scrivendo quello che penso, solitamente senza presunzioni, presupposti o supposti

Widespread literacy… is not a natural baseline but a costly ecological accomplishment. It depends on sustained, large-scale societal investment in both cultivation and maintenance. If that investment falters—or if new modes of communication arise that are less cognitively demanding and more closely aligned with our oral-auditory predispositions—then this hard-won literate ecology can erode rapidly.

In other words, mass literacy is not simply a skill that might fade. It is a complex cognitive adaptation—difficult to build, easy to displace—and, if outcompeted, literacy may once again become the province of a specialized elite.

Historically, we accepted literacy’s steep training cost because it offered a unique bundle of symbolic affordances: durable storage, precise retrieval, spatialization, and combinability. These were not luxuries— they were prerequisites for disciplines like law, science, literature, and philosophy.

Now, AI-mediated oral-auditory systems provide many of those same affordances—cloud memory, instant query, spatialized workspaces, speech-to-anything translation—at a fraction of the acquisition cost. We do not need ten years of schooling to learn to ask a language model, by voice, to store or retrieve language.

If new media outperform text on primary utility, ordinary selection pressure may displace literacy from its cultural and cognitive niche. But while these systems may replicate many of the affordances of textuality, their effects may be fundamentally different. And when it comes to literacy, it is precisely the secondary and tertiary effects that carry disproportionate value.

These effects include recursive empathy, long-horizon abstraction, disciplined counterfactual reasoning, interiority, and the capacity to entertain multiple perspectives over time. They emerge slowly, through sustained symbolic engagement. They are difficult to measure, easy to overlook, and prone to erosion when unattended.

To be clear about the mechanism: our society selects for the affordances of a medium—speed, ease, efficiency—not for its effects. And it is the effects of literacy that hold its civilizational value. This is the critical point: those deep cognitive and ethical capacities are not being selected for. They are not easily monetized or optimized. They rarely register on the dashboards that guide decision-making.

Jac Mullen

https://jacmullen.substack.com/p/before-and-after-literacy

The adaptive logic programme aims at developing a type of formal logics (and the connected metatheory) that is especially suited to explicate the many interesting dynamic consequence relations that occur in human reasoning but for which there is no positive test (see the next section). Such consequence relations occur, for example, in inductive reasoning, handling inconsistent data, …

The explication of such consequence relations is realized by the dynamic proof theories of adaptive logics. These proof theories are dynamic in that formulas derived at some stage may not be derived at a later stage, and vice versa.

The programme is application driven. This is one of the reasons why the predicative level is considered extremely important, even if, for many adaptive logics, the basic features of the dynamics are already present at the propositional level. The main applications are taken from the philosophy of science; some also from more pedestrian contexts.

Much interesting actual reasoning displays two forms of non-standard dynamics.

1. An external dynamics: a conclusion may be withdrawn in view of new information. This means that the consequence relation is non-monotonic.
2. An internal dynamics: a conclusion may be withdrawn in view of the better understanding of the premises provided by a continuation of the reasoning.

While examples of logics displaying the external dynamics are available, logicians did not pay much attention to the internal dynamics. And yet it is very familiar to anyone. Reasoning from one’s convictions, one often derives a consequence that one later rejects, even if one’s convictions were not modified. The point is that humans are unable to see at once all the consequences of a set of premises (in this case, one’s convictions).

To clearly understand the two forms of dynamics, it is useful to compare them to the standard forms of logical dynamics. These are common to all reasoning, and well known from usual logics. First consider the standard external dynamics. If we are reasoning (by some logic L) from a set of data  and, at some point in time, are supplied with a supplementary set of data ‘, we are in general able to derive more consequences from that point in time on. Formally: Cn_L()  Cn_L(’). Next consider the standard internal dynamics. Given a set of rules of inference, not all formulas derivable from a set of premises are derivable by a single application of a rule at some stage of a proof. The set of formulas derivable by a single application of a rule monotonically increases as the proof proceeds. A different form of dynamics is related to the fact that humans are unable to see at once all the consequences of a set of premises. As a result, some statements will only be seen to be derivable from the premises after other statements have been derived. The derivability of a statement, however, does not depend on the question whether one sees that it is derivable. So, this form of internal dynamics is related to logical heuristics and to computational aspects, rather than of the logic properly. To be more precise: the formulation of the proof theory is fully independent of it. As we shall see later, the matter is completely different for consequence relations that display an adaptive internal dynamics.

Many consequence relations are undecidable and the predicative versions of nearly all logics are undecidable. If a logic is undecidable but monotonic, there still may be a positive test for derivability. However, if a consequence relation is undecidable and non-monotonic, there can only be a positive test for it in some rather artificial cases. There may at best be a definition of consequence relation in terms of a monotonic logic or in terms of a semantics or in terms of continuations of a proof. And as a logic may be decidable for certain fragments of the language, there may also be criteria for derivability.

