Essay on the Principles of Logic - Preface to the English Version

2016

From physics to society∗ Abstract. In Part I of our joint paper [WuB13], we outlined our respective theories, The Basic Theory of the Philosophy of Information (BTPI) and Logic in Reality (LIR) and showed their synergy for the understanding of complex informational processes. In this part, we develop Wu’s fundamen-tal philosophical insight of the origin of the values of information in the interactions of complex information processing. A key concept in our work is that of a logical isomorphism between human individual and social value and the natural laws of the physical world. On the basis of Wu’s concept of Informational Thinking, we propose an Informational Stance, a philosophi-cal stance that is most appropriate for, and not separated nor isolated from, the emerging unified theory of information. We propose our metaphilosophy and metalogic of information as further support for the ethical development of the Information Society.

The Art of Logic by Avi Sion is a collection of recent essays on various topics in logic theory and in applied logic. The same faculty and art of logic is called for in formulating theoretical logic and in applying its findings to diverse fields. The essays here collected deal with some very important issues in logic, philosophy, and spirituality, which he had not previously treated in as much detail if at all.

Essay on the Principles of Logic: A Defense of Logical Monism, 2023

Table of Contents for my translation of Michael Wolff's Essay on the Principles of Logic: A Defense of Logical Monism. Michael Wolff's book is an attempt to show that a non-truth-functional syllogistic logic is the only formal and general logic - in that it introduces no specific conceptual content into its formulas and principles. Further, he shows that post-Fregean logics can be reproduced within syllogistic, so long as postulates are added which are not universally valid. Yet because "classical" logics depend on postulates that are not valid in every case, they cannot earn the title of formal and general logic with the same right as the syllogistic. The book includes a full comparison of syllogistic with class-logical and function-theoretic logical languages, as well as a reconstruction of Aristotle's syllogistic within Wolff's new syllogistic language.

This talk surveys a range of positions on the fundamental metaphysical and epistemological questions about elementary logic, for example, as a starting point: what is the subject matter of logic-what makes its truths true? how do we come to know the truths of logic? A taxonomy is approached by beginning from well-known schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics-Logicism, Intuitionism, Formalism, Realism-and sketching roughly corresponding views in the philosophy of logic. Kant, Mill, Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Ayer, Quine, and Putnam are among the philosophers considered along the way.

Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 19: 145-98, 2013

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Dialogue, 1970

2015

Modern logic has the tools for becoming a broad science of reasoning and other information directed behavior that plays an important role in connecting the humanities, exact sciences and social sciences at the university, and which is part of the bedrock of our information society. This paper is a revised version of a valedictory lecture delivered on 26 September 2014 as a University Professor of Pure and Applied Logic in the main auditorium of the University of Amsterdam. It traces the history of modern logic, illustrates the emergence of new trends in logic and agency, and discusses the most important future challenges facing it.

Principia: an international journal of epistemology, 2007

In this paper six of the most important issues in the philosophy of logic are examined from a standpoint that rejects the First Commandment of empiricist analytic philosophy, namely, Ockham's razor. Such a standpoint opens the door to the clarification of such fundamental issues and to possible new solutions to each of them. As an absolute principle, which is what it purports to be, Ockam's razor is the expression of a philosophical castration complex.

Master thesis, University of Oslo, 2020

The thesis is an investigation into the logical pluralism debate, aiming to understand how the philosophical commitments sustaining each side to the debate connects to more general issues connected to the foundations of logic. My investigation centers on the following three notions: (1) Epistemic justification, (2) The metaphysical "ground" for logical truth, and (3) Normativity. Chapter 1 traces the monistic and pluralistic conception of logic back to its philosophical/mathematical roots, which we find in the writings of Rudolf Carnap and Gottlob Frege. I argue that logical pluralism - in its more plausible, epistemic (rather than ontic) form - was enabled by the semantic shift which Carnap seems to have anticipated and that, from a conventionalist perspective, his 'Principle of Tolerance' follows as a consequence of that shift. Chapter 2 concerns the issues ensuing from Willard V. O Quine’s critique of Carnap's conventionalism, which had a devastating effect for his foundationalist project. The aim is in particular to address the issue of meaning-variance, a crucial assumption for the conventionalist approach to pluralism. In chapter 3, I present another framework for pluralism, due to Stewart Shapiro’s [2014] ‘modelling’ conception of logic, according which logic is conceived as a mathematical model of natural language. Shapiro argues that our concept of logical consequence is vague and in need of a sharpening to attain a fixed meaning. Pluralism follows from there being two or more equally "correct" such sharpenings; i.e., relative to our theoretical aims. I argue that the modelling-conception is the best way to approach a justification of basic logical laws. However, since that conception also grounds Timothy Williamson’s [2017] argument for monism, I argue that the conception ultimately fails to establish logical pluralism. Since both Williamson and Shapiro take a pragmatic approach to justification, I conclude that the question of pluralism does not turn on epistemological commitments (i.e., on (1)), and suggest instead that it is a matter of (2), i.e., of one's conception of the "ground" for logical truth.