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Paraconsistency and Philosophy of Science: Foundations and Perspectives

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Paraconsistent Logic: Consistency, Contradiction and Negation

Part of the book series: Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science ((LEUS,volume 40))

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Abstract

This chapter examines the close connections between paraconsistency and philosophy of science, providing a philosophical justification for LFIs, and for paraconsistent logics in general, concluding that a paraconsistent approach to the foundations of science seem to be almost inevitable.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Quote attributed to Stephen Hawking.

  2. 2.

    An acerbic criticism of ‘those philosophers and logicians who have craved for, relied on, hinted at or watched over inconsistent science (henceforth: iMongers)’, comparing them to warmongers, as if science could be saved from contradiction by blaming the ones who point to the problem, is advanced in [12].

  3. 3.

    The reader should perhaps compare with an analogous difficulty in demonstrating the non-existence of dialetheias, qua ontologically true contradictions; dialetheias may be useful as hypothetical entities to simplify the explanation of paraconsistent logic, but they are hardly necessary.

  4. 4.

    The discussion in this subsection is based upon material from [19], mostly following A. Einstein himself in [20 ] and Chap. 15 of [21].

  5. 5.

    Actually, what Einstein did was to consider that the mass of a body increases with velocity, and of course this changed the whole thing. We are not going into more details, but a friendly and accessible presentation may be found in Chap. 15 of [21].

  6. 6.

    Recall that multivalued operations, defining swap structures, are essential in order to semantically characterize some LFIs, as shown in Chap. 6.

  7. 7.

    In the text below, the page numbers refers to the notes for Husserl’s lecture published as an appendix to the Philosophie der Arithmetik, E. Husserl, Pfeffer, Halle, 1891.

  8. 8.

    The note refers to G.H. Moore: 1982, Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg-New York, pp. 64–76.

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Carnielli, W., Coniglio, M.E. (2016). Paraconsistency and Philosophy of Science: Foundations and Perspectives. In: Paraconsistent Logic: Consistency, Contradiction and Negation. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 40. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33205-5_9

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