A new edition of Quine's most important work.Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is a social art. In acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." As Patricia Smith Churchland notes in her foreword to this new edition, with Word and Object Quine challenged the tradition of conceptual analysis as …
Lectures, many never before published, that offer insights into the early thinking of the mathematician and polymath George Boole.George Boole (1815-1864), remembered by history as the developer of an eponymous form of algebraic logic, can be considered a pioneer of the information age not only because of the application of Boolean logic to the design of switching circuits but also because of h…
Formal ways of representing uncertainty and various logics for reasoning about it; updated with new material on weighted probability measures, complexity-theoretic considerations, and other topics.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many other disciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematical logic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community. This book presents a comprehensive treatment …
"The thirteen chapters written expressly for this book by logicians, theoretical computer scientists, philosophers, and semanticists address, from the perspective of mathematical logic, the problems of understanding and studying the flow of information through any information-processing system. The logic of information flow has applications in both computer science and natural language processi…
Nearly a hundred years have passed since Viggo Brun invented his famous sieve, and the use of sieve methods is constantly evolving. As probability and combinatorics have penetrated the fabric of mathematical activity, sieve methods have become more versatile and sophisticated and in recent years have played a part in some of the most spectacular mathematical discoveries. Many arithmetical inves…
The study of NIP theories has received much attention from model theorists in the last decade, fuelled by applications to o-minimal structures and valued fields. This book, the first to be written on NIP theories, is an introduction to the subject that will appeal to anyone interested in model theory: graduate students and researchers in the field, as well as those in nearby areas such as combi…
Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. In this volume, the seventh publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, Font and Jansana develop a very general approach to the algebraization of…
This book presents a unifying framework for using priority arguments to prove theorems in computability. Priority arguments provide the most powerful theorem-proving technique in the field, but most of the applications of this technique are ad hoc, masking the unifying principles used in the proofs. The proposed framework presented isolates many of these unifying combinatorial principles and us…
This book celebrates the work of Don Pigozzi on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In addition to articles written by leading specialists and his disciples, it presents Pigozzi’s scientific output and discusses his impact on the development of science. The book both catalogues his works and offers an extensive profile of Pigozzi as a person, sketching the most important events, not only relat…