Composing leads-to properties

AbstractCompositionality is of great practical importance when building systems from individual components. Unfortunately, leads-to properties are not, in general, compositional, and theorems describing the special cases where they are, are needed. In this paper, we develop a general theory of compositional leads-to properties, and use it to derive a composition theorem based on the notion of progress sets, where progress sets can be defined in various ways. Appropriate definitions of progress sets yield new results and generalized versions of known theorems

Proceedings of Monterey Workshop 2001 Engineering Automation for Sofware Intensive System Integration

The 2001 Monterey Workshop on Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Army Research Office and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency. It is our pleasure to thank the workshop advisory and sponsors for their vision of a principled engineering solution for software and for their many-year tireless effort in supporting a series of workshops to bring everyone together.This workshop is the 8 in a series of International workshops. The workshop was held in Monterey Beach Hotel, Monterey, California during June 18-22, 2001. The general theme of the workshop has been to present and discuss research works that aims at increasing the practical impact of formal methods for software and systems engineering. The particular focus of this workshop was "Engineering Automation for Software Intensive System Integration". Previous workshops have been focused on issues including, "Real-time & Concurrent Systems", "Software Merging and Slicing", "Software Evolution", "Software Architecture", "Requirements Targeting Software" and "Modeling Software System Structures in a fastly moving scenario".Office of Naval ResearchAir Force Office of Scientific Research Army Research OfficeDefense Advanced Research Projects AgencyApproved for public release, distribution unlimite

Integration of analysis techniques in security and fault-tolerance

This thesis focuses on the study of integration of formal methodologies in security protocol analysis and fault-tolerance analysis. The research is developed in two different directions: interdisciplinary and intra-disciplinary. In the former, we look for a beneficial interaction between strategies of analysis in security protocols and fault-tolerance; in the latter, we search for connections among different approaches of analysis within the security area. In the following we summarize the main results of the research

Linguistic Competence and New Empiricism in Philosophy and Science

The topic of this dissertation is the nature of linguistic competence, the capacity to understand and produce sentences of natural language. I defend the empiricist account of linguistic competence embedded in the connectionist cognitive science. This strand of cognitive science has been opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science, coupled with transformational-generative grammar, which was committed to nativism due to the view that human cognition, including language capacity, should be construed in terms of symbolic representations and hardwired rules. Similarly, linguistic competence in this framework was regarded as being innate, rule-governed, domain-specific, and fundamentally different from performance, i.e., idiosyncrasies and factors governing linguistic behavior. I analyze state-of-the-art connectionist, deep learning models of natural language processing, most notably large language models, to see what they can tell us about linguistic competence. Deep learning is a statistical technique for the classification of patterns through which artificial intelligence researchers train artificial neural networks containing multiple layers that crunch a gargantuan amount of textual and/or visual data. I argue that these models suggest that linguistic competence should be construed as stochastic, pattern-based, and stemming from domain-general mechanisms. Moreover, I distinguish syntactic from semantic competence, and I show for each the ramifications of the endorsement of a connectionist research program as opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science and transformational-generative grammar. I provide a unifying front, consisting of usage-based theories, a construction grammar approach, and an embodied approach to cognition to show that the more multimodal and diverse models are in terms of architectural features and training data, the stronger the case is for the connectionist linguistic competence. I also propose to discard the competence vs. performance distinction as theoretically inferior so that a novel and integrative account of linguistic competence originating in connectionism and empiricism that I propose and defend in the dissertation could be put forward in scientific and philosophical literature

A Connectionist Defence of the Inscrutability Thesis and the Elimination of the Mental

