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220635.739213
“Poetic expression,” says the sugar-coated-pill theory, “is the honey that makes palatable the medicine of content, be it philosophical, moral, or scientific.” It’s an old theory. It’s there even in Ancient Greek and Roman theory and practice: Lucretius dipped De rerum natura, his scientific/philosophical treatise about atoms swerving in the void, in the rhythms of dactylic hexameter. …
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538816.739545
According to a prominent view about existence, it’s a property of things; there’s only one kind of existence; it’s the same as being; everything has it; it’s tied to first-order existential quantification; and ‘exist’ isn’t ambiguous or context-sensitive. But each of these metaphysical or semantic claims is disputed. Some argue that existence is a higher-order property of properties, or that there’s more than one kind of existence, or that existence and being are diPerent, or that some things don’t exist, or that quantification doesn’t have anything to do with existence, or that ‘exist’ is ambiguous or context-sensitive.
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554815.739565
In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for epistemic planning based on dynamic epistemic logic (DEL). The novelty is that we limit the depth of reasoning of the planning agent to an upper bound b, meaning that the planning agent can only reason about higher-order knowledge to at most (modal) depth b. The algorithm makes use of a novel type of canonical b-bisimulation contraction guaranteeing unique minimal models with respect to b-bisimulation. We show our depth-bounded planning algorithm to be sound. Additionally, we show it to be complete with respect to planning tasks having a solution within bound b of reasoning depth (and hence the iterative bound-deepening variant is complete in the standard sense). For bound b of reasoning depth, the algorithm is shown to be (b + 1)-E XPTIME complete, and furthermore fixed-parameter tractable in the number of agents and atoms. We present both a tree search and a graph search variant of the algorithm, and we benchmark an implementation of the tree search version against a baseline epistemic planner.
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564779.739578
Are English future auxiliaries (like will and be going to) modals in some semantically interesting sense? Are they the semantic brethren of might and should, or are they more similar to the past and past tenses? According to the non-modal view of future auxiliaries, such expressions merely serve to shift the time of evaluation forward, just as the past tense shifts the time of evaluation backward. Perhaps the most familiar modal analysis of future operators is the Peircean theory discussed by Prior (1967). One version of this theory says that fut ϕ is true just in case ϕ is true at all future possibilities (more carefully: fut ϕ is true at a world w and time t just in case every future possibility w for w at t is such that there is a time t later than t such that ϕ is true at w and t ). But what is a future possibility? A schematic answer: given a possible world w and a time t, we say that w is a future possibility for w at t iff w is sufficiently similar to w up until and including t (so w and w may differ significantly thereafter).
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640737.739589
In the course of developing his theory of meaning, Grice also developed an influential theory of speech acts. The main idea is that to perform a speech act is to act with a communicative intention, and speech acts of different kinds are intended to produce different kinds of responses in addressees. This theory wasn’t intended to apply to conventional acts, like pronouncing a couple married or testifying in court, but only to communicative acts, like asserting, requesting, and directing. And, notably, Grice’s theory applies to indirect, nonlinguistic, and non-conventional communicative acts, in addition to those performed with linguistic utterances. In this chapter, I spell out this theory in greater detail, trace its origins in Grice’s work and later developments by others, and show how it relates to several other schools of thought about speech acts.
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723376.739601
Warning: I worry there may be something wrong in the reasoning below. Causal Decision Theory (CDT) and Epistemic Decision Theory (EDT) tend to disagree when the payoff of an option statistically depends on your propensity to go for that option. …
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1510198.739613
The definition of tool use has long been debated, especially when applied beyond humans. Recent work argues that the phenomena included within tool use are so broad and varied that there is little hope of using the category for scientific generalizations, explanations, and predictions about the evolution, ecology, and psychology of tool users. One response to this argument has been the development of tooling as a replacement for tool use. In this article, we analyze the tool use and tooling frameworks. Identifying advantages and limitations in each, we offer a synthetic approach that suggests promising avenues for future research.
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1674082.739644
What do large language models actually model? Do they tell us something about human capacities, or are they models of the corpus we’ve trained them on? I give a non-deflationary defence of the latter position. Cognitive science tells us that linguistic capabilities in humans rely supralinear formats for computation. The transformer architecture, by contrast, supports at best a linear formats for processing. This argument will rely primarily on certain invariants of the computational architecture of transformers. I then suggest a positive story about what transformers are doing, focusing on Liu et al. (2022)’s intriguing speculations about shortcut automata. I conclude with why I don’t think this is a terribly deflationary story. Language is not (just) a means for expressing inner state but also a kind of ‘discourse machine’ that lets us make new language given appropriate context. We have learned to use this technology in one way; LLMs have also learned to use it too, but via very different means.
