Volume 4, Number 9 September 2010

www.thereasoner.org ISSN 1757-0522

decided to ask Professor Ilkka Niiniluoto for an inter- Contents view. During the last forty years, Niiniluoto has pub- lished an impressive number of papers on virtually all §1 Editorial 133 fields of contemporary philosophy of science, focussing particularly on probability and inductive , truth and §2 Features 134 verisimilitude (also known as truthlikeness or truth ap- proximation), realism and scientific progress, and the §3 News 137 evaluation of theories within natural and social sciences. Let me briefly survey his main contributions, which ex- §4 What’s Hot in . . . 143 plain why he is the right person to answer my questions. Niiniluoto is presently Chancellor of the Univer- §5 Events 144 sity of Helsinki, where he teaches Theoretical Phi- §6 Courses and Programmes 147 losophy, and Chairman of the Philosophical Society of Finland. He is one of the most §7 Jobs and Studentships 148 prominent figures of the philosoph- ical school going back to Eino Kaila, Georg H. von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka. The development §1 of this tradition has been recently analyzed in a volume, Analytic Editorial Philosophy in Finland (Rodopi, 2003), edited by Niiniluoto himself I am delighted to return as guest editor of The Rea- (together with Leila Haaparanta), soner. Exactly one year ago, I opened the September is- for which Niiniluoto wrote also the sue with an interview with Theo Kuipers from the Uni- introductory, historical chapter. Within this tradition, versity of Groningen. In our conversation, we touched the Finnish School of inductive logic takes the lion’s upon a number of topics, in particular scientific real- share. Niiniluoto’s first important contribution to the ism, progress, truth, verisimilitude, and the method of School’s research programme is Theoretical Concepts philosophy of science. Nearly the same topics are the and Hypothetico-Inductive Inference (Reidel, 1973), central ones of this month’s interview. This is due not written together with Raimo Tuomela, in which the au- only to my lack of imagination, but also to the fact that, thors use Hintikka’s inductive logic in order to defend in my view, these are some of the most important prob- critical scientific realism. A few years later, Niiniluoto lems in the philosophy of science. For this reason, I and Tuomela also edited The Logic and

133 of Scientific Change (Acta Philosophica Fennica, 30, and Roberto Festa and Luca Tambolo for many conver- 1979), a collection of papers devoted to four very recent sations on the topics of the interview, which inspired (at that time) methodological research programmes: most of the questions below. structuralism, cognitive decision theory, verisimilitude, and the logical theory of belief change. Gustavo Cevolani Sometimes, errors do trigger progress in the history Philosophy, Bologna of ideas. It is well-known that Popper’s attempt (in Con- jectures and Refutations, 1963) to explicate the notion of verisimilitude (construed as similarity or closeness to the comprehensive truth about a target domain) was §2 technically flawed, as Pavel Tichy´ and David Miller in- Features dependently proved in 1974. This failure opened the way to the post-Popperian theories of verisimilitude, Interview with Ilkka Niiniluoto which constitute a lively research programme in formal philosophy of science. The most developed and well- Gustavo Cevolani: First of all, thank you for agreeing known theory of verisimilitude is the so-called “simi- to be this month’s interviewee. As usual, let me start larity approach”, proposed since 1974 by Pavel Tichy´ by asking you about your intellectual history. How did and Risto Hilpinen, and subsequently developed by Ni- you first get into research in logic and philosophy of iniluoto, Tuomela and Graham Oddie. About a decade science? Who had the greatest influence on your philo- later, Niiniluoto published two books: Is Science Pro- sophical career? gressive? (Reidel, 1984), a collection of essays devoted Ilkka Niiniluoto: I did my Master’s degree in math- to explicating scientific progress in terms of increasing ematics in 1968, specializing in probability theory and verisimilitude, and Truthlikeness (Reidel, 1987), a pre- Bayesian statistics with Professor sentation of his own theory of verisimilitude, as well as Gustav Elfving. At the same time, a detailed discussion of the history, importance, and ap- I had started to study philosophy plicability of this notion, and a defence against its crit- and mathematical logic with Pro- ics. Truthlikeness is often referred to as “the Bible of fessor Oiva Ketonen. The philo- verisimilitude”, since it contains virtually all you need sophical devotion and personal in- to know for seriously studying the subject (in this case, tegrity of Academician Georg Hen- you will also find useful Niiniluoto’s survey article on rik von Wright made a strong im- “Verisimilitude: The third period” in the British Journal pression on me. I had already de- for Philosophy of Science, 49, 1998). cided to move from mathematics to In his most recent book on these themes, Critical theoretical philosophy when Professor Jaakko Hintikka Scientific Realism (Oxford University Press, 1999), Ni- appointed me his research assistant in the summer of iniluoto offers a detailed and up-to-date presentation 1971. Hintikka’s distributive normal forms and his mea- of his philosophical outlook. The book subtly com- sures of inductive probability and semantic information bines a coherently fallibilist view of human knowledge provided me the basic tools for the study of theoretical with an uncompromising defence of realism in ontol- terms and inductive inference. The most inspiring and ogy, semantics, epistemology, theory construction, and valuable lessons in philosophical methodology I have methodology. Niiniluoto carefully distinguishes all the learned from Hintikka. main forms of realism, antirealism, and relativism dis- GC: You were trained in the tradition of the “Finnish cussed in the recent literature, so that Critical Scien- school” of inductive logic, pursuing the research inau- tific Realism can be read also as a high-level textbook, gurated by Eino Kaila, von Wright and Hintikka. In containing one of the most learned and complete expo- retrospective, what have been the most important con- sitions of the subject to date. The reader interested in tributions of this school? How lively is this tradition the recent debate on Niiniluoto’s philosophy of science today? should read Approaching Truth (College Publications, IN: Von Wright’s treatment of eliminative induc- 2007), a Festschrift edited by Sami Pihlstrom,¨ Panu tion was an important contribution, but it is not much Raatikainen, and Matti Sintonen, collecting a number of discussed today. The greatest achievement of the papers by leading scholars devoted to his work in three Finnish school was Hintikka’s system of inductive gen- wide areas: 1) , of language, and of eralization which improved Carnap’s inductive logic mathematics; 2) induction, truthlikeness, and scientific by showing how universal statements in infinite do- progress; and 3) epistemology, culture, and religion. mains can receive non-zero probabilities. Hintikka’s Before starting the interview, I wish to thank Feder- students—including Risto Hilpinen, Raimo Tuomela, ica Russo, Jon Williamson, and Lorenzo Casini for their Juhani Pietarinen and myself—then developed and ap- invitation to open this issue and for their editorial work; plied this insight in various directions. My own work

134 on truthlikeness and its estimation is also a continua- career, in the early Seventies. At that time, anti-realism tion of this tradition. Hintikka himself downplayed the (in its instrumentalist version) was widespread and be- role of induction in his interrogative model of inquiry came very fashionable shortly after, with the publica- in the 1990s. It is a little disappointing to see that tion of The Scientific Image by Bas van Fraassen (1980). Hintikka’s achievement is often ignored by Bayesian Today, the trend may appear to be reversed. Last year, scholars who either reject inductive logic or work within the PhilPapers website organized a survey on a number the Carnapian framework. The models of induction in of central philosophical questions. Among 1800 pro- Artificial Intelligence are less sophisticated than Hin- fessionals (PhDs or faculty members), over 70% is re- tikka’s system. But I am happy that there are philoso- ported to “accept or lean toward” scientific realism (al- phers in other countries—among them Theo Kuipers though the figure falls toward 50% among those broadly and Roberto Festa—who have made progress along the specialized in philosophy of science). How do you lines of the Finnish school. judge the results of this poll and, more generally, the GC: The post-Popperian research programme on present state of the realism/anti-realism debate? truthlikeness (aka verisimilitude, or truth approxima- IN: I am glad to hear about this relative success of tion) is a distinguished approach to the central prob- scientific realism. Arthur Fine was wrong when he an- lems of contemporary philosophy of science. Your 1987 nounced the death of realism some twenty-five years book, Truthlikeness, is a milestone of this programme, ago. Of course one should remember, as I tried to show exploring both the logical definition of verisimilitude in my Critical Scientific Realism (1999), that there are and its methodological applications. However, the en- many interesting forms of realism and anti-realism. One tire programme failed, at least until now, to gain wide can reliably predict that this debate will always be a vi- acceptance and visibility among philosophers of sci- tal issue in the philosophy of science. During the last ence. First, truthlikeness is still often conflated with decade, structural realism has gained popularity, and in- different concepts like probability, approximate truth, ternal realism has lost ground. But my guess is also partial truth, and so on. Second, its role for the axi- that “leaning toward scientific realism” is quite common ology and the methodology of science is largely under- among those scholars who are working within the phi- estimated and sometimes plainly ignored. What are the losophy of special sciences: they have to rely on some reasons of this situation, in your opinion? sort of realist interpretation when they take a serious IN: Truthlikeness is a fascinating topic which has look at the contents of the best theories in physics, biol- kept me active already for 36 years, and there is still ogy, medicine, psychology, economics, and sociology. much research to be done in this area. The commu- GC: The survey mentioned above reports a slight ma- nity of logicians working seriously on this theme is rel- jority (56%) of philosophers leaning toward moral real- atively small, and there is a lot of disagreement about ism, rising to over 60% among the specialists of nor- the right approach. Many philosophers who are fond mative ethics and meta-ethics. In your Critical Scien- of the realist idea of truth approximation have found tific Realism, you defend realism in ontology, seman- the logical treatments of truthlikeness too technical or tics, epistemology and methodology but accept (a form “Carnapian”—Popper himself never gave me any ref- of) moral relativism. Can you elaborate a bit on this erence or personal communication, even though I suc- point? In particular, if “moral facts” are human-made ceeded to save the notion of verisimilitude with an ex- and then relative to time, culture, etc., what is the dif- plication that satisfies all the central Popperian desider- ference between them and other human artefacts? ata. As there is no consensus so far about the basic IN: I have indeed defended “moral constructivism” principles of truthlikeness, it may be difficult for other which treats moral values and principles as human- philosophers of science to appreciate the important con- made social artifacts. Moral facts differ from some ceptual distinctions, so that they simply work with an other human artifacts by their Durkheimian coercive intuitive notion of “approximate truth”. It is also easy force—their power in guiding our actions and decisions. for them to ignore the potential of the precise concept In this sense, morality is a “real” phenomenon in the of truthlikeness for wider issues in the philosophy of Popperian World 3. It is an extremely important aspect science. The situation is different from the role of prob- of our life and social interaction, but it has no transcen- ability: in spite of various interpretations, there is an dent (religious or metaphysical) ground independently accepted standard mathematical explication of this no- of human activity. Morality cannot be reduced to natu- tion. On the other hand, there are also hot disputes ral facts about human needs or evolution, either: indi- about many other important concepts in the philosophy vidually and socially, we are free to critically reconsider of science—such as theory, model, truth, confirmation, and renew the moral standards prevailing in our com- lawlikeness, explanation, and reduction. munity. This sort of modest relativism is compatible GC: Verisimilitude plays a crucial role in your own with human responsibility, tolerance towards different version of “critical scientific realism”. You have been value systems, and attempts to reach world-wide agree- defending scientific realism since the beginning of your ments on human rights.

135 GC: If you had to suggest a direction of research to your opinion, is there a danger of scientific dogmatism? young philosophers of science starting out today, what What have philosophers to say, and to do, about these are the topics that you would recommend? episodes? IN: There are still important and largely open prob- IN: As a critical scientific realist, I am a fallibilist lems in inductive logic: inductive reasoning with ob- who endorses the corrigibility of all human knowledge. servational errors and inductive systems with relational Scientific dogmatism is harmful, since it is in conflict predicates. The connection between truth approxima- with the self-corrective nature of science and inhibits tion and belief revision models is a promising area. An- scientific progress. But scientists themselves should be other up to date topic is the analysis of abductive infer- able to estimate the reliability of their tentative conclu- ence in terms of probability and truthlikeness. A young sions. When the scientific community reaches a con- logician could also spend some time in going through sensus on some question, open criticism should still be the related work in the field of Artificial Intelligence. allowed, but naturally a change in the prevailing opin- Illumination of the key ideas of scientific realism in his- ion would need strong scientific counter-arguments and torical case studies would also give opportunities for in- new evidence. As experts of critical thinking, philoso- teresting research projects. phers should assist in such episodes by assessing the GC: A question of a more general nature. In the Pref- weight of the rival arguments and positions. ace to your Festschrift, the reader learns that, as “one of the most prominent public intellectuals in Finland”, you Tempus Dictum have “constantly defended science and reason”. Which are, in your opinion, the worst enemies of reason today? Technological Aids to Cognition Don’t you think that a middle course is needed between http://tempusdictum.com two equally dangerous extremes, the “Scylla” of rela- tivism and the “Charybdis” of scientism? IN: In my view, the most dangerous enemies of rea- Kaplan on indexical logic son come from circles that base their beliefs and prac- It is a simple matter of grammar that it is predicates tices upon irrational faith and superstition with a hos- of ‘that’-clauses, rather than predicates of mentioned tile attitude towards scientific inquiry. Radical forms of sentences, that are equivalent to operators on used sen- postmodern relativism may give support to such com- tences (see 2010a: “On Forgetting ‘that”’, The Rea- munities. The reliance on science is not as such danger- soner 4.4, 57-8). So ‘It is true/necessary that I am here ous, since science itself is the critical way of forming now’, for instance, in which there are operators ‘It is beliefs about the world on the basis of public evidence. true/necessary that’ on a used sentence, is equivalent The mistake of scientism lies in its overstatement of the to ‘That I am here now is true/necessary’, and not “‘I scope of scientific reason: even though scientific knowl- am here now” is T/N’ for any predicates ‘T’ or ‘N’, edge is relevant for most urgent decision problems, the of the now mentioned sentence ‘I am here now’. The scientists have no monopoly for solving value questions difficulty for the main line logical tradition on this is- within a free democratic society. sue has been that there is no term forming element (like GC: Regarding scientism, sometimes one is under ‘that’) in standard formal languages transforming a sen- the impression that large parts of the scientific com- tence into a nominal phrase referring to the proposition munity don’t practice what they preach. On the one the sentence expresses, when used. And this has led to hand, scientists adopt a Popperian jargon, willingly as- considerable confusion, through attempts to make pred- senting to the idea that theories are always conjectural icates of mentioned sentences do the job of predicates of and open to revision. On the other hand, they become ‘that’-clauses (see 2010b: ‘What Priest (amongst many very touchy when their pet theories are challenged, and others) has been missing’, Ratio XXIII.2, 184-198). seem often motivated by ideological, political or eco- The specific example of this confusion just given nomic reasons. In this connection, let me mention two arises in the work of David Kaplan. For one significant, recent episodes. The first is the publication of Fodor and repeated assertion of Kaplan’s is that it is the content of Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong (London, a sentence (i.e., the proposition expressed) that carries 2010), which is giving rise to much debate also in my the truth-value. Thus we find, for example, (Almog, J., country (one of the authors is Italian). The second Perry, J., and Wettstein, H. (eds) 1989: Themes from is the so-called Climategate, concerning some hacked Kaplan, O.U.P., Oxford, 500): documents seemingly showing an attempt to minimize or conceal evidence about climate change. In both What is said in using a given indexical in dif- cases (admittedly very different in nature), some sci- ferent contexts may be different. Thus if I say, entists violently reacted in defence of a purported sci- today, ‘I was insulted yesterday’, and you ut- entific consensus about, respectively, (neo-)Darwinian ter the same words tomorrow, what is said is evolutionism and anthropogenic global warming. In different. If what we say differs in truth-value,

136 that is enough to show that we say different al. 1989: 596)? So (8) has the form ‘V‘p”? But why, things. But even if the truth-values were the then, should (8) not express a logical truth? The sen- same, it is clear that there are possible circum- tence ‘I am here now’ does express a true proposition in stances in which what I said would be true but every proper context—by the definition of ‘proper con- what you said would be false. Thus we say text’. different things. So does Necessitation fail in the presence of index- icals? As before, Necessitation is the inference com- But, on the other hand, in his discussion of the sentence monly written as above; but that is only because of the ‘I am here now’, Kaplan talks about (mentioned) sen- convention about omitting quotes, since ‘`’ (unlike ‘L’) tences being true. He says (Almog et al 1989: 508-9): is a meta-linguistic symbol. So the rule would be better Consider the sentence (6) I am here now put as the inference from ‘`‘p” to ‘`‘Lp”. Now cer- . . . Intuitively, (6) is deeply, and in some tainly if ‘`’ was Kaplan’s ‘is valid’ then the inference sense, which we shall shortly make precise, would be invalid, if ‘p’ was ‘I am here now’. But ‘`’ is universally true. One need only understand not ‘is valid’, since the former is not confined to proper the meaning of (6) to know that it cannot be contexts, and even Kaplan acknowledges that the latter uttered falsely. . . . Let the class of indices be must be distinguished from ‘it is necessary that’ (Al- narrowed to include only the proper ones— mog et al. 1989: 596). Thus (6) is not ‘logically true’ as namely those (w, x, p, t) such that in the world Kaplan claims above. Obviously ‘Necessitation’ does w, x is located at p at the time t. Our reform not hold if its premise is re-interpreted as not showing has the consequence that (6) comes out, cor- something is necessary! In fact it is false both that `‘p’, rectly, to be logically true. Now consider (8) and that `‘Lp’, for the given ‘p’. So Necessitation does  I am here now. Since the contained sen- not fail in the presence of indexicals. tence (namely (6)) is true at every proper in- Hartley Slater dex, (8) also is true at every proper index and Philosophy, University of Western Australia thus also is logically true. . . . But (8) should not be logically true, since it is false. It is cer- tainly not necessary that I be here now. . . .

