Virtual environments engage millions of people and billions of dollars each year. What is the ontological status of the virtual objects that populate those environments? An adequate answer to that question requires a developed semantics for virtual environments. The truth-conditions must be identified for “tree”-sentences when uttered by speakers immersed in a virtual environment (VE). It will be argued that statements about virtual objects have truth-conditions roughly comparable to the verificationist conditions popular amongst some (...) contemporary antirealists. This does not mean that the virtual objects lack ontological standing. There is an important sense in which virtual objects are no less real for being mind-dependent. (shrink)

Most philosophers appear to have ignored the distinction between the broad concept of Virtual Machine Functionalism (VMF) described in Sloman&Chrisley (2003) and the better known version of functionalism referred to there as Atomic State Functionalism (ASF), which is often given as an explanation of what Functionalism is, e.g. in Block (1995). -/- One of the main differences is that ASF encourages talk of supervenience of states and properties, whereas VMF requires supervenience of machines that are arbitrarily complex networks of (...) causally interacting (virtual, but real) processes, possibly operating on different time-scales, examples of which include many different procesess usually running concurrently on a modern computer performing various tasks concerned with handling interfaces to physical devices, managing the file system, dealing with security, providing tools, entertainments, and games, and possibly processing research data. Another example of VMF would be the kind of functionalism involved in a large collection of possibly changing socio-economic structures and processes interacting in a complex community, and yet another is illustrated by the kind of virtual machinery involved in the many levels of visual processing of information about spatial structures, processes, and relationships (including percepts of moving shadows, reflections, highlights, optical-flow patterns and changing affordances) as you walk through a crowded car-park on a sunny day: generating a whole zoo of interacting qualia. (Forget solitary red patches, or experiences thereof.) -/- Perhaps VMF should be re-labelled "Virtual MachinERY Functionalism" because the word 'machinery' more readily suggests something complex with interacting parts. VMF is concerned with virtual machines that are made up of interacting concurrently active (but not necessarily synchronised) chunks of virtual machinery which not only interact with one another and with their physical substrates (which may be partly shared, and also frequently modified by garbage collection, metabolism, or whatever) but can also concurrently interact with and refer to various things in the immediate and remote environment (via sensory/motor channels, and possible future technologies also). I.e. virtual machinery can include mechanisms that create and manipulate semantic content, not only syntactic structures or bit patterns as digital virtual machines do. -/- Please note: Click on the title above or the link below to read the paper. I prefer to keep all my papers freely accessible on my web site so that I can correct mistakes and add improvements. -/- http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/vm-functionalism.html -/- This is now part of the Meta-Morphogenesis project: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/meta-morphogenesis.html. (shrink)

When certain formal symbol systems (e.g., computer programs) are implemented as dynamic physical symbol systems (e.g., when they are run on a computer) their activity can be interpreted at higher levels (e.g., binary code can be interpreted as LISP, LISP code can be interpreted as English, and English can be interpreted as a meaningful conversation). These higher levels of interpretability are called "virtual" systems. If such a virtual system is interpretable as if it had a mind, is such (...) a "virtual mind" real? This is the question addressed in this "virtual" symposium, originally conducted electronically among four cognitive scientists: Donald Perlis, a computer scientist, argues that according to the computationalist thesis, virtual minds are real and hence Searle's Chinese Room Argument fails, because if Searle memorized and executed a program that could pass the Turing Test in Chinese he would have a second, virtual, Chinese-understanding mind of which he was unaware (as in multiple personality). Stevan Harnad, a psychologist, argues that Searle's Argument is valid, virtual minds are just hermeneutic overinterpretations, and symbols must be grounded in the real world of objects, not just the virtual world of interpretations. Computer scientist Patrick Hayes argues that Searle's Argument fails, but because Searle does not really implement the program: A real implementation must not be homuncular but mindless and mechanical, like a computer. Only then can it give rise to a mind at the virtual level. Philosopher Ned Block suggests that there is no reason a mindful implementation would not be a real one. (shrink)

