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I. Science, myth, magic: three components of knowledge, in other words three types of activity in man who, in interaction with his surrounding environment seeks to accomodate himself to the constraints which this environment imposes on him while at the same time seeing to his own immediate or far-reaching needs.

Since Kaplan : 81–98, 1979) first provided a logic for context-sensitive expressions, it has been thought that the only way to construct a logic for indexicals is to restrict it to arguments which take place in a single context— that is, instantaneous arguments, uttered by a single speaker, in a single place, etc. In this paper, I propose a logic which does away with these restrictions, and thus places arguments where they belong, in real world conversations. The central innovation is (...) that validity depends not just on the sentences in the argument, but also on certain abstract relations between contexts. This enrichment of the notion of logical form leads to some seemingly counter-intuitive results: a sequence of sentences may make up a valid argument in one sequence of contexts, and an invalid one in another such sequence. I argue that this is an unavoidable result of context sensitivity in general, and of the nature of indexicals in particular, and that reflection on such examples will lead us to a better understanding of the idea of applying logic to context sensitive expressions, and thus to natural language in general. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt a reading of Heidegger’s interpretations of St. Paul’s Epistles in light of the distinction between Eastern and Western thought. To this end, I suggest that Heidegger’s recourse to the Paulinic texts represents his endeavor to gain access to the original structures of life by circumventing the metaphysical framework of Greek (Plato’s and Aristotle’s) thought. Thus, I argue that by doing this, Heidegger actually approaches the Eastern way of thinking, i.e. a non-metaphysical alternative. In order to (...) better understand what defines Eastern thought, I discuss in some detail Zizioulas’s interpretations of temporality in Eastern Christianity. Along the lines of this different understanding of temporality, the proximity of Heideggerian thought can be seen. Finally, I show that the importance of my argument lies in that it can open a possible research path for what Heidegger in his latter works calls “the other beginning.”. (shrink)

In this paper we aim to examine a novel view on distributive justice, i.e. limitarianism, which claims that it is morally impermissible to be rich. Our main goal is to assess the two arguments provided by Ingrid Robeyns in favour of limitarianism, namely the democratic argument and the argument from unmet urgent needs and the two distinct limitarian views which these arguments give rise to. We claim that strong limitarianism, which is supported by the democratic argument, should be rejected as (...) it fails to fully instantiate the value of political equality, while having some other unattractive implications as well. By contrast, we argue that weak limitarianism, which is supported by the argument from unmet urgent needs, should be endorsed, albeit in a qualified version which also takes responsibility constraints into consideration. (shrink)

European writer of Romanian origin, Vintila Horia - Goncourt Prize in 1960 for the novel Dieu est né enexil - was a truly awakened consciousness of his time. Wherever he was - in Bucharest or Florence, Buenos Aires or Paris, Rome or Madrid - this “polyglot nomad” never left the unyielding values of the spirit and of knowledge. His work of literary epistemology, hisnovelistic creation - fed by exile, love and by the divine -, as well as the Journal d’un (...) paysan du Danube, stand as testimony. Focal point of my approach, this text sheds light on the metaphysical realm of a way of thinking in which the undivided man and the man to come are one and the same. Since for the exiled VintilaHoria,”the peasant from the Danube” is “celui dans lequel ce qui fut rencontre celui qui sera, dans un espace-temps non-euclidien”, and his journal emphasizes this “rediscovery”, in spite of the dark times of history; an encounter in, through and beyond the broken grounds of science, art and philosophy, but nevertheless, deeply anchored in philosophy, art and science. Apparently, rediscovery and isolation of the same proportion; in fact, we are talking about an anagnorisis: the inner man and the outer man have never separated, despite the “microbial fauna of Kali Yuga”. “Nomade polyglotte” through his evolution, a result of flawless reflexive stability, Vintila Horia proves himself to be, at the same time, animmobile nomad; “the peasant from the Danube” is the plenary expression of this unusual simultaneity. (shrink)

Basarab Nicolescu’s book What is Reality? is an attempt to enlighten the contradictory logic promoted by Stéphane Lupasco. However, it also proves to be the solid ground necessary for the axiomatic crystallization of the transgressive-integratory view of the world, a vision based on transdisciplinary thought. For this reason our text will focus not only on the connection between the Included Third and the Hidden Third but also on the “fusion between horizons” in an Infinite Third, one which belongs to Meaning.

The Romanian-born European writer Vintilă Horia - whose birth centenary is celebrated this year - was a genuine searcher of truth. His entire work pleads for transgressive-integrating knowledge, in opposition to binary logic and scientism; it is the privileged space of articulation between cognition, creation and gnosis, between the apophatism of science, mystic apofatism and artistic apofatism. Although much less known than the trilogy of exile - Dieu est né en exil, Le chevalier de la résignation and ¡Perseguid a Boecio! (...) - the small-sized novel Le voyage à San Marcos acts as an exemplary attestation to this pompous conjunction. The current article focuses especially on the text’s trans-temporal valence. (shrink)

Built in between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in a mountainous region in Romania, the Peleş Castle and its gardens were conceived according to the mid sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries landscape design principles. Thus, the surrounding landscape, the park and gardens at the royal residence in Sinaia make up an overall image of a Mannerist landscape in which the Villa or, in this case, the castle, is integrated in a complex allegorical, (...) alchemical and political programme. To explore this chronologically incongruent design and to explore gardening principles perhaps invisible in plain sight for modern eyes, the following study aims to emphasize the presence of early modern Western European gardens in the design of the park and gardens at Peleş. This analysis will also reveal the various ways in which, by manipulating nature according to Late Renaissance and Mannerism principles, nature was staged to achieve political goals. (shrink)

The classical rule of Repetition says that if you take any sentence as a premise, and repeat it as a conclusion, you have a valid argument. It's a very basic rule of logic, and many other rules depend on the guarantee that repeating a sentence, or really, any expression, guarantees sameness of referent, or semantic value. However, Repetition fails for token-reflexive expressions. In this paper, I offer three ways that one might replace Repetition, and still keep an interesting notion of (...) validity. Each is a fine way to go for certain purposes, but I argue that one in particular is to be preferred by the semanticist who thinks that there are token-reflexive expressions in natural languages. (shrink)

If the absence and disappearance of the body have enjoyed considerable attention in the social sciences, the same cannot be said about its appearance, other than during dysfunctional states such as pain and illness. The present article draws from a large array of phenomenological studies and presents a situation in which the body comes to the fore in one’s consciousness during the learning of combat sports, a seemingly destructive practice. The argument that I will develop, starting from extensive ethnographic research (...) in two distinctive combat sports, is that every type of bodily practice develops a specific type of reflective body awareness that has a significant impact upon both the way we feel our bodies and the way we feel the world. In other words, what we do with and to our bodies shapes the way we see and experience the world. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new way to distinguish between indexicals, like “I” and “today”, and demonstratives, like “she” and “this”. The main test case is the second person singular pronoun “you”. The tradition would generally count it as a demonstrative, because the speaker’s intentions play a role in providing it with a semantic value. I present cross-linguistic data and explanations offered of the data in typology and semantics to show that “you” belongs on the indexical side, and argue (...) that they can be generalized to a novel criterion for distinguishing between indexicals and demonstratives. The central theoretical claim is that the semantic values of indexicals are objects which play certain utterance-related roles, which are fixed independently of the words being used in the utterance. For instance, the speaker plays the speaker role whether or not she uses the word “I”, and the addressee plays that role whether or not the speaker uses the word “you”. Demonstratives, on the other hand, pick out objects that play no such role, and are instead helped by the speaker’s word-specific intentions. (shrink)

