Intensional concepts in propositional semantic networks

An integrated statement is made concerning the semantic status of nodes in a propositional semantic network, claiming that such nodes represent only intensions. Within the network, the only reference to extensionality is via a mechanism to assert that two intensions have the same extension in same world. This framework is employed in three application problems to illustrate the nature of its solutions. The formalism used here utilizes only assertional information and no structural, or definitional, information. This restriction corresponds to many of the psychologically motivated network models. Some of the psychological implications of network processes called node merging and node splitting are discussed. Additionally, it is pointed out that both our networks and the psychologically based networks are prone to memory confusions about knowing unless augmented by domain-specific inference processes, or by structural information.     

You can say what you think: vindicating the effability of our thoughts

The thesis of Ineffability has it that no proposition can be fully expressed by a sentence, this meaning that no sentence-type, or even sentence-token whose indexicality and ambiguities have been resolved, can fully encode a proposition. The thesis of the propositionality of thoughts has it that thoughts are propositional. An implication of the joint endorsement of these two theses is that thoughts are ineffable. The aim of this paper is to argue that this is not the case: there are effable thoughts, and we can even safely say that, generally, thoughts are effable. In order to defend this insight, I first counter the thesis of the propositionality of thought by bringing some counterexamples to it, which amount to cases of non-fully propositional thought. I then argue that, if thoughts can be and often are non-fully propositional, they can be expressed by sentences that fail to fully express a proposition. I also show that the propositional thoughts that we can entertain are after all effable (in a suitable, relevant sense) and resist some alleged examples of insurmountable ineffability.     

Depression and attention to two kinds of meaning: A cognitive perspective

The complexity of a mental disorder such as depression is such that a way of interlinking the neural, mental and interpersonal levels is needed. This paper proposes that a theoretical framework which distinguishes, and relates, macro-theory and micro-theory at these levels can serve this purpose. The 'Interacting Cognitive Subsystems' approach to mental architecture is used to show how, via the detailed specification of mental processes and representations, a macro-theory of mental architecture contributes to our understanding of depressed states. In the account advanced by Teasdale and Barnard depressed states are seen as being maintained by an abnormal version of a dynamic dialogue between two qualitatively distinct types of meaning: one is referentially specific, propositional meaning, the other consists of holistic schemata rich in latent content and is called implicational meaning. In depressed states with ruminative and avoidant thought patterns, the mental function of attention is seen as being directed preferentially at propositional meanings. There is a corresponding neglect of attention to implicational meanings. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of how this approach can address transdiagnostic issues and how it may suggest new strategies for therapeutic interventions.     

Computing finite models by reduction to function-free clause logic

Recent years have seen considerable interest in procedures for computing finite models of first-order logic specifications. One of the major paradigms, MACE-style model building, is based on reducing model search to a sequence of propositional satisfiability problems and applying (efficient) SAT solvers to them. A problem with this method is that it does not scale well because the propositional formulas to be considered may become very large.We propose instead to reduce model search to a sequence of satisfiability problems consisting of function-free first-order clause sets, and to apply (efficient) theorem provers capable of deciding such problems. The main appeal of this method is that first-order clause sets grow more slowly than their propositional counterparts, thus allowing for more space efficient reasoning.In this paper we describe our proposed reduction in detail and discuss how it is integrated into the Darwin prover, our implementation of the Model Evolution calculus. The results are general, however, as our approach can be used in principle with any system that decides the satisfiability of function-free first-order clause sets.To demonstrate its practical feasibility, we tested our approach on all satisfiable problems from the TPTP library. Our methods can solve a significant subset of these problems, which overlaps but is not included in the subset of problems solvable by state-of-the-art finite model builders such as Paradox and Mace4.     