The Chinese room thought experiment of John Searle militates against strong artificial intelligence, illustrating his claim that syntactical knowledge by itself is neither constitutive nor sufficient for semantic understanding as found in human minds. This thought experiment was put to a behavioural test, concerning the syntax of a finite algebraic field. Input, rules and output were presented with letters instead of numbers. The set of rules was first presented as a table but finally internalized by the participants. Quite in line (...) with Searle's argument, uninformed participants mastered the syntax but did not explicitly report semantic knowledge. In order to test the virtual mind reply to the Chinese room argument, the reaction time pattern of the participants was compared to that of an informed control group. The correlation was quite high but could be traced back to memory load and response priming, i.e. to syntactical factors. No trace of tacit semantic knowledge of the task could be found in the experimental group. (shrink)

Recent developments in the semantics of natural language seem to lead to a genuine synthesis of ideas from linguistics and logic, producing novel concepts and questions of interest to both parent disciplines. This book is a collection of essays on such new topics, which have arisen over the past few years. Taking a broad view, developments in formal semantics over the past decade can be seen as follows. At the beginning stands Montague's pioneering work, showing how a rigorous (...) semantics can be given for complete fragments of natural language by creating a suitable fit between syntactic categories and semantic types. This very enterprise already dispelled entrenched prejudices concerning the separation of linguistics and logic. Having seen the light, however, there is no reason at all to stick to the letter of Montague's proposals, which are often debatable. Subsequently, then, many improvements have been made upon virtually every aspect of the enterprise. More sophisticated grammars have been inserted (lately, lexical-functional grammar and generalized phrase structure grammar), more sensitive model structures have been developed (lately, 'partial' rather than 'total' in their com position), and even the mechanism of interpretation itself may be fine-tuned more delicately, using various forms of 'representations' mediating between linguistic items and semantic reality. In addition to all these refinements of the semantic format, descriptive coverage has extended considerably. (shrink)

In The Philosophy of Information, Luciano Floridi presents a theory of “strongly semantic information”, based on the idea that “information encapsulates truth” (the so-called “veridicality thesis”). Starting with Popper, philosophers of science have developed different explications of the notion of verisimilitude or truthlikeness, construed as a combination of truth and information. Thus, the theory of strongly semantic information and the theory of verisimilitude are intimately tied. Yet, with few exceptions, this link has virtually pass unnoticed. In this paper, we briefly (...) survey both theories and offer a critical comparison of strongly semantic information and related notions, like truth, verisimilitude, and partial truth. (shrink)

Model-theoretic 1-types overa given first-order theory T may be construed as natural metalogical miniatures of G. W. Leibniz' ``complete individual notions'', ``substances'' or ``substantial forms''. This analogy prompts this essay's modal semantics for an essentiallyundecidable first-order theory T, in which one quantifies over such ``substances'' in a boolean universe V(C), where C is the completion of the Lindenbaum-algebra of T.More precisely, one can define recursively a set-theoretic translate of formulae νNϕ of formulae ν of a normal modal theory Tm (...) based on T, such that the counterpart `ξi' of a the modal variable `xi' of L(Tm) in this translation-scheme ranges over elements of V(C) that are 1-types of T with value 1 (sometimes called `definite' C-valued 1-types of T).The article's basic completeness-result (2.13) then establishes that ϕvarphi; is a theorem of Tm iff [[νN(ϕ) is aconsequenceof νN(Tm) for each extension N of T which is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory (ultrafilter) u]] = 1 – or equivalently, that Tm is consistent iff[[there is anextension N of T such that N is a subtheory of the canonical generic theory u, and νN(ϕ) for all ϕ in Tm]] > 0.The proof of thiscompleteness-result also shows that an N which provides a countermodel for a modally unprovable ϕ – or equivalently, a closed set in the Stone space St(T) in the sense of V(C) – is intertranslatable with an `accessibility'-relation of a closely related Kripke-semantics whose `worlds' are generic extensions of an initial universe V via C.This interrelation providesa fairly precise rationale for the semantics' recourse to C-valued structures, and exhibits a sense in which the boolean-valued context is sharp. (shrink)

