Modality and Explanatory Reasoning PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Modality and Explanatory Reasoning PDF full book. Access full book title Modality and Explanatory Reasoning by Boris Kment. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Boris Kment
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191056715
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concerns the questions of what is possible and what is necessary. However, there is considerable controversy over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This procedure is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, the relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships. In the course of developing this position, the book offers new accounts of possible worlds, counterfactual conditionals, essential truths and their role in grounding, and a novel theory of how counterfactuals relate to causation and explanation.
Author: Boris Kment
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191056715
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concerns the questions of what is possible and what is necessary. However, there is considerable controversy over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This procedure is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, the relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships. In the course of developing this position, the book offers new accounts of possible worlds, counterfactual conditionals, essential truths and their role in grounding, and a novel theory of how counterfactuals relate to causation and explanation.
Author: Boris Christian Kment
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191758928
Category : Modality (Theory of knowledge)
Languages : en
Pages : 362
Get Book Here
Book Description
Boris Kment takes a new approach to the study of modality that emphasises the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. He argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in counterfactual reasoning, which allows us to investigate explanatory connections. Contrary to accepted views, explanation is more fundamental than modality.
Author: Boris Kment
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191668990
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
Since the ground-breaking work of Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others in the 1960s and 70s, one dominant interest of analytic philosophers has been in modal truths, which concerns the questions of what is possible and what is necessary. However, there is considerable controversy over the source and nature of necessity. In Modality and Explanatory Reasoning, Boris Kment takes a novel approach to the study of modality that places special emphasis on understanding the origin of modal notions in everyday thought. Kment argues that the concepts of necessity and possibility originate in a common type of thought experiment—counterfactual reasoning—that allows us to investigate explanatory connections. This procedure is closely related to the controlled experiments of empirical science. Necessity is defined in terms of causation and other forms of explanation such as grounding, the relation that connects metaphysically fundamental facts to non-fundamental ones. Therefore, contrary to a widespread view, explanation is more fundamental than modality. The study of modal facts is important for philosophy, not because these facts are of much metaphysical interest in their own right, but because they provide evidence about explanatory relationships. In the course of developing this position, the book offers new accounts of possible worlds, counterfactual conditionals, essential truths and their role in grounding, and a novel theory of how counterfactuals relate to causation and explanation.
Author: Timothy O'Connor
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444350889
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 193
Get Book Here
Book Description
An expansive, yet succinct, analysis of the Philosophy of Religion – from metaphysics through theology. Organized into two sections, the text first examines truths concerning what is possible and what is necessary. These chapters lay the foundation for the book’s second part – the search for a metaphysical framework that permits the possibility of an ultimate explanation that is correct and complete. A cutting-edge scholarly work which engages with the traditional metaphysician’s quest for a true ultimate explanation of the most general features of the world we inhabit Develops an original view concerning the epistemology and metaphysics of modality, or truths concerning what is possible or necessary Applies this framework to a re-examination of the cosmological argument for theism Defends a novel version of the Leibnizian cosmological argument
Author: Alastair Wilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198846215
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book defends a radical new theory of contingency as a physical phenomenon. Drawing on the many-worlds approach to quantum theory and cutting-edge metaphysics and philosophy of science, it argues that quantum theories are best understood as telling us about the space of genuine possibilities, rather than as telling us solely about actuality. When quantum physics is taken seriously in the way first proposed by Hugh Everett III, it provides the resources for a new systematic metaphysical framework encompassing possibility, necessity, actuality, chance, counterfactuals, and a host of related modal notions. Rationalist metaphysicians argue that the metaphysics of modality is strictly prior to any scientific investigation; metaphysics establishes which worlds are possible, and physics merely checks which of these worlds is actual. Naturalistic metaphysicians respond that science may discover new possibilities and new impossibilities. This book's quantum theory of contingency takes naturalistic metaphysics one step further, allowing that science may discover what it is to be possible. As electromagnetism revealed the nature of light, as acoustics revealed the nature of sound, as statistical mechanics revealed the nature of heat, so quantum physics reveals the nature of contingency.
Author: Francesco Berto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198812795
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Get Book Here
Book Description
The latter half of the 20 ...
