ISBN: 9780199570423

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a natural point of entry to what for most readers will be a new subject. Plural logic deals with plural terms (''Whitehead and Russell'', ''Henry VI… Altro …

Alex Oliver and Timothy Smiley provide a natural point of entry to what for most readers will be a new subject. Plural logic deals with plural terms (''Whitehead and Russell'', ''Henry VIII''s wives'', ''the real numbers'', ''the square root of -1'', ''they''), plural predicates (''surrounded the fort'',''are prime'', ''are consistent'', ''imply''), and plural quantification (''some things'', ''any things''). Current logic is singularist: its terms stand for at most one thing. By contrast, the foundational thesis of this book is that a particular term may legitimately stand for several things at once; inother words, there is such a thing as genuinely plural denotation. The authors argue that plural phenomena need to be taken seriously and that the only viable response is to adopt a plural logic, a logic based on plural denotation. They expound a framework of ideas that includes the distinctionbetween distributive and collective predicates, the theory of plural descriptions, multivalued functions, and lists. A formal system of plural logic is presented in three stages, before being applied to Cantorian set theory as an illustration. Technicalities have been kept to a minimum, and anyone who is familiar with the classical predicate calculus should be able to follow it. The authors'' approach is an attractive blend of no-nonsense argumentative directness and open-minded liberalism, and they convey the exciting and unexpectedrichness of their subject. Mathematicians and linguists, as well as logicians and philosophers, will find surprises in this book. | Plural Logic by Alex Oliver Hardcover | Indigo Chapters Books > Philosophy P10105, Alex Oliver<

2013, ISBN: 0199570426

[EAN: 9780199570423], Libro nuevo, [SC: 18.56], [PU: Oxford University Press], Book is in NEW condition., Books

2013, ISBN: 9780199570423

Buch, Hardcover, [PU: Oxford University Press], Oxford University Press, 2013