One of the most dominant approaches to semantics for relevant (and many paraconsistent) logics is the Routley-Meyer semantics involving a ternary relation on points. To some (many?), this ternary relation has seemed like a technical trick devoid of an intuitively appealing philosophical story that connects it up with conditionality in general. In this paper, we respond to this worry by providing three different philosophical accounts of the ternary relation that correspond to three conceptions of conditionality. We close by briefly discussing (...) a general conception of conditionality that may unify the three given conceptions. (shrink)

This paper is an insighful critique of the shareholder and stakeholder models of organizational purpose. The authors emphasize that both these models fail to serve as an adequate basis for explaining the purpose of an organization and are unable to capture a fuller meaning of living in an organizational community. The paper thus endeavours to introduce into the mainstream of discussion a third model, based on the idea of the common good which draws inspiration from the communitarian Catholic tradition. The (...) first part of this paper traces the idea of common good as it relates to organizations. The second part engages the common good tradition with the shareholder and stake holder models. The paper goes on to describe common good within the organization through three propositions: fundamentality, excellence and integration. The authors reiterate, however, that the idea of the common good does not provide a micro-blueprint for managers, but rather an orientation or moral compass that directs organizational activity towards human development. (shrink)

Managers throughout the world regularly face ethical dilemmas that have important, and perhaps complex, professional and personal implications. Further, societal consequences of decisions made can be far-reaching. In this study, 210 financial services managers from Australia, Chile, Ecuador and the United States were queried about their ethical beliefs when faced with four diverse dilemmas. In addition, the situational context was altered so the respondent viewed each dilemma from a top management position and from a position of economic hardship. Results suggest (...) a complex interaction of situation, culture and issue when individuals make ethical judgments. Specifically, Chileans were found to have different beliefs about sex discrimination and child labor dilemmas when compared to their colleagues from the other three nations. Chileans and Australians also disagreed on the bribery dilemma. Anglo managers were more likely than Latin American managers to change their ethical responses when the situation was altered. For multinational firms interested in maintaining healthy ethical climates, the findings suggest that culturally contingent ethical guidelines, or policies adapted to the local customs, must be considered. Further, managers must remain aware of issues related to specific situations, both internal and external, that would cause subordinates to alter their moral judgment. (shrink)

The author finds no support for the claim that J. M. Keynes had severe reservations, in general, as opposed to particular, concerning the application of mathematical, logical and statistical methods in economics. These misinterpretations rest on the omission of important source material as well as a severe misconstrual ofThe Treatise on Probability (1921).

The conclusions derived by Keynes in his Treatise on Probability (1921) concerning induction, analogical reasoning, expectations formation and decision making, mirror and foreshadow the main conclusions of cognitive science and psychology.The problem of weight is studied within an economic context by examining the role it played in Keynes' applied philosophy work, The General Theory (1936). Keynes' approach is then reformulated as an optimal control approach to dealing with changes in information evaluation over time. Based on this analysis the problem of (...) inductive justification, from a societal perspective, is not, What can we rationally believe will occur in the economic future, given our past experiences? but Can we make the future so as to attain specific economic goals with practical certainty? An answer requires that restrictions be placed on the methodological individualist approach and the acceptance of a restricted holistic approach. (shrink)

Abstract It is shown that J. M. Keynes was the originator of what is called a weighted monetary value (WMV) approach to decision making under uncertainty and risk as opposed to either the expected monetary value (EMV) or subjective expected utility (SEU) approaches.

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

The paper reviews a number of approaches for handling restricted quantification in relevant logic, and proposes a novel one. This proceeds by introducing a novel kind of enthymematic conditional.

Review of New Waves in Metaethics, edited by Michael Brady; and New Waves in Truth, edited by Cory D. Wright and Nikolaj J.L.L. Pedersen.

This volume includes three previously untranslated transcripts of Kant's logic lectures.

Arnon Avron has written: “Dunn-McCall logic RM is by far the best understood and the most well-behaved in the family of logics developed by the school of Anderson and Belnap.” I agree. There is the famous saying: “Do not let the perfect become the enemy of the good.” I might say: “good enough.” In this spirit, I will examine the logic R-Mingle, exploring how it is only a “semi-relevant logic” but still a paraconsistent logic. I shall discuss the history of (...) RM, and compare RM to Anderson and Belnap’s system R of relevant implication and to classical two-valued logic. There is a “consumer’s guide,” evaluating these logics as “tools,” in the light of my recent work on “Humans as Rational Toolmaking Animals.”. (shrink)

Results of a study investigating the relation between personality traits and ethical-orientation indicate sex is not an good predictor for differences in Machiavellian-, Type A personality- or ethical-orientation. Intelligence is found to be positively associated with Machiavellian- and Type A personality-orientation but negatively associated with ethical-orientation. Machiavellians tend to have Type A personalities, but tend to be less ethically-oriented than Nonmachiavellians. Type A personalities are more ethically-orientated than Type B personalities.

Gangestad & Simpson's theory accounts for the existence of male strategic variation admirably well, although it does not specify the precise nature of the adaptation linking male developmental stability to strategic pluralism. In contrast, female strategic variation remains elusive. Empirical data suggest that genetic variation partly underlies such variation, but the causes of female strategic differences largely remain unexplained.

