Over the last decade, several extensions of Dung’s Abstract Argumentation Frameworks (AFs) have been introduced in the literature. Some of these extensions concern the nature of the attack relation, such as the consideration of recursive attacks, whereas others incorporate additional interactions, such as a support relation. Recently, the Attack–Support Argumentation Framework (ASAF) was proposed, which accounts for recursive attacks and supports, attacks to supports and supports to attacks, at any level, where the support relation is interpreted as necessity. Currently, to (...) determine the accepted elements of an ASAF (which may be arguments, attacks, and supports) it is required to translate such an ASAF into a Dung’s AF. In this work, we provide a formal characterization of acceptability semantics directly on the ASAF, without requiring such a translation. We prove that our characterization is sound since it satisfies different results from Dung’s argumentation theory; moreover, we formally show that the approach proposed here for addressing acceptability is equivalent to the preexisting one, in which the ASAF was translated into an AF. Also, we formalize the relationship between the ASAF and other frameworks on which it is inspired: the Argumentation Framework with Recursive Attacks (AFRA) and the Argumentation Framework with Necessities (AFN). (shrink)

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine-grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of different semantic classes occur naturally in alternative dative constructions, a pattern quite different from English. The fact that dative alternation appears independent of semantic classes challenges traditional semantic-based approaches. Second, acceptability rating tasks (...) reveal that dative constructions containing highly entrenched word combinations and frequent word order are judged more acceptable regardless of the verbs' semantics. The results are interpreted in favor of usage-based accounts: Acceptability of dative constructions may be language-specific and depend on patterns of use and conventionalization. (shrink)

Naive speakers find some logical contradictions acceptable, specifically borderline contradictions involving vague predicates such as Joe is and isn’t tall. In a recent paper, Cobreros et al. (J Philos Logic, 2012) suggest a pragmatic account of the acceptability of borderline contradictions. We show, however, that the pragmatic account predicts the wrong truth conditions for some examples with disjunction. As a remedy, we propose a semantic analysis instead. The analysis is close to a variant of fuzzy logic, but conjunction and (...) disjunction are interpreted as intensional operators. (shrink)

It has been argued that reduction procedures are closely connected to the question about identity of proofs and that accepting certain reductions would lead to a trivialization of identity of proofs in the sense that every derivation of the same conclusion would have to be identified. In this paper it will be shown that the question, which reductions we accept in our system, is not only important if we see them as generating a theory of proof identity but is also (...) decisive for the more general question whether a proof has meaningful content. There are certain reductions which would not only force us to identify proofs of different arbitrary formulas but which would render derivations in a system allowing them meaningless. To exclude such cases, a minimal criterion is proposed which reductions have to fulfill to be acceptable. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism makes the case that the conjunction of evolutionary theory and naturalism cannot be rationally believed, as, if both evolutionary theory and naturalism were true, it would be highly unlikely that our cognitive faculties are reliable. I present Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism and survey a theory of meaning espoused by Robert Brandom, known as semantic inferentialism. I argue that if one accepts semantic inferentialism, as it is developed by Brandom, then Plantinga's motivation for the (...) evolutionary argument against naturalism is undermined. (shrink)

Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves (...) to express. In support, we synthesize data from the critical literature on expressivism—largely reflecting interactions between modals and disjunctions—and present a semantic expressivism that readily predicts the data. This contrasts with salient competitors, including: pragmatic expressivism based on domain semantics or dynamic semantics; semantic expressivism à la Moss [2015]; and the bounded relational semantics of Mandelkern [2019]. (shrink)

This paper aims to argue for two related statements: first, that formal semantics should not be conceived of as interpreting natural language expressions in a single model (a very large one representing the world as a whole, or something like that) but as interpreting them in many different models (formal counterparts, say, of little fragments of reality); second, that accepting such a conception of formal semantics yields a better comprehension of the relation between semantics and pragmatics and (...) of the role to be played by formal semantics in the general enterprise of understanding meaning. For this purpose, three kinds of arguments are given: firstly, empirical arguments showing that the many models approach is the most straightforward and natural way of giving a formal counterpart to natural language sentences. Secondly, logical arguments proving the logical impossibility of a single universal model. And thirdly, theoretical arguments to the effect that such a conception of formal semantics fits in a natural and fruitful way with pragmatic theories and facts. In passing, this conception will be shown to cast some new light on the old problems raised by liar and sorites paradoxes. (shrink)

Drawing on the puzzling behavior of ordinary knowledge ascriptions that embed an epistemic (im)possibility claim, we tentatively conclude that it is untenable to jointly endorse (i) an unfettered classical logic for epistemic language, (ii) the general veridicality of knowledge ascription, and (iii) an intuitive ‘negative transparency’ thesis that reduces knowledge of a simple negated ‘might’ claim to an epistemic claim without modal content. We motivate a strategic trade-off: preserve veridicality and (generalized) negative transparency, while abandoning the general validity of contraposition. (...) We criticize various approaches to incorporating veridicality into domain semantics, a paradigmatic ‘information-sensitive’ framework for capturing negative transparency and, more generally, the non-classical behavior of sentences with epistemic modals. We then present a novel information-sensitive semantics that successfully executes our favored strategy: stable acceptance semantics, extending a vanilla bilateral state-based semantics for epistemic modals with a knowledge operator loosely inspired by the defeasibility theory of knowledge. (shrink)

José L. Zalabardo defends a pragmatist account of what grounds the meaning of central semantic discourses--ascriptions of truth, of propositional attitudes, and of meanings. He argues that it is the procedures that regulate acceptance and rejection that give the sentences of these discourses their meanings, and explores the application of the pragmatist template to ethical discourse. The pragmatist approach is presented as an alternative to representationalist accounts of the meaning grounds of declarative sentences, according to which a sentence has the (...) meaning it has as a result of links with the bits of the world that it purports to represent. Zalabardo develops a version of the open-question argument to support the claim that the meaning grounds of the discourses he focuses on cannot receive representationalist accounts. It is generally assumed that a declarative sentence cannot perform the function of representing the world unless it has a representationalist meaning ground. Zalabardo rejects this assumption, arguing that sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds can represent the world in exactly the same sense that sentences with representationalist meaning grounds do. This requires that there are states of affairs that the target sentences represent as obtaining, and Zalabardo develops an account of the nature of the states of affairs that can play this role for sentences with pragmatist meaning grounds. Pragmatist Semantics concludes by developing the suggestion that the meaning grounds of all our representational discourses might be ultimately pragmatist. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for (...) philosophy of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

It’s widely accepted that normativity is not subject to truth values. The underlying reasoning is that truth values can only be predicated of descriptive statements; normative statements are prescriptive, not descriptive; thus truth value predicates cannot be assigned to normative statements. Hence, deonticity lacks logical semantics. This semantic monism has been challenged over the last decades from a series of perspectives that open the way for legal logics with imperative semantics. In the present paper I will go back (...) to Kant and review his understanding of practical judgments, presenting it as supported by a pluralistic semantics. From this perspective a norm of Law is a logical expression that includes as content a generic description of a possible behavior by a generality of juridical agents, and assigns to that content the assertion of its obligatory character, accompanied by a disincentive for non-compliance. From this perspective legal norms can be syntactically formalized and assigned appropriate semantic values in such terms that they can be incorporated into valid inferential schemes. The consequence is that we can put together legal logics that handle both the phenomenal and the deontic dimensions of legality. (shrink)

This chapter presents a thorough analysis of Neurath’s physicalist syntacticism. It explores connections between syntacticism and other elements of Neurath’s philosophy such as the unity of science and the sociological imperative of empiricism. It also defends the intelligibility of syntacticism. Finally, the case is made that Neurath’s fear of semantics was warranted: logical empiricism was undermined to a large extent by the widespread acceptance of semantics.

Mental (or semantic) holism is the doctrine that the identity of a belief content (or the meaning of a sentence that expresses it) is determined by its place in the web of beliefs or sentences comprising a whole theory or group of theories. It can be contrasted with two other views: atomism and molecularism. Molecularism characterizes meaning and content in terms of relatively small parts of the web in a way that allows many different theories to share those parts. For (...) example, the meaning of 'chase' might be said by a molecularist to be try to catch. Atomism characterizes meaning and content in terms of none of the web; it says that sentences and beliefs have meaning or content independently of their relations to other sentences or beliefs. One major motivation for holism has come from reflections on the natures of confirmation and learning. As Quine (1953) observed, claims about the world are confirmed not individually, but only in conjunction with theories of which they are a part. And typically, one cannot come to understand scientific claims without understanding a significant chunk of the theory of which they are a part. For example, in learning the Newtonian concepts of 'force', 'mass', kinetic energy' and 'momentum', one doesn't learn any definitions of these terms in terms that are understood beforehand, for there are no such definitions. Rather, these theoretical terms were all learned together in conjunction with procedures for solving problems. The major problem with holism is that it threatens to make generalization in psychology virtually impossible. If the content of any state depends on all others, it would be extremely unlikely that any two believers would ever share a state with the same content. Moreover, holism would appear to conflict with our ordinary conception of reasoning. What sentences one accepts influence what one infers. if i accept a sentence and then later reject it, i thereby change the inferential role of that sentence, so the meaning of what i accept wouldn't be the same as what i later reject. but then it would be difficult to understand on this view how one could rationally --or even irrationally!-- change one's mind. and agreement and translation are also problematic for much the same reason. holists have responded (1) by proposing that we should think not in terms of "same/different" meaning but in terms of a gradient of similarity of meaning, (2) by proposing "two factor" theories or (3) by simply accepting the consequence that there is no real difference between changing meanings and changing beliefs. (shrink)