Author: Richard Corry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192577204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
The world is a complex place, and this complexity is an obstacle to our attempts to explain, predict, and control it. In Power and Influence, Richard Corry investigates the assumptions that are built into the reductive method of explanation—the method whereby we study the components of a complex system in relative isolation and use the information so gained to explain or predict the behaviour of the complex whole. He investigates the metaphysical presuppositions built into the reductive method, seeking to ascertain what the world must be like in order that the method could work. Corry argues that the method assumes the existence of causal powers that manifest causal influence—a relatively unrecognised ontological category, of which forces are a paradigm example. The success of the reductive method, therefore, is an argument for the existence of such causal influences. The book goes on to show that adding causal influence to our ontology gives us the resources to solve some traditional problems in the metaphysics of causal powers, laws of nature, causation, emergence, and possibly even normative ethics. What results, then, is not just an understanding of the reductive method, but an integrated metaphysical worldview that is grounded in an ontology of power and influence.
Author: Nissim Francez
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848901834
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 438
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is a monograph on the topic of Proof-Theoretic Semantics, a theory of meaning constituting an alternative to the more traditional Model-Theoretic Semantics. The latter regards meaning as truth-conditions (in arbitrary models), the former regards meaning as canonical derivability conditions in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof-system. In the first part of the book, the Proof-Theoretic Semantics for logic is presented. It surveys the way a natural-deduction system can serve as meaning-conferring, and in particular analyses various criteria such a system has to meet in order to qualify as meaning-conferring. A central criterion is harmony, a balance between introduction-rules and elimination-rules. The theory is applied to various logics, e.g., relevance logic, and various proof systems such as multi-conclusion natural-deduction and bilateralism. The presentation is inspired by recent work by the author, and also surveys recent developments. In part two, the theory is applied to fragments of natural language, both extensional and intensional, a development based on the author's recent work. For example, conservativity of determiners, once set up in a proof-theoretic framework, becomes a provable property of all (regular) determiners. It is shown that meaning need not carry the heavy ontological load characteristic of Model-Theoretic Semantics of complex natural language constructs. Nissim Francez is an emeritus professor of computer science at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. At a certain point in his career he moved from research related to concurrent and distributed programming and program verification to research in computational linguistics, mainly formal semantics of natural language. In recent years, he has worked on Proof-Theoretic Semantics, in particular for natural language.
Author: Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351730053
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Get Book Here
Book Description
Timothy Williamson is one of the most influential living philosophers working in the areas of logic and metaphysics. His work in these areas has been particularly influential in shaping debates about metaphysical modality, which is the topic of his recent provocative and closely-argued book Modal Logic as Metaphysics (2013). This book comprises ten essays by metaphysicians and logicians responding to Williamson’s work on metaphysical modality, as well as replies by Williamson to each essay. In addition, it contains an original essay by Williamson, ‘Modal science,’ concerning the role of modal claims in natural science. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
Author: Uygar Abacı
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192567314
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Get Book Here
Book Description
Kant's Revolutionary Theory of Modality is a comprehensive study of Immanuel Kant's views on modal notions of possibility, actuality or existence, and necessity. Abacı locates Kant's views on these notions in their broader historical context, establishes their continuity and transformation across Kant's precritical and critical texts, and determines their role in the substance as well as the development of Kant's philosophical project. He makes two overarching claims. First, Kant's precritical views on modality, which appear in the context of his attempts to revise the ontological argument and are critical of the tradition only from within its prevailing paradigm of modality, develop into a revolutionary theory of modality in his critical period, radicalizing his critique of the ontotheological and rationalist metaphysical tradition. While the traditional paradigm construes modal notions as fundamental ontological predicates, expressing different modes or ways of being of things, Kant's theory consists in redefining them as subjective and relational features of our discursivity, expressing different modes in which our conceptual representations of objects are related to our cognitive faculty. Second, this revolutionary theory of modality is not only a crucial component of Kant's critical epistemology and his radical critique of rationalist metaphysics, but it is in fact directly constitutive of the critical turn itself, as Kant originally formulates the latter in terms of a shift from an ontological to an epistemological approach to the question of possibility. Thus, tracing the development of Kant's understanding of modality comes to fruition in an alternative reading of Kant's overall philosophical development.
