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47299.425622
This post is a sequel to an earlier discussion of close reading, though it should be self-contained, if closely read. Let’s begin with points of convergence. Like Jonathan Kramnick, John Guillory posits close reading as a skill or technê, a form of acquired know-how or expertise. …
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75594.425766
This paper offers a critical analysis of Ding and Liu’s (2022) contribution to the ongoing debate stemming from Machery et al.’s (2004) experimental investigation of Kripke’s Gödel Case. Machery et al . test referential intuitions on proper names among laypeople from American and Chinese backgrounds and contend that their results challenge Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism. Ding and Liu argue that descriptions in Gödel-style scenarios are ambiguous between a brute-fact and a social-fact interpretation, and Machery et al. overlook the latter. Building upon this ambiguity, Ding and Liu conduct several studies, maintaining that the results reveal that Machery et al. misclassify some descriptivist answers as causal-historical. If that is the case, the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to Kripke’s refutation of descriptivism is even more substantial than Machery et al.
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75702.425778
Phil Dowe’s Conserved Quantity Theory (CQT) is based on the following theses: (a) CQT is the result of an empirical analysis and not a conceptual one, (b) CQT is metaphysically contingent, and (c) CQT is refutable. I argue, on the one hand, that theses (a), (b), and (c) are not only problematic in themselves, but also they are incompatible with each other and, on the other, that the choice of these theses is explained by the particular position that the author embraces regarding the relationship between metaphysics and physics.
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75787.425787
There is no doubt that slurs harm . They do so by denigrating their targets, by putting them down, by marginalizing them . This is why in many legislations around the world, the use of slurs has been banned or penalized . But should all uses of slurs be banned? Many uses of slurs seem to be non-derogatory and to have beneficial effects . However, such uses are double-faceted: as both armchair reflection and experimental studies have shown, they are able to produce harm as well . In this paper, I approach the broad question of whether all non-derogatory uses of slurs should be banned . I first present the main uses of slurs that have been considered to be non-derogatory and recent reactions to those . The upshot of this survey is that uses of slurs that have been considered non-derogatory do, in fact, produce harm . I also flag what various authors have recommended in relation to the issue of banning such uses . Against this background, I engage with a recent view put forward by Alba Moreno Zurita and Eduardo Pérez-Navarro, who urge extreme caution with respect to any uses of slurs, due to their potential to normalize derogation . After presenting their view and their main argument, I raise an objection related to their treatment of neutral uses of slurs . I end with pointing out that, while their endeavour has merit in that it pushes the discussion further, it raises certain issues —of both an empirical and a normative nature— that need to be addressed .
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75808.425795
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in dual character concepts (DCCs) . These concepts are defined by their internal structures, which consist of two distinct dimensions: a descriptive and an independent normative dimension . However, a more in-depth exploration of their internal structures is still needed . This article examines the internal structure of one DCC that has garnered significant attention in the literature, scientist . First, I analyze the components of the different dimensions of this concept . Second, I explore the interaction between these two dimensions . To do so, I investigate scientist in the enTenTen20 corpus using Sketch Engine, focusing on the expressions “good scientist” and “true scientist”, as the literature suggests they interact more directly with the descriptive and normative dimensions, respectively . The findings from this investigation offer valuable insights for studying other DCCs, as the results suggest, among others, the following key points: first, that the complexity of the two dimensions of scientist is greater than previously recognized; and second, contrary to what is agreed, both the descriptive and the normative dimension interact with “good” and “true,” which implies that both expressions can be used to make the two types of normative evaluation proper of DCCs .
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409957.425812
The dialogical stance on meaning in the Lorenzen-Lorenz tradition is dynamic, as it is based on interaction between players, and contextual, as meaning depends on the set of rules adopted for the dialogical justification of claims including those implicit in linguistic practice. Grasping the meaning of an expression or an action amounts to identifying the rationale behind our verbal and behavioural practices. This knowledge is informed by the collective intelligence embodied within public criticism Different aspects of meaning are made explicit within the game rules: particle rules for the meaning of logical constants, the Socratic rule for non-logical constants and structural rules that set contextual meaning by shaping the development of a play. The level of plays is governed by these meaning-determining rules, and validity (or proof) is built from the plays. The result is a framework that grounds language and logic in the dynamics of dialogical meaning, and which has proven fruitful for studying frameworks for the logical analysis of language, modern and ancient.
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595686.425824
Two recent, prominent theorems—the “no-go theorem for observer-independent facts” and the “Local Friendliness no-go theorem”—employ so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenarios to try to impose novel, non-trivial constraints on the possible nature of physical reality. While the former is argued to entail that there can be no theory in which the results of Wigner and his friend can both be considered objective, the latter is said to place on reality stronger constraints than the Bell and Kochen-Specker theorems. Here, I conduct a thorough analysis of these theorems and show that they suffer from a list of shortcomings that question their validity and limit their strength. I conclude that the “no-go theorem for observer-independent facts” and the “Local Friendliness no-go theorem” fail to impose significant constraints on the nature of physical reality.
