Fatalism as a Metaphysical Thesis

Even though fatalism has been an intermittent topic of philosophy since Greek antiquity, this paper argues that fate ought to be of little concern to metaphysicians. Fatalism is neither an interesting metaphysical thesis in its own right, nor can it be identified with theses that are, such as realism about the future or determinism

The actual future is open

Open futurism is the indeterministic position according to which the future is 'open,' i.e., there is now no fact of the matter as to what future contingent events will actually obtain. Many open futurists hold a branching conception of time, in which a variety of possible futures exist. This paper introduces two challenges to (branching-time) open futurism, which are similar in spirit to a challenge posed by Kit Fine to (standard) tense realism. The paper argues that, to address the new challenges, open futurists must (i) adopt an objective, non-perspectival notion of actuality and (ii) subscribe to an A-theoretic, dynamic conception of reality. Moreover, given a natural understanding of "actual future," (iii) open futurism is naturally coupled with the view that a unique, objectively actual future exists, contrary to a common assumption in the current debate. The paper also contends that recognising the existence of a unique actual future helps open futurists to avoid potential misconceptions

A temporal semantics for Nilpotent Minimum logic

In [Ban97] a connection among rough sets (in particular, pre-rough algebras) and three-valued {\L}ukasiewicz logic {\L}3 is pointed out. In this paper we present a temporal like semantics for Nilpotent Minimum logic NM ([Fod95, EG01]), in which the logic of every instant is given by {\L}3: a completeness theorem will be shown. This is the prosecution of the work initiated in [AGM08] and [ABM09], in which the authors construct a temporal semantics for the many-valued logics of G\"odel ([G\"od32], [Dum59]) and Basic Logic ([H\'aj98]).Comment: 19 pages, 2 table

GRAMPAL: A Morphological Processor for Spanish implemented in Prolog

A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflection for verbs, nouns and adjectives is presented. This model is based on feature unification and it relies upon a lexicon of allomorphs both for stems and morphemes. Word forms are built by the concatenation of allomorphs by means of special contextual features. We make use of standard Definite Clause Grammars (DCG) included in most Prolog implementations, instead of the typical finite-state approach. This allows us to take advantage of the declarativity and bidirectionality of Logic Programming for NLP. The most salient feature of this approach is simplicity: A really straightforward rule and lexical components. We have developed a very simple model for complex phenomena. Declarativity, bidirectionality, consistency and completeness of the model are discussed: all and only correct word forms are analysed or generated, even alternative ones and gaps in paradigms are preserved. A Prolog implementation has been developed for both analysis and generation of Spanish word forms. It consists of only six DCG rules, because our {\em lexicalist\/} approach --i.e. most information is in the dictionary. Although it is quite efficient, the current implementation could be improved for analysis by using the non logical features of Prolog, especially in word segmentation and dictionary access.Comment: 11 page

Word graphs: The third set

This is the third paper in a series of natural language processing in term of knowledge graphs. A word is a basic unit in natural language processing. This is why we study word graphs. Word graphs were already built for prepositions and adwords (including adjectives, adverbs and Chinese quantity words) in two other papers. In this paper, we propose the concept of the logic word and classify logic words into groups in terms of semantics and the way they are used in describing reasoning processes. A start is made with the building of the lexicon of logic words in terms of knowledge graphs

On Time chez Dummett

I discuss three connections between Dummett's writings about time and philosophical aspects of physics. The first connection (Section 2) arises from remarks of Dummett's about the different relations of observation to time and to space. The main point is uncontroversial and applies equally to classical and quantum physics. It concerns the fact that perceptual processing is so rapid, compared with the typical time-scale on which macroscopic objects change their observable properties, that it engenders the idea of a 'common now', spread across space. The other two connections are specific to quantum theory, as interpreted along the lines of Everett. So for these two connections, the physics side is controversial, just as the philosophical side is. In Section 3, I connect the subjective uncertainty before an Everettian 'splitting' of the multiverse to Dummett's suggestion, inspired by McTaggart, that a complete, i.e. indexical-free description of a temporal reality is impossible. And in Section 4, I connect Barbour's denial that time is real---a denial along the lines of Everett, rather than McTaggart---to Dummett's suggestion that statements about the past are not determinately true or false, because they are not effectively decidable.Comment: 25 pages; no figure