Externalism is the thesis that the contents of intentional states and speech acts are not determined by the way the subjects of those states or acts are internally. It is a widely accepted but not entirely uncontroversial thesis. Among such theses in philosophy, externalism is notable for owing the assent it commands almost entirely to thought experiments, especially to variants of Hilary Putnam's famous Twin Earth scenario. This paper presents a thought experiment-free argument for externalism. It shows that externalism is (...) a deductive consequence of a pair of widely accepted principles whose relevance to the issue has hitherto gone unnoticed. (shrink)

It's widely accepted that social facts about an individual's linguistic community can affect both the reference of her words and the concepts those words express. Theorists sympathetic to the internalist tradition have sought to accommodate these social dependence phenomena without altering their core theoretical commitments by positing deferential reference-fixing criteria. In this paper, we sketch a different explanation of social dependence phenomena, according to which all concepts are individuated in part by causal-historical relations linking token elements of thought.

What is the content of a sentence in context? A proposition, says the standard propositional view accepted in much of semantics. A set of propositions, says the hitherto little-explored view of Semantic Pluralism. The aim of this book is to motivate, develop and defend Semantic Pluralism. To achieve this aim, the book puts forward two arguments against Contextualism, the most popular propositional theory. It spells out two versions of Semantic Pluralism: Flexible Pluralism, which takes many expressions to be context-sensitive, (...) and Strong Pluralism, which denies that context-sensitivity is widespread. And it shows how Pluralists can reply to several objections that have been lodged against non-propositional semantic theories. (shrink)

Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 (...) propositional attitude verbs’ syntactic distributions using an acceptability judgment task. Experiments 2a and 2b gather measures of semantic similarity between those same verbs using a generalized semantic discrimination task and an ordinal scale task, respectively. Two kinds of analyses are conducted on the data from these experiments. The first compares both the acceptability judgments and the semantic similarity judgments to previous classifications derived from the syntax and semantics literature. The second kind compares the acceptability judgments to the semantic similarity judgments directly. Through these comparisons, we show that there is quite fine-grained information about propositional attitude verbs’ semantics carried in their syntactic distributions—whether one considers the sorts of discrete qualitative classifications that linguists traditionally work with or the sorts of continuous quantitative classifications that can be derived experimentally. (shrink)

Formal semantics is an approach to SEMANTICS1, the study of meaning, with roots in logic, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, and since the 1980’s a core area of linguistic theory. Characteristics of formal semantics to be treated in this article include the following: Formal semanticists treat meaning as mind-independent (though abstract), contrasting with the view of meanings as concepts “in the head” (see I-LANGUAGE AND E-LANGUAGE and MEANING EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM); formal semanticists distinguish semantics from knowledge (...) of semantics (Lewis 1975, Cresswell 1978), which has consequences for the notion of semantic COMPETENCE. A central part of the meaning of a sentence on this approach is its TRUTH CONDITIONS, and most although not all formal semantics is model-theoretic, relating linguistic expressions to model-theoretically constructed semantic values cast in terms of truth, REFERENCE, and possible worlds. This sets formal semantics apart from approaches which view semantics as relating a sentence just to a representation on another linguistic “level” (LOGICAL FORM) or a representation in an innate LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT. The formal semanticist could accept such representations as an aspect of semantics but would insist on asking what the model-theoretic semantic interpretation of the given representationlanguage is (Lewis 1970). Formal semantics is centrally concerned with COMPOSITIONALITY at the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE, how the meanings of larger constituents are built up from the meanings of their parts on the basis of their syntactic structure, and with the relation between compositional SENTENCE MEANING and meaning in discourse. (shrink)

I review a widely accepted argument to the conclusion that the contents of our beliefs, desires and other mental states cannot be causally efficacious in a classical computational model of the mind. I reply that this argument rests essentially on an assumption about the nature of neural structure that we have no good scientific reason to accept. I conclude that computationalism is compatible with wide semantic causal efficacy, and suggest how the computational model might be modified to accommodate this possibility.

