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18Information Recovery ProblemsTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 10 (3): 55-78. 1995.An information recovery problem is the problem of constructing a proposition containing the information dropped in going from a given premise to a given conclusion that folIows. The proposition(s) to beconstructed can be required to satisfy other conditions as well, e.g. being independent of the conclusion, or being “informationally unconnected” with the conclusion, or some other condition dictated by the context. This paper discusses various types of such problems, it presents techniques and pr…Read more
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12Future Research on Ancient Theories of Communication and ReasoningIn Ancient Logic and its Modern Interpretations, Reidel. pp. 185--187. 1974.
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Dept. of Philosophy University of California at San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093 USALinguistics and Philosophy 13 423-475. 1990.
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735A Farewell Letter To My StudentsPhilosophy Now 92 18-18. 2012.I am saying farewell after more than forty happy years of teaching logic at the University of Buffalo. But this is only a partial farewell. I will no longer be at UB to teach classroom courses or seminars. But nothing else will change. I will continue to be available for independent study. I will continue to write abstracts and articles with people who have taken courses or seminars with me. And I will continue to honor the LogicLifetimeGuarantee™, which is earned by taking one of my logic cours…Read more
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352Hare and Others on the PropositionPrincipia: An International Journal of Epistemology 15 (1): 51-76. 2011.History witnesses alternative approaches to “the proposition”. The proposition has been referred to as the object of belief, disbelief, and doubt: generally as the object of propositional attitudes, that which can be said to be believed, disbelieved, understood, etc. It has also been taken to be the object of grasping, judging, assuming, affirming, denying, and inquiring: generally as the object of propositional actions, that which can be said to be grasped, judged true or false, assumed for rea…Read more
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309Lies, half-truths, and falsehoods about Tarski’s 1933 “liar” antinomies.Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 18 (1): 140-141. 2012.We discuss misinformation about “the liar antinomy” with special reference to Tarski’s 1933 truth-definition paper [1]. Lies are speech-acts, not merely sentences or propositions. Roughly, lies are statements of propositions not believed by their speakers. Speakers who state their false beliefs are often not lying. And speakers who state true propositions that they don’t believe are often lying—regardless of whether the non-belief is disbelief. Persons who state propositions on which they hav…Read more
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3731The inseparability of logic and ethicsFree Inquiry 9 (2): 37-40. 1989.This essay takes logic and ethics in broad senses: logic as the science of evidence; ethics as the science justice. One of its main conclusions is that neither science can be fruitfully pursued without the virtues fostered by the other: logic is pointless without fairness and compassion; ethics is pointless without rigor and objectivity. The logician urging us to be dispassionate is in resonance and harmony with the ethicist urging us to be compassionate.
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El nacimiento de la lógica. La concepción de la prueba en términos de Verdad y ConsecuenciaAgora 11 (2): 67. 1992.
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335Expressing set-size equalityBulletin of Symbolic Logic 21 (2): 239. 2015.The word ‘equality’ often requires disambiguation, which is provided by context or by an explicit modifier. For each sort of magnitude, there is at least one sense of ‘equals’ with its correlated senses of ‘is greater than’ and ‘is less than’. Given any two magnitudes of the same sort—two line segments, two plane figures, two solids, two time intervals, two temperature intervals, two amounts of money in a single currency, and the like—the one equals the other or the one is greater than the other…Read more
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1109String theoryJournal of Symbolic Logic 39 (4): 625-637. 1974.For each positive n , two alternative axiomatizations of the theory of strings over n alphabetic characters are presented. One class of axiomatizations derives from Tarski's system of the Wahrheitsbegriff and uses the n characters and concatenation as primitives. The other class involves using n character-prefixing operators as primitives and derives from Hermes' Semiotik. All underlying logics are second order. It is shown that, for each n, the two theories are definitionally equivalent [or syn…Read more
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334Two-method errors: having it both ways.Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. forthcoming.►JOHN CORCORAN AND IDRIS SAMAWI HAMID, Two-method errors: having it both ways. Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150, USA E-mail: [email protected] Philosophy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1781 USA E-mail: [email protected] Where two methods produce similar results, mixing the two sometimes creates errors we call two-method errors, TMEs: in style, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, implicature, logic, or action. This lecture analyzes examples found i…Read more
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18Book Review:Foundations of Mathematics William S. Hatcher (review)Philosophy of Science 39 (1): 88-. 1972.
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989Completeness of an ancient logicJournal of Symbolic Logic 37 (4): 696-702. 1972.In previous articles, it has been shown that the deductive system developed by Aristotle in his "second logic" is a natural deduction system and not an axiomatic system as previously had been thought. It was also stated that Aristotle's logic is self-sufficient in two senses: First, that it presupposed no other logical concepts, not even those of propositional logic; second, that it is (strongly) complete in the sense that every valid argument expressible in the language of the system is deducib…Read more
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322CORCORAN REVIEWS THE 4 VOLUMES OF TARSKI’S COLLECTED PAPERSMATHEMATICAL REVIEWS 91 (I): 110-114. 1991.CORCORAN REVIEWS THE 4 VOLUMES OF TARSKI’S COLLECTED PAPERS Alfred Tarski (1901--1983) is widely regarded as one of the two giants of twentieth-century logic and also as one of the four greatest logicians of all time (Aristotle, Frege and Gödel being the other three). Of the four, Tarski was the most prolific as a logician. The four volumes of his collected papers, which exclude most of his 19 monographs, span over 2500 pages. Aristotle's writings are comparable in volume, but most of the Aristo…Read more
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364SYNTACTICSIn AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, . pp. 746-7. 2007.Corcoran, J. 2007. Syntactics, American Philosophy: an Encyclopedia. 2007. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge. pp.745-6. Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics are the three levels of investigation into semiotics, or the comprehensive study of systems of communication, as described in 1938 by the American philosopher Charles Morris (1903-1979). Syntactics studies signs themselves and their interrelations in abstraction from their meanings and from their uses and users. Semant…Read more
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1492007-2008 Winter Meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic-San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA-January 8-9, 2008-Abstracts (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 14 (3). 2008.
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Bernard Bolzano's "Theory of Science" (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 (2): 282. 1973.
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334Counterarguments and counterexamples.In Luis Vega (ed.), Luis Vega, Ed. Compendio de Lógica, Argumentación, y Retórica. Madrid: Trotta., . pp. 137-142. 2010.English translation of an entry on pages 137–42 of the Spanish-language dictionary of logic: Luis Vega, Ed. Compendio de Lógica, Argumentación, y Retórica. Madrid: Trotta. DEDICATION: To my friend and collaborator Kevin Tracy. This short essay—containing careful definitions of ‘counterargument’ and ‘counterexample’—is not an easy read but it is one you’ll be glad you struggled through. It contains some carefully chosen examples suitable for classroom discussion. Using the word ‘counterexample’ …Read more
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48On definitional equivalence and related topicsHistory and Philosophy of Logic 1 (n/a): 231. 1980.
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238Review of: Garciadiego, A., "Emergence of...paradoxes...set theory", Historia Mathematica (1985), in Mathematical Reviews 87j:01035.MATHEMATICAL REVIEWS 87 (J): 01035. 1987.DEFINING OUR TERMS A “paradox" is an argumentation that appears to deduce a conclusion believed to be false from premises believed to be true. An “inconsistency proof for a theory" is an argumentation that actually deduces a negation of a theorem of the theory from premises that are all theorems of the theory. An “indirect proof of the negation of a hypothesis" is an argumentation that actually deduces a conclusion known to be false from the hypothesis alone or, more commonly, from the hypothesi…Read more
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Axiomatic methodIn Audi Robert (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 57--58. 1995.
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552This presentation includes a complete bibliography of John Corcoran’s publications devoted at least in part to Aristotle’s logic. Sections I–IV list 20 articles, 43 abstracts, 3 books, and 10 reviews. It starts with two watershed articles published in 1972: the Philosophy & Phenomenological Research article that antedates Corcoran’s Aristotle’s studies and the Journal of Symbolic Logic article first reporting his original results; it ends with works published in 2015. A few of the items are anno…Read more
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12La lógica de Aristóteles en el departamento de filosofía de la Universidad de BúfaloIdeas y Valores: Revista Colombiana de Filosofía 140 5. 2009.
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895Meanings of ImplicationDiálogos. Revista de Filosofía de la Universidad de Puerto Rico 9 (24): 59-76. 1973.Thirteen meanings of 'implication' are described and compared. Among them are relations that have been called: logical implication, material implication,deductive implication, formal implication, enthymemic implication, and factual implication. In a given context, implication is the homogeneous two-place relation expressed by the relation verb 'implies'. For heuristic and expository reasons this article skirts many crucial issues including use-mention, the nature of the entities that imply and a…Read more
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257The principle of wholistic referenceManuscrito 27 (1): 159-171. 2004.In its strongest, unqualified form the principle of wholistic reference is that each and every proposition refers to the whole universe of discourse as such, regardless how limited the referents of its non-logical or content terms. Even though Boole changed from a monistic fixed-universe framework in his earlier works of 1847 and 1848 to a pluralistic multiple-universe framework in his mature treatise of 1854, he never wavered in his frank avowal of the principle of wholistic reference, possibly…Read more
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41Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Boole's Laws of ThoughtHistory and Philosophy of Logic 24 (4): 261-288. 2003.Prior Analytics by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and Laws of Thought by the English mathematician George Boole are the two most important surviving original logical works from before the advent of modern logic. This article has a single goal: to compare Aristotle's system with the system that Boole constructed over twenty-two centuries later intending to extend and perfect what Aristotle had started. This comparison merits an article itself. Accordingly, this article does not discuss many othe…Read more
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Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |