Semantics and supervenience

I have presented much of this research in talks at the University of Costa Rica and the University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to my audiences for their comments and advice. I would like especially to thank Luis Camacho, Nicholas Asher, and Robert Koons. Many of the ideas in the paper stem from an informal seminar on type-free theories held at the University of Texas's Center for Cognitive Science from 1984 to 1987. I am grateful to the participants in that seminar — Ignacio Angelelli, Nicholas Asher, Herbert Hochberg, Hans Kamp, Frederick Kronz, Per Lindström and Mark Sainsbury — for their many insights into type-free semantics, and to the Center for Cognitive Science for providing such a hospitable environment for this work. I have also profited from the criticisms of two anonymous referees. Finally, I am indebted to the University of Texas's University Research Institute and to the National Science Foundation's Information Science and History and Philosophy of Science programs for grant support.     

Perception,meaning, and mind

Earlier versions of this paper were read in the Philosophy department at the University of Helsinki, in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, at Vanderbilt University, at the Indiana Philosophical Association, and at the Institute for Logic and Cognitive Science at the University of Houston. I am grateful for very helpful comments on each of these occasions, and I am especially appreciative to John Haugeland, Mark Johnson, and George McClure for their comments and suggestions. Thanks, too, to Robert Solomon who urged me to amplify my claims about perceptual meaning.     

Leibniz's complete propositional logic

Conclusion I have shown (to my satisfaction) that Leibniz's final attempt at a generalized syllogistico-propositional calculus in the Generales Inquisitiones was pretty successful. The calculus includes the truth-table semantics for the propositional calculus. It contains an unorthodox view of conjunction. It offers a plethora of very important logical principles. These deserve to be called a set of fundamentals of logical form. Aside from some imprecisions and redundancies the system is a good systematization of propositional logic, its semantics, and a correct account of general syllogistics. For 1686 it was quite an accomplishment. It is a pity that Leibniz himself did not fully appreciate what he had achieved. It does seem to me that this was due in part, as the Kneales urge (Note 4), to his having kept the focus of his attention on traditional syllogistics. It is a great pity that he did not polish GI 195–200 for publication. The publication of GI 195, 198, and 200 would have most likely promoted further research.This paper was conceived in a Seminar on the Generales Inquisitiones offered by Professor Klaus Jacobi at the University of Freiburg during the 1987 winter semester. I am grateful to him for having allowed me to participate in that exciting seminar. I am grateful to all the seminar participants, especially to Professor Jacobi, Professor Klaus Erich Kaehler, Doctor Helmut Pape, and Herr Hans-Peter Engelhart for sustained and illuminating discussions of some passages of the GI. Jacobi was extremely kind in reading the second version of this paper with a highly refined comb. I am most grateful to him for having pointed out typos, stylistic infelicities, and conceptual obscurities. He also provided advice on the translation, and, most generously and cooperatively, offered suggestions for improving the exposition and the arguments.     

On S

The sentential logic S extends classical logic by an implication-like connective. The logic was first presented by Chellas as the smallest system modelled by contraining the Stalnaker-Lewis semantics for counterfactual conditionals such that the conditional is effectively evaluated as in the ternary relations semantics for relevant logics. The resulting logic occupies a key position among modal and substructural logics. We prove completeness results and study conditions for proceeding from one family of logics to another.We are grateful to Peter Apostoli, Kosta Doen, and anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. A.F.'s work has been supported by a grant from the Volkswagen-Stiftung.Presented byJan Zygmunt     

Semantics for relevance logic with identity

Models are constructed for a variety of systems of quantified relevance logic with identity. Models are given for systems with different principles governing the transitivity of identity and substitution, and the relative merits of these principles are discussed. The models in this paper are all extensions of the semantics of Fine's Semantics for Quantified Relevance Logic (Journal of Philosophical Logic 17 (1988)).I am indebted to J. M. Dunn for reading earlier versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Nuel D. Belnap, Jr., Robert K. Meyer, Timothy Day, and Adriano Palma for discussing the topic with me and to Kit Fine for helpful correspondence. Moreover, I am grateful to an anonymous referee for many useful suggestions. A slightly different version presented in a seminar in the philosophy department of the Research School for Social Sciences at The Australian National University. While working on this paper I was funded by postdoctoral fellowship 456-89-0128 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Tacit and accessible understanding of language

