Logic, Thought and Action

This second volume in the series Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science brings a pragmatic perspective to the discussion of the unity of science.

Contemporary philosophy and cognitive science increasingly acknowledge the systematic interrelation of language, thought and action. The principal function of language is to enable speakers to communicate their intentions to others, to respond flexibly in a social context and to act cooperatively in the world. This book will contribute to our understanding of this dynamic process by clearly presenting and discussing the most important hypotheses, issues and theories in philosophical and logical study of language, thought and action. Among the fundamental issues discussed are the rationality and freedom of agents, theoretical and practical reasoning, individual and collective attitudes and actions, the nature of cooperation and communication, the construction and conditions of adequacy of scientific theories, propositional contents and their truth conditions, illocutionary force, time, aspect and presupposition in meaning, speech acts within dialogue, the dialogical approach to logic and the structure of dialogues and other language games, as well as formal methods needed in logic or artificial intelligence to account for choice, paradoxes, uncertainty and imprecision.

This volume contains major contributions by leading logicians, analytic philosophers, linguists and computer scientists. It will be of interest to graduate students and researchers from philosophy, logic, linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence. There is no comparable survey in the existing literature.

Résumé
their communication abilities? The ?rst part of the book,Reason, - tion and Communication, contains a general philosophicaldiscussion of these important questions. In Chapter 2,The Balance ofReason, Dascal discusses the ideal of aperfectly reliable balance of reason, an ideal challenged by scepticism. He shows that the balance metaphor is compatible with two di?erent conceptions of rationality which are both present in Western thought. The ?rst conception expects the balance of reason to provide conclusive decisionsin every rational deliberation. Thesecond conception ackno- edges the limits of human reason. It is clearly more appropriate for h- dling uncertainty, revision of intentions and more apt to face scepticism. Leibnitz, one of the most eminent rationalist philosophers, made a s- stantial contribution to both conceptions of rationality. Dascal discusses in detailhis ideas. He shows how Leibnizcameto grips with the balance metaphor. Thestateof equilibrium of thescalesof a balancemirrorsthe equilibriumofindi?erence betweentheargumentsforandthearguments against a belief, a decision or an action. Yet an indi?erence of that kind seems to model arbitrariness rather than rationality. Leibniz, as Dascal stresses, was well aware oftheproblem. Heacknowledged that the b- ance of reason, when it is conceived as a metric and digital balance, lies open to the objection raised above, but he worked out another version of the balance of reason to circumvent this. We can conceive of a balance which permits us to directly compare the values of what is placed on the scales without reducing them to universal measuring units.

Contenu
Reason, Action and Communication.- The Balance of Reason.- Desire, Deliberation and Action.- Two Basic Kinds of Cooperation.- Speech Acts and Illocutionary Logic.- Communication, Linguistic Understanding and Minimal Rationality in the Tradition of Universal Grammar.- Experience, Truth and Reality in Science.- Truth and Reference.- Empirical Versus Theoretical Existence and Truth.- Michel Ghins on the Empirical Versus the Theoretical.- Propositions, Thought and Meaning.- Propositional Identity, Truth According to Predication and Strong Implication.- Reasoning and Aspectual-Temporal Calculus.- Presupposition, Projection and Transparency in Attitude Contexts.- The Limits of a Logical Treatment of Assertion.- Agency, Dialogue and Game-Theory.- Agents and Agency in Branching Space-Times.- Attempt, Success and Action Generation: A Logical Study of Intentional Action.- Pragmatic and Semiotic Prerequisites for Predication.- On How to Be a Dialogician.- Some Games Logic Plays.- Backward Induction Without Tears?.- Reasoning and Cognition in Logic and Artificial Intelligence.- On the Usefulness of Paraconsistent Logic.- Algorithms for Relevant Logic.- Logic, Randomness and Cognition.- From Computing with Numbers to Computing with Words from Manipulation of Measurements to Manipulation of Perceptions.