BiblioVault - Books about Logic

A Manual of Intensional Logic

2nd Edition

Johan van Benthem

CSLI, 1988

Intensional logic, as understood here, is based on the broad presupposition that so-called "intensional contexts" in natural language can be explained semantically by the idea of multiple reference. The text reviews tense, modality, and conditionals, then presents developments in intensional theory, including partiality and generalized quantifiers. JOHAN van BENTHEM is professor of mathematical logic at the University of Amsterdam.

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Mathematical Logic

Revised Edition

W. V. Quine

Harvard University Press, 1951

W. V. Quine’s systematic development of mathematical logic has been widely praised for the new material presented and for the clarity of its exposition. This revised edition, in which the minor inconsistencies observed since its first publication have been eliminated, will be welcomed by all students and teachers in mathematics and philosophy who are seriously concerned with modern logic.

Max Black, in Mind, has said of this book, “It will serve the purpose of inculcating, by precept and example, standards of clarity and precision which are, even in formal logic, more often pursued than achieved.”

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Mathematical Reasoning with Diagrams

Mateja Jamnik

CSLI, 2001

Mathematicians at every level use diagrams to prove theorems. Mathematical Reasoning with Diagrams investigates the possibilities of mechanizing this sort of diagrammatic reasoning in a formal computer proof system, even offering a semi-automatic formal proof system—called Diamond—which allows users to prove arithmetical theorems using diagrams.

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Mathematics of Modality

Robert Goldblatt

CSLI, 1993

Modal logic is the study of modalities—expressions that qualify assertions about the truth of statements—like some ordinary language phrases and mathematically motivated expressions. The study of modalities dates from antiquity, but has been most actively pursued in the last three decades. This volume collects together a number of Golblatt's papers on modal logic, beginning with his work on the duality between algebraic and set-theoretic models, and including two new articles, one on infinitary rules of inference, and the other about recent results on the relationship between modal logic and first-order logic.

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Methods of Logic

Fourth Edition

W. V. Quine

Harvard University Press, 1982

This widely used textbook of modern formal logic now offers a number of new features. Incorporating updated notations, selective answers to exercises, expanded treatment of natural deduction, and new discussions of predicate-functor logic and the affinities between higher set theory and the elementary logic of terms, W. V. Quine’s new edition will serve admirably for both classroom and independent use.

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The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 1, 1899 - 1924

Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany Published in the 1899-1901 Period, and The School and Society, and The Educational Situation

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Includes the complete text of The School and Society and The Educational Situation.

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The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 2, 1899 - 1924

Journal Articles, Book Reviews, and Miscellany in the 1902-1903 Period, and Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and the Curriculum

John Dewey

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Includes the complete text of Dewey’s Studies in Logical Theory and The Child and the Curriculum.

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The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 8, 1899 - 1924

Essays and Miscellany in the 1915 Period and German Philosophy and Politics and Schools of To-Morrow

John Dewey. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Volume 8 comprises all Dewey’s published writings for the year 1915—and only for 1915, a year of typically elevated productivity, which saw publication of fifteen articles and miscellaneous pieces and three books, two of which are reprinted here: German Philosophy and Politics and Schools of Tomorrow.

Professor Hook says that the publications in this volume reveal John Dewey at the height of his philosophical powers. Even though his greatest works were still to come—Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature, The Quest for Certainty, and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry—“the themes elaborated therein were already sounded and developed with incisive brevity in the articles and books of this banner year.”

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Military Realism

The Logic and Limits of Force and Innovation in the U.S. Army

Peter Campbell

University of Missouri Press, 2024

After the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army considered counterinsurgency (COIN) a mistake to be avoided. Many found it surprising, then, when setbacks in recent conflicts led the same army to adopt a COIN doctrine. Scholarly debates have primarily employed existing theories of military bureaucracy or culture to explain the army’s re-embrace of COIN, but Peter Campbell advances a unique argument centering on military realism to explain the complex evolution of army doctrinal thinking from 1960 to 2008.

In five case studies of U.S. Army doctrine, Campbell pits military realism against bureaucratic and cultural perspectives in three key areas—nuclear versus conventional warfare, preferences for offense versus defense, and COIN missions—and finds that the army has been more doctrinally flexible than those perspectives would predict. He demonstrates that decision makers, while vowing in the wake of Vietnam to avoid (COIN) missions, nonetheless found themselves adapting to the geopolitical realities of fighting “low intensity” conflicts. In essence, he demonstrates that pragmatism has won out over dogmatism. At a time when American policymakers remain similarly conflicted about future defense strategies, Campbell’s work will undoubtedly shape and guide the debate.

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Modal Logic for Open Minds

Johan van Benthem

CSLI, 2010

In Modal Logic for Open Minds, Johan van Benthem provides an up-to-date introduction to the field of modal logic, outlining its major ideas and exploring the numerous ways in which various academic fields have adopted it. Van Benthem begins with the basic theories of modal logic, semantics, bisimulation, and axiomatics, and also covers more advanced topics, such as expressive power and computational complexity. The book then moves to a wide range of applications, including new developments in information flow, intelligent agency, and games. Taken together, the chapters show modal logic at the crossroads of philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science, and economics. Most of the chapters are followed by exercises, making this volume ideal for undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, symbolic systems, cognitive science, and linguistics.

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The Myth of Artificial Intelligence

Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do

Erik J. Larson

Harvard University Press, 2021

“Exposes the vast gap between the actual science underlying AI and the dramatic claims being made for it.” —John Horgan

“If you want to know about AI, read this book…It shows how a supposedly futuristic reverence for Artificial Intelligence retards progress when it denigrates our most irreplaceable resource for any future progress: our own human intelligence.” —Peter Thiel

Ever since Alan Turing, AI enthusiasts have equated artificial intelligence with human intelligence. A computer scientist working at the forefront of natural language processing, Erik Larson takes us on a tour of the landscape of AI to reveal why this is a profound mistake.

AI works on inductive reasoning, crunching data sets to predict outcomes. But humans don’t correlate data sets. We make conjectures, informed by context and experience. And we haven’t a clue how to program that kind of intuitive reasoning, which lies at the heart of common sense. Futurists insist AI will soon eclipse the capacities of the most gifted mind, but Larson shows how far we are from superintelligence—and what it would take to get there.

“Larson worries that we’re making two mistakes at once, defining human intelligence down while overestimating what AI is likely to achieve…Another concern is learned passivity: our tendency to assume that AI will solve problems and our failure, as a result, to cultivate human ingenuity.”
—David A. Shaywitz, Wall Street Journal

“A convincing case that artificial general intelligence—machine-based intelligence that matches our own—is beyond the capacity of algorithmic machine learning because there is a mismatch between how humans and machines know what they know.”
—Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books

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