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923209.080195
In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions—predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc.—intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou, and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this talk, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: (i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; (ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made.
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1336757.080396
Halvorson has proposed an intriguing example of a pair of theories whose categories are equivalent but which are not themselves definitionally equivalent. Moreover, it seems obvious that these theories are not equivalent in any intuitive sense. We offer a new topological proof that these theories are not definitionally equivalent. However, the underlying theorem for this claim has a converse that shows a surprising collection of theories, which are superficially similar to those in Halvorson’s example, turn out to be definitionally equivalent after all. This offers some new insight into what is going “wrong” in the Halvorson example.
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2030140.080406
This event might strike you as perplexing, but it motivates questions lying at the core of the computational sciences. For example, what does it mean to say that a system like LaMDA computes but a system like the Apennine Mountains does not? Do nervous systems compute? If they do, in virtue of what do they compute? Do they compute in the same way as LaMDA does? And what is the relationship between computing and having a conscious mind?
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2074817.080425
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson are the co-founders of relevance theory, one of the most influential programmes of research in work on communication and utterance interpretation. This entry first provides brief biographical information then explains the essentials of relevance theory. Relevance theory aims to provide an explicit account of how utterances are interpreted, grounded in a more general account of human cognition. According to relevance theory, interpretation of utterances is governed by principles that apply to cognition and to communication, and is carried out by an inferential heuristic, guided by the hearer’s expectations, which yields representations of both explicatures and implicatures. This framework provides explanations of many apparently diverse phenomena in communication. Two are discussed here: verbal irony and lexical pragmatics. Sperber and Wilson distinguish between use of an utterance to represent the speaker’s own thoughts and those of another, and analyse verbal irony as language use in which the speaker says something that she tacitly attributes to someone else and to which she tacitly expresses a negative (“dissociative”) attitude. Working with Robyn Carston and others, Sperber and Wilson have set out a theory of lexical pragmatics according to which many uses of words express occasion-specific ‘ad hoc concepts’. On this basis they argue that literal use, loose use, hyperbole and metaphor form a continuum. This entry concludes with brief remarks on other areas of active research, including experimental pragmatics and work on epistemic vigilance.
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2142637.080439
Negation often has a positive side-effect. (1a), for example, denies that we will have pizza for dinner, but also conveys that we will have something else. (1) a. We will not have [pizza]F for dinner. b. ↝ We will have something other than pizza for dinner. I want to suggest that the mechanism behind this effect may also explain the phenomenon of “neg-raising”, exemplified in (2).
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2275240.080453
Although the numbers used in the introductory example are fine, I’m unhappy with it and seek a replacement–ideally with the same or similar numbers. It is assumed that there is a concern both with inferring larger, as well as smaller, discrepancies than warranted. …
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2808168.080461
Propositional attitudes have an attitude type (belief, desire, etc. ), and a content. A popular idea in the literature on intentionality is that attitude type is determined by functional role and content in some other way. …
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2860676.08047
Understanding the actions of others is fundamental for human social life. It builds on a grasp of the subjective intentionality behind behavior: one action comprises different things simultaneously (e.g., moving their arm, turning on the light) but which of these constitute intentional actions, in contrast to merely foreseen side-effects (e.g., increasing the electricity bill), depends on the description under which the agent represents the acts. She may be acting intentionally only under the description “turning on the light,” but did not turn on the light in order to increase the electricity bill. In preregistered studies (N = 620), we asked how adults and children engage in such complex subjective action interpretation and evaluation in moral dilemmas. To capture the deep structure of subjects’ representations of the intentional structures of actions, we derived “act trees” from their response patterns to questions about the acts. Results suggest that people systematically distinguish between intended main and merely foreseen side-effects in their moral and intentionality judgments, even when main and side-effects were closely related and the latter were harmful. Additional experimental conditions suggest that, when given ambiguous information, the majority of subjects assume that agents act with beneficial main intentions. This “good intention prior” was so strong that participants attributed good intentions even when the harmful action was no longer necessary to resolve the dilemma (Study 2). These methods
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2992519.080478
We investigate whether ordinary quantification over objects is an extensional phenomenon, or rather creates non-extensional contexts; each claim having been propounded by prominent philosophers. It turns out that the question only makes sense relative to a background theory of syntax and semantics (here called a grammar) that goes well beyond the inductive definition of formulas and the recursive definition of satisfaction. Two schemas for building quantificational grammars are developed, one that invariably constructs extensional grammars (in which quantification, in particular, thus behaves extensionally) and another that only generates non-extensional grammars (and in which quantification is responsible for the failure of extensionality). We then ask whether there are reasons to favor one of these grammar schemas over the other, and examine an argument according to which the proper formalization of deictic utterances requires adoption of non-extensional grammars.