Because of his point here, Kaplan has claimed that §3 the rule of Necessitation fails in the presence of News indexicals—the rule of Necessitation being commonly written as the inference from ‘`p’ to ‘`Lp’, where ‘L’ is Degrees of Belief vs Belief, 14–15 May the operator ‘It is necessary that’. Kaplan’s confusion here can be pinpointed by focus- Here is a summary of the invited talks of the workshop ing on what he said when using the sentence ‘It is cer- Degrees of Belief vs Belief, which took place on 14th- tainly not necessary that I be here now’. For he did not 15th May and was hosted by the University of Stirling. assert then that the sentence ‘I am here now’ is not nec- David Christensen (Brown): “Rational Reflection”. essary, but instead that the proposition that he (in par- The main question of the paper concerned the relation- ticular) was where he was at the time in question was ship between what it is rational for one to believe and not necessary. But is the reverse of this what (8) says? what it is rational for one to believe about what it is ra- The difficulty of seeing clearly what (8) says is not tional for one to believe. Christensen approached the helped by the omission of quotation marks after ‘(6)’ issue mainly in the context of graded belief. He formu- and ‘(8)’ in the text. That is a common convention in lated a rational reflection principle: Cr (A/Pr(A)=n)=n, the formal logic tradition, but in the present context it where Cr stands for the agents credences, and Pr stands only helps to blur the needed distinction between talk for the credences that would be maximally rational for about words and talk about what they mean. Specifi- someone in that agents epistemic situation. Christensen cally, if (6) is the sentence ‘I am here now’ then is it showed how this prima facie plausible principle leads intended that (8) be ‘ I am here now’ with ‘’ the op- to some puzzling results and explored a number of dif- erator on used sentences ‘It is necessary that’? So (8) ferent reactions to the puzzling cases. has the form ‘Lp’? Or is (8) intended to be ‘ “I am Peter Milne (Stirling): “Belief, Degrees of Belief, here now”’, with ‘’ some predicate of mentioned sen- and Assertion”. On the basis of an in-depth discus- tences? It cannot be the former that is intended, since at sion of the role of assertion and the relationship be- no proper index does it then express a proposition that tween assertion and belief, Milne went on to discuss is true. So is ‘’ the predicate of mentioned sentences two puzzling issues: The first concerned the assertion ‘is valid’ that Kaplan later defines as ‘in every [proper] of indicative conditionals. Much recent research in the context expresses a proposition that is true’ (Almog et psychology of reasoning supports two theses: that peo-

137 ple ascribe to the indicative conditional the so-called mal and informal) analogies (and disanalogies) between defective truth-table in which an indicative conditional partial belief and full belief, when it comes to the phe- with false antecedent is deemed neither true nor false; nomenon of accuracy-dominance. In particular, Fitel- and that people assign as probability to an indicative son and Easwaran discussed the case of an extremal conditional, the (conditional) probability of consequent agent (who can only assign degrees of belief 0 or 1) and conditional upon antecedent. The second issue Milne showed that there are non-probabilistic extremal func- discussed concerned the relationship between assertion tions that are not even weakly dominated by any proba- and degrees of belief. Certain well known cases sug- bilistic extremal function (using the Brier score). gest that a high degree of belief is neither necessary nor sufficient for a willingness to assert. Philip Ebert Brian Weatherson (Rutgers/Arche):´ “Rational Be- Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling lief and Rational Action”. Weatherson discussed the principle, defended by Jeremy Fantl and Matthew Mc- Martin Smith Grath, that if S’s belief that p is justified, then it is per- Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow missible for S to use p as a premise in practical rea- soning. Weatherson argued that the principle is false. In cases where the agent has some rational beliefs and some irrational beliefs, it might be that justification is Logic and Knowledge, 16–19 June insufficient to ground action. Weatherson went on to discuss a novel suggestion regarding the relationship The conference, reminiscent of Russell’s classical book between rational beliefs and rational degrees of belief. Logic and Knowledge, took place from June 16 to 19 Alan Hajek´ (ANU): “Staying Regular”. Hajek´ first in the Faculty of Philosophy at La Sapienza Univer- reviewed several arguments for regularity as a norm of sity of Rome. It was organized by Emiliano Ippoliti, rationality. There are two ways an agent could violate Carlo Cellucci, Emily Grosholz, and aimed to explore this norm: by assigning probability zero to some dox- the connection between logic and knowledge, in partic- astic possibility, and by failing to assign probability al- ular the interconnections among epistemology, philoso- together to some doxastic possibility. Williamson and phy of logic and philosophy of mathematics, in order to Easwaran have argued forcefully that the former kind provide a more comprehensive and articulated view of of violation may be unavoidable. Hajek’s´ discussion the topics dealt with. focused on violations of the second kind. Both kinds The cooperation between speakers and discussants, of violations of regularity have serious consequences as well as the depth of the discussions, allowed the con- for traditional Bayesian epistemology, in particular con- ference to fulfilling its major aim, i.e. to offer new view ditional probability, conditionalization, probabilistic in- points on logic, epistemology and their relations. dependence and decision theory. The conference was opened by Donald Gillies’ (Uni- Carl Hoefer (Barcelona): “Connecting Objective versity College London) talk on the empiricist view of and Subjective probability: How to Justify the Princi- mathematics. Gillies, criticizing Quine, suggested that pal Principle”. Hoefer focused on David Lewis’ Prin- quantum logic does not give a decisive argument in cipal Principle and the claim that “Truth is to belief as favour of this view, but that such an argument is pro- agreement with objective chance is to degree of belief”. vided by the successful application of non-classical log- The plausibility and defensibility of these theses de- ics in Artificial Intelligence. pend, clearly, on how we understand objective chance. Mario De Caro (University of Roma Tre) in his talk The paper introduced an account of objective chance: argued for the conclusion that if we have reasons for be- a Humean/reductive account closely related to Lewis’ lieving that neurobiology can enrich our understanding own. One of the key virtues of this account of chance is of the features of the human mind, there is no sound that it allows us to demonstrate that the PP is indeed a reason for thinking it will ever explain them all, and he requirement of rationality. Hoefer also argued for a sec- discussed the case of free will to support his conclusion. ond thesis on which agreement with actual frequencies, After the lunch break, Michael Detlefsen (University rather than chances, serves as the core virtue for degrees of Notre Dame), in his talk about rigor, logic and intu- of belief. ition considered various conceptions of rigor, the bene- Branden Fitelson (Berkeley) & Kenny Easwaran fits of rigor so conceived, or supposed to be, what roles (USC) “Partial Belief, Full Belief, and Accuracy- logical reasoning has been taken to play in the attain- Dominance”. The paper had two main aims: (1) ment of rigor and whether and/or under what conditions to make some (cautionary) remarks about the set-up it may indeed serve in such a roles. and interpretation of some recent accuracy-dominance Goran¨ Sundholm (University of Leiden) in his paper based arguments for probabilism (with respect to par- offered a comparison between the tree-like representa- tial beliefs), and (2) to discuss some interesting (for- tions for the grounding of knowledge and of truths that