Much research on intelligent systems has concentrated on low level mechanisms or sub-systems of restricted functionality. We need to understand how to put all the pieces together in an *architecture* for a complete agent with its own mind, driven by its own desires. A mind is a self-modifying control system, with a hierarchy of levels of control, and a different hierarchy of levels of implementation. AI needs to explore alternative control architectures and their implications for human, animal, and artificial minds. (...) Only within the framework of a theory of actual and possible architectures can we solve old problems about the concept of mind and causal roles of desires, beliefs, intentions, etc. The high level ``virtual machine'' architecture is more useful for this than detailed mechanisms. E.g. the difference between connectionist and symbolic implementations is of relatively minor importance. A good theory provides both explanations and a framework for systematically generating concepts of possible states and processes. Lacking this, philosophers cannot provide good analyses of concepts, psychologists and biologists cannot specify what they are trying to explain or explain it, and psychotherapists and educationalists are left groping with ill-understood problems. The paper sketches some requirements for such architectures, and analyses an idea shared between engineers and philosophers: the concept of ``semantic information''. (shrink)

Presentations of Gricean semantics, including Stephen Neale’s in “Silent Reference,” totally ignore vagueness, even though virtually every utterance is vague. I ask how Gricean semantics might be adjusted to accommodate vague speaker-meaning. My answer is that it can’t accommodate it: the Gricean program collapses in the face of vague speaker-meaning. The Gricean might, however, find some solace in knowing that every other extant meta-semantic and semantic program is in the same boat.

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)

With the current changes driven by the expansion of the World Wide Web, this book uses a different approach from other books on the market: it applies ontologies to electronically available information to improve the quality of knowledge management in large and distributed organizations. Ontologies are formal theories supporting knowledge sharing and reuse. They can be used to explicitly represent semantics of semi-structured information. These enable sophisticated automatic support for acquiring, maintaining and accessing information. Methodology and tools are developed (...) for intelligent access to large volumes of semi-structured and textual information sources in intra- and extra-, and internet-based environments to employ the full power of ontologies in supporting knowledge management from the information client perspective and the information provider. The aim of the book is to support efficient and effective knowledge management and focuses on weakly-structured online information sources. It is aimed primarily at researchers in the area of knowledge management and information retrieval and will also be a useful reference for students in computer science at the postgraduate level and for business managers who are aiming to increase the corporations' information infrastructure. The Semantic Web is a very important initiative affecting the future of the WWW that is currently generating huge interest. The book covers several highly significant contributions to the semantic web research effort, including a new language for defining ontologies, several novel software tools and a coherent methodology for the application of the tools for business advantage. It also provides 3 case studies which give examples of the real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic-web based ontologies in "real world" situations. As such, the book is an excellent mixture of theory, tools and applications in an important area of WWW research. * Provides guidelines for introducing knowledge management concepts and tools into enterprises, to help knowledge providers present their knowledge efficiently and effectively. * Introduces an intelligent search tool that supports users in accessing information and a tool environment for maintenance, conversion and acquisition of information sources. * Discusses three large case studies which will help to develop the technology according to the actual needs of large and or virtual organisations and will provide a testbed for evaluating tools and methods. The book is aimed at people with at least a good understanding of existing WWW technology and some level of technical understanding of the underpinning technologies (XML/RDF). It will be of interest to graduate students, academic and industrial researchers in the field, and the many industrial personnel who are tracking WWW technology developments in order to understand the business implications. It could also be used to support undergraduate courses in the area but is not itself an introductory text. (shrink)