The empirical nature of our understanding of language is explored. I first show that there are several important and different distinctions between tacit and accessible awareness. I then present empirical evidence concerning our understanding of language. The data suggests that our awareness of sentence-meanings is sometimes merely tacit according to one of these distinctions, but is accessible according to another. I present and defend an interpretation of this mixed view. The present project is shown to impact on several diverse areas, including inferential role semantics and holism, the nature of learning, and the role of linguistics in the law. I am indebted to a number of people for their useful feedback, especially Peter Ludlow, Paul Pietroski, and two anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at an Eastern meeting of the APA, a meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy at Simon Fraser University, and at a semantics workshop in Ottawa, Canada. I greatly appreciate the comments from those audiences.     

Belief in discourse representation theory

Conclusion I hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time.I am grateful to Dan Bonevac, Irene Heim, Richard Larson, Stan Peters, Rich Thomason and especially Hans Kamp and an anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Philosophical Logic for comments on previous drafts of this paper, as well as to The Center for Cognitive Science for research support.     

Time and modality in the logic of agency

Recent theories of agency (sees to it that) of Nuel Belnap and Michael Perloff are examined, particularly in the context of an early proposal of the author.Elements of this paper formed the contents of lectures I gave in New Zealand and Australia in 1989. I would like again to thank Graham Oddie at Massey University, in Palmerston North, Jack Copeland at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, John Bacon at the University of Sydney, and Graham Priest at the University of Queensland for their kindness and the gracious receptions they and their colleagues gave me. My thanks go to Graham Oddie and Krister Segerberg, who organized a workshop on Events, Processes, Actions at Lake Taupo, New Zealand, in November 1989, and invited me to participate with a preliminary version of this paper. In June 1990, I presented a fuller specimen at the annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy, in Wakulla Springs, Florida. Bob Beard at Florida State University organized that splendid gathering, and I am grateful to him for the opportunity to speak at it.For the past several years, Nuel Belnap has sent me copies and updates of his and Michael Perloff's papers. I would like to record my gratitude to him for this and also, especially, for extended comments on the penultimate draft of the present paper. With a few exceptions, I have not tried to take these into account here; I hope that discussions of points on which we disagree will find their way into print in due course.I would also like to acknowledge and thank a referee for a number of helpful suggestions.My largest debt is to Krister Segerberg, who as professor and head of the philosophy department at the University of Auckland invited me to spend a sabbatical autumn (antipodal spring) with him in 1989. It was he who suggested — and then insisted — that I contribute to his seminar on modal logic and agency a session or two on Belnap and Perloff's theories, and then he encouraged me to write this paper. I would like to express my deep gratitude as well to Krister and Anita Segerberg for their hospitality and companionship during my stay in New Zealand.     

Physics and common causes

The common cause principle states that common causes produce correlations amongst their effects, but that common effects do not produce correlations amongst their causes. I claim that this principle, as explicated in terms of probabilistic relations, is false in classical statistical mechanics. Indeterminism in the form of stationary Markov processes rather than quantum mechanics is found to be a possible saviour of the principle. In addition I argue that if causation is to be explicated in terms of probabilities, then it should be done in terms of probabilistic relations which are invariant under changes of initial distributions. Such relations can also give rise to an asymmetric cause-effect relationship which always runs forwards in time.This paper was written while I was on an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, for which I am grateful. I am also grateful for comments from John Norton and an anonymous referee.     

War,innocence, and the doctrine of double effect

I am grateful to members of the philosophy departments at the University of Melbourne and Sydney, to students in my Fall 1991 Ethical Theory class at the University of Maryland, especially John Watts, and to David Luban for useful discussions.     

The logic of obligation, ‘better’ and ‘worse’

Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, FT-33794. I am grateful to an anonymous referee of this journal for remarks on an earlier version of this paper.     

