(1) *I Ariadne exi zisi sto Parisi mexri tora.
Ariadne has lived in Paris until now.

(2) *I Ariadne exi xasi ta klidia tis mexri tora.
Ariadne has lost her keys until now.

(3) *Ariadne has lived in Paris until 1998.

This is a puzzle in the light of two common assumptions that predict no incompatibility between the use of an UNTIL term and a form of Present Perfect:

(i) perfect eventualities denote result states (McCoard 1978, Dowty 1979, Vlach 1983, Kamp and Reyle 1993),
(ii) UNTIL is a stative modifier

I sense no such incompatibilities when using any equivalent Portuguese tenses in the first case:

(4) Ariadne viveu/ tem vivido/vem vivendo em Paris ate agora.

But in the second case there is a distinction between using the real participle and an adjective form:

(5) *Ariadne tem perdido (participle) as chaves ate agora.
(6) Ariadne tem perdidas (adjective) as chaves ate agora.

Perhaps, these are extra evidences to the known fact that not all languages have Perfect Tenses like English has.

See also this other post about Roumyana Pancheva's paper on the present perfect tense puzzle.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 06:43 BST

Updated: Thursday, 12 August 2004 06:48 BST

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Constructions and Formal Semantics

by Marc Moffett
Source: Close Range June 27, 2004

I have been arguing, for instance in my dissertation, that the correctness of Construction Grammar is pretty much uncontroversial. The point, basically, is that no one has ever proposed a semantic theory for even a simple language that doesn't assume the existence of at least one linguistic construction, usually the subject-predicate construction. So in my view those guys over in Berkeley (and their followers) are on pretty solid ground. (The only way I can see to avoid this conclusion is to argue that predication, or function-application, isn't part of the semantics, but something extra.)

Unfortunately, in virtue of not taking explicit account of the role of constructions in their philosophical semantics, philosophers (and linguistic semanticists) philosophers of language have been led to, in my estimation, very implausible linguistic theses. My personal bugbear is the doctrine of logical forms, construed as a linguistic thesis. I want to be clear here that, although I am not convinced of the need for a level LF in syntax, that notion of logical form is far too weak to do the sort of work required by the sorts of robust semantic analyses posited these days. (Think, for instance, of the neoDavidsonian analysis of eventive sentences!) In order to accomodate these robust semantic analyses, the underlying logical forms would have to be vastly more complex than can be reasonably motivated on purely syntactic grounds.

So why have so many philosophers been suckered into accepting them? I'm not sure, but I wonder if it doesn't arise in part from an implicit acceptance of the Fregean view of the language-proposition relation. According to Frege (or, at least, Dummett's Frege), our only cognitive access onto propositions is via the linguistic structure of the sentences that express them. If Frege's Thesis is correct, then the need for a robust semantics will require a correspondingly complex underlying linguistic structure.

[It is also worth considering, in this quasi-historical context, whether or not Russell's notion of contextual definition and the associated doctrine of "incomplete symbols" doesn't mark out an inchoate construction-based theory of language.]

Comments

Jason Stanley

Your question should be -- why have so many *linguists* been suckered into accepted logical form, with rich covert syntactic structures. Once the point is put in this more adequate manner, it becomes clear you're being more than a little dogmatic.
Those philosophers who do accept rich logical forms do so, because, in taking syntax classes for many years, we've been introduced to the notion of a rich logical form with lots of covert structure (is Richard Larson in a philosophy department? Is Chomsky in a philosophy department? Pesetsky?). Robert May's book on logical form in the 1980's had a big impact on syntax and semantics, and many of us who started doing linguistics then were doing GB, and read that book. Minimalist syntax makes different assumptions than GB, and seeks to explain different evidence. But, if anything, it postulates much more covert structure.
In my experience, it's *philosophers* who are reluctant to buy linguistic arguments for covert structures.

Part of the problem has to do with what's meant by "purely syntactic grounds". If what you mean is, on the basis of judgements of grammaticality and ungrammaticality alone, then that is simply an oversimplistic conception of "purely syntactic grounds". For example, we distinguish bound vs. free readings of pronouns not on the grounds of grammaticality, but on the grounds that they give rise to different readings. We appeal to different potentential attachment sites of modifiers as arguments for underlying constituent structures. And so on -- so your post assumes some conception of "purely syntactic grounds" that is overly philosophical in nature.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:15 BST

Updated: Monday, 9 August 2004 07:38 BST

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BOOK #1

TIME, TENSE AND REFERENCE

Edited by Aleksandar Jokic &Varieties of Meaning
The 2002 Jean Nicod Lectures
By Ruth Garrett Millikan

Many different things are said to have meaning: people mean to do various things; tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things; representations in people's minds also presumably mean things. In Varieties of Meaning, Ruth Garrett Millikan argues that these different kinds of meaning can be understood only in relation to each other.