Model-theoretic 1-types overa given first-order theory T may be construed as natural metalogical miniatures of G. W. Leibniz' ``complete individual notions'', ``substances'' or ``substantial forms''. This analogy prompts this essay's modal semantics for an essentiallyundecidable first-order theory T, in which one quantifies over such ``substances'' in a boolean universe V(C), where C is the completion of the Lindenbaum-algebra of T.More precisely, one can define recursively a set-theoretic translate of formulae N of formulae of a normal modal theory Tm based (...) on T, such that the counterpart `i' of a the modal variable `xi' of L(Tm) in this translation-scheme ranges over elements of V(C) that are 1-types of T with value 1 (sometimes called `definite' C-valued 1-types of T). (shrink)

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of (...) objective being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

Salient landmarks enhance route learning. We hypothesised that semantically salient nostalgic landmarks would improve route learning compared to non-nostalgic landmarks. In two experiments, participants learned a route through a computer-generated maze using directional arrows and wall-mounted pictures. On the test trial, the arrows were removed, and participants completed the maze using only the pictures. In the nostalgia condition, pictures were of popular music artists and TV characters from 5 to 10 years ago. In the control condition, they were recent pictures (...) of these same artists and characters. In Experiment 1, in the test trial, participants in the nostalgia condition completed the maze faster than controls. Experiment 2 conceptually replicated these findings and extended them by exploring boundary conditions. Participants had to learn two mazes sequentially. In Maze 1, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks only at non-decision points (whereas we placed them at decision points in Experiment 1). In Maze 2, we placed nostalgic/control landmarks at decision points during acquisition but removed them in the test trial (whereas they were present in the test trial in Experiment 1). In both mazes, participants in the nostalgia (compared to control) condition completed the test trial faster. (shrink)

This article presents an empirical examination of the consequences of the virtual entailment principle proposed by Jean Buridan to resolve the Liar paradox. This principle states that every sentence in natural language implicitly asserts its own truth. Adopting this principle means that the Liar sentence is not paradoxical but false, because its content is contradictory to what is virtually implied. As a result, humans should perceive the Liar sentence the same way as any other false sentence. This solution to (...) the Liar paradox received criticism for making ad hoc claims about the natural language. However, thanks to modern advancements in psychophysiology, it became possible to empirically investigate if the human brain really perceives the Liar sentence like a false sentence. We designed and conducted an experiment to examine brain activity in response to true sentences, false sentences and self-referential sentences. Our results provide support for the Buridan’s hypothesis and show that the Liar sentence is processed by the human brain identically to false sentences, while the Truthteller sentence is perceived identically to true sentences. This agrees with predictions derived from the virtual entailment principle and supports the idea that humans think with the logic of truth—a logic for which the truth is a designated value of its adequate semantics. (shrink)

Hallucinatory states are experienced not only in connection with drugs and psychopathologies but occur naturally and spontaneously across the human circadian cycle: Our nightly dreams bring multimodal experiences in the absence of adequate external stimuli. The current study proposes a new, tighter measure of these hallucinatory states: Sleep onset, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep are shown to differ with regard to motor imagery indicating interactions with a rich imaginative world, and cognitive agency that could enable sleepers to recognize their hallucinatory (...) state. Mentation reports from the different states were analysed quantitatively with regard to two grammatical–semantic constructs, motor agency and cognitive agency. The present results support earlier physiological and psychological evidence in revealing a decline in cognitive functions and an increase in simulated interactions with a hallucinatory world, en route to normal REM sleep. This leads us to introduce the hypothesis that REM sleep, which exhibits remarkably high levels of sensorimotor processes, may have evolved to serve as a virtual laboratory for the development and rehearsal of embodied cognition. The new measure of hallucinatory states presented here may also hold implications for the study of executive functions and cognitions, which might be interesting, for example, for the investigation of lucid dreaming. (shrink)

