This category needs an editor. We encourage you to help if you are qualified.
Volunteer, or read more about what this involves.
Related

Contents
398 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 398
  1. Quantification, negation, and focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional semantic interface.Tista Bagchi - manuscript
    Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of structurally (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Future Displacement and Modality.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    In this survey article, I discuss the variety of ways in which language allows us to talk about the future. Topics discussed include how the category of predictive expressions broadly understood relates to the syntactic category of tense; what it means to say that a language does not have tense; how predictiveness relates to modality; and finally technical issue concerning the scope of negation in a semantics that is capable of shifting evaluation towards the future.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. The Modal Future Hypothesis Debugged.Fabrizio Cariani - manuscript
    This note identifies and corrects some problems in developments of the thesis that predictive expressions, such as English "will", are modals. I contribute a new argument supporting Cariani and Santorio's recent claim that predictive expressions are non-quantificational modals. At the same time, I improve on their selectional semantics by fixing an important bug. Finally, I show that there are benefits to be reaped by integrating the selection semantics framework with standard ideas about the future orientation of modals.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  4. Reporting, telling, and showing dreams.Emar Maier - manuscript
    Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like “I dreamed that…”. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like NARRATION, BACKGROUND, and EXPLANATION) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that-clause (or a sequence of independently embedded (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Pictorial language and linguistics.Emar Maier - manuscript
    A language is a system of signs used for communication, and linguists are tasked with, among other things, uncovering the syntax and semantics of such systems. In this paper I explore to what extent pictures fit this characterization of a language and hence would fall within the domain of linguistics. I conclude that at the very least there are well-defined systems of depiction for which we can give a precise semantics, in a familiar possible worlds framework, although pictorial propositions are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. Provability with Minimal Type Theory.P. Olcott - manuscript
    Minimal Type Theory (MTT) shows exactly how all of the constituent parts of an expression relate to each other (in 2D space) when this expression is formalized using a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This provides substantially greater expressiveness than the 1D space of FOPL syntax. -/- The increase in expressiveness over other formal systems of logic shows the Pathological Self-Reference Error of expressions previously considered to be sentences of formal systems. MTT shows that these expressions were never truth bearers, thus (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Refuting Tarski and Gödel with a Sound Deductive Formalism.P. Olcott - manuscript
    The conventional notion of a formal system is adapted to conform to the sound deductive inference model operating on finite strings. Finite strings stipulated to have the semantic value of Boolean true provide the sound deductive premises. Truth preserving finite string transformation rules provide the valid deductive inference. Sound deductive conclusions are the result of these finite string transformation rules.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Intensionality from Self-Reference.T. Parent - manuscript
    If a semantically open language has no constraints on self-reference, one can prove an absurdity. The argument exploits a self-referential function symbol where the expressed function ends up being intensional in virtue of self-reference. The prohibition on intensional functions thus entails that self-reference cannot be unconstrained, even in a language that is free of semantic terms. However, since intensional functions are already excluded in classical logic, there are no drastic revisionary implications here. Still, the argument reveals a new sort of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  9. On the Semantics of Email Addresses.Brian Rabern - manuscript
    At the turn of the century, electronic mail emerged as a core mode of communication, fundamentally transforming the way individuals and organizations interact. In this digital age, one ubiquitous representational device is the email address. Given the importance of email addresses in our lives, it is natural to ask: what do email addresses represent? And how do they represent it? Given that email addresses have a semantic interpretation, and that they have a formal syntax, it is reasonable to assume that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. Credence for Epistemic Discourse.Paolo Santorio - manuscript
    Many recent theories of epistemic discourse exploit an informational notion of consequence, i.e. a notion that defines entailment as preservation of support by an information state. This paper investigates how informational consequence fits with probabilistic reasoning. I raise two problems. First, all informational inferences that are not also classical inferences are, intuitively, probabilistically invalid. Second, all these inferences can be exploited, in a systematic way, to generate triviality results. The informational theorist is left with two options, both of them radical: (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  11. Modals, Contextual Parameters, and the Modal Uniformity Hypothesis.Daniel Skibra - manuscript
    There is a common assumption in the semantics of modal auxiliaries in natural language; in utterances of MOD φ , where MOD is a modal and φ is the prejacent, context determines the particular flavor of modality expressed by the modal. Such is the standard contextualist semantics of Kratzer and related proposals. This winds up being a problem, because there is a significant class of modals which have constraints on the admissible modal flavor that are not traceable to context. For (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Use, Compositionality and Prior's Puzzle.Simon Vonlanthen - manuscript
  13. Semantics.David Beaver & Joey Frazee - forthcoming - The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics 2nd Edition.
