6,453 research outputs found
Supervenience among classes of relations
This paper extends the definition of strong supervenience to cover classes of relations of any adicity, including transworld relations. It motivates that project by showing that not all interesting supervenience claims involving relations are global supervenience claims. The proposed definition has five welcome features: it reduces to the familiar definition in the special case where the classes contain only monadic properties; it equips supervenience with the expected formal properties, such as transitivity and monotonicity; it entails that a relation supervenes on its converse; it classifies certain paradigms correctly; it makes distinctions even in the realm of the non-contingent, as witnessed by the fact that identity does not supervene on any class of relations. Finally, the paper applies the defined concept, and the related concept of orthogonality, to the study of internal and external relations
Towards concept analysis in categories: limit inferior as algebra, limit superior as coalgebra
While computer programs and logical theories begin by declaring the concepts
of interest, be it as data types or as predicates, network computation does not
allow such global declarations, and requires *concept mining* and *concept
analysis* to extract shared semantics for different network nodes. Powerful
semantic analysis systems have been the drivers of nearly all paradigm shifts
on the web. In categorical terms, most of them can be described as
bicompletions of enriched matrices, generalizing the Dedekind-MacNeille-style
completions from posets to suitably enriched categories. Yet it has been well
known for more than 40 years that ordinary categories themselves in general do
not permit such completions. Armed with this new semantical view of
Dedekind-MacNeille completions, and of matrix bicompletions, we take another
look at this ancient mystery. It turns out that simple categorical versions of
the *limit superior* and *limit inferior* operations characterize a general
notion of Dedekind-MacNeille completion, that seems to be appropriate for
ordinary categories, and boils down to the more familiar enriched versions when
the limits inferior and superior coincide. This explains away the apparent gap
among the completions of ordinary categories, and broadens the path towards
categorical concept mining and analysis, opened in previous work.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures and 9 diagram
Infinite vs. Singularity. Between Leibniz and Hegel
The aim of this paper is to reconsider the controversial problem of the relationship between the philosophy of Hegel and Leibniz. Beyond the thick curtain of historical references (which have been widely developed by scholars), it is in fact possible to assume some guideline concepts (i.e. those of \u2018singularity\u2019 and \u2018infinity\u2019) to reconstruct the deep theoretical influence which Leibniz played in Hegel\u2019s thought since the Jenaer Systementwurf of 1804/05
Quantity Tropes and Internal Relations
In this article, we present a new conception of internal relations between quantity
tropes falling under determinates and determinables. We begin by providing a novel
characterization of the necessary relations between these tropes as basic internal
relations. The core ideas here are that the existence of the relata is sufficient for their
being internally related, and that their being related does not require the existence of
any specific entities distinct from the relata. We argue that quantity tropes are, as
determinate particular natures, internally related by certain relations of proportion and
order. By being determined by the nature of tropes, the relations of proportion and
order remain invariant in conventional choice of unit for any quantity and give rise to
natural divisions among tropes. As a consequence, tropes fall under distinct
determinables and determinates. Our conception provides an accurate account of
quantitative distances between tropes but avoids commitment to determinable
universals. In this important respect, it compares favorably with the standard
conception taking exact similarity and quantitative distances as primitive internal
relations. Moreover, we argue for the superiority of our approach in comparison with
two additional recent accounts of the similarity of quantity tropes
Semantic values in higher-order semantics
Recently, some philosophers have argued that we should take quantification of any (finite) order to be a legitimate and irreducible, sui generis kind of quantification. In particular, they hold that a semantic theory for higher-order quantification must itself be couched in higher-order terms. Øystein Linnebo has criticized such views on the grounds that they are committed to general claims about the semantic values of expressions that are by their own lights inexpressible. I show that Linnebo's objection rests on the assumption of a notion of semantic value or contribution which both applies to expressions of any order, and picks out, for each expression, an extra-linguistic correlate of that expression. I go on to argue that higher-orderists can plausibly reject this assumption, by means of a hierarchy of notions they can use to describe the extra-lingustic correlates of expressions of different orders
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