I erect a framework within the semantic view of theories for explaining the empirical success of internally inconsistent models and theories, with scientific realism in mind. The framework is an instance of the ‘content-driven’ approach to inconsistency, advocated by both Norton (Philos Sci 54:327–350, 1987) and Smith (Stud Hist Philos Sci 19:429–445, 1988a, In: Fine A, Leplin J (eds) PSA1988, ...

Introduction This essay will explore the space between mathematical realism and anti-realism, while also providing a possible answer to the "mindlessness" of natural (not necessarily mathematical) laws (Field, 1982). We will also consider biologically-inspired models of physical systems, as well as consider intentionlike goal-oriented behavior in the context of combinatorial representations. To...

The main realism/anti-realism issue in the philosophy of science is the issue of scientific realism, concerned with the unobservable entities of science. However, there is also a more general issue, often known as “realism about the external world,” concerned primarily with the observable entities of common sense, but which spreads to scientific entities, both observable and unobservable. The i...

I begin here in §1 with some prima facie linguistic difficulties had by two prominent metaethical accounts of the meaning of normative terms – basically the accounts implicit in realism and expressivism – when these are applied in a straightforward albeit naïve way to the word ‘ought’. In §2, I explain what I take to be the standard framework in theoretical semantics for accounting for the sema...

In this paper, we introduce a semantic modeling project by implementing a southeast China vernacular urban modeling system. This system converts the basic modeling components of geometry units (e.g. point, line, triangle etc.) into the semantic components (e.g. street, block, patch, house etc.). To implement the urban modeling system semantically, an XML based description and DTD[31] based veri...

We propose a way to base Situation Semantic to a computational ground of concurrency and to linear logic. One of the core ideas of Situation Semantics is ecological realism, the idea that meaning arises from the interaction between a cog-nitive agent and his/her environments. We model both the agent and environments as a process and study the interaction as a system of communicating processes. ...