1,920 research outputs found
Quantum Structure in Cognition, Origins, Developments, Successes and Expectations
We provide an overview of the results we have attained in the last decade on
the identification of quantum structures in cognition and, more specifically,
in the formalization and representation of natural concepts. We firstly discuss
the quantum foundational reasons that led us to investigate the mechanisms of
formation and combination of concepts in human reasoning, starting from the
empirically observed deviations from classical logical and probabilistic
structures. We then develop our quantum-theoretic perspective in Fock space
which allows successful modeling of various sets of cognitive experiments
collected by different scientists, including ourselves. In addition, we
formulate a unified explanatory hypothesis for the presence of quantum
structures in cognitive processes, and discuss our recent discovery of further
quantum aspects in concept combinations, namely, 'entanglement' and
'indistinguishability'. We finally illustrate perspectives for future research.Comment: 25 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1412.870
The Paraconsistent Approach to Quantum Superpositions Reloaded: Formalizing Contradictory Powers in the Potential Realm
In [7] the authors of this paper argued in favor of the possibility to
consider a Paraconsistent Approach to Quantum Superpositions (PAQS). We claimed
that, even though most interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM) attempt to
escape contradictions, there are many hints -coming from present technical and
experimental developments in QM- that indicate it could be worth while to
engage in a research of this kind. Recently, Arenhart and Krause have raised
several arguments against the PAQS [1, 2, 3]. In [11, 12] it was argued that
their reasoning presupposes a metaphysical stance according to which the
physical representation of reality must be exclusively considered in terms of
the equation: Actuality = Reality. However, from a different metaphysical
standpoint their problems disappear. It was also argued that, if we accept the
idea that quantum superpositions exist in a (contradictory) potential realm, it
makes perfect sense to develop QM in terms of a paraconsistent approach and
claim that quantum superpositions are contradictory, contextual existents.
Following these ideas, and taking as a standpoint an interpretation in terms of
the physical notions of power and potentia put forward in [10, 12, 15], we
present a paraconsistent formalization of quantum superpositions that attempts
to capture the main features of QM.Comment: 26 pages, no figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1502.05081, arXiv:1404.5186, arXiv:1506.0737
Negation 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts
Metalinguistic negation (MN) is interesting for at least the following two reasons: (a) it is one instance of the much broader, very widespread and various phenomenon of metarepresentational use in linguistic communication, whose semantic and pragmatic properties are currently being extensively explored by both linguists and philosophers of language; (b) it plays a central role in recent accounts of presupposition-denial cases, such as āThe king of France is not bald; there is no king of Franceā. It is this latter employment that discussion of metalinguistic negation has focused on since Horn (1985)'s key article on the subject. While Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b) saw the MN account of presupposition-denials as providing strong support for his semantic theory of presupposition, I have offered a multi-layered pragmatic account of these cases, which also involves MN, but maintains the view that the phenomenon of presupposition is pragmatic (Carston 1994, 1996, 1998a)
Not wacky vs. definitely wacky: A study of scalar adverbs in pretrained language models
Vector space models of word meaning all share the assumption that words
occurring in similar contexts have similar meanings. In such models, words that
are similar in their topical associations but differ in their logical force
tend to emerge as semantically close, creating well-known challenges for NLP
applications that involve logical reasoning. Modern pretrained language models,
such as BERT, RoBERTa and GPT-3 hold the promise of performing better on
logical tasks than classic static word embeddings. However, reports are mixed
about their success. In the current paper, we advance this discussion through a
systematic study of scalar adverbs, an under-explored class of words with
strong logical force. Using three different tasks, involving both naturalistic
social media data and constructed examples, we investigate the extent to which
BERT, RoBERTa, GPT-2 and GPT-3 exhibit general, human-like, knowledge of these
common words. We ask: 1) Do the models distinguish amongst the three semantic
categories of MODALITY, FREQUENCY and DEGREE? 2) Do they have implicit
representations of full scales from maximally negative to maximally positive?
3) How do word frequency and contextual factors impact model performance? We
find that despite capturing some aspects of logical meaning, the models fall
far short of human performance.Comment: Published in BlackBoxNLP workshop, EMNLP 202
The critics of paraconsistency and of many-valuedness and the geometry of oppositions
In 1995 Slater argued both against Priestās paraconsistent system LP (1979) and against paraconsistency in general, invoking the fundamental opposition relations ruling the classical logical square. Around 2002 BĆ©ziau constructed a double defence of paraconsistency (logical and philosophical), relying, in its philosophical part, on Sesmatās (1951) and Blancheās (1953) ālogical hexagonā, a geometrical, conservative extension of the logical square, and proposing a new (tridimensional) āsolid of oppositionā, meant to shed new light on the point raised by Slater. By using n-opposition theory (NOT) we analyse Beziauās anti-Slater move and show both its right intuitions and its technical limits. Moreover, we suggest that Slaterās criticism is much akin to a well-known one by Suszko (1975) against the conceivability of many-valued logics. This last criticism has been addressed by Malinowski (1990) and Shramko and Wansing (2005), who developed a family of tenable logical counter-examples to it: trans-Suszkian systems are radically many-valued. This family of new logics has some strange logical features, essentially: each system has more than one consequence operator. We show that a new, deeper part of the aforementioned geometry of logical oppositions (NOT), the ālogical poly-simplexes of dimension mā, generates new logical-geometrical structures, essentially many-valued, which could be a very natural (and intuitive) geometrical counterpart to the āstrangeā, new, non-Suszkian logics of Malinowski, Shramko and Wansing. By a similar move, the geometry of opposition therefore sheds light both on the foundations of paraconsistent logics and on those of many-valued logics
Vagueness, Logic and Use: Four Experimental Studies on Vagueness
Although arguments for and against competing theories of vagueness often appeal to claims about the use of vague predicates by ordinary speakers, such claims are rarely tested. An exception is Bonini et al. (1999), who report empirical results on the use of vague predicates by Italian speakers, and take the results to count in favor of epistemicism. Yet several methodological difficulties mar their experiments; we outline these problems and devise revised experiments that do not show the same results. We then describe three additional empirical studies that investigate further claims in the literature on vagueness: the hypothesis that speakers confuse āPā with ādefinitely Pā, the relative persuasiveness of different formulations of the inductive premise of the Sorites, and the interaction of vague predicates with three different forms of negatio
The New Quantum Logic
It is shown how all the major conceptual difficulties of standard (textbook)
quantum mechanics, including the two measurement problems and the (supposed)
nonlocality that conflicts with special relativity, are resolved in the
consistent or decoherent histories interpretation of quantum mechanics by using
a modified form of quantum logic to discuss quantum properties (subspaces of
the quantum Hilbert space), and treating quantum time development as a
stochastic process. The histories approach in turn gives rise to some
conceptual difficulties, in particular the correct choice of a framework
(probabilistic sample space) or family of histories, and these are discussed.
The central issue is that the principle of unicity, the idea that there is a
unique single true description of the world, is incompatible with our current
understanding of quantum mechanics.Comment: Minor changes and corrections to bring into conformity with published
versio
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