Strict Identity with No Overlap

It is common lore that standard, Kripke-style semantics for quantified modal logic is incompatible with the view that no individual may belong to more than one possible world, a view that seems to require a counterpart-theoretic semantics instead. Strictly speaking, however, this thought is wrong-headed. This note explains why

Identity and Granularity of Events in Text

In this paper we describe a method to detect event descrip- tions in different news articles and to model the semantics of events and their components using RDF representations. We compare these descriptions to solve a cross-document event coreference task. Our com- ponent approach to event semantics defines identity and granularity of events at different levels. It performs close to state-of-the-art approaches on the cross-document event coreference task, while outperforming other works when assuming similar quality of event detection. We demonstrate how granularity and identity are interconnected and we discuss how se- mantic anomaly could be used to define differences between coreference, subevent and topical relations.Comment: Invited keynote speech by Piek Vossen at Cicling 201

Self-Similar Tilings of Fractal Blow-Ups

New tilings of certain subsets of $\mathbb{R}^{M}$ are studied, tilings associated with fractal blow-ups of certain similitude iterated function systems (IFS). For each such IFS with attractor satisfying the open set condition, our construction produces a usually infinite family of tilings that satisfy the following properties: (1) the prototile set is finite; (2) the tilings are repetitive (quasiperiodic); (3) each family contains self-similartilings, usually infinitely many; and (4) when the IFS is rigid in an appropriate sense, the tiling has no non-trivial symmetry; in particular the tiling is non-periodic

Ought a Four-Dimensionalist To Believe in Temporal Parts?

This paper presents the strongest version of a non-perdurantist four-dimensionalism: a theory according to which persisting objects are four-dimensionally extended in space-time, but not in virtue of having maximal temporal parts. The aims of considering such a view are twofold. First, to evaluate whether such an account could provide a plausible middle ground between the two main competitor accounts of persistence: three-dimensionalism and perdurantist four-dimensionalism. Second, to see what light such a theory sheds on the debate between these two competitor theories. I conclude that despite prima facie reasons to suppose that non-perdurantist four-dimensionalism might be a credible alternative to either other account of persistence, ultimately the view is unsuccessful. The reasons for its failure illuminate the sometimes stagnant debate between three-dimensionalists and perdurantists, providing new reasons to prefer a perdurantist metaphysics