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2992549.080489
Given any set E of expressions freely generated from a set of atoms by syntactic operations, there exist trivially compositional functions on E (to wit, the injective and the constant functions), but also plenty of non-trivially compositional functions. Here we show that within the space of non-injective functions (and so a fortiori within the space of non-injective and non-constant functions), compositional functions are not sufficiently abundant in order to generate the consequence relation of every propositional logic. Logical consequence relations thus impose substantive constraints on the existence of compositional functions when coupled with the condition of noninjectivity (though not without it). We ask how the apriori exclusion of injective functions from the search space might be justified, and we discuss the prospects of claims to the effect that any function can be “encoded” in a compositional one.
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3171261.080496
Intuitively, collective nouns are pseudo-singular: a collection of things (a pair of people, a flock of birds, etc.) just is the things that make ‘it’ up. But certain facts about natural language seem to count against this view. In short, distributive predicates and numerals interact with collective nouns in ways that they seemingly shouldn’t if those nouns are pseudo-singular. We call this set of issues ‘the distribution problem’. To solve it, we propose a modification to cover-based semantics. On this semantics, the interpretation of distributive predicates and numerals depends on a cover, where the choice of cover is strongly semantically constrained by the noun with which they interact.
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3172069.080502
For billions of people, the internet has become a second home. It is where we meet friends and strangers, where we organise and learn, debate, deceive, and do business. In some respects, it is like the town square it was once claimed to be, while in others, it provides a strange new mode of interaction whose influence on us we are yet to understand. This collection of papers aims to give a short indication of some of the exciting philosophical work being carried out at the moment that addresses the novel aspects of online communication. The topics range from the expressive functions of emoji to the oppressive powers of search engines.
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3234991.080509
Today I’d like to dig a little deeper into some ideas from Part 2. I’ve been talking about causal loop diagrams. Very roughly speaking, a causal loop diagram is a graph with labeled edges. I showed how to ‘pull back’ and ‘push forward’ these labels along maps of graphs. …
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3278956.080518
Bisimulations are standard in modal logic and, more generally, in the theory of state-transition systems. The quotient structure of a Kripke model with respect to the bisimulation relation is called a bisimulation contraction. The bisimulation contraction is a minimal model bisimilar to the original model, and hence, for (image-)finite models, a minimal model modally equivalent to the original. Similar definitions exist for bounded bisimulations (k-bisimulations) and bounded bisimulation contractions. Two finite models are k-bisimilar if and only if they are modally equivalent up to modal depth k. However, the quotient structure with respect to the k-bisimulation relation does not guarantee a minimal model preserving modal equivalence to depth k. In this paper, we remedy this asymmetry to standard bisimulations and provide a novel definition of bounded contractions called rooted k-contractions. We prove that rooted k-contractions preserve k-bisimilarity and are minimal with this property. Finally, we show that rooted k-contractions can be exponentially more succinct than standard k-contractions.
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3354280.080524
Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truth-maker semantics generalizes collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.
