The Logical Burdens of Proof. Assertion and Hypothesis

The paper proposes two logical analyses of (the norms of) justification. In a first, realist-minded case, truth is logically independent from justification and leads to a pragmatic logic LP including two epistemic and pragmatic operators, namely, assertion and hypothesis. In a second, antirealist-minded case, truth is not logically independent from justification and results in two logical systems of information and justification: AR4 and AR4¢, respectively, provided with a question-answer semantics. The latter proposes many more epistemic agents, each corresponding to a wide variety of epistemic norms. After comparing the different norms of justification involved in these logical systems, two hexagons expressing Aristotelian relations of opposition will be gathered in order to clarify how (a fragment of) pragmatic formulas can be interpreted in a fuzzy-based question-answer semantics

Component-Enhanced Chinese Character Embeddings

Distributed word representations are very useful for capturing semantic information and have been successfully applied in a variety of NLP tasks, especially on English. In this work, we innovatively develop two component-enhanced Chinese character embedding models and their bigram extensions. Distinguished from English word embeddings, our models explore the compositions of Chinese characters, which often serve as semantic indictors inherently. The evaluations on both word similarity and text classification demonstrate the effectiveness of our models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, conference, EMNLP 201

Classifying conditionals: The case of metalinguistic 'if you like'

It is agreed that metalinguistic ‘if you like’ puts some aspect of communication into metalinguistic focus, serving the pragmatic function of commenting upon the appropriateness of the words uttered, but there is little consensus as to whether metalinguistic ‘if you like’ introduces a conditional. By taking observations from the International Corpus of English, this paper aims to show that utterances using metalinguistic ‘if you like’ belong in the class of conditional expressions. This is achieved by proposing pragmatic criteria to guide the categorisation of conditional expressions, where conditionality is not inherently linked to truth-conditional content. Next, this paper argues that ‘if you like’ can be classed in the broad category of speechact conditionals, where it is not the truth of the if-clause that provides the situations of truth of the main clause, but rather where the if-clause refers to the situations where the main clause is felicitously used. Finally, by utilising the semantic contextualist framework of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2010), this paper shows that ‘if you like’ is comparable to other if-clauses which overtly invoke a metalinguistic sense in a full phrase. In sum, this paper takes the case of ‘if you like’ as a case study in re-conceptualising the class of conditionals and truth-conditional content

Towards more accurate real time testing

The languages Message Sequence Charts (MSC) [1], System Design Language1 (SDL) [2] and Testing and Test Control Notation Testing2 (TTCN-3) [3] have been developed for the design, modelling and testing of complex software systems. These languages have been developed to complement one another in the software development process. Each of these languages has features for describing, analysing or testing the real time properties of systems. Robust toolsets exist which provide integrated environments for the design, analysis and testing of systems, and it is claimed, for the complete development of real time systems. It was shown in [4] however, that there are fundamental problems with the SDL language and its associated tools for modelling and reasoning about real time systems. In this paper we present the limitations of TTCN-3 and propose recommendations which help minimise the timing inaccuracies that would otherwise occur in using the language directly

Lying and Fiction

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. In this chapter I discuss the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. I argue that there’s little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, I will first explore how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e. as proposals to update the common ground

Reasoning about Knowledge in Linear Logic: Modalities and Complexity

In a recent paper, Jean-Yves Girard commented that ”it has been a long time since philosophy has stopped intereacting with logic”[17]. Actually, it has no

Eligibility and inscrutability

The philosophy of intentionality asks questions such as: in virtue of what does a sentence, picture, or mental state represent that the world is a certain way? The subquestion I focus upon here concerns the semantic properties of language: in virtue of what does a name such as ‘London’ refer to something or a predicate such as ‘is large’ apply to some object? This essay examines one kind of answer to this “metasemantic”1 question: interpretationism, instances of which have been proposed by Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and others. I characterize the “twostep” form common to such approaches and briefl y say how two versions described by David Lewis fi t this pattern. Then I describe a fundamental challenge to this approach: a “permutation argument” that contends, by interpretationist lights, there can be no fact of the matter about lexical content (e.g., what individual words refer to). Such a thesis cannot be sustained, so the argument threatens a reductio of interpretationism. In the second part of the article, I will give what I take to be the best interpretationist response to the inscrutability paradox: David Lewis’s appeal to the differential “eligibility” of semantic theories. I contend that, given an independently plausible formulation of interpretationism, the eligibility response is an immediate consequence of Lewis’s general analysis of the theoretical virtue of simplicity. In the fi nal sections of the article, I examine the limitations of Lewis’s response. By focusing on an alternative argument for the inscrutability of reference, I am able to describe conditions under which the eligibility result will deliver the wrong results. In particular, if the world is complex enough and our language suffi ciently simple, then reference may be determinately secured to the wrong things