"The Logic of Place" and Common Sense

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West

Wittgenstein on Believing that p

The outlines of Wittgenstein"s conception of propositions can be sketched by means of the following four or five points. First, in 1913 Wittgenstein focuses on whatever it is that judgments have in common that allows them to depict a sense and express a thought. In so doing Wittgenstein is pressing to find a sense or proposition – what is believed in -- of concern to logic and independent of psychological conditions like judging, asserting, and negating

On the Smarandache Paradox

The Smarandache Paradox is a very interesting paradox of logic because it has a background common sense. However, at the same time, it gets in a contradiction with itself. Although it may appear well cohesive, a careful look on the science definition and some logic can break down this paradox showing that it exist only when we are trying to mix two different universes, where in one we have two possibilities and in the other we have only one. When we try to understand the second possibility in the universe which has only one possibility, we end in the Smarandache Paradox

The University-Commune

In this new book we return to the challenge of deepening the task to the point of imagining the university formed by commoner university students. It is a turn, a new place from which to name and reconsider community management and action from a sense of co-responsibility for the commons that we must guarantee so that the common project prevails and achieves long-term self-sustainability.This is what the seven articles in this book are about, which calls into question what it means for the university to be and act according to economic principles and logics (giving, receiving, undertaking), social (distribution of roles and benefits) and policies (agreements, consensus, participation and assignment of responsibilities) of the commune. The institutional dimension is important but the vitality, the sense of belonging and the profound strength of the Salesian university project depend much more on the commons logic. Feeling of the commons is not a possibility among many others. We are convinced that, in order to take on this project, it is necessary to transcend institutional, business logic and state regulations. Therefore, the university-commune is the way and, perhaps, the only one possible. University and Common Goods Research Group Universidad Politécnica Salesian

Negation and Dichotomy

The present contribution might be regarded as a kind of defense of the common sense in logic. It is demonstrated that if the classical negation is interpreted as the minimal negation with n = 2 truth values, then deviant logics can be conceived as extension of the classical bivalent frame. Such classical apprehension of negation is possible in non- classical logics as well, if truth value is internalized and bivalence is replaced by bipartition

A qualitative logic of decision

An important aspect of intelligent behavior is the ability to reason, make decisions, and act in spite of uncertainty. This paper presents a qualitative logic of decision that supports decision-making under uncertainty. To be specific, the paper presents a knowledge representation language based upon subjective Bayesian decision theory that aims to capture some aspects of common-sense reasoning associated with making decisions about actions. The language addresses the problem of describing justifications of rational choices in situations where the alternatives involve trading off potential losses and gains. The logic and an associated qualitative arithmetic are implemented in an efficient PROLOG program. Examples illustrate their use in several concrete decision-making situations

The inheritance of dynamic and deontic integrity constraints or: Does the boss have more rights?

In [18,23], we presented a language for the specification of static, dynamic and deontic integrity constraints (IC's) for conceptual models (CM's). An important problem not discussed in that paper is how IC's are inherited in a taxonomic network of types. For example, if students are permitted to perform certain actions under certain preconditions, must we repeat these preconditions when specializing this action for the subtype of graduate students, or are they inherited, and if so, how? For static constraints, this problem is relatively trivial, but for dynamic and deontic constraints, it will turn out that it contains numerous pitfalls, caused by the fact that common sense supplies presuppositions about the structure of IC inheritance that are not warranted by logic. In this paper, we unravel some of these presuppositions and show how to avoid the pitfalls. We first formulate a number of general theorems about the inheritance of necessary and/or sufficient conditions and show that for upward inheritance, a closure assumption is needed. We apply this to dynamic and deontic IC's, where conditions arepreconditions of actions, and show that our common sense is sometimes mistaken about the logical implications of what we have specified. We also show the connection of necessary and sufficient preconditions of actions with the specification of weakest preconditions in programming logic. Finally, we argue that information analysts usually assume constraint completion in the specification of (pre)conditions analogous to predicate completion in Prolog and circumscription in non-monotonic logic. The results are illustrated with numerous examples and compared with other approaches in the literature

Modal logic NL for common language

Despite initial appearance, paradoxes in classical logic, when comprehension is unrestricted, do not go away even if the law of excluded middle is dropped, unless the law of noncontradiction is eliminated as well, which makes logic much less powerful. Is there an alternative way to preserve unrestricted comprehension of common language, while retaining power of classical logic? The answer is yes, when provability modal logic is utilized. Modal logic NL is constructed for this purpose. Unless a paradox is provable, usual rules of classical logic follow. The main point for modal logic NL is to tune the law of excluded middle so that we allow for a sentence and its negation to be both false in case a paradox provably arises. Curry's paradox is resolved differently from other paradoxes but is also resolved in modal logic NL. The changes allow for unrestricted comprehension and naive set theory, and allow us to justify use of common language in formal sense