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  1. A Case Study on Computational Hermeneutics: E. J. Lowe’s Modal Ontological Argument.David Fuenmayor & Christoph Benzmueller - manuscript
    Computers may help us to better understand (not just verify) arguments. In this article we defend this claim by showcasing the application of a new, computer-assisted interpretive method to an exemplary natural-language ar- gument with strong ties to metaphysics and religion: E. J. Lowe’s modern variant of St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God. Our new method, which we call computational hermeneutics, has been particularly conceived for use in interactive-automated proof assistants. It aims at shedding light on the (...)
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  2. Optimizing Political Influence: A Jury Theorem with Dynamic Competence and Dependence.Thomas Mulligan - forthcoming - Social Choice and Welfare.
    The purpose of this paper is to illustrate, formally, an ambiguity in the exercise of political influence. To wit: A voter might exert influence with an eye toward maximizing the probability that the political system (1) obtains the correct (e.g. just) outcome, or (2) obtains the outcome that he judges to be correct (just). And these are two very different things. A variant of Condorcet's Jury Theorem which incorporates the effect of influence on group competence and interdependence is developed. Analytic (...)
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  3. Normative Formal Epistemology as Modelling.Joe Roussos - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    I argue that normative formal epistemology (NFE) is best understood as modelling, in the sense that this is the reconstruction of its methodology on which NFE is doing best. I focus on Bayesianism and show that it has the characteristics of modelling. But modelling is a scientific enterprise, while NFE is normative. I thus develop an account of normative models on which they are idealised representations put to normative purposes. Normative assumptions, such as the transitivity of comparative credence, are characterised (...)
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  4. Experimental Philosophy Meets Formal Epistemology.Jonah N. Schupbach - forthcoming - In Sytsma & Buckwalter (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy. Blackwell.
    Formal epistemology is just what it sounds like: epistemology done with formal tools. Coinciding with the general rise in popularity of experimental philosophy, formal epistemologists have begun to apply experimental methods in their own work. In this entry, I survey some of the work at the intersection of formal and experimental epistemology. I show that experimental methods have unique roles to play when epistemology is done formally, and I highlight some ways in which results from formal epistemology have been used (...)
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  5. Does reflective equilibrium help us converge?Andreas Freivogel - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-22.
    I address the worry that reflective equilibrium is too weak as an account of justification because it fails to let differing views converge. I take up informal aspects of convergence and operationalise them in a formal model of reflective equilibrium. This allows for exploration by the means of computer simulation. Findings show that the formal model does not yield unique outputs, but still boosts agreement. I conclude from this that reflective equilibrium is best seen as a pluralist account of justification (...)
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  6. The competition for knowledge: Shades of gray and rules of thumb.Luis M. Augusto - 2022 - Journal of Knowledge Structures and Systems 3 (3):50 - 62.
    All research is immersed in the competition for knowledge, but this is not always governed by fairness. In this opinion article, I elaborate on indicators of unfairness to be found in both evaluation guides and evaluation panels, and I spontaneously offer a number of rules of thumb meant to keep it at bay. Although they are explicitly offered to the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and in particular to the evaluation panel for Philosophy, Ethics and Religion of FCT's (...)
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  7. Sated but Thirsty: A Prolegomenon to Multidimensional Measures of Need-Based Justice.Alexander Max Bauer - 2022 - Axiomathes 32 (3):529-538.
    In attempts to compare different distributions with regards to need, so-called “measures of need-based distributive justice” have emerged in recent years. Each of the proposed measures relies on a single dimension of need that is taken into account. This is shown to be problematic since humans experience different kinds of need that appear to be incommensurable. A strategy to deal with this problem is introduced by using multidimensional measures.
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  8. Computer verification for historians of philosophy.Landon D. C. Elkind - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-28.
    Interactive theorem provers might seem particularly impractical in the history of philosophy. Journal articles in this discipline are generally not formalized. Interactive theorem provers involve a learning curve for which the payoffs might seem minimal. In this article I argue that interactive theorem provers have already demonstrated their potential as a useful tool for historians of philosophy; I do this by highlighting examples of work where this has already been done. Further, I argue that interactive theorem provers can continue to (...)
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  9. Ideological innocence.Daniel Rubio - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-22.
