Meaning as an Inferential Role

By Jaroslav Peregrin

Contemporary theories of meaning can be divided, with a certain amount of oversimplification, into those which see the meaning of an expression as principally a matter of what the expression denotes or stands for, and those which see it as a matter of how the expression is used. A prominent place among the latter ones is assumed by those which identify the semantically relevant aspect of the usage of an expression with an inferential pattern governing it. According to these theories, the meaning of an expression is principally its inferential role.

[1]. Brandom, Hegel and Inferentialism

By Tom Rockmore

In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian.

Keywords: Hegel, Brandom, Rorty, Inferentialism, Semantics
Source: International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 10, Number 4 / November 01, 2002

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[2]. Brandom on the Normativity of Meaning

By Shapiro L.

Brandom's "inferentialism" - his theory that an expression's or state's contentfulness consists in its use or occurrence being governed by inferential norms - proves dubiously compatible with his own deflationary approach to underwriting the objectivity of intentional content (an approach that is one of the theory's essential presuppositions). This is because a deflationist argument, adapted from the case of truth to that of correct inference , undermines the key criterion of adequacy Brandom employs in motivating inferentialism. Once that constraint is abandoned, furthermore, Brandom is left vulnerable to the charge thathis inferential norms are unavailable toplay the meaning-constituting role he claims for them. Yet Brandom's account of meaning tacitly intertwines inferentialism with a separate explanatory project, one that in explaining the pragmatic significance of meaning-attributions does yield a convincing construal of the claim that the concept of meaning is a normative one.

Source: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1 January 2004, vol. 68, no. 1, pp. 141-160(20)

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Thursday, 3 February 2005 16:50 GMT

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Fragments and ellipsis

By Jason Merchant

Fragmentary utterances such as `short' answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A'-movement of the fragment to a clause peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena.

Note: To appear in Linguistics and Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 15:10 GMT

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On Partial and Paraconsistent Logics

By Reinhard Muskens

In this paper we consider the theory of predicate logics in which the principle of Bivalence or the principle of Non-Contradiction or both fail. Such logics are partial or paraconsistent or both. We consider sequent calculi for these logics and prove Model Existence. For L₄, the most general logic under consideration, we also prove a version of the Craig-Lyndon Interpolation Theorem. The paper shows that many techniques used for classical predicate logic generalise to partial and paraconsistent logics once the right set-up is chosen. Our logic L₄ has a semantics that also underlies Belnap's and is related to the logic of bilattices. L₄ is in focus most of the time, but it is also shown how results obtained for L₄ can be transferred to several variants.

Source: Semantics Archive
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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Saturday, 15 January 2005 15:33 GMT

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A Puzzle Concerning Time Perception

By Robin Le Poidevin

According to a plausible and influential account of perceptual knowledge, the truth-makers of beliefs that constitute perceptual knowledge must feature in the causal explanation of how we acquire those beliefs. However, this account runs into difficulties when it tries to accommodate time perception --specifically perception of order and duration -since the features we are apparently tracking in such perception are (it is argued) not causal. The central aim of the paper is to solve this epistemological puzzle. Two strategies are examined. The first strategy locates the causal truth-makers within the psychological mechanism underlying time perception, thus treating facts about time order and duration as mind-dependent. This strategy, however, is problematic. The second strategy modifies the causal account of perceptual knowledge to include a non-causal component in the explanation of belief-acquisition, namely chronometric explanation. Applying this much more satisfactory approach to perceptual knowledge of time, we can preserve the mind-independence of order and duration, but not that of time's flow.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Wednesday, 12 January 2005 03:32 GMT

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Realism about Structure: The Semantic View and Non-linguistic Representations

By Steven French and Juha Saatsi
Source: PhilSci Archive

The central concern of this paper is whether the Semantic Approach to theories has the resources to appropriately capture the core tenets of structural realism. Chakravartty, for example, has argued that a realist notion of correspondence cannot be accommodated without introducing a linguistic component which undermines the Approach itself. We suggest first of all, that this worry can be addressed by an appropriate understanding of the role of language with respect to the Semantic Approach. Secondly, we argue that an appropriately structuralist account of representation can serve the structural realist's needs. However, the real challenge, we feel, is whether a core notion of `explanatory approximate truth' can be incorporated into this account and in such a way that the emphasis on structure is retained. The extent to which this challenge can be met is something on which even the authors are divided!