The basic notion of justification

Conclusion Our tasks are then complete. We offered, in J7, a defensible claim that there is a relation of necessity and sufficiency between doxastic and propositional justification. We claimed as well that propositional justification is the basic kind of justification. In order to defend this claim, several tasks were undertaken. First, a preliminary investigation showed that there are at most three irreducible kinds of justification. In order to show that there is only one kind, we first showed how personal justification is equivalent to doxastic justification. We then showed that, whereas doxastic justification can be defined in terms of propositional justification, propositional justification cannot be defined in terms of that kind of doxastic justification predicable of tokens of beliefs. We conclude that propositional justification is the basic kinds of justification.These results have implications both for the substance of epistemology and for the methodology employed in constructing an epistemological theory. First, no version of reliabilism can be defended by claiming that there are fundamentally distinct and irreducible notions of justification. Further, the procedure adopted by those versions of reliabilism which count as instances of Aristotelian epistemology cannot be correct. Such theories begin by discussing our intellectual powers, faculties, virtues, or cognitive processes and then define a primitive notion of justification in terms of the doxastic products of such powers, faculties, virtues, or processes. This approach cannot succeed, for, as we have seen, no such theory can given an adequate explanation of the connection between doxastic and propositional justification. For these theories to succeed, one of three alternatives must be available. The first is that propositional justification is explicable in terms of doxastic justification; as we have seen, that claim is false. The second and third alternatives are that Aristotelians either might claim irreducibility between propositional and doxastic justification, or the might hold that, for some reason or other, there is no such thing as propositional justification. Both of these alternatives are unattractive because of the plausibility of J7. If it is adequate, then doxastic justification is explicable in terms of propositional justification. Further, if J7 is adequate, claiming that there is no such thing as propositional justification puts the notion of doxastic justification in jeopardy as well, for doxastic justification is definable in terms of propositional justification. In sum: present reliabilist theories which hold that justification is the result of the proper employment of our cognitive equipment, and which are thereby committed to constructing a theory of justification with doxastic justification as the basic notion of justification, are incompatible with the fact that propositional justification is the basic kind of justification.     

Frege and propositional unity

This paper identifies a tension in Frege’s philosophy and offers a diagnosis of its origins. Frege’s Context Principle can be used to dissolve the problem of propositional unity. However, Frege’s official response to the problem does not invoke the Context Principle, but the distinction between ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’ propositional constituents. I argue that such a response involves assumptions that clash with the Context Principle. I suggest, however, that this tension is not generated by deep-seated philosophical commitments, but by Frege’s occasional attempt to take a dubious shortcut in the justification of his conception of propositional structure.     

Seeing the Stove as World: Significance (Bedeutung) in the Early Wittgenstein

What is it to see a stove as world (als Welt) and why does the early Wittgenstein use such a curious example to describe what it means to see something as significant (bedeutend)? I argue that Wittgenstein's odd choice can be best understood in the light of a conceptual relation between value and semantic meaning. To that purpose, I draw attention to his use of the word Bedeutung to denote value, and to the direct connection he draws between seeing as world and seeing with the whole logical space. To see a stove as bedeutend, I conclude, is to see it against the background of the propositional contexts in which a stove figures meaningfully.     

Embodied experience and linguistic meaning

What role does people's embodied experiences have in their use and understanding of meaning? Most theories in cognitive science view meaning in terms of propositional structures that may be combined to form higher-order complexes in representing the meanings of conversations and texts. A newer approach seeks to capture meaning in terms of high-dimensional semantic space. Both views reflect the idea that meaning is best understood as abstract and disembodied symbols. My aim in this article is to make the case for an embodied view of linguistic meaning. This view provides a challenge to traditional approaches to linguistic meaning (although may not necessarily be entirely incompatible with them). I discuss several new lines of research from both linguistics and psychology that explore the importance of embodied perception and action in people's understanding of words, phrases, and texts. These data provide strong evidence in favor of the idea that significant aspects of thought and language arises from, and is grounded in, embodiment.     

Normative Practical Reasoning: Christian Pillar

In the first part I discuss the thesis, advanced by John Broome, that intentions are normatively required by all-things-considered judgments about what one ought to do. I endorse this thesis, but remain sceptical about Broome's programme of grounding the correctness of reasoning in formal relations between contents of mental states. After discussing objections to the thesis, I concentrate in the second part on the relation between rational action and rational intention. I distinguish between content-related and attitude-related reasons for propositional attitudes like believing, wanting, and intending something. The former appeal to features of the content of the propositional attitude they are reasons for, the latter would be reasons for a propositional attitude because of features of the propositional attitude as a whole, for example the feature of its being beneficial to believe or to want that p . I try to show that the common philosophical reaction to attitude-related reasons, namely to claim that they are merely content-related reasons in disguise, is mistaken. In its most extreme form such a reaction would fail to respect the first-person character of reasoning which manifests itself in, among other things, the fact that a Moore-sentence and its analogue for intentions cannot be a conclusion of reasoning. In the third part I argue that there are attitude-related reasons for intentions, and, in showing how they influence practical deliberation, I find that their existence can be rendered compatible with the thesis that it is rational to intend to do what one thinks one ought to do.     

