17 research outputs found

    Asking and Answering

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    Questions are everywhere and the ubiquitous activities of asking and answering, as most human activities, are susceptible to failure - at least from time to time. This volume offers several current approaches to the systematic study of questions and the surrounding activities and works toward supporting and improving these activities. The contributors formulate general problems for a formal treatment of questions, investigate specific kinds of questions, compare different frameworks with regard to how they regulate the activities of asking and answering of questions, and situate these activities in a wider framework of cognitive/epistemic discourse. From the perspectives of logic, linguistics, epistemology, and philosophy of language emerges a report on the state of the art of the theory of questions

    A Defeasible Calculus for Zetetic Agents

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    The study of defeasible reasoning unites epistemologists with those working in AI, in part, because both are interested in epistemic rationality. While it is traditionally thought to govern the formation and (with)holding of beliefs, epistemic rationality may also apply to the interrogative attitudes associated with our core epistemic practice of inquiry, such as wondering, investigating, and curiosity. Since generally intelligent systems should be capable of rational inquiry, AI researchers have a natural interest in the norms that govern interrogative attitudes. Following its recent coinage, we use the term ``zetetic'' to refer to the properties and norms associated with the capacity to inquire. In this paper, we argue that zetetic norms can be modeled via defeasible inferences to and from questions---a.k.a erotetic inferences---in a manner similar to the way norms of epistemic rationality are represented by defeasible inference rules. We offer a sequent calculus that accommodates the unique features of ``erotetic defeat" and that exhibits the computational properties needed to inform the design of zetetic agents. The calculus presented here is an improved version of the one presented in Millson (2019), extended to cover a new class of defeasible erotetic inferences

    Support and Sets of Situations

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    Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion

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    A fascinating recent turn in epistemology focuses on inquiring attitudes like wondering and being curious. Many have argued that these attitudes are governed by norms similar to those that govern our doxastic attitudes. Yet, to date, this work has only considered norms that might *prohibit* having certain inquiring attitudes (``norms of restriction''), while ignoring those that might *require* having them (``norms of expansion''). We aim to address that omission by offering a framework that generates norms of expansion for inquiring attitudes. The framework draws on inferential erotetic logic, which we explain and augment with some theorems. We explore several of the norms that it yields - some sympathetically, others unsympathetically

    Toward a dynamic logic of questions

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    Toward a dynamic logic of questions

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    Questions are triggers for explicit events of ‘issue management’. We give a complete logic in dynamic-epistemic style for events of raising, refining, and resolving an issue, all in the presence of information flow through observation or communication. We explore extensions of the framework to multi-agent scenarios and long-term temporal protocols. We sketch a comparison with some alternative accounts

    Plongement de la sémantique intentionnelle en sémantique inquisitrice

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    International audienceInquisitive semantics [Ciardelli, Groenedijk and Roelofsen, 2018] is a model of natural language semantics which uniformly represents interrogative and declarative sentences. Clauses are represented by a nonempty downward-closed set of sets of possible worlds, the maximal elements of which are called alternatives. Questions have several alternatives corresponding to their possible answers. In this thesis, we investigate an embedding of (declarative) intentional semantics into inquisitive semantics. We provide a conservative extension [de Groote, 2015] mapping every lexical meaning to an inquisitive meaning.La sémantique inquisitrice [Ciardelli, Groenedijk et Roelofsen, 2018] est un modèle de la sémantique de la langue qui représente uniformément les phrases interrogatives et déclaratives. Les propositions sont représentées par un ensemble d'ensembles de mondes possibles, non vide et clos par le bas, dont les éléments maximaux sont appelés alternatives. Les questions ont plusieurs alternatives, lesquelles correspondent à leurs réponses possibles. Dans ce mémoire, on examine le plongement de la sémantique intentionnelle dans la sémantique inquisitrice. On conçoit une extension conservatrice [de Groote, 2015] qui à toute représentation sémantique lexicale associe un sens inquisiteur. On prouve que cette transformation conserve la conséquence logique (et donc l'équivalence logique) et la composition

    Inquisitive Semantics

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    There is an age-old tradition in linguistics and philosophy to identify the meaning of a entence with its truth-conditions. This can be explained by the fact that linguistic and philosophical investigations are usually carried out in a logical framework that was originally designed to characterize valid reasoning. Indeed, in order to determine whether an argument is valid, it suffices to know the truth-conditions of the premises and conclusion. However, argumentation is neither the sole, nor the primary function of language. One task that language more widely and ordinarily fulfils is to enable the exchange of information between conversational participants. Inquisitive semantics is a new logical framework for the analysis of this fundamental usage of language. Information exchange can be seen as a process of raising and resolving issues. Inquisitive semantics provides a new formal notion of issues, which makes it possible to model various concepts that are crucial for the analysis of linguistic information exchange in a more refined and more principled way than has been possible in previous frameworks. This book provides a detailed exposition of inquisitive semantics, and demonstrates its benefits with a range of applications in the semantic analysis of questions, coordination, modals, conditionals, and intonation
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