Urban Development: The Logic Of Making Plans

This book serves as a basis for the exploration of language in a more systematic way. The main impetus for writing this book derives from the fact that linguistics and semiotics are two fields of study that need to be brought together under one compass because language is what is known as the “passkey semiotic,” i.e. the system of signs that underlies all other sign systems owing to its foundational status. Due to the current balkanization of linguistics as an academic discipline, the academic study of language structure rarely if ever incorporates the insights of semiotics and semioticians when presenting its material.

The last twenty years have seen remarkable developments in our understanding of how the ancient Greek thinkers handled the general concept of being and its several varieties. The most general examination of the meaning of the Greek verb 'esti'/'einai'/'on' both in common usage and in the philosophical literature has been presented by Charles H. Kahn, most extensively in his 1973 book The Verb 'Be' in Ancient Greek.

In their book, the authors introduce the topic of urban development from a systems (theoretical) perspective and provide explanatory approaches, tips and methodological instructions for dealing with urban complexity. Knowing full well that this sometimes amounts to squaring the circle, the authors draw on applied systemic approaches and systematically couple these with epistemological currents that can be assigned to Luhmann's systems theory. The social understanding of this theory of social systems represents a very good starting point for understanding urban development and urban complexity. From this perspective, urban development can be seen as a process in which organisations and individuals with their own expectations and perspectives are involved, in which contradictions and conflicts seem inevitable and the future cannot be clearly predicted. Decisions in cities and municipalities are therefore always associated with risks, irritations and unexpected consequences. With the Potsdam lodestar approach, Rolfes and Wilhelm present a multidimensional approach to managing urban development processes.

This book is about the logic of Boolean equations. Such equations were central in the "algebra of logic" created in 1847 by Boole [12, 13] and devel­ oped by others, notably Schroder [178], in the remainder of the nineteenth century. Boolean equations are also the language by which digital circuits are described today. Logicians in the twentieth century have abandoned Boole's equation­ based logic in favor of the more powerful predicate calculus. As a result, digital engineers-and others who use Boole's language routinely-remain largely unaware of its utility as a medium for reasoning. The aim of this book, accordingly, is to is to present a systematic outline of the logic of Boolean equations, in the hope that Boole's methods may prove useful in solving present-day problems. Two Logical Languages Logic seeks to reduce reasoning to calculation.

This book provides the blueprint of a thinking machine.
While most of the current works in Artificial Intelligence (AI) focus on individual aspects of intelligence and cognition, the project described in this book, Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS), is designed and developed to attack the AI problem as a whole.