The value in Hartmann’s point of view can be watched from the perspective of some heteronymous plans - an ideal one, which would be “the modality of existence”, and a real one, which would be “the modality of knowing” the value. In Hartmann’s expression we deal with “the absolute character” 1 of values and “the apriority of knowing the values”. It’s interfering here the problem of the validity of values. The question is if the existence of values is reduced to (...) their validity, or if they exist without the dependence of the real states of the world. This validity, for Hartmann, is strictly referring to the second plan, the real one, which is dealing with values. The values are valid “for” – we have here the connection with the existing- but they have their own “world” beside this nip with reality that we call unbiased 2 . The validity of value is aprioristic, no matter the appreciation - like one “pure subjective”, arbitrary - the apriority of value is not depending of some constrain and converge at the level of the logical schemes of thinking. In the general conception of Hartmann’s philosophy the problem of value is diminishing in the analysis of the distinction between the theory of knowledge plan, which is aiming at the subject-object domain, and the ontological one, represented by the relation objective - trans-objective. Although the philosophical analysis will be done from the perspective of the theory of knowledge domain of the relation subject-object, the problem that will concern mostly Hartman will be the objective - trans-objective report seen from the angle of one “critic ontology”, trying to solve the problem of the report between general and specific in the way of being of the axiological structure. (shrink)

In this paper I aim to provide a novel account of the Democratic Argument for limitarianism. I first claim that the standard version of this argument is questionable due to its reliance on a problematic central premise, namely that excessive wealth damages democracy because of its detrimental impact on political equality. Subsequently, I relocate the fundamental democratic worry in regard to excessive wealth in the process of backsliding, and more specifically in the relation between excessive wealth and political polarization. I (...) then offer a new account of the Democratic Argument for limitarianism which envisages wealth capping as instrumental for democratic resilience, but I maintain that the argument is not unambiguously successful. (shrink)

Migration generates well-being for individuals and communities, but the pursuit of well-being is not without risks. Tens of thousands of Romanian children are affected by the migration of their parents, others have to cope with the effects of their own migration. Should migrants have difficulties adjusting when returning “home”? Is readjustment even possible for all remigrants, without support? The article aims to present some issues that the remigrants are confronted with when trying to readjust to their communities of origin. The (...) article shows how readjustment is influenced by the social image, which in turn influences the social support for their adjustment and subsequent development. (shrink)

Synonymy, at its most basic, is sameness of meaning. A token-reflexive expression is an expression whose meaning assigns a referent to its tokens by relating each particular token of that particular expression to its referent. In doing so, the formulation of its meaning mentions the particular expression whose meaning it is. This seems to entail that no two token-reflexive expressions are synonymous, which would constitute a strong objection against token-reflexive semantics. In this paper, I propose and defend a notion of (...) synonymy for token-reflexive expressions that allows such expressions to be synonymous, while being a fairly conservative extension of the customary notion of synonymy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the proposal made by Lombardi and Labarca (Found Chem 7:125–148, 2005) that internal realism can secure the ontological autonomy of chemistry. I argue that internal realism is not, by itself, sufficient to accomplish this task. The fact that conceptual schemes may differ with respect to their theoretical virtues, and the possibility that the relations between them may be reductive undermine the premise that each conceptual scheme has an equal right to define its own ontology, which is a (...) key premise in Lombardi and Labarca’s proposal. (shrink)

We construct logical languages which allow one to represent a variety of possible types of changes affecting the information states of agents in a multi-agent setting. We formalize these changes by defining a notion of epistemic program. The languages are two-sorted sets that contain not only sentences but also actions or programs. This is as in dynamic logic, and indeed our languages are not significantly more complicated than dynamic logics. But the semantics is more complicated. In general, the semantics of (...) an epistemic program is what we call aprogram model. This is a Kripke model of ‘actions’,representing the agents' uncertainty about the current action in a similar way that Kripke models of ‘states’ are commonly used in epistemic logic to represent the agents' uncertainty about the current state of the system. Program models induce changes affecting agents' information, which we represent as changes of the state model, called epistemic updates. Formally, an update consists of two operations: the first is called the update map, and it takes every state model to another state model, called the updated model; the second gives, for each input state model, a transition relation between the states of that model and the states of the updated model. Each variety of epistemic actions, such as public announcements or completely private announcements to groups, gives what we call an action signature, and then each family of action signatures gives a logical language. The construction of these languages is the main topic of this paper. We also mention the systems that capture the valid sentences of our logics. But we defer to a separate paper the completeness proof. (shrink)

