24 research outputs found
Thought and predication in Frege and Russell
This dissertation offers a reappraisal of how Russell’s views about thought and predication around the time of his Principles of Mathematics relate to Frege’s own theorizing about those topics. It does so by telling a story about the encounter of Russell’s world with Frege’s logic. The main protagonist in that story is Russell. Briefly, the story is as follows.
Russell inherited from Moore the elements of the largely atomistic worldview that he upheld around 1903. Underlying that worldview was a model of term combination that we may call the building blocks model. That model was primarily targeted at the composition of atomic propositions (chapter 3). In one respect, the model proved advantageous, in that it prevented Russell from mistaking propositional functions (or what they stand for) for properties in the traditional sense (chapters 1 and 4). In other respects, it had a deleterious effect on Russell’s theorizing. In fact, it would break down even in the case of atomic propositions themselves (chapter 4). However, it was as a model for the kinds of complexity introduced by propositional functions (chapter 5) and that-clauses (chapter 6) that it proved seriously inadequate. By contrast, Frege’s model of complexity derived entirely from his account of generality, and was therefore perfectly suited to functions (chapter 2). Yet, Frege’s relative indifference towards ontological questions, or at any rate his lack of a developed picture of the world comparable to Russell’s, meant that he could avoid any deep commitments with regard to the other two cases (chapters 2 and 7)."This work was supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, grant number SFRH/BD/129498/2017.
I am grateful for additional support from the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Stirling, the St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy, and the Centre for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon."--Fundin
Ontological Investigations in the Quantum Domain: A deflationary approach on ontology of physics
The aim of this thesis is to propose a deflationary approach towards the ontological analysis of physical theories. Such an approach sustains that the development of ontologies for physical theories must be neutral relatively to the debate between realists and anti-realists in philosophy of physics.
Mainly, our attention will be oriented towards what we called "quantum domain", which includes the non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics and variants of the Quantum Field Theory. This meta-ontological approach consists in an attempt to provide a methodology for the development of specific ontologies for physical theories. With this aim we suggest the separation between physical phenomena and physical theories on one side, and physical theories and ontologies on the other side. This separation intends to endorse the idea that physical theories can provide all the informative contents required for the development of the ontologies associated with them. The result is a defense of the idea that physical theories can positively contribute for the constitution of the ontologies in physics. Additionally, we present a critical analysis of four different ontological approaches to QM and QFT. Each one of these interpretations deals with a different ontological category (tropes, events and processes).
At the end of the thesis we will analyze the concepts of interaction and commutation in QFT in order to exemplify the main lines of the deflationary approach suggested here
Adjudication in judicial review: an inferential approach
The thesis focuses on Judicial Review of Legislation, exploring—with the aid of Robert Brandom’s inferential semantics—the possibility of engaging in a properly judicial assessment of the constitutionality of a law. In order to do this, and after criticizing the proportionality approach to the subject, it addresses both the nature of the question that is put forward in cases of review of legislation and the essential features of adjudicative decisions, claiming that the conjunction of these two aspects leads to the configuration of a dilemma: the question asked in judicial review of legislation cases does not seem to be judicially answered. Resorting to inferential semantics, the thesis aims to provide a solution to the dilemma and to make explicit the costs of staying within judicial boundaries
The epistemology of violence: understanding the root causes of violence and 'non-conducive' social circumstances in schooling, with a case-study from Brazil.
This study investigates the root causes of violence in Schooling, an area of study which lacks in-depth conceptual foundations upon which effective interventions and non-violent practice can be built. The thesis begins by discussing what is currently lacking in theory, illustrating this with an analysis of ‘Educommunication’; an example of current practice considered to take a ‘radical’ and innovative approach to reducing violence in schooling. After highlighting the inadequacies of such approaches, the thesis formulates a multidimensional theoretical model for understanding the root causes of violence drawing on sociology, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, learning theory and critical theory.
Two new key concepts are introduced: ‘violent epistemology’ and ‘non-conducive social circumstances’. These concepts are put to the test through a detailed ethnographic and socio-historical analysis of a case-study school in Brazil and its surrounding context, demonstrating how violent epistemology and non-conducive circumstances combine to foster multiple manifestations of violence (broadly defined) in schooling. Finally, a preliminary formulation of the concepts of ‘non-violent epistemology’ and ‘more conducive circumstances’ are presented, along with suggestions about how these concepts might be translated into practice.
This study combines detailed theoretical formulations with analysis of sociohistorical accounts, and of primary data collected during an immersive period of qualitative field research. Primary data was collected using Participant Observation and analysed using methods inspired by critical dialectics, phenomenology and grounded theory. The key contributions of this thesis include the presentation of a systematic and comprehensive framework for understanding the root causes of violence in schooling; the demonstration of how violent epistemology and its effects can be identified as running through all levels of society as well as throughout history; and the identification of theoretical and practical starting points for addressing violence at its root causes
Modal auxiliary verbs and contexts
Modal auxiliary verbs, such as `could', `might', `must', `would', and others, have different readings depending on the context in which they occur (Kratzer 1981). The sentence `Jess could fry the fish' can mean that, in a time previous to the utterance of the sentence, Jess had the ability to fry the fish, or it can mean that, at the time of the utterance, Jess frying the fish is a possible event.