Graeme Forbes (2011) raises some problems for two-dimensional semantic theories. The problems concern nested environments: linguistic environments where sentences are nested under both modal and epistemic operators. Closely related problems involving nested environments have been raised by Scott Soames (2005) and Josh Dever (2007). Soames goes so far as to say that nested environments pose the “chief technical problem” for strong two-dimensionalism. We call the problem of handling nested environments within two-dimensional semantics “the nesting problem”. We show that the (...) two-dimensional semantics for attitude ascriptions developed in Chalmers (2011a) has no trouble accommodating certain forms of the nesting problem that involve factive verbs such as “know” or “establish”. A certain form of the nesting problem involving apriority and necessity operators does raise an interesting puzzle, but we show how a generalized version of the nesting problem arises independently of two-dimensional semantics—it arises, in fact, for anyone who accepts the contingent a priori. We, then, provide a two-dimensional treatment of the apriority operator that fits the two-dimensional treatment of attitude verbs and apply it to the generalized nesting problem. We conclude that two-dimensionalism is not seriously threatened by cases involving the nesting of epistemic and modal operators. (shrink)

According to success semantics, a belief’s content is that which guarantees the success of the actions that the belief, in combination with the relevant desires, would cause. One worry with the view is that it seems to apply only to full beliefs and fares poorly in dealing with partial beliefs. For example, if Ida’s partial belief that p is of strength 0.5, she may act in a way that would fulfill her desires if p were in fact false—assuming that (...) she desires money, she may well accept a bet that pays her $500 if not-p and costs her nothing otherwise. In response to the worry, defenders of success semantics hold that the content of a partial belief is simply that which guarantees the success of the actions it would cause were it a full belief. But, as I’ll argue in this paper, such a response is unsatisfactory. (shrink)

This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities (...) is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism. (shrink)

Some scientific theories are inconsistent, yet non-trivial and meaningful. How is that possible? The present paper aims to show that we can analyse the inferential use of such theories in terms of consistent compositions of the applications of universal axioms. This technique will be represented by a preferred models semantics, which allows us to accept the instances of universal axioms selectively. For such a semantics to be developed, the framework of partial structures by da Costa and French will (...) be extended by a few elements of the Sneed formalism, also known as the structuralist approach to science. (shrink)

We present a semantic analysis of the Ramsey test, pointing out its deep underlying flaw: the tension between the “static” nature of AGM revision (which was originally tailored for revision of only purely ontic beliefs, and can be applied to higher-order beliefs only if given a “backwards-looking” interpretation) and the fact that, semantically speaking, any Ramsey conditional must be a modal operator (more precisely, a dynamic-epistemic one). Thus, a belief about a Ramsey conditional is in fact a higher-order belief, hence (...) the AGM revision postulates are not applicable to it, except in their “backwards-looking” interpretation. But that interpretation is consistent only with a restricted (weak) version of Ramsey’s test (in-applicable to already revised theories). The solution out of the conundrum is twofold: either accept only the weak Ramsey test; or replace the AGM revision operator ∗ by a truly “dynamic” revision operator ⊗, which will not satisfy the AGM axioms, but will do something better: it will “keep up with reality”, correctly describing revision with higher-order beliefs. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to reveal the role of religious, political and cultural factors on the way of understanding the concept of Ahl al-ḥaqq, one of the most important theopolitical concepts of Islamic thought, and to identify the projections of the semantic traansformatinon that concept of Ahl al-ḥaqq has experienced. In the comparative study with the group of "Ahl al-Shirk", "Ahl al-Kitāb", "Ahl al-Bid'at" and "Ahl al-Hawā", it has been determined that the concept of Ahl al-Haq has a (...) multi-layered spectrum of meaning. A number of critical periods can be mentioned in the formation of this multi-layered meaning structure. The first of these periods is the founding period in which a conception is constructed through the description of the superstitious actions of the "Ahl al-Shirk" and "Ahl al-Kitâb" groups in belief and practice, even though the term "Ahl al-haqq" is not mentioned in the Qur’ān. In this context, it can be said that all Muslims who confess and recite the shahada or the word tawhid with the intention of illa'l-haqq in faith and deeds are included in the category of Ahl al-haqq. After the first semantic period in which the opposition between Islam and un-Islam was decisive, the socio-political issues that emerged among Muslims moved the debate on who could be included in the scope of Ahl al-haqq to the intra-Islamic plane. In the second semantic period, in which every sect considered itself to be right, the scope of Ahl al-Haq was mostly described through the nass-centered references of the Salafiyya and the superstitious practices in belief and practice of Muslims included in the Ahl al-Bid'at category. The third semantic period was shaped relatively by the encounter with philosophical traditions. This is the period in which theologians defending the Islamic faith tried to keep dynamic the outward/objective epistemological aspect of the concept. In the fourth semantic period, which coincided with post-modernism, Ahl al-Haq returned to the socio-political meaning of the opposition between Islam and un-Islam in the founding period as an anti-imperial attitude against colonization activities. As a result, considering all these definitions, it is concluded at the present time that, it would be more accurate that the concept of Ahl al-Haq is better defined to include all Muslims who have accepted the principles of Islamic belief and declared their adherence to the Qur’ān and Sunna. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of face emoji (disc-shaped pictograms with stylized facial expressions) that accompany written text. We propose that there is a use of face emoji in which they comment on a target proposition expressed by the accompanying text, as opposed to making an independent contribution to discourse. Focusing on positively valenced and negatively valenced emoji (which we gloss as _happy_ and _unhappy_, respectively), we argue that the emoji comment on how the target proposition bears on a contextually (...) provided discourse value endorsed by the author. Discourse values embody what an author desires, aspires to, wishes for, or hopes for. Our analysis derives a range of non-trivial generalizations, including (i) ordering restrictions with regards to the placement of emoji and text, (ii) cases of apparent mixed emotions, and (iii) cases where the lexical content of the accompanying text influences the acceptability of a face emoji. (shrink)

