In this paper we discuss the extent to which conjunction and disjunction can be rightfully regarded as such, in the context of infectious logics. Infectious logics are peculiar many-valued logics whose underlying algebra has an absorbing or infectious element, which is assigned to a compound formula whenever it is assigned to one of its components. To discuss these matters, we review the philosophical motivations for infectious logics due to Bochvar, Halldén, Fitting, Ferguson and Beall, noticing that none of them discusses (...) our main question. This is why we finally turn to the analysis of the truth-conditions for conjunction and disjunction in infectious logics, employing the framework of plurivalent logics, as discussed by Priest. In doing so, we arrive at the interesting conclusion that —in the context of infectious logics— conjunction is conjunction, whereas disjunction is not disjunction. (shrink)

This is a nontechnical overview of how various approaches to quantum gravity suggest modifications to the way we conceptualize space and time. A theory of quantum gravity is needed to reconcile quantum physics with general relativity, our best theory for gravity. The most popular approaches to quantum gravity are string theory and loop quantum gravity. So far, no approach has been empirically successful, and there is no commonly accepted theory. Thus, the conclusions presented here are tentative. Many approaches suggest that (...) space and time—or perhaps, it is better to talk about spacetime—might not be fundamental. Various views on how to think about time in quantum gravity are briefly presented. (shrink)

Continuous deep sedation (CDS) has the effect of making the patient unconscious until death, and that it has this effect is clearly an undesirable aspect of CDS. However, some authors have recently maintained that many physicians do not intend this effect when practicing CDS. According to these authors, CDS is differentiated into two types; in what is called “gradual” CDS (or CDS as a result of proportionate palliative sedation), physicians start with low doses of sedatives and increase them only gradually, (...) whereas in “rapid” CDS (or palliative sedation to unconsciousness), physicians rapidly administer a heavy dose that clearly induces unconsciousness from the beginning. The claim is that the physicians intend permanent unconsciousness only if they rapidly administer a heavy dose, but they do not intend it when the unconsciousness is the result of a gradual increase of sedatives. This paper attempts to refute these claims based on a close examination of the protocol of gradual CDS. If my argument is valid, the doctrine of double effect would not be useful in justifying most, if not all, cases of CDS. (shrink)

There is a relatively recent trend in treating negation as a modal operator. One such reason is that doing so provides a uniform semantics for the negations of a wide variety of logics and arguably speaks to a longstanding challenge of Quine put to non-classical logics. One might be tempted to draw the conclusion that negation is a modal operator, a claim Francesco Berto, 761–793, 2015) defends at length in a recent paper. According to one such modal account, the negation (...) of a sentence is true at a world x just in case all the worlds at which the sentence is true are incompatible with x. Incompatibility is taken to be the key notion in the account, and what minimal properties a negation has comes down to which minimal conditions incompatibility satisfies. Our aims in this paper are twofold. First, we wish to point out problems for the modal account that make us question its tenability on a fundamental level. Second, in its place we propose an alternative, non-modal, account of negation as a contradictory-forming operator that we argue is superior to, and more natural than, the modal account. (shrink)

In this introduction, we offer an overview of main systems developed in the growing literature on connexive logic, and also point to a few topics that seem to be collecting attention of many of those interested in connexive logic. We will also make clear the context to which the papers in this special issue belong and contribute.

In this introduction to the special issue “40 years of FDE”, we offer an overview of the field and put the papers included in the special issue into perspective. More specifically, we first present various semantics and proof systems for FDE, and then survey some expansions of FDE by adding various operators starting with constants. We then turn to unary and binary connectives, which are classified in a systematic manner. First-order FDE is also briefly revisited, and we conclude by listing (...) some open problems for future research. (shrink)

A collection of essays discussing the philosophy and foundations of quantum gravity. Written by leading philosophers and physicists in the field, chapters cover the important conceptual questions in the search for a quantum theory of gravity, and the current state of understanding among philosophers and physicists.

