logic – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:39:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Logic and Ontology http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2009/06/19/logic-and-ontology/ Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:39:30 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=214 I found an interesting article on the SEP this morning, it seemed to me well written and clearly argumented. ‘Logic and ontology‘, by Thomas Hofweber. Defining logic and ontology is not an easy thing – maybe because it is just a truism to say that there is one unifying view of what they they are. Something like physics… it is likely that no physicist would tell you that there is one thing  such as ‘the physics’, but a range of different approaches and theories which constitute physics as a whole.

Nonetheless, you can look for similarities and differences and come up with a nice classification. I think that’s what this article is doing:

Overall, we can thus distinguish four notions of logic:

  • (L1) the mathematical study of artificial formal languages
  • (L2) the study of formally valid inferences and logical consequence
  • (L3) the study of logical truths
  • (L4) the study of the general features, or form, of judgements

Then he continues with ontology:

The larger discipline of ontology can thus be seen as having four parts:

  • (O1) the study of ontological commitment, i.e. what we or others are committed to,
  • (O2) the study of what there is,
  • (O3) the study of the most general features of what there is, and how the things there are relate to each other in the metaphysically most general ways,
  • (O4) the study of meta-ontology, i.e. saying what task it is that the discipline of ontology should aim to accomplish, if any, how the question it aims to answer should be understood, and with what methodology they can be answered.

I also tried to run the article through WordSift (a text-visualizer tool I mentioned some time ago) but the results were not so exciting I must say. The initial hope was to extract the ‘core’ terms of the article, and somehow let the inherent argument or discourse emerge.. but I guess we’re still far from there! WordSift is probably useful for an english teacher to explain some of the most used terms in a text, but for anything deeper or more domain-centered than that we’ve got to look for something else…..

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the ‘words’ clouds in WordSift

Picture 3

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the visual thesaurus applet :

Picture 1

 

]]> 214 Epistemic Logic http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2008/02/12/epistemic-logic/ http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2008/02/12/epistemic-logic/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 11:04:47 +0000 http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/mikele/blog/?p=268 It’s nice when a few people’s interests happen to converge. You start tackling problems together, and learning as a group. This is what happened KMi recently with the Epistemic Logic interest group. We’ve decided to start a seminar, trying to make sense of the ‘epistemic logic‘ area and possibly draw some useful tips from it.

The seminar’s title is “reasoning about knowledge‘. Fagin and others, lead authors in the area, define its scope as follows (get the PDF here):

As its title suggests, this book investigates reasoning about knowledge, in particular, reasoning about the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other’s knowledge. This is the type of reasoning one often sees in puzzles or Sherlock Holmes mysteries, where we might have reasoning such as this:
If Alice knew that Bob knew that Charlie was wearing a red shirt, then Alice would have known that Bob would have known that Charlie couldn’t have been in the pantry at midnight. But Alice didn’t know this . . .
As we shall see, this type of reasoning is also important in a surprising number of other contexts. Researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, from philosophy to economics to cryptography, have all found that issues involving agents reasoning about other agents’ knowledge are of great relevance to them. We attempt to provide here a framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable.

For the moment we’ve just been clarifying our language and the conceptual tools we need to move on to the core issues. But the discussion’s been really lively, so I guess I’ll keep posting about this. A simple map of the recent meeting is online for public consumption :-)

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