Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, (...) broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents:IntroductionAntónio ZILHÃO: Folk-Psychology, Rationality and Human ActionJoão BRANQUINHO: The Problem of Cognitive DynamicsJ.P. MONTEIRO: Hume, Induction and Single ExperimentsMarco RUFFINO: The Primacy of Concepts and the Priority of Judgments in Frege's LogicJoão Vergílio Gallerani CUTER: Die unanwendbare Arithmetik des TractatusSílvio PINTO: Wittgenstein's Anti-PlatonismFernando FERREIRA: A Substitutional Framework for Arithmetical ValidityJ.R. CROCA & R.N. MOREIRA: Indeterminism Versus CausalismLuíz MONIZ PEREIRA: The Logical Impingement of Artifical Intelligence.

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

The article proposes an analysis of imperatives and possibility and necessity statements that (i) explains their differences with respect to the licensing of free choice any and (ii) accounts for the related phenomena of free choice disjunction in imperatives, permissions, and statements. Any and or are analyzed as operators introducing sets of alternative propositions. Free choice licensing operators are treated as quantifiers over these sets. In this way their interpretation can be sensitive to the alternatives any and or introduce in (...) their scope. (shrink)

The article deals with the interpretation of propositional attitudes in the framework of modal predicate logic. The first part discusses the classical puzzles arising from the interplay between propositional attitudes, quantifiers and the notion of identity. After comparing different reactions to these puzzles it argues in favor of an analysis in which evaluations of de re attitudes may vary relative to the ways of identifying objects used in the context of use. The second part of the article gives this analysis (...) a precise formalization from a model-and proof-theoretic perspective. (shrink)

The paper examines the logic and semantics of knowledge attributions of the form “s knows whether A or B”. We analyze these constructions in an epistemic logic with alternative questions, and propose an account of the context-sensitivity of the corresponding sentences and of their presuppositions.

This article proposes an account of knowing-who constructions within a generalisation of Hintikka’s quantified epistemic logic employing the notion of a conceptual cover Aloni PhD thesis [1]. The proposed logical system captures the inherent context-sensitivity of knowing-wh constructions Boër and Lycan, as well as expresses non-trivial cases of so-called concealed questions Heim. Assuming that quantifying into epistemic contexts and knowing-who are linked in the way Hintikka had proposed, the context dependence of the latter will translate into a context dependence (...) of de re attitude ascriptions and this will result in a ready account of a number of traditionally problematic cases including Quine’s well-known double vision puzzles Quine. (shrink)

Conceived through collaboration by activist academics from Israel and Northern Ireland, this book draws from experience to offer practical and theoretical insights and programs for promoting activist pedagogy for shared learning and shared life in divided societies.

Caro leitor! Em busca de sempre mais apresentar reflexões consistentes e relevantes para o pensar teológico, em conexão com o mundo e às urgências da Igreja, a presente edição trás importantes temas que ajudam refletir a realidade humana à luz do mistério de Deus. Por isso, os artigos oferecidos nas mais variadas áreas, a saber: bíblico-teológica, dogmática, moral, pastoral, antropologia teológica, filosofia e eclesiologia, dão suporte científico e metodológico para a reflexão teológica. Antes de conferir as novidades desta edição, gostaria (...) de comunicar que esta Revista Eletrônica conquistou um espaço ainda maior de publicação, ao tornar-se indexada na base de dados do Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). (shrink)

We discuss the 'problem of convergent knowledge', an argument presented by J. Schaffer in favour of contextualism about knowledge attributions, and against the idea that knowledge- wh can be simply reduced to knowledge of the proposition answering the question. Schaffer's argument centrally involves alternative questions of the form 'whether A or B'. We propose an analysis of these on which the problem of convergent knowledge does not arise. While alternative questions can contextually restrict the possibilities relevant for knowledge attributions, what (...) Schaffer's puzzle reveals is a pragmatic ambiguity in what 'knowing the answer' means: in his problematic cases, the subject knows only a partial answer to the question. This partial knowledge can be counted as adequate only on externalist grounds. (shrink)