The present note offers a proof that systems developed by Majkić are actually extensions of intuitionistic logic, and therefore not paraconsistent.

In [1] Béziau developed the paraconsistent logic Z, which is definitionally equivalent to the modal logic S5, and gave an axiomatization of the logic Z: the system HZ. In the present paper, we prove that some axioms of HZ are not independent and then propose another axiomatization of Z. We also discuss a new perspective on the relation between S5 and classical propositional logic with the help of the new axiomatization of Z. Then we conclude the paper by making a (...) remark on the paraconsistency of HZ. (shrink)

This edited volume collects essays on the four-valued logic known as Belnap-Dunn logic, or first-degree entailment logic. It also looks at various formal systems closely related to it. These include the strong Kleene logic and the Logic of Paradox. Inside, readers will find reprints of seminal papers written by the fathers of the field: Nuel Belnap and Michael Dunn. In addition, the collection also features a well-known but previously unpublished manuscript of Dunn, an interview with Belnap, and a new essay (...) by Dunn. Besides the original, monumental papers, the book also includes research by leading scholars. They consider the extraordinary importance of Belnap-Dunn logic from several perspectives. They look at how, philosophically, it has served as a basic system of inconsistency-tolerant reasoning, as the core of underlying logics for theories based on dialetheism, and, more recently, for theories based on Buddhist philosophy. Coverage also explores its contributions to computer science, such as knowledge representation and information processing. This mix of seminal papers and insightful analysis by top scholars offers readers a comprehensive outlook on Belnap-Dunn logic and its related expansions, which have been agenda setting for the debate on philosophical logic as well as philosophy of logic. The book will also enhance further discussion on the philosophical issues related to nonclassical logics in general. (shrink)

In this paper, some conceptual issues are addressed in order to make sense of what string theory is supposed to tell us about spacetime. The dualities in string theory are used as a starting point for our argumentation. We explore the consequences of a standard view towards these dualities, namely that the dual descriptions represent the same physical situation. Given this view, one has to understand string theory in a manner such that what counts as physical spacetime is based only (...) on the shared physical content—or common core—of the dual descriptions. In general such a spatiotemporal picture does not have to agree with, or be similar to, any of the ones suggested by naïve readings of the dual descriptions. However, in certain regimes or limits, one or the other of the initial dual descriptions may give a good effective description of physical spacetime. (shrink)

Three multifunctional protein kinases, cyclic AMP‐dependent protein kinase, protein kinase C, and calmodulin‐dependent protein kinase II, are involved in signal transduction in response to their respective second messengers, cyclic AMP, diacylglycerol, and Ca2+. This review will summarize the key findings on calmodulin‐dependent protein kinase II.

ベストセラー『7日間で突然頭がよくなる本』の著者による、はじめてのニッポン論。古代の神話や仏教、儒学、武士道から国学、さらには福澤諭吉らによる啓蒙書さえも「日本哲学である」と定義する。1500年にもお よぶ日本思想の遺伝子的深層を新視点から読み解く最新の入門書。.

String theory has been the dominating research field in theoretical physics during the last decades. Despite the considerable time elapse, no new testable predictions have been derived by string theorists and it is understandable that doubts have been voiced. Some people have argued that it is time to give up since testability is wanting. But the majority has not been convinced and they continue to believe that string theory is the right way to go. This situation is interesting for philosophy (...) of science since it highlights several of our central issues. In this paper we will discuss string theory from a number of different perspectives in general methodology. We will also relate the realism/antirealism debate to the current status of string theory. Our goal is two-fold; both to take a look at string theory from philosophical perspectives and to use string theory as a test case for some philosophical issues. (shrink)

We apply the technique of generic ultrapowers to study the splitting problem of stationary subsets of P K λ . We present some conditions which guarantee the splitting of stationary subsets of P K λ.

We prove that if λ is a strong limit singular cardinal and κ a regular uncountable cardinal < λ, then NSκλ, the non-stationary ideal over [Formula: see text], is nowhere precipitous. We also show that under the same hypothesis every stationary subset of [Formula: see text] can be partitioned into λκ disjoint stationary sets.

