By extending the underlying data structure by new elements, we also extend the intput/output relation generated by a program i.e., no existing run is killed, and no new one lying entirely in the old structure is created. We investigate this stability property for the weak second order semantics derived from nonstandard time models. It turns out that the light face, i.e., parameterless collection principle always induces stable semantics, but the bold face one may be unstable. We give an example (...) where an elementary extension kills a bold face run showing also that the light face semantics is strictly weaker than the bold face one. (shrink)

The paper discusses three different ways of explaining the referential stability of concepts of physics. In order to be successful, an approach to referential stability has to provide resources to understand what constitutes the difference between the birth of a new concept with a history of its own, and an innovative step occurring within the lifetime of a persisting concept with stable reference. According to Theodore Arabatzis' 'biographical' approach (Representing Electrons 2006), the historical continuity of representations of the (...) electron manifests itself by the numerical stability of experimental parameters like the charge-to-mass ratio, and the continued acceptance of earlier experiments as manifestations of electron properties. I argue, against Arabatzis' approach, that the stability of experimental parameters justifies the assumption that there exists a chain of representations of a unique theoretical entity only if this stability occurs against the background of evidence for theoretical continuity. The Bain/Norton approach proposes to add exactly this element to the picture, but fails to reach its aim by focusing on formal similarities of Hamiltonians as an indicator of theoretical continuity. I shall argue that theoretical continuity has to be demonstrated rather on the level of particular solutions. This task is accomplished by the semantic embedding approach by means of defining a co-reference criterion for theoretical terms requiring the existence of semantic embedding relations between the terms that occur in particular solutions of different theories. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at a (...) branching point. The transition semantics exploits the structural resources a branching time structure has to offer and provides a fine-grained picture of the interrelation of modality and time. In addition to temporal and modal operators, a so-called stability operator becomes interpretable as a universal quantifier over the possible future extensions of a given transition set. The stability operator allows us to specify how and how far time has to unfold for the truth value of a sentence at a moment to become settled and enables a perspicuous treatment of future contingents. We show that the semantics developed along those lines generalizes and extends extant approaches: both Peirceanism and Ockhamism can be viewed as limiting cases of the transition approach that build on restricted resources only, and on both accounts, stability collapses into truth. (shrink)

The paper begins with a conceptual discussion of Michael Dummett's proof-theoretic justification of deduction or proof-theoretic semantics, which is based on what we might call Gentzen's thesis: 'the introductions constitute, so to speak, the "definitions" of the symbols concerned, and the eliminations are in the end only consequences thereof, which could be expressed thus: In the elimination of a symbol, the formula in question, whose outer symbol it concerns, may only "be used as that which it means on the basis (...) of the introduction of this symbol".' The intuitive philosophical content of Dummett's notions of harmony and stability is that harmony obtains if the grounds for asserting a proposition match the consequences of accepting it, and stability obtains if the converse also holds. Rules of inference define the meanings of a logical constant they govern if and only if they are stable. Gentzen observed that 'it should be possible to establish on the basis of certain requirements that the elimination rules are functions of the corresponding introduction rules.' One of the objectives of this paper is to specify such a function: I will specify a process by which it is possible to determine the elimination rules of logical constants from their introduction rules, and conversely, to determine the introduction rules from the elimination rules. I'll give the general forms of rules of inference and generalised reduction procedures for the normalisation of deduction. I'll give a formally precise characterisations of harmony and stability and show that deductions in logics that contain only constants governed by stable rules always normalise. (shrink)

We explore the computational complexity of justification, stability and relevance in incomplete argumentation frameworks (IAFs). IAFs are abstract argumentation frameworks that encode qualitative uncertainty by distinguishing between certain and uncertain arguments and attacks. These IAFs can be completed by deciding for each uncertain argument or attack whether it is present or absent. Such a completion is an abstract argumentation framework, for which it can be decided which arguments are acceptable under a given semantics. The justification status of an argument (...) in a completion then expresses whether the argument is accepted (in), not accepted because it is attacked by an accepted argument (out) or neither (undec). For a given IAF and certain argument, the justification status of that argument need not be the same in all completions. This is the issue of stability, where an argument is stable if its justification status is the same in all completions. For arguments that are not stable in an IAF, the relevance problem is of interest: which uncertain arguments or attacks should be investigated for the argument to become stable? In this paper, we define justification, stability and relevance for IAFs and provide a complexity analysis for these problems under grounded, complete, preferred and stable semantics. (shrink)

This paper discusses proof-theoretic semantics, the project of specifying the meanings of the logical constants in terms of rules of inference governing them. I concentrate on Michael Dummett’s and Dag Prawitz’ philosophical motivations and give precise characterisations of the crucial notions of harmony and stability, placed in the context of proving normalisation results in systems of natural deduction. I point out a problem for defining the meaning of negation in this framework and prospects for an account of the meanings (...) of modal operators in terms of rules of inference. (shrink)