Agreement attraction is a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a verb occasionally agrees not with its subject, as required by grammar, but instead with an unrelated noun (“The key to the cabinets were…”). Despite the clear violation of grammatical rules, comprehenders often rate these sentences as acceptable. Contenders for explaining agreement attraction fall into two broad classes: Morphosyntactic accounts specifically designed to explain agreement attraction, and more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model, which explain attraction as a (...) consequence of how linguistic structure is stored and accessed in content-addressable memory. In the present research, we disambiguate between these two classes by testing a surprising prediction made by the Lewis and Vasishth model but not by the morphosyntactic accounts, namely, that attraction should not be limited to morphosyntax, but that semantic features of unrelated nouns equally induce attraction. A recent study by Cunnings and Sturt provided initial evidence that this may be the case. Here, we report three single-trial experiments in English that compared semantic and agreement attraction and tested whether and how the two interact. All three experiments showed strong semantically induced attraction effects closely mirroring agreement attraction effects. We complement these results with computational simulations which confirmed that the Lewis and Vasishth model can faithfully reproduce the observed results. In sum, our findings suggest that attraction is a more general phenomenon than is commonly believed, and therefore favor more general sentence processing models, such as the Lewis and Vasishth model. (shrink)

Aldo Antonelli offers a novel view on abstraction principles in order to solve a traditional tension between different requirements: that the claims of science be taken at face value, even when involving putative reference to mathematical entities; and that referents of mathematical terms are identified and their possible relations to other objects specified. In his view, abstraction principles provide representatives for equivalence classes of second-order entities that are available provided the first- and second-order domains are in the equilibrium dictated by (...) the abstraction principles, and whose choice is otherwise unconstrained.entities are the referents of abstraction terms: such referents are to an extent indeterminate, but we can still quantify over them, predicate identity or non-identity, etc. Our knowledge of them is limited, but still substantial: we know whatever has to be true no matter how the representatives are chosen, i.e., what is true in all models of the corresponding abstraction principles. This view is backed up by an “austere” conception of universals, according to which these are first-order objects, i.e., ways of collecting first-order objects. Antonelli thus claims that second-order logic does not import any novel ontological commitment beyond ontology of first-order, naturalistically acceptable, objects. Moreover, in the case of arithmetic, even if Hume’s Principle is construed as described above, Frege’s Theorem goes through unaffected, since there is nothing in its proof that depends on an account of the “true nature” of numbers. A viable construal of logicism is then given by the combination of semantic nominalism and a naturalistic conception of abstraction. [Editors note]. (shrink)

The entire development of modern logic is characterized by various forms of confrontation of what has come to be called proof theory with what has earned the label of model theory. For a long time the widely accepted view was that while model theory captures directly what logical formalisms are about, proof theory is merely our technical means of getting some incomplete grip on this; but in recent decades the situation has altered. Not only did proof theory expand into new (...) realms, generalizing the concept of proof in various directions; many philosophers also realized that meaning may be seen as primarily consisting in certain rules rather than in language-world links. However, the possibility of construing meaning as an inferential role is often seen as essentially compromised by the limits of prooftheoretical means. The aim of this paper is to sort out the cluster of problems besetting logical inferentialism by disentangling and clarifying one of them, namely determining the power of various inferential frameworks as measured by that of explicitly semantic ones. (shrink)

The widely accepted two-dimensional circumplex model of emotions posits that most instances of human emotional experience can be understood within the two general dimensions of valence and activation. Currently, this model is facing some criticism, because complex emotions in particular are hard to define within only these two general dimensions. The present theory-driven study introduces an innovative analytical approach working in a way other than the conventional, two-dimensional paradigm. The main goal was to map and project semantic emotion space in (...) terms of mutual positions of various emotion prototypical categories. Participants (N = 187; 54.5% females) judged 16 discrete emotions in terms of valence, intensity, controllability and utility. The results revealed that these four dimensional input measures were uncorrelated. This implies that valence, intensity, controllability and utility represented clearly different qualities of discrete emotions in the judgments of the participants. Based on this data, we constructed a 3D hypercube-projection and compared it with various two-dimensional projections. This contrasting enabled us to detect several sources of bias when working with the traditional, two-dimensional analytical approach. Contrasting two-dimensional and three-dimensional projections revealed that the 2D models provided biased insights about how emotions are conceptually related to one another along multiple dimensions. The results of the present study point out the reductionist nature of the two-dimensional paradigm in the psychological theory of emotions and challenge the widely accepted circumplex model. (shrink)

