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Sunday, 6 March 2005

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: PARACONSISTENCY

Using Counterfactuals in Knowledge-Based Programming


By Joseph Y. Halpern & Yoram Moses

Knowledge-based programs, first introduced by Halpern and Fagin [and further developed by Fagin, Halpern, Moses, and Vardi, are intended to provide a high-level framework for the design and specification of protocols. The idea is that, in knowledge-based programs, there are explicit tests for knowledge. Thus, a knowledge-based program might have the form
if K(x = 0) then y := y + 1 else skip,

where K(x = 0) should be read as "you know x = 0" and skip is the action of doing nothing. We can informally view this knowledge-based program as saying "if you know that x = 0, then set y to y + 1 (otherwise do nothing)".
Knowledge-based programs are an attempt to capture the intuition that what an agent does depends on what it knows. They have been used successfully (...) both to help in the design of new protocols and to clarify the understanding of existing protocols. However, as we show here, there are cases when, used naively, knowledge-based programs exhibit some quite counterintuitive behavior. We then show how this can be overcome by the use of counterfactuals. In this introduction, we discuss these issues informally, leaving the formal details to later sections of the paper.
Source: CLE

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 4 March 2005 19:06 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Cognition & Epistemology

Counterfactual conditionals and false belief: a developmental dissociation


By Josef Perner, Manuel Sprung & Bettina Steinkogler

The objective of this study was to explore factors that affect the difficulty of counterfactual reasoning in 3-5-year-old children and to shed light on the reason why counterfactual reasoning relates to understanding false belief [Cognitive Development, 13 (1998) 73-90]. Using travel scenarios, the difference between simple scenarios, in which each departure point led to exactly one destination, and complex scenarios, in which each of the departure points was cross-connected with all destination points, proved very important. In simple scenarios even 3 and 1/2 -year olds gave 75% correct answers to counterfactual questions, a level achieved on complex scenarios a year, and on false belief questions, irrespective of scenario, 1 and 1/2 years later. Since simple scenarios require the same kind of reasoning as complex scenarios, this calls into question the suggestion by Peterson and Riggs [Mind & Language 14 (1999) 80-112] that modified derivation is the common denominator for answering counterfactual questions and questions about false belief.

Keywords: Counterfactual conditionals; False belief; Conditional reasoning

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 4 March 2005 19:25 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: GENERAL LOGIC

Causation and Counterfactuals


A recommended book

Edited by John Collins, Ned Hall and L. A. Paul, Published by Bradford Books

One philosophical approach to causation sees counterfactual dependence as the key to the explanation of causal facts: for example, events c (the cause) and e (the effect) both occur, but had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. The counterfactual analysis of causation became a focus of philosophical debate after the 1973 publication of the late David Lewis's groundbreaking paper, "Causation," which argues against the previously accepted "regularity" analysis and in favor of what he called the "promising alternative" of the counterfactual analysis. Thirty years after Lewis's paper, this book brings together some of the most important recent work connecting--or, in some cases, disputing the connection between--counterfactuals and causation, including the complete version of Lewis's Whitehead lectures, "Causation as Influence," a major reworking of his original paper. Also included is a more recent essay by Lewis, "Void and Object," on causation by omission. Several of the essays first appeared in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, but most, including the unabridged version of "Causation as Influence," are published for the first time or in updated forms.

Other topics considered include the "trumping" of one event over another in determining causation; de facto dependence; challenges to the transitivity of causation; the possibility that entities other than events are the fundamental causal relata; the distinction between dependence and production in accounts of causation; the distinction between causation and causal explanation; the context-dependence of causation; probabilistic analyses of causation; and a singularist theory of causation.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 4 March 2005 19:04 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Interconnections

FACTS AND COUNTERFACTUALS IN ECONOMIC LAW


By Jorg Guido Hulsmann

Ludwig von Mises emphasized that economics is the foremost political science of our age. As such, the clarification of the facts on which this science is built, and of the way political conclusions are based on them, is of the greatest practical importance.
The same spirit of a practical-minded interest for the epistemology and methodology of economic science motivates the present paper. I will argue that the nature of human choice jeopardises the mainstream approach to analysing human action, and then show that the difficulties of analysing choice can be overcome once it is recognised that a whole class of economic laws are counterfactual laws. They concern the relationship between what human beings actually do (their behaviour, their thoughts) and what they could have done instead. These laws can be applied in counterfactual analyses of the real world, which consist in comparing observed human behaviour and its unrealised choice alternatives in various (e.g., quantitative) terms.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 4 March 2005 19:05 GMT

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK
Topic: GENERAL LOGIC

Intertranslating Counterfactuals and Updates


By Mark Ryan & Pierre-Yves Schobbens

We recall that the Ramsey Rule can be seen as axiomatising the relationship of inverse accessibility relations which exists between the notions of update and counterfactual conditional. We use this fact to translate between postulates for updates and postulates for counterfactuals. Thus, Katsuno/Mendelzon?s postulates U1{U8 are translated into counterfactual postulates C1{C8 (theorem 6), and many of the familar counter-factual postulates are translated into postulates for updates (theorem 7). Our conclusions are summarised in table 5.


Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Saturday, 5 March 2005

Now Playing: COUNTERFACTUALS WEEK (REPOSTED)
Topic: Cognition & Epistemology

Contradictions and Counterfactuals:
Generating Belief Revisions in Conditional Inference
By Ruth M.J. Byrne & Clare R. Walsh

Reasoners revise their beliefs in the premises when an inference they have made is contradicted. We describe the results of an experiment that shows that the belief they revise depends on the inference they have made. They revise their belief in a conditional (if A then B) when they make a modus tollens inference (from not-B to not-A) that is subsequently contradicted (A). But when they make a modus ponens inference (from A to B) that is contradicted (not-B) they revise their belief in the categorical assertion (A). The experiment shows that this inference contradiction effect occurs not only for factual conditionals but also for counterfactual conditionals. However, reasoners revise their beliefs in factual conditionals more than counterfactuals.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Saturday, 5 March 2005 09:22 GMT
Thursday, 3 March 2005

Topic: Interconnections

A Nominalist's Dilemma


By Otavio Bueno & Edward N. Zalta

Current versions of nominalism in the philosophy of mathematics have the benefit of avoiding commitment to the existence of mathematical objects. But this comes with a cost: to avoid commitment to mathematical entities, nominalists cannot take mathematical theories literally, and so, they seem unable to accommodate mathematical practice. In a recent work, Jody Azzouni (2004) has challenged this conclusion, by formulating a nominalist view that doesn't have this cost. In this paper, we argue that, as it stands, Azzouni's proposal doesn't yet succeed. It faces a dilemma to the effect that either the view isn't nominalist or it fails to take mathematics literally. So, in the end, it still doesn't do justice to mathematical practice. After presenting the dilemma, we suggest a solution for Azzouni's version of nominalism.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy
To appear in Philosophia Mathematica

Posted by Tony Marmo at 16:31 GMT
Updated: Thursday, 3 March 2005 16:41 GMT

Topic: PARACONSISTENCY

Modulated Logics and Uncertain Reasoning


By Walter Carnielli & Maria Claudia C. Gracio

This paper studies a family of monotonic extensions of first-order logic which we call modulated logics, constructed by extending classical logic through generalized quantifiers called modulated quantifiers. We give an uniform treatment of modulated logics, obtaining some general results in model theory. Besides carefully reviewing the Logic of Ultrafilters and the Logic of Most, two new monotonic logical systems are introduced here: the Logic of Many and the Logic of Ubiquity, which formalize inductive assertions of the kind many and almost everywhere through new modulated quantifiers and, respectively. Although the notion of most can be captured by means of a modulated quantifier semantically interpreted by cardinal measure on sets of evidences, it is proven that this system, although sound, cannot be complete if checked against the intended model. This justifies the interest on a purely qualitative approach to this kind of quantification, what is guaranteed by interpreting the modulated quantifiers, respectively, as families of upper closed sets and pseudo-topologies. Modulated logics can be used to provide alternative foundations for fuzzy concepts and fuzzy reasoning, for reasoning on social choice theory, and for gaining a new regard on certain problems in philosophy of science.

Source: CLE

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Thursday, 3 March 2005 08:01 GMT
Tuesday, 1 March 2005

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

TRUTH AND DISQUOTATION


By Richard G. Heck Jr.

Hartry Field has suggested that we should adopt at least a methodological deflationism:
We should assume full-fledged deflationism as a working hypothesis. That way, if full-fledged deflationism should turn out to be inadequate, we will at least have a clearer sense than we now have of just where it is that inflationist assumptions ... are needed.

I argue here that we do not need to be methodological deflationists. More precisely, I argue

[1] that we have no need for a disquotational truth-predicate;
[2] that the word true, in ordinary language, is not a disquotational truth-predicate;
[3] and that it is not at all clear that it is even possible to introduce a disquotational truth-predicate into ordinary language.

If so, then we have no clear sense how it is even possible to be a methodological deflationist. My goal here is not to convince a committed deflationist to abandon his or her position. My goal, rather, is to argue, contrary to what many seem to think, that reflection on the apparently trivial character of T-sentences should not incline us to deflationism.

To apper in Synthese, Volume 142, Number 3

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Tuesday, 1 March 2005 06:12 GMT
Monday, 28 February 2005

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Unbound Anaphoric Pronouns: E-Type, Dynamic, and Structured Propositions Approaches


By Friederike Moltmann

In this paper, we have seen some fundamental problems with the E-type account as well as the dynamic semantic account. Whereas the crucial advantages of the E-types account were the preservation of the traditional notion of proposition with its truth conditions being independent of those of the previous discourse context, the advantages of the dynamic semantic account included the variable-like treatment of unbound anaphora, The present account incorporates both of those aspects:
[1] by using structured propositions which are meanings associated with individual sentence (though possibly with truth conditions that need to be supplemented by a background) and

[2] by using parametric objects thus giving justice to the variable-like status of unbound anaphora.


It accounts for the antecedent-relatedness and discourse-drivenness of unbound anaphora, the Regress Problem, the Same-Value Condition, and the problem of determiner choice, in essential the way the dynamic account does. The account moreover, did give some importance to the notion of context change, but in the sense that backgrounds of static means are determined by background contexts that themselves may change within the utterance of a sentence. The crucial empirical advantages of the present account over the dynamic account are that it gives a more immediate or better account of deviations from antecedent conditions and that it provides a solution to Barker's problem.(...)

Source: Semantics Archive
To appear in Synthese

Posted by Tony Marmo at 07:36 GMT
Updated: Monday, 28 February 2005 07:38 GMT
Saturday, 26 February 2005

Topic: PARACONSISTENCY

Resolving Contradictions : A Plausible Semantics for Inconsistent Systems


By Eliezer L. Lozinskii

The purpose of a Knowledge System S is to represent the world W faithfully. If S turns out to be inconsistent containing contradictory data, its present state can be viewed as a result of information pollution with some wrong data. However, we may reasonably assume that most of the system content still reflects the world truthfully, and therefore it would be a great loss to allow a small contradiction to depreciate or even destroy a large amount of correct knowledge. So, despite the pollution, S must contain a meaningful subset, and so it is reasonable to assume (as adopted by many researchers) that the semantics of a logic system is determined by that of its maximally consistent subsets, mc-subsets. The information contained in S allows deriving certain conclusions regarding the truth of a formula F in W. In this sense we say that S contains a certain amount of semantic information, and provides an evidence of F. A close relationship is revealed between the evidence, the quantity of semantic information of the system, and the set of models of its mc-subsets. Based on these notions, we introduce thesemantics of weighted mc-subsets as a way of reasoning in inconsistent systems. To show that this semantics indeed enables reconciling contradictions and deriving plausible beliefs about any statement including ambiguous ones, it is successfully applied to a series of justifying examples, such as chain proofs, rules with exceptions, and paradoxes. (Go on)

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Saturday, 26 February 2005 13:39 GMT
Sunday, 20 February 2005

Topic: Temporal Logic

Combining Temporal Logic Systems


By Marcelo Finger & Dov Gabbay

This paper investigates modular combinations of temporal logic systems. Four combination methods are described and studied with respect to the transfer of logical properties from the component one-dimensional temporal logics to the resulting combined two-dimensional temporal logic. Three basic logical properties are analyzed, namely soundness, completeness, and decidability. Each combination method comprises three submethods that combine the languages, the inference systems, and the semantics of two one-dimensional temporal logic systems, generating families of two-dimensional temporal languages with varying expressivity and varying degrees of transfer of logical properties. The temporalization method and the independent combination method are shown to transfer all three basic logical properties. The method of full join of logic systems generates a considerably more expressive language but fails to transfer completeness and decidability in several cases. So a weaker method of restricted join is proposed and shown to transfer all three basic logical properties.

Source: Notre Dame J. Formal Logic ?37 (1996), no. 2, 204-232
Open Access

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Sunday, 20 February 2005 17:06 GMT
Saturday, 19 February 2005

Topic: Cognition & Epistemology

Indexicality and A Prioricity


By James Pryor

I consider beliefs that are claimed to be a priori in virtue of (i) their indexical character--beliefs like "I am here now", or in virtue of (ii) their self-verifying character--beliefs like "I exist" and "I am now thinking about myself." I argue that none of these beliefs really are a priori.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Saturday, 19 February 2005 06:48 GMT
Friday, 18 February 2005

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

ACCOMPLISHMENTS
By James Higginbotham

This article is a synopsis or digest of my thoughts over a number of years, which for whatever reason took some time to reach even the shape that they are in now. I repeat some arguments, going back to class presentations at MIT in 1990, that accomplishments are syntactically represented by ordered pairs of positions for event, and that the "accomplishment" interpretation of a predicate may stem from the complex thematic structure <E,E'> of a Preposition, a syntactic adjunct, rather than from the head. The structures <E,E'> are telic pairs; and I hold that the formation of telic pairs is a compositional, rather than a lexical, process. This thesis is applied to a number of constructions, yielding, if I am right, the basis for family of distinctions between English- (or Chinese-) type languages, on the one hand, and Romance (or Korean or Japanese) on the other. The conceptions in this first part of what follows are then applied to the location and locatum V of Ken Hale and Jay Keyser. I suggest an alternative derivation of these V, at least in English, and while acknowledging the cogency of the comments of Paul Kiparsky I defend a version of their syntactic theory against his objections. In particular, I argue that certain semantic properties of the location and locatum V are not a matter of primitive stipulation, in the lexicon or elsewhere, but rather follow from the nature of the construction, together with a certain notion of normativity, explained below. The chief novelty, however, in what follows is a systematic response to standard arguments against lexical decomposition, arguments that must be answered if contemporary morphosyntax corresponds in any but an impressionistic way to what might be called morphosemantics. My defense turns upon demoting the notion of causation; that is, upon seeing it as a consequence, rather than the driving force, behind accomplishment predicates.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT
Updated: Friday, 18 February 2005 05:52 GMT
Monday, 14 February 2005

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

A Formal Treatment of the Pragmatics of Questions and Attitudes


By Maria Aloni

This article discusses pragmatic aspects of our interpretation of intensional constructions like questions and propositional attitude reports. In the first part, it argues that our evaluation of these constructions may vary relative to the identification methods operative in the context of use. This insight is then given a precise formalization in a possible world semantics. In the second part, an account of actual evaluations of questions and attitudes is proposed in the framework of bi-directional optimality theory. Pragmatic meaning selections are explained as the result of specific rankings of potentially conflicting generation and interpretation constraints.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 02:25 GMT

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