Theoria: An International Journal for Theory, History and Foundations of Science

It is in the Tractatus 6.31’s that Wittgenstein, according to our view, draws a fruitful discussion framework for raising the contemporary debate on scientific realism. We argue that Wittgenstein outlines here a two-sided approach to the logical status of the most general scientific propositions; an approach inconsistent both with a realist interpretation of the nature of scientific knowledge and with a conventionalist one. After briefly commenting on the historical context underlying Wittgenstein’s approach, and tentatively considering a possible extension of the Tractarian approach (to idealized generalisations describing classes of physical systems), we defend that Wittgenstein’s sketchy approach has not been successfully extended and developed in the philosophy of science until the last decades. Such an achievement, weconclude, has been possible after the rejection of the propositional view of scientific knowledge underlying the very Wittgensteinian approach.

Concept formation is complex cognitive phenomenon which has been only partially modelIed in Cognitive Psychology and AI. Following a detailed and critical evaluation of such models we conclude that their main shortcoming of not being able to explain the nature of the semantics of concepts is because they fail to take into account the role of learning in concept formation. As a radical alternative it is proposed that a more (semantically) complete model would necessarily have to give an account of how concepts are formed as a result of agent-environment interaction, that is mediated by an agents action in its environment and feedback from it. Such a shift in focus renders the investigation of the nature of concept formation as a complex and dynamic adaptive system. In accordance with this shift in perspective we propose and describe a novel methodological approach and a computational model that would support simple concept formation in an autonomous agent, which enables us to investigate concept formation in a more comprehensive manner. Overall we provide a compelling justification of the efficacy of such an ecological approach to the study of concept formation.

Jorgensen’s dilemma has been analysed from various theoretical angles. However, it is not the aim of this essay to “theorize” but to “experiment” on the above mentioned dilemma; particularly to carry out attempts of deontic reproduction of a logical paradox substituting the value “truth” for the value “validity”. The relevance of the obtained results will be appraised from the point of view of Conte’s paradigm“syntactic (deontic) validity” vs. “dianoetic validity”.

Taking into account that no subordering of a scattered partial ordering is dense, we are going to define one idea of rank of a partial ordering which will make possible an equivalent but more operative definition of a scattered partial ordering. Using this notion of rank and the Scott’s sentence associated with the ordering, we are going to characterise in the infinitary language Lw1.w each element of a subclass of the partial orderings, this of the strongly scattered countable partial orderings.

The notion of hyperrandomness is introduced and it is proved that the set of the hyperrandom numbers is effectively inmune but not hyperinmune.