The myth of occurrence-based semantics

The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon :415, 2006) and Glanzberg and King :1–29, 2020) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl :381–415, 2010c) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy

Dare et Capere: Virtuous Mesh and a Targeting Diagram

In Miller, P. D. and Matviyenko, S. (Eds.) (2014). The Imaginary App. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pp. 143-162

Bilateral Investment Treaties and Domestic Institutional Reform

The bilateral investment treaties (BITs) signed between developed and developing countries are supposed to increase the flow of investment from the former to the latter. But the evidence indicates that the existing approach of guaranteeing special protections for foreign investors has only a modest impact on luring their dollars. At the same time they are failing to produce meaningful benefits, these treaty commitments create substantial costs for the host states that make them, exposing them to liability and constraining their regulatory authority. Given this state of imbalance, the time seems ripe for a new approach, but existing proposals for revising BITs are either insufficient or unrealistic, or in some instances even counterproductive. This Article calls for a fundamental redesign of BITs based on empirically validated premises about how host states actually attract foreign investment. Political science and economic studies show that foreign investors place substantial weight on the quality of domestic institutions. Existing BITs fail to promote investment because they are not an adequate substitute for these institutions, nor are they effective in generating reform. The proposed model would make domestic institutional reform the organizing principle of BIT design, and the Article offers several specific provisions that would help achieve that goal. Such an approach would produce immediate benefits for host states and so should be particularly attractive to developing countries. But the institutional reform model also retains the end goal shared by both sides of increasing foreign investment and so should be more realistically attainable than proposals pitched as benefiting developing states alone

Engineering Existence?

This paper investigates the connection between two recent trends in philosophy: higher-orderism and conceptual engineering. Higher-orderists use higher-order quantifiers (in particular quantifiers binding variables that occupy the syntactic positions of predicates) to express certain key metaphysical doctrines, such as the claim that there are properties. I argue that, on a natural construal, the higher-orderist approach involves an engineering project concerning, among others, the concept of existence. I distinguish between a modest construal of this project, on which it aims at engineering higher-order analogues of the familiar notion of first-order existence, and an ambitious construal, on which it additionally aims at engineering a broadened notion of existence that subsumes first-order and higher-order existence. After identifying a substantial problem for the ambitious project, I investigate a possible response which is based on adopting a cumulative type theory as the background higher-order logic. While effective against the problem at hand, this strategy turns out to undermine a major reason to embrace higher-orderism in the first place, namely the idea that higher-orderism dissolves a range of otherwise intractable debates in metaphysics. Higher-orderists are therefore best advised to pursue their engineering project on the modest variant and against the background of standard type theory

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Contextual Linear Types for Differential Privacy

Language support for differentially-private programming is both crucial and delicate. While elaborate program logics can be very expressive, type-system based approaches using linear types tend to be more lightweight and amenable to automatic checking and inference, and in particular in the presence of higher-order programming. Since the seminal design of Fuzz, which is restricted to $\epsilon$-differential privacy, a lot of effort has been made to support more advanced variants of differential privacy, like ($\epsilon$,$\delta$)-differential privacy. However, supporting these advanced privacy variants while also supporting higher-order programming in full has been proven to be challenging. We present Jazz, a language and type system which uses linear types and latent contextual effects to support both advanced variants of differential privacy and higher-order programming. Even when avoiding advanced variants and higher-order programming, our system achieves higher precision than prior work for a large class of programming patterns. We formalize the core of the Jazz language, prove it sound for privacy via a logical relation for metric preservation, and illustrate its expressive power through a number of case studies drawn from the recent differential privacy literature.Comment: Journal revisio

PROUST AND SCHELLING ON MEMORY AND TRUTH

Proust and Schelling ask, in their different ways, what is our rapport to the past? What is our relationship to the past such that it can offer us the truth about itself, about its appearance, about our perception of its appearance and finally, about ourselves? Were we there when it happened (which asks the same as ‘did we have being when it happened’), has it happened and has it finished happening? In the Ages of the World, Schelling explicates an ontology of the past. His formulation of being which exists although it has no being is a useful framework within which the past can be situated as a relationship to the present, that is to say, it is where non-being can exist in relationship to the being of the present, which I use as a formulation for memory throughout my discussion of Proust. KEYWORDS

Critical Environmentalism - Towards an Epistemic Framework for Architecture

Upon identifying the multifaceted and disparate array of ever-changing environmental informants to architectural discourse, one is confronted with how to unite this dialogue in meaningful ways to current modes of thought and action. The question gains more significance as our knowledge of the greater environmental domain becomes more systemic and complexly heterogenic, while at the same time, approaches to the issues have proved to be progressively more reductivist, disconnected, overtly abstracted or theorized, and universally globalized in regard to multifaceted and content-rich human particularities in situ. This research focuses on the implications and applications of Critical Environmentalism (CE) to propose a corresponding epistemological framework to wide-ranging socio-environmental complexities occurring across architectural endeavors, primarily within urban and community developments as comprising the greatest number of intersections between human constructions and the greater environmental domain. CE addresses environmental issues reciprocally emerging across numerous disciplines and theoretical stances and fosters critical and systemically collective approaches to knowledge integration, amalgamating multiple stakeholder perspectives within an interconnective and operational goal of creative communal development and betterment of the human condition in relation to environmental concerns. Situating the environment (Umwelt) as an interconnecting catalyst between divergent points-of-views, CE promotes a multi-methodological, co-enabling framework intended to foster increased ethical and participatory dynamics, communal vitality, co-invested attention, and productive interchanges of knowledge that cultivate an overall quality of knowing and being within the intricacies of the greater domain. As such, it engages broader definitions for architecture within its social community, significantly embodied and epistemologically co-substantiating within a shared, environmental life-place. Fundamentally a hermeneutic standpoint, this investigation elucidates conceptual connections and mutual grounds, objectives, and modes-of-operation across knowledge domains, initiating an essential, socio-environmentally oriented framework for architectural endeavors. In this, it brings together common threads within critical social theory and environmentalist discourse to subsequently promote distinct interconnective components within a framework of socio-environmental thought for architecture. The research then provides case examples and recommendations toward stimulating progressive environmental initiatives and thus increased capacity to improve existing epistemic conditions for architecture, urban design, and community development within the broader scope of Critical Environmentalism