It is widely accepted by formal and informal logicians alike that a formal logic which, by the lights of English, gets the connectives wrong, nevertheless conspires to get entailment right—right that is, modulo English. There is a vexing problem occasioned by this semantic alienation of formal logic. It is next to impossible for formal logic to meet the expectations of realism. What, then, of informal logic?

I defend a semantic theory of quotation marks, according to which these are ambiguous, as they have several different acceptations involving corresponding different conventional indications. In particular, in allusion (“mixed”) uses, the corresponding conventional indication is one with an adverbial or prepositional content, roughly equivalent to “using the quoted expression or an appropriate version of it”. And in “scare” uses, the corresponding conventional indication is that the enclosed expression should be used not plainly but in some broadly speaking distanced way, (...) or that it is being so used by the utterer. I also defend this view against some alternative views on which allusion and distance indications are to be seen as pragmatically conveyed. In particular, I consider several views that attempt to explain especially allusion and distance indications as pragmatic suggestions generated from a meager conventional basis, and I argue that they cannot accommodate a number of linguistic phenomena and reflectively supported theses about the use of quotation marks. I lay special emphasis on the fact that the main pragmatic theories fail to pass an extremely plausible test for challenges to polysemic accounts of an expression. (shrink)

The semantic view of computation is the claim that semantic properties play an essential role in the individuation of physical computing systems such as laptops and brains. The main argument for the semantic view rests on the fact that some physical systems simultaneously implement different automata at the same time, in the same space, and even in the very same physical properties. Recently, several authors have challenged this argument. They accept the premise of simultaneous implementation but reject the semantic conclusion. (...) In this paper, I aim to explicate the semantic view and to address these objections. I first characterize the semantic view and distinguish it from other, closely related views. Then, I contend that the master argument for the semantic view survives the counter-arguments against it. One counter-argument is that computational individuation is not forced to choose between the implemented automata but rather always picks out a more basic computational structure. My response is that this move might undermine the notion of computational equivalence. Another counter-argument is that while computational individuation is forced to rely on extrinsic features, these features need not be semantic. My reply is that the semantic view better accounts for these extrinsic features than the proposed non-semantic alternatives. (shrink)

Speech act theory is one of the more lasting products of the linguistic movement in philosophy of the mid−Twentieth century. Within philosophy itself the movement's products did not in general prove so durable. Particularly striking in this respect is the perceived fate of what was one of the most characteristic applications of the linguistic turn in philosophy, namely the view that many traditional philosophical problems are such as to yield to an understanding of the distinctive function of a particular part (...) of language. Most typically, the crucial insight was held to be that despite appearances, the function of the part of language in question is not assertoric, or descriptive, and that the traditional problems arose at least in part from a failure to appreciate this point. Thus problems in moral philosophy were thought to yield to an appreciation that moral discourse is expressive rather than descriptive, problems in the philosophy of mind to an understanding of distinctive r×le of psychological ascriptions, and so on. The philosophical journals of the 1950s are rich with views like these. (No general term for this approach seems to have become widely accepted at the time. I shall call it "non−factualism", for what it denies, most characteristically, is the fact−stating r×le of language of a certain kind.). (shrink)

Proof-theoretic semantics provides meanings to the connectives of intuitionistic logic without the need for a semantics in the standard sense of an attribution of semantic values to formulas. Meanings are given by the inference rules that, in this case, do not express preservation of truth but rather preservation of availability of a constructive proof. Elsewhere we presented two paraconsistent systems of natural deduction: the Basic Logic of Evidence and the Logic of Evidence and Truth. The rules of BLE (...) have been conceived to preserve a notion weaker than truth, namely, evidence, understood as reasons for believing in or accepting a given proposition. \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$LET_{J}$$\end{document}, on the other hand, is a logic of formal inconsistency and undeterminedness that extends \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$BLE$$\end{document} by adding resources to recover classical logic for formulas taken as true, or false. We extend the idea of proof-theoretic semantics to these logics and argue that the meanings of the connectives in BLE are given by the fact that its rules are concerned with preservation of the availability of evidence. An analogous idea also applies to \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$LET_{J}$$\end{document}. (shrink)

