Situation theory, as developed by Barwise and his collaborators, is used to demonstrate the possibility of defining teleology (and related notions, like that of proper or biological function) in terms of higher order causation, along the lines suggested by Taylor and Wright. This definition avoids the excessive narrowness that results from trying to define teleology in terms of evolutionary history or the effects of natural selection. By legitimating the concept of teleology, this definition also provides promising new avenues for solving (...) long standing problems in the philosophy of mind, such as the problems of intentionality and mental causation. (shrink)

In an article dating back in 1992, Kosta Došen initiated a project of modal translations in substructural logics, aiming at generalising the well-known Gödel–McKinsey–Tarski translation of intuitionistic logic into S4. Došen's translation worked well for (variants of) BCI and stronger systems (BCW, BCK), but not for systems below BCI. Dropping structural rules results in logic systems without distribution. In this article, we show, via translation, that every substructural (indeed, every non-distributive) logic is a fragment of a corresponding sorted, residuated (multi) (...) modal logic. At the conceptual and philosophical level, the translation provides a classical interpretation of the meaning of the logical operators of various non-distributive propositional calculi. Technically, it allows for an effortless transfer of results, such as compactness and the Löwenheim-Skolem property and it opens up new directions for deducing properties of substructural logic systems by establishing appropriate transfer theorems. (shrink)