Simple locative sentences show a variety of pseudo-quantificational interpretations. Some locatives give the impression of universal quantification over parts of objects, others involve existential quantification, and yet others cannot be characterized by either of these quantificational terms. This behavior is explained by virtually all semantic theories of locatives. What has not been previously observed is that similar quantificational variability is also exhibited by locative sentences containing indefinites with the ‘a’ article. This phenomenon is especially problematic for traditional existential treatments of (...) indefinites. We propose a solution where indefinites denote properties and are assigned locations similarly to other spatial descriptions. This Property-Eigenspace Hypothesis accounts for the correlation between the interpretations of locative indefinites and the pseudo-quantificational effects with simple entity-denoting NPs. Thereby, the proposal opens up a new empirical domain for property-based theories of indefinites, with implications for the analysis of collective descriptions, generics, negative polarity items and part–whole structure. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that the conjunction of linguistic ersatzism, the ontologically deflationary view that possible worlds are maximal and consistent sets of sentences, and possible world semantics, the view that the meaning of a sentence is the set of possible worlds at which it is true, implies that no actual speaker can effectively use virtually any language to successfully communicate information. This result is based on complexity issues that relate to our finite computational ability to deal (...) with large bodies of information and a strong, but well motivated, assumption about the cognitive accessibility of meanings of sentences ersatzers seem to be implicitly committed to. It follows that linguistic ersatzism, possible world semantics, or both must be rejected. (shrink)

The corner space, an important area of underground commercial streets, not only converts space functions but also exerts a great impact on the space atmosphere by transforming the environmental quality of the commercial street space. Based on corner space investigations of several underground commercial streets in China, this paper constructs a realistic scene model using virtual reality technology and screens. This paper classifies the corner space elements of underground commercial streets through preliminary experiments. Based on the conclusions, different morphological (...) models of the corner space were constructed by orthogonal experiments and virtual reality technology combined with psychology. A semantic differential was used to quantitatively evaluate and analyze the spatial experience cognition of the subjects. This enabled an analysis of the of underground commercial street corners’ relationship to the component elements and the visitors’ psychological perception of their spatial form. (shrink)

In the chapter on quantum logic in Volume 6 of Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Dalla Chiara and Giuntini make an interesting observation that there is a unified relational semantics underlying both the {¬,∧}\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\{ {\lnot }, {\wedge } \}$$\end{document}-fragment of intuitionistic logic and ortho-logic. In this paper, we contribute to a systematic investigation of this relational semantics by providing an axiomatization of its logic.

Artificial agents are progressively becoming more present in everyday-life situations and more sophisticated in their interaction affordances. In some specific cases, like Google Duplex, GPT-3 bots or Deep Mind’s AlphaGo Zero, their capabilities reach or exceed human levels. The use contexts of everyday life necessitate making such agents understandable by laypeople. At the same time, displaying human levels of social behavior has kindled the debate over the adoption of Dennett’s ‘intentional stance’. By means of a comparative analysis of the literature (...) on robots and virtual agents, we defend the thesis that approaching these artificial agents ‘as if’ they had intentions and forms of social, goal-oriented rationality is the only way to deal with their complexity on a daily base. Specifically, we claim that this is the only viable strategy for non-expert users to understand, predict and perhaps learn from artificial agents’ behavior in everyday social contexts. Furthermore, we argue that as long as agents are transparent about their design principles and functionality, attributing intentions to their actions is not only essential, but also ethical. Additionally, we propose design guidelines inspired by the debate over the adoption of the intentional stance. (shrink)

A motivation and a presentation of the semantics of a formal system which proceeds from von neumann's "eine axiomatisierung der mengenlehre" by taking as fundamental notions the notion of partial functions, his principles of reification on the grounds of a "method of simulation" of meaningless terms and formulas by "ideal" terms and "virtual" formulas. theory of sets appears as the end of axiomatic extensions of the theory of objects (the intermediary extensions being the theories of classes, of universes, (...) of aggregates). (shrink)

The ArgumentErnst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and promising (...) linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises a partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits. (shrink)