One of the problems we face in many-valued logic is the difficulty of capturing the intuitive meaning of the connectives introduced through truth tables. At the same time, however, some logics have nice ways to capture the intended meaning of connectives easily, such as four-valued logic studied by Belnap and Dunn. Inspired by Dunn’s discovery, we first describe a mechanical procedure, in expansions of Belnap-Dunn logic, to obtain truth conditions in terms of the behavior of the Truth and the False, (...) which gives us intuitive readings of connectives, out of truth tables. Then, we revisit the notion of functional completeness, which is one of the key notions in many-valued logic, in view of Dunn’s idea. More concretely, we introduce a generalized notion of functional completeness which naturally arises in the spirit of Dunn’s idea, and prove some fundamental results corresponding to the classical results proved by Post and Słupecki. (shrink)

A world is trivial if it makes every proposition true all at once. Such a world is impossible, an absurdity. Our world, we hope, is not an absurdity. It is important, nevertheless, for semantic and metaphysical theories that we be able to reason cogently about absurdities—if only to see that they are absurd. In this note we describe methods for ‘observing’ absurd objects like the trivial world without falling in to incoherence, using some basic techniques from modal logic. The goal (...) is to begin to locate the trivial world’s relative position in modal space; the outcome is that the less we assume about relative possibility, the more detail we can discern at the edge of reason. (shrink)

Many contemporary physicists suggest that we should take the claim that we live in a multiverse seriously. When doing this they often invoke arguments based on the controversial anthropic principle. Critics argue that this leads to untestable and unscientific theories. In this paper criteria are suggested that need to be satisfied before a multiverse theory should be considered scientifically respectable. One important point is that the multiverse is described in sufficient detail. In some cases, a multiverse theory can be testable; (...) however, to properly test a multiverse theory it is important to distinguish new predictions from explanations based on the multiverse. (shrink)

Dialetheism is the metaphysical claim that there are true contradictions. And based on this view, Graham Priest and his collaborators have been suggesting solutions to a number of paradoxes. Those paradoxes include Russell’s paradox in naive set theory. For the purpose of dealing with this paradox, Priest is known to have argued against the presence of classical negation in the underlying logic of naive set theory. The aim of the present paper is to challenge this view by showing that there (...) is a way to handle classical negation. (shrink)

We show that if κ is an inaccessible cardinal then P κ λ splits into $\lambda^{ many disjoint stationary subsets. We also show that if P κ λ carries a strongly saturated ideal then the nonstationary ideal cannot be λ + -saturated.

We observe that Jc Beall’s shrieking and shrugging strategy gives us an opportunity to reflect on the Australian plan for negation in FDE, a basic subclassical logic that is used in Beall’s argument for subclassical logics. An implication of our observation is applied to a recent defense of the Australian plan for negation by Francesco Berto and Greg Restall.

The present note revisits the joint work of Leonard Goddard and Richard Routley on significance logics with the aim of shedding new light on their understanding by studying them under the lens of recent semantic developments, such as the plurivalent semantics developed by Graham Priest. These semantics allow sentences to receive one, more than one, or no truth-value at all from a given carrier set. Since nonsignificant sentences are taken to be neither true nor false, i.e. truth-value gaps, in this (...) essay we show that with the aid of plurivalent semantics it is possible to straightforwardly instantiate Goddard and Routley’s understanding of how the connectives should work within significance logics. (shrink)

ドゥルーズの「リゾーム」、フーコーの「脱中心化」、バタイユの「蕩尽」、デリダの「ディコンストラクション」。80年代のニューアカデミズム、ポストモダンとは何だったのか?世界を席捲した現代思想のキイ・ワー ドが、20年の歳月をへて、今よみがえる。新たに第5部を書き加えて、21世紀の思想状況に斬り込む「増補決定版」が、ここに登場!現代思想はいま、どの地点にまでたどりついたのか。.