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647387.425832
Some of our conditional knowledge is counterepistemic: it is knowledge of an indicative conditional whose antecedent is false. Counterepistemic knowledge ascriptions give rise to puzzles—and in particular, to systematic violations of factivity. I critically examine propositionalist explanations, including contextualist and descriptivist accounts, and argue that they ultimately fail to accommodate the non-triviality and consistency of counterepistemic knowledge ascriptions. Instead, I propose a non-propositional theory drawing on ideas from the literatures on belief revision and on conversational update. On the positive account, counterepistemic knowledge is not reducible to knowledge of propositions, and knowledge states are more than relations to facts known. Besides distinguishing a live class of epistemic alternatives, a knowledge state also orders the possibilities it eliminates.
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707563.425846
This is a stand-alone essay, but if you’re curious you can read Part 1, Against Feet Revisited. 1. Timothy Steele’s book All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing aims to offer “an explanation of English meter,” especially iambic pentameter. …
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768660.425854
Since Meyer and Dunn showed that the rule γ is admissible in E, relevantists have produced new proofs of the admissibility of γ for an ever more expansive list of relevant logics. We show in this paper that this is not cause to think that this is the norm; rather γ fails to be admissible in a wide variety of relevant logics. As an upshot, we suggest that the proper view of γ-admissibility is as a coherence criterion, and thus as a selection criterion for logical theory choice.
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819828.425861
“Degenerate Case” Dialetheism
Motivation: trouble with even the most sophisticated and beautiful gappy approaches e.g. Kripke - the ‘not true’ and samesaying. Priest’s view really is better in a way. A resting place. …
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942596.425869
I consider the claim that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an action counts as an assertion are sufficient for it to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information—or conversational common ground—grounded in conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. I suggest that the function of assertion in conversation is not to share information, but to signal that we can be relied on to act as though some information is true, and to foster that same reliability in others.
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1177466.425876
Free verse often leaves me cold: my dirty little secret. But when the going gets tough—the saying goes—read criticism, so I opened The Modern Element, a book of criticism by Adam Kirsch. Kirsch’s own poetry is written in strict iambic pentameter, but as a reader he seems to have an infinite patience for the freer kind. …
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1335408.425883
Fragmentation is a widely discussed thesis on the architecture of mental content, saying, roughly, that the content of an agent’s belief state is best understood as a set of information islands that are individually coherent and logically closed, but need not be jointly coherent and logically closed, nor uniformly accessible for guiding the agent’s actions across different deliberative contexts. Expressivism is a widely discussed thesis on the mental states conventionally expressed by certain categories of declarative discourse, saying, roughly, that prominent forms of declarative utterance should be taken to express something other than the speaker’s outright acceptance of a representational content. In this paper, I argue that specific versions of these views—Topical Fragmentation and Semantic Expressivism—present a mutually beneficial combination. In particular, I argue that combining Topical Fragmentation with Semantic Expressivism fortifies the former against (what I call) the Connective Problem, a pressing objection that lays low more familiar forms of Fragmentation. This motivates a novel semantic framework: Fragmented Semantic Expressivism, a bilateral state-based system that (i) prioritizes fragmentationist acceptance conditions over truth conditions, (ii) treats representational content as hyperintensional, and (iii) gives expressivistic acceptance conditions for the standard connectives. Finally, we discuss the distinctive advantages of this system in answering the problem of logical omniscience and Karttunen’s problem for epistemic ‘must’.
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1340386.425895
Proof automation is crucial to large-scale formal mathematics and software/hardware verification projects in ITPs. Sophisticated tools called hammers have been developed to provide general-purpose proof automation in ITPs such as Coq and Isabelle, leveraging the power of ATPs. An important component of a hammer is the translation algorithm from the ITP’s logical system to the ATP’s logical system. In this paper, we propose a novel translation algorithm for ITPs based on dependent type theory. The algorithm is implemented in Lean 4 under the name Lean-auto. When combined with ATPs, Lean-auto provides general-purpose, ATP-based proof automation in Lean 4 for the first time. Soundness of the main translation procedure is guaranteed, and experimental results suggest that our algorithm is sufficiently complete to automate the proof of many problems that arise in practical uses of Lean 4. We also find that Lean-auto solves more problems than existing tools on Lean 4’s math library Mathlib4.