138 are offered by Frege and Bolzano. generated, extracted, processed and transferred. He dis- Carl Posy (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)— cussed the Feynman Integral Path as case study. starting from ’s famous lecture “On the The third day was opened by Dag Prawitz (University Infinite” which invokes Kant’s philosophy of mathemat- of Stockholm), who argued for the need of the Aris- ics to endorse the need for intuitive finitary reasoning in totelian distinction between perfect and imperfect syl- mathematics—discussed Kant’s analysis of the notion logisms, in order to say what a proof is and to explain of finite grasp and the issues that arise when we mix how inferences can generate knowledge, and he tried to certain ideal ideas of reason into the realm of the empir- offer a systematic approach to the issue. ically real. Reuben Hersh (University of New Mexico) started The second day was opened by Riccardo his talk playing with Jody Azzouni a dialogue between Chiaradonna (University of Roma Tre) talk about a teacher of mathematics and a student and then he dis- Galen’s medical epistemology. Chiaradonna fo- cussed, in mathematical practice, the notion of mathe- cused on Galen’s views about the epistemic status of matical intuition and the validity of heuristic and com- medicine, pointing out that Galen argues that demon- putational reasoning in mathematics—both pure and ap- strative methods have an intrinsic heuristic value and he plied. seeks to transpose the ‘analytical’ geometrical method After the lunch break, Carlo Cellucci (University of of resolution of problems into the domain of medicine. Rome La Sapienza), gave his talk about classifying In her talk on the importance of sight and hearing in and justifying inferences. He offered a new classifi- 17th and 18th century logic, Mirella Capozzi (Univer- cation and justification of inferences (deductive, non- sity of Roma La Sapienza) pointed out that the relation deductive and abductive) which takes into account their between logic and sight was favored by many authors role in knowledge. He argued that the justification of logical calculi. She also argued, however, that some of deductive, non-deductive and abductive inferences of such authors believed that logic should investigate raises similar problems and is to be approached much methods of discovery by taking inspiration from the arts in the same way. of discourse, so strictly connected to hearing and to the Emily Grosholz (The Pennsylvania State University) vague meanings of spoken words. talk offered a philosophical critique of logic. In fact, The morning session ended with the talk of Jan von she argued, logic must treat its terms as if they were Plato, (University of Helsinki), on the dimensionality of homogeneous, to exhibit valid inferences, but the kinds deductive arguments. Von Plato showed through histor- of representations that make successful reference possi- ical examples from Aristotle, Hilbert and Bernays, and ble and those that make successful analysis possible in Gentzen, that the tree form has decisive advantages over mathematics and the sciences often juxtapose heteroge- a linear arrangement. neous terms. Timothy Williamson (University of Oxford) consid- Robert Thomas (University of Manitoba), in his talk ered and questioned Michael Dummett’s contention, in assimilated mathematics to science and discussed the The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, that semantic theo- operation of assimilation. He pointed to assimilations in ries should be formulated in such a way that the logic of history that would not happen today, abandoned assim- the object-language is maximally insensitive to the logic ilations failing to make important distinctions, and cur- of the meta-language. Examining the status of the Bar- rent assimilations that are controversial. He suggested can formula and its converse in quantified modal logic that the lack of assimilations in mathematical practice is as a case study, Williamson argued that the insensitiv- an important reason for the dependability of arbitrarily ity in question is a less desirable feature of a semantic long chains of reasoning uniquely in mathematics. theory than Dummett suggests. The conference program closed on Saturday with Cesare Cozzo (University of Roma La Sapienza) two talks. Roberto Cordeschi (University of Roma La discussed and questioned Williamson’s contention, in Sapienza), offered a discussion of Herbert Simon’s ap- Knowledge and its Limits, that “knowing is the most proach to the study of rational choice, and he regarded it general factive stative attitude, that which one has to as more than a starting point for evaluating an integrated a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to approach to the study of behaviour. it at all”. According to Cozzo, Williamson does not The last talk was given by Jody Azzouni (Tufts Uni- prove that his principle that factive-stative attitudes en- versity), who criticized the idea that there is the way tail knowledge and he considered a counterexample in the world is, and that such a way can be characterized order to show that. Emiliano Ippoliti (University of in purely nominalistic terms. He tried to argue that the Roma La Sapienza) ended the day with a talk about indispensability of mathematics to the languages of the the issue of ampliation of knowledge. He argued that sciences shows that this is false and he tried to refute the generation of knowledge requires revising the no- the possibility that the indispensability of mathematics tions of inference, logic and knowledge from an infor- screens us off from what the world itself is like, show- mational point of view, examining how information is ing that we can characterize aspects of the world that

139 are really out there. rooted through group theory or category theory. The philosophical and logical contribution purpoted to ex- Emiliano Ippoliti emplify the theoretical development of the theory of Faculty of Philosophy, “La Sapienza” University of opposition after Aristotle’s square and Robert Blanche´ Rome (and Augustin Sesmat)’s hexagon: fuzzy logic gives rise to an indefinite seriation of logical oppositions; accord- ingly, an extension of opposite terms gives rise to an in- Square of Opposition, 20–22 June definite sequence of polygons whose geometrical prop- erties respect the scientific criteria of rigor and fruitful- Two concepts and one famous name strikingly come to ness (Alessio Moretti’s n-opposition theory: N.O.T.); fi- one’s mind when opposition is dealt with: incompati- nally, the philosophical roots of logical opposition don’t bility and negation, on the one hand; Aristotle, on the prevent this concept from being reduced to an algebraic other hand. Can there be more to be said about the approach and introduced into an alternative logic where well-known theory of opposition, or is it just an old- inconsistency is the central property. In a nutshell, a fashioned by-product of logic for undergraduate stu- number of topics from history of philosophy to philos- dents? In order to address this question, the philoso- ophy of logic have been considered from the point of pher and logician Jean-Yves Beziau´ created a periodic view of the theory of opposition, among which: non- meeting since 2007 (in Montreux, Switzerland); conse- classical , the theory of negation, (dynamic) epis- quently, the Second World Congress on the Square of temic logic, logical pluralism, Eastern logics, Arabic Opposition has taken place in the University of Corte logic, categoricity, speech act theory, universal logic. (Corsica, France) from 20th to 22nd June 2010. Despite The Third Congress on the Square of Opposition is its somehow restrictive title, this worldwide event pur- announced for 2012 and should take place in Crete. Be- ported to give an updating overview of the concept of yond the huge variety of topics to be addressed, a cru- opposition as such, whether organized in a basic square cial question that covers these is about the scientific or any more complex structure. More generally, the value of the concept of opposition: how relevant is it point was to see how opposition can be entertained or for scientific thought, and what does its proper contri- applied to so many various disciplines like philosophy, bution amount to in the history of ideas? A tentative an- linguistics, mathematics, psychology, computer science swer has been already given through the first two events, or cognitive science. pending the third one. The Congress consisted in two distinct sorts of talks, whether from invited speakers or contributors. Among Fabien Schang the four invited speakers, Pierre Cartier proposed an in- Dresden University of Technology, Germany vestigation of infinity and its paradoxical import, thus leading to the topic of paraconsistency and contradic- tion in mathematics. Stephen Read recalled the legacy Inductive Logic Programming, 27–30 June of the medieval logician John Buridan with respect to the theory of opposition, and he exemplified this with The 20th International Conference on Inductive Logic a special theory of truth where temporal and modal ex- Programming (ILP 2010) has been held in Firenze, pressions result in an intriguing logical octagon. Slid- Italy, chaired by Paolo Frasconi (Universita` degli Studi ing from the Middle Age to the 20th century, Damian di Firenze) and Francesca A. Lisi (Universita` degli Niwinski proposed a reconstruction of Zermelo’s theo- Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro”). The program featured 31 rem about chess games in terms of fixed-point calculus accepted papers (see here), 3 invited talks (here) and 2 and modal oppositions, while Hartley Slater returned to tutorials (here). Contributions spanned from theory to the famous existential import problem and showed how practice, mainly within the stream of the so-called Sta- this problem could be viewed from another perspective tistical Relational Learning (SRL). Here is a summary than the usual quantification. of the principal new ideas (presenters’ names are in ital- As to the fifty-four contributors, the various sorts of ics). talks helped to give clues to several fundamental ques- Best Student Paper: “From Inverse Entailment to tions about the theory of opposition: how it came to Inverse Subsumption” (Yamamoto, Inoue, Iwanuma) be within the area of philosophy, how it has been de- shows how IE can be reduced to inverse subsumption veloped and improved through the ages and scientific by preserving its completeness. disciplines, what is it its expected utility for solving sci- “Approximate Bayesian Computation for the Pa- entific problems. The linguists notably emphasized the rameters of PRISM Programs” (Cussens) presents a ambiguous use of negation in ordinary discourse and Bayesian method for approximating the posterior dis- the plurarity of its geometrical representations, while tribution over PRISM parameters. the mathematicians showed how opposition is deeply “Applying the Information Bottleneck Approach to

140 SRL: Learning LPAD Parameters” (Riguzzi, Di Mauro) of the Semantic Web. adopts the Information Bottleneck approach for learn- Francesca A. Lisi ing LPAD parameters. Dipartimento di Informatica, Universita` degli Studi di “Extending ProbLog with Continuous Distributions” Bari “A. Moro” (Gutmann, Jaeger, De Raedt) extends ProbLog with abilities to specify and infer over continuous distribu- tions. “Probabilistic Rule Learning” (De Raedt, Thon) up- Work in Progress in Causal and Probabilis- grades rule learning to a setting in which both the ex- tic Reasoning, 28-29 June amples and their classification can be probabilistic. Federica Russo and Phyllis McKay Illari from the “Boosting Relational Dependency Networks” University of Kent recently organised an international (Natarajan et al.) proposes the use of gradient tree workshop titled ‘Work in Progress in Causal and Prob- boosting in RDNs. abilistic Reasoning’. The workshop took place in the “Multitask Kernel-based Learning with First-Order afternoon of June 28th and the morning of June 29th. Logic Constraints” (Diligenti et al.) defines a general Paris, more precisely, the campus of the University framework to integrate supervised/unsupervised exam- of Kent at Paris, formed the congenial venue for the ples with background knowledge in the form of FOL meeting, with its wood-panelled rooms and flower-filled clauses into kernel machines. courtyards. “Stochastic Refinement” (Tamaddoni-Nezhad, Mug- The aim was to form a hub for exchanges between gleton) introduces the notions of stochastic refinement graduate students and experienced researchers in the operator and search. field. Jon Williamson, Phyllis McKay Illari and Fed- erica Russo from Kent, Julian Reiss from Rotterdam, “Hypothesizing about Networks in Meta-level Ab- Margherita Benzi from Vercelli, and Bert Leuridan and duction” (Inoue, Doncescu, Nabeshima) deals with Leen De Vreese from Gent were the more experienced completing causal networks by means of meta-level ab- researchers in the field who took part in the workshop, duction. fostering the exchange of thoughts through feedback, “Learning Discriminant Rules as a Minimal Satura- additional presentations, and the leading and feeding tion Search” (Lopez, Martin, Vrain) defines a non-blind of discussions. But it was primarily the attendance bottom-up search strategy for hypotheses. and the contributions of the participating young re- searchers from Kent, Rotterdam, London, and Paris, “Speeding up Planning through Minimal Generaliza- which made the workshop a success. Taken all together, tions of Partially Ordered Plans” (Cernoch, Zelezny) a wide range of topics related to causation were cov- presents an ILP framework for planning which exploits ered during the two half-days of talks: causal plural- existing plans in new similar planning tasks. ism (Leen De Vreese), causal contextualism (Michael “Exact Data Parallel Computation for Very Large ILP Wilde), Glennan-style mechanisms and complex sys- Datasets” (Srinivasan, Faruquie, Joshi) shows how dis- tems (Lorenzo Casini), causal evidence in economics tributed computing can be used effectively in ILP. (Franc¸ois Claveau), causation and explanation (Conrad “Automating the ILP Setup Task: Converting User Hughes), causation and constitutive relevance (Adam Advice about Specific Examples into General Back- White and Bert Leuridan), causal inference in the social ground Knowledge” (Walker et al.) introduces some sciences (Attilia Ruzzene), and invariantism and proba- techniques to automate the use of ILP systems for a non- bility (Eric Raidl). Plenty of time was reserved for feed- ILP expert. back and discussion on purpose, to give graduate stu- dents the experience of academic debate at a research “Fire! Firing Inductive Rules from Economic Ge- level. ography for Fire Risk Detection” (Vaz, Santos Costa, Ferreira) provides an elegant and powerful approach to The whole organizational set-up clearly formed a spatial data mining by coupling Spatial-Yap with an ILP fruitful venue, in which junior researchers could learn in engine. an informal setting, not only about the content of their own and others’ research work, but also about present- The invited talks were very inspiring. Kifer argued ing and giving feedback more generally. A follow-up that RIF, a W3C recommendation for the exchange of workshop with the same aims, to continue this work, Semantic Web rules, is a major opportunity to rekindle would be highly recommended. the interest in logic programming. Pfeffer presented a new probabilistic programming language named Figaro Leen De Vreese that is designed with practicality and usability in mind. Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, UGent Poole claimed that SRL and ILP need to be a foundation

141 Automated Reasoning about Context and learning to ontology evolution and also pointed out the Ontology Evolution, 16–17 August main issue involved in semantic technology: where to get the relevant data from? In computer science an ontology is a formal represen- There are plans to continue the ARCOE collabora- tation of the knowledge used by computer applications. tion and to reach out other communities interested in Contexts play a key role in ontology dynamics. ontologies, context and reasoning. More information An ontology can be compared with its different ver- on the website. sions under many respects. For instance, the choice of the specification language matters: one should strive Alan Bundy for the appropriate balance between expressiveness and School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK complexity. Description logics (DLs) are widely used thanks to the good balance they strike. Other languages, Jos Lehmann though, may be used to support more expressiveness School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK or ease of use, like higher-order logics, modal logics, RDF, among others. On the other hand, the same ontol- ogy can be compared with itself relative to its evolution Guilin Qi over time, dictated by new requirements or changes in School of Computer Science and Engineering, the domain knowledge. Southeast University, China Understanding how to automate the evolution of on- tologies and the role that contexts play in it was the cen- Ivan Jose´ Varzinczak tral theme of ARCOE-10, held at ECAI-10, in Lisbon. CSIR Meraka Institute, Pretoria, South Africa The two-day workshop had two invited talks, nine regu- lar presentations, a participants and a panel discussion. Prof. Meyer gave an invited talk on ontology dy- Calls for Papers namics and its relationship with belief change and non- monotonic reasoning. Prof. Giunchiglia’s invited talk Logic and Natural Language: special issue of Studia covered the notion of knowledge diversity and stressed Logica, deadline 3 September. the importance of relating localized semantics to shared The Extended Mind: special issue of Teorema, deadline semantics. 1 October. Two contributed talks by Ribeiro and Wassermann Recurrence,Provability and Truth: special issue of and by Meyer, Moodley and Varzinczak brought tech- Logos Architekton, deadline 15 October. niques from belief revision to the ontology case. With From Embodied Cognition to Free Will: special issue similar motivations, Nguyen, Alechina and Logan of Humana.Mente, deadline 30 October. showed how to use assumption-based truth maintenance AILACT Essay Prize: in Informal Logic / Critical systems for debugging ontologies. Lehmann, Bundy Thinking / Argumentation Theory, with publication on and Chan analyzed the evolution of physics theories by Informal Logic, deadline 31 October. qualitative causal analysis of experimental data. Wal- Philosophical History of Science: special issue of The lace and Naz focused on the role of contexts in ontology Monist, deadline 31 October. construction; Chan, Bundy and Lehmann used contexts Categorical Logic: special issue of Logica Universalis, in detecting conflicts between ontologies; d’Amato and deadline 1 November. Fanizzi presented a machine learning approach to com- Philosophy &Technology Best Paper Prizes: winning paring entities in a given context. Finally, Pease and papers are published in Philosophy & Technology, dead- Benzmueller presented in one talk the historical evolu- line 1 November. tion of the SUMO ontology and in another talk a higher- Concepts of Tradition in Phenomenology: special issue order logic approach to embedding formulas in SUMO. of Studia Phaenomenologica, deadline 15 November. Two discussions about the relationships between the Social Cognition:Mindreading and Alternatives: spe- talks made clear the value of a multi-disciplinary forum cial issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, like ARCOE. During the panel discussion Giunchiglia deadline 1 December. pointed out the fundamental problems of the Semantic Visual Reasoning with Diagrams: special issue of Log- Web endeavor and of its deductive approach. Thomas ica Universalis, deadline 15 December. Meyer stressed the differences between semantic web Experimental Philosophy: special issue of The Monist, and semantic technologies: even if the semantic web deadline 30 April 2011. endeavor might eventually fail, this does not prevent C. L. Hamblin and Argumentation Theory: special is- us from taking advantage of specific existing semantic sue of Informal Logic, deadline 30 June. technologies, which have proven to be useful. Fanizzi Formal and Intentional Semantics: special issue of The commented on how to bring methods from machine Monist, deadline 30 April 2012.

