We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction _and_, disjunction _or_, and negated disjunction _nor_; the lexical quantifiers are _all, some_ and _no_. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, (...) the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by \( \phi \) depends on the logical form of \( \phi \) and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. (shrink)

The concept system around 'quantity' and 'quantity value' is fundamental for measurement science, but some very basic issues are still open on such concepts and their relation. This paper argues that quantity values are in fact individual quantities, and that a complementarity exists between measurands and quantity values. This proposal is grounded on the analysis of three basic 'equality' relations: (i) between quantities, (ii) between quantity values and (iii) between quantities and quantity values. A consistent characterization of such concepts is (...) obtained, which is then generalized to 'property' and 'property value'. This analysis also throws some light on the elusive concept of magnitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACTLinguistic evidence supports the claim that certain, weak rejections are less specific than assertions. On the basis of this evidence, it has been argued that rejected sentences cannot be premisses and conclusions in inferences. We give examples of inferences with weakly rejected sentences as premisses and conclusions. We then propose a logic of weak rejection which accounts for the relevant phenomena and is motivated by principles of coherence in dialogue. We give a semantics for which this logic is sound and (...) complete, show that it axiomatizes the modal logic KD45 and prove that it still derives classical logic on its asserted fragment. Finally, we defend previous logics of strong rejection as being about the linguistically preferred interpretations of weak rejections. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Philologus Jahrgang: 159 Heft: 2 Seiten: 365-369.

This open access book investigates the role played by identity of proofs in proof-theoretic semantics. It develops a conception of proof-theoretic semantics as primarily concerned with the relationship between proofs (understood as abstract entities) and derivations (the linguistic representations of proofs). It demonstrates that identity of proof is a key both to clarify some —still not wholly understood— notions at the core of proof-theoretic semantics, such as harmony; and to broaden the range of the phenomena which can be analyzed using (...) the tools of this semantic paradigm, so as to include for instance paradoxes. The volume covers topics such as the philosophical significance of different criteria of identity of proofs, and adequacy conditions for an intensional account of the notion of harmony. The author also examines the Prawitz-Tennant analysis of paradoxes by investigating on the one hand the prospects of turning it into a theory of meaning for paradoxical languages, and on the other hand two distinct kinds of phenomena, first observed by Crabbe and Ekman, showing that the Tennant-Prawitz criterion for paradoxicality overgenerates. This volume is of interest to scholars in formal and philosophical logic. (shrink)

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. We implement the deflationist insight in a bilateral theory by taking (...) the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. We combine this account of the meaning of the truth predicate with a new diagnosis of the Liar Paradox: its derivation requires the truth rules to preserve evidence, but these rules only preserve commitment. The result is a novel inferential deflationist theory of truth, which solves the Liar Paradox in a principled manner. We end by showing that our theory and simple extensions thereof have the resources to axiomatize the internal logic of several supervaluational hierarchies, including Cantini’s. This solves open problems of Halbach (2011) and Horsten (2011). (shrink)

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign‐function mapping optionality, one of acquisition‐dependent sign‐function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: (...) abandoning arbitrariness‐talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept. (shrink)

The combination of panpsychism and priority monism leads to priority cosmopsychism, the view that the consciousness of individual sentient creatures is derivative of an underlying cosmic consciousness. It has been suggested that contemporary priority cosmopsychism parallels central ideas in the Advaita Vedānta tradition. The paper offers a critical evaluation of this claim. It argues that the Advaitic account of consciousness cannot be characterized as an instance of priority cosmopsychism, points out the differences between the two views, and suggests an alternative (...) positioning of the Advaitic canon within the contemporary debate on monism and panpsychism. (shrink)

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don’t actually enable us to (...) acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright’s responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi’s argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright cannot answer Moruzzi’s challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification. (shrink)

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign-function mapping optionality, one of acquisition-dependent sign-function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: (...) abandoning arbitrariness-talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept. (shrink)

How psychopaths and their capacity for moral action are viewed is not only philosophically interesting but is also important and relevant for policy. The philosophical discussion of psychopathy has focussed upon the psychological faculties that are prerequisites for moral responsibility and empirical findings regarding psychopathy that are relevant to philosophical accounts of moral understanding and motivation. However, there are legitimate worries about whether psychopathy is a robust scientific construct, and there are risks attached to reifying psychopathy or other psychiatric constructs. (...) We defend the concept of psychopathy by pointing out the relevance of empirical studies about it for our ordinary practices of ascribing moral responsibility and folk psychological accounts of moral understanding and motivation. (shrink)