The Unity of Language and Logic in Wittgenstein's Tractatus

The purpose of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the Tractatus’ proof of the unity of logic and language. The kernel of the proof is the thesis that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form. I argue that the Grundgedanke, the existence of the sole fundamental operation N and the analyticity thesis, together with the fact that the operation NN can always be seen as having no specific formal difference between its result and its base, imply that NN is intrinsic to every elementary proposition. I also argue that the picture theory of proposition is an account of the generation of propositions via naming, and that its crucial idea is that naming is the instantiation of the form of a name, which consists in arbitrarily picking out an object as the meaning of the name from those objects sorted out by the form of the name. It follows that the existential quantifier, that is, NN, is intrinsic to naming (and therefore to every elementary proposition). It is then proven that the sole logical constant is the general propositional form. This, together with the truth‐functionality of logical necessity, implies that logic and language are unified via a general rule – logical syntax.     

Content in a Dynamic Context

The standing tradition in theorizing about meaning, since at least Frege (1882), identifies meaning with propositions, which are, or determine, the truth‐conditions of a sentence in a context. But a recent trend has advocated a departure from this tradition: in particular, it has been argued that modal claims do not express standard propositional contents. This non‐propositionalism has received different implementations in expressivist semantics (Moss, 2015; Swanson, 2006; Yalcin, 2007) and certain kinds of dynamic semantics (Gillies, 2004, 2010; von Fintel and Gillies, 2007; Veltman, 1985, 1996). They maintain that the key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context. I argue that pessimism about truth‐conditions arises from an overly simplistic picture of content, context and their interaction. While I agree with the critics that an important aspect of modal meaning is the dynamic effect modals have on the context, I argue that they have mischaracterized the nature and the complexity of this effect. A more nuanced account of the interaction between modals and context shows that far from being incompatible with propositional meaning, the dynamic aspect of meaning is precisely what allows us to predict the correct propositional content of an utterance.     

Specifying executive representations and processes in number generation tasks

The Interacting Cognitive Subsystems framework, ICS (Barnard, 1985) proposes that central executive phenomena can be accounted for by two autonomous subsystems, which process different forms of meaning: propositional and schematic (implicational) meanings. The apparent supervisory role of the executive arises from limitations on the exchange of information between these and other cognitive subsystems. This general proposal is elaborated in four experiments in which a total of 1,293 participants are asked to spontaneously generate a large verbal number to varying task constraints, with the intention of specifying the representations of number and task that underlie responses. Responses change systematically according to participants' use of explicit propositional information provided by the instructions, and inferred implicational information about what the experimenter is requesting. There was a high error rate (between 6% and 24%), participants producing responses that did not fall within the large range indicated by the instructions. The studies support the distinction between propositional and implicational processing in executive function, and provide a framework for understanding normal executive representations and processes.     

Content and context in incremental processing: “the ham sandwich” revisited

The interplay of content and context is observable in a moment to moment manner as propositional content unfolds. The current contribution illustrates this through data from real-time language comprehension indicating that propositional content is not computed in isolation but relies in important ways on context during every step of the computation of meaning. The relevant notion of context that we have to adopt includes all aspects of possible worlds and draws on a variety of knowledge representations, which in a first processing phase serve to generate expectations for upcoming words. In a second phase, the discourse representation is assessed and if necessary updated by means of inferential reasoning and enrichment to reflect the speaker’s intended meaning.     

