TRUTH AS AN EPISTEMIC IDEAL

Several philosophers—including C. S. Peirce, William James, Hilary Putnam and Crispin Wright—have proposed various versions of the notion that truth is an epistemic ideal. More specifically, they have held that a proposition is true if and only if it can be fixedly warranted by human inquirers, given certain ideal epistemic conditions. This paper offers a general critique of that idea, modeling conceptions of ideality and fixed warrant within the semantics that Kripke developed for intuitionistic logic. It is shown that each of the two plausible notions of fixed warrant faces difficulties and that, moreover, “truth” defined in terms of either of them is distressingly dependent upon one’s conception of idealized inquiry and perhaps also upon one’s standards of warrant.     

Why Propositions Cannot be Sets of Truth-supporting Circumstances

No semantic theory satisfying certain natural constraints can identify the semantic contents of sentences (the propositions they express), with sets of circumstances in which the sentences are true–no matter how fine-grained the circumstances are taken to be. An objection to the proof is shown to fail by virtue of conflating model-theoretic consequence between sentences with truth-conditional consequence between the semantic contents of sentences. The error underlines the impotence of distinguishing semantics, in the sense of a truth-based theory of logical consequence, and semantics, in the sense of a theory of meaning.     

An Approach to Glivenko’s Theorem in Algebraizable Logics

In a classical paper [15] V. Glivenko showed that a proposition is classically demonstrable if and only if its double negation is intuitionistically demonstrable. This result has an algebraic formulation: the double negation is a homomorphism from each Heyting algebra onto the Boolean algebra of its regular elements. Versions of both the logical and algebraic formulations of Glivenko’s theorem, adapted to other systems of logics and to algebras not necessarily related to logic can be found in the literature (see [2, 9, 8, 14] and [13, 7, 14]). The aim of this paper is to offer a general frame for studying both logical and algebraic generalizations of Glivenko’s theorem. We give abstract formulations for quasivarieties of algebras and for equivalential and algebraizable deductive systems and both formulations are compared when the quasivariety and the deductive system are related. We also analyse Glivenko’s theorem for compatible expansions of both cases. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

Grades of meaning

In this paper, I lend novel support to H. P. Grice’s account of speaker meaning (GASM) by blunting the force of a significant objection. Stephen Schiffer has argued that in order to make GASM sufficient, one must add restrictions that are psychologically impossible to fulfill, thereby making GASM untenable. In what follows, I explain the elements of GASM that require it to invoke these psychologically unrealizable restrictions. I then accept Schiffer’s criticism, but modify its significance to GASM. I argue that the problem that Schiffer notes is not a reason to reject GASM, but a reason to embrace it. GASM shows that meaning is best understood as an absolute concept—an unrealizable ideal limit. Taking some inspiration from contextualist theories of knowledge attribution, I argue that my version of GASM offers a useful contextualist account of meaning attribution. Hence, pragmatic theories of meaning and communication should not wholly exclude GASM from their theorizing, at least not for the reasons that are commonly given.     

Modelling simultaneous games in dynamic logic

We make a proposal for formalizing simultaneous games at the abstraction level of player’s powers, combining ideas from dynamic logic of sequential games and concurrent dynamic logic. We prove completeness for a new system of ‘concurrent game logic’ CDGL with respect to finite non-determined games. We also show how this system raises new mathematical issues, and throws light on branching quantifiers and independence-friendly evaluation games for first-order logic.     

拥挤的动机：公益投资中的公共服务动机与外部激励

现代公共管理日益重视公共服务动机,但如何激励公共服务动机,却悬而未决。针对已有研究的局限,采用公益投资博弈的实验范式,考察了激励类型、性别和PSM水平对动机-绩效关系的影响。发现：1）PSM能显著预测公益投资绩效;2）金钱激励撤销后对所有被试均造成了不良后果（动机挤出）;4）荣誉激励能显著提升男性被试的公益投资绩效,且不造成消极后果;但会给女性带来PSM的挤出。未来研究还应考察PSM是否存在内隐层面,并应当考虑文化适合性。     

第三方惩罚与社会规范激活——社会责任感与情绪的作用

社会规范需要被激活才能显著影响个体行为,第三方惩罚（TP）正是这样一个激活的过程。本研究将TP引入独裁者博弈（DG）,社会规范被激活的被试参与了TP与DG,未激活的被试只参与了DG。结果表明,前者在TP之后显著提升了DG中的亲社会行为。进一步的分析发现,在社会规范激活过程中,社会责任感越高的个体被激活的程度越高,对违背社会规范的行为产生的愤怒情绪也越高,从而产生了更高水平的亲社会行为。在排除了实验中其他因素和相关理论的解释后,这一基本的实验结果表明社会规范激活受到社会责任感的影响并伴随着特定情绪的激发。     

Understanding the Brandenburger-Keisler Paradox

Adam Brandenburger and H. Jerome Keisler have recently discovered a two person Russell-style paradox. They show that the following configurations of beliefs is impossible: Ann believes that Bob assumes that Ann believes that Bob’s assumption is wrong. In [7] a modal logic interpretation of this paradox is proposed. The idea is to introduce two modal operators intended to represent the agents’ beliefs and assumptions. The goal of this paper is to take this analysis further and study this paradox from the point of view of a modal logician. In particular, we show that the paradox can be seen as a theorem of an appropriate hybrid logic. Special Issue Formal Epistemology II. Edited by Branden Fitelson     

The semantic/episodic distinction: The case for social information processing

The directed-forgetting paradigm was used in order to dissociate episodic from semantic processes in an impression formation task. Results demonstrate that incongruent behaviors are more prone to manipulations that disrupt episodic memory, whereas congruent behaviors are unaffected by such manipulations. The results suggest that the distinction between episodic and semantic memory processes is central for the understanding of social information processing. An explanation is put forward according to which the incongruency effect, a signature effect of impression formation, is due to an episodic encoding advantage for incongruent behaviors because of their semantically isolated nature, and their impoverished semantic encoding.     

Optimal assertions,and what they implicate. A uniform game theoretic approach

To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, suggesting that there is no need for an independent linguistic theory of generalized implicatures. In the final section, we show how we can embed our theory in the framework of signaling games, and how it relates with other game theoretic analyses of implicatures.