Incompatibility Semantics from Agreement

In this paper, I discuss the analysis of logic in the pragmatic approach recently proposed by Brandom. I consider different consequence relations, formalized by classical, intuitionistic and linear logic, and I will argue that the formal theory developed by Brandom, even if provides powerful foundational insights on the relationship between logic and discursive practices, cannot account for important reasoning patterns represented by non-monotonic or resource-sensitive inferences. Then, I will present an incompatibility semantics in the framework of linear logic which allow to refine Brandom’s concept of defeasible inference and to account for those non-monotonic and relevant inferences that are expressible in linear logic. Moreover, I will suggest an interpretation of discursive practices based on an abstract notion of agreement on what counts as a reason which is deeply connected with linear logic semantics.     

Netscal: A network scaling algorithm for nonsymmetric proximity data

A simple property of networks is used as the basis for a scaling algorithm that represents nonsymmetric proximities as network distances. The algorithm determines which vertices are directly connected by an arc and estimates the length of each arc. Network distance, defined as the minimum pathlength between vertices, is assumed to be a generalized power function of the data. The derived network structure, however, is invariant across monotonic transformations of the data. A Monte Carlo simulation and applications to eight sets of proximity data support the practical utility of the algorithm.I am grateful to Roger Shepard and Amos Tversky for their helpful comments and guidance throughout this project. The work was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS-75-02806 to Roger Shepard and a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship to the author. Parts of this paper were drawn from a doctoral dissertation submitted to Stanford University (Hutchinson, 1981).     

States, state types, and the causation of behavior

An earlier version of this paper has been read at a conference on Mental Causation which was held on March 12–14, 1990, at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, as an integral part of the work of the research group Mind and Brain. I am very grateful to ZiF for the financial support that made it possible for me to take part in the research group. Thanks also to the organizers of the conference Peter Bieri and Jaegwon Kim.     

On the Logic of Nonmonotonic Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities: Predicate Logic

In a previous paper I described a range of nonmonotonic conditionals that behave like conditional probability functions at various levels of probabilistic support. These conditionals were defined as semantic relations on an object language for sentential logic. In this paper I extend the most prominent family of these conditionals to a language for predicate logic. My approach to quantifiers is closely related to Hartry Field's probabilistic semantics. Along the way I will show how Field's semantics differs from a substitutional interpretation of quantifiers in crucial ways, and show that Field's approach is closely related to the usual objectual semantics. One of Field's quantifier rules, however, must be significantly modified to be adapted to nonmonotonic conditional semantics. And this modification suggests, in turn, an alternative quantifier rule for probabilistic semantics.     

Conceptual dependency as the language of thought

Roger Schank's research in AI takes seriously the ideas that understanding natural language involves mapping its expressions into an internal representation scheme and that these internal representations have a syntax appropriate for computational operations. It therefore falls within the computational approach to the study of mind. This paper discusses certain aspects of Schank's approach in order to assess its potential adequacy as a (partial) model of cognition. This version of the Language of Thought hypothesis encounters some of the same difficulties that arise for Fodor's account.An ancestor of this paper was written while I was on sabbatical leave from the University of Michigan, Flint, during which time I held a fellowship in the Computer Science Department of Wright State University. Revisions were made while I held a Visiting Lectureship at the University of Waikato. I am grateful to these three institutions for their support, and to James H. Fetzer, David Hemmendinger, and Edwin Hung for helpful comments on earlier versions.     