What does meaning in the sense of purpose (when something is said to be meant for something) have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying? Millikan argues that the explicit human purposes, explicit human intentions, are represented purposes. They do not merely represent purposes; they possess the purposes that they represent. She argues further that things that signify, intentional signs such as sentences, are distinguished from natural signs by having purpose essentially; therefore, unlike natural signs, intentional signs can misrepresent or be false.

Part I discusses "Purposes and Cross-Purposes" -- what purposes are, the purposes of people, of their behaviors, of their body parts, of their artifacts, and of the signs they use. Part II then describes a previously unrecognized kind of natural sign,
"locally recurrent" natural signs, and several varieties of intentional signs, and discusses the ways in which representations themselves are represented. Part III offers a
novel interpretation of the way language is understood and of the relation between semantics and pragmatics. Part IV discusses perception and thought, exploring stages in the development of inner representations, from the simplest organisms whose behavior is governed by perception-action cycles to the perceptions and intentional attitudes of humans.
Quentin Smith

Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary.

The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to
further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections -- one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other
on the metaphysics of time.

link

BOOK #2

THE SYNTAX OF TIME

Edited by Jacqueline Gueron and Jacqueline Lecarme

Any analysis of the syntax of time is based on a paradox: it must include a syntax-based theory of both tense construal and event construal. Yet while time is undimensional, events have a complex spatiotemporal structure that reflects their human participants. How can an event be flattened to fit into the linear time axis?
Chomsky's The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, offers a way to address this problem. The studies collected in The Syntax of Time investigate whether problems concerning the construal of tense and aspect can be reduced to syntactic problems for which the basic mechanism and principles of generative grammar already provide solutions.

These studies, recent work by leading international scholars in the field,offer varied perspectives on the syntax of tense and the temporal construal of events: models of tense interpretation, construal of verbal forms, temporal aspect versus lexical aspect, the relation between the event and its argument structure, and the interaction of case with aktionsart or tense construal. Advances in the theory of temporal interpretation in the sentence are also applied to the temporal interpretation of nominals.

link

Posted by Tony Marmo at 13:01 BST

Updated: Monday, 9 August 2004 07:44 BST

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Contrastivism and Hawthorne?s principle of practical reasoning

by Jon Kvanvig
Source: Certain Doubts 7/26/2004

Contrastivism holds that the truth makers for knowledge attributions always involve a contrast, and Hawthorne thinks that if you know something, you are entitled to use it in practical reasoning. So one way to test what it is known is to see what kinds of practical reasoning we?ll allow are acceptable.

Depending on what the contrast is, contrastive knowledge may be easy or hard to have. So, it is easier to know ?the train will be on time rather than a day late? than it is to know ?the train will be on time rather than 2 minutes late.? One way to put the difference is that one is presupposing more in knowing the first claim that one is in knowing the second.

Consider then a piece of practical reasoning using the following conditional: if you are pointing a gun at me, and if your gun is loaded and if you intend to shoot me, I should shoot you first. Suppose I know that you are pointing a gun at me rather than a twig, and that I know that your gun is loaded rather than having just been disassembled for cleaning, and suppose I know that you intend to shoot me rather than give me a million bucks. Should I shoot you? Maybe this is an anti-gun sentiment coming out, but I think it is far from obvious that I should.

Compare this case to another. In this case, I know that you are pointing a gun at me rather than any non-lethal item, and I know that your gun is loaded rather than merely having the appearance of being loaded from where I stand, and I know that you intend to shoot me rather than anyone else in the universe. Now I think I should shoot you first.

Why the difference? In contrastivist language, I?m presupposing too much in the first case, I think. The knowledge I have is easy knowledge because it presupposes so much. I?m presupposing that the thing in your hand is either a gun or a twig, that it?s either loaded or disassembled, that you intend to shoot me or make me rich. In the context of these assumptions, it?s too easy to come to the conclusion that I should shoot first and ask questions later. In the second, case, however, my presuppositions are much broader, broad enough that my knowledge is no longer easy. And since my knowledge is not easy, I doubt I could be faulted on grounds of rationality for shooting first.

It appears, then, that contrastivists will have to deny Hawthorne?s principle. Moreover, I don?t see any obvious way to qualify the principle for the following reason. If the action is relatively inconsequential, then easy knowledge may be enough to warrant performing the action. But if the action is immensely significant, as it is in the case of taking a life, then easy knowledge doesn?t seem to be enough.

One way to think about such cases is that they may provide a reason for including pragmatic issues in one?s account, either indirectly as contextualists typically do or directly as we find in the invariantist camp. Or maybe a reason for rejecting Hawthorne?s principle??

Posted by Tony Marmo at 12:28 BST

Updated: Monday, 9 August 2004 07:45 BST

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Obituary

Posted by Tony Marmo at 05:48 BST

Updated: Monday, 9 August 2004 07:46 BST

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Be warned, this could be the matrix

Source: The Sidney Morning Herald, July 22, 2004

The multiverse theory has spawned another - that our universe is a simulation, writes Paul Davies.