142 §4 possess a biconditional (↔) determining logical equiv- What’s Hot in ... alence. Consequently, it was claimed that these logical systems are not susceptible to the Lindenbaum-Tarski process of forming the quotient algebra from the for- We are looking for columnists willing to write pieces mula algebra Fm. Hence, algebraically oriented logi- of 100-1000 words on what’s hot in particular areas cians introduced the concept of the Leibniz congruence of research related to reasoning, inference or method, (Ω(T)) and by using it the Lindenbaum-Tarski process broadly construed (e.g., Bayesian statistical inference, can be fully generalized and applied to any deductive legal reasoning, scientific methodology). Columns system C. should alert readers to one or two topics in the par- Recall that Ω(T) defined on Fm over a theory T is ticular area that are hot that month (featuring in blog characterized in the subsequent way: for any pair α, β discussion, new publications, conferences etc.). If you of terms, α ≡ β (modulo Ω(T)) if for every formula wish to write a “What’s hot in . . . ?” column, either on ϕ and any variable p occurring in ϕ, it is the case that a monthly or a one-off basis, just send an email to fea- ϕ(p/α) ∈ T if and only if ϕ(p/β) ∈ T. Then α and β are [email protected] with a sample first column. said to be Leibniz-congruent (modulo T). Identifying any theory T of C with the deductively closed set of . . . Logic and Rational Interaction formulas Φ it can be asserted that if α and β are Leibniz- congruent (modulo Φ), then Conference season has started in the area of Logic and Rational Interaction as well, and reports on a number of Φ ∪ {α} `C β and Φ ∪ {β} `C α. recent events are already available on LORIWEB. The Paris-Amsterdam Logic Meeting of Young Researchers This interderivability condition is equivalent to (PALYMR) took place in Amsterdam this year. Ines Φ−indiscernibility of two Leibniz-congruent (modulo Crespo and Lucian Zagan provide information about Φ) formulas. If Φ is the set of theorems of C, then this the talks given. The Workshop on Solution Concepts relation is said to be synonymy relation. It turns out that for Extensive Games (SCEG ’10) was organized by the definition of Ω(T) depends only on the structural (i.e., Center for Algorithm Game Theory at Aarhus Univer- grammatical) properties of the language of C. Hence sity and took place June 22-25, 2010. Peter Bro Mil- if α ≡ β (moduloΩ(T)), then α and β are interchange- tersen reports on the workshop, which brought together able with respect to T in every context represented by computer scientists and game theorists. Paolo Turrini any formula ϕ ∈ Fm. It should be stressed that the def- discusses his impressions gathered at the tenth edition inition of the Leibniz congruence is associated to the of the International Conference on Deontic Logic in method of defining the identity relation in second-order Computer Science. And Jean-Yves Beziau provides logic that is due to Gottfried Leibniz. Recall that ac- information about the second world congress on the cording to the famous Leibniz Law the identity can be square of opposition, which took place in Corsica this expressed by the formula June. ∀a∀b [a = b ↔ ∀P (P (a) ↔ P (b))] Readers of The Reasoner may also be interested in the Justification Logic Bibliography, which has been where P is a variable running over all unary predicates. updated with several new publications recently. Roman This ontological principle states that two objects a and Kuznets provides details. b are identical (i.e., they are the same entity), if they As usual, we would like to invite all readers of have all their properties in common. This means that The Reasoner to contribute to LORIWEB with news a and b are identical if any predicate possessed by a is on events, job openings or publications in the area of also possessed by b and vice versa. Consequently, it is Logic and Rational Interaction. Please contact Rasmus obvious that according to this law the identity of two Rendsvig, our web manager, or write to the loriweb ad- substances is defined by their indiscernibility. dress. In order to formulate this principle algebraically let us introduce the notion of a logical matrix. This model- Ben Rodenhauser¨ theoretic concept generalizes the well-known (from el- Philosophy, Groningen ementary logic) notion of truth tables. Logical matrices are regarded as models for a logical language L. Any logical matrix has the form M = hA, Fi where A is an . . . Algebraic, abstract algebraic and behav- abstract algebra of type L and F ⊆ A is the set of des- ioral approaches to logical systems. Part II ignated values. The fundamental function of algebra in logic is to constitute semantic correlates of sentences. In the previous contribution to The Reasoner it was ob- The term ‘semantic correlate’ is synonymous with such served that there are deductive systems which do not concepts as ‘meaning’ and ‘denotation’. It is assumed

143 that each formula ϕ ∈ Fm has a uniquely determined in- h(x1) = a1, ..., h(xn) = an. In our approach to BAAL it is terpretation in A depending on the values in A that are assumed that the set of sorts is split in two disjoint sets V assigned to its variables. Then the interpretation of ϕ and H which are called visible and hidden sorts. Then a can be expressed algebraically as h(ϕ), where h is a ho- hidden many-sorted signature is a triple hΣ, V, Ei where momorphism (i.e., an assignment) from Fm to A map- Σ = hS, Fi is a many-sorted signature, V ⊆ S is the set ping each variable of ϕ into its assigned value. Then A of visible sorts and E is the set of available experiments. is identified with the universe of all possible interpreta- These experiments are identified with terms of visible tion, i.e., semantic correlates for each ϕ ∈ Fm. Each sort of the form t (x : s, x1 : s1, ..., xn : sn) where x is a such homomorphism h : Fm → A becomes a possible designated variable of hidden sort, i.e., s ∈ H = S \V. semantic correlate function from the language L to A. It follows that in BAAL it is possible to reason about Then any subset F ⊆ A is said to be a truth predicate hidden data only indirectly using behavioral indistin- (or a truth set). Therefore, it is said that a sentence ϕ is guishability with respect to the available experiments. true in M if h(ϕ) ∈ F. Otherwise ϕ is false in M. Intuitively speaking, it is necessary to evaluate equa- Using logical matrices it is possible to reformulate tions involving hidden values using only their visible Leibniz’s second-order definition of identity. Namely it properties. Such we arrive at the following definition: follows that Definition 1. Consider a hidden signature hΣ, V, Ei

( A A ) and a Σ−algebra A. Then given a hidden sort s ∈ H it is ϕ (a, c0, ..., cn−1) ∈ F iff ϕ (b, c0, ..., cn−1) ∈ F ΩA(F): = ha, bi : . for all ϕ(x, z0, ..., zn−1) ∈ Fm and all c0, ..., cn−1 ∈ A said that two values a, b ∈ As are E−behaviorally equiv- alent, symbolically a ≡E b, if for every experiment t(x : This is the first-order analogue of Leibniz’s defini- s, x1 : s, ..., xn : sn) ∈ E and every ha1, ..., ani ∈ As1 ×...× tion. The notation ϕ(x, z , ..., z − ) indicates that each of A A 0 n 1 Asn it is the case that t (a, a1, ..., an) = t (b, a1, ..., an). the variables from ϕ occurs in the list x, z0, ..., zn−1 and Concluding, it can be stated that in BAAL it is possi- A ϕ (a, c0, ..., cn−1) is the algebraic interpretation of ϕ in ble to observe the behavior of terms of hidden sorts by A, i.e., h(ϕ) where h is any homomorphism h : Fm → A their indirect impact on the truth-values of the formulas such that h(x) = a and h(zi) = ci for all i < n. The string which involve them. of variables c0, ..., cn−1 ∈ A is regarded as the sequence Piotr Wilczek of parameters. Also it follows that ΩA(F) is a congru- Mathematics, Poznan´ University of Technology, ence on A. Observe that the definition of ΩA(F) is com- pletely independent of any logic C. It depends entirely Poland on the grammatical properties of L, i.e., it is defined intrinsically with respect to A and F. Then it is obvi- Introducing ... ous that according to ΩA(F) two entities are identical If you would like to write one or more short iff they are indiscernible with respect to each property introductions to concepts, topics, authors or books expressed by any first-order formula ϕ ∈ Fm. It turns connected with reasoning, inference or method, or if out that ΩA(F) is the main metalogical tool of Abstract you have an editorial project to collate such pieces and Algebraic Logic (AAL). would like to print some of them here, please email Recall that in the framework of AAL we consider only [email protected] with your proposal. one-sorted languages and algebras. While in the case of Behavioral Abstract Algebraic Logic (BAAL) it is nec- essary to use many-sorted languages and algebras. A §5 many-sorted signature is a pair Σ = hS, Fi where S is Events a set of sorts and F = {Fws}w∈S ∗,s∈S is an indexed fam- ily of sets of operations. For simplicity, it is written September f : s1...sn → s ∈ F for an element f ∈ Fs1...sn s. Then the formula algebra FmΣ in BAAL is generated by a sorted ICTAC: 7th International Colloquium on Theoretical family X = {Xs}s∈S of variable sets. The fact that x ∈ Xs Aspects of Computing, Natal, Brazil, 1–3 September. is denoted by x : s. Given a signature Σ = hS, Fi it is KSEM: 4th International Conference on Knowledge said that a Σ−algebra (similar to many-sorted language) D E Science, Engineering and Management, Belfast, North- is a pair A = {As}s∈S, A , where each As is a non-void ern Ireland, UK, 1–3 September. set (i.e.,the carrier of sort s) and A assigns to each oper- FEW: 7th Annual Formal Epistemology Workshop, ation f : s1...sn → s a function f : AS ×...×AS → AS . Konstanz, 2–4 September. A 1 n An assignment over A is a S −sorted family of functions CMM Graduate Conference: University of Leeds, 3 h = {hs : Xs → As}s∈S . Given a Σ−algebra A, a formula September. from FmΣ, i.e., ϕ(x1 : s1, ..., xn : sn) and ha1, ..., ani ∈ The Cartesian “Myth of the Ego” and the Ana- A As1 × ... × Asn , then we denote by ϕ (a1, ..., an) the value lytic/Continental Divide: Faculty of Philosophy, Rad- h(ϕ) that ϕ takes in A under an assignment h such that boud University Nijmegen, 3–4 September.

144 TIME: 17th International Symposium on Temporal History,Cognition, and Visualisation in Science:The Representation and Reasoning, Paris, France, 6–8 David Gooding Memorial Meeting: University of Bath, September. UK, 22–23 September. CP: Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Actual Causation: University of Konstanz, Germany, St. Andrews, Scotland, 6–10 September. 23–24 September. Principles and Methods of Statistical Inference with Truth,Knowledge and Science: 9th National Confer- Interval Probability: Durham, 6–10 September. ence of the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy, Uni- Causation and Disease in the Postgenomic Era: 1st Eu- versity of Padua, 23–25 September. ropean Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life &HPS3: Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, Sciences, Geneva, Switzerland, 6–11 September. Indiana University, Bloomington, 23–26 September. FEW: Formal Ethics Week, University of Groningen, Logic and Language Conference: Northern Institute of 7–10 September. Philosophy, University of Aberdeen, 24–26 September. Logic,Algebra and Truth Degrees: Prague, Czech Re- Workshop on Mental Causation: Durham University, public, 7–11 September. 27 September. Pluralism in the Foundations of Statistics: University SMPS: 5th International Conference on Soft Methods of Kent, Canterbury, UK, 9–10 September. in Probability and Statistics, Mieres (Asturias), Spain, Economics and Naturalism: Kazimierz Dolny, Poland, 28 September - 1 October. 11–15 September. Logic or Logics?: Workshop, Arche´ Research Centre, CNL: 2nd Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages, St Andrews, Scotland, 30 September - 1 October. Marettimo Island, Sicily, Italy, 13–15 September. Truth,Meaning, and Normativity: Department of Phi- PGM: 5th European Workshop on Probabilistic Graph- losophy, Institute for Logic, Language and Computa- ical Models, Helsinki, Finland, 13–15 September. tion, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 30 September - 2 Oc- tober. Epistemic Aspects of Many-valued Logics: Prague, 13– Types of Explanation in the Special Sciences: the Case 16 September. of Biology and History: University of Cologne, 30 RSS: Royal Statistical Society International Confer- September - 3 October. ence, Brighton, United Kingdom, 13–17 September. Vagueness and Metaphysics: Barcelona, 16–17 Septem- ber. October Levels of Processing:Foundations of Social Cogni- AP-CAP: Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Con- tion: University Club Bonn, 16–18 September. ference, Wellington Institute of Technology (WelTec), Non-Classical Logic.Theory and Applications: Torun, Petone, Wellington, New Zealand, 1–2 October. Poland, 16–18 September. E-CAP: 8th European Conference on Computing and AS: Applied Statistics, Ribno, Bled, Slovenia, 19–22 Philosophy,Muenchen, Germany, 4–6 October. September. Objectivity and the Practice of Science: Tilburg Cen- GAMES: Annual Workshop of the ESF Networking ter for Logic and Philosophy of Science, 5 October. Programme on Games for Design and Verification, St AIAI: 6th IFIP International Conference on Artificial Anne’s College, Oxford, UK, 19–23 September. Intelligence. Applications & Innovations, Ayia Napa, Words and Concepts:An Interdisciplinary Workshop Cyprus, 5–7 October. on Philosophy,Psychology, and Linguistics: University Calculation,Intuition, and APriori Knowledge: of Granada, Spain, 20–21 September. Tilburg University, The Netherlands, 5–8 October. IVA: 10th International Conference on Intelligent Vir- Validation in Statistics and Machine Learning: Weier- tual Agents, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 20–22 strass Institute, Berlin, 6–7 October. September. Causality in the Biomedical and Social Sciences LRR: Logic, Reason and Rationality, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Belgium, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 6–8 October 20–22 September. The Limits of Knowledge Society: Iasi, Romania, 6–9 World Computer Congress: International Federation October. for Information Processing, Brisbane, Australia, 20–23 Integrating Complexity:Environment and History: September. University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, ECML: European Conference on Machine Learning Canada, 7–10 October. and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in LPAR: 17th International Conference on Logic for Pro- Databases, Barcelona, Spain, 20–24 September. gramming, Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning, Yo- MATES: 8th German Conference on Multi-Agent Sys- gyakarta, Indonesia, 10–15 October. tem Technologies, Karslruhe, Germany, 21–23 Septem- Philosophy of Mind,Reduction,Neuroscience: Univer- ber. sity of Lausanne, Switzerland, 12–16 October.