Werkmeister's new book, The Basis and Structure of Knowledge is the second major attempt in recent years to defend the idealistic theory of knowledge. The first was Blanshard's Nature of Thought; and it is worth noticing that both authors, in undertaking the defense of a position long in the shadows, are well aware of contemporary developments in logic and technical philosophy. Werkmeister freely acknowledges his debt to Blanshard; yet his work differs in scope from the latter's in at least two (...) ways. Firstly, the more recent book is concerned largely with the epistemological analysis of meaning and truth and hardly at all with what an older generation called "philosophical psychology," while philosophical psychology fills all of the first and part of the second volume of Blanshard's work. In my opinion, this is all to the good. (That our generation inverts the error and too often indulges in psychological philosophy is another story!) Secondly, Werkmeister presents us with detailed analyses of scientific method, of the structure of scientific theories, and of mathematics, all three areas to which Blanshard pays virtually no attention. The First Part of Werkmeister's book treats of Language and Meaning; the Second of Truth and the World About Us, the Third of Formal Knowledge, and the Fourth Part deals with Empirical Knowledge. But there is a fundamental thesis that runs through all of this. The analysis of each of these four domains reveals, according to Werkmeister, that only a coherence theory of meaning and truth can adequately reflect the criteria actually used by science and commonsense. It is not my intention to rehearse here the familiar dialectic of the arguments for and against this doctrine; the less so, since Werkmeister himself gives a useful review of both sides of the controversy. Rather, I want to try to fix as precisely as possible, within the context of Werkmeister's discussion, the nature of the difference between coherence theories on the one hand and correspondence theories on the other. This difference has not always been too clearly stated; it even seems that recent developments in linguistic analysis have been the occasion for some new confusions on this very point. For coherence theorists who have recognized that philosophical semantics is a "formal" discipline now insist that "to say what a symbol means is not to relate it to an object, but to give it an interpretation in terms of other symbols," as Ayer2 has recently put it. This seems to contradict the "comparison with fact" feature of the traditional realistic formulations of the correspondence view. A superficial bystander could even believe that the correspondence theorists have given up their original position, since both sides now agree that truth is a matter of a relation between symbols. Such agreement, as I hope to show, is more apparent than real, for what is now at stake is the nature of that "intrasymbolic relation." And on this nature the two parties disagree. There is little doubt that Werkmeister's book appears at a moment more propitious for the advocacy of the coherence theory of truth than did Blanshard's. In the near decade that separates the two works the intellectual climate has become, for better or for worse, considerably more favorable to a reconsideration of, and possibly even a reconciliation with, some of the major tenets of rationalism. This is reflected in the current discussion regarding the contrary-to-fact conditional, the dissatisfaction with material implication, and the correlative concern for a more adequate analysis of the concept of a natural law. It is evident too in the revived enthusiasm for intensional logic and in the related interest in the modalities. As uncompromising an empiricist as C. L. Lewis, with whom, by the way, Werkmeister shares a common Kantian background, has introduced into his latest work a "congruence" theory of truth which, despite the substitution of a so-called "probability" inference for necessary inference, looks very much like the coherance criterion all over again. So Werkmeister's book should be welcome for its clear presentation of the relevant issues; and even those who disagree with him can admire the candor and forthrightness with which he champions what remains, despite vacillations, an essentially unpopular position. (shrink)

We investigate an information based generalization of the incompatibility-frame treatment of logics with non-classical negation connectives. Our framework can be viewed as an alternative to the neighbourhood semantics for extensions of lattice logic by various negation connectives, investigated by Hartonas. We set out the basic semantic framework, along with some correspondence results for extensions. We describe three kinds of constructions of canonical models and show that double negation law is not canonical with respect to any of these constructions. We (...) also compare our semantics to Hartonas’. (shrink)

After I had delivered the paper (Stechow, 2003), a colleague wrote to me that the system outlined was virtually identical with (Kratzer, 1998), and that this article had not been cited. The longer version (Stechow, 2002 (to appear)) quotes (Kratzer, 1998), and the reference has been deleted by my automatic bibliography program when I rewrote and shortened the paper. I am sorry for that.