    Formal semantics is the study of linguistic meaning using precise mathematical characterizations; this chapter introduces formal semantics to scholars and students of natural-language processing. We give simple logical representations of English sentences, and show how meanings are composed in a grammar. We then consider two more advanced issues that arise in processing texts, anaphora and temporality, using Discourse Representation Theory. Finally we discuss the relationship between deep logic-based methods for semantic analysis and shallower distributional methods that have been used in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  14. Positive gradable adjective ascriptions without positive morphemes.Fabrizio Cariani, Paolo Santorio & Alexis Wellwood - forthcoming - Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 2023.
    A long-standing tension in semantic theory concerns the reconciliation of positive gradable adjective (GA) ascriptions and comparative GA ascriptions. Vagueness-based ap- proaches derive the comparative from the positive, and face non-trivial challenges with incommensurability and non-GA comparatives. Classic degree-based approaches effectively derive the positive from the comparative, out of sync with the direction of evidence from morphology, and create some difficulties in accounting for GA scale-mates with differing thresholds (e.g., cold ∼ warm ∼ hot). We propose a new reconciliation that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. Rigid and flexible quantification in plural predicate logic.Lucas Champollion, Justin Bledin & Haoze Li - forthcoming - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 27.
    Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as <i>some apples</i> or <i>a quantity of milk</i>, differ from bare noun phrases like <i>apples</i> or <i>milk</i> in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16. Donkeys under Discussion.Lucas Champollion, Dylan Bumford & Robert Henderson - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  17. Tarski’s Convention T: condition beta.John Corcoran - forthcoming - South American Journal of Logic 1 (1).
    Tarski’s Convention T—presenting his notion of adequate definition of truth (sic)—contains two conditions: alpha and beta. Alpha requires that all instances of a certain T Schema be provable. Beta requires in effect the provability of ‘every truth is a sentence’. Beta formally recognizes the fact, repeatedly emphasized by Tarski, that sentences (devoid of free variable occurrences)—as opposed to pre-sentences (having free occurrences of variables)—exhaust the range of significance of is true. In Tarski’s preferred usage, it is part of the meaning (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Idealisation in Natural Language Semantics: Truth-Conditions for Radical Contextualists.Gabe Dupre - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of natural language (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19. Review of Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence, by Una Stojnić. [REVIEW]Daniel W. Harris - forthcoming - Philosophical Review.
    I summarize several of the main claims, arguments, and innovations in Stojnić's 2021 book. I then take issue with her foundational view, on which both the context of a conversation and the contents of context-sensitive expressions are wholly fixed by the history of a conversation together with grammatical rules.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. On the nature of the lexicon: the status of rich lexical meanings.Lotte Hogeweg & Agustin Vicente - forthcoming - Journal of Linguistics.
    The main goal of this paper is to show that there are many phenomena that pertain to the construction of truth-conditional compounds that follow characteristic patterns, and whose explanation requires appealing to knowledge structures organized in specific ways. We review a number of phenomena, ranging from non-homogenous modification and privative modification to polysemy and co-predication that indicate that knowledge structures do play a role in obtaining truth-conditions. After that, we show that several extant accounts that invoke rich lexical meanings to (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  21. Compatibility, compossibility, and epistemic modality.Wesley Holliday & Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Proceedings of the 23rd Amsterdam Colloquium.
