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LINGUISTIX&LOGIK, Tony Marmo's blog
Wednesday, 27 October 2004

Topic: GENERAL LOGIC

Grim on Vagueness


The text introduced hereinafter could easily be a paper on the semantics of any natural language, such as Latin, English, Spanish, Korean or French. As the reader can see by the specific topic, which is approached by Grim, issues respecting greater philosophical discussions often have to do with puzzles in Linguistics:


The buried quantifier:
an account of vagueness and the sorites


By Patrick Grim

Contrary to the great bulk of philosophical work on vagueness, the core of vagueness is not to be found in vague monadic predicates such as bald, tall, or old. The true source of vagueness - at least vagueness of the type that typically appears in the sorites - lies beneath these, in a mechanism using a buried quantifier operative over the comparatives balder, taller and older.

Or so I propose. Here the quantifier account is presented in its simplest form, with the limited claim that it offers a paradigmatic treatment for paradigmatic vague predicates in the sorites. Questions remain as to whether the account or something like it can be extended to all sorites vulnerable predicates, and qualifications and concessions in this regard are offered in ?9. What the approach promises, however, even in this limited form, is deeper understanding of vagueness through a deeper understanding of non-comparative adjectives derived from comparatives, a central explanation for a range of otherwise puzzling and disparate phenomena, and a new resolution for the sorites.

Source: Analysis Preprints

Go on


It is interesting to notice that in the Semantics of natural languages the question of whether there are covert quantifiers or operators is a top issue nowadays. Their proponents consider that they are necessary to explain many facts associated with the interpretation of sentences.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Tuesday, 26 October 2004 00:04 BST
Tuesday, 26 October 2004

Topic: GENERAL LOGIC

Some more curious inferences


By Jeffrey Ketland

Nominalism denies the existence of numbers, sets and functions. But a widely discussed problem concerns whether nominalism can account for the applicability of mathematics. This is the indispensability argument against nominalism, associated with Godel, Quine and Putnam. Above we examined examples of the application of mathematics to relationships of logical consequence. It seems to me that the `speed-up' phenomenon under discussion suggests a modified version of the indispensability argument, based now on unfeasibility considerations. Presumably the nominalist does not wish to deny the validity of the inferences I, I{2}, and I{3} under consideration. But there is no feasible direct verification for the above inferences, and the short mathematical derivations involve practically indispensable assumptions about numbers, sets and functions. So, how might a nominalist account for our knowledge that such inferences are valid? After all, the anecdotal evidence is that even nonmathematicians find I{2} and I{3} `obvious'.

Source: Analysis Preprints

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OFFTOPIC NOTE:
Setting aside the problems Ketland mentions above, Everett could try to write a Nominalist Semantics for Pirah?, for that would be consistent with Everett's recent works. Nevertheless, in such case any claim Everett made in the case of Pirah? would have to be valid for other natural languages, and, of course, his views would not easily convince those who do not accept nominalism.

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Wednesday, 27 October 2004 00:00 BST
Monday, 25 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Vagueness and Blurry Sets


By Nicholas J. J. Smith

This paper presents a new theory of vagueness, which is designed to retain the virtues of the fuzzy theory, while avoiding the problem of higher-order vagueness. The theory presented here accommodates the idea that for any statement S1 to the effect that `Bob is bald 'is xtrue, for xin [0,1], there should be a further statement S2which tells us how true S1 is, and so on -that is, it accommodates higher-order vagueness -without resorting to the claim that the metalanguage in which the semantics of vagueness is presented is itself vague, and without requiring us to abandon the idea that the logic -as opposed to the semantics -of vague discourse is classical. I model the extension of a vague predicate Pas a blurry set, this being a function which assigns a degree of membership or degree function to each object o, where a degree function in turn assigns an element of [0,1] to each finite sequence of elements of [0,1]. The idea is that the assignment to the sequence [lang] 0.3,0.2 [rang] , for example, represents the degree to which it is true to say that it is 0.2 true that ois Pto degree 0.3. The philosophical merits of my theory are discussed in detail, and the theory is compared with other extensions and generalisations of fuzzy logic in the literature.

Keywords
blurry sets, degree functions, degrees of truth, fuzzy logic, fuzzy sets, higher-order vagueness, logic, sorites paradox, truth, type nfuzzy logic, vagueness

Source: Journal of Philosophical Logic

Read it


Posted by Tony Marmo at 06:12 BST
Sunday, 24 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Formal semantics and intentional states


By Emma Borg

My aim in this note is to address the question of how a context of utterance can figure within a formal, specifically truth-conditional, semantic theory. In particular, I want to explore whether a formal semantic theory could, or should, take the intentional states of a speaker to be relevant in determining the literal meaning of an uttered sentence. The answer I'm going to suggest, contrary to the position of many contemporary formal theorists, is negative. The structure of this note is then as follows: first, I'll very briefly sketch three distinct forms of semantic theory. One, `strong formal semantics', will be seen to be immediately problematic, leaving us with two other options: use-based theories and what I'll term `moderate formal semantics'. If we opt for the latter position, the question arises of what kinds of appeals to a context of utterance are legitimate given a formal outlook. I'll suggest that this question arises in two distinct ways and explore the moderate formal semanticist's position in regard to both. However, the conclusion I will reach is that what is characteristic of formal semantics is that it makes only the most minimal semantic concessions to context.

Link

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Sunday, 24 October 2004 12:16 BST

Topic: PARACONSISTENCY

Chunk and Permeate, a Paraconsistent Inference Strategy.
Part I: The Infinitesimal Calculus



By Bryson Brown & Graham Priest

In this paper we introduce a paraconsistent reasoning strategy, Chunk and Permeate. In this, information is broken up into chunks, and a limited amount of information is allowed to flow between chunks. We start by giving an abstract characterisation of the strategy. It is then applied to model the reasoning employed in the original infinitesimal calculus. The paper next establishes some results concerning the legitimacy of reasoning of this kind -specifically concerning the preservation of the consistency of each chunk -and concludes with some other possible applications and technical questions.

Keywords:
chunking, infinitesimal calculus, paraconsistent logic

Published version (For Subscribers of the Journal of Philosophical Logic)


Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Sunday, 24 October 2004 12:14 BST
Saturday, 23 October 2004

Topic: Cognition & Epistemology

Could a machine have a mind?


By Tennessee Leeuwenburg

Attempting to answer poses a frankly massive ontological problem - so great that I believe that could one solve the ontological issues, the answer to the question would be apparent. There is a definite history to understanding the philosophy of the mind, and many of the attempts to describe the mind will be outlined in this essay. However, there is only one logical launching point - the simple fact that humans have minds. It will be my eventualy position that a machine can indeed have a mind, but before this can be argued for, let alone established, the problem must first be understood.

Continue


Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Friday, 22 October 2004 18:30 BST
Friday, 22 October 2004


Coulda,Woulda, Shoulda


By Stephen Yablo

(...)
An enormous amount has been done with the metaphysical/conceptual distinction. Yet, and I think this is agreed by everyone, the distinction remains not terribly well understood. One reason it is not well understood is that the conceptual side of the distinction didn't receive at Kripke's hands the same sort of development as the metaphysical side.

This might have been intentional on Kripke's part. He might have thought the conceptual notion to be irremediably obscure, but important to mention lest it obscure our view of metaphysical necessity. Certainly this is the attitude that many take about the conceptual notion today. It could be argued that much of the contemporary skepticism about narrow content is at the same time skepticism about conceptual possibility. Narrow content, if it existed, would give sense to conceptual possibility: holding its narrow content fixed, S could have expressed a truth. If one rejects narrow content, one needs a different explanation, and none comes to mind. Going in the other direction, one might try to define S's narrow content as the set of worlds w whose obtaining conceptually necessitates that S. Lewis remarks somewhere that whoever claims not to understand something will take care not to understand anything else whereby it might be explained. If you don't understand narrow content, you will take care not to understand conceptual possibility either.

But,although many people have doubts about conceptual possibility,a number of other people are entirely gung ho about it. Some even treat it (and narrow content) as more, or anyway no less, fundamental than metaphysical possibility (and broad content). (...)

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 04:06 BST
Updated: Friday, 22 October 2004 04:08 BST
Thursday, 21 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Why Compositionality Won't Go Away:
Reflections on Horwich's `Deflationary' Theory


By Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore

Compositionality is the idea that the meanings of complex expressions (or concepts) are constructed from the meanings of the less complex expressions (or concepts) that are their constituents. Over the last few years, we have just about convinced ourselves that compositionality is the sovereign test for theories of lexical meaning. So hard is this test to pass, we think, that it filters out practically all of the theories of lexical meaning that are current in either philosophy or cognitive science. Among the casualties are, for example, the theory that lexical meanings are statistical structures (like stereotypes); the theory that the meaning of a word is its use; the theory that knowing the meaning of (at least some) words requires having a recognitional capacity for (at least some) of the things that it applies to; and the theory that knowing the meaning of a word requires knowing criteria for applying it. Indeed, we think that only two theories of the lexicon survive the compositionality constraint: viz., the theory that all lexical meanings are primitive and the theory that some lexical meanings are primitive and the rest are definitions. So compositionality does a lot of work in lexical semantics, according to our lights.

