Islamic Education Construction in the Perspective of Falsification of Karl R. Popper

Epistemology as a branch in philosophy has an important position in science including in Islamic education. This research critically examines the epistemological construction of Islamic education through a perspective of falsification which was coined by Karl R. Popper. This research used a qualitative approach to the type of literature study and analyzes data through a productive hermeneutical approach. The conclusion of this research shows that scientific epistemology needs to be designed to understand the theories, concepts, and propositions of the Islamic education system. Scientific epistemology contains the verificative-philosophical logic and intuition-revelation logic (Qur'an and al-Hadith. This epistemology has a rational-critical, empirical, intuitive, and prophetic (illahiyah) dimension and it is called Prophetic Criticism. The implication is that Islamic education will have an integrative view of the profane (physical) and transcendental (metaphysical) side. Islamic education is the logical-superlogical content of subjective-objective thinking, the world of theory-supratheory, and critical argumentation with a rational-intuitive foundation of self and outside self-views

A 4-valued logic of strong conditional

How to say no less, no more about conditional than what is needed? From a logical analysis of necessary and sufficient conditions (Section 1), we argue that a stronger account of conditional can be obtained in two steps: firstly, by reminding its historical roots inside modal logic and set-theory (Section 2); secondly, by revising the meaning of logical values, thereby getting rid of the paradoxes of material implication whilst showing the bivalent roots of conditional as a speech-act based on affirmations and rejections (Section 3). Finally, the two main inference rules for conditional, viz. Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens, are reassessed through a broader definition of logical consequence that encompasses both a normal relation of truth propagation and a weaker relation of falsity non-propagation from premises to conclusion (Section 3)

The Logical Web

Different logic systems are motivated by attempts to fix the counter-intuitive instances of classical argumentative forms, e.g., strengthening of the antecedent, contraposition and conditional negation. These counter-examples are regarded as evidence that classical logic should be rejected in favour of a new logic system in which these argumentative forms are considered invalid. It is argued that these logical revisions are ad hoc, because those controversial argumentative forms are implied by other argumentative forms we want to keep. It is impossible to remove an argumentative form from a logical system without getting entangled in an intricate logical web, since these revisions imply the removal of other parts of a system we want to maintain. Consequently, these revisions are incoherent and unwarranted. At the very least, the usual approach in the analysis of counter-examples of argumentative forms must be seriously reconsidered

Non-Fregean Logics of Analytic Equivalence (I)

The identity connective is usually interpreted in non-Fregean logic as an operator representing the identity of situations. This interpretation is related to the modal criterion of the identity of sentence correlates, characteristic of the WT system and some stronger systems. However, this connective can also be interpreted in a different way – as an operator representing the identity of propositions. The “propositional” interpretation is in turn associated with the modal-contents criterion of the identity of sentence correlates. This begs the question of whether there is a system of non-Fregean logic, providing an adequate formalization of this criterion. The aim of the paper is to systematize the metalogical and philosophical context of the issue and to point to a system that provides its solution.The research reported in this paper is a part of the project financed from the funds supplied by the National Science Centre, Poland (decision no. DEC-2011/03/N/HS1/04580)

Gentzen-Prawitz Natural Deduction as a Teaching Tool

We report a four-years experiment in teaching reasoning to undergraduate students, ranging from weak to gifted, using Gentzen-Prawitz's style natural deduction. We argue that this pedagogical approach is a good alternative to the use of Boolean algebra for teaching reasoning, especially for computer scientists and formal methods practionners

"If-then" as a version of "Implies"

Russell’s role in the controversy about the paradoxes of material implication is usually presented as a tale of how even the greatest minds can fall prey of basic conceptual confusions. Quine accused him of making a silly mistake in Principia Mathematica. He interpreted “if- then” as a version of “implies” and called it material implication. Quine’s accusation is that this decision involved a use-mention fallacy because the antecedent and consequent of “if- then” are used instead of being mentioned as the premise and the conclusion of an implication relation. It was his opinion that the criticisms and alternatives to the material implication presented by C. I. Lewis and others would never be made in the first place if Russell simply called the Philonian construction “material conditional” instead of “material implication”. Quine’s interpretation on the topic became hugely influential, if not universally accepted. This paper will present the following criticisms against this interpretation: (1) the notion of material implication does not involve a use-mention fallacy, since the components of “if-then” are mentioned and not used; (2) Quine’s belief that the components of “if-then” are used was motivated by a conditional-assertion view of conditionals that is widely controversial and faces numerous difficulties; (3) if anything, it was Quine who could be accused of fallacious reasoning: he ignored that in the assertion of a conditional is the whole proposition that is asserted and not its constituents; (4) the Philonian construction remains counter-intuitive even if it is called “material conditional”; (5) the Philonian construction is more plausible when it is interpreted as a material implication

Knowability Relative to Information

We present a formal semantics for epistemic logic, capturing the notion of knowability relative to information (KRI). Like Dretske, we move from the platitude that what an agent can know depends on her (empirical) information. We treat operators of the form K_AB (‘B is knowable on the basis of information A’) as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a topic- or aboutness- preservation constraint. Variable strictness models the non-monotonicity of knowledge acquisition while allowing knowledge to be intrinsically stable. Aboutness-preservation models the topic-sensitivity of information, allowing us to invalidate controversial forms of epistemic closure while validating less controversial ones. Thus, unlike the standard modal framework for epistemic logic, KRI accommodates plausible approaches to the Kripke-Harman dogmatism paradox, which bear on non-monotonicity, or on topic-sensitivity. KRI also strikes a better balance between agent idealization and a non-trivial logic of knowledge ascriptions