Luis M. Augusto

Not focusing on the history of classical logic, this book provides discussions and quotes central passages on its origins and development, namely from a philosophical perspective. Not being a book in mathematical logic, it takes formal logic from an essentially mathematical perspective. Biased towards a computational approach, with SAT and VAL as its backbone, this is an introduction to logic that covers essential aspects of the three branches of logic, to wit, philosophical, mathematical, and computational.

Since Freud and his co-author Breuer spoke of dissociation in 1895, a scientific paradigm was painstakingly established in the field of unconscious cognition. This is the dissociation paradigm. However, recent critical analysis of the many and various reported dissociations reveals their blurred, or unveridical, character. Moreover, we remain ignorant with respect to the ways cognitive phenomena transition from consciousness to an unconscious mode. This hinders us from filling in the puzzle of the unified mind. We conclude that we have reached a Kuhnian crisis in the field of unconscious cognition, and we predict that new models, incorporating partly the relevant findings of the dissociation paradigm—but also of dynamic psychology—, will soon be established. We further predict that some of these models will be largely based on the pairs representation–process and analog–digital.

2nd edition. Many-valued logics are those logics that have more than the two classical truth values, to wit, true and false; in fact, they can have from three to infinitely many truth values. This property, together with truth-functionality, provides a powerful formalism to reason in settings where classical logic—as well as other non-classical logics—is of no avail. Indeed, originally motivated by philosophical concerns, these logics soon proved relevant for a plethora of applications ranging from switching theory to cognitive modeling, and they are today in more demand than ever, due to the realization that inconsistency and vagueness in knowledge bases and information processes are not only inevitable and acceptable, but also perhaps welcome. The main modern applications of (any) logic are to be found in the digital computer, and we thus require the practical knowledge how to computerize—which also means automate—decisions (i.e. reasoning) in many-valued logics. This, in turn, necessitates a mathematical foundation for these logics. This book provides both these mathematical foundation and practical knowledge in a rigorous, yet accessible, text, while at the same time situating these logics in the context of the satisfiability problem (SAT) and automated deduction. The main text is complemented with a large selection of exercises, a plus for the reader wishing to not only learn about, but also do something with, many-valued logics.

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist viewpoint, I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations.

The traditional model of human cognition (TMHC) postulates an ontological and/or structural gap between conscious and unconscious mental representations. By and large, it sees higher-level mental processes as commonly conceptual or symbolic in nature and therefore conscious, whereas unconscious, lower-level representations are conceived as non-conceptual or sub-symbolic. However, experimental evidence belies this model, suggesting that higher-level mental processes can be, and often are, carried out in a wholly unconscious way and/or without conceptual representations, and that these can be processed unconsciously. This entails that the TMHC, as well as the theories on mental representation it motivates and that in turn support it, is wrong.

More often than not, theories of belief and of belief ascription restrict themselves to conscious beliefs, thus obliterating a vast part of our mental life and offering extremely incomplete, unrealistic theories. Indeed, conscious beliefs are the exception, not the rule, as far as human doxastic states are concerned, and a naturalistic, realistic theory of knowledge that aspires to completeness has to take unconscious beliefs into consideration. This paper is the elaboration of such a theory of belief.

Contemporary studies in unconscious cognition are essentially founded on dissociation, i.e., on how it dissociates with respect to conscious mental processes and representations. This is claimed to be in so many and diverse ways that one is often lost in dissociation. In order to reduce this state of confusion we here carry out two major tasks: based on the central distinction between cognitive processes and representations, we identify and isolate the main dissociation paradigms; we then critically analyze their key tenets and reported findings.

Eckhart’s doctrine of the bilder is highly original not so much for containing new elements as for the conciliation it achieved among sources at first sight incompatible; these sources can be reduced to three main ones: Plato, Aristotle, and Christian thought. In this paper, I show that Eckhart’s doctrine of the bilder is simultaneously a) an Aristotelian epistemic recreation of Plato’s doctrine of ideas, and b) a Christian ontological recreation of Aristotle’s doctrine of cognition. As such, it is a technical manipulation of these sources, rather than a mystical doctrine.

The concept of unconscious knowledge is fundamental for an understanding of human thought processes and mentation in general; however, the psychological community at large is not familiar with it. This paper offers a survey of the main psychological research currently being carried out into cognitive processes, and examines pathways that can be integrated into a discipline of unconscious knowledge. It shows that the field has already a defined history and discusses some of the features that all kinds of unconscious knowledge seem to share at a deeper level. With the aim of promoting further research, we discuss the main challenges which the postulation of unconscious cognition faces within the psychological community.

The definition of knowledge as justified true belief is the best we presently have. However, the canonical tripartite analysis of knowledge does not do justice to it due to a Platonic conception of a priori truth that puts the cart before the horse. Within a pragmatic approach, I argue that by doing away with a priori truth, namely by submitting truth to justification, and by accordingly altering the canonical analysis of knowledge, this is a fruitful definition. So fruitful indeed that it renders the Gettier counterexamples vacuous, allowing positive work in epistemology and related disciplines.

Given the evidence available today, we know that the later Middle Ages knew strong forms of idealism. However, Plato alone will not do to explain some of its features. Aristotle was the most important philosophical authority in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but until now no one dared explore in his thought the roots of this idealism because of the dogma of realism surrounding him. I challenge this dogma, showing that the Stagirite contained in his thought the roots of idealist aspects that will be developed, namely by Dietrich of Freiberg and Eckhart of Hochheim, into a fully idealist epistemology.

In Who's Afraid of Idealism? the philosophical concept of idealism, the extent to which reality is mind-made, is examined in new light. Author Luis M. Augusto explores epistemological idealism, at the source of all other kinds of idealism, from the viewpoints of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, two philosophers who spent a large part of their lives denigrating the very concept. Working from Kant and Nietzsche's viewpoints that idealism was a scandal to philosophy and the cause of nihilism, Augusto evaluates these philosophers and their role in shaping epistemological idealism. Using textual evidence from their writings and their reactions to western philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, and Hegel, Who's Afraid of Idealism? argues that in fact Kant and Nietzsche were really idealists at heart. In accessible prose, this text puts forward a theory that goes against current scholarly opinion, and even Kant and Nietzsche's opinions of themselves.