The communication of first-person thoughts

A discussion of Frege's views concerning the meaning of 'I' and his distinction between the 'I' of soliloquy and the 'I' of conversation

Context Dependence, MOPs,WHIMs and procedures Recanati and Kaplan on Cognitive Aspects in Semantics

After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semanti

Planning Complex Agro-Ecosystems: The Case of Analog Forestry

Traditional agroecosystems, aimed at maximizing the short term productivity, are characterized by oversimplification of ecological structure and dependence on the use of external inputs. Moreover, intensive agriculture is one of the main cause of deforestation. The main consequence of traditional agriculture is the loss of natural ecosystems and of their precious services. Analog forestry has emerged as a sustainable productive model able to be integrated in forest contexts, without degrading their ecological functions. The obtained agro-ecosystem is characterized by an ecological structure similar to the one of forest, and by the presence of several productive species in the same area. In this study we formalize a planning problem aimed at the optimized design of an analog forest on the medium term. In particular, besides the maximization of income, we considered both ecological (i.e., the presence of different vertical layers and several species) and socio-economic requirements (i.e., the smoothing of both inter- and intra-annual variability of income). We focus the analysis on the Peruvian Amazon, basing on a species database created by ArBio, a Peruvian association which promotes the analog forestry as tool for pursuing the conservation of forest ecosystem services. The obtained results show that the interannual income variability, characterizing an approach of short-term maximization, can be eliminated by adopting the gradual planting of individuals belonging to the same species. Secondly, we quantified the economic and ecological performance of the designed analog forest under different settings of the planning problem. The introduction of the defined ecological and socio-economic constraints affects the economic performance on the medium term, by reducing the annual economic income up to 80%

Relinquishing Control: What Romanian De Se Attitude Reports Teach Us About Immunity To Error Through Misidentification

Higginbotham argued that certain linguistic items of English, when used in indirect discourse, necessarily trigger first-personal interpretations. They are: the emphatic reflexive pronoun and the controlled understood subject, represented as PRO. PRO is special, in this respect, due to its imposing obligatory control effects between the main clause and its subordinates ). Folescu & Higginbotham, in addition, argued that in Romanian, a language whose grammar doesn’t assign a prominent role to PRO, de se triggers are correlated with the subjunctive mood of certain verbs. That paper, however, didn’t account for the grammatical diversity of the reports that display immunity to error through misidentification in Romanian: some of these reports are expressed by using de se triggers; others are not. Their IEM, moreover, is not systematically lexically controlled by the verbs, via their theta-roles; it is, rather, determined by the meaning of the verbs in question. Given the data from Romanian, I will argue, the phenomenon of IEM cannot be fully explained starting either from the syntactical or the lexical structure of a language

Distributed utterances

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.

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 utterance’s 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 utterance’s 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 agent’s 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

J. L. Austin and literal meaning

Alice Crary has recently developed a radical reading of J. L. Austin's philosophy of language. The central contention of Crary's reading is that Austin gives convincing reasons to reject the idea that sentences have context-invariant literal meaning. While I am in sympathy with Crary about the continuing importance of Austin's work, and I think Crary's reading is deep and interesting, I do not think literal sentence meaning is one of Austin's targets, and the arguments that Crary attributes to Austin or finds Austinian in spirit do not provide convincing reasons to reject literal sentence meaning. In this paper, I challenge Crary's reading of Austin and defend the idea of literal sentence meaning

Predication and cognitive context: Between minimalism and contextualism

In this paper, we suggest a strategy for modelling cognitive context within a truth‐conditional semantics, using Asher's model of predication. This allows us to introduce the notion of type presupposition intended as a lexical constraint to the composition of the truth‐conditional content. More specifi‐cally, we suggest that this model of predication produces a notion of truth‐conditional meaning where the cognitive context fixes a set of lexical restrictions and forced modifi‐cations. We conclude that this model might offer an inter‐mediate position between Minimalism and Contextualism: an account that provides intuitive truth conditions within a formal semantic theory

Assessing Crop Portfolios: Diversification versus Monoculture for Biodiesel

The selection of crop patterns for agricultural areas is usually guided by the maximization of expected income. This variable is, however, influenced by the fluctuations of both crop productivity and prices. The annual variability is directly related to the risk of a crop portfolio and, according to the so called Modern Theory Portfolio (MTP), it is a fundamental aspect to be taken into account during the selection of crops. This is true especially in case of those farmers who are not wealthy. Crop diversification is considered an effective solution able to alleviate the abovementioned inter-annual fluctuations and to guarantee a safe minimum income. This being the context we assess different alternative crop portfolios for biodiesel production in Brazil, where many small and resource-poor ones co-exist with capital-intensive and large-scale farms (units of less than 20 hectares constitute more than 60% of the total farm number). By adopting the MTP approach, we aim to compare two alternative and opposite strategies: monoculture and crop diversification for biofuel crop production. In particular, we evaluate the effectiveness of crop diversification in reducing the risk of crop portfolios and estimate possible losses in terms of expected incomes. The obtained results confirm that the choice of a mixed crop portfolio can guarantee the minimum risk in the majority of the analyzed cases, but the incomes are considerably lower than the ones obtained with monocultures. Nevertheless, the obtained outcomes vary considerably depending on the considered crop. Finally, an increment of diversity could have improved both expected income and risk of actual average national crop portfolio, which is close to soybean monoculture

Multi-objective design of sustainable agroecosystems to regenerate deforested lands

Agriculture is a major cause of deforestation and of the consequent GHG emissions, biodiversity and ecosystem degradation. Nevertheless, agriculture represents an attractive solution to both recover the lost forest ecosystems and fight deforestation, by supporting the provisioning of food and other ecosystem services. These benefits strongly rely on the type of agroecosystem management practices adopted by the farmer, among which crop selection plays a key role. Traditionally, farmers aim at maximizing their yield and income, but those objectives should be integrated with social and environmental ones. This is particularly evident in areas like the Amazon, where the ecosