From: diraerts@vub.ac.be (Aerts Dirk)
Subject: AFOS Newsletter 22 May 1997.
To: afos@listserv.vub.ac.be
Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 02:12:21 +0200 (DST)
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Sender: afos-request@listserv.vub.ac.be
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            A F O S - N E W S L E T T E R  22 May 1997.
           *******************************************


Dear AFOS member,

In this AFOS newsletter you will find new information about the AFOS 
www site, the information about the summer school on Theory of 
Knowledge that AFOS organizes this summer, some FOS matters, 
information about the formation of regional AFOS groups in Russia and 
China, and a letter of the president concerning the Bialowski panel.
For any suggestions, remarks or questions concerning AFOS matters in 
general, and concerning particularly the content of this newsletter, 
you can send an e-mail to the secretary Diederik Aerts 
(diraerts@vub.ac.be) or to the president Ryszard Wojcicki 
(iandi@plearn.edu.pl).

Ryszard Wojcicki, Diederik Aerts and Paul Humphreys.


              1. T H E  A F O S   W W W   S I T E.
              ************************************

As you were told in the foregoing newsletter, AFOS has now a www site 
that is continuously being updated. The address of the AFOS www site 
is: 

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/AFOS/

We would like to invite all members of AFOS to send us suggestions 
about the content of this WWW site. In particular we would like to 
receive the information about links that we could make with AFOS 
related www pages, such that the AFOS WWW site can function as a 
continuously updated forum of information for our AFOS members and 
regional AFOS groups. Could we especially invite the chairpersons of 
the AFOS regional groups:

(1) if they have their own www page, to send us this address such that 
pages can be linked to the AFOS main www site.

(2) if they do not have their own www page, a special page could be 
constructed for them in Brussels. In this case the regional groups 
should send us the material, best already ordered and structured in 
such a way as it should be for the construction of their www page 
(compare to the structure of the main AFOS site).

If the time is ready for it, this AFOS www site will eventually 
replace this news-letter.


           2. S U M M E R   S C H O O L   O N   T H E O R Y
           ************************************************
                     O F   K N O W L E D G E.
                     ***********************

                Warsaw - Madralin, 16-31 August 1997
                ************************************


The First Summer School for Theory of Knowledge organized under 
auspices of AFOS and sponsored by the Higher Education Support Program 
of the Open Society Institute and Stefan Batory Foundation will be 
held in Warsaw in Warsaw-Madralin, 16 - 31 August this year.

Steering Committee
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ryszard Wojcicki - Chair (Poland), Diedrik Aerts (Belgium), Evandro 
Agazzi (Switzerland), Nancy Cartwright (UK), Maria Luisa Dalla Chiara 
(Italy), Irina Dobronravova (Ukraina), Gerald L. Eberlein (Germany), 
Leo Esakia (Georgia), Viktor Finn (Russia), Ado lf Grunbaum (USA), 
Stephan Hartmann (Germany), Peter Kolr (Czech Republic), Andrzej 
Lewenstam (Finland), Kestutis Masiulis (Lithuania), Wolfgang Spohn 
(Germany), Ronald P. Thompson (Canada), Tibor Vamos (Hungary), Paul 
Weingartner (Austria)

Participation 
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Participation is open to Ph.D students and young scholars (up to 30 
years old). Applications, addressed to Prof. Ryszard Wojcicki, 
Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of 
Sciences, Nowy Swiat 72, 00-330 Warsaw, Poland, should be submitted by 
April 30. Application should contain: (1) a short CV, (2) a short 
description of the scientific interest of the applicant, (3) a list of 
publications, (4) one or two letters of recommendation, (5) statement 
of the financial support requested. Applicants are also invited to 
offer a contribution (30 min. lecture) to the program of the School.

Full cost of participation (meal and lodging in a double room) is US$ 
660. A limited number of grants from the Soros Foundation is available 
for candidates from Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet 
Union. 

Program 
^^^^^^^

Lectures, seminars and discussions held at the School are intended to 
stimulate scientific cooperation between the scholars from the East 
and the West with a large participation of young people. The formula 
of the School presupposes the active participation of students in all 
the activities. 

Main courses:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Risto Hilpinen (USA): Belief Systems, Knowledge and Reasoning (20 hrs)

Ryszard Wojcicki (Poland): Main Topics in the Theory of Knowledge (20 
hrs)

Noretta Koertge (USA) and Adam Grobler (Poland): The Fundamentals of 
Popperian Methodology (12 hrs)

Jan Zytkow (USA): Automated Discovery Systems Perspective on Knowledge 
(6 hrs)

Wolfgang Balzer (Germany): Structuralist Aspects of the Social 
Sciences (6 hrs)

For more information contact kschool@plearn.edu.pl
See also http://www.cc.uni.torun.pl/kschool.


                       3. F O S. M A T T E R S
                       ***********************

All the four issues of the first volume of FOS have been published and 
they are available at Bookkeeping Dept. KLUWER Academic Publishers, 
Spuiboulevard 50, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.

FOS 2:1(1997) "Mathematics -- Essential Tensions" (M. Heller and J. 
Urbaniec, guest eds.) should appear in June this year.


              4. R E G I O N A L   A F O S   G R O U P S
              ******************************************

A) V. Vasyukov sends the news that the Russian Regional Group has been 
formed and is now active. Anyone interested in joining this group or 
in finding out more about their activities should contact the group at 
the e-mail address below.

1.  The staff - 25 members.
The Members of Regional Bureau are:
   V.S.Stepin (Chairman), Institute of Philosophy RAS
   V.K.Finn, Institute of Informatics RAS
   VT.Romanovskaya, Institute of Philosophy RAS
   V.L.Vasyukov, Institute of Philosophy RAS, e-mail: logic@sovam.com
 
2.  Activities which have taken place in the last year:
a)  two AFOS meetings devoted to:
   - an election of the members of Regional Bureau;
   - discussion on the results of Florence Congress on Logic, 
Methodology and Philosophy of Science.
b) in the framework of International First Smirnov's Readings devoted 
to the memory of Chairman of AFOS Russian Regional Bureau Prof. 
V.A.Smirnov the section of Philosophy of Science was organized.

3.  Activity in progress:
a)  an organization of the net of AFOS Russian subregional committees;
b)  FOS subscription activity.

B) Dr Chang Yi-Fang announces that the Chinese Regional Group of AFOS 
was formed in Beijing on March 26 1997, under the direction of 
Professor Jin Wulun. This supplements the Yunnan University 
Synergetics Institute which is already a group member of AFOS. More 
details of the Chinese groups activities will be forthcoming in the 
next newsletter.


            5. TWENTIETH WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY
            *****************************************

AFOS will be holding two sessions at the Twentieth World Congress
of Philosophy, occurring in Boston (USA) between August 10 and August 
16 1998. Members of AFOS, especially those from outside the U.S., are 
encouraged to submit papers for the AFOS section at the Congress. 
Papers should be in English, of no more than 2500 words, and 
accompanied by an abstract of about 100 words. The submissions may be 
on any topic consistent with the general aims of AFOS. Three (3) 
copies should be submitted by November 15 1997 to:

Professor Fritz Rohrlich,
Department of Physics,
Syracuse University,
Syracuse, NY 13244-1130, USA.

Brief questions about the requirements may be submitted, if necessary, 
to Prof. Rohrlich at rohrlich@mailbox.syr.edu

All papers will be refereed and authors of accepted papers will be 
notified by March 1 1998. Although AFOS is unable to provide financial 
support to participants, we shall provide a letter of acceptance for 
applications to funding agencies in the member's home country.

General information about the World Congress of Philosophy (not
about the AFOS sessions) can be found at the Web address: 
http://web.bu.edu/WCP or from the American Organizing Committee, 745 
Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA. fax (617) 353-5441. e-
mail: paideia@bu.edu


     6. Letter of the President concerning the "Bialowski e-panel".
     ************************************************************

To all the participants of "Bialkowski e-panel"
I am afraid the panel was a failure. I am very unhappy about it 
because my idea was to publish selected part of the discussion in 
Foundations of Science and set in this way a pattern of cooperation 
between the editors of the journal, its authors and its audience.

I still believe that besides hard version of FOS, there should be an 
electronic forum related to the journal at which selected ideas, 
problems, recently published books etc., will be discussed in a 
preliminary form. If the outcomes of such discussion turns out to be 
of quite wide interest, some fragments might be exploited then as some 
initial materials for publication in FOS. The e-forum would then allow 
both the editors of FOS and the prospective guest-editors of the 
journal to experiment with various ideas of topics and problems to be 
covered by the journal. The discussions at e-forum of FOS may also be 
useful in discovering people who may provide some interesting 
contribution to a relevant topic issue of FOS.

I wonder whether we should give up the idea to discuss Bialkowski's 
text or rather we should renew our discussion aiming toward publishing 
an issue devoted to the main topics of Bialkowski's text in 1998. 
After all the contributions of some of the participants of the 
discussion (Allan Franklin, Fritz Rohrlich, Diederik Aerts, Bill 
Wimsat, Jan Zytkow, to mention a few names at least) surely were of 
considerable interest and, if presented anew in a concise way, they 
may form an interesting introduction to the next round of the 
discussion.

May I have your reaction to the above question. If there are 
sufficiently many people who are willing to participate in the next 
round of discussion, perhaps we should schedule it for October this 
year. Meantime the next issue of FOS (FOS 2:1 (1997)) will be 
published. It will contain Bialkowski's text (of course it will be 
available in an electronic form too) and short summary of the past 
discussion. Whether that summary will be the end of the discussion or 
rather the beginning of the next round depends on the reaction to this 
letter.

Ryszard Wojcicki (iandi@plearn.edu.pl)