Our evaluation of questions and knowledge attributions may vary relative to the way in which the relevant objects are identified. In the first part, the article proposes a theory that represents different methods of trans-world identification and is able to account for their impact on interpretation. In the second part, the same theory is used to account for the meaning of concealed questions. On the proposed account, the interpretation of a concealed question results from the application of a type-shifting operation (...) mapping an individual denoting expression into an identity question interpreted relative to a contextually selected identification method. (shrink)

Concealed questions are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions (e.g., John knows the capital of Italy ≈ John knows what the capital of Italy is). This paper offers a novel account of the interpretation of concealed questions, which assumes that an entity-denoting expression α may be type-shifted into an expression ?z.P(α), where P is a contextually determined property, and z ranges over a contextually determined domain of individual concepts. Different resolutions of P and the domain of z (...) yield a wide range of concealed question interpretations, some of which were not noted previously. On the other hand, principled constraints on the resolution process prevent overgeneration. (shrink)

This article discusses pragmatic aspects of our interpretation of intensional constructions like questions and prepositional 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. (shrink)

In this article I propose a conception of empowering educational dialogue within the framework of humanistic education. It is based on the notions of Humanistic Education and Empowerment, and draws on a large and diverse repertoire of dialogues—from the classical Socratic, Confucian and Talmudic dialogues, to the modern ones associated with the works of Nietzsche, Buber, Korczak, Rogers, Gadamer, Habermas, Freire, Noddings and Levinas. These forms of dialogue—differing in their treatment of and emphasis on the cognitive, affective, moral and existentialist (...) elements—have become more dominant in recent educational discourse and practice—an intellectual phenomenon that calls for a more analytic and reflective elaboration of the essential elements that constitute educational dialogues. Hence it is the purpose of this article to elucidate the distinguishing marks of true dialogues, to set them within the normative discourse of humanistic education and empowerment, and to offer a normative and stipulative conception of empowering educational dialogue that can be utilized in the various intellectual and practical spheres of humanistic education—a paradigm,working definition, and outline for contemporary teachers in their quest to develop their students’ sensibilities and sensitivities, and empower their ability to live complete, autonomous, authentic, moral and dignified human lives. (shrink)

Data involving epistemic modals suggest that some classically valid argument forms, such as _reductio_, are invalid in natural language reasoning as they lead to modal collapses. We adduce further data showing that the classical argument forms governing the existential quantifier are similarly defective, as they lead to a _de re–de dicto_ collapse. We observe a similar problem for disjunction. But if the classical argument forms for negation, disjunction and existential quantification are invalid, what are the correct forms that govern the (...) use of these items? Our diagnosis is that epistemic modals interfere with hypothetical reasoning. We present a modal first-order logic and model theory that characterizes hypothetical reasoning with epistemic modals in a principled manner. One upshot is a sound and complete natural deduction system for reasoning with epistemic modals in first-order logic. (shrink)

(1) Somebody arrived late. (Guess who?/Namely Mary) a. Conventional meaning: Somebody arrived late b. Ignorance implicature: The speaker doesn’t know who..

Although Spinoza's formative influence on the cultural ideals of the West is widely recognized, especially with reference to liberal democracy, secular humanism, and naturalistic ethics, little has been written about the educational implications of his philosophy. This article explores the pedagogical tenets that are implicit in Spinoza's writings. I argue (1) that Spinoza's ethics is eudaimonistic, aiming at self‐affirmation, full humanity and wellbeing; (2) that the flourishing of individuals depends on their personal resources, namely, their conatus, power, vitality or capacity (...) to act from their own inner natures; and (3) that the combination of the Spinozian conceptions of humanism, liberal democracy, eudaimonistic ethics, and the enlightened and sovereign individual constitute together the grounds for a comprehensive empowering and liberating pedagogy. (shrink)

This article seeks to examine central aspects of the relationship between ethics and education in the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since both ethics and education are practical disciplines that are bound to deal with and are challenged by human predicaments, cultural ills and social evils, it seems that in examining the relations between the two, one is required to go beyond analytic elucidation into a more normative, prescriptive and political discourse. It is in light of this understanding and in (...) light of the catastrophes and social ills that humanity has brought upon itself in the last century that I will argue that the time is ripe for educators around the world to substitute their loyalty to the national, religious and ideological establishments, in their own communities, for a commitment to a universal professional ethics-one that is founded on the tenets of humanism and critical pedagogy. (shrink)

