52,426 research outputs found
Logical Semantics and Norms: A Kantian Perspective
It’s widely accepted that normativity is not subject to truth values. The underlying reasoning is that truth values can only be predicated of descriptive statements; normative statements are prescriptive, not descriptive; thus truth value predicates cannot be assigned to normative statements. Hence, deonticity lacks logical semantics. This semantic monism has been challenged over the last decades from a series of perspectives that open the way for legal logics with imperative semantics. In the present paper I will go back to Kant and review his understanding of practical judgments, presenting it as supported by a pluralistic semantics. From this perspective a norm of Law is a logical expression that includes as content a generic description of a possible behavior by a generality of juridical agents, and assigns to that content the assertion of its obligatory character, accompanied by a disincentive for non-compliance. From this perspective legal norms can be syntactically formalized and assigned appropriate semantic values in such terms that they can be incorporated into valid inferential schemes. The consequence is that we can put together legal logics that handle both the phenomenal and the deontic dimensions of legality
Rumfitt on truth-grounds, negation, and vagueness
In The Boundary Stones of Thought, Rumfitt defends classical logic against challenges from intuitionistic mathematics and vagueness, using a semantics of pre-topologies on possibilities, and a topological semantics on predicates, respectively. These semantics are suggestive but the characterizations of negation face difficulties that may undermine their usefulness in Rumfitt’s project
From Many-Valued Consequence to Many-Valued Connectives
Given a consequence relation in many-valued logic, what connectives can be
defined? For instance, does there always exist a conditional operator
internalizing the consequence relation, and which form should it take? In this
paper, we pose this question in a multi-premise multi-conclusion setting for
the class of so-called intersective mixed consequence relations, which extends
the class of Tarskian relations. Using computer-aided methods, we answer
extensively for 3-valued and 4-valued logics, focusing not only on conditional
operators, but on what we call Gentzen-regular connectives (including negation,
conjunction, and disjunction). For arbitrary N-valued logics, we state
necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such connectives in a
multi-premise multi-conclusion setting. The results show that mixed consequence
relations admit all classical connectives, and among them pure consequence
relations are those that admit no other Gentzen-regular connectives.
Conditionals can also be found for a broader class of intersective mixed
consequence relations, but with the exclusion of order-theoretic consequence
relations.Comment: Updated version [corrections of an incorrect claim in first version;
two bib entries added
"Ought" and Error
The moral error theory generally does not receive good press in metaethics. This paper adds to the bad news. In contrast to other critics, though, I do not attack error theorists’ characteristic thesis that no moral assertion is ever true. Instead, I develop a new counter-argument which questions error theorists’ ability to defend their claim that moral utterances are meaningful assertions. More precisely: Moral error theorists lack a convincing account of the meaning of deontic moral assertions, or so I will argue
Buying Logical Principles with Ontological Coin: The Metaphysical Lessons of Adding epsilon to Intuitionistic Logic
We discuss the philosophical implications of formal results showing the con-
sequences of adding the epsilon operator to intuitionistic predicate logic. These
results are related to Diaconescu’s theorem, a result originating in topos theory
that, translated to constructive set theory, says that the axiom of choice (an
“existence principle”) implies the law of excluded middle (which purports to be
a logical principle). As a logical choice principle, epsilon allows us to translate
that result to a logical setting, where one can get an analogue of Diaconescu’s
result, but also can disentangle the roles of certain other assumptions that are
hidden in mathematical presentations. It is our view that these results have not
received the attention they deserve: logicians are unlikely to read a discussion
because the results considered are “already well known,” while the results are
simultaneously unknown to philosophers who do not specialize in what most
philosophers will regard as esoteric logics. This is a problem, since these results
have important implications for and promise signif i cant illumination of contem-
porary debates in metaphysics. The point of this paper is to make the nature
of the results clear in a way accessible to philosophers who do not specialize in
logic, and in a way that makes clear their implications for contemporary philo-
sophical discussions. To make the latter point, we will focus on Dummettian discussions of realism and anti-realism.
Keywords: epsilon, axiom of choice, metaphysics, intuitionistic logic, Dummett,
realism, antirealis
Normal forms for Answer Sets Programming
Normal forms for logic programs under stable/answer set semantics are
introduced. We argue that these forms can simplify the study of program
properties, mainly consistency. The first normal form, called the {\em kernel}
of the program, is useful for studying existence and number of answer sets. A
kernel program is composed of the atoms which are undefined in the Well-founded
semantics, which are those that directly affect the existence of answer sets.
The body of rules is composed of negative literals only. Thus, the kernel form
tends to be significantly more compact than other formulations. Also, it is
possible to check consistency of kernel programs in terms of colorings of the
Extended Dependency Graph program representation which we previously developed.
The second normal form is called {\em 3-kernel.} A 3-kernel program is composed
of the atoms which are undefined in the Well-founded semantics. Rules in
3-kernel programs have at most two conditions, and each rule either belongs to
a cycle, or defines a connection between cycles. 3-kernel programs may have
positive conditions. The 3-kernel normal form is very useful for the static
analysis of program consistency, i.e., the syntactic characterization of
existence of answer sets. This result can be obtained thanks to a novel
graph-like representation of programs, called Cycle Graph which presented in
the companion article \cite{Cos04b}.Comment: 15 pages, To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
(TPLP
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