2,865 research outputs found
Rich Situated Attitudes
We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich
Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances
is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness,
an utteranceâs rich situated content varies with the informational
situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its
richness, this content contains information beyond the utteranceâs lexically
encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content
solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language
(cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance
contents with the interpreting agentâs informational situation, it
solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for
the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman
will reason with more propositions than an expert
Do we need dynamic semantics?
I suspect the answer to the question in the title of this paper is no. But
the scope of my paper will be considerably more limited: I will be concerned
with whether certain types of considerations that are commonly cited in
favor of dynamic semantics do in fact push us towards a dynamic semantics.
Ultimately, I will argue that the evidence points to a dynamics of discourse
that is best treated pragmatically, rather than as part of the semantics
A Bridge from Semantic Value to Content
A common view relating compositional semantics and the objects of assertion holds the following: Sentences Ï and Ï expresses the same proposition iff Ï and Ï have the same modal profile. Following Dummett, Evans, and Lewis, Stanley argues that this view is fundamentally mistaken. According to Dummett, we must distinguish the semantic contribution a sentence makes to more complex expressions in which it occurs from its assertoric content. StojniÄ insists that views which distinguish the roles of content and semantic value must nevertheless ensure a tight connection between the two. But, she contends, there is a crucial disanalogy between the views that follow Lewis and the views that follow Dummett. Stanleyâs Dummettian view is argued to contain a fatal flaw: On such views, there is no way to secure an appropriate connection between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content. I will review the background issues from Dummett, Evans, Lewis, and Stanley, and provide a principled way of bridging the gap between semantic value and a theoretically motivated notion of assertoric content
The Logical Burdens of Proof. Assertion and Hypothesis
The paper proposes two logical analyses of (the norms of) justification. In a first, realist-minded case, truth is logically independent from justification and leads to a pragmatic logic LP including two epistemic and pragmatic operators, namely, assertion and hypothesis. In a second, antirealist-minded case, truth is not logically independent from justification and results in two logical systems of information and justification: AR4 and AR4Âą, respectively, provided with a question-answer semantics. The latter proposes many more epistemic agents, each corresponding to a wide variety of epistemic norms. After comparing the different norms of justification involved in these logical systems, two hexagons expressing Aristotelian relations of opposition will be gathered in order to clarify how (a fragment of) pragmatic formulas can be interpreted in a fuzzy-based question-answer semantics
Thinking Impossible Things
âThere is no use in trying,â said Alice; âone canât believe impossible things.â âI dare say you havenât had much practice,â said the Queen. âWhen I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes Iâve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfastâ.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.
It is a rather common view among philosophers that one cannot, properly speaking, be said to believe, conceive, imagine, hope for, or seek what is impossible.
Some philosophers, for instance George Berkeley and the early Wittgenstein, thought that logically contradictory propositions lack cognitive meaning (informational content) and cannot, therefore, be thought or believed. Philosophers who do not go as far as Berkeley and Wittgenstein in denying that impossible propositions or states of affairs are thinkable, may still claim that it is impossible to rationally believe an impossible proposition. On a classical âCartesianâ view of belief, belief is a purely mental state of the agent holding true a proposition p that she âgraspsâ and is directly acquainted with. But if the agent is directly acquainted with an impossible proposition, then, presumably, she must know that it is impossible. But surely no rational agent can hold true a proposition that she knows is impossible. Hence, no rational agent can believe an impossible proposition. Thus it seems that on the Cartesian view of propositional attitudes as inner mental states in which proposition are immediately apprehended by the mind, it is impossible for a rational agent to believe, imagine or conceive an impossible proposition.
Ruth Barcan Marcus (1983) has suggested that a belief attribution is defeated once it is discovered that the proposition, or state of affairs that is believed is impossible. According to her intuition, just as knowledge implies truth, belief implies possibility.
It is commonplace that people claim to believe propositions that later turn out to be impossible. According to Barcan Marcus, the correct thing to say in such a situation is not: I once believed that A but I donât believe it any longer since I have come to realize that it is impossible that A. What one should say is instead: It once appeared to me that I believed that A, but I did not, since it is impossible that A. Thus, Barcan Marcus defends what we might call Aliceâs thesis: Necessarily, for any proposition p and any subject x, if x believes p, then p is possible.
Aliceâs thesis that it is impossible to hold impossible beliefs, seems to come into conflict with our ordinary practices of attributing beliefs. Consider a mathematical example. Some mathematicians believe that CH (the continuum hypothesis) is true and others believe that it is false. But if CH is true, then it is necessarily true; and if it is false, then it is necessarily false. Regardless of whether CH is true or false, the conclusion seems to be that there are mathematicians who believe impossible propositions.
Examples of apparent beliefs in impossible propositions outside of mathematics are also easy to come by. Consider, for example, Kripkeâs (1999) story of the Frenchman Pierre who without realizing it has two different names âLondonâ and âLondresâ for the same city, London. After having arrived in London, Pierre may assent to âLondres is beautiful and London is not beautifulâ without being in any way irrational. It seems reasonably to infer from this that Pierre believes that Londres is beautiful and London is not beautiful. But since âLondresâ and âLondonâ are rigid designators for the same city, it seems to follow from this that Pierre believes the inconsistent proposition that we may express as âLondon is both beautiful and not beautifulâ
Extending Dynamic Doxastic Logic: Accommodating Iterated Beliefs And Ramsey Conditionals Within DDL
In this paper we distinguish between various kinds of doxastic theories. One distinction is between informal and formal doxastic theories. AGM-type theories of belief change are of the former kind, while Hintikkaâs logic of knowledge and belief is of the latter. Then we distinguish between static theories that study the unchanging beliefs of a certain agent and dynamic theories that investigate not only the constraints that can reasonably be imposed on the doxastic states of a rational agent but also rationality constraints on the changes of doxastic state that may occur in such agents. An additional distinction is that between non-introspective theories and introspective ones. Non-introspective theories investigate agents that have opinions about the external world but no higher-order opinions about their own doxasticnstates. Standard AGM-type theories as well as the currently existing versions of Segerbergâs dynamic doxastic logic (DDL) are non-introspective. Hintikka-style doxastic logic is of course introspective but it is a static theory. Thus, the challenge remains to devise doxastic theories that are both dynamic and introspective. We outline the semantics for truly introspective dynamic doxastic logic, i.e., a dynamic doxastic logic that allows us to describe agents who have both the ability to form higher-order beliefs and to reflect upon and change their minds about their own (higher-order) beliefs. This extension of DDL demands that we give up the Preservation condition on revision. We make some suggestions as to how such a non-preservative revision operation can be constructed. We also consider extending DDL with conditionals satisfying the Ramsey test and show that GĂ€rdenforsâ well-known impossibility result applies to such a framework. Also in this case, Preservation has to be given up
On Context Shifters and Compositionality in Natural Languages
My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplanâs (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality but, unfortunately, do not provide a proof, or an argument in favor of their position. The aim of this paper is to do precisely that. Additionally, I provide a new proof that compositionality for propositional content (intension) is a proper generalization of compositionality for character (hyper-intensions)
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