    We give a theory of epistemic modals in the framework of possibility semantics and axiomatize the corresponding logic, arguing that it aptly characterizes the ways in which reasoning with epistemic modals does, and does not, diverge from classical modal logic.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. The Logic of Dynamical Systems is Relevant.Levin Hornischer & Francesco Berto - forthcoming - Mind.
    Lots of things are usefully modelled in science as dynamical systems: growing populations, flocking birds, engineering apparatus, cognitive agents, distant galaxies, Turing machines, neural networks. We argue that relevant logic is ideal for reasoning about dynamical systems, including interactions with the system through perturbations. Thus, dynamical systems provide a new applied interpretation of the abstract Routley-Meyer semantics for relevant logic: the worlds in the model are the states of the system, while the (in)famous ternary relation is a combination of perturbation (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23. Truthmaker Semantics in Linguistics (3rd edition).Mark Jago - forthcoming - In Hilary Nesi & Petar Milin (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
    Truthmaker semantics is a recent development in formal and philosophical semantics, with similar motivation and scope to possible worlds semantics. The technical background is rather different, however, and results in a more fine-grained hyperintensional notion of content, allowing us to distinguish between classically equivalent propositions. After briefly introducing the main ideas, this entry will describe the technical apparatus of state spaces and the central notions of content and partial content. It will then outline applications of truthmaker semantics in language, logic, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. ‘You do it like this!’: Bare Impersonals as Indefinite Singular Generics.James Ravi Kirkpatrick & Joshua Knobe - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    Sentences with impersonal pronouns, like 'You do it like this', seem to make both statistical and prescriptive claims, that a certain way of behaving is common and that it is prescriptively good. We argue that these kinds of sentences are closely related to another kind of sentence, namely, indefinite singular generics, like 'A person does it like this'. We propose that there is a single underlying mechanism that allows both kinds of sentences to express mixed statistical/prescriptive readings. We then provide (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. (1 other version)Exhaustivity in Questions with Non-Factives.Nathan Klinedinst & Daniel Rothschild - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
  26. Is Stalnaker's Semantics Complete?Alexander W. Kocurek - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    It is shown that one common formulation of Stalnaker's semantics for conditionals is incomplete: it has no sound and (strongly) complete proof system. At first, this seems to conflict with well-known completeness results for this semantics (e.g., Stalnaker and Thomason 1967; Stalnaker 1970 and Lewis 1973, ch. 6). As it turns out, it does not: these completeness results rely on another closely-related formulation of the semantics that is provably complete. Specifically, the difference comes down to how the Limit Assumption is (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. On the Agent-Relativity of 'Ought'.Junhyo Lee - forthcoming - Analysis.
    In the standard theory of deontic modals, ‘ought’ is understood as expressing a propositional operator. However, this view has been called into question by Almotahari and Rabern’s puzzle about deontic ‘ought’, according to which the ethical principle that one ought to be wronged by another person rather than wrong them is intuitively coherent but the standard theory makes it incoherent. In this paper, I take up Almotahari and Rabern’s challenge and offer a refinement of the standard theory to handle the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Graded Genericity.Junhyo Lee & Anthony Nguyen - forthcoming - Philosophical Studies.
    Any adequate semantics of generic sentences (e.g., “Philosophers evaluate arguments”) must accommodate both what we call the positive data and the negative data. The positive data consists of observations about what felicitous interpretations of generic sentences are available. Conversely, the negative data consists of observations about which interpretations of generic sentences are unavailable. Nguyen argues that only his pragmatic neo-Gricean account and Sterken’s indexical account can accommodate the positive data. Lee and Nguyen have advanced the debate by arguing that the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Disjunction and possibility.Matthew Mandelkern - forthcoming - Philosophical Perspectives.
    I explore constructions which contain an embedded disjunction ⌜p or q⌝which is interpreted as (p∨q) ∧♢p∧♢q, where ♢is a possibility modal whose flavor is epistemic, circumstantial, or deontic. I argue that no extant theory can account for these interpretations. I propose that the best way to do so is with a direct theory on which ⌜p or q⌝ simply means (p∨q) ∧♢p∧♢q. In addition to accounting for the novel cases I discuss, this theory explains both wide- and narrow-scope free choice (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. The primate gestural meaning continuum.Pritty Patel-Grosz - forthcoming - In Kate Stanton, Gabriel Dupre & Ryan Nefdt (eds.), Oxford handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics. OUP.
    Research in formal theoretical semantics has recently expanded its scope to include gestural communication, focusing in particular on gestures that contribute to the content of an accompanying utterance, e.g., size gestures (LARGE, WIDE), pointing gestures, and gestures that depict objects (TELESCOPE) or actions (SLAP). At the same time, fruitful inquiries at the intersection of primatology and linguistics have given rise to the hypothesis that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (=imperative) gestures. Directive gestures such as (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. Lógica y gramática en Richard Montague.J. Daniel Quesada - forthcoming - Convivium. Revista de Filosofía, 1975, Núm. 46.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32. Clause-internal coherence as presupposition resolution.Kelsey Sasaki & Daniel Altshuler - forthcoming - Proceedings of Amsterdam Colloquium 2022.
    Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  33. Oxford handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics.Kate Stanton, Gabriel Dupre & Ryan Nefdt (eds.) - forthcoming - OUP.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  34. An Explanation of the Veridical Uniformity Universal.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - forthcoming - Journal of Semantics.
    A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  35. Learnability and Semantic Universals.Shane Steinert-Threlkeld & Jakub Szymanik - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of learning that can (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  36. Hyperintensionality and Overfitting.Francesco Berto - 2024 - Synthese 203:117.
    A hyperintensional epistemic logic would take the contents which can be known or believed as more fine-grained than sets of possible worlds. I consider one objection to the idea: Williamson’s Objection from Overfitting. I propose a hyperintensional account of propositions as sets of worlds enriched with topics: what those propositions, and so the attitudes having them as contents, are about. I show that the account captures the conditions under which sentences express the same content; that it can be pervasively applied (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  37. Map Semantics and the Geography of Meaning.Gabriel Greenberg - 2024 - In Ernest Lepore & Luvell Anderson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 489-522.
    This chapter develops a semantic theory for maps and situates it within the broader geography of meaning and semiotic significance. The discussion focuses on three central aspects of map semantics: the use of space, line marking, and linguistic tags. It is argued that the treatment of space in maps must be based on geometrical projection from a viewpoint rather than the traditional analysis in terms of spatial isomorphism. The chapter then shows how to integrate the projection-based semantics of maps and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  38. Modal Knowledge for Expressivists.Peter Hawke - 2024 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 53 (4):1109-1143.
    What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  39. Truth, topicality, and transparency: one-component versus two-component semantics.Peter Hawke, Levin Hornischer & Franz Berto - 2024 - Linguistics and Philosophy 47 (3):481-503.
    When do two sentences say the same thing, that is, express the same content? We defend two-component (2C) semantics: the view that propositional contents comprise (at least) two irreducibly distinct constituents: (1) truth-conditions and (2) subject-matter. We contrast 2C with one-component (1C) semantics, focusing on the view that subject-matter is reducible to truth-conditions. We identify exponents of this view and argue in favor of 2C. An appendix proposes a general formal template for propositional 2C semantics.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  40. Covert Mixed Quotation.Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini - 2024 - Semantics and Pragmatics 17 (5):1-54.
    The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  41. Reconceptualising the Psychological Theory of Generics.Tom Ralston - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (11):2973-2995.