Well, so imagine our consternation and surprise when, having just about convinced ourselves of all this, we heard that Paul Horwich has on offer a `deflationary' account of compositionality, according to which,
...the compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted (154; our emphasis).

Surely, we thought, that can't be right; surely compositionality must rule out at least some theories about what word meanings are; for example, the theory that they are rocks, or that they are sparrows or chairs; for how could the meanings of complex expressions be constructed from any of those? What, we wondered, is going on here?

Continue


This essay, together with a number of others on related topics, is reprinted in the book `The Compositionality Papers' by Fodor and Lepore (OUP).

Posted by Tony Marmo at 05:30 BST
Updated: Thursday, 21 October 2004 21:50 BST
Wednesday, 20 October 2004

Topic: PARACONSISTENCY

Dialetheism, logical consequence and hierarchy


By Bruno Whittle

Dialetheism is defined by Graham Priest to be the view that there are true contradictions. It is supposed to offer treatments of the semantic paradoxes that avoid the problems faced by more orthodox resolutions. The advantage of these treatments is supposed to be that they avoid the sort of appeal to a hierarchy of languages or concepts that more orthodox resolutions seem invariably to have to make. For since a dialetheist can simply accept as sound the derivations of contradictions involved in the paradoxes, there is no need for him to invoke a hierarchy to block these derivations.

In this article I argue that dialetheists have a problem with the concept of logical consequence. The upshot of this problem is that dialetheists must appeal to a hierarchy of concepts of logical consequence. Since this hierarchy is akin to those invoked by more orthodox resolutions of the semantic paradoxes, its emergence would appear to seriously undermine the dialetheic treatments of these paradoxes. And since these are central to the case for dialetheism, this would represent a significant blow to the position itself.

In ?1 I explain why and how a dialetheist needs to be able to talk about logical consequence. In ?2 I argue that there are in fact severe restrictions upon how exactly a dialetheist can talk about logical consequence. These restrictions stem from a version of Curry's paradox. I then argue in ?3 that a dialetheist must appeal to a hierarchy of concepts of logical consequence, and, further, that each of these concepts is dialetheically unobjectionable. The justification of this latter claim involves proving that the addition of these concepts together with natural rules for them conservatively extends dialetheic logic. This is proved in the appendix.

Read this article

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Wednesday, 20 October 2004 04:23 BST
Tuesday, 19 October 2004

Topic: GENERAL LOGIC

Lockean and Logical Truth Conditions


By James Dreier
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

The distinction between logical and Lockean truth conditions helps Expressivism to distinguish itself from Subjectivism. Expressivism is the view that moral judgements lack logical truth conditions. Subjectivism says that moral judgements have logical truth conditions involving the speaker's attitudes. Both theories may allow that moral judgements have Lockean truth conditions involving the speaker's attitudes.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Tuesday, 19 October 2004 05:18 BST
Monday, 18 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Indicative versus subjunctive in future conditionals


By Adam Morton

There are both Indicative and Subjunctive future-tense conditionals. And moreover sometimes the same words can be used to express both.

Jonathan Bennett (2003), in his wonderfully clear and persuasive book, A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, continues a debate concerning conditionals about the future. For conditionals about the past there is a clear contrast between so-called indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For most people the contrast is typified by a familiar family of incompatible pairs of sentences such as
If Shakespeare did not write Hamlet someone else did.
If Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have.

The first of these is assertable, given normal beliefs about the world, and the second is not, so the `did/would have' contrast seems to mark a difference in meaning. I'll call these `Adams pairs', since the first examples were due to Ernest Adams.
I'll assume familiarity with the basic use of Adams pairs to make an indicative/subjunctive distinction. Most people on absorbing the distinction are inclined to classify many future tense conditionals, such as
If Bill won't write the play, someone else will.

with subjunctive `did/would have' past-tense conditionals. Bennett argues against this, urging us to classify `will/will' and `is/will' conditionals with indicative `did/did' ones. Bennett's claim is strong: not only are future tense conditionals usually of the indicative variety, but we cannot use these grammatical forms to express subjunctive conditionals. In this paper I shall contest this latter claim, focusing on paired examples in the familiar family. So the central task is to show that there are Adams pairs set in the future.