The past decade or so has witnessed an increase in the number of philosophical discussions about emergence and reduction in science. However, many of these discussions (though not all) remain too abstract and theoretical, and are wanting with respect to concrete examples taken from the sciences. This dissertation studies the topics of reduction and emergence in the context of a case study. I focus on the case of chemistry and investigate how emergentism can help us secure the autonomy of this (...) discipline in relation to the underlying microphysics. I develop an account of emergence (called functional emergence) that is, I argue, capable of answering the question of why we have chemistry instead of just applied quantum mechanics. I argue that functionally emergent properties in chemistry -- properties that are defined by their behaviour, not by some shared microphysical constituent -- can help us defend the autonomy of chemistry; they allow for the existence of sui generis chemical regularities, which can be used in sui generis chemical explanations. Functional emergence generates difficulties for some accounts of inter-theoretic reduction, but unlike other theories of emergence it is compatible with weaker forms of reductionism. (shrink)

In this article I aim to offer a first critical assessment of the most prominent arguments in favour of restricting the voting rights of senior citizens. The first argument discussed, most thoroughly articulated by van Parijs, maintains that intergenerational justice would be improved under schemes which restrict the voting rights of senior citizens, thereby diminishing their overall electoral weight. The second argument, reconstructed from Lau's defence of child enfranchisement, maintains that the cognitive decline associated with the process of aging should (...) lead us to treat children and senior citizens identically in respect to electoral rights; thus, if we agree that children should not have the right to vote, consistency dictates that senior citizens should be disenfranchised as well. I respond to these arguments with several objections, arguing that the former relies on a number of faulty empirical premises and has deeply unattractive implications for enfranchisement once consistently applied, and that the latter fails to make empirically salient distinctions between children and senior citizens when it comes to the political domain. (shrink)

In this paper I show that Elga’s argument for a restricted principle of indifference for self-locating belief relies on the kind of mistaken reasoning that recommends the ‘staying’ strategy in the Monty Hall problem.

This paper discusses the reception of Frankfurt School critical theory in Communist Romania. After some opening remarks concerning the relevance of this topic, Section 2 sketches the evolving political and historical contexts that circumscribed this philosophical reception. The content and configuration of the Romanian reception of critical theory is then discussed in a double sequence: first (Section 3), by surveying and analysing the main clusters of arguments developed in these texts, which are filtered and classified into four categories: a) general (...) considerations and strategic approach to critical theory; b) positive assessments; c) philosophical critiques; d) politico-practical critiques. Then, Section 4 attempts to delineate the divergent paths adumbrated in this field of critical reception, which it illustrates through the specific authorial trajectories of the main Romanian interpreters (Tertulian, Marga and Tismăneanu). Finally, the concluding remarks are devoted to some brief comparative and historical considerations on the meaning, value and amplitude of this critical reception. (shrink)

De ce a fost fondată Uniunea Europeană? Un prim răspuns ar fi dorinţa de pace după un război devastator şi umilitor. Un al doilea răspuns ar fi realizarea importanţei unităţii. O unitate care se va caracteriza printr-o diversitate a culturilor şi a limbilor. Statele europene nu au dorit să renunţe la suveranitatea lor, au vrut să devină un corp comun pentru a nu a mai putea fi călcate în picioare de iureşul istoriei. Ca orice unitate, UE avea nevoie de un (...) cadru de reglementare oferit de instituţii şi politici europene. De asemenea, pentru a armoniza ceva trebuie să poţi pune împreună anumite elemente separate. Armonizarea Uniunii a fost realizată prin fondarea instituţiilor şi a reglementărilor acestora (structura instituţională a UE este prezentată în Anexa nr. 1). Instituţionalizarea Uniunii Europene este cheia de boltă a construcţiei istorice europene. Început în anul 1957, acest proces a lăsat urme adânci în conştiinţa politică europeană. Dacă la început a fost privită cu reticenţă, acum Uniunea nu poate exista fără instituţii. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that there is a lot of philosophy in the philosophy of chemistry—not only in the problems and questions specific to chemistry, which this science brings up in philosophical discussions, but also in the topics of wider interest like reductionism and emergence, for which chemistry proves to be an ideal case study. The fact that chemical entities and properties are amenable to a quantitative understanding, to measurement and experiment to a greater extent than those in psychology (...) or biology, makes chemistry an ideal case study for those interested in reductionism and emergence. (shrink)