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1924762.739656
The early study Tennant [11] sought to show how the role played by formal semantics in furnishing models that would invalidate unprovable first-order arguments from premise-sets to conclusions could be taken over by proofs and disproofs. (A disproof of a set of premises is a proof of ⊥, i.e., absurdity, from it.) For any given invalid first-order argument, these latter would be proofs and disproofs in Peano Arithmetic (PA), employing suitable substitutions of arithmetical predicates for the primitive predicates involved in the argument. PA-proofs would be furnished for the premises of the invalid argument, and a PA-disproof would be furnished for its conclusion. This was an early move towards a general proof-theoretic semantics—the approach to By a theorem of Hilbert and Bernays [4], these arithmetical predicates can be taken to be of arithmetical complexity no greater than Δ .
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2034878.739674
Reminder: everyone is welcome here, but paid subscriptions are what enable me to devote the necessary time to researching and writing this newsletter, including pieces like this one on Katie Johnson, the woman who alleged Trump sexually assaulted her at the age of thirteen at a party of Jeffrey Epstein’s. …
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2781049.739686
The family of relevant logics can be faceted by a hierarchy of increasingly fine-grained variable sharing properties—requiring that in valid entailments A → B, some atom must appear in both A and B with some additional condition (e.g., with the same sign or nested within the same number of conditionals). In this paper, we consider an incredibly strong variable sharing property of lericone relevance that takes into account the path of negations and conditionals in which an atom appears in the parse trees of the antecedent and consequent. We show that this property of lericone relevance holds of the relevant logic BM (and that a related property of faithful lericone relevance holds of B) and characterize the largest fragments of classical logic with these properties. Along the way, we consider the consequences for lericone relevance for the theory of subject-matter, for Logan’s notion of hyperformalism, and for the very definition of a relevant logic itself.
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2954373.739697
This paper proposes an alternative to standard first-order logic that seeks greater naturalness, generality, and semantic self-containment. The system removes the first-order restriction, avoids type hierarchies, and dispenses with external structures, making the meaning of expressions depend solely on their constituent symbols. Terms and formulas are unified into a single notion of expression, with set-builder notation integrated as a primitive construct. Connectives and quantifiers are treated as operators among others rather than as privileged primitives. The deductive framework is minimal and intuitive, with soundness and consistency established and completeness examined. While computability requirements may limit universality, the system offers a unified and potentially more faithful model of human mathematical deduction, providing an alternative foundation for formal reasoning.
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3069846.739714
While causal models are introduced very much like a formal logical system, they have not yet been taken to the level of a proper logic of causal reasoning with structural equations. In this paper, we furnish causal models with a distinct deductive system and a corresponding model-theoretic semantics. Interventionist conditionals will be defined in terms of inferential relations in this logic of causal models.
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3448870.739725
This commentary aims to support Tim Crane’s account of the structure of intentionality by showing how intentional objects are naturalistically respectable, how they pair with concepts, and how they are to be held distinct from the referents of thought. Crane is right to reject the false dichotomy that accounts of intentionality must be either reductive and naturalistic or non-reductive and traffic in mystery. The paper has three main parts. First, I argue that the notion of an intentional object is a phenomenological one, meaning that it must be understood as an object of thought for a subject. Second, I explain how Mark Sainsbury’s Display Theory of Attitude Attribution pairs well with Crane’s notion of an intentional object and allows for precisification in intentional state attributions while both avoiding exotica and capturing the subject’s perspective on the world. Third, I explain the reification fallacy, the fallacy of examining intentional objects as if they exist independently of subjects and their conceptions of them. This work helps to bring out how intentionality can fit in the natural world while at the same time not reducing aboutness to some non-intentional properties of the natural world.
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3463369.739749
— We present a reformulation of the model predictive control problem using a Legendre basis. To do so, we use a Legendre representation both for prediction and optimization. For prediction, we use a neural network to approximate the dynamics by mapping a compressed Legendre representation of the control trajectory and initial conditions to the corresponding compressed state trajectory. We then reformulate the optimization problem in the Legendre domain and demonstrate methods for including optimization constraints. We present simulation results demonstrating that our implementation provides a speedup of 31-40 times for comparable or lower tracking errors with or without constraints on a benchmark task.
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3534383.739762
Commemorative artefacts purportedly speak—they communicate messages to their audience, even if no words are uttered. Sometimes, such artefacts purportedly communicate demeaning or pejorative messages about some members of society. The characteristics of such speech are, however, under-examined. I present an account of the paradigmatic characteristics of the speech of commemorative artefacts (or, “commemorative artefactual speech”), as a distinct form of political speech. According to my account, commemorative artefactual speech paradigmatically involves the use of an artefact by an authorised member of a group to declare the importance of remembering a subject, in virtue of some feature of the subject. Then, I outline a variety of ways that commemorative artefactual speech can go awry. Such speech can be unauthorised, involve unfair exclusion or incorrect identification, be aesthetically inadequate, invoke clandestine explanations, and be directed at inappropriate subjects. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my account for resisting problematic commemorative artefactual speech.
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3683083.739781
We introduce a challenge designed to evaluate the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in performing mathematical induction proofs, with a particular focus on nested induction. Our task requires models to construct direct induction proofs in both formal and informal settings, without relying on any preexisting lemmas. Experimental results indicate that current models struggle with generating direct induction proofs, suggesting that there remains significant room for improvement.
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3691238.739792
On its surface, a sentence like If Laura becomes a zombie, she wants you to shoot her looks like a plain conditional with the attitude want in its consequent. However, the most salient reading of this sentence is not about the desires of a hypothetical zombie- Laura. Rather, it asserts that the actual, non-zombie Laura has a certain restricted attitude: her present desires, when considering only possible states of affairs in which she becomes a zombie, are such that you shoot her. This can be contrasted with the shifted reading about zombie-desires that arises with conditional morphosyntax, e.g., If Laura became a zombie, she would want you to shoot her. Furthermore, as Blumberg and Holguín (J Semant 36(3):377–406, 2019) note, restricted attitude readings can also arise in disjunctive environments, as in Either a lot of people are on the deck outside, or I regret that I didn’t bring more friends. We provide a novel analysis of restricted and shifted readings in conditional and disjunctive environments, with a few crucial features. First, both restricted and shifted attitude conditionals are in fact “regular” conditionals with attitudes in their consequents, which accords with their surface-level appearance and contrasts with Pasternak’s (The mereology of attitudes, Ph.D. thesis, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, 2018) Kratzerian approach, in which the if -clause restricts the attitude directly. Second, whether the attitude is or is not shifted—i.e., zombie versus actual desires—is dependent on the presence or absence of conditional morphosyntax. And third, the restriction of the attitude is effected by means of aboutness, a concept for which we provide two potential Kai von Fintel and Robert Pasternak are listed alphabetically and share joint lead authorship of this work.
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4107006.739804
philosophical logic may also interest themselves with the logical appendices, one of which presents modal logic as a subsystem of the logic of counterfactuals. Last but not least, the work also includes an afterword that is both a severe reprimand to the analytic community for a certain sloppiness and an exhortation to all colleagues to apply more rigor and patience in addressing metaphysical issues. People familiar with Williamson’s work will not be surprised by the careful and detailed (sometimes a bit technical) argumentation, which demands careful attention from the reader. As expected, this is a most relevant contribution to an increasingly popular topic by one of today’s leading analytic philosophers.
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4220305.739815
PEA Soup is pleased to introduce the July Ethics article discussion on “Gender, Gender Expression, and the Dilemma of the Body” by Katie Zhou (MIT). The précis is from Cressida Heyes (University of Alberta). …
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4279627.739829
The paper proposes and studies new classical, type-free theories of truth and determinateness with unprecedented features. The theories are fully compositional, strongly classical (namely, their internal and external logics are both classical), and feature a defined determinateness predicate satisfying desirable and widely agreed principles. The theories capture a conception of truth and determinateness according to which the generalizing power associated with the classicality and full compositionality of truth is combined with the identification of a natural class of sentences – the determinate ones – for which clear-cut semantic rules are available. Our theories can also be seen as the classical closures of Kripke-Feferman truth: their ω-models, which we precisely pinned down, result from including in the extension of the truth predicate the sentences that are satisfied by a Kripkean closed-off fixed point model. The theories compare to recent theories proposed by Fujimoto and Halbach, featuring a primitive determinateness predicate. In the paper we show that our theories entail all principles of Fujimoto and Halbach’s theories, and are proof-theoretically equivalent to Fujimoto and Halbach’s CD . We also show establish some negative results on Fujimoto and Halbach’s theories: such results show that, unlike what happens in our theories, the primitive determinateness predicate prevents one from establishing clear and unrestricted semantic rules for the language with type-free truth.