Columbia University Press's multivolume _Prison Notebooks_ is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English. Based on the authoritative Italian edition of Gramsci's work, _Quaderni del Carcere_, this comprehensive translation presents the intellectual as he ought to be read and understood, with critical notes that clarify Gramsci's history, culture, and sources; an index of names; and a contextualization of the thinker's ideas against his earlier writings and letters. This set includes notebooks 1 through 8 with (...) all attendant notes and materials and is an indispensible resource for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

The 2007 edition of the Amsterdam Colloquium is the Sixteenth in a series which started in 1976. Originally, the Amsterdam Colloquium was an initiative of the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1984 the Colloquium is organized by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.

We present a number of puzzles arising for the interpretation of modified numerals. Following Büring and others we assume that the main difference between comparative and superlative modifiers is that only the latter convey disjunctive meanings. We further argue that the inference patterns triggered by disjunction and superlative modifiers are hard to capture in existing semantic and pragmatic analyses of these phenomena (neo-Gricean or grammatical alike), and we propose a novel account of these inferences in the framework of bilateral state-based (...) modal logic defining a first order extension of Aloni (Semant Pragmat 15:5-EA, 2022. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.15.5)’s. (shrink)

Formal semantics - the scientific study of meaning in natural language - is one of the most fundamental and long-established areas of linguistics. This Handbook offers a comprehensive, yet compact guide to the field, bringing together research from a wide range of world-leading experts. Chapters include coverage of the historical context and foundation of contemporary formal semantics, a survey of the variety of formal/logical approaches to linguistic meaning and an overview of the major areas of research within current semantic theory, (...) broadly conceived. The Handbook also explores the interfaces between semantics and neighbouring disciplines, including research in cognition and computation. This work will be essential reading for students and researchers working in linguistics, philosophy, psychology and computer science. (shrink)

Book Description (Blurb): Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds explains the crucial role that human cognition research plays in the design and realization of artificial intelligence systems, illustrating the steps necessary for the design of artificial models of cognition. It bridges the gap between the theoretical, experimental and technological issues addressed in the context of AI of cognitive inspiration and computational cognitive science. -/- Beginning with an overview of the historical, methodological and technical issues in the field of Cognitively-Inspired Artificial Intelligence, (...) Lieto illustrates how the cognitive design approach has an important role to play in the development of intelligent AI technologies and plausible computational models of cognition. Introducing a unique perspective that draws upon Cybernetics and early AI principles, Lieto emphasizes the need for an equivalence between cognitive processes and implemented AI procedures, in order to realise biologically and cognitively inspired artificial minds. He also introduces the Minimal Cognitive Grid, a pragmatic method to rank the different degrees of biologically and cognitive accuracy of artificial systems in order project and predict their explanatory power with respect to the natural systems taken as source of inspiration. -/- Providing a comprehensive overview of cognitive design principles in constructing artificial minds, this text will be essential reading for students and researchers of artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (shrink)

In two different occasions in the twentieth century John Dewey and Maxine Greene stressed the point that educators should attend to ‘what the known demands of us’. Following this dictum, from a critical perspective and with a constructive pedagogical spirit, in this paper we portray a new paradigm for values education that addresses the major challenges to the sustainable futures of young people in the third decade of the twenty first century as well as proposing transformative and empowering educational strategies. (...) Employing the terminology of sustainability in its wider sense, we begin with a widely acknowledged diagnosis of the five major global risks – interconnected and interdependent – that endanger the sustainable future of humanity and nature: environmental, political, social, health, and cultural. We then move to suggest a constructive solution, proposing three conceptual pillars for repairing the world and laying foundation for a thriving sustainable future: (a) Ecohumanism as the paradigm for values education – merging the humanist concern for human dignity, social justice and democracy with the ecological concern for climate stability, biodiversity and environmental sustainability; (b) education of democratic personality and for democratic culture that is holistic and transformative; and (c) a threefold notion of activist pedagogy that addresses the element of cultivating personal agency, empowering political literacy and agency, and engaging students in experiential, holistic, and active teaching-learning experiences. (shrink)

