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SORITES, ISSN 1135-1349

Issue #05. May 1996. Pp. 4-5

Abstracts of the Papers

Copyright (C) by SORITES and the authors

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Abstracts of the Papers

Technological Escalation and the Exploration Model of Natural Science by Nicholas Rescher (1) Our cognitive competence is well accounted for by our evolutionary niche in the world's scheme of things. (2) The development of inquiry in natural science is best understood on analogy with exploration -- to be sure, not in the geographical mode but rather exploration in nature's parametric space of such physical quantities as temperature, pressure, and field strength. (3) The technology-mediated exploration at issue here involves an interaction between us humans and nature that becomes increasingly difficult (and expensive) as we move ever farther away from the home base of the accustomed environment of our evolutionary heritage. The course of scientific progress accordingly involves a technological escalation -- an ascent to successively higher levels of technological sophistication that is unavoidably required for the production of the requisite observational data.

Deontics between Semantics and Ontology
by Carlos Alarcón Cabrera As an adjective, the term «Deontic» is traditionally used in the sense of «directive», «normative», «prescriptive», «concerning ought». As a noun, «Deontics» is later introduced by Amedeo G. Conte, referring to the analysis of the theoretical and philosophical foundations of Deontic Logic. Within the wide field of Contian Deontics, I am dealing here with five questions: a) the distinction between «categorical constitutivity» and «hypothetical constitutivity»; b) the typology of the concept of validity; c) the problem of the pragmatic ambivalence of deontic utterances; d) the conception of repeal as an act of rejection; e) the reinterpretation of the «Is-ought question».

Counterfactuals Revisited by Joseph S. Fulda This paper presents an ontologically leaner, mathematically cleaner, and logically keener explication of counterfactuals and possible worlds than the standard Lewis-Stalnaker account.