This work consists of two parts. In Part I (chapters 1-5), I shall produce a Connectionist Defence of Quine's Thesis of the Inscrutability of Reference, according to which there is no objective fact of the matter as to what the ontological commitments of the speakers of a language are. I shall start by reviewing Quine's project in his original behaviouristic setting. Chapters 1, and 2 will be devoted to addressing several criticisms that Gareth Evans, and Crispin Wright, have put forward on behalf of the friend of semantic realism. Evans (1981) and, more recendy, Wright (1997) have argued on different grounds that, under certain conditions, structural simplicity may become alethic-i.e., truth-conducive-for semantic theories. Being structurally more complex than the standard semantic theory, Quine's perverse semantic route (see chapter 1) is an easy prey for Evans' and Wright's considerations. I shall argue that both Evans' and Wright's criticisms are unmotivated, and do not jeopardize Quine's overall enterprise. I shall then propose a perverse theory of reference (chapter 3) which differs substantially from the ones advanced in the previous literature on the issue. The motivation for pursuing a different perverse semantic proposal resides in the fact that the route I shall be offering is as simple, structurally speaking, as our sanctioned theory of reference is meant to be. Thanks to this feature, my strategy is not subject to certain criticisms which may put perverse proposals a la Quine in jeopardy, thereby becoming an overall better candidate for the Quinean to fulfill her goal. In chapter 4, I shall introduce and develop a criterion recently produced by Wright (1997) in terms of 'psychological simplicity' which threatens the perverse semantic proposal I offered in chapter 3. I shall argue that a Language-of-Thought (LOT)-model of human cognition could motivate Wright's criterion. I shall then introduce the reader to some basic aspects of connectionist theory, and elaborate on a particularly promising neurocomputational approach to language processing put forward by Jeff Elman (1992; 1998). I shall argue that if instead of endorsing a LOT hypothesis, we model human cognition by a recurrent neural network a la Elman, then Wright's criterion is unmotivated. In particular, I shall argue that considerations regarding 'psychological simplicity' are neutral, favouring neither a standard theory of reference, nor a perverse one. In the remainder of Part I, I shall focus upon certain problems for the defender of the Inscrutability Thesis highlighted by the friend of connectionist theory. In chapter 5 I shall introduce a mathematical technique for measuring conceptual similarity across networks that Aarre Laakso and Gary Cottrell (1998; 2000) have recently developed. I shall show how Paul Churchland makes use of Laakso and Cottrell's results to argue that connectionism can furnish us with all we need to construct a robust theory of semantics, and a robust theory of translation-robustness that may potentially be exploited by a connectionist foe of Quine to argue against the Inscrutability Thesis. The bulk of the chapter will be devoted to showing that the notion of conceptual similarity available to the connectionist leaves room for a "connectionist Quinean" to kick in with a or\Q-io-many translational mapping across networks. In Part II (chapters 6, and 7), I shall produce a Connectionist Defence of the Thesis of Eliminative Materialism, according to which propositional attitudes don't exist (see chapter 7). I shall start by rejoining to two arguments that Stephen Stich has recently put forward against the thesis of eliminative materialism. In a nutshell, Stich (1990; 1991) argues that (i) the thesis of eliminative materialism, is neither true nor false, and that (ii) even if it were true, that would be philosophically uninteresting. To support (i) and (ii) Stich relies on two premises: (a) that the job of a theory of reference is to make explicit the tacit theory of reference which underlies our intuitions about the notion of reference itself; and (b) that our intuitive notion of reference is a highly idiosyncratic one. In chapter 6 I shall address Stich's anti-eliminativist claims (i) and (ii). I shall argue that even if we agreed with premises (a) and (b), that would lend no support whatsoever for (i) and (ii). Finally, in chapter 7, I shall introduce a connectionist-inspired conditional argument for the elimination of the posits of folk psychology put forward by William Ramsey, Stephen Stich, and Joseph Garon. I shall consider an objection to the eliminativist argument raised by Andy Clark. I shall then review a counter that Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield produce on behalf of the eliminativist. The discussion in chapter 5 on 'state space semantics and conceptual similarity' will be used to show that Clark's argument is not threatened by Stich and Warfield's considerations. Then, in the remainder of Part II, I shall offer a different line of argument to counter to Clark. A line that focuses on the notion of causal efficacy. I hope to show that the thesis of eliminativist materialism is correct. Conclusions, and directions for future research will follow

Rules and Meaning in Quantum Mechanics

This book concerns the metasemantics of quantum mechanics (QM). Roughly, it pursues an investigation at an intersection of the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of semantics, and it offers a critical analysis of rival explanations of the semantic facts of standard QM. Two problems for such explanations are discussed: categoricity and permanence of rules. New results include 1) a reconstruction of Einstein's incompleteness argument, which concludes that a local, separable, and categorical QM cannot exist, 2) a reinterpretation of Bohr's principle of correspondence, grounded in the principle of permanence, 3) a meaning-variance argument for quantum logic, which follows a line of critical reflections initiated by Weyl, and 4) an argument for semantic indeterminacy leveled against inferentialism about QM, inspired by Carnap's work in the philosophy of classical logic.Comment: 150 page