In this work the author presents Nietzsche as a counter-nihilistic philosopher-educator who aimed, very much like Plato and Rousseau, to set forth a healing education for western man in a characteristically decadent era. The principal pedagogical or edifying dimension of his philosophy, it is argued, consists of a redefinition of the educational aim of modern humanityóformulated in medical and cultural termsóas the recovery of health and worth.

In this article, I am suggesting that one effective strategy for revitalizing moral education consists in incorporating classical traditions of care ethics, East and West, which are very mu...

In this paper we identify and characterize an analysis of two problematic aspects affecting the representational level of cognitive architectures (CAs), namely: the limited size and the homogeneous typology of the encoded and processed knowledge. We argue that such aspects may constitute not only a technological problem that, in our opinion, should be addressed in order to build arti cial agents able to exhibit intelligent behaviours in general scenarios, but also an epistemological one, since they limit the plausibility of the (...) comparison of the CAs' knowledge representation and processing mechanisms with those executed by humans in their everyday activities. In the fi nal part of the paper further directions of research will be explored, trying to address current limitations and future challenges. (shrink)

In actuarial parlance, the price of an insurance policy is considered fair if customers bearing the same risk are charged the same price. The estimate of this fair amount hinges on the expected value obtained by weighting the different claims by their probability. We argue that, historically, this concept of actuarial fairness originates in an Aristotelian principle of justice in exchange (equality in risk). We will examine how this principle was formalized in the 16th century and shaped in life insurance (...) during the following two hundred years, in two different interpretations. The Domatian account of actuarial fairness relied on subjective uncertainty: An agreement on risk was fair if both parties were equally ignorant about the chances of an uncertain event. The objectivist version grounded any agreement on an objective risk estimate drawn from a mortality table. We will show how the objectivist approach collapsed in the market for life annuities during the 18th century, leaving open the question of why we still speak of actuarial fairness as if it were an objective expected value. (shrink)

We defend, from a contractarian perspective, that the fair price of an insurance policy is the amount that the contracting parties agree when they are both equally uncertain about the insured event. Drawing on the approach developed by R. Sugden in _The Community of Advantage_, we answer two standard objections raised against contractarianism in the actuarial sciences: (1) people are not wise enough to assess their actuarial risks; (2) they are not rational enough to decide which insurance policy suits them (...) better. We show under which circumstances people can make fair actuarial agreements, without presupposing any objective risk or rationality benchmarks. (shrink)

In this article we present an advanced version of Dual-PECCS, a cognitively-inspired knowledge representation and reasoning system aimed at extending the capabilities of artificial systems in conceptual categorization tasks. It combines different sorts of common-sense categorization (prototypical and exemplars-based categorization) with standard monotonic categorization procedures. These different types of inferential procedures are reconciled according to the tenets coming from the dual process theory of reasoning. On the other hand, from a representational perspective, the system relies on the hypothesis of conceptual (...) structures represented as heterogeneous proxytypes. Dual-PECCS has been experimentally assessed in a task of conceptual categorization where a target concept illustrated by a simple common-sense linguistic description had to be identified by resorting to a mix of categorization strategies, and its output has been compared to human responses. The obtained results suggest that our approach can be beneficial to improve the representational and reasoning conceptual capabilities of standard cognitive artificial systems, and –in addition– that it may be plausibly applied to different general computational models of cognition. The current version of the system, in fact, extends our previous work, in that Dual-PECCS is now integrated and tested into two cognitive architectures, ACT-R and CLARION, implementing different assumptions on the underlying invariant structures governing human cognition. Such integration allowed us to extend our previous evaluation. (shrink)

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of the combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC + TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC + TR by typicality inclusions of the (...) form p :: T(C) v D, whose intuitive meaning is that “we believe with degree p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds”. As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying standard Description Logic ALC. (shrink)