On The Computational Consequences of Independence in Propositional Logic

Sandu and Pietarinen [Partiality and Games: Propositional Logic. Logic J. IGPL 9 (2001) 101] study independence friendly propositional logics. That is, traditional propositional logic extended by means of syntax that allow connectives to be independent of each other, although the one may be subordinate to the other. Sandu and Pietarinen observe that the IF propositional logics have exotic properties, like functional completeness for three-valued functions. In this paper we focus on one of their IF propositional logics and study its properties, by means of notions from computational complexity. This approach enables us to compare propositional logic before and after the IF make-over. We observe that all but one of the best-known decision problems experience a complexity jump, provided that the complexity classes at hand are not equal. Our results concern every discipline that incorporates some notion of independence such as computer science, natural language semantics, and game theory. A corollary of one of our theorems illustrates this claim with respect to the latter discipline.     

Higher-order defeat and intellectual responsibility

It’s widely accepted that higher-order defeaters, i.e., evidence that one’s belief is formed in an epistemically defective way, can defeat doxastic justification. However, it’s yet unclear how exactly such kind of defeat happens. Given that many theories of doxastic justification can be understood as fitting the schema of proper basing on propositional justifiers, we might attempt to explain the defeat either by arguing that a higher-order defeater defeats propositional justification or by arguing that it defeats proper basing. It has been argued that the first attempt is unpromising because a variety of prominent theories of propositional justification don’t imply that we lose propositional justification when gaining higher-order defeaters. This leads some scholars to take the second attempt. In this paper, I criticize this second attempt, and I defend the first attempt by arguing that a theory of propositional justification that requires intellectual responsibility can nicely account for higher-order defeat. My proposal is that we lose doxastic justification when we gain higher-order defeaters because there is no intellectually responsible way for us to maintain our original beliefs due to the defeaters.

     

Classical harmony: Rules of inference and the meaning of the logical constants

The thesis that, in a system of natural deduction, the meaning of a logical constant is given by some or all of its introduction and elimination rules has been developed recently in the work of Dummett, Prawitz, Tennant, and others, by the addition of harmony constraints. Introduction and elimination rules for a logical constant must be in harmony. By deploying harmony constraints, these authors have arrived at logics no stronger than intuitionist propositional logic. Classical logic, they maintain, cannot be justified from this proof-theoretic perspective. This paper argues that, while classical logic can be formulated so as to satisfy a number of harmony constraints, the meanings of the standard logical constants cannot all be given by their introduction and/or elimination rules; negation, in particular, comes under close scrutiny.     

Obligation and Aspect

‘Fred must open the door’ concerns Fred’s obligations. This obligative meaning is turned off by adding aspect: ‘Fred must have opened/be opening/have been opening the door’ are one and all epistemic. Why? In a nutshell: obligative ’must’ operates on procedural contents of imperative sentences, epistemic ‘must’ on propositional contents of declarative sentences; and adding aspect converts procedural into propositional content.     

Emotional Truth: Ronald de Sousa

Taking literally the concept of emotional truth requires breaking the monopoly on truth of belief-like states. To this end, I look to perceptions for a model of non-propositional states that might be true or false, and to desires for a model of propositional attitudes the norm of which is other than the semantic satisfaction of their propositional object. Those models inspire a conception of generic truth, which can admit of degrees for analogue representations such as emotions; belief-like states, by contrast, are digital representations. I argue that the gravest problem—objectivity—is not insurmountable.     

The Monodic Fragment of Propositional Term Modal Logic

We study term modal logics, where modalities can be indexed by variables that can be quantified over. We suggest that these logics are appropriate for reasoning about systems of unboundedly many reasoners and define a notion of bisimulation which preserves propositional fragment of term modal logics. Also we show that the propositional fragment is already undecidable but that its monodic fragment (formulas using only one free variable in the scope of a modality) is decidable, and expressive enough to include interesting assertions.

     

祈使句和反问句中双重否定的加工机制

采用句-图匹配范式,以可预测对立意义的句子和图片为实验材料,考察汉语双重否定的加工方式以及句子的形式与语义对句子加工的影响,包括2个实验。研究发现：（1）双重否定是整体加工的;（2）在理解初期（250ms）,否定反问句、双重否定祈使句与肯定祈使句的加工模式一致,都是直接表征事件的实际状态;（3）当句子形式与语义不一致时,读者更多地受到句子语义的影响。这表明,在双重否定加工机制的理论解释中,命题表征理论忽略语义,注重句子形式结构,而基于经验模拟理论的两步模拟假设则立足语义,忽略句子形式结构,两者都有一定的合理性,但也都存在一定的片面性。