This paper explores allowing truth value assignments to be undetermined or "partial" and overdetermined or "inconsistent", thus returning to an investigation of the four-valued semantics that I initiated in the sixties. I examine some natural consequence relations and show how they are related to existing logics, including ukasiewicz's three-valued logic, Kleene's three-valued logic, Anderson and Belnap's relevant entailments, Priest's "Logic of Paradox", and the first-degree fragment of the Dunn-McCall system "R-mingle". None of these systems have nested implications, and I investigate (...) twelve natural extensions containing nested implications, all of which can be viewed as coming from natural variations on Kripke's semantics for intuitionistic logic. Many of these logics exist antecedently in the literature, in particular Nelson 's "constructible falsity". (shrink)

This comprehensive text shows how various notions of logic can be viewed as notions of universal algebra providing more advanced concepts for those who have an introductory knowledge of algebraic logic, as well as those wishing to delve into more theoretical aspects.

In spite of a powerful tradition, more than two thousand years old, that in a valid argument the premises must be relevant to the conclusion, twentieth-century logicians neglected the concept of relevance until the publication of Volume I of this monumental work. Since that time relevance logic has achieved an important place in the field of philosophy: Volume II of Entailment brings to a conclusion a powerful and authoritative presentation of the subject by most of the top people working in (...) the area. Originally the aim of Volume II was simply to cover certain topics not treated in the first volume--quantification, for example--or to extend the coverage of certain topics, such as semantics. However, because of the technical progress that has occurred since the publication of the first volume, Volume II now includes other material. The book contains the work of Alasdair Urquhart, who has shown that the principal sentential systems of relevance logic are undecidable, and of Kit Fine, who has demonstrated that, although the first-order systems are incomplete with respect to the conjectured constant domain semantics, they are still complete with respect to a semantics based on "arbitrary objects." Also presented is important work by the other contributing authors, who are Daniel Cohen, Steven Giambrone, Dorothy L. Grover, Anil Gupta, Glen Helman, Errol P. Martin, Michael A. McRobbie, and Stuart Shapiro. Robert G. Wolf's bibliography of 3000 items is a valuable addition to the volume. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

We give a set of postulates for the minimal normal modal logicK + without negation or any kind of implication. The connectives are simply , , , . The postulates (and theorems) are all deducibility statements . The only postulates that might not be obvious are.

Negative people/wildlife interaction has raised public interest in wildlife population control. We present a contingent valuation study of alternative deer control measures considered for Hilton Head Island, SC. Lethal control usig sharpshooters and nonlethal immuno-contraception techniques are evaluated. A mail-back survey was used to collect resident willingness-to-pay information for reduced deer densities and consequent property damage. Residents are unwilling to spend more for the nonlethal alternative. The estimated WTP appears theoretically consistent as increasing levels of abatement for both lethal and (...) nonlethal alternatives demonstrate diminishing marginal benefits. Over 60% of respondents bid zero regardless of control measure, suggesting a referendum would fail. However, only half of these zero bidders expressed no problem with deer, while the other half bid zero because of distaste for the control alternative, safety concerns, or doubt about effectiveness. Inclusion of these responses as legitimate zero bids depressed mean WTP estimates from 22 to 31%. (shrink)

We study an application of gaggle theory to unary negative modal operators. First we treat negation as impossibility and get a minimal logic system Ki that has a perp semantics. Dunn 's kite of different negations can be dealt with in the extensions of this basic logic Ki. Next we treat negation as “unnecessity” and use a characteristic semantics for different negations in a kite which is dual to Dunn 's original one. Ku is the minimal logic that has a (...) characteristic semantics. We also show that Shramko's falsification logic FL can be incorporated into some extension of this basic logic Ku. Finally, we unite the two basic logics Ki and Ku together to get a negative modal logic K-, which is dual to the positive modal logic K+ in [7]. Shramko has suggested an extension of Dunn 's kite and also a dual version in [12]. He also suggested combining them into a “united” kite. We give a united semantics for this united kite of negations. (shrink)

Kant's views on logic and logical theory play an important part in his critical writings, especially the Critique of Pure Reason. However, since he published only one short essay on the subject, we must turn to texts derived from his logic lectures to understand his views. This volume includes three previously untranslated transcripts of Kant's logic lectures: the Blomberg Logic, the Vienna Logic supplemented by the recently discovered Hechsel Logic, and the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic. Also included is a new translation of (...) the Jäsche Logic, compiled at Kant's request from his lectures and published in 1800, and concordances relating Kant's lectures to Georg Friedrich Meier's Excerpts from the Doctrine of Reason, the book on which Kant lectured throughout his life and in which he left extensive notes. (shrink)

Anselm's argument has two distinct conclusions: (a) we cannot intelligibly doubt that god exists, and (b) this god, whose existence we cannot doubt, exists necessarily. if we replace anselm's vague conception of god by the spinozistic conception of substance, a defensible version of the ontological argument, understood as having these two conclusions, can be constructed. two important consequences of this analysis are: (1) the ontological argument, properly understood, deals simply with the concept of substance. it is a further question whether (...) substance ought to be understood as god. (2) the ontological argument does not actually demonstrate the existence of anything. it simply makes clear the consequences of adopting a metaphysical view which employs the spinozistic conception of substance. (shrink)