This article argues, first, that the fundamental structure of the skeptical argument in Kripke's book on Wittgenstein has been seriously misunderstood by recent commentators. Although it focuses particularly on recent commentary by John McDowell, it emphasizes that the basic misunderstandings are widely shared by other commentators. In particular, it argues that, properly construed, Kripke offers a fully coherent reading of PI #201 and related passages. This is commonly denied, and given as a reason for rejecting Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein's text. (...) Second, it is pretty universally accepted that Kripke's Wittgenstein is a `non-factualist' about ascriptions of meaning. The article argues that, when Kripke's discussion is rightly understood and the content of `non-factualism' is clarified, there is an important sense in which the skeptical solution is not committed to non-factualism. (shrink)

What makes our utterances mean what they do? In this work I formulate and justify a structural constraint on possible answers to this key question in the philosophy of language, and I show that accepting this constraint leads naturally to the adoption of an algebraic formalization of truth-theoretic semantics. I develop such a formalization, and show that applying algebraic methodology to the theory of meaning yields important insights into the nature of language. ;The constraint I propose is, roughly, this: (...) the meaning of an utterance of a natural language sentence is derived from the place of that sentence within a system that includes other sentences, and is structured in virtue of primitive semantic facts about complete sentences. This constraint calls for a formal semantics program where the meaning of natural language sentences is represented by an appropriate assignment of the elements of an algebraic structure to sentences, an assignment that represents facts concerning complete sentences. I call the above constraint 'The Algebraic Thesis', and the corresponding formal semantics program 'Algebraic Semantics.' ;I introduce AT by carving it out of the holistic views of language of Quine and Davidson, and I show that it is independent of other important features of these philosophers' views. I then argue for AT, taking into account recent work by Brandom, Dummett, Fodor and Lepore, Gaifman and Perry. In developing Algebraic Semantics I present structures of two basic types: Boolean algebras and cylindric algebras; these structures are construed in the context of AT in a novel way: they are treated as applying to classes of sentences as numbers apply to physical objects in measurement. Applying algebraic methodology to formal semantics and to the theory of meaning, I develop these results: ; An account of the semantics of necessity and possibility that avoids both Quine's dismissal of these notions and their reduction by David Lewis to quantification over possible worlds; ; The application of the model-theoretic notion of expansion to capture the process of our learning progressively more of the meaning of expressions in our first languages. (shrink)

In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of (...) Putnam’s semantic externalism, situate his debate with Sellars in it, and reconstruct the two arguments he presented against Sellars. The second half of this paper aims to reconstruct how Sellars replied to Putnam. I argue that Sellars not only accepts the social character of language but also suggests how inferentialists can accommodate the contribution of the world. Sellars’s key idea is that substance terms have a “promissory note aspect” which is to be cashed out in a successor conceptual framework. I reconstruct Sellars’s position as ideal successor externalism, and compare it with temporal externalism. (shrink)

This extended investigation of the semantics of event (and state) sentences in their various forms is a major contribution to the semantics of natural language, simultaneously encompassing important issues in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. It develops the view that the logical forms of simple English sentences typically contain quantification over events or states and shows how this view can account for a wide variety of semantic phenomena. Focusing on the structure of meaning in English sentences at a &"subatomic&" (...) level&-that is, a level below the one most theories accept as basic or &"atomic&"&-Parsons asserts that the semantics of simple English sentences require logical forms somewhat more complex than is normally assumed in natural language semantics. His articulation of underlying event theory explains a wide variety of apparently diverse semantic characteristics of natural language, and his development of the theory shows the importance of seeing the distinction between events and states. Parsons demonstrates that verbs, also, indicate kinds of actions rather than specific, individual actions. Verb phrases, too, he argues, depend on modifiers to make their function and meaning in a sentence specific. An appendix gives many of the details needed to formalize the theory discussed in the body of the text and provides a series of templates that permit the generation of atomic formulas of English. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the class of truth-functional modal many-valued logics with the complete lattice of truth-values. The conjunction and disjunction logic operators correspond to the meet and join operators of the lattices, while the negation is independently introduced as a hierarchy of antitonic operators which invert bottom and top elements. The non-constructive logic implication will be defined for a subclass of modular lattices, while the constructive implication for distributive lattices (Heyting algebras) is based on relative pseudo-complements as in (...) intuitionistic logic. We show that the complete lattices are intrinsically modal, with banal identity modal operator. We define the autoreferential set-based representation for the class of modal algebras, and show that the autoreferential Kripke-style semantics for this class of modal algebras is based on the set of possible worlds equal to the complete lattice of algebraic truth-values. The philosophical assumption is based on the consideration that each possible world represents a level of credibility, so that only propositions with the right logic value (i.e., level of credibility) can be accepted by this world, then we connect it with paraconsistent properties and LFI logics. The bottom truth value in this complete lattice corresponds to the trivial world in which each formula is satisfied, that is, to the world with explosive inconsistency. The top truth value corresponds to the world with classical logics, while all intermediate possible worlds represent the different levels of paraconsistent logics. (shrink)