There is significant interest in type-free systems that allow flexible self-application. Such systems are of interest in property theory, natural language semantics, the theory of truth, theoretical computer science, the theory of classes, and category theory. While there are a variety of proposed type-free systems, there is a particularly natural type-free system that we believe is prototypical: the logic of recursive algorithms. Algorithmic logic is the study of basic statements concerning algorithms and the algorithmic rules of inference between such statements. (...) As shown in [1], the threat of paradoxes, such as the Curry paradox, requires care in implementing rules of inference in this context. As in any type-free logic, some traditional rules will fail. The first part of the paper develops a rich collection of inference rules that do not lead to paradox. The second part identifies traditional rules of logic that are paradoxical in algorithmic logic, and so should be viewed with suspicion in type-free logic generally. (shrink)

A semantics for quantified modal logic is presented that is based on Kleene's notion of realizability. This semantics generalizes Flagg's 1985 construction of a model of a modal version of Church's Thesis and first-order arithmetic. While the bulk of the paper is devoted to developing the details of the semantics, to illustrate the scope of this approach, we show that the construction produces (i) a model of a modal version of Church's Thesis and a variant of a modal set theory (...) due to Goodman and Scedrov, (ii) a model of a modal version of Troelstra's generalized continuity principle together with a fragment of second-order arithmetic, and (iii) a model based on Scott's graph model (for the untyped lambda calculus) which witnesses the failure of the stability of non-identity. (shrink)

Purpose of the present work is to attempt to give a glance at the problem of existential and anthropological risk caused by the contemporary man-made civilization from the perspective of comparison and confrontation of aesthetics, the substrate of which is emotional and metaphorical interpretation of individual subjective values and politics feeding by objectively rational interests of social groups. In both cases there is some semantic gap present between the represented social reality and its representation in perception of works of (...) art and in the political doctrines as well. Methodology of the research is evolutionary anthropologicalcomparativistics. Originality of the conducted analysis comes to the following: As the antithesis to biological and social reductionism in interpretation of the phenomenon of bio-power it is proposed a co-evolutionary semantic model in accordance with which the described semantic gap is of the substantial nature related to the complex module organization of a consistent and adaptive human strategy consisting of three associated but independently functional modules. Evolutionary trajectory of all anthropogenesis components including civilization cultural and social-political evolution is identified by the proportion between two macro variables – evolutionary effectiveness and evolutionary stability, i.e. preservation in the context of consequential transformations of some invariants of Homo sapiens species specificity organization. It should be noted that inasmuch as in respect to human, some modules of the evolutionary strategy assume self-reflection attributes, it would be more correctly to state about evolutionary correctness, i.e. correspondence to some perfection. As a result, the future of human nature depends not only on the rationalist principles of ethics of Homo species, but also on the holistic and emotionally aesthetic image of «Self». In conclusion it should be noted that there is a causal link between the development of High Hume technologies and the totality of the trend in the anthropological phenomenon of bio-power that permeates all the available human existence in modern civilization. As a result, there is a transformation of a contemporary social risk in the evolutionary civilization risk. (shrink)

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native English speakers. In the first (...) experiment, we tested between-subjects variability in meaning representations. In the second experiment, we tested the stability of meaning representations over time by testing the same group of participants in two experimental sessions. In both experiments, participants performed the verification task. They verified a sentence with a quantifier (e.g., “Most of the gleerbs are feezda.”) based on the numerical information provided in the second sentence, (e.g., “60% of the gleerbs are feezda”). To investigate between-subject and within-subject differences in meaning representations, we proposed an extended version of the Diffusion Decision Model with two parameters capturing truth conditions and vagueness. We fit the model to responses and reaction times data. In the first experiment, we found substantial between-subject differences in representations of most as reflected by the variability in the truth conditions. Moreover, we found that the verification of most is proportion-dependent as reflected in the reaction time effect and model parameter. In the second experiment, we showed that quantifier representations are stable over time as reflected in stable model parameters across two experimental sessions. These findings challenge semantic theories that assume the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more than half and contribute to the representational theory of vague concepts. The current study presents a promising approach to study semantic representations, which can have a wide application in experimental linguistics. (shrink)

Purpose of the present work is to attempt to give a glance at the problem of existential and anthropological risk caused by the contemporary man-made civilization from the perspective of comparison and confrontation of aesthetics, the substrate of which is emotional and metaphorical interpretation of individual subjective values and politics feeding by objectively rational interests of social groups. In both cases there is some semantic gap present between the represented social reality and its representation in perception of works of (...) art and in the political doctrines as well. Methodology of the research is evolutionary anthropologicalcomparativistics. Originality of the conducted analysis comes to the following: As the antithesis to biological and social reductionism in interpretation of the phenomenon of bio-power it is proposed a co-evolutionary semantic model in accordance with which the described semantic gap is of the substantial nature related to the complex module organization of a consistent and adaptive human strategy consisting of three associated but independently functional modules. Evolutionary trajectory of all anthropogenesis components including civilization cultural and social-political evolution is identified by the proportion between two macro variables – evolutionary effectiveness and evolutionary stability, i.e. preservation in the context of consequential transformations of some invariants of Homo sapiens species specificity organization. It should be noted that inasmuch as in respect to human, some modules of the evolutionary strategy assume self-reflection attributes, it would be more correctly to state about evolutionary correctness, i.e. correspondence to some perfection. As a result, the future of human nature depends not only on the rationalist principles of ethics of Homo species, but also on the holistic and emotionally aesthetic image of «Self». In conclusion it should be noted that there is a causal link between the development of High Hume technologies and the totality of the trend in the anthropological phenomenon of bio-power that permeates all the available human existence in modern civilization. As a result, there is a transformation of a contemporary social risk in the evolutionary civilization risk. (shrink)