Continue

Posted by Tony Marmo at 19:24 BST
Updated: Monday, 18 October 2004 19:28 BST

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Binding alongside Hamblin alternatives calls for variable-free semantics


Chung-chieh Shan
Source: Semantics Archive

The compositional, bottom-up computation of alternative sets was first introduced by Hamblin (1973) into Montague grammar to treat in-situ wh-questions. In the thirty years since then, alternative sets have found their way into theories of focus (Rooth 1985), indeterminate pronouns (Shimoyama 2001), and free-choice indefinites (Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). These theories often position alternatives as a scope-taking mechanism that operates separately from Quantifier Raising (May 1977), Quantifying In (Montague 1974), or some other scope-taking mechanism for "genuine" quantifiers like most. On these theories, then, it is not surprising that (say) in-situ who takes scope di erently from most, as is empirically observed.
In particular, if "genuine" scope requires syntactic movement but alternative scope does not, then constraints on movement apply only to the former, and we predict--correctly--that the scope of most is more restricted than the scope of in-situ who.
(1) Who denied that who left?
`Which x and y are such that x denied that y left?'
(2) Who denied that most people left?
*`Which x is such that, for most y, x denied that y left?'

Many theories of quantification, including Quantifier Raising and Quantifying In, make essential use of variables for binding. In the first half of this paper, I show that using variables for binding is incompatible with computing alternatives bottom-up. For example, a theory on which who denotes an alternative set and most books binds a variable cannot account for who read most books. To fix this problem, we can either perform binding without variables (Jacobson 1999, 2000) or compute alternatives non-compositionally. Since Karttunen (1977) has already explored the latter option, I consider the former here: in the second half of this paper, I spell out how to compute alternatives compositionally in a variable-free theory of binding and quantification. Both options fix the problem.

Continue

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Monday, 18 October 2004 19:09 BST
Sunday, 17 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Indexicals, Fictions, and Ficta


by Eros Corazza and Mark Whitsey

We defend the view that an indexical uttered by an actor works on the model of deferred reference. If it defers to a character which does not exist, it is an empty term, just as `Hamlet' and `Ophelia' are. The utterance in which it appears does not express a proposition and thus lacks a truth value. We advocate an ontologically parsimonious, anti-realist, position. We show how the notion of truth in our use and understanding of indexicals (and fictional names) as they appear within a fiction is not a central issue. We claim that our use and understanding of indexicals (and names) rests on the fact that their cognitive contribution is not exhausted by their semantic contribution.


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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST
Updated: Sunday, 17 October 2004 04:46 BST
Friday, 15 October 2004

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

Double Negatives, Negative Concord and Metalinguistic Negation


By Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Elena Guerzoni

Two properties of the so-called (after Laka 1990) n-words (Italian nessuno, niente... and Spanish nadie, nada...) do not find a unified account in any of the existing analyses of Negative Concord (NC):
(i) their uses in the special context of denials and
(ii) their incompatibility with factive environments.

We suggest that the unifying property of these two apparently unrelated phenomena is the common sensitivity of these two environments (denials and factives) to non-truthconditional aspects of meaning. Therefor we take these properties to reveal that the meaning of n-words involves a nontruthconditional component. Specifically, we explore the hypothesis that n-words are existential quantifiers at the truth-conditional level but that they contribute negative existentials at the level of their conventional implicatures. This hypothesis explains the special uses of n-words in denials and their incompatibility with factive environments. The fact that they are restricted to the scope of negation (or more precisely averidical expressions (Giannakidou's 1997,2000)) in non-sentence-initial position follows as a consequence of the relation between their implicature and their semantic contribution to the truth conditions of the sentences they appear in. Under certain common additional stipulations, this view can be extended to preverbal occurrences as well.


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Posted by Tony Marmo at 13:30 BST

Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS

On Tough Movement
By Milan Rezac

The problematique of Tough Movement (Kate[i] is easy to please e[i]) is addressed as four problems:
(i) What gives rise to the one-to-one correlation between a non-expletive subject and a clausal complement with a gap;
(ii) How does the subject link to the gap;
(iii) How does the gap enter into the A'-system in its clause and why does it show anomalous properties;
(iv) What determines the distribution of Tough Movement.
(i) and (ii) are shown to follow from the syntax and interpretation of non-thematic positions. Much of (iii) suggests that the gap does not move but enters pure A'-Agree with the C of its clause, combining the virtue of earlier A' and pro approaches. (iv) is addressed more vaguely in terms of the latter hypothesis and the need of pure A'-Agree to be externally identified.

Source: Ling Buzz/000045

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

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