A general characteristic of the consequence relations mentioned in the previous section is that certain inferences are considered as correct iff certain formulas behave normally. What normality means will depend on the adaptive logic. In an inconsistency-adaptive logic, abnormalities are inconsistencies (possibly of a specific form); in some adaptive logics of induction, abnormalities are negations of generalizations (for example: ~(x)(PxQx)). In some (prioritized) adaptive logics, abnormalities (of some priority level) are negations of premises (of that priority) — see the section on Flat and prioritized adaptive logics for an example.

An adaptive logic supposes that all formulas behave normally unless and until proven otherwise. Moreover, if an abnormality occurs, it is considered as local. This means that, even if some formula behaves abnormally, all other formulas are still supposed to behave normally unless and until proven otherwise. We shall see the effect of this in the following section.

While some consequences of a set of premises depend on the normal behaviour of certain formulas, other consequences follow come what may. Thus, an adaptive logic of induction enables one to derive certain generalizations as well as certain ‘predictions’ from a set of premises. To do so, one relies on the supposition that formulas behave normally unless and until proven otherwise. However, the premises also have deductive consequences that follow independently of any normality suppositions.

This naturally leads to seeing an adaptive logic as defined by three elements: the lower limit logic, a set of abnormalities, and an adaptive strategy.
· The lower limit logic determines which consequences hold independently of any presuppositions (or conditions).
· A set of abnormalities, which is characterized by a logical form. For example, the set of abnormalities may contain the existential closure of all formulas of the form A&~A. This logical form may be restricted. For example, the formulas of the form A&~A may be restricted to those in which A is a primitive formula (a schematic letter for sentences, a primitive predicative formula, or an identity). Extending the lower limit logic with an axiom that rules out the occurrence of abnormalities, results in the upper limit logic. In other words, the set of lower limit models that verify no abnormality are the upper limit models. The upper limit logic determines which consequences follow in the normal situation.
· An adaptive strategy. If an abnormality is derivable from the premises (by the lower limit logic), the upper limit logic reduces the premises (or theory) to triviality. However, the adaptive logic still interprets the premises “as normally as possible”. This phrase is ambiguous: there are several ways to do so. The adaptive strategy will pick one specific way to interpret the premises as normally as possible.

This clarifies the way in which adaptive logics adapt themselves to specific premises. The logic interprets the premises in agreement with the lower limit logic and, moreover, as much as possible in agreement with the upper limit logic. If some formulas (premises or lower limit consequences of the premises) are abnormal, the adaptive logic will not add the upper limit consequences of these formulas.

(Universiteit Gent, Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science)

http://logica.ugent.be/adlog/al.html

I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian. But I had first encountered Thomism thirty-eight years earlier, as an undergraduate, not in the form of moral philosophy, but in that of a critique of English culture developed by members of the Dominican order. Yet, although impressed by that critique, I hesitated, for those Dominicans made me aware of the philosophical presuppositions of their critique, of a set of Thomistic judgments about the relationships between body, mind, and soul, about passions, will, and intellect, about virtues and reason-informed human actions. And those theses I found problematic. Why so?

From 1945 to 1949 I was an undergraduate student in classics at what was then Queen Mary College in the University of London, reading Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle with my teachers, while also, from 1947 onwards, occasionally attending lectures given by A. J. Ayer or Karl Popper, or by visiting speakers to Ayer’s seminar at University College, such as John Wisdom. Early on I had read Language, Truth and Logic, and Ayer’s student James Thomson introduced me to the Tractatus and to Tarski’s work on truth. Ayer and his students were exemplary in their clarity and rigor and in the philosophical excitement that their debates generated. And I became convinced that the test of any set of philosophical theses, including those defended by Thomists, was whether it could be vindicated. In and through such debates. Yet I also had to learn—and this took a little longer—that in the debates of academic philosophy in the twentieth century no set of theses is ever decisively vindicated.

(more…)

C.so Cairoli (TO)

L’opera letteraria potrebbe essere definita come un’operazione nel linguaggio scritto che coinvolge contemporaneamente più livelli di realtà.

… la letteratura non conosce la realtà ma solo livelli. Se esista la realtà di cui i vari livelli non sono che aspetti parziali, o se esistano solo i livelli, questo la letteratura non può deciderlo. La letteratura conosce la realtà dei livelli e questa è una realtà che conosce forse meglio di quanto non s’arrivi a conoscerla attraverso altri procedimenti conoscitivi. È già molto.

(I livelli della realtà in letteratura. 1978)