We attempt to address here some alleged criticisms against the philosophical import of the so-called Brazilian approach to paraconsistency, especially by providing some demanded epistemic elucidations to the whole enterprise of the logics of formal inconsistency. In the way of elucidating, we substantiate the view that difficulties in reasoning under contradictions in both the Buddhist and the ...

This paper explores the possibilities of using character education through poetry to cultivate virtue in a secondary-school context. It focuses on philosophical assumptions behind intervention development and some implications intervention. We explore teaching as tool for moral reasoning means method ‘poetic inquiry,’ drawing also insights from Wittgenstein. Character inquiry’ share similar goa...

In a article in the Journal of Philosophical Logic in 1996, “Towards a Model Theory of Venn Diagrams,” (Vol. 25, No. 5, pp. 463–482), Hammer and Danner proved the full completeness of Shin’s formal system for reasoning with Venn Diagrams. Their proof is eight pages long. This note gives a brief 5 line proof of this same result, using connections between diagrammatic and sentential representations.

As a profession, we have standard practices for handling reasoning and argumentation. One feature of these practices is so familiar and pervasive that it is almost invisible: the medium of philosophical argumentation is prose. We spend a great deal of time articulating arguments in written prose, and identifying arguments in the writings of others. The dominance of prose goes beyond writing; ev...

This paper presents the case for using the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence and a derivative of it, to model the reasoning process in debates on difficult philosophical, theological and scientific questions. This gives a useful formal framework within which to enhance the debating process. A well-known theological debate and two scientific exemplars are given for illustration of the working a...

The papers presented here offer great contrast to the usual philosophical discussions. They are rigorous treatments of philosophical problems that are fully informed about research in artificial intelligence, and are directly concerned with the specific logical and epistemological issues that arise in attempting to automate reasoning and represent knowledge. Each one speaks directly to the conc...

Critical thinking comprises the mental processes, strategies, and representations people use to solve problems, make decisions, and learn new concepts. The study of critical thinking combines the educational, philosophical, and psychological traditions of thought. R. Ennis offers a philosophical taxonomy suggesting that critical thinking results from the interaction of a set of dispositions tow...

In 1971 I wrote a paper attempting to relate some old philosophical issues about representation and reasoning to problems in Artificial Intelligence. A major theme of the paper was the importance of distinguishing “analogical” from “Fregean” representations. I still think the distinction is important, though perhaps not as important for current problems in A.I. as I used to think. In this paper...

This paper sketches an operational semantics and protocol for naming observed objects. The semantics and protocol are motivated by a philosophical account of reference. We illustrate the protocol on an example in which two agents jointly explore an unknown domain and exchange information about observed objects. The protocol is examined for compatibility with two forms of default reasoning. We t...

We present and motivate the contents of a one quarter AI course. In this course, we provide a solid introduction to search and logic, combined with a philosophical review of classical AI. We furthermore introduce major tools and applications, including knowledge representation, reasoning under uncertainty and several forms of machine learning including neural networks. We end the course with st...