Scaling from Weather to Climate

One of the theoretical tensions that has arisen from Anthropocene studies is what Dipesh Chakrabarty has called the ‘two figures of the human’, and the question of which of these two figures of the human inheres in the concept of the Anthropocene more. On the one hand, the Human is conceived as the universal reasoning subject upon whom political rights and equality are based, and on the other hand, humankind is the collection of all individuals of our species, with all of the inequalities, differences, and variability inherent in any species category. This chapter takes up Deborah Coen’s argument that Chakrabarty’s claim of the ‘incommensurability’ of these two figures of the human ignores the way both were constructed within debates over how to relate local geophysical specificities to theoretical generalities. This chapter examines two cases in the history of science. The first is Martin Rudwick’s historical exploration of how geologists slowly gained the ability to use fossils and highly local stratigraphic surveys to reconstruct the history of the Earth in deep time, rather than resort to speculative cosmological theory. The second is Coen’s own history of imperial, Austrian climate science, a case where early nineteenth-century assumptions about the capriciousness of the weather gave way to theories of climate informed by thermodynamics and large-scale data collection.

MECHANIZING PRINCIPIA LOGICO-METAPHYSICA IN FUNCTIONAL TYPE-THEORY

Principia Logico-Metaphysica contains a foundational logical theory for metaphysics, mathematics, and the sciences. It includes a canonical development of Abstract Object Theory [AOT], a metaphysical theory (inspired by ideas of Ernst Mally, formalized by Zalta) that distinguishes between ordinary and abstract objects.This article reports on recent work in which AOT has been successfully represented and partly automated in the proof assistant system Isabelle/HOL. Initial experiments within this framework reveal a crucial but overlooked fact: a deeply-rooted and known paradox is reintroduced in AOT when the logic of complex terms is simply adjoined to AOT’s specially formulated comprehension principle for relations. This result constitutes a new and important paradox, given how much expressive and analytic power is contributed by having the two kinds of complex terms in the system. Its discovery is the highlight of our joint project and provides strong evidence for a new kind of scientific practice in philosophy, namely, computational metaphysics.Our results were made technically possible by a suitable adaptation of Benzmüller’s metalogical approach to universal reasoning by semantically embedding theories in classical higher-order logic. This approach enables one to reuse state-of-the-art higher-order proof assistants, such as Isabelle/HOL, for mechanizing and experimentally exploring challenging logics and theories such as AOT. Our results also provide a fresh perspective on the question of whether relational type theory or functional type theory better serves as a foundation for logic and metaphysics.

Is pragmatics the answer to our quest for meaning?

In this paper, I aim to explore the contribution (neo-)Gricean pragmatics, as seen by Mira Ariel, can make to the notion of meaning. In her view, the ‘semantic meaning’ of a sentence, seen as the core unit of grammar, can be computed on the basis of the (rule-based) code of a given natural language, revealing the range of meaning(s) this sentence has in isolation. Pragmatic meaning starts with semantic meaning; it is calculated through ‘inferencing’, involving the contextualisation of this sentence and the application of (universal) reasoning. It makes us understand a sentence. This view comes with problems, e.g. the notion of language as ‘code’, the status of rules, the borderline between grammar and pragmatics, the issues of cognition and of the speaker’s intentions (problems of which Ariel is very much aware). As an alternative, I will suggest an approach that bases the interpretation of text segments on discourse evidence shared by the interpretive community, without recourse to people’s minds.