The present article represents an attempt to argue in the favor of the thesis that, in the First Meditation, in the fragment where the problem of madness is spoken of, Descartes’ view aims to exclude the possibility that the knowing subject, the Cogito, could be insane, and not only to avoid the problem of madness because of various reasons or to replace the madness-example with a dreaming-example. In other words, this research aims to expose and to argue for Michel Foucault’s (...) point of view regarding the Cartesian problem of madness, and also to argue against Jacques Derrida’s view on the same issue. More broadly speaking, beyond the highlight of a possible different approach to Descartes’ text or the analysis of the Derrida-Foucault controversy, the main aim of this article is to emphasize a problem maybe less discussed of the act of knowing: beyond the proper usage of a wrong method, the misusage of a correct method or the poor practice of some spiritual exercises, the errors in the act of knowledge could as well follow from a deficiency in the knowing subject itself. (shrink)

Résumé Des artistes roumains se rassemblent pour collaborer, dans leur pratique indissociablement artistique et politique, mais aussi bien au-delà. À travers leurs forces collectives, ils peuvent mieux résister contre le contrôle des forces de polices qui occupent tout espace d’organisation. Le collectif les aide aussi à voir en quoi l’amitié est aujourd’hui une valeur éminemment politique.

Stalnaker, 169–199 2006) introduced a combined epistemic-doxastic logic that can formally express a strong concept of belief, a concept of belief as ‘subjective certainty’. In this paper, we provide a topological semantics for belief, in particular, for Stalnaker’s notion of belief defined as ‘epistemic possibility of knowledge’, in terms of the closure of the interior operator on extremally disconnected spaces. This semantics extends the standard topological interpretation of knowledge with a new topological semantics for belief. We prove that the belief (...) logic KD45 is sound and complete with respect to the class of extremally disconnected spaces and we compare our approach to a different topological setting in which belief is interpreted in terms of the derived set operator. We also study belief revision as well as belief dynamics by providing a topological semantics for conditional belief and belief update modalities, respectively. Our setting based on extremally disconnected spaces, however, encounters problems when extended with dynamic updates. We then propose a solution consisting in interpreting belief in a similar way based on hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces, and axiomatize the belief logic of hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces. Finally, we provide a complete axiomatization of the logic of conditional belief and knowledge, as well as a complete axiomatization of the corresponding dynamic logic. (shrink)

Background Only a few studies have been conducted to assess physicians’ knowledge of legal standards. Nevertheless, prior research has demonstrated a dearth of medical law knowledge. Our study explored physicians’ awareness of legal provisions concerning informed consent and confidentiality, which are essential components of the physician-patient relationship of trust. -/- Methods A cross-sectional study assessed attending physicians’ legal knowledge of informed consent and confidentiality regulations. The study was conducted in nine hospitals in Dolj County, Romania. Physicians were given a questionnaire (...) with ten scenarios and instructed to select the response that best reflected their practice. We assessed the responses of physicians who claimed their practice to be entirely legal. Their legal knowledge was evaluated by comparing their answers to applicable laws. We also calculated a score for the physicians who admitted to committing a legal breach. -/- Results Of the 305 respondents, 275 declared they never committed any law violation. However, their median correct answer score was 5.35 ± 1.66 out of 10. The specialty was the strongest predictor of legal knowledge, with emergency physicians rating the lowest and non-surgical physicians scoring the highest. Physicians who worked in both private and public sectors were better knowledgeable about legal issues than those who worked exclusively in the public sector. Results indicate that physicians are aware of the patient’s right to informed consent but lack comprehensive understanding. While most physicians correctly answered simple questions, only a tiny minority identified the correct solution when confronted with ethical dilemmas. The physicians who acknowledged breaching the law, on the other hand, had a slightly higher knowledge score at 5.45 ± 2.18. -/- Conclusion Legal compliance remains relatively low due to insufficient legal awareness. Physicians display limited awareness of legal requirements governing patient autonomy, confidentiality, and access to health data. Law should be taught in all medical schools, including undergraduate programs, to increase physicians’ legal knowledge and compliance. (shrink)

In this article I aim to provide the first normative discussion of barter voting markets, namely markets which allow the trading of votes on issues/elections for votes on other issues/elections. The article is framed within the wider literature on the legal permissibility of vote buying, with a particular focus on the recent debate between Christopher Freiman and James Stacey Taylor. I argue that while Taylor's objections successfully defeat Freiman's case in favour of standard voting markets, they are unable to also (...) defeat the type of voting markets outlined here. Furthermore, I argue that there are at least two plausible prima facie reasons in favour of barter voting markets, grounded in their capacity to contribute to the alleviation of injustice for systematically disadvantaged socio‐economic groups and to their capacity to reduce one form of bad voting, i.e. voting from ignorance. (shrink)

This paper presents a simple decidable logic of functional dependence LFD, based on an extension of classical propositional logic with dependence atoms plus dependence quantifiers treated as modalities, within the setting of generalized assignment semantics for first order logic. The expressive strength, complete proof calculus and meta-properties of LFD are explored. Various language extensions are presented as well, up to undecidable modal-style logics for independence and dynamic logics of changing dependence models. Finally, more concrete settings for dependence are discussed: continuous (...) dependence in topological models, linear dependence in vector spaces, and temporal dependence in dynamical systems and games. (shrink)

In this annotated critical edition of Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_ Lambda Stefan Alexandru draws upon many hitherto unexplored sources of the direct and indirect tradition, _inter alia_ upon an independent Greek manuscript he has discovered in the Vatican Library.

We present a complete, decidable logic for reasoning about a notion of completely trustworthy evidence and its relations to justifiable belief and knowledge, as well as to their explicit justifications. This logic makes use of a number of evidence-related notions such as availability, admissibility, and “goodness” of a piece of evidence, and is based on an innovative modification of the Fitting semantics for Artemovʼs Justification Logic designed to preempt Gettier-type counterexamples. We combine this with ideas from belief revision and awareness (...) logics to provide an account for explicitly justified knowledge based on conclusive evidence that addresses the problem of omniscience. (shrink)

We investigate the discrete (finite) case of the Popper–Renyi theory of conditional probability, introducing discrete conditional probabilistic models for knowledge and conditional belief, and comparing them with the more standard plausibility models. We also consider a related notion, that of safe belief, which is a weak (non-negatively introspective) type of “knowledge”. We develop a probabilistic version of this concept (“degree of safety”) and we analyze its role in games. We completely axiomatize the logic of conditional belief, knowledge and safe belief (...) over conditional probabilistic models. We develop a theory of probabilistic dynamic belief revision, introducing probabilistic “action models” and proposing a notion of probabilistic update product, that comes together with appropriate reduction laws. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the view that a demonstrative refers to something partly in virtue of the speaker intending it to refer to that thing. In recent work, Una Stojnić has argued that the natural interpretation of demonstratives in some discourses is that they do not refer to the objects intended by the speaker, and instead refer to other things. In this paper, I defend intentionalism against this charge. In particular, I argue that the data presented by Stojnić can be explained from (...) an intentionalist point of view. The explanations take two forms: either the audience’s reaction to the discourse does not concern reference, or the natural interpretation is wrong. This latter claim has been defended by Stojnić in other work as applied to word identifi cation and is neutral between intentionalism and Stojnić’s objectivism. It is also very plausible. But it takes away the import of the argument from natural interpretation, at least in the form discussed here. (shrink)

