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193943.687776
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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246451.688278
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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378294.688357
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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378324.688401
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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557036.688431
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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557844.688467
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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620766.688503
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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664731.688537
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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740055.688569
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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825228.688591
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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1118549.688624
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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1204847.688665
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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1390657.688686
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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1560731.688705
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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1810596.688728
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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1921550.688743
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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2416758.688763
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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2575214.688789
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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2575243.688814
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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2873413.688836
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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2873438.68885
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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3051265.688861
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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3166852.68888
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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3453968.688897
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. …
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3553900.688914
Modal expressions in language can describe what is possible in light of a subject’s abilities. In English, modals of this sort include the modal auxiliary can, as well as the predicate able. Here are some examples: (1) a. Ava can hit the target on the next throw. b. Ben is able to join the conference virtually. c. Clem can run 100m in 10 seconds. Ability modals are obviously related to other modalities in language, such as epistemic or deontic modality, but also give rise to anomalies that make them unique. This paper develops a general theory of ability modals that is broadly compatible with standard modal semantics, while predicting their peculiar behavior. The central idea is that ability modals include reference to a notion of dependence. Roughly, (1a) requires that there is an accessible world where Ava hits the target, and that Ava’s hitting the target depends on features of Ava, in some relevant sense of dependence.
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3565077.68893
This article provides an overview of the philosophical and linguistic issues raised by de se attitudes. After discussing a version of the problem of de se attitudes, I examine three influential theories of de se attitudes, while also considering the possibility of retaining a more conservative view. I close by discussing some of the further significance of de se attitudes for philosophy and linguistics.
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3565096.688946
This essay attempts to cast light on the recent debate over whether the norm of assertion is ‘weak’ or ‘strong’. I proceed somewhat indirectly, first arguing for a distinction between two classes of utterances of declarative sentences, classes that can be empirically distinguished along a number of dimensions. For example, these two kinds of utterances differ from each other in what they add to the common ground, how they are elicited, and what sorts of attitude reports they license. I suggest that whether this should be understood as showing that ‘the norm of assertion’ is weak or strong or context-sensitive appears to be largely a terminological question about which utterances of declaratives ought to be called “assertions”. But however the terminological issue is resolved, there remain interesting questions concerning what role each type of utterance plays in our epistemic and communicative practices, and I close with some remarks bearing on this issue.
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3681465.688962
Unless we are willing to countenance the skeptical possibility that most of our thought and talk is meaningless, it would seem that something must guarantee that the ontology presupposed by semantics aligns with the truth about ontology. One motivation for Linguistic Idealism is that it provides such a guarantee. We argue here that such a guarantee is not actually needed to avoid skepticism, since semantics can successfully ‘do its job’ of systematically pairing meanings with utterances even if it has false ontological presuppositions. More broadly, we explore and defend a form of anti-realism about linguistics according to which correct or acceptable linguistic theories can have false presuppositions and thus fail to be true. We argue that this is partly due to the fact that linguistic ‘laws’ or principles themselves—the things that govern or explain language and linguistic competence—do not need to be true in order to ‘do their job’.
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3852048.688977
Mark (10:11-12) and Luke (16:18) have rather simple and straightforward statements on divorce and remarriage: if you divorce and remarry, you’re in adultery. A standard interpretation is the Strict View:
- (SV) Divorce does not actually remove the marriage, and so if you remarry, you’re still married to the previous party, and hence are committing adultery. …
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3859588.688995
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.