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1436523.425902
Consultant Statistician
Edinburgh
Relevant significance? Be careful what you wish for
Despised and Rejected
Scarcely a good word can be had for statistical significance these days. We are admonished (as if we did not know) that just because a null hypothesis has been ‘rejected’ by some statistical test, it does not mean it is not true and thus it does not follow that significance implies a genuine effect of treatment. …
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1789324.425911
The paper offers a new analysis of the German particle wohl as akin to Italian futuro. They are both, we argue, necessity modals, but without bias. They are therefore more flexible than MUST and useable in situations with less reliable evidence or heightened uncertainty such as in reflective questions where they create Socratic inquisitiveness, a self- directed state of inquisitiveness with the goal to introspect rather than seek information.
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1908484.425924
Few contributions, if any, has had a more significant impact on philosophy of language than Kripke’s (1980) ‘Naming and Necessity’ lectures. As a result of Kripke’s work, Millianism, viz. the view that names are singular terms a kin to individual constants in first-order logic, became orthodoxy. In this paper, we want to explore the idea that there is an alternative to Millianism that is not only compatible with Kripke’s seminal arguments in ‘Naming and Necessity’, but in fact strongly supported by those arguments. This alternative view is now typically referred to as Variabilism. Variabilism maintains, like Millianism, that proper names are singular terms, but rather than individual constants, the Variabilist argues that names are in fact individual variables. Throughout the years, there has been a numberVariabilist views proposed. These views share the assumption that names should be treated as variables, but they differ significantly in how these variables behave, what kind of restrictions are imposed, and what syntactic environments they can occur in. These details are obviously essential especially with respect to how similar the view is to the standard Millian view.
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2128295.425931
Clark (2006) proposes that a standard challenge to the hypothesis of extended cognition can be avoided in the case of linguistically structured cognition, because the role played by our public manipulation of linguistic artifacts is irreducible to the role played by the brain’s operations over internal representations. I demonstrate that Clark’s argument relies on a view of the brain’s cognitive architecture to which he no longer subscribes. I argue that on Clark’s later view of the brain as engaged in ‘predictive processing’, his earlier defense of extended cognition from this challenge is no longer an eJective strategy. I explore the implications of this for Clark’s attempts to reconcile his previous arguments for extended cognition with his characterization of the predictive-processing brain.
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2386389.425946
Writing iambic pentameter is hard. Well maybe it’s easy for you, but we can at least agree that it’s not trivial: not just any ten-syllable line counts. There are rules! A theory of meter, whatever else it is, is an attempt to state those rules (for iambic and all other meters). …
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2482548.425958
Modality has long presented a range of philosophical problems and puzzles. For example, Are there (really) modal properties, modal facts, or possible worlds? If there are modal properties, how could they be related to non-modal properties or relations? If there are modal facts, properties, or possible worlds, how could we come to know about them, given that modal features of the world seem not to be empirically detectable, and that possible worlds seem to be, in principle, causally disconnected from us?
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2545457.425966
Inner speech arguably plays a central role in human consciousness, and yet, compared to other key psychological phenomena it seems to be somewhat neglected. Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that inner speech may be under-cited in the literature and might not have received its share of attention as a research area. Study 1 investigated how frequently inner speech and related terms were mentioned in Introductory Psychology textbooks. Only 7 out of 32 textbooks (21.8%) cited either inner speech, self-talk, private speech, or self-statements in their subject indexes. Study 2 compared citation frequency in PsycINFO for inner speech and related terms to 103 key psychological concepts and phenomena in peer-reviewed journal articles. The average citation frequency for all psychological terms was 1719; by comparison, inner speech was cited 52 times. 84.5% of all terms were cited more often than inner speech. Taken together these observations suggest that inner speech does tend to be overlooked, not so much because it is unimportant but probably because it is taken for granted.
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3288466.425973
Common ground is the information that the participants in a conversation treat as background information for the purposes of their interaction. We review two traditions of research on common ground: The formal tradition, consisting mainly of theoretical linguists and philosophers of language, has developed increasingly sophisticated formal models of common ground in order to generate predictions about an expanding range of empirical phenomena. Meanwhile, the psycholinguistic tradition has focused on a narrower range of phenomena while developing more realistic theories of the psychological mechanisms that allow us to select and represent common ground. After summarizing these two traditions, we consider several reasons why they should be re-integrated, and argue that the best way to bring them back together would be to adopt a cognitive-pluralist approach, whereby language users have access to a variety of mechanisms for managing background information, which are more or less available and efficient depending on the communicative situation and the kind of information mentally represented, as well as the cognitive demands of each mechanism.
