307 research outputs found
The Modal Bond of Analytic Pragmatism
In his recent John Locke Lectures, Robert Brandom defends a view of pragmatism as an extension
of the classical project of semantic analysis powerful enough as to incorporate not only relations
among meanings, but also, and more fundamentally, relations among meaning and use.
The paper explores one of the core aspects of this project – the relation between modal, normative,
and empirical vocabularies.
Brandom’ focus on a general semantics for non-logical vocabularies intends to meet and answer
the empiricist concerns about the intelligibility of modal concepts, which are themselves
couched in a modal metavocabulary. Brandom’s purpose is to show that, in using ordinary
empirical vocabulary, «in order to be able to talk at all, to make claims and inferences, one
must already know how to do everything necessary in principle to deploy modal and normative
vocabulary». This is the so-called «Kant-Sellars thesis».
In the first part, I present the general framework of analytic pragmatism, the rationale for
that project, and its normative foundation. Although the project is in continuity with the
goal, pursued in Making It Explicit, of explaining inferential semantics in terms of a normative
pragmatics, more structure is added, which clarifies the foundation of the overall enterprise. In
the second part, I focus on some objections to the complementary structure of normative and
modal vocabularies, and defend a different interpretation of its foundational structure. The
goal is to show the modal vocabulary underlies the conceivability and the very inferential
practices in which normative vocabulary is involved
The Modal Bond of Analytic Pragmatism
In his recent John Locke Lectures, Robert Brandom defends a view of pragmatism as an extension
of the classical project of semantic analysis powerful enough as to incorporate not only relations
among meanings, but also, and more fundamentally, relations among meaning and use.
The paper explores one of the core aspects of this project – the relation between modal, normative,
and empirical vocabularies.
Brandom’ focus on a general semantics for non-logical vocabularies intends to meet and answer
the empiricist concerns about the intelligibility of modal concepts, which are themselves
couched in a modal metavocabulary. Brandom’s purpose is to show that, in using ordinary
empirical vocabulary, «in order to be able to talk at all, to make claims and inferences, one
must already know how to do everything necessary in principle to deploy modal and normative
vocabulary». This is the so-called «Kant-Sellars thesis».
In the first part, I present the general framework of analytic pragmatism, the rationale for
that project, and its normative foundation. Although the project is in continuity with the
goal, pursued in Making It Explicit, of explaining inferential semantics in terms of a normative
pragmatics, more structure is added, which clarifies the foundation of the overall enterprise. In
the second part, I focus on some objections to the complementary structure of normative and
modal vocabularies, and defend a different interpretation of its foundational structure. The
goal is to show the modal vocabulary underlies the conceivability and the very inferential
practices in which normative vocabulary is involved
Completeness and limitation of natural languages
This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.Expressibility, namely the condition that whatever can be thought can be said, is for strong reasons considered as an essential property of natural languages. To avoid circularity, thought cannot be identified here as what language expresses. The present paper argues that completeness of language with regard to thought is a natural consequence of the fact that the language faculty is essentially the capacity to acquire and use combinatorial systems of symbols. In contrast to iconic signs, symbolic systems do not depend on similarity between signal and meaning, but are based on convention. This symbolic nature of language provides access to any domain of human experience, since no situational connection or similarity between signal and denotatum is required; the combinatorial character allows for any degree of detail, as it provides for expressions of arbitrary complexity. The symbolic and combinatorial nature of human languages implies their discrete and abstract character, by which they are limited to the expression of discrete meanings. Mental structures that are bound to similarity with the signal they rely on are therefore outside the range of language. Percepts of faces and the meaning of music are briefly discussed as mental representations that cannot be verbalized. The symbolic nature of language sets the limits of expressibility, but it also allows for metalanguage and definitions, which in turn are means to overcome local constraints on expressibility. Finally, expressibility is to be distinguished from codability, i.e., the preference for optimal expression and its consequences, which shape conventions and use of symbols.Peer Reviewe
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Modeling Narrative Discourse
This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers the conversational networks to be found in literary fiction as a key aspect of discourse coherence; by isolating and analyzing these networks, we are able to comment on longstanding literary theories. The second approach proposes a new set of discourse relations that are specific to narrative. By focusing on certain key aspects, such as agentive characters, goals, plans, beliefs, and time, these relations represent a theory-of-mind interpretation of a text. We show that these discourse relations are expressive, formal, robust, and through the use of a software system, amenable to corpus collection projects through the use of trained annotators. We have procured and released a collection of over 100 encodings, covering a set of fables as well as longer texts including literary fiction and epic poetry. We are able to inferentially find similarities and analogies between encoded stories based on the proposed relations, and an evaluation of this technique shows that human raters prefer such a measure of similarity to a more traditional one based on the semantic distances between story propositions
Fair decomposition of group obligations
We consider the problem of decomposing a group norm into a set of individual obligations for the agents comprising the group, such that if the individual obligations are fulfilled, the group obligation is fulfilled. Such an assignment of tasks to agents is often subject to additional social or organisational norms that specify permissible ways in which tasks can be assigned. An important role of social norms is that they can be used to impose ‘fairness constraints’, which seek to distribute individual responsibility for discharging the group norm in a ‘fair’ or ‘equitable’ way. We propose a simple language for this kind of fairness constraints and analyse the problem of computing a fair decomposition of a group obligation, both for non-repeating and for repeating group obligations
Dialogues with algorithms
In this short paper we focus on human in the loop for rule-based software
used for law enforcement. For example, one can think of software that computes
fines like tachograph software, software that prepares evidence like DNA
sequencing software or social profiling software to patrol in high-risk zones,
among others. An important difference between a legal human agent and a
software application lies in possible dialogues. A human agent can be
interrogated to motivate her decisions. Often such dialogues with software are
at the best extremely hard but mostly impossible. We observe that the absence
of a dialogue can sincerely violate civil rights and legal principles like, for
example, Transparency or Contestability. Thus, possible dialogues with legal
algorithms are at the least highly desirable. Futuristic as this may sound, we
observe that in various realms of formal methods, such dialogues are easily
obtainable. However, this triggers the usual tension between the expressibility
of the dialogue language and the feasibility of the corresponding computations
Logics for modelling collective attitudes
We introduce a number of logics to reason about collective propositional
attitudes that are defined by means of the majority rule. It is well known that majoritarian
aggregation is subject to irrationality, as the results in social choice theory and judgment
aggregation show. The proposed logics for modelling collective attitudes are based on
a substructural propositional logic that allows for circumventing inconsistent outcomes.
Individual and collective propositional attitudes, such as beliefs, desires, obligations, are
then modelled by means of minimal modalities to ensure a number of basic principles. In
this way, a viable consistent modelling of collective attitudes is obtained
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