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3439453.08053
Trump won. Within hours, the pundits had come out. They proposed diagnoses of why he won: institutional failures, cultural backlash, big money, political unoriginality, or luck. They pointed to mistakes: Biden shouldn’t have run again, Harris should’ve gone on Joe Rogan, the Democrats should’ve proposed a clearer vision, and so on. …
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3732774.080536
Absence is peculiar, yet an important notion in ontology as well as semantics. Absence contrasts with presence and as such the notion has been discusses in the context of truthmaker semantics, as the absence of a truthmaker of a sentence S and thus and thus the truthmaker of the negation of S. Absence then is, roughly, the negation of presence. But absence contrasts not only with presence. There is a stronger notion of absence on which absence of a thing presupposes that that thing should have been there, to make something else complete. Absence in that sense is a modal notion that crucially involve the notion of completion. This notion is the one reflected linguistically in the semantics of what I will call ‘completion-related predicates of absence’. In English, these are lack and be missing, as below: (1) a. The house lacks a door. b. A screw is missing (from the chair).
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3819072.080543
A challenge for relevant logicians is to delimit their area of study. I propose and explore the definition of a relevant logic as a logic satisfying a variable-sharing property and closed under detachment and adjunction. This definition is, I argue, a good definition that captures many familiar logics and raises interesting new questions concerning relevant logics. As is familiar to readers of Entailment or Relevant Logics and Their Rivals, the motivations for relevant logics have a strong intuitive pull. The philosophical picture put forward by Anderson and Belnap (1975), for example, is compelling and has led to many fruitful developments. With some practice, one can develop a feel for what sorts of axioms or rules lead to violations of relevance in standard relevant logics. These sorts of intuitions only go so far, as some principles that lead to violations of relevance in stronger logics are compatible with it in weaker logics. There is a large number of relevant logics, but there is not much discussion of precise characterizations of the class of relevant logics.
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4004882.080549
I’m talking about ‘causal loop diagrams’, which are graph with edges labeled by ‘polarities’. Often the polarities are simply and signs, like here:
But polarities can be elements of any monoid, and last time I argued that things work even better if they’re elements of a rig, so you can not only multiply them but also add them. …
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4174956.080555
This is a progress report on some joint work with Xiaoyan Li, Nathaniel Osgood and Evan Patterson. Together with collaborators we have been developing software for ‘system dynamics’ modelling, and applying it to epidemiology—though it has many other uses. …
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4424821.080561
Some words express different meanings in different contexts, such as “bank” and “I.“ Linguistic alethic pluralists claim that “true” is another such word. This is a surprising thesis that holds implications for debates about the nature of truth. Yet it is in need of careful elaboration and evaluation. I describe several versions of linguistic alethic pluralism, alongside tests that natural language theorists use to identify different types of meaning variation. I also consider empirical studies that have recently targeted the use of “true.” I conclude that there is currently no evidence for linguistic alethic pluralism, and unlikely to be any forthcoming.
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4535775.080566
I have elsewhere shown the consistency of the theory commonly called New Foundations or NF, originally proposed by W. v. O. Quine in his paper “New foundations for mathematical logic”. In this note, I review that original paper and may eventually review some other sources one might consult for information about this theory . Quine himself made some errors in this paper and later in his discussion of NF, and there are other characteristic difficulties that people have with this system which such a review might allow us to discuss.
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5030983.080572
In this article, the suppositional account and different approaches of relevance conditionals are analysed on a specific type of conditional: Conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have a relevance connection, but where the acceptability of the antecedent has no influence on the acceptability of the consequent. Such conditionals occur in cases of multiple implication of a consequent, as in overdetermination. When evaluating such conditionals, the approaches examined lead to different and partly incoherent results. It is argued that approaches to conditionals should consider such conditionals acceptable, which is a challenge for e.g. approaches based on statistical measures. Furthermore, it is argued that the probability of a conditional should be evaluated only according to the strength of the relevance connection between the antecedent and the consequent, but not according to other relevance connections. It is shown that only two approaches correctly evaluate such conditionals, one of which, inferentialism, may provide a basis for a coherent theory of conditionals.
