Time, Action and Necessity: A Proof of Free Will

Dialogue, 1970

Manuscrito, 2004

Abstract Guillermo Rosado-Haddock: In this paper on Oswaldo Chateaubriand's book Logical Forms I, I am mostly concerned with the critical task of indicating some shortcomings and stressing my disagreements with the distinguished scholar. The most important shortcoming of the book is Chateaubriand's unfamiliarity with Husserl's views on logic and semantics, some of which anticipate views propounded by the former--e.g., the distinction between logical law and logical necessity--, whereas others are more subtle than Chateaubriand's views--e.g. Husserl's views on the referent of statements. One of the most important contributions of Chateaubriand's book is his analysis and rejection of all forms of the so-called "slingshot argument". On the other hand, I disagree with Chateaubriand's rendering of some of Frege's views, though some of these are very common among Frege scholars. Finally, I assess Chateaubriand's criticisms of Kripke's views as well as those of Tarski. I tend to agree with his criticism of Kripke, but disagree with his assessment of Tarskian semantics. Abstract response: In §§1-2 I consider some issues that Guillermo raises in connection with Husserl, especially the distinction between the notion of state of affairs and the more general notion of situation of affairs conceived as a common substratum for different states of affairs. After a few remarks about Church’s slingshot argument in §3, I discuss several objections that Guillermo raises to my interpretation of Frege (§4), to Kripke’s notion of rigid designator (§5) and to my objections to Tarski’s semantic conception of truth (§6).

History and Philosophy of Logic, 2015

Boston: Walter de Gruyter. The book is simultaneously the first volume of a new de Gruyter series "Peirceana", edited by Francesco Bellucci and Ahti Pietarinen. To Peirce scholars and other aficionados of logic, semiotics, and pragmatism, 2017 brought the great news of Bellucci's Speculative Grammar book, providing the eye-opening first detailed chronological overview over Peirce's career-length developing of his semiotics. Now, the first volume of Ahti Pietarinen's long-awaited three-volume publication of the totality of Peirce's writings on his mature logic representation system known as Existential Graphs (EGs) not only give us a plethora of hitherto unpublished Peirce papers but also a new and in many ways surprising view into the origin and development of this important fruit of Peirce's last, creative philosophical burst taking its beginning around 1896, famously to peak in his annus mirabilis of 1903. Ahti Pietarinen has spent an admirable effort not only to find, collect and transcribe the enormous amount of Peirce's EG writings, but also to frame and comment the results in a planned three-volume, 2000-pages critical edition named Logic of the Future. The title has been chosen from a 1909 letter to William James in which Peirce describes the EG system and exclaims: "This ought to be The Logic of the Future". Now, the first volume of this gargantuan work has appeared, subtitled "History and Applications". A brief general introduction presents the layout of the whole planned edition, while another brief intro takes the uninitiated reader into the central issues of Existential Graphs. The tentative principle of selection of texts is ambitious: to be "comprehensive", that is, publishing the majority of the some 5000 ms. pages in which Peirce address EGs, including a vast amount of alternate text versions presented as footnotes and appendices to texts presented. A second principle is the overall chronological structure of the three volumes. A third is that texts already published (in the CP, in the NEM, or elsewhere) are left out. The two latter criteria, however, are rules of thumbs not rigorously followed. This appears from the detailed 100-pages introduction to the present volume, which goes through each of the volume's 28 selected texts and text collections from Peirce's writings, spanning the period from 1895 to 1911. The selection is not strictly chronological, however, which is partially a result of the overall disposition of all of the three volumes. In a certain sense, the central volume of the whole project is that of volume two, still to appear, to cover Peirce's intense 1903 developments and presentations of the EGs in the "Logical Tracts" and the "Lowell Lectures", each of which are planned to fill one subvolume of Logic of the Future volume two. The third and final volume, "Pragmaticism and Correspondence" then, is planned to contain post-1903 EG writings related to Peirce's Pragmaticism paper series in the Monist, in which Peirce puts the EGs to use in his mature arguments for pragmatism if not decidedly a proof of pragmatism-as well as Peirce's presentation and discussion of the EGs in lengthy correspondence with colleagues. These selection choices leave for the first volume primarily a batch of central texts documenting the early development of the EGs from 1896-98, forming the epicenter of the present volume. A bit surprisingly, this is flanked by two other batches of texts. First, texts 1-4, a small selection of philosophy-of-logic papers, most of them late, around 1910; Pietarinen's argument is that these texts present Peirce's most clarified general view of logic, as a preparation

Studia Logica

Synthese

Computational Intelligence, 1988

McDermott has recently explained his fundamental philosophical shift on the methodology of artificial intelligence (AI) and has further suggested that the shift is both necessary and inevitable. The shift results from a perception that a trend towards overformalisation has detached the real problems from the research results. McDermott's criticism is an enlightened exhumation of the criticisms of the seventies and explains new ways in which the logical methodology can be abused. I argue that McDermott's criticism should not discourage the use of logic, but force a timely reexamination of its fundamental role in AI.

Computational Intelligence, 1987

operationalized and concretely realized in systems. McDermott shares with the logicists a view of knowledge as residing in discrete facts expressed in interpreted symbolic data structures and differs from them only his views of what kind of inference pmesses should be allowed to operate on these structures. Unfomnately, the interpreted-symbolic structures approach, although attractive in many ways, has undesirable consequences for the design of actual systems. Not only does it tie the performance characteristics of the system (e.g., its ability to act in real time) to the computational complexity of deriving assertions in a symbolic representation language, but it also diverts attention from the real informational phenomena, namely, the objective ongoing relations between a system with complex states and conditions in the environment with which that system interacts.

2017

A.N. Prior’s Past, Present and Future [18] was published 50 years ago in 1967 and was clearly a milestone in the development of tense-logic. It is a mature and comprehensive presentation of the basic concepts, systems and issues in tense-logic. In addition it also contains a number of interesting ideas that later led to important further developments of the field. Past, Present and Future represents a culmination of Prior’s struggle with the problem of determinism (including his study of the tension between the doctrines of divine foreknowledge and human freedom). Prior’s study of the problem of determinism led him to a reconstruction of the famous DiodoreanMaster Argument which had for centuries been regarded as a strong argument in favour of determinism. In his further analysis of the problem, hemade extensive use of tense-logic and the idea of branching time. However, in Past, Present and Future Prior also stresses that time as such should not simply be understood in terms of bra...

The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, 2001