Comments on the paradox of analysis

A version of the so‐called paradox of analysis is enunciated which involves two principles of synonymy, referred to respectively as that of substitution and that of triviality. It is argued that for most “familiar” concepts of synonymy the former principle can be maintained whereas the latter one has to be rejected. I deal with some solutions to the paradox that have been proposed or discussed by Carnap, Lewy, Feyerabend and Hare, and adhere to Carnap's view that the puzzle arises from the use of unclarified and imprecise notions of synonymy.     

Semantic networks of English.

Principles of lexical semantics developed in the course of building an on-line lexical database are discussed. The approach is relational rather than componential. The fundamental semantic relation is synonymy, which is required in order to define the lexicalized concepts that words can be used to express. Other semantic relations between these concepts are then described. No single set of semantic relations or organizational structure is adequate for the entire lexicon: nouns, adjectives, and verbs each have their own semantic relations and their own organization determined by the role they must play in the construction of linguistic messages.     

Remarks on Wittgenstein's über Gewissheit and a Norwegian discussion

In the late forties and in the fifties, what was then known as the Oslo School of Philosophy, that is, Arne Naess and his students, received some fame, or notoriety, for its empirical investigations of lay uses of various epistemological terms, such as ‘true’, ‘certain’, ‘probable’. It is less known that Arne Naess, in 1953, opened up a series of investigations into conceptual frameworks, the comparability of conceptual frameworks, and the senses, if any, in which a conceptual framework can be said to represent knowledge. In the course of these investigations Arne Naess, together with some of his students, developed views that are strikingly close to those of Ludwig Wittgenstein in Über Gewissheit. This paper examines some of those similarities and a few dissimilarities.     

阿兰·奈斯论深层生态学

奈斯看来,深层生态学既是一种社会思潮,又是以这种思潮为指导的一场旨在改变现行的人类实践模式的社会运动。作为一种社会思潮,它是一个由一系列基本原理构成的演绎性的逻辑体系。奈斯认为,深层生态学的理论内核是八大原理,而在其背后,还有更为基本的前提与终极规范,即各种生态智慧。而奈斯本人的生态智慧的终极规范是(大)自我实现。     

Current Approaches to Phenomenology

Tennessen and Naess both assume that we can make meaningful judgments about the value of life but disagree with one another about whether it is obvious, as Tennessen believes, that the more men know the less reason they have to affirm life. It is their common assumption which Nietzsche would question and these notes try to bring out why.     

Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision,naming, and semantic categorization tasks: interactions between orthography,phonology, and semantics

In this article, ambiguity and synonymy effects were examined in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks. Whereas the typical ambiguity advantage was observed in lexical decision and naming, an ambiguity disadvantage was observed in semantic categorization. In addition, a synonymy effect (slower latencies for words with many synonyms than for words with few synonyms) was observed in lexical decision and naming but not in semantic categorization. These results suggest that (a) an ambiguity disadvantage arises only when a task requires semantic processing, (b) the ambiguity advantage and the synonymy disadvantage in lexical decision and naming are due to semantic feedback, and (c) these effects are determined by the nature of the feedback relationships from semantics to orthography and phonology.     

Does the Quine/duhem Thesis Prevent Us from Defining Analyticity?

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section 2). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section 3). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section 4). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section 5).     

The Bricot–Mair Dispute: Scholastic Prolegomena to Non-Compositional Semantics

From a general semantic point of view, Thomas Bricot (d. 1516) and John Mair (1467–1550) are proponents of the solution to semantic paradoxes based on appreciation of the contextuality of truth, who differ in their approach to the relations of logical consequence and contradiction. The core of the study is the analysis of Mair's criticism of Bricot presented in the sixth quaestio of his Tractatus insolubilium where the consequences of non-compositional semantics for the concepts of synonymy and logical form are addressed. The polemic between John Mair and Thomas Bricot is construed as having immediate consequences for research in the area of non-compositional semantics.     

Examining the role of word identification in synonymy judgment

This paper examines the role of word identification in semantic judgment tasks. We argue that word-identification processes can substantially alter the functional properties of semantic judgment tasks. We investigate this empirically by examining the effects of semantic relatedness and relatedness proportion on synonymy judgments of non-synonym pairs. The results demonstrate that semantic relatedness slows synonymy judgments for non-synonym pairs when the relatedness proportion is low, but speeds them when the relatedness proportion is high. The former effect is a replication of traditional findings, while the latter effect reverses these findings. We explain these results by hypothesizing that increasing the relatedness proportion increases the beneficial effects of semantic relatedness in word identification, and this produces the reversal of traditional findings. We close by emphasizing that models of semantic judgment tasks can become more comprehensive by focusing on word identification.     