    Generics have historically proven difficult to analyse using the tools of formal semantics. In this paper, I argue that an influential theory of the meaning of generics due to Sarah-Jane Leslie, the Psychological Theory of Generics, is best interpreted not as a theory of their meaning, but as a theory of the psychological heuristics that we use to judge whether or not generics are true. I argue that Leslie’s methodology is not well-suited to producing a theory of the meaning of (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  42. Cross-linguistic insights in the theory of semantics and its interface with syntax.Anna Szabolcsi - 2024 - Theoretical Linguistics 50 (1/2):125-133.
    This paper highlights a small selection of cases where crosslinguistic insights have been important to big questions in the theory of semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. The selection includes (i) the role and representation of Speaker and Addressee in the grammar; (ii) mismatches between form and interpretation motivating high-placed silent operators for functional elements; and (iii) the explanation of semantic universals, including universals pertaining to inventories, in terms of learnability and the trade-off between informativeness and simplicity.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  43. The Logic of Framing Effects.Francesco Berto & Aybüke Özgün - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (3):939-962.
    _Framing effects_ concern the having of different attitudes towards logically or necessarily equivalent contents. Framing is of crucial importance for cognitive science, behavioral economics, decision theory, and the social sciences at large. We model a typical kind of framing, grounded in (i) the structural distinction between beliefs activated in working memory and beliefs left inactive in long term memory, and (ii) the topic- or subject matter-sensitivity of belief: a feature of propositional attitudes which is attracting growing research attention. We introduce (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  44. Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing.WooJin Chung & Salvador Mascarenhas - 2023 - Synthese 202 (1):1-40.
    We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically advantageous, but also has far-reaching empirical consequences. In particular, we predict modal versions of reasoning fallacies from the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  45. The Iconic-Symbolic Spectrum.Gabriel Greenberg - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (4):579-627.
    It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the difference not in the signs themselves, nor in the contents they express, but in the semantic rules by which signs are associated with contents. The two kinds of rule have (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  46. Reasoning with Attitude: Foundations and Applications of Inferential Expressivism.Luca Incurvati & Julian J. Schlöder - 2023 - New York: Oxford University Press USA.
  47. Reference to singular kinds in Germanic and Romance.Samuel Jambrović - 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
    The need for the definite article to express a singular kind ("the cat") in the Germanic languages is predicted by Borer's (2005) structural approach to the mass-count distinction. Chierchia's (1998) "down" operator can apply to nPs to derive mass kinds ("rice") and to DivPs to derive plural kinds ("cats"), but there is no determinerless structure that exclusively denotes properties of atomic individuals to which this same operator can apply to derive singular kinds. The only alternative is the process that Chierchia (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  48. Generic Excluded Middle.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint.
    There is a standard quantificational view of generic sentences according to which they have a tripartite logical form involving a phonologically null generic operator called 'Gen'. Recently, a number of theorists have questioned the standard view and revived a competing proposal according to which generics involve the predication of properties to kinds. This paper offers a novel argument against the kind-predication approach on the basis of the invalidity of Generic Excluded Middle, a principle according to which any sentence of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  49. The Dynamics of Generics.James Ravi Kirkpatrick - 2023 - Journal of Semantics 40 (4):523–548.
    It is a familiar point that we can use generic sentences to express generalisations that are tolerant to exceptions and then go on to state those exceptions explicitly. It is a less familiar point that switching the order of the generics has deleterious effects on their felicity. For example, the sequences ‘Ravens are black, but albino ravens aren’t’ is perfectly felicitous and judged to be true, whereas its reverse ‘Albino ravens aren’t black, but ravens are’ is infelicitous and contradictory-sounding. This (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  50. Sources of hyperintensionality.Giorgio Lenta - 2023 - Theoria 89 (6):811-822.
    A wide variety of concepts are nowadays considered to be hyperintensional, and some of them do not seem to involve our representational attitudes. This led some philosophers to identify and defend a notion of worldly hyperintensionality: the idea that some hyperintensional phenomena derive from features of objective reality, independently of how we represent it. Against this view, Darragh Byrne and Naomi Thompson argue that the correct understanding of such phenomena must be conceptualist in nature, and claim that hyperintensionality always derives (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
1 — 50 / 398