With the use symbols by political subjects arises the problem of their understanding. Groups of symbols can be created in such a way to contain a message. The state coat of arms is a political symbol, in which is concentrated a number of meanings and significance. The coat of arms — it is a symbol garnished with colossal endless meaning and potential withing its power. Besides this, the state coat of arms appears in numbers like mandalas: it is like this (...) archaic symbol, that combines various geometric shapes expressing the idea of order. The state coat of arms perceptively unites people of different genders, ages, social status andfaith into a united orderly community. A person contemplating the state coat of arms understands it as the center of the universe. The coat of arms is transformed into endlessness, attaining the result of uniting the macrocosm — society and state — and with the macrocosm — man. The function of political symbols exists so as to represent the “body” of a concrete political subject or society as a whole, at the same time in every part of a text “is highlighted” yet another part of the endless semantical richness of the symbol. Political symbols have important significance for the support or destruction of socio-political order. But the chief essence ofpolitical symbols — is the ability to give meaning to all political activities, and the regular “exposition” of state symbols guarantees the stability of the existing socio-political system. (shrink)

Presented in this book is a theory of concept formation and understanding that does not make use of a notion of an innate mental language as a means of concept representation. Instead, experimental concepts are treated semantically as stabilising structuring of growing sets of data, which are sets of experienced satisfaction situations for expressions, and theoretical concepts are based on coherent sets of general sentences held true. There are two kinds of structures to be established: general concepts by means of (...) similarity sets under perspectives and historical concepts. This gives rise to a theory of understanding new situations and expressions by integrating new data into established sets of data salva stability, or by extending the conceptual structure in a metaphorical or metonymical way. The theory provides a way to understand what identity between propositional attitudes amounts to, especially how people can have more or less the same belief. (shrink)

Here, we defend the thesis whereby the event plays a main role of sense in the meaning of certain sentences. This thesis is based on the one hand on recent work in the metaphysics of so-called “happening” entities, which has led to a distinction between concrete physical processes and abstract events, the latter being conceived as psychological constructs accounting for stabilities or changes in the world. Furthermore, we look back at the work on intentionality carried out in the Brentanian school (...) at the turn of the 20th century and we relate abstract events to the mental states of affairs studied by Twardowski but which were then neglected by contemporary philosophers of language. Abstract events, thus characterized, have the contingent property of occurring, when facts obtain and realize them. We suggest that the facts in question correspond to Wittgensteinian states of affairs. (shrink)

The linguistic input children receive across early childhood plays a crucial role in shaping their knowledge about the world. To study this input, researchers have begun applying distributional semantic models to large corpora of child‐directed speech, extracting various patterns of word use/co‐occurrence. Previous work using these models has not measured how these patterns may change throughout development, however. In this work, we leverage natural language processing methods—originally developed to study historical language change—to compare caregivers' use of words when talking (...) to younger versus older children. Some words' usage changed more than others; this variability could be predicted based on the word's properties at both the individual and category levels. These findings suggest that caregivers' changing patterns of word use may play a role in scaffolding children's acquisition of conceptual structure in early development. (shrink)

We examine a proposal for dealing with perhaps the chief difficulty facing holistic theories of meaning—meaning instability. The problem is that, given a robust holism, small changes in a representational system are likely to lead to meaning changes throughout the system. Consequently, different individuals are likely never to mean the same thing. Eric Lormand suggests that holists can avoid this problem—and even secure more stability than non-holists—by positing that symbols have multiple meanings. We argue that the proposal doesn't work, (...) however, since multiple meanings are unstable for much the same reason that single meanings are. (shrink)

I argue that the dispute between two leading theories of interpretation of legal texts, textual originalism and textual evolutionism, depends on the false presupposition that changes in the way a word is used necessarily require a change in the word’s meaning. Semantic externalism goes a long way towards reconciling these views by showing how a word’s semantic properties can be stable over time, even through vicissitudes of usage. I argue that temporal externalism can account for even more (...) class='Hi'>semantic stability, however. Temporal externalism is the theory that the content of an utterance at time t may be determined by developments in linguistic usage subsequent to t. If this semantic theory is correct, then the originalist and evolutionist positions effectively collapse. Originalism is correct in that the original meaning of the text is the meaning that is binding on jurists, but evolutionism is vindicated, as it is the current practices and standards that determine the meaning the text now has, and has always had. Objections to temporal externalism, and to its application to the interpretation of legal texts, are considered and addressed. (shrink)

