Presuppositions in Context: Constructing Bridges

About the book: The First International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modelling and Using Context, Rio de Janeiro, January 1997, gave rise to the present book, which contains a selection of the papers presented there, thoroughly refereed and revised. The treatment of contexts as bona fide objects of logical formalisation has gained wide acceptance, following the seminal impetus given by McCarthy in his Turing Award address. The field of natural language offers a particularly rich variety of examples and challenges to researchers concerned with the formal modelling of context, and several chapters in the volume deal with contextualisation in the setting of natural language. Others adopt a purely formal-logical viewpoint, seeking to develop general models of even wider applicability. The 12 chapters are organised in three groups: formalisation of contextual information in natural language understanding and generation, the application of context in mechanised reasoning domains, and novel non-classical logics for contextual application

CHR as grammar formalism. A first report

Grammars written as Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) can be executed as efficient and robust bottom-up parsers that provide a straightforward, non-backtracking treatment of ambiguity. Abduction with integrity constraints as well as other dynamic hypothesis generation techniques fit naturally into such grammars and are exemplified for anaphora resolution, coordination and text interpretation.Comment: 12 pages. Presented at ERCIM Workshop on Constraints, Prague, Czech Republic, June 18-20, 200

Presupposition projection as proof construction

Even though Van der Sandt's presuppositions as anaphora approach is empirically successful, it fails to give a formal account of the interaction between world-knowledge and presuppositions. In this paper, an algorithm is sketched which is based on the idea of presuppositions as anaphora. It improves on this approach by employing a deductive system, Constructive Type Theory (CTT), to get a formal handle on the way world-knowledge influences presupposition projection. In CTT, proofs for expressions are explicitly represented as objects. These objects can be seen as a generalization of DRT's discourse markers. They are useful in dealing with presuppositional phenomena which require world-knowledge, such as Clark's bridging examples and Beaver's conditional presuppositions

Stages Of Discovery And Entrepreneurship

In an attempt at a systematic theory of entrepreneurship, this paper connects various literatures, from economics and business. In economics, there are many notions of entrepreneurship, some of which seem to contradict each other. For example, there are notions of entrepreneurship as an equilibrating and as a disequilibrating force. In this paper, these differences are connected with the issue of exploitation and exploration from the business literature. The question is how one can explore while maintaining exploitation. For this, a cycle of discovery has been proposed, with stages of equilibration and disequilibration which build on each other, in process where exploitation leads to exploration. It is proposed that different notions of entrepreneurship can be associated with different stages of that cycle. In this way, different types of entrepreneurship complement each other in an ongoing process of discovery.entrepreneurship;innovation;organizational learning;discovery

Why Scientific Knowledge Is Still the Best

In his latest attack, even though he claims to be a practitioner of “close reading” (Wills 2018b, 34), it appears that Wills still has not bothered to read the paper in which I defend the thesis he seeks to attack (Mizrahi 2017a), or any of the papers in my exchange with Brown (Mizrahi 2017b; 2018a), as evidenced by the fact that he does not cite them at all. This explains why Wills completely misunderstands Weak Scientism and the arguments for the quantitative superiority (in terms of research output and research impact) as well as qualitative superiority (in terms of explanatory, predictive, and instrumental success) of scientific knowledge over non-scientific knowledge

Abductive two-dimensionalism: a new route to the a priori identification of necessary truths

Epistemic two-dimensional semantics, advocated by Chalmers and Jackson, among others, aims to restore the link between necessity and a priority seemingly broken by Kripke, by showing how armchair access to semantic intensions provides a basis for knowledge of necessary a posteriori truths. The most compelling objections to E2D are that, for one or other reason, the requisite intensions are not accessible from the armchair. As we substantiate here, existing versions of E2D are indeed subject to such access-based objections. But, we moreover argue, the difficulty lies not with E2D but with the typically presupposed conceiving-based epistemology of intensions. Freed from that epistemology, and given the right alternative—one where inference to the best explanation provides the operative guide to intensions—E2D can meet access-based objections, and fulfill its promise of restoring the desirable link between necessity and a priority. This result serves as a central application of Biggs and Wilson, according to which abduction is an a priori mode of inference

Space exploration: The interstellar goal and Titan demonstration

Automated interstellar space exploration is reviewed. The Titan demonstration mission is discussed. Remote sensing and automated modeling are considered. Nuclear electric propulsion, main orbiting spacecraft, lander/rover, subsatellites, atmospheric probes, powered air vehicles, and a surface science network comprise mission component concepts. Machine, intelligence in space exploration is discussed

Tracing the Biological Roots of Knowledge

The essay is a critical review of three possible approaches in the theory of knowledge while tracing the biological roots of knowledge: empiricist, rationalist and developmentalist approaches. Piaget's genetic epistemology, a developmentalist approach, is one of the first comprehensive treatments on the question of tracing biological roots of knowledge. This developmental approach is currently opposed, without questioning the biological roots of knowledge, by the more popular rationalist approach, championed by Chomsky. Developmental approaches are generally coherent with cybernetic models, of which the theory of autopoiesis proposed by Maturana and Varela made a significant theoretical move in proposing an intimate connection between metabolism and knowledge. Modular architecture is currently considered more or less an undisputable model for both biology as well as cognitive science. By suggesting that modulation of modules is possible by motor coordination, a proposal is made to account for higher forms of conscious cognition within the four distinguishable layers of the human mind. Towards the end, the problem of life and cognition is discussed in the context of the evolution of complex cognitive systems, suggesting the unique access of phylogeny during the ontogeny of human beings as a very special case, and how the problem cannot be dealt with independent of the evolution of coding systems in nature

Decisionmaking in practice: The dynamics of muddling through

An alternative to conventional models that treat decisions as open-loop independent choices is presented. The alterative model is based on observations of work situations such as healthcare, where decisionmaking is more typically a closed-loop, dynamic, problem-solving process. The article suggests five important distinctions between the processes assumed by conventional models and the reality of decisionmaking in practice. It is suggested that the logic of abduction in the form of an adaptive,muddling through process is more consistent with the realities of practice in domains such as healthcare.The practical implication is that the design goal should not be to improve consistency with normativemodels of rationality, but to tune the representations guiding the muddling process to increase functional perspicacity