Analyticity Without Synonymy In Simple Comparative Logic

In this paper I provide some formal schemas for theanalysis of vague predicatesin terms of a set of semantic relations other thanclassical synonymy, includingweak synonymy (as between ``large' and ``huge'),antonymy (as between ``large'and ``small'), relativity (as between ``large'and ``large for a dog'), and a kind ofsupervenience (as between ``large' and ``wide'or ``long'). All of these relationsare representable in the simple comparativelogic CL, in accordance with the basicformula: the more something is F, the more(or less) it is G. I use Carnapianmeaning postulates to define these relationsas constraints on interpretations of theformal language of CL.     

语境同义性逻辑(英文)

众所周知,基于可能世界语义的内涵逻辑由于对意义的刻画过于粗粝而导致了所谓的"超内涵问题"。为了解决超内涵问题,出现了各种超内涵逻辑,其中由Suszko提出的带等词的命题逻辑(SCI)是超内涵逻辑中最基本的一种。本文是对SCI的精炼,其动机是语境同义性论题(CST)。该论题认为,同义性标准具有语境依赖性。基于认知语境主义,我们给出了CST的一个论证。通过将SCI中的二元等词修改为一个三元结构,用来表示两个陈述相对某个语境表达同一命题,我们给出了CST的希尔伯特式公理系统。我们证明了该系统相对一个代数模型类是可靠的和完全的。该代数模型的论域由命题构成,同时附带一组命题上的全等关系,用以刻画相对于语境的命题同一性。我们运用该逻辑部分解决了分析悖论这一困扰逻辑学家多年的问题。与我们之前的基于相同动机的论文[17]相比,本文给出的形式语言更加丰富,从而能够表达不同语境之间以及不同语境的同义性之间的关系。     

The long-term effect of relational information in classification learning

This study examines the long-term effect of mutual information in the learning of Shepardian classifications. Mutual information is a measure of the complexity of the relationship between features because it quantifies how the features relate to each other. For instance, in various categorisation models, Type VI concepts—originally studied by Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961)—are unanimously judged to be the most complex kind of 3-D Boolean concepts. This has been largely confirmed by empirical data. Yet, it is apparently inconsistent with the fact that this concept entails the greatest amount of mutual information of all the 3-D Boolean concepts. The present study was aimed at verifying whether individuals can use relational information, in the long run, to devise easier strategies for category learning. Subject performance was measured repeatedly for 1 hour on either successive Type VI concepts (using different features between problems) or successive Type IV concepts. The results showed that shortly after the second problem, Type VI concepts became easier to learn than Type IV ones. The gap between the mean per-problem error rates of the two concepts continued to increase as the number of problems increased. Two other experiments tended to confirm this trend. The discussion brings up the idea of combining different metrics in categorisation models in order to include every possible way for subjects to simplify the categorisation process.     

A Quinean Definition Of Synonymy

The main purpose of this paper is to propose and defend anew definition of synonymy. Roughly (and slightly misleadingly), theidea is that two expressions are synonymous iff intersubstitutions insentences preserve the degree of doxastic revisability. In Section 1 Iargue that Quine's attacks on analyticity leave room for such adefinition. The definition is presented in Section 2, and Section 3elaborates on the concept of revisability. The definition is defendedin Sections 4 and 5. It is, inter alia, shown that the definition hasdesired formal properties. In Sections 6 and 7 I briefly comment on,first, the relation of the definition to Quine's later ideas about (stimulus)synonymy, and, second, its relation to a general, interlinguistic, conceptof meaning.     

Constraints on spontaneous transfer in problem-solving tasks

In three experiments, we investigated the conditions under which relevant knowledge is spontaneously transferred to problem-solving tasks. Subjects were presented with key concepts that could help them solve problems presented at a later time in the experiment. The key concepts were embedded in statements that had surface structures similar or dissimilar to those of the problems and that emphasized relevant or irrelevant properties of the key concepts for the problemsolving task (contextual relevance). The results indicated that the spontaneous transfer of clue information to subsequent problem-solving tasks is affected by the contextual relevance and the surface-structure similarity of the clue statements to the problems. The findings also suggested that the surface-structure similarity and the contextual relevance of clue statements differentially affect the accessibility and appropriate application of key concepts in problem-solving tasks. The implications of these results for understanding the transfer of knowledge in problem-solving tasks are discussed.     