Modal auxiliary verbs often create intensional environments, leading the events described by the second verb to be understood to be non-actual events. When the readings are described as being determined by a context, it is often a broad notion of non-linguistic and extra-sentential linguistic context that is the focus of the interpretation. For example, descriptive pragmatic constraints are used in Lewis 1973 and Kratzer 1981 to characterize types of accessibility relations and types of orderings of worlds.
A large part of the meaning of modal auxiliary verbs, however, centers around how the events described by the second verb are situated relative to the time at which the sentence containing the modal auxiliary is used. Information about the temporal situation of an event is conveyed through the linguistic context in which a modal auxiliary verb occurs, including, but not limited to, lexical properties of the linguistic expressions describing the event in the scope of the modal auxiliary, lexical properties of the modal auxiliary itself, and temporal and aspectual marking on linguistic expressions in the verbal projections.
In order to provide a framework for representing the interactions of tense, aspect, and modality, a fragment of English is given in a Multi-Modal Combinatorial Categorial Grammar (Baldridge & Kruijff, Steedman 2012). Modal auxiliaries are given verb-like lexical entries in the grammar using lexical entries that combine features from Villavicenio 2002 and standard attribute value matrices of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard & Sag 1999, Sag, Wasow, & Bender 2003). Modal auxiliaries have default lexical arguments with which they combine, and they combine with temporal and aspectual meaning that is sometimes morphologically manifested through grammatical tense and aspect. Portions of the combinatory methods are based on Bach 1983, who argued for less constrained combinatorial rules and unification of features in order to represent modal auxiliaries.
The notion of event semantics (Davidson 1967) plays an important role in the formulation of the compositional semantics due to the way in which event times are related to aspectual meaning. The grammar uses a Neo-Davidsonian approach (Parsons 1990) to representing the arguments of the verb and builds on the work of Champollion 2015. The temporal component is very important in this work and uses portions of the temporal and event ontology proposed in Muskens 1995, 2003.
Two paradigms of modal auxiliaries are proposed: Tense-bearing modal auxiliaries and non-tense-bearing modal auxiliaries. Within each paradigm, readings are shown to have differing semantics with respect to the semantic roles with which they combine and the temporal and aspectual readings that they can have. Differing results with respect to their behaviour in describing various states of affairs are addressed as is their behaviour in expressing past tense, sequence of tense contexts (Abusch 1997), and the distribution of perfect aspect.
The formal grammar distinguishes parts of the meaning of sentences with modal auxiliary verbs that can be represented in terms of composition of temporal and aspectual expressions with modal auxiliary verbs or composition of a modal auxiliary verb with its arguments on one hand from parts of the meaning that are constrained by a broader notion of context, on the other hand.
The notion of a broader context is not, however, neglected in the treatment. The English language fragment presented in the grammar is interpreted in a relativist semantic model, motivated by the assessment-sensitivity of epistemic modal auxiliaries (MacFarlane 2011, Lasersohn 2005, Lasersohn 2015). Readings that do not require assessment sensitivity are given truth conditions according to those given for monadic truth in Lasersohn 2015.
The interaction of readings with their grammatical distribution provides additional theoretical insights into the linguistic contexts that are conducive to assessment sensitivity, actuality inferences, and counterfactual readings. Most notably, it is shown that assessment sensitivity is only present in modal auxiliaries that are in the non-tense-bearing paradigm.
Parts of the theoretical treatment presented in this work have been applied in areas of automated classification of modal auxiliary verbs (Moon 2011, Moon 2012, Moon et al. 2016), showing that temporal, aspectual, and argument structure information can be used to determine the most likely reading of a modal auxiliary at the sentence level, increasing the ease of reading identification for automated tools
Finality revived: powers and intentionality
Proponents of physical intentionality argue that the classic hallmarks of intentionality highlighted by Brentano are also found in purely physical powers. Critics worry that this idea is metaphysically obscure at best, and at worst leads to panpsychism or animism. I examine the debate in detail, finding both confusion and illumination in the physical intentionalist thesis. Analysing a number of the canonical features of intentionality, I show that they all point to one overarching phenomenon of which both the mental and the physical are kinds, namely finality. This is the finality of ‘final causes’, the long-discarded idea of universal action for an end to which recent proponents of physical intentionality are in fact pointing whether or not they realise it. I explain finality in terms of the concept of specific indifference, arguing that in the case of the mental, specific indifference is realised by the process of abstraction, which has no correlate in the case of physical powers. This analysis, I conclude, reveals both the strength and weakness of rational creatures such as us, as well as demystifying (albeit only partly) the way in which powers work