Purpose (metatask) of the present work is to attempt to give a glance at the problem of existential and anthropo- logical risk caused by the contemporary man-made civilization from the perspective of comparison and confronta- tion of aesthetics, the substrate of which is emotional and metaphorical interpretation of individual subjective values and politics feeding by objectively rational interests of social groups. In both cases there is some semantic gap pre- sent between the represented social reality and its representation in (...) perception of works of art and in the political doctrines as well. Methodology of the research is evolutionary anthropological comparativistics. Originality of the conducted analysis comes to the following: As the antithesis to biological and social reductionism in interpretation of the phenomenon of bio-power it is proposed a co-evolutionary semantic model in accordance with which the de- scribed semantic gap is of the substantial nature related to the complex module organization of a consistent and adaptive human strategy consisting of three associated but independently functional modules (genetic, cultural and techno-rational). Evolutionary trajectory of all anthropogenesis components including civilization cultural and so- cial-political evolution is identified by the proportion between two macro variables – evolutionary effectiveness and evolutionary stability (sameness), i.e. preservation in the context of consequential transformations of some invari- ants of Homo sapiens species specificity organization. It should be noted that inasmuch as in respect to human, some modules of the evolutionary (adaptive) strategy assume self-reflection attributes, it would be more correctly to state about evolutionary correctness, i.e. correspondence to some perfection. As a result, the future of human nature de- pends not only on the rationalist principles of ethics of Homo species (the archaism of Jurgen Habermas), but also on the holistic and emotionally aesthetic image of «Self». In conclusion it should be noted that there is a causal link between the development of High Hume (NBIC) technologies and the totality of the trend in the anthropological phenomenon of bio-power that permeates all the available human existence in modern civilization. As a result, there is a transformation of a contemporary social (man-made) risk in the evolutionary civilization risk. (shrink)

One major insight derived from the moral twin earth debate is that evaluative and descriptive terms possess different levels of semantic stability, in that the meanings of the former but not the latter tend to remain constant over significant counterfactual variance in patterns of application. At the same time, it is common in metanormative debate to divide evaluative terms into those that are thin and those that are thick. In this paper, I combine debates about semantic (...) class='Hi'>stability and the distinction between the thin and the thick by presenting a new seamless inferentialist account of thin and thick evaluative terms which, despite subsuming them under the same metasemantic analysis, can nevertheless account for their varying levels of semantic stability. According to this position of ‘seamless metaconceptualism’, thin and thick evaluative terms do not belong to different categories, but are both understood as metaconceptual devices which do not differ in kind, but in scope. By providing the same analysis for both thin and thick terms, seamless metaconceptualism not only entails that the latter cannot shoulder the philosophical work that some have attributed to them, but also removes much of their surrounding intrigue. (shrink)

Does moral vagueness require ontic vagueness? A central challenge for nonontic treatments of moral vagueness arises from the referential stability of moral terms across small changes in how they are applied: if moral vagueness is not ontic vagueness, it’s hard to explain this referential stability. Pointing to this challenge, Miriam Schoenfield has argued that moral vagueness is ontic vagueness, at least for a moral realist. I disagree. I argue that a moral realist can use a conceptual role semantics (...) for moral terms to give a purely semantic treatment of moral vagueness. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a semantic analysis of the well-known knowability paradox stemming from the Church–Fitch observation that the meaningful knowability principle /all truths are knowable/, when expressed as a bi-modal principle F --> K♢F, yields an unacceptable omniscience property /all truths are known/. We offer an alternative semantic proof of this fact independent of the Church–Fitch argument. This shows that the knowability paradox is not intrinsically related to the Church–Fitch proof, nor to the Moore sentence upon (...) which it relies, but rather to the knowability principle itself. Further, we show that, from a verifiability perspective, the knowability principle fails in the classical logic setting because it is missing the explicit incorporation of a hidden assumption of /stability/: ‘the proposition in question does not change from true to false in the process of discovery.’ Once stability is taken into account, the resulting /stable knowability principle/ and its nuanced versions more accurately represent verification-based knowability and do not yield omniscience. (shrink)

The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task and colouring-in task to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for (...) body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required. (shrink)

For some relativists some of the time the evidence for their view is a puzzling data pattern: On the one hand, there's evidence that the terms in question exhibit some kind of content stability across contexts. On the other hand, there's evidence that their contents vary from one context of use to another. The challenge is to reconcile these two sets of data. Truth relativists claim that their theory can do so better than contextualism and invariantism. Truth relativists, in (...) effect, use an argument to the best explanation: they present data they claim to be able to handle better than any competing theory2. (shrink)

It is often argued that inferential role semantics (IRS) entails semantic holism as long as theorists fail to answer the question about which inferences, among the many, are meaning-constitutive. Since analyticity, as truth in virtue of meaning, is a widely dismissed notion in indicating which inferences determine meaning, it seems that holism follows. Semantic holism is often understood as facing problems with the stability of content and many usual explanations of communication. Thus, we should choose between giving (...) up IRS, to avoid these holistic entailments, and defending holism against this charge, to rescue IRS. I try to pursue the second goal by analyzing certain patterns of counterfactual reasoning. Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom claim that, to defend IRS, content-constitutive inferences are those counterfactually robust. While it is difficult to assess the goodness of such a view, it nonetheless entails that counterfactually non-robust inferences (which I call “modally ruled out inferences”) are not content-constitutive. If this is true, and if we take certain remarks about the grasp of concepts on board, there is a way to restrict the scope of the holism entailed by IRS to the extent of reshaping problems with the stability of content. (shrink)