This essay tries to rethink Benjamin’s notion of “aura” through the consideration of two authors such as G. Didi-Huberman and D. Costello. The aim is not to distinguish between auratic and postauratic (or non-auratic) works of art, but to rethink the problem of aesthetic perception in the age of mechanical reproduction. More specifically, Costello and Didi-Huberman point out the relation between “aura” and “subjectivity”: on the one hand, the intersubjective (and ethical) nature of an “authentic” (i.e., auratic) experience; on the (...) other hand, the presence of the aura nowadays in the “interplay of gazes” between the (subject-)work and the (subject-)spectator. Works of art are indeed characterized by a “two-fold” or aesthetic “transcendence” – they are at once both inside and outside my world – which enables them to resist the reification into reproducible commodity. (shrink)

It is assumed sometimes that the input of a measurement, and therefore the entity with which a measuring system interacts, is a quantity value, possibly the (true) measurand value, and from this hypothesis the model of ideal measurement as an identity process is formulated. In this paper we show that this position is based on an inappropriate superposition of quantities and quantity values, and therefore should be discarded.

This paper aims at revealing the originality of Max Weber’s conception of the logical category of “historicity”, suggesting that in his writings on the methodology of the social sciences we can find a stimulating and forerunner contribution to the analysis of some logical and formal problems concerning the relationship between human knowledge and the chaos of reality (what we might call, ante-litteram, “science of chaos”). In particular, considering that in Weber’s conception scientific knowledge finds no facts “to grasp” in the (...) natural world, but rather a chaos of unique and infinitely divisible events, the analysis will be focused on the following aspects: (a) Weber’s separation of causal imputation from the notion of necessary (natural) law; (b) the importance attached to “probability judgments” with different degrees of certainty; (c) the proclaimed irreducibility of individual events to scientific models, laws, and (ideal)-types; (d) the effects imputed to the differentiation of the point of view of a scientific observer. (shrink)

A selection of recent philosophical texts—in Italian translation—dealing with the mereology of material objects and the nature of their boundaries. Introduction by L. Morena. Papers by R. M. Chisholm, P. M. Simons, B. Smith, A. Stroll, A. C. Varzi.

Requiring only a background in elementary calculus and elementary mechanics, this book starts with the basics, introduces the most important developments in classical statistical mechanics over the last thirty years, and guides readers to ...

According to Originalism, word types are non-eternal continuants which are individuated by their causal-historical lineage and have a unique possible time of origination. This view collides with the intuition that individual words can be added to the lexicon of a language at different times, and generates other problematic consequences. The paper shows that such undesired results can be accommodated without abandoning Originalism.

Tracciare un percorso netto e polivalente che contribuisca a chiarificare – o, almeno, a comprendere – adeguatamente un’esperienza estetica è un’impresa, come già ricordava Jauss in Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik, tutt’altro che isolabile dall’ausilio di tradizioni e contesti di varia provenienza. Rimodulando a più riprese gli approcci e partendo da posizioni a priori non squalificanti (ma, non per questo, “deboli”) ci si rende conto che la questione non pertiene solo – co...

Phenomenal conservatism (PC) is the internalist view that non-inferential justification rests on appearances. PC’s advocates have recently argued that seemings are also required to explain inferential justification. The most general and developed view to this effect is Huemer (2016)’s theory of inferential seemings (ToIS). Moretti (2018) has shown that PC is affected by the problem of reflective awareness, which makes PC open to sceptical challenges. In this paper I argue that ToIS is afflicted by a version of the same problem (...) and it is thus hostage to inferential scepticism. I also suggest a possible response on behalf of ToIS’s advocates. (shrink)