According to the normativists, dispositionalist theories of meaning fail because meaning is normative, not descriptive. One way to understand this notion of normativity is in terms of semantic correctness conditions. Anti-normativists typically accept that meaning implies semantic correctness but deny that this in turn implies that meaning is normative. Jeffrey Kaplan has recently argued that while semantic correctness may not imply full-blown normativity, semantic correctness is not descriptive either. I contend that Kaplan's argument has two main problems. First, his focus (...) on dispositionalism leaves it open for other descriptive facts to provide the basis of semantic correctness conditions. Second, he fails to show that the problems of dispositionalism are connected to semantic correctness in a way that demonstrates problems with descriptive theories of meaning. (shrink)

Hillary Putnam has famously argued that we can know that we are not brains in a vat because the hypothesis that we are is self-refuting. While Putnam's argument has generated interest primarily as a novel response to skepticism, his original use of the brain in a vat scenario was meant to illustrate a point about the "mind/world relationship." In particular, he intended it to be part of an argument against the coherence of metaphysical realism, and thus to be part of (...) a defense of his conception of truth as idealized rational acceptability. Putnam's conclusions about the scenario are, however, actually out of line with central and plausible aspects of his own account of the relationship between our minds and the world. Reflections on semantics give us no compelling reason to suppose that claims like "I am a brain in a vat" could not turn out to be true. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of multiple-conclusion sequents as a kind of meta-inference rule: just as single-conclusion sequents represent inferences from sentences to sentences, so multiple-conclusion sequents represent a certain kind of inference from single-conclusion sequents to single-conclusion sequents. The semantics renders sound and complete the standard structural rules of reflexivity, monotonicity (or thinning), and transitivity (or cut). The paper is not the first one to attempt to account for multiple-conclusion sequents without invoking notions of truth or falsity—but unlike (...) earlier such efforts, which have typically helped themselves to primitive notions of both acceptance and rejection, the present one makes do with the former alone. For technical reasons, the treatment is limited to sequents with non-empty succedents. (shrink)

This paper will deal with three questions regarding Carnap's transition from the position he held at the time of writing Syntax to the doctrines he held during his semantic phase: (1) What was Carnap's attitude towards truth at the time of writing Syntax? (2) What was Carnap's position regarding questions of reference and ontology at the time of writing Syntax? (3) Was Carnap's acceptance of Tarski's analysis of truth and reference detrimental to his philosophical project? Section 1 of this paper (...) will deal with the first of these questions. Special attention will be paid to identifying what it was that prevented Carnap from defining a truth predicate for descriptive languages in Syntax. Section 2 of this paper will deal with the question of Carnap's attitude towards reference and ontology in Syntax. It will be shown that the attempt in Syntax to address ontological questions is seriously defective. Section 3 of this paper addresses the last of the questions posed above. It is argued that in the light of what is established in Sections 1 and 2, Carnap could not have retained the position of Syntax with respect to truth and reference. (shrink)

A central debate in the cognitive sciences surrounds the nature of adult speakers' linguistic representations: Are they purely syntactic (a traditional and widely held view; e.g., Branigan & Pickering, ), or are they semantically structured? A recent study (Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, ) found support for the latter view, showing that adults' acceptability judgments of passive sentences were significantly predicted by independent semantic “affectedness” ratings designed to capture the putative semantics of the construction (e.g., Bob was (...) pushed by Wendy is rated as more acceptable than Bob was liked by Wendy, as Bob is more affected in the former). However, because English lacks a separate topicalization construction which provides an alternative means of highlighting the patient (e.g., BOB, Wendy kicked), these findings have a possible alternative explanation: that highly affected entities are more likely to be topicalized, rather than passivized per se. Here we show that, in fact, Ambridge et al.'s () finding replicates in Indonesian, a language with a topicalization construction. The present study therefore provides particularly compelling evidence that grammatical representations have semantic structure. (shrink)

Pragmatism in semantics is hampered by its proponents' tendency to tie understanding too closely to our mastery of epistemic practice. Both Brandom's inferentialist semantics and the anti-realist semantics championed by Dummett and Tennant amply illustrate this tendency. As a consequence, neither theory can successfully handle cases of the innocuously unknowable in which two sentences, though mutually consistent, nonetheless cannot be known to be true together. On Brandom's account, such sentences are treated as being mutually inconsistent after all. (...) According to both Dummett's and Tennant's version of anti-realist semantics, we cannot know that there are any true sentences of this kind. Neither result is the least acceptable, whence either theory fails. The lesson to be learnt from this failure is that understanding should not be identified with the ability to reach warranted verdicts, but with the ability to think, where thinking is constitutively involved in, but nonetheless distinct from judging. (shrink)