Logic in Opposition

It is claimed hereby that, against a current view of logic as a theory of consequence, opposition is a basic logical concept that can be used to define consequence itself. This requires some substantial changes in the underlying framework, including: a non-Fregean semantics of questions and answers, instead of the usual truth-conditional semantics; an extension of opposition as a relation between any structured objects; a definition of oppositions in terms of basic negation. Objections to this claim will be reviewed

Quantum Structure of Negation and Conjunction in Human Thought

We analyse in this paper the data collected in a set of experiments performed on human subjects on the combination of natural concepts. We investigate the mutual influence of conceptual conjunction and negation by measuring the membership weights of a list of exemplars with respect to two concepts, e.g., 'Fruits' and 'Vegetables', and their conjunction 'Fruits And Vegetables', but also their conjunction when one or both concepts are negated, namely, 'Fruits And Not Vegetables', 'Not Fruits And Vegetables' and 'Not Fruits And Not Vegetables'. Our findings sharpen existing analysis on conceptual combinations, revealing systematic and remarkable deviations from classical (fuzzy set) logic and probability theory. And, more important, our results give further considerable evidence to the validity of our quantum-theoretic framework for the combination of two concepts. Indeed, the representation of conceptual negation naturally arises from the general assumptions of our two-sector Fock space model, and this representation faithfully agrees with the collected data. In addition, we find a further significant deviation and a priori unexpected from classicality, which can exactly be explained by assuming that human reasoning is the superposition of an 'emergent reasoning' and a 'logical reasoning', and that these two processes can be successfully represented in a Fock space algebraic structure.Comment: 44 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.235

Some Endeavours at Synthesising a Solution to the Sorites

‘Puzzles’, ‘word games’, ‘logical anomalies’, whatever we call them, they perplex us and challenge our familiar patterns of reasoning. One of these puzzles, among many others, originated from the mind of an ancient Megarian logician, Eubulides of Miletus, and endures to the modern day.1 Its name, ‘sorites’, can be traced to the Greek word soros, meaning ‘heap.’ The answer to whether one grain of sand ‘is a heap’ or ‘is not a heap’ seems quite simple: it is not a heap. However, as we add grains to the one, at what future point does the non-heap become a heap? Our decision is fraught with uncertainty. Are the objects or the language we are using to describe them vague? In academic philosophy, the ancient Greek puzzle has gained the status of a paradox, as philosophers apply stoic and modern logic to these propositions considered to have vague predicates. The current debate has developed quite serious and wide-ranging implications, such as whether sorites issues provide adequate grounds for abandoning our standard ontology (or our understanding of what really exists), 2 and (germinating into another discipline) whether vagueness in the language of legal rules can generate disagreement as to whether there are right answers to questions of law. 3 Several unique solutions to the paradox have been proposed, yet all suffer from specific inadequacies that might, upon further reflection, disappear in the event that we endeavour to produce a synthesis. When we say that we are attempting to derive a synthesis, we seek to combine elements of two solutions for the sake of creating a new (and hopefully, though not necessarily, a better) one. The paradox of the sorites, or ‘the heap’, appeals to us because it challenges our assumption that we may categorically describe clear cases and their negations, yet fail to distinguish the borderline ones. I will demonstrate that some combinations of solutions are easy fits while others are extremely weak and awkward as attempts at resolving the paradox. Nonetheless, the process of synthesis produces three noteworthy combinations

Principles of ‘Newspeak’ in Polish Translations of British and American Press Articles under Communist Rule

The paper analyses selected Polish translations of British and American press articles published in the magazine Forum in the years 1965 - 1989. In communist Poland, all such texts were censored before publication, which forced the translators to avoid content and language that could be banned by censors and to adopt a specific style of expression known as Newspeak. The paper lists the linguistic phenomena in the target language that represent features typical of Newspeak and identifies manipulative procedures which led to their occurrence, using a corpus of 25 English texts and their Polish translations

Creating a method for video game subtitle analysis and presenting a demonstrative case study on Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles

In this study, I set out to create a method for video game subtitle analysis that could benefit translation studies, especially the study of video game subtitling. I demonstrate the use of my method by conducting a case study on the video game Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles in comparison to the English original subtitles. Much of the popularity of video games can be credited to their translations, as having been translated to multiple different languages has enabled them to be marketed all around the world. However, little research on video games is done by translation studies, even though video games have become a globally popular pastime in the past few decades. I chose this topic for my study as I believed it could benefit the field of translation studies by bringing a new research topic and a practical method of research into the attention of a larger audience. The study begins by presenting background information on both subtitling and video games, as they are the essential factors of this study. Then, the study introduces the theoretical background on which the new analysing method is based on, which is by the works of Díaz-Cintas and Remael Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling (2014) and Mangiron Subtitling in game localisation: A descriptive study (2012). Linguistic subtitle analysis by Diaz-Cintas and Remael (2014) and video game subtitling conventions by Mangiron (2012) are combined into a new analysing method for video game subtitles. The method consists of two main categories; linguistic analysis components and video game subtitling attributes. There are three linguistic analysis components: text reduction, linguistic cohesion and coherence in subtitling and segmentation and line breaks; and five video game subtitling attributes: subtitle length and duration, font: size, type colour, and background, character identification, sound effects and emotions, reduction and segmentation. The method is introduced on its own, and then demonstrated in use in the case study on Trine 2’s Finnish subtitles. The case study on Trine 2 successfully demonstrated the use of my method for video game subtitle analysis. The Finnish subtitles were compared to the English originals by using the new method, and the analysis provided much results. The case study proved that this method could be used by translation studies to study video game subtitles and lay the foundation for future work in video game translation studies

Emotive ontology: extracting fine-grained emotions from terse, informal messages

With the uptake of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, there is now a vast amount of new user generated content on a daily basis, much of it in the form of short, informal free-form text. Businesses, institutions, governments and law enforcement organisations are now actively seeking ways to monitor and more generally analyse public response to various events, products and services. Our primary aim in this project was the development of an approach for capturing a wide and comprehensive range of emotions from sparse, text based messages in social-media, such as Twitter, to help monitor emotional responses to events. Prior work has focused mostly on negative / positive sentiment classification tasks, and although numerous approaches employ highly elaborate and effective techniques with some success, the sentiment or emotion granularity is generally limiting and arguably not always most appropriate for real-world problems. In this paper we employ an ontology engineering approach to the problem of fine-grained emotion detection in sparse messages. Messages are also processed using a custom NLP pipeline, which is appropriate for the sparse and informal nature of text encountered on micro-blogs. Our approach detects a range of eight high-level emotions; anger, confusion, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, shame and surprise. We report f-measures (recall and precision) and compare our approach to two related approaches from recent literature. © 2013 IADIS