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4315483.73984
The concept of preference spans numerous research fields, resulting in
diverse perspectives on the topic. Preference logic specifically
focuses on reasoning about preferences when comparing objects,
situations, actions, and more, by examining their formal properties. This entry surveys major developments in preference logic to date. Section 2
provides a historical overview, beginning with foundational work by
Halldén and von Wright, who emphasized the syntactic aspects of
preference. In
Section 3,
early semantic contributions by Rescher and Van Dalen are introduced. The consideration of preference relations over possible worlds
naturally gives rise to modal preference logic where preference
lifting enables comparisons across sets of possible worlds.
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4791292.739851
When thinking about online speech, it’s tempting to start with questions like: What’s new here? Do online speech environments enable new types of speech acts, new semantic phenomena, new expressive effects? In other words, how has the shift to online speech fundamentally changed how we use language to communicate, coordinate, obfuscate, rouse, empower, disempower, insult, etc.? What hidden truths might online speech reveal about the nature of meaning and communication more broadly?
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4905973.739874
We present a logic which deals with connexive exclusion. Exclusion (also called “co-implication”) is considered to be a propositional connective dual to the connective of implication. Similarly to implication, exclusion turns out to be non-connexive in both classical and intuitionistic logics, in the sense that it does not satisfy certain principles that express such connexivity. We formulate these principles for connexive exclusion, which are in some sense dual to the well-known Aristotle’s and Boethius’ theses for connexive implication. A logical system in a language containing exclusion and negation can be called a logic of connexive exclusion if and only if it obeys these principles, and, in addition, the connective of exclusion in it is asymmetric, thus being different from a simple mutual incompatibility of propositions. We will develop a certain approach to such a logic of connexive exclusion based on a semantic justification of the connective in question. Our paradigm logic of connexive implication will be the connexive logic C, and exactly like this logic the logic of connexive exclusion turns out to be contradictory though not trivial.
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5222245.739886
Robert H. Jackson was an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court by day, and one of the most eloquent men alive. In 1945-46 he led the American prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials, “perhaps the greatest opportunity ever presented to an American lawyer.” His powerful opening statement testifies to the power of words, used well, to shape the meaning of events:
That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason. …
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6351851.739897
Apparently, Italy requires residents to secure a medical certificate before joining a gym, sports club, or other source of regular physical exercise. This is (very loosely) estimated to prevent a few deaths per year from sudden cardiac events but at a net cost of thousands of QALYs lost due to exercise deterrence. …
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6513283.739908
There is a longstanding puzzle about empty names. On the one hand, the principles of classical logic seem quite plausible. On the other hand, there would seem to be truths involving empty names that require rejecting certain classically valid principles.
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6513333.739924
Consider the property of being something that is identical to Hesperus. For short, call this the property of being Hesperus. What is the nature of this property? How does it relate to the property of being Phosphorus? And how do these properties relate to the purely haecceitistic property of being v—the unique thing that has the property of being Hesperus and the property of being Phosphorus?
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6591574.73994
Casajus (J Econ Theory 178, 2018, 105–123) provides a characterization of the class of positively weighted Shapley value for …nite games from an in…nite universe of players via three properties: e¢ ciency, the null player out property, and superweak differential marginality. The latter requires two players’payoffs to change in the same direction whenever only their joint productivity changes, that is, their individual productivities stay the same. Strengthening this property into (weak) differential marginality yields a characterization of the Shapley value. We suggest a relaxation of superweak differential marginality into two subproperties: (i) hyperweak differential marginality and (ii) superweak differential marginality for in…nite subdomains. The former (i) only rules out changes in the opposite direction. The latter (ii) requires changes in the same direction for players within certain in…nite subuniverses. Together with e¢ ciency and the null player out property, these properties characterize the class of weighted Shapley values.
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6611613.739952
In this paper, I distinguish and compare three kinds of logical expressivism. The first, reminiscent of attitude expressivism in meta-ethics, holds that logic is expressive in that logical vocabulary serves to express attitudes. For instance, traditional attitude expressivism about negation, going back to the work of Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Huw Price and others, holds that not expresses disbelief. The second kind of logical expressivism, reminiscent of deflationism about truth and championed by Robert Brandom, holds that logic is expressive in that logical vocabulary serves to make explicit—typically, by expressing them as contents of assertions—the commitments that are implicit in our discursive practices. For instance, content expressivism about the conditional holds that if expresses as content commitment to the goodness of certain inferential moves. The third kind of logical expressivism, and the one I will be arguing for, holds that, in a sense, logic is expressive in both ways: logical vocabulary serves to make explicit commitments to expressions of attitudes.