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5189439.080579
Polysemy is a phenomenon involving single lexical items with multiple related senses. Much theorizing about it has focused on developing linguistic accounts that are responsive to various compositional and representational challenges in semantics and psychology. We focus on an underexplored question: Why does systematic polysemy cluster in the ways it does? That is, why do we see certain regular patterns of sense multiplicity, but not others? Drawing on an independently motivated view of kind cognition—i.e., the formal structures for different classes of kind representations—we argue for an answer centered on conceptual individuation. Specifically, we argue that classes of kind concepts vary in what they individuate (i.e., counting as one and specifying what makes it the same or different from others). By elucidating these differences, we can explain why a range of patterns of systematic polysemy are found cross-linguistically and why other patterns are not attested. Overall, our account provides an explanatory framework addressing an important question at the interface between language and mind and opens new avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.
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5189468.080592
We start with an observation about implicit quantifier domain restriction: certain implicit restrictions (e.g., restricting objects by location and time) appear to be more natural and widely available than others (e.g., restricting objects by color, aesthetic, or historical properties). Our aim is to explain why this is. That is, we aim to explain why some implicit domain restriction possibilities are available by default. We argue that, regardless of their other explanatory virtues, extant pragmatic and metasemantic frameworks leave this question unanswered. We then motivate a partially nativist account of domain restriction that involves a minimal view of joint planning around broad shared goals about navigating and influencing our environments augmented with cognitive heuristics that facilitate these. Finally, we sketch how the view can be extended to account for the ways non-default restriction possibilities become available when conversationalists have shared idiosyncratic goals.
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5487638.080599
According to most writers on lying, to lie is to assert something one believes to be false, as captured by what is sometimes called “The Assertion-Based Definition of Lying:” The Assertion-Based Definition of Lying (AL) A lies to B if and only if there is a proposition p such that (AL1) A asserts that p, and (AL2) A believes that p is false.
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5487663.080604
This paper examines a form of talking about speech acts, mental states, and other features so far unexplored in philosophy: quotative be like. Quotative be like is the use of like and to be that occurs in constructions such as "Ellen was like "I'm leaving!"" We argue that neglect of quotative be like represents a gap in our understanding of our ways of characterizing the minds and speech of ourselves and others. Further, we show that quotative be like is not reducible to more familiar forms of direct discourse or indirect discourse. Mapping out a number of different options for theorizing about quotative be like, we argue for an account on which the quoted material in quotative be like picks out properties.
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5665490.08061
Relevance Theory (RT; Gutt, 1989, 1991, 2000) stipulates that translation is an act of interpretive language use, establishing interlingual interpretive resemblance between source and target language utterances, rather than describing, assessing or transferring truth values of utterances. In an extension to the original RT framework, Gutt (2004, 2005) distinguishes between two modes of translation - a stimulus mode (S-mode) and an interpretive mode (I-mode) - by which translators establish interpretive resemblances across languages. S-mode translation is tightly linked to linguistic forms, while I-mode translation appeals to the translator’s (self) awareness of the cognitive/cultural environment in which the translation unfolds. In this chapter, I argue that interlingual resemblance and contentful representation, as in descriptive language use, are two incompatible categories and that translation – defined as interlingual interpretive resemblance – can be seen as a form of non-representational language production. I suggest that translation as interpretive language use is heavily based in priming processes. While perceptual/semantic/affective priming mechanisms drive S-mode translation, the phenomenal consciousness of subjective experiences underly I-mode translation.
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5781077.080615
I extend the literature on norms of assertion to the ubiquitous use of graphs in scientific papers and presentations, which I term “graphical testimony.” On my account, the testimonial presentation of a graph involves commitment to both (a) the in-context reliability of the graph’s framing devices and (b) the perspective-relative accuracy of the graph’s content. Despite apparent disagreements between my account and traditional accounts of assertion, the two are compatible and I argue that we should expect a similar pattern of commitments in a set of cases that extends beyond the graphical one. I end by demonstrating that the account resolves apparent tensions between the demands of honesty and the common scientific practice of presenting idealized or simplified graphs: these “distortions” can be honest so long as there’s the right kind of alignment between the distortion and the background beliefs and values of the audience.
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6068193.080621
Disciplinary manifestos typically propose grand reconceptions or reorientations of the field. The work is not what we believe it to be; or if it is, it should be radically transformed. I tend to be impatient with philosophers who operate in this mode. …