Putnam’s internal realism implies a form of conceptual relativity with respect to ontology. There can be different descriptions of the world which are based on distinct ontologies. It has been argued that this relativity forecloses any possibility of unifying our knowledge and can even lead to inconsistency. If this is true, internal realism should be abandoned because it is compatible with non-rational positions. We will argue that these objections can be dismissed if truth as idealized warranted assertibility is understood as (...) stability of a belief state under new evidence. This view of truth is still compatible with the existence of distinct belief states expressing different views on the world. This understanding of the notion of truth is a consequence of interpreting both our cognitive activities and the notion of meaning dynamically. The meaning of a sentence is no longer given in terms of (static) truth conditions but as a relation between belief sets, that is, as a kind of information change potential. (shrink)

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a (...) standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically assess Mark Richard’s interesting and important development of the claim that linguistic meanings can be fruitfully analogized with biological species. I argue that linguistic meanings qua cluster of interpretative presuppositions need not and often do not display the population-level independence and reproductive isolation that is characteristic of the biological species concept. After developing these problems in some detail, I close with a discussion of their implications for the picture that Richard paints concerning the dangers of (...) conceptual engineering and the prospects for dynamic notions of semantic stability. (shrink)

It is often claimed that realism about normativity entails that it is difficult for us to know anything about it. I refine this thought by characterizing realism as a thesis which is committed to explaining a semantic thesis about possible uses of normative language: that normative terms like ‘ought’ are semantically stable, in the sense that the term refers to the same property even if it is used differently. There are independent arguments which show that a realist view, if (...) it is plausible, should entail semantic stability for ‘ought’. In this paper I argue that, if the realist succeeds in explaining semantic stability, the realist view implies that normative beliefs will be at risk of being false, and hence not knowledge. Central to this argument is a phenomenon I call meta-semantic risk. I argue that the phenomenon of meta-semantic risk gives rise to a significant dose of normative skepticism for the realist, but it does not entail wholesale skepticism, since the epistemic threats are only contingent, and threatens only precise normative beliefs. I close by sketching two arguments that may show that even this limited form of skepticism counts significantly against the realist view. (shrink)

The term ‘homology’ is persistently polysemous, defying the expectation that extensive scientific research should yield semantic stability. A common response has been to seek a unification of various prominent definitions. This paper proposes an alternative strategy, based on the insight that scientific concepts function as tools for research: When analyzing various conceptualizations of homology, we should preserve those distinguishing features that support particular research goals. We illustrate the fruitfulness of our strategy by application to two cases. First, we (...) revisit E. Ray Lankester’s celebrated (1870) evolutionary reappraisal of homology and argue that his analysis has been distorted by assimilation to modern agendas. His ‘homogeny’ does not mean the same thing as modern evolutionary ‘homology,’ and his ‘homoplasy’ is no mere antonym. Instead, Lankester uses both new terms to pose a question that remains strikingly relevant—how do mechanistic and historical causes of morphological resemblance interact? Second, we examine the puzzle of avian digit homology, which exemplifies disciplinary differences in homology conceptualization and assessment. Recent progress has been fueled by the development of new tools within the relevant disciplines (paleontology and developmental biology) and especially by increasing interdisciplinary cooperation. Conceptual unification has played very little role in this work, which instead seeks concrete evolutionary scenarios that integrate all the available evidence. Together these cases indicate the complex relationship between concepts and other tools in homology research. (shrink)

"The question of complex systems is relatively new for critics today. Analyzing complex systems in Renaissance texts shows that the Christian kabbalistical concept of harmonia mundi led to an aesthetical development, reflecting the worldview of harmonious parallel worlds. Failure to perceive the esoteric text uniting apparently contradicting themes has often led Renaissance scholars to elaborate a theory of the instability of atmospheres characterizing the English Baroque. This article gives an example of a complex system in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra revealing (...) that the Christian kabbalistical Hercules unifies contradicting metaphors and intertexts of the play, and reintegrates this work in a form of semantic stability more in harmony with the aesthetics of its time. In the case of postmodern literature, contradictory intertexts appear as a device to deconstruct all values and logic previously established. With the study of a text structured by the optical questions around the refraction of light, this paper shows that in the case of Nabokov, the unifying system of apparently contradicting semantic systems is the underlying logic of scientific theory. In Nabokov's text, failing to perceive the fundamental intertext of scientific debate leads one to assimilate Nabokov's writing to a form of postmodern deconstruction. Both cases studied tend to show a continuity of a form of aesthetics through different epistemological eras.". (shrink)

Can we conceive of a mind without body? Does, for example, the idea of the soul's immortality make sense? Certain versions of materialism deny such questions; I shall try to prove that these versions of materialism cannot be right. They fail because they cannot account for the mental vocabulary from the language of brains in the vat. Envatted expressions such as "I think", "I believe", etc., do not have to be reinterpreted when we translate them to our language; they are (...) semantically stable. By contrast, physical expressions from the vat language are semantically instable; due to Putnam's externalism they cannot be transported to our language without change. This contrast opens the way to a new understanding of what the immortality of the soul might be like: A brain in a vat (and its mental life) might survive what the brain calls "my physical body's death". (shrink)

Building on Bernard Williams’ thesis about the intertwining of history and political philosophy, the essay explores how the problem of the history of dēmokratia after the late-eighteenth and over the nineteenth-century in Britain constituted a primary and critical field in which the philosophical meaning of democracy was debated. Configuring a new temporal perspective grounded in the relationship between ancient and modern democracy, historiographical works by John Gillies, William Mitford, and George Grote put forth an understanding of the concept as a (...) battlefield, involving several conflicting meanings, narratives and historical forces. This historiographical tradition highlighted the tensions underpinning the definition of democracy in the long-term temporal frame linking antiquity and modernity. So even more than contemporary philosophical and political writings, historical understanding constituted a unique concept of democracy that both concentrated and dispersed meaning; it was not just one vision of democracy, among others, but one that acquired the paradoxical power to forge some semantic stability and coherence over time, and to accentuate the threat of the concept’s break up into distinct political premises and historical moments that constituted it. (shrink)

The paper studies the extension of harmony and stability, major themes in proof-theoretic semantics, from single-conclusion natural-deduction systems to multiple -conclusions natural-deduction, independently of classical logic. An extension of the method of obtaining harmoniously-induced general elimination rules from given introduction rules is suggested, taking into account sub-structurality. Finally, the reductions and expansions of the multiple -conclusions natural-deduction representation of classical logic are formulated.

This paper is dedicated to extending and adapting to modal logic the approach of fractional semantics to classical logic. This is a multi-valued semantics governed by pure proof-theoretic considerations, whose truth-values are the rational numbers in the closed interval $[0,1]$. Focusing on the modal logic K, the proposed methodology relies on three key components: bilateral sequent calculus, invertibility of the logical rules, and stability (proof-invariance). We show that our semantic analysis of K affords an informational refinement with respect (...) to the standard Kripkean semantics (a new proof of Dugundji’s theorem is a case in point) and it raises the prospect of a proof-theoretic semantics for modal logic. (shrink)

In classical modal semantics, a binary accessibility relation connects worlds. In this paper, we present a uniform and systematic treatment of modal semantics with a continuous accessibility relation alongside the continuous accessibility modal logics that they model. We develop several such logics for a variety of philosophical applications. Our main conclusions are as follows. Modal logics with a continuous accessibility relation are sound and complete in their natural classes of models. The class of Kripke frames where a continuous accessibility relation (...) has a magnitude characterizing its degree of accessibility is not modally definable, and this has unappreciated significance to completeness proofs for such logics, revealing a methodological advantage of using classical multimodal semantics over fuzzy modal semantics. There is a pseudometric space modal logic that is complete in the class of pseudometric spaces, a natural semantic setting for quantitative modal reasoning about similarity. There is a metric space modal logic that is complete in the class of metric spaces, a natural semantic setting for quantitative modal reasoning about neighborhoods and counterfactual stability. There is a real line continuous temporal logic that is canonical for real lines, a natural semantic setting for quantitative modal reasoning about time. (shrink)

In this paper, I report new empirical data on folk semantic intuitions concerning color adjectives in so-called context-shifting experiments. Contextualists present such experiments — that is, they describe different conversational contexts in which a given sentence is uttered — in order to argue that context can shape meaning and truth conditions to such a degree that competent speakers would give opposite truth evaluations of the same sentence in different contexts. The initial findings of Hansen and Chemla (2013) suggest that (...) laypersons’ semantic judgments are sensitive to context in the same way that is predicted by contextualists. In this paper, I focus on context-shifting experiments that involve color adjectives; also, I present experiments that are a partial replication and methodological extension of Hansen and Chemla’s study. One aim of my study was to corroborate these authors’ findings using a bigger sample (total N = 1128), but the main goal was to test the stability of results in different methodological variants of empirical adaptations of context-shifting experiments. This part of the study addresses the issues pointed out in my earlier paper (Ziółkowski 2017), where I argued that certain experimental settings (within-subjects) might bring data that is more favorable to contextualism than other settings (between-subjects). My study compares three different experimental settings: within-subjects (with randomized order of context presentation), between-subjects (where participants evaluating different contexts aredistinct groups), and “contrastive design” (where both contexts are presented side by side on the same screen). My results are highly consistent across the methodological variants I employed, but while they show some of the effects expected by contextualists, it is disputable whether they bring strong support to contextualism with respect to color adjectives. (shrink)

Inspired by the grammar of natural language, the paper presents a variant of first-order logic, in which quantifiers are not sentential operators, but are used as subnectors . A quantified term formed by a subnector is an argument of a predicate. The logic is defined by means of a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof-system, according to the proof-theoretic semantics program. The harmony of the I/E-rules is shown. The paper then presents a translation, called the Frege translation, from the defined logic to standard (...) first-order logic, and shows that the proof-theoretic meanings of both logics coincide. The paper criticizes Frege’s original regimentation of quantified sentences of natural language, and argues for advantages of the proposed variant. (shrink)

Many topics have not been covered, in most cases because I don't know quite what to say about them. Would it be possible to add a decidability predicate to the language? What about stronger connectives, like exclusion negation or Lukasiewicz implication? Would an expanded language do better at expressing its own semantics? Would it contain new and more terrible paradoxes? Can the account be supplemented with a workable notion of inherent truth (see note 36)? In what sense does stage semantics (...) lie “between” fixed point and stability semantics? In what sense, exactly, are our semantical rules inconsistent? In what sense, if any, does their inconsistency resolve the problem of the paradoxes?The ideals of strength, grounding, and closure together define an intuitively appealing conception of truth. Nothing would be gained by insisting that it was the intuitive conception of truth, and in fact recent developments make me wonder whether such a thing exists. However that may be, until the alternatives are better understood it would be foolish to attempt to decide between them. Truth gives up her secrets slowly and grudgingly, and loves to confound our presumptions. (shrink)

Meaning holists hold, roughly, that each representation in a linguistic or mental system depends semantically on every other representation in the system. The main difficulty for holism is the threat it poses to meaning stability--shared meaning between representations in two systems. If meanings are holistically dependent, then semantic differences anywhere seem to balloon into semantic differences everywhere. My positive aim is to show how holism, even at its most extreme, can accommodate and also increase meaning stability. (...) My negative aim is to provide reasons for rejecting various nonholist proposals, at least for systems of mental representations. (shrink)

The Lambek-Grishin calculus is a symmetric version of categorial grammar obtained by augmenting the standard inventory of type-forming operations (product and residual left and right division) with a dual family: coproduct, left and right difference. Interaction between these two families is provided by distributivity laws. These distributivity laws have pleasant invariance properties: stability of interpretations for the Curry-Howard derivational semantics, and structure-preservation at the syntactic end. The move to symmetry thus offers novel ways of reconciling the demands of natural (...) language form and meaning. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. (...) Drawing on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)

During Einstein’s lifetime, the special and general theories of relativity were quite frequently interpreted by philosophers. Most of these interpretations actually were misinterpretations. Even today interpretative statements about relativity theory are often false or highly misleading. Why is this so? In my Ph.D. dissertation (Hentschel 1990a), I analyzed (mis)interpretations by 10 different philosophical schools active in the early twentieth century which widely differed in their approaches, emphasis and blind spots. Many of these interpreters – including philosophers of high standing such (...) as Ernst Cassirer, Moritz Schlick or Joseph Petzoldt – had studied the theory intensely and many even had close contact with Einstein himself or with one of the members of his “protective belt” of close friends and allies. Rather than declaring all of these (mis)interpreters as either luminaries or idiots (which would be implausible, if not downright silly), I show structurally how these misunderstandings arose and why they were kind of unavoidable, even for highly qualified and often well-informed interpreters. More popular texts about relativity theory were often second-order interpretations of these first-order accounts, thus multiplying the first-order errors of misinterpretations. I will give a few characteristic examples but my focus will rather be on structural characteristics of these misinterpretations. I will discuss how to analyze them historically by means of interpretational frames. A link will also be made to Ludwik Fleck’s thesis that socially and cognitively stabilized “thought collectives” (“Denkkollektive”) exert strong constraints on human thinking and interpretation (“Denkzwang”). My concept of interpretational frames is one method to formalize and analyze the complex interrelations between different assumptions and inferences within such a frame of thinking (“Denkstil”). Semantic frames and word clouds are also discussed as alternative approaches but both are discarded as unsuitable for the purpose of reconstructing interpretative frames. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that ideal theories in political philosophy are a form of ideology. This article examines arguments building on the work of Charles Mills and Raymond Geuss for the claim that ideal theories are cognitively distorting belief systems that have the effect of stabilizing unjust social arrangements. I argue that Mills and Geuss neither succeed in establishing that the content of ideal theories is necessarily cognitively defective in the way characteristic for ideologies, nor can they make plausible which (...) mechanisms ensure the alleged negative effects of the widespread acceptance of ideal theorizing. This does not mean that all hope is lost for the ideology objection, however. By turning to a second Marxian model of ideology, I argue that the ideological character of ideal theories is not so much a matter of their content, but rather of their form. Ideal theories falsely present the normative concepts that they use as semantically practice-independent and thereby block potential challenges from subordinate groups to dominant ideologies. It is therefore not the normative content of ideal theories which proves to be objectionable, but the particular role their concepts play in wider political discourse. (shrink)