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Wednesday, 12 January 2005 03:35 GMT

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The Inconsistency View on Vagueness

By Matti Eklund

I elaborate and defend the inconsistency view on vagueness I have earlier argued for in my (2002) and (forthcoming). In rough outline, the view is that the sorites paradox arises because tolerance principles, despite their inconsistency, are meaning-constitutive for vague expressions. Toward the end of the paper I discuss other inconsistency views on vagueness that have been proposed, and compare them to the view I favor.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Thursday, 6 January 2005 19:02 GMT

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Negative Inversion

By Daniel Buring

In this paper I set out to explore the conditions under which preposed phrases trigger inversion. Pushing the hypothesis that all and only those phrases that can license NPIs trigger inversion, I was then forced to come up with a story for all those cases in which an otherwise attestedly negative element seemed to fail to trigger inversion. This strategy revealed a number of straightforward ambiguities that distinguished seemingly minimal pairs such as the with no clothes and not even ten years ago cases.
Extending this line of analysis to the case of less than and its kin (at most, not more than. . . ) lead to the discovery of two distinct semantic construals of these quantifiers, modifying and cumulative v. scope taking and distributive. The analysis I provided for these cases maintains the initial hypothesis that all negative phrases obligatorily trigger inversion, and that, conversely, the non-inverted cases are not DE. An account was given for the subtly, yet clear meaning-differences, the lack of DE, and the difference in prosodic patterning. Finally, the impossibility of no-quantifiers in plain topicalization was traced back to a more general restriction on the relative scope of these and the event quantifier.

Source: Semantics Archive
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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Sunday, 9 January 2005 12:41 GMT

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A Positive Formalization
for the Notion of Pragmatic Truth

By Tarcisio Pequeno, Arthur Buchsbaum & Marcelino Pequeno

A logic aimed to formalize the concept of pragmatic truth is presented. We start by examining a previous attempt of formalization by da Costa and collaborators, reported in Mikenberg, da Costa, and Chuaqui (1986), da Costa, Chuaqui, and Bueno (1996) and da Costa, Bueno and French(1998). However, their formalization works as mere possibility in face of what is known, or assumed. It is pointed out here that not being in conflict with the assumed knowledge is not enough to regard a proposition as a truth of any sort, providing just a necessary condition.
A typical picture of the way a scientific theory evolves exhibit alternative hypothesis competing for expanding the theory. In our view, a pragmatic knowledge, at this stage of development of the theory, is one that can be taken as true under all those competing hypothesis. The logic presented here formalizes this process of theory evolution in order to properly express the notion of pragmatic truth as we understand it.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Saturday, 8 January 2005 13:12 GMT

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Decidability of Quantified Propositional Intuitionistic Logic and S4 on Trees of Height and Arity [le] [omega]

By Richard Zach

Quantified propositional intuitionistic logic is obtained from propositional intuitionistic logic by adding quantifiers [forall] p,[exist] p, where the propositional variables range over upward-closed subsets of the set of worlds in a Kripke structure. If the permitted accessibility relations are arbitrary partial orders, the resulting logic is known to be recursively isomorphic to full second-order logic (Kremer, 1997). It is shown that if the Kripke structures are restricted to trees of at height and width at most [omega] , the resulting logics are decidable. This provides a partial answer to a question by Kremer. The result also transfers to modal S4 and some G?del-Dummett logics with quantifiers over propositions.

Source: Journal of Philosophical Logic

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Thursday, 6 January 2005 18:51 GMT

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Yablo's paradox rides again: a reply to Ketland

By Otavio Bueno & Mark Colyvan

Yablo ' s paradox is generated by the following (infinite) list of sentences (called Yablo's list):

(S1) For all k> 1, Sk is not true.
(S2) For all k> 2, Sk is not true.
(S3) For all k> 3, Sk is not true.
...
(Sn) For all k>n, Sk is not true.