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3468880.425982
In the topic-sensitive theory of the logic of imagination due to Berto [3], the topic of the imaginative output must be contained within the imaginative input. That is, imaginative episodes can never expand what they are about. We argue, with Badura [2], that this constraint is implausible from a psychological point of view, and it wrongly predicts the falsehood of true reports of imagination. Thus the constraint should be relaxed; but how? A number of direct approaches to relaxing the controversial content-inclusion constraint are explored in this paper. The core idea is to consider adding an expansion operator to the mereology of topics. The logic that results depends on the formal constraints placed on topic expansion, the choice of which are subject to philosophical dispute. The first semantics we explore is a topological approach using a closure operator, and we show that the resulting logic is the same as Berto’s own system. The second approach uses an inclusive and monotone increasing operator, and we give a sound and complete axiomatiation for its logic. The third approach uses an inclusive and additive operator, and we show that the associated logic is strictly weaker than the previous two systems, and additivity is not definable in the language. The latter result suggests that involved techniques or a more expressive language is required for a complete axiomatization of the system, which is left as an open question. All three systems are simple tweaks on Berto’s system in that the language remains propositional, and the underlying theory of topics is unchanged.
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3894940.425992
Canonical is a solver for type inhabitation in dependent type theory, that is, the problem of producing a term of a given type. We present a Lean tactic which invokes Canonical to generate proof terms and synthesize programs. The tactic supports higher-order and dependently-typed goals, structural recursion over indexed inductive types, and definitional equality. Canonical finds proofs for 84% of Natural Number Game problems in 51 seconds total.
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3986309.425999
Given the extreme importance that Wittgenstein attached to the
aesthetic dimension of life, it is in one sense surprising that he
wrote so little on the subject. It is true that we have the notes
assembled from his lectures on aesthetics given to a small group of
students in private rooms in Cambridge in the summer of 1938
(Wittgenstein 1966, henceforth LA) and we have G. E. Moore’s
record of some of Wittgenstein’s lectures in the period
1930–33 (Moore 1972). Of Wittgenstein’s own writings, we
find remarks on literature, poetry, architecture, the visual arts, and
especially music and the philosophy of culture more broadly scattered
throughout his writings on the philosophies of language, mind,
mathematics, and philosophical method, as well as in his more personal
notebooks; a number of these are collected in Culture and
Value (Wittgenstein 1980a).
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4528945.426007
Indicative conditional antecedents appear to be remarkably scopeless: they are scopeless with respect to the truth-functional connectives, scopeless with respect to epistemic modals, and scopeless with respect to each other (i.e., commutative). This pervasive scopelessness is a basic explanandum for any theory of indicatives, and the subject of much recent work. In this paper I revisit the theory of McGee [1989], which already comes surprisingly close to delivering a simple and powerful account of all of this scopelessness. I reformulate the theory as information-sensitive in the contemporary sense, and extend it with epistemic modals. On the resulting theory, epistemic modals become in e!ect quantifiers over choice functions, and their scopeless interaction with indicative antecedents drops out naturally. I give McGee’s logic a new axiomatization, and show that if his Import-Export axiom is replaced with a weaker Commutativity axiom stating that indicative antecedents commute, then Import-Export can be derived. I explain how the issue of commutativity interacts with the question how to extend information-sensitive theories of the indicative to modal antecedents. Along the way I add to the collapse results of both McGee [1985] and Mandelkern [2021], showing that under weak assumptions, Commutativity is in tension with Modus Ponens and (more generally) with the principle Mandelkern calls Ad Falsum. I convict Ad Falsum, and refine the case against Modus Ponens.
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4799105.42602
An adequate theory of representation should distinguish between the structure of a representation and the structure of what it represents. I argue that the simplest sorts of transformers (the architecture that underlies most familiar Large Language Models) have only a very lightweight structure for their representations: insofar as they work with the structure of language, they represent it but do not use it. In addition to being interesting in its own right, this also shows how we may use high-level invariants at the computational level to place constraints on representational formats at the algorithmic level.
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5084579.426028
In his paper, Cian Dorr presents formal development of the view that higher-order entities such as properties, relations, and propositions act not just act as semantic values of predicates and sentences, but also as referents of referential noun phrases (NPs), generally considered singular terms. Dorr’s paper focuses on properties; thus, wise as in Socrates is wise is taken to stand for the very same entity, a property, as the NPs wisdom and the property of being wise. The view entails that lots of expressions now would apply to entities of different types: some, the, is interesting now apply to entities of the type of individuals as well as the type of properties. Moreover, quantifiers like everything will now be able to range over both individuals and properties, and in fact over both individuals and properties at once (Everything is interesting). These problems are dealt with by imposing type ambiguities on the relevant expressions and allowing quantifiers like everything to be specified for sum types, roughly, a disjunctive specification of types.
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5270375.426035
We argue that logicism, the thesis that mathematics is reducible to logic and analytic truths, is true. We do so by (a) developing a formal framework with comprehension and abstraction principles, (b) giving reasons for thinking that this framework is part of logic, (c) showing how the denotations for predicates and individual terms of an arbitrary mathematical theory can be viewed as logical objects that exist in the framework, and (d) showing how each theorem of a mathematical theory can be given an analytically true reading in the logical framework.