Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

In traditional logic, contradictoriness (the presence of contradictions in a theory or in a body of knowledge) and triviality (the fact that such a theory entails all possible consequences) are assumed inseparable, granted that negation is available. This is an effect of an ordinary logical feature known as ‘explosiveness’: According to it, from a contradiction ‘α and ¬α’ everything is derivable. Indeed, classical logic (and many other logics) equate ‘consistency’ with ‘freedom from contradictions’. Such logics forcibly fail to distinguish, thus, between contradictoriness and other forms of inconsistency. Paraconsistent logics are precisely the logics for which this assumption is challenged, by the rejection of the classical ‘consistency presupposition’.

Perhaps the key philosophical questions concerning causality are the following: +what are causal relationships? how can one discover causal relationships? how should one reason with causal relationships? This chapter will focus on the first two questions.

The ability to think conditional thoughts is a basic part of our mental equipment. A view of the world would be an idle, ineffectual affair without them. There’s not much point in recognising that there’s a predator in your path unless you also realise that if you don’t change direction pretty quickly you will be eaten.

For a long time, the word ‘quantifier’ in linguistics and philosophy simply stood for the universal and existential quantifiers of standard predicate logic. In fact, this use is still prevalent in elementary textbooks. It seems fair to say that the dominance of predicate logic in these fields has obscured the fact that the quantifier expressions form a syntactic category, with characteristic interpretations, and with many more members than ∀ and ∃.