Human mental workload is arguably the most invoked multidimensional construct in Human Factors and Ergonomics, getting momentum also in Neuroscience and Neuroergonomics. Uncertainties exist in its characterization, motivating the design and development of computational models, thus recently and actively receiving support from the discipline of Computer Science. However, its role in human performance prediction is assured. This work is aimed at providing a synthesis of the current state of the art in human mental workload assessment through considerations, definitions, measurement techniques (...) as well as applications, Findings suggest that, despite an increasing number of associated research works, a single, reliable and generally applicable framework for mental workload research does not yet appear fully established. One reason for this gap is the existence of a wide swath of operational definitions, built upon different theoretical assumptions which are rarely examined collectively. A second reason is that the three main classes of measures, which are self-report, task performance, and physiological indices, have been used in isolation or in pairs, but more rarely in conjunction all together. Multiple definitions complement each another and we propose a novel inclusive definition of mental workload to support the next generation of empirical-based research. Similarly, by comprehensively employing physiological, task-performance, and self-report measures, more robust assessments of mental workload can be achieved. (shrink)

In the present paper, the Fregean conception of proof-theoretic semantics that I developed elsewhere will be revised so as to better reflect the different roles played by open and closed derivations. I will argue that such a conception can deliver a semantic analysis of languages containing paradoxical expressions provided some of its basic tenets are liberalized. In particular, the notion of function underlying the Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov explanation of implication should be understood as admitting functions to be partial. As argued in previous (...) work, the correctness of an inference rule should not be defined in terms of transmission of provability, but rather should be grounded on weaker principles, which I show that are motivated by consideration about the content of the inversion principle. In the conclusion, I briefly address the issue of compositionality, arguing that the violation of compositionality induced by paradoxes are no worse than others that are regarded, at least by Dummett, as wholly unproblematic. (shrink)

A través de este escrito nos adentraremos en el contexto histórico y social de la edad victoriana y de algunos de sus autores. Analizaremos temas inherentes a la sexualidad, sus leyes y prohibiciones. En contraste con el progreso tecnológico que experimentó la sociedad británica durante el siglo XIX, la época victoriana se caracterizó por un puritanismo exagerado, una tremenda represión sexual y la infravaloración de la mujer, transformada en responsable de todos los males sociales. Moral que fue duramente criticada por (...) algunos de sus contemporáneos, como los escritores Oscar Wilde y Bernard Shaw, que reflejaron en sus obras la mediocridad y la estrechez de miradas de aquella sociedad. Por lo tanto, a lo largo de este artículo, examinaremos leyes represivas y restrictivas que dan crédito a tal afirmación. La dualidad de la época victoriana será el tema y núcleo principal del estudio, en relación con el contexto histórico, social y político de la sociedad inglesa durante el periodo en cuestión. Las conexiones literarias entre transformación psicológica, dualidad y carácter del personaje literario, entendido en sentido genérico o bien como un yo literario, serán determinantes, pues nos remiten a las concepciones de los autores en torno a la personalidad dualista como reelaboración o como metáfora de la existencia humana y de la vida en su transformación material. Los resultados de esta investigación, a lo largo de sus detalladas cinco secciones y su conclusión, nos inducen a creer que la victoriana fue una sociedad plenamente dual, donde, por un lado, se emanaron leyes represivas de género y, por el otro, se dio total desenfreno al libertinaje. (shrink)

"The last remnant of physical objectivity of space-time" is disclosed, beyond the Leibniz equivalence, in the case of a continuous family of spatially non-compact models of general relativity. The physical individuation of point-events is furnished by the intrinsic degrees of freedom of the gravitational field, (viz, the "Dirac observables") that represent - as it were - the "ontic" part of the metric field. The physical role of the "epistemic" part (viz. the "gauge" variables) is likewise clarified. At the end, a (...) peculiar four-dimensional "holistic and structuralist" view of space-time emerges which includes elements common to the tradition of both substantivalism and relationism. The observables of our models undergo real "temporal change" and thereby provide a counter-example to the thesis of the "frozen-time" picture of evolution. (shrink)

This paper investigates interdiscursivity in talk about gender norms in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer community. Drawing from field work conducted among gay and lesbian parents, transgender people, and the Drag King community, I show how accounts like les hommes sont comme ça or les femmes sont comme ça emerging in discourse about pregnancy reveal gender-based norms and their relationship to social conditions. Adopting a linguistic anthropology perspective, while paying particular attention to agency, categorization, circulation, and recontextualization processes, I (...) show how gender norms are constructed and deconstructed through interactional, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns found in a variety of multisemiotic mediums and in a diversity of contexts. In addition to its contribution to the study of gender and language, this article takes new steps in the ongoing development of membership categorization analysis and queer linguistics. (shrink)