    Quine taught us the difference between a theory’s ontology and its ideology. Ontology is the things a theory’s quantifiers must range over if it is true, Ideology is the primitive concepts that must be used to state the theory. This allows us to split the theoretical virtue of parsimony into two kinds: ontological parsimony and ideological parsimony. My goal is help illuminate the virtue of ideological parsimony by giving a criterion for ideological innocence—a rule for when additional ideology does not (...)
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  10. Human Symmetry Uncertainty Detected by a Self-Organizing Neural Network Map.Birgitta Dresp-Langley - 2021 - Symmetry 13:299.
    Symmetry in biological and physical systems is a product of self-organization driven by evolutionary processes, or mechanical systems under constraints. Symmetry-based feature extraction or representation by neural networks may unravel the most informative contents in large image databases. Despite significant achievements of artificial intelligence in recognition and classification of regular patterns, the problem of uncertainty remains a major challenge in ambiguous data. In this study, we present an artificial neural network that detects symmetry uncertainty states in human observers. To this (...)
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  11. Changing use of formal methods in philosophy: late 2000s vs. late 2010s.Samuel C. Fletcher, Joshua Knobe, Gregory Wheeler & Brian Allan Woodcock - 2021 - Synthese 199 (5-6):14555-14576.
    Traditionally, logic has been the dominant formal method within philosophy. Are logical methods still dominant today, or have the types of formal methods used in philosophy changed in recent times? To address this question, we coded a sample of philosophy papers from the late 2000s and from the late 2010s for the formal methods they used. The results indicate that the proportion of papers using logical methods remained more or less constant over that time period but the proportion of papers (...)
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  12. Groundwork for a pragmatics for formalized languages.David Kashtan - 2021 - Semiotica 2021 (240):211-239.
    The use-mention distinction is elaborated into a four-way distinction between use, formal mention, material mention and pragmatic mention. The notion of pragmatic mention is motivated through the problem of monsters in Kaplanian indexical semantics. It is then formalized and applied in an account of schemata in formalized languages.
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  13. Remarks on the origin and foundations of formalisation.Srećko Kovač - 2020 - In Marcin Będkowski, Anna Brożek, Alicja Chybińska, Stepan Ivanyk & Dominik Traczykowski (eds.), Formal and Informal Methods in Philosophy. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. pp. 163-179..
    The Aristotelian origins of formal systems are outlined, together with Aristotle's use of causal terms in describing syllogisms. The precision and exactness of a formalism, based on the projection of logical forms into perceptive signs, is contrasted with foundational, abstract concepts, independent of any formalism, which are presupposed for the understanding of a formal language. The definition of a formal system by means of a Turing machine is put in the context of Wittgenstein's general considerations of a machine understood as (...)
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  14. The General Theory of Second Best Is More General Than You Think.David Wiens - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (5):1-26.
    Lipsey and Lancaster's "general theory of second best" is widely thought to have significant implications for applied theorizing about the institutions and policies that most effectively implement abstract normative principles. It is also widely thought to have little significance for theorizing about which abstract normative principles we ought to implement. Contrary to this conventional wisdom, I show how the second-best theorem can be extended to myriad domains beyond applied normative theorizing, and in particular to more abstract theorizing about the normative (...)
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  15. How to Do Digital Philosophy of Science.Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (5):930-941.
    Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of (...)
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  16. Logic and Philosophy of Logic in Wittgenstein.Sebastian Sunday Grève - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (1):168-182.
    This essay discusses Wittgenstein's conception of logic, early and late, and some of the types of logical system that he constructed. The essay shows that the common view according to which Wittgenstein had stopped engaging in logic as a philosophical discipline by the time of writing Philosophical Investigations is mistaken. It is argued that, on the contrary, logic continued to figure at the very heart of later Wittgenstein's philosophy; and that Wittgenstein's mature philosophy of logic contains many interesting thoughts that (...)
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  17. What matters and how it matters: A choice-theoretic representation of moral theories.Franz Dietrich & Christian List - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (4):421-479.
    We present a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. We show that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: a specification of which properties of the objects of moral choice matter in any given context, and a specification of how these properties matter. Reason-based representations provide a very general taxonomy of moral theories, as differences among theories can be attributed to differences in (...)
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  18. The Unreasonable Destructiveness of Political Correctness in Philosophy.Manuel Doria - 2017 - Philosophies 2 (3):17.
    I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by (...)
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  19. Genuine Process Logic.Wolfgang Sohst - 2017 - Collected Lectures of MoMo Berlin.