Development of comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if”

The comprehension of sentences with “because” or “if” was investigated in children aged 2;9–11;11. Imitation, comprehension (choosing one of two picture sequences to go with a sentence), recognition (judging sentences with connective or structure differences as heard before or not), and synonymy (judging equivalence of meaning in sentences with different connectives or structures) tasks were administered, along with logical ordering, reversibility, and classification tasks. Above-chance responding in the comprehension task occurred by age 8, and in recognition and synonymy by age 10. Cognitive performance predicted 28.4% of the variance in the linguistic scores and cognitive success was concurrent with or preceded linguistic success. Comprehension of “because” and “if” appears to develop gradually, and is related to the development of certain operative rules.     

ANALYSIS,ABSTRACTION PRINCIPLES,AND SLINGSHOT ARGUMENTS

Frege's views regarding analysis and synomymy have long been the subject of critical discussion. Some commentators, led by Dummett, have argued that Frege was committed to the view that each thought admits of a unique ultimate analysis. However, this interpretation is in apparent conflict with Frege's criterion of synonymy, according to which two sentence express the same thought if one cannot understand them without regarding them as having the same truth–value. In a recent article in this journal, Drai attempts to reconcile Frege's criterion of synonymy with unique ultimate analysis by holding that, for Frege, if two sentences satisfy the criterion without being intensionally isomorphic, at most one of them is a privileged representation of the thought expressed. I argue that this proposal fails, because it conflicts not only with Frege's views of abstraction principles but also with slingshot arguments (including one presented by Drai herself) that accurately reflect Frege's commitment to the view that sentences alike in truth–value have the same Bedeutung. While Drai helpfully connects Frege's views of abstraction principles with such slingshot arguments, this connection cannot become fully clear until we recognise that Frege rejects unique ultimate analysis.     

Synonymy and Intra-Theoretical Pluralism

The starting point of this paper is a version of intra-theoretical (logical) pluralism that was recently proposed by Hjortland [2013]. In a first move, I use synonymy-relations to formulate an intuitively compelling objection against Hjortland's claim that, if one uses a single calculus to characterise the consequence relations of the paraconsistent logic LP and the paracomplete logic K3, one immediately obtains multiple consequence relations for a single language and hence a reply to the Quinean charge of meaning variance. In a second move, I explain how a natural generalisation of the notion of synonymy (adapted to the 3-sided sequent-calculus used by Hjortland) can be used to counter this objection, but I also show how the solution can be turned into an equally devastating ‘one logic after all’ type of objection. Finally, I propose the general diagnosis that these problems could only arise in the presence of conceptual distinctions that are too coarse to accommodate coherent pluralist theses. The latter leads to the general methodological recommendation that the conceptual resources used to think and talk about logic should be kept in line with the formal resources that are used to define and describe a logical theory.     

COMMENTS AND CORRECTIONS: Chance and Intentionality in Creative Performance

Because people must organize information and combine or reorganize categories to produce creative solutions, there is reason to suspect that concepts play an important role in creative thought. Unfortunately, little is known about the kind of concepts that contribute to the success of people' s creative problem-solving efforts. Accordingly, 135 college students were presented with a series of novel, ill-defined problems in which they were asked to select a set of concepts they thought would help them solve these problems. These indices of concept preferences were then correlated with the quality and originality of the solutions obtained on a set of two creative problem-solving tasks. The use of concepts organized around long-term goals was positively related to indices of solution quality and originality. The implications of these findings for understanding the kind of concepts that contribute to creative thought are discussed.     

Barriers to evidence-based treatment: developmental psychopathology and the interdisciplinary disconnect in school mental health practice

Reframing the role of school psychologists and related school professionals in a public health and primary prevention model represents a proactive antidote to their more traditional reactive stance to mental health problems. Two additional concepts, developmental psychopathology and complex comorbidity, are suggested as critical to complete this transition, and illustrations of these concepts for more effective school mental health services are provided.