145 SEFA: 6th Conference of the Spanish Society for Ana- AMBN: 1st International Workshop on Advanced lytic Philosophy, University of La Laguna, Tenerife.14– Methodologies for Bayesian Networks, Tokyo, Japan, 16 October 18–19 November. Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation:AChal- LENLS: Logic and Engineering of Natural Language lenge to Philosophy of Science: Center for Philosophy Semantics, Tokyo, 18–19 November. of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 15–16 October. TAAI: Conference on Technologies and Applications of The Nature of Belief: The Ontology of Doxastic Atti- Artificial Intelligence, Hsinchu, Taiwan, 18–20 Novem- tudes, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, 18–19 ber 18-20. October. KICS: 5th International Conference on Knowledge, In- FMCAD: International Conference on Formal Methods formation and Creativity Support Systems, Chiang Mai, in Computer-Aided Design, Lugano, Switzerland, 20– Thailand, 25–27 November. 23 October. ISDA: International Conference on Intelligent Systems ADT: 1st International Conference on Algorithmic De- Design and Applications, Cairo, Egypt, 29 November - cision Theory, Venice, Italy, 21–23 October. 1 December. Workshop on Bayesian Argumentation: Department of Philosophy & Cognitive Science, Lund University, December Sweden, 22–23 October. Field Science: 26th Boulder Conference on the History Semantics for Robots:Utopian and Dystopian Visions and Philosophy of Science, University of Colorado at in the Age of the ‘Language Machine’: Chicago, Illi- Boulder, 22–24 October. nois, USA, 2–4 December. Thinking and Speaking a Better World: 3rd Interna- MINDGRAD: Warwick Graduate Conference in the tional Conference on Argumentation, Rhetoric, Debate Philosophy of Mind, University of Warwick, UK, 4–5 and the Pedagogy of Empowerment, Faculty of Arts, December. University of Maribor, Slovenia, 22–24 October. CACS: International Congress on Computer Applica- tions and Computational Science, Singapore, 4–6 De- NonMon@30: Thirty Years of Nonmonotonic Reason- cember. ing, Lexington, KY, USA, 22–25 October. NIPS: 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information MWPMW: 11th annual Midwest PhilMath Workshop, Processing Systems, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 6–11 Philosophy Department, , 23– December. 24 October. From Cognitive Science and Psychology to an IJCCI: 2nd International Joint Conference on Computa- Empirically-informed Philosophy of Logic: Amster- tional Intelligence, Valencia, Spain, 24–26 October. dam, 7–8 December. BNAIC: 22nd Benelux Conference on Artificial Intelli- MIWAI: 4th Mahasarakham International Workshop on gence, Luxembourg, 25–26 October. Artificial Intelligence, Mahasarakham, Thailand, 9–10 ICTAI: 22th International IEEE Conference on Tools December. with Artificial Intelligence, Arras, France, 27–29 Oc- APMP: 1st International Meeting of the Association for tober. the Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, Brussels, 9– 11 December. November ICDM: International Conference on Data Mining, Syd- ney, Australia, 13–17 December. ICMSC: IEEE International Conference on Modeling, SILFS: International Conference of the Italian Society Simulation and Control, Cairo, Egypt, 2–4 November. for Logic and Philosophy of Sciences, University of LogKCA: International Workshop on Logic and Phi- Bergamo, Italy, 15–17 December. losophy of Knowledge, Communication and Action, Scepticism and Justification: COGITO Research Cen- Donostia, San Sebastian,´ Spain, 3–5 November. tre in Philosophy, Bologna, 17–18 December. MindNetwork: 2nd meeting of the Mind Network, a International Conference on Recent Advances in Cog- network for Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science, nitive Science: Varanasi, India, 18–20 December. King’s College, Cambridge, 6 November. MICAI: 9th Mexican International Conference on Arti- January ficial Intelligence, Pachuca (near Mexico City), Mexico, 8–12 November. LogICCC Meets India: Delhi University, India, 7–8 Causation,Coherence, and Concepts.Themes from January. the Philosophy of Wolfgang Spohn: Konstanz, 11–13 ICLA: 4th Indian Conference on logic and its Applica- November. tions, New Delhi, India, 9–11 January. P-NPMW: 2nd Paris-Nancy PhilMath Workshop, Paris, Graduate Conference in Epistemology: Miami, FL, 17–19 November. 13–15 January.

146 Philosophy of Science Colloquium: Durban, SA, 18 September. January. Logic or Logics?: Mini-course, Arche´ Research Centre, The Notion of Form in 19th and Early 20th Century St Andrews, Scotland, 27–29 September. Logic and Mathematics: International graduate work- BLT: Bochum-Lausanne-Tilburg Graduate School: Phi- shop, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 20–21 January. losophy of Language, Mind and Science on Calcula- SODA11: ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algo- tion, Intuition, and A Priori Knowledge, Tilburg Uni- rithms, San Francisco, California, USA, 23–25 January. versity, The Netherlands, 5–8 October; Philosophy of ICISD: International Conference on Intellingent Sys- Mind, Reduction, Neuroscience, University of Lau- tems & Data Processing, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat, sanne, Switzerland, 12–16 October. India, 24–25 January. SELLC: Sino-European Winter School in Logic, Lan- ICAART: 3rd International Conference on Agents and guage and Computation, Guangzhou, China, 3–18 De- Artificial Intelligence, Rome, Italy, 28–30 January. cember. CCA: Computability and Complexity in Analysis, Cape Town, South Africa, 31 January - 4 February. Programmes

February Doctoral Programme in Philosophy: Language, Mind and Practice, Department of Philosophy, University of AIA: 11th International Conference on Artificial Intel- Zurich, Switzerland. ligence and Applications, Innsbruck, Austria, 14–16 HPSM: MA in the History and Philosophy of Science February. and Medicine, Durham University. PhDs in Logic: Graduate Conference and Winter Master Programme: Philosophy of Science, Technol- School, Brussels, 17–18 February. ogy and Society, Enschede, the Netherlands. MA in Cognitive Science: School of Politics, Inter- March national Studies and Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast. STACS: 28th International Symposium on Theoretical MA in Logic and the Philosophy of Mathematics: De- Aspects of Computer Science, Dortmund, Germany, partment of Philosophy, University of Bristol. 10–12 March. MA in Metaphysics,Language, and Mind: Department NAFIPS: 30th North American Fuzzy Information Pro- of Philosophy, University of Liverpool. cessing Society Annual Conference, El Paso, Texas, MA in Mind,Brain and Learning: Westminster Insti- USA, 18–20 March. tute of Education, Oxford Brookes University. AI and Health Communication: Stanford University, MA in Philosophy: by research, Tilburg University. California, 21–23 March. MA in Philosophy of Biological and Cognitive Sci- ences: Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol. April MA in Rhetoric: School of Journalism, Media and SpringSim: Spring Simulation Multi-conference, Communication, University of Central Lancashire. Boston, MA, USA, 4–9 April. MA programmes: in Philosophy of Language and Lin- The Authority of Science: University of Sydney, Aus- guistics, and Philosophy of Mind and Psychology, Uni- tralia, 8–10 April. versity of Birmingham. AIML: ICGST International Conference on Artificial MRes in Methods and Practices of Philosophical Re- Intelligence and Machine Learning, Dubai United Arab search: Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Emirates, 11–14 April. Aberdeen. AICS: 22nd Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cogni- MSc in Applied Statistics and Datamining: School of tive Science Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 16–17 Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews. April. MSc in Artificial Intelligence: Faculty of Engineer- NFM: 3rd NASA Formal Methods Symposium, ing, University of Leeds. Pasadena, California, USA, 18–20 April. MA in Reasoning An interdisciplinary programme at the University of §6 Kent, Canterbury, UK. Core modules on logical, causal, probabilistic, scientific, mathematical and Courses and Programmes machine reasoning and further modules from Philosophy, Psychology, Computing, Statistics, Social Courses Policy, Law, Biosciences and History. SIPTA: 4th school of the Society for Imprecise Prob- MSc in Cognitive &Decision Sciences: Psychology, ability: Theories and Applications, Durham, UK, 1–6 University College London.

147 MSc in Cognitive Science: University of Osnabruck,¨ PhD position: “Modelling the evolution of theory of Germany. mind”, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (ALICE), Uni- MSc in Cognitive Psychology/Neuropsychology: versity of Groningen, deadline 1 September. School of Psychology, University of Kent. PhD position: “A cognitive system supporting intel- MSc in Mathematical Logic and the Theory of Compu- ligent interaction”, Institute of Artificial Intelligence tation: Mathematics, University of Manchester. (ALICE), University of Groningen, deadline 1 Septem- MSc in Philosophy of Science,Technology and Soci- ber. ety: University of Twente, The Netherlands. PhD position: “Logics for higher-order social cogni- Master of Science: Logic, Amsterdam. tion”, Institute of Artificial Intelligence (ALICE), Uni- Research Master in Cognitive Science and Humanities: versity of Groningen, deadline 1 September. Language,Communication and Organization: Institute PhD positions: in the programme “Foundations of the for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information, Uni- Life Sciences and Their Ethical Consequences” (FOL- versity of the Basque Country (DonostiaSan Sebastian). SATEC) at the SEMM (European School of Molecular Medicine), Milano, deadline 26 September.

§7 Jobs and Studentships

Jobs Postdoctoral Research Associate: on the project “Word Segmentation from Noisy Data with Minimal Supervision”, School of Informatics, University of Ed- inburgh, deadline 1 September. Professorship of Philosophy: Fac- ulty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, deadline 10 September. Professorship: in Mathematical Logic, Department of Mathematics, Stockholm University, deadline 15 September. Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships: in the Hu- manities, Social Sciences, and Theoretical Sciences, All Souls College, University of Oxford, deadline 24 September. Visiting International Fellowship: in social research methods for visits in calendar year 2011, Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, dead- line 30 September. Post-doc Stipend: in theoretical philosophy, Philoso- phy Department, Ruhr-Universitat¨ Bochum, deadline 10 October. Tenure-track position: with specialisation in philoso- phy of science, Department of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, deadline 1 November. Wagner Risk Fellowship: Center for Philosophy of Sci- ence, University of Pittsburgh, deadline 15 November.

Studentships 10 PhD student positions: within the doctoral pro- gram “Mathematical Logic in Computer Science”, Vi- enna University of Technology (TU Wien), until filled. PhDStudentship: “Hyper-heuristics for Grouping Problems”, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, until filled.

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