If you've ever thought life was actually a dream, take comfort. Some pretty distinguished scientists may agree with you. Philosophers have long questioned whether there is in fact a real world out there, or whether "reality" is just a figment of our imagination.

Then along came the quantum physicists, who unveiled an Alice-in-Wonderland realm of atomic uncertainty, where particles can be waves and solid objects dissolve away into ghostly patterns of quantum energy.

Now cosmologists have got in on the act, suggesting that what we perceive as the universe might in fact be nothing more than a gigantic simulation.

The story behind this bizarre suggestion began with a vexatious question: why is the universe so bio-friendly? Cosmologists have long been perplexed by the fact that the laws of nature seem to be cunningly concocted to enable life to emerge. Take the element carbon, the vital stuff that is the basis of all life. It wasn't made in the big bang that gave birth to the universe. Instead, carbon has been cooked in the innards of giant stars, which then exploded and spewed soot around the universe.
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The process that generates carbon is a delicate nuclear reaction. It turns out that the whole chain of events is a damned close run thing, to paraphrase Lord Wellington. If the force that holds atomic nuclei together were just a tiny bit stronger or a tiny bit weaker, the reaction wouldn't work properly and life may never have happened.

The late British astronomer Fred Hoyle was so struck by the coincidence that the nuclear force possessed just the right strength to make beings like Fred Hoyle, he proclaimed the universe to be "a put-up job". Since this sounds a bit too much like divine providence, cosmologists have been scrambling to find a scientific answer to the conundrum of cosmic bio-friendliness.

The one they have come up with is multiple universes, or "the multiverse". This theory says that what we have been calling "the universe" is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is an infinitesimal fragment of a much grander and more elaborate system in which our cosmic region, vast though it is, represents but a single bubble of space amid a countless number of other bubbles, or pocket universes.

Things get interesting when the multiverse theory is combined with ideas from sub-atomic particle physics. Evidence is mounting that what physicists took to be God-given unshakeable laws may be more like local by-laws, valid in our particular cosmic patch, but different in other pocket universes. Travel a trillion light years beyond the Andromeda galaxy, and you might find yourself in a universe where gravity is a bit stronger or electrons a bit heavier.

The vast majority of these other universes will not have the necessary fine-tuned coincidences needed for life to emerge; they are sterile and so go unseen. Only in Goldilocks universes like ours where things have fallen out just right, purely by accident, will sentient beings arise to be amazed at how ingeniously bio-friendly their universe is.

It's a pretty neat idea, and very popular with scientists. But it carries a bizarre implication. Because the total number of pocket universes is unlimited, there are bound to be at least some that are not only inhabited, but populated by advanced civilisations - technological communities with enough computer power to create artificial consciousness. Indeed, some computer scientists think our technology may be on the verge of achieving thinking machines.

It is but a small step from creating artificial minds in a machine, to simulating entire virtual worlds for the simulated beings to inhabit. This scenario has become familiar since it was popularised in The Matrix movies.

Now some scientists are suggesting it should be taken seriously. "We may be a simulation ... creations of some supreme, or super-being," muses Britain's astronomer royal, Sir Martin Rees, a staunch advocate of the multiverse theory. He wonders whether the entire physical universe might be an exercise in virtual reality, so that "we're in the matrix rather than the physics itself".

Is there any justification for believing this wacky idea? You bet, says Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, who even has a website devoted to the topic ( http://www.simulation-argument.com ). "Because their computers are so powerful, they could run a great many simulations," he writes in The Philosophical Quarterly .

So if there exist civilisations with cosmic simulating ability, then the fake universes they create would rapidly proliferate to outnumber the real ones. After all, virtual reality is a lot cheaper than the real thing. So by simple statistics, a random observer like you or me is most probably a simulated being in a fake world. And viewed from inside the matrix, we could never tell the difference.

Or could we? John Barrow, a colleague of Martin Rees at Cambridge University, wonders whether the simulators would go to the trouble and expense of making the virtual reality foolproof. Perhaps if we look closely enough we might catch the scenery wobbling.

He even suggests that a glitch in our simulated cosmic history may have already been discovered, by John Webb at the University of NSW. Webb has analysed the light from distant quasars, and found that something funny happened about 6 billion years ago - a minute shift in the speed of light. Could this be the simulators taking their eye off the ball?

I have to confess to being partly responsible for this mischief. Last year I wrote an item for The New York Times , saying that once the multiverse genie was let out of the bottle, Matrix -like scenarios inexorably follow. My conclusion was that perhaps we should retain a healthy scepticism for the multiverse concept until this was sorted out. But far from being a dampener on the theory, it only served to boost enthusiasm for it.

Where will it all end? Badly, perhaps. Now the simulators know we are on to them, and the game is up, they may lose interest and decide to hit the delete button. For your own sake, don't believe a word that I have written.

Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy at Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Astrobiology. His latest book is How to Build a Time Machine.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:25 BST

Updated: Monday, 9 August 2004 07:55 BST

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