Reason and Argument - Böcker

This work is in two parts. It began as a general investigation of vagueness in natural languages. The Sorites Paradox came to dominate the work however, and the second part of the book consists in an discussion ofthat puzzle and related problems. The first part contains a general discussion ofthe nature ofvagueness and its sources. I discuss various conceptions of vagueness in chapter 1 and outline some of the problems to do with the conception of vagueness as a linguistic phenomenon. The most interesting of these is the Sorites paradox, which occurs where natural languages exhibit a particular variety of borderline case vagueness. I discuss some sources of vagueness of the borderline case variety, and views of the relation between linguistic behaviour and languages which are vague in this sense. I argue in chapter 2 that these problems are not to be easily avoided by statistical averaging techniques or attempts to provide a mathematical model of consensus in linguistic usage. I also consider in chapter 3 various approaches to the problem of providing an adequate logic and semantics for vague natural languages, and argue against two currently popular approaches to vagueness. These are supervaluation accounts which attempt to provide precise semantic models for vague languages based on the notion of specification spaces, and attempts to replace the laws ofclassical logic with systems offuzzy logic.

I. Towards Philosophy Jan Srzednicki 3 LOGICAL CONCERNS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS Jerzy Perzanowski ONTOLOGIES AND ONTOLOGICS 23 Elizabeth Anscombe TRUTH, SENSE AND ASSERTION, OR: WHAT PLATO SHOULD HAVE TOLD THE SOPHISTS 43 Peter Geach IDENTITY OVER TIME 47 Joseph M. Font, Ventura Verdu 53 TWO LEVELS OF MODALITY: AN ALGEBRAIC APPROACH Boguslaw Wolniewicz 63 ELZENBERG'S LOGIC OF VALUES Jerzy Szymura WHEN MAY G. E. MOORE'S DEFINITION OF AN INTERNAL RELATION BE USED RATIONALLY? 71 II. Historical Perspective J6zef M. Bochenski HISTORY OF LOGIC AND THE CRITERIA OF RATIONALITY 85 Jan Waszkiewicz, Agnieszka Wojciechowska ON THE ORIGIN OF REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM 87 vi CONTENTS Ewa ~arnecka-Bialy PREMONITION OF MATHEMATICAL LOGIC IN ARISTOTLE'S PRIOR ANALYTICS 97 Leopold Regner "IMPOSSIBlLIA" OF SIGER OF BRABANT 107 Tomasz Weber DEFENDING THESES IN MATHEMATICS AT A 19TH CENTURY UNIVERSITY 113 Gerhardt PlBchl BASIC NORM AND METALANGUAGE. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF KELSEN'S IDEAS 125 m.Logic and Natural Language Marek Tokarz EARLY SYSTEMS OF FORMAL PRAGMATICS 151 Barbara Stanosz DEDUCTION AND THE CONCEPT OF ASSERTION 159 Helmut Metzler METHODOLOGICAL INTERDEPENDENCIES BETWEEN CONCEPTUALIZATION AND OPERATIONALIZATION IN EMPIRICAL SOCIAL SCIENCES 167 Jaroslaw Fall GAME-THEORETICAL SEMANTICS APPLIED TO DEFINITE DESCRIPTIONS AND ANAPHORA 177 Karl-Heinz Krampitz ON LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF ORDINARY SENTENCES 191 Anna Madarasz GAME THEORETICAL SEMANTICS WITH VALUE-GAPS AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 199 Andrzej Lachwa THE SEMANTIC AND FORMAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN TEXT COMPONENTS 221 Index of Names 227 L. . ::1. . ~t G. Elizabeth ANSCOMBE - University of Cambridge, England J6zef M.

Relevance logics came of age with the one and only International Conference on relevant logics in 1974. They did not however become accepted, or easy to promulgate. In March 1981 we received most of the typescript of IN MEMORIAM: ALAN ROSS ANDERSON Proceedings of the International Conference of Relevant Logic from the original editors, Kenneth W. Collier, Ann Gasper and Robert G. Wolf of Southern Illinois University. 1 They had, most unfortunately, failed to find a publisher - not, it appears, because of overall lack of merit of the essays, but because of the expense of producing the collection, lack of institutional subsidization, and doubts of publishers as to whether an expensive collection of essays on such an esoteric, not to say deviant, subject would sell. We thought that the collection of essays was still (even after more than six years in the publishing trade limbo) well worth publishing, that the subject would remain undeservedly esoteric in North America while work on it could not find publishers (it is not so esoteric in academic circles in Continental Europe, Latin America and the Antipodes) and, quite important, that we could get the collection published, and furthermore, by resorting to local means, published comparatively cheaply. It is indeed no ordinary collection. It contains work by pioneers of the main types of broadly relevant systems, and by several of the most innovative non-classical logicians of the present flourishing logical period. We have slowly re-edited and reorganised the collection and made it camera-ready.