    The Genuine Process Logic described here (abbreviation: GPL) places the object-bound process itself at the center of formalism. It should be suitable for everyday use, i.e. it is not primarily intended for the formalization of computer programs, but instead, as a counter-conception to the classical state logics. The new and central operator of the GPL is an action symbol replacing the classical state symbols, e.g. of equivalence or identity. The complete renunciation of object-language state expressions also results in a completely (...)
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  20. Can There Be a Chinese Philosophy?--A Review of Searle's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy by Bo Mou 440p(2008).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 3rd Ed 686p(2017).
    This book is invaluable as a synopsis of some of the work of one the greatest philosophers of recent times. There is much value in analyzing his responses to the basic confusions of philosophy, and in the generally excellent attempts to connect classical Chinese thought to modern philosophy. I take a modern Wittgensteinian view to place it in perspective. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date account of Wittgenstein, Searle and their analysis of behavior from the modern two systems (...)
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  21. Causal interpretation of Gödel's ontological proof.Srećko Kovač - 2015 - In Kordula Świętorzecka (ed.), Gödel's Ontological Argument: History, Modifications, and Controversies. Semper. pp. 163.201.
    Gödel's ontological argument is related to Gödel's view that causality is the fundamental concept in philosophy. This explicit philosophical intention is developed in the form of an onto-theological Gödelian system based on justification logic. An essentially richer language, so extended, offers the possibility to express new philosophical content. In particular, theorems on the existence of a universal cause on a causal "slingshot" are formulated.
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  22. Gödel's "slingshot" argument and his onto-theological system.Srećko Kovač & Kordula Świętorzecka - 2015 - In Kordula Świętorzecka (ed.), Gödel's Ontological Argument: History, Modifications, and Controversies. Semper. pp. 123-162.
    The paper shows that it is possible to obtain a "slingshot" result in Gödel's theory of positiveness in the presence of the theorem of the necessary existence of God. In the context of the reconstruction of Gödel's original "slingshot" argument on the suppositions of non-Fregean logic, this is a natural result. The "slingshot" result occurs in sufficiently strong non-Fregean theories accepting the necessary existence of some entities. However, this feature of a Gödelian theory may be considered not as a trivialisation, (...)
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  23. Modal collapse in Gödel's ontological proof.Srećko Kovač - 2012 - In Miroslaw Szatkowski (ed.), Ontological Proofs Today. Ontos Verlag. pp. 50--323.
    After introductory reminder of and comments on Gödel’s ontological proof, we discuss the collapse of modalities, which is provable in Gödel’s ontological system GO. We argue that Gödel’s texts confirm modal collapse as intended consequence of his ontological system. Further, we aim to show that modal collapse properly fits into Gödel’s philosophical views, especially into his ontology of separation and union of force and fact, as well as into his cosmological theory of the nonobjectivity of the lapse of time. As (...)
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  24. The cornucopia of formal-ontological relations.Barry Smith & Pierre Grenon - 2004 - Dialectica 58 (3):279–296.
    The paper presents a new method for generating typologies of formal-ontological relations. The guiding idea is that formal relations are those sorts of relations which hold between entities which are constituents of distinct ontologies. We provide examples of ontologies (in the spirit of Zemach’s classic “Four Ontologies” of 1970), and show how these can be used to give a rich typology of formal relations in a way which also throws light on the opposition between threeand four-dimensionalism.
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  25. Gustav Bergmann, New Foundations of Ontology. [REVIEW]Barry Smith - 1995 - Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 3:304-306.
    The formal ontology here presented is what we might call a typed combinatorial Meinongian mereology. Its author seeks to formulate the laws, here called ‘canons’, regulating how entities can combine together in wholes of different sorts. The method, as in Bergmann’s earlier works, involves the construction of an ideal language of such a sort that the analysis of complex wholes can be achieved by transforming our natural-language representations of reality into what we might think of as artificial characteristic maps or (...)
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  26. Framework for formal ontology.Barry Smith & Kevin Mulligan - 1983 - Topoi 2 (1):73-85.
    The discussions which follow rest on a distinction, first expounded by Husserl, between formal logic and formal ontology. The former concerns itself with (formal) meaning-structures; the latter with formal structures amongst objects and their parts. The paper attempts to show how, when formal ontological considerations are brought into play, contemporary extensionalist theories of part and whole, and above all the mereology of Leniewski, can be generalised to embrace not only relations between concrete objects and object-pieces, but also relations between what (...)
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