We take a logical approach to threshold models, used to study the diffusion of opinions, new technologies, infections, or behaviors in social networks. Threshold models consist of a network graph of agents connected by a social relationship and a threshold value which regulates the diffusion process. Agents adopt a new behavior/product/opinion when the proportion of their neighbors who have already adopted it meets the threshold. Under this diffusion policy, threshold models develop dynamically towards a guaranteed fixed point. We construct a (...) minimal dynamic propositional logic to describe the threshold dynamics and show that the logic is sound and complete. We then extend this framework with an epistemic dimension and investigate how information about more distant neighbors’ behavior allows agents to anticipate changes in behavior of their closer neighbors. Overall, our logical formalism captures the interplay between the epistemic and social dimensions in social networks. (shrink)

We address the old question whether a logical understanding of Quantum Mechanics requires abandoning some of the principles of classical logic. Against Putnam and others (Among whom we may count or not E. W. Beth, depending on how we interpret some of his statements), our answer is a clear "no". Philosophically, our argument is based on combining a formal semantic approach, in the spirit of E. W. Beth's proposal of applying Tarski's semantical methods to the analysis of physical theories, with (...) an empirical-experimental approach to Logic, as advocated by both Beth and Putnam, but understood by us in the view of the operationalrealistic tradition of Jauch and Piron, i. e. as an investigation of "the logic of yes-no experiments" (or "questions"). Technically, we use the recently-developed setting of Quantum Dynamic Logic (Baltag and Smets 2005, 2008) to make explicit the operational meaning of quantum-mechanical concepts in our formal semantics. Based on our recent results (Baltag and Smets 2005), we show that the correct interpretation of quantum-logical connectives is dynamical, rather than purely propositional. We conclude that there is no contradiction between classical logic and (our dynamic reinterpretation of) quantum logic. Moreover, we argue that the Dynamic-Logical perspective leads to a better and deeper understanding of the "non-classicality" of quantum behavior than any perspective based on static Propositional Logic. (shrink)

The prospect of cognitive enhancement well beyond current human capacities raises worries that the fundamental equality in moral status of human beings could be undermined. Cognitive enhancement might create beings with moral status higher than persons. Yet, there is an expressibility problem of spelling out what the higher threshold in cognitive capacity would be like. Nicholas Agar has put forward the bold claim that we can show by means of inductive reasoning that indefinite cognitive enhancement will probably mark a difference (...) in moral status. The hope is that induction can determine the plausibility of post‐personhood existence in the absence of an account of what the higher status would be like. In this article, we argue that Agar's argument fails and, more generally, that inductive reasoning has little bearing on assessing the likelihood of post‐personhood in the absence of an account of higher status. We conclude that induction cannot bypass the expressibility problem about post‐persons. (shrink)

Compositionality is a principle used in logic, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science for assigning meanings to language expressions in a systematic manner following syntactic construction, thereby allowing for a perspicuous algebraic view of the syntax-semantics interface. Yet the status of the principle remains under debate, with positions ranging from compositionality always being achievable to its having genuine empirical content. This paper attempts to sort out some major issues in all this from a logical perspective. First, we stress the fundamental (...) harmony between Compositionality and its apparent antipode of Contextuality that locates meaning in interaction with other linguistic expressions and in other settings than the actual one. Next, we discuss basic further desiderata in designing and adjudicating a compositional semantics for a given language in harmony with relevant contextual syntactic and semantic cues. In particular, in a series of concrete examples in the realm of logic, we point out the dangers of over-interpreting compositional solutions, the ubiquitous entanglement of assigning meanings and the key task of explaining given target inferences, and the dynamics of new language design, illustrating how even established compositional semantics can be rethought in a fruitful manner. Finally, we discuss some fresh perspectives from the realm of game semantics for natural and formal languages, the general setting for Samson Abramsky’s influential work on programming languages and process logics. We highlight outside-in coalgebraic perspectives on meanings as finite or infinitely unfolding behavior that might challenge and enrich current discussions of compositionality. (shrink)