An Alternative Model of Political Reasoning

The primary instrument of dispute management in political liberalism is a form of political thinking and talking that tries to reconcile opposed positions with an impartial settlement based on fair arrangements and mutual respect, one that is careful to treat rival views equitably, and reasoned through from start to finish with open methods that lead to a public justification understandable to the disputants. But this model of reasoning is notoriously deficient in resolving disputes among radically different communities. A more effective form of political reasoning for these disputes that yet respects the background values of liberalism is found in the languages of state depicted in realist accounts of international relations. These languages avoid liberal appeals to be reasonable, reciprocity controlled by moral criteria, and the quest for common reasons. They represent a deliberative search for an accord that will meet the interests of the disputing parties as they define these interests and understand the settlements, and in this sense are welcome models to manage divisive issues in pluralist democracies. A complete version of political reasoning would contain both liberal and realpolitik models and a mechanism to adjudicate the appropriate uses of each model.I do not know how even to begin thanking my spring 2003 graduate seminar for the wonderful discussions that allowed me to refine my thinking on this research project. In different ways the following individual members of the seminar were helpful: Amanda Dipaolo, Dimitria Gatzia, Michael McFall, Michael McKeon, Roald Nashi, Paul Prescott, Joshua Vermette, Amy Widestrom, and the two regular auditors, Cyril Ghosh and Darrell Driver. I have also profited from numerous discussions with other graduate students, including, early in this project, Steven Benko and, more constantly, Ali Shomali. Faculty colleagues who have commented on the work and suggested literatures for me to read and references to track include James Bennett, Hans Schmidt, Peg Hermann, Elizabeth Cohen, Jim Watts, Jim Wiggins, David Miller and Thomas Green. I am particularly grateful to Everita Silina, a graduate student who has been a constant friend and invaluable research assistant for the past five years. The Miami International Relations Theory group provided a critical venue to try out portions of this paper at the University of Miami campus on April 23, 2004. I then presented a later version of the paper to a Philosophy Department colloquium at the University of Miami on April 22, 2005. The comments made by those who attended one or both of the sessions were very helpful. I am also grateful to Ken Baynes and Ned McClennen for allowing me to be an unlisted third instructor in their seminar on “law, economics and public reason” in the fall semester 2004 at Syracuse University, and for the opportunity to present some of this work at one of the seminar meetings. If anything demonstrates the importance of a good collective setting on intellectual work this seminar was one such demonstration.     

Seeing through CORNEA

For useful comments on an early draft of this paper, I wish to thank Andrew Cortens, William Hasker, Richard Swinburne and Mark Webb. I am especially grateful to William Alston, Frances Howard-Snyder and John O'Leary-Hawthorne for extended discussion on several pertinent matters.     

Relevant implication and the case for a weaker logic

We collect together some misgivings about the logic R of relevant inplication, and then give support to a weak entailment logic DJ^d. The misgivings centre on some recent negative results concerning R, the conceptual vacuousness of relevant implication, and the treatment of classical logic. We then rectify this situation by introducing an entailment logic based on meaning containment, rather than meaning connection, which has a better relationship with classical logic. Soundness and completeness results are proved for DJ^d with respect to a content semantics, which embraces the concept of meaning containment.Dedicated to Robert K. Meyer on the occasion of his 60th birthdayThis paper was presented to the Australasian Association for Logic Conference, A.N.U., Canberra, in July, 1992. This Conference commemorated the 60th birthday of Robert K. Meyer, in recognition of the enormous contribution he has made to Logic, especially to Relevant Logic, and of the general lift he has given to the field in his adopted country, Australia. This paper owes its inspiration to Robert Meyer's Farewell to Entailment [37] and his earlier Why I am not a Relevantist [35]. This paper also owes a great deal to Richard Sylvan who has consistently supported weaker relevant logics at a time when stronger relevant logics were in vogue (see especially [47], Chapter 3). In writing this paper, I have also benefited from conversations with Nuel Belnap, Michael Dunn, Kit Fine and Alasdair Urquhart during a period of study leave in 1991. I also thank Robert Meyer, Michael Dunn, Martin Bunder and John Slaney for useful comments on my conference paper. I would also like to thank the referees of this Journal for their helpful comments, which led me to make substantial improvements to this paper.     

Newcomb's Problem,Prisoners' Dilemma,and collective action

Among various cases that equally admit of evidentialist reasoning, the supposedly evidentialist solution has varying degrees of intuitive attractiveness. I suggest that cooperative reasoning may account for the appeal of apparently evidentialist behavior in the cases in which it is intuitively attractive, while the inapplicability of cooperative reasoning may account for the unattractiveness of evidentialist behaviour in other cases. A collective causal power with respect to agreed outcomes, not evidentialist reasoning, makes cooperation attractive in the Prisoners' Dilemma. And a natural though unwarranted assumption of such a power may account for the intuitive appeal of the one-box response in Newcomb's Problem.This paper was originally submitted to Synthese in March 1989. For helpful comments and criticisms of earlier versions I am grateful to Michael Bacharach, John Broome, David Gauthier, Isaac Levi, Adam Morton, Derek Parfit, Howard Sobel, Robert Sugden, Bas van Fraassen, and members of audiences on various occasions on which I have presented this paper. I am also grateful to the Humanities Council of Princeton University for their generous support during the period when this paper was written.