In a series of papers, 137–158; 1994, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 61–74, 1999) Fine develops his hylomorphic theory of embodiments. In this article, we supply a formal semantics for this theory that is adequate to the principles laid down for it in. In Section 1, we lay out the theory of embodiments as Fine presents it. In Section 2, we argue on Cantorian grounds that the theory needs to be stabilized, and sketch some ways forward, discussing various choice points (...) in modeling the view. In Section 3, we develop a formal semantics for the theory of embodiments by constructing embodiments in stages and restricting the domain of the second-order quantifiers. In Section 4 we give a few illustrative examples to show how the models deliver Finean hylomorphic consequences. In Section 5, we prove that Fine’s principles are sound with respect to this semantics. In Section 6 we present some inexpressibility results concerning Fine’s various notions of parthood and show that in our formal semantics these notions are all expressible using a single mereological primitive. In Section 7, we prove several mereological results stemming from the model theory, showing that the mereology is surprisingly robust. In Section 8, we draw some philosophical lessons from the formal semantics, and in particular respond to Koslicki’s main objection to Fine’s theory. In the appendix we present proofs of the inexpressibility results of Section 6. (shrink)

The subject of the study is carnival and laughter forms in the traditional life cycle rites of the peoples of the Middle Volga region before 1917. On the basis of archival materials collected by the author and local history literature, a typology of variants of the manifestation of carnival and laughter forms in the ritual practices of the population of the region is carried out for the first time. Based on specific historical examples, the analysis of the selected variants ("noisy (...) performance", "antics", "censure" and "imitation") is carried out. The article uses systematic and culturological approaches that allow to explain the reasons for the stability and semantic content of the rituals, as well as their role in the translation of spiritual and moral values of the inhabitants of the region. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the interpretation of the traditional life cycle rites of the peoples of the Middle Volga region as the focus of carnival and laughter forms that help overcome fears of an unknown future and create an atmosphere of optimism. The main result of the research is a new understanding of the traditional life cycle rites of the peoples of the Middle Volga region as a means of psychotherapy due to their inherent carnival and laughter forms that help a person adapt to various conditions of existence. The material of the article can serve as a basis for scientific research in the field of psychology of ritual activity, for the preparation of educational courses on the history of everyday life and cultural studies. (shrink)

his article will focus on the mechanistic origins of the computer metaphor, which forms the conceptual framework for the methodology of the cognitive sciences, some areas of artificial intelligence and the philosophy of mind. The connection between the history of computing technology, epistemology and the philosophy of mind is expressed through the metaphorical dictionaries of the philosophical discourse of a particular era. The conceptual clarification of this connection and the substantiation of the mechanistic components of the computer metaphor is the (...) main goal of this article. The statement is substantiated that the invention of mechanical computing devices, having a long history in the European engineering tradition, formed the prerequisites for the emergence of machine functionalism in the modern philosophy of mind. The idea of multiple implementation stems from the principle that a formal symbol system prescribes rules for the use of rational abstractions through the physical architecture of a computational engine. The article considers the reasons for the conceptual shift and reveals the semantic foundations for the metaphorical transfer of the properties of abstract objects from the theory of automata to the field of modern philosophy of mind. The criticism and ways of protecting the philosophical program of machine functionalism are analyzed by changing the content of the metaphor “Mind as machine”. The reasons for the stability of the information-computer approach in cognitive sciences are also disclosed and explained. (shrink)

Distance is central to both Heidegger’s depiction of being-in-the-world and Derrida’s theorization of the culture of friendship. It is equally fundamental to the structure of language and, I argue, to the concept of the foreign. This essay brings together these theories of distance and demonstrates the ways they act on and through each other, the role that linguistic distance plays in constructing both foreigners and friends, and the permeable semantic boundaries that the concept of distance shares with movement, strangeness, (...) instability, and indefiniteness. It further contends that this semantic seepage has proven threatening to certain species of philosophy and politics and prompted disciplinary efforts – to eradicate distance, regulate foreigners, immobilize meaning, and stabilize friendship – that are remarkably structurally similar and sometimes mutually supportive, but that both Heidegger and Derrida, by contrast, undertake a significant revaluation of distance and the foreignness and indeterminacy associated with it. (shrink)

Dummett's objections to the coherence of the strict finitist philosophy of mathematics are thus, at the present time at least, ill-taken. We have so far no definitive treatment of Sorites paradoxes; so no conclusive ground for dismissing Dummett's response — the response of simply writing off a large class of familiar, confidently handled expressions as semantically incoherent. I believe that cannot be the right response, if only because it threatens to open an unacceptable gulf between the insight into his own (...) understanding available to a philosophically reflective speaker and the conclusions available to one confined to observing the former's linguistic practice; for an observer of our linguistic practice could never justifiably arrive at the conclusion that ‘red’, ‘child’, etc., are governed by inconsistent rules. But the Sorites is not the subject of this paper. The points I hope to have made plausible are: that a generalized intuitionist position cannot be so much as formulated and that even a most local intuitionism, argued for the special case of arithmetic, is hard pressed effectively to stabilize and defend itself; that strict finitism remains the natural outcome of the anti-realism which Dummett has propounded by way of support for the intuitionist philosophy of mathematics; that it is powerfully buttressed by the ideas of the latter Wittgenstein on rule-following; and that there is no extant compelling reason to suppose that its involvement with predicates of surveyability calls its coherence into question. The correct philosophical assessment of strict finitism, and its proper mathematical exegesis, remain absolutely open, almost virgin issues. This is not a situation which philosophers of mathematics should tolerate very much longer. (shrink)