A little reflection reveals that this list is paradoxical. The source and nature of the paradox has been the focus of a fascinating debate. The crucial issue, of course, is whether Yablo's paradox involves circularity. Stephen Yablo (1993), Roy Sorensen (1998), and Bueno and Colyvan (2003b) have argued that the Yablo list generates a liar-like paradox without circularity. In the other camp are Graham Priest (1997) and JC Beall (2001), who argue that the paradox involves a fixed-point construction and therefore is circular. In Bueno and Colyvan (2003a), we respond by showing that there is a way of deriving a contradiction from the Yablo list without invoking any fixed-point construction and so, it would seem, the paradox does not essentially involve circularity.
In a recent paper, Jeffrey Ketland (2004) argues that our response is incorrect, and claims that the derivation presented in our paper is invalid.
(...)

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Thursday, 6 January 2005 18:42 GMT

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THE PHASE STRUCTURE OF TENSE

By Jonny Butler

I argue that phases should be defined as domains of quantificational closure. I propose that a phase consists of a core predicative category (V, T), topped by l-syntactic little heads (v, t) that introduce situation variables; this whole structure then topped off by a CP level which closes off the variables introduced by the little heads. This derives a theory of temporal construal akin to that of Stowell (1996). The system is extended to cover aspectual notions like perfect/progressive, where evidence from their interaction with modality suggests that perfect and progressive aspect should be considered to head their own phases.

Source: lingBuzz/000065
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Posted by Tony Marmo at 19:31 GMT

Updated: Tuesday, 4 January 2005 19:34 GMT

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Information Dependency in Quantificational Subordination

By Linton Wang, Eric McCready, and Nicholas Asher

The purpose of this paper is to

(a) show that the received view of the problem of quantificational subordination (QS) is incorrect, and that, consequently, existing solutions do not succeed in explaining the facts, and
(b) provide a new account of QS.

On the received view of QS within dynamic semantic frameworks, determiners treated as universal quantifiers (henceforth universal determiners) such as all, every, and each behave as barriers to inter-sentential anaphora yet allow anaphoric accessibility in a number of situations. We argue that universal determiners are not intrinsic anaphora barriers and that anaphoric accessibility under them is enabled factors including lexicon information and discourse effects of universal determiners. In support of this viewpoint, we first provide a data survey on the phenomena of QS and its interactions with plurals, rhetorical relations, and adverbial quantification. The results of the survey show that judgments of (naive) native English speakers on the QS examples are quite different from what is claimed in the literature. We argue that the various solutions in the literature, which in general accept that universal determiners are intrinsic anaphora barriers, fail to account for the facts from the survey data. We then describe the approach we adopt, which denies that universal determiners are anaphora barriers and reconstructs their semantics so that information in their scope can be released for anaphora. The constraints on QS noted in the literature we model in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) as conditions on the discourse relations which can hold between subordinated constituents. We show that this approach accounts for the QS data.

Keywords: Anaphora, Dynamic Semantics, Pronouns, Quantificational Subordination, Rhetorical Relations, SDRT, Telescoping, Universal Determiners

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Monday, 3 January 2005 13:52 GMT

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Investigations in grounded semantics for multi-agent systems specification via deontic logic

By Alessio Lomuscio and Marek Sergot

We investigate an extension of the formalism of interpreted systems by Halpern and colleagues to model correct behaviour of agents. The semantical model allows for the representation and reasoning about states of correct and incorrect functioning behaviour of the agents, and of the system as a whole. We axiomatise this semantic class by mapping it into a suitable class of Kripke models. The resulting logic, KD45_n^i-j, is a stronger version of KD, the system often referred to as Standard Deontic Logic. We discuss these issues and present further directions of work related to epistemic Logic.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Sunday, 2 January 2005 12:08 GMT

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