Persisting problems for a quantificational theory of complex demonstratives

I criticized Jeffrey King’s theory of complex demonstratives in “Problems for a Quantificational Theory of Complex Demonstratives.” King replied in “Complex Demonstratives as Quantifiers: Objections and Replies.” I here comment on some of King’s replies.

Indirect perceptual realism and demonstratives

I defend indirect perceptual realism against two recent and related charges to it offered by A. D. Smith and P. Snowdon, both stemming from demonstrative reference involving indirect perception. The needed aspects of the theory of demonstratives are not terribly new, but their connection to these objections has not been discussed. The groundwork for my solution emerges from considering normal cases of indirect perception (e.g., seeing something depicted on a television) and examining the role this indirectness plays in demonstrative assertions. I argue that indirectness routinely if not typically plays a justificatory role in such judgements, and not a semantic one, and that the same can be said of such judgements when considered within the indirect realist framework. The denial of this, on my analysis, is essential to the criticisms of Snowdon and Smith. The discussion is extended to include scenarios involving the sorts of misconceptions Smith employs.

Complex demonstratives as quantifiers: objections and replies

In “Complex Demonstratives: A Quantificational Account” (MIT Press 2001) (henceforth CD), I argued that complex demonstratives are quantifiers. Many philosophers had held that demonstratives, both simple and complex, are referring terms. Since the publication of CD various objections to the account of complex demonstratives I defended in it have been raised. In the present work, I lay out these objections and respond to them.

Lexical decomposition of complex Kanji characters in Japanese readers

Summary The study investigates the question whether during recognition of a complex Kanji character readers also access the meaning of opaque components of the character. The experiment used a speeded semantic-categorization task of two characters, in which readers were requested to decide whether two characters represented words related in meaning or not. The control pairs consisted of (a) graphically similar, but semantically unrelated, characters, and (b) a simple character and a complex character, of which the simple character was a component (part-whole relation), the two characters being again semantically unrelated. The critical pairs consisted of two characters unrelated in meaning, one of which contained an opaque component element related in meaning to the other character. A corresponding trial with English and its alphabetic system would be to ask a subject to decide whether boycott is related in meaning to girl or not. In this condition the subject is expected to give a No response, but if the pseudocomponent boy is activated, interference could occur. (If boy is recovered during recognition of the pseudocompound boycott, the appropriate No response for boycott-girl could become more difficult to take.) The result of the experiment indicated interference in all three conditions (graphically similar characters, part-whole related characters, and opaque-component related characters. Thus, in an analogous task with alphabetic material, it would be more difficult to say No about the existence of a semantic relation between (a) tree and free, (b) boy and boycott, and (c) boycott and girl. The last result can be interpreted as offering evidence for the activation of the opaque component upon recognition of the complex character.This account is somewhat oversimplified. It is not always easy to determine which is a radical in a complex character. A higher radical can in fact be a combination of a lower radical with the addition of one or more strokes.     

Communication and Structured Correlation

Philosophers and social scientists have recently turned to Lewis sender–receiver games to provide an account of how lexical terms can acquire meaning through an evolutionary process. However, the evolution of meaning is contingent on both the particular sender–receiver game played and the choice of evolutionary dynamic. In this paper I explore some differences between models that presume an infinitely large and randomly mixed population and models in which a finite number of agents communicate with their neighbors in a social network. My results show that communication with neighbors is more conducive to the evolution of meaning than communication with strangers. Additionally, I show that the behavior of the system is highly dependent on the topological structure of the social network. I argue that a specific class of networks—small world graphs—is especially conducive to the evolution of meaning. This is because small world graphs have a short characteristic path length while still maintaining a high degree of correlation between neighbors. Since many actual social networks, such as friendship networks and nervous systems, are conjectured to be small world structures, these results indicate that these networks are quite hospitable to the efficient evolution of meaning.     

Structured meanings and reflexive domains

This paper is about the most important technical problem faced by Structured Meanings Semantics: the reiteration of hyperintensional functors (i.e., functors of -categorial languages of the sort defined by Max Cresswell in [6]). A way to solve this problem in a general and natural way by using Scott's Domains is both suggested and shown. The result is a semantics which unrestrictedly allows reiterations of hyperintensional functors. The semantics is also extended to accommodate -categorial languages with variables.I would like to thank Johan van Benthem, Harold Shellinx, Willem Groenelveld and Bruce Toombs for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. This work was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (doctoral fellowship 452-88-2518).     

Structured propostions and sentence structure

It is argued that taken together, two widely held claims ((i) sentences express structured propositions whose structures are functions of the structures of sentences expressing them; and (ii) senteces have underlying structures that are the input to semantic interpretation) suggest a simple, plausible theory of propositional structure. According to this theory, the structures of propositions are the same as the structures of the syntactic inputs to semantics they are expressed by. The theory is defended against a variety of objections.I have benefitted from discussions with Michael Jubien, Michacl Liston, Paul Teller, Howard Wettstein, Mark Wilson and especially David Copp. The comments of Mark Richard and an anonymous referee for Journal of Philosophical Logic on an earlier draft resulted in a much improved paper. Various circumstances resulted in this paper appearing after King [1995], though the latter was written later and amends the present view in several ways. See notes 9, 13, 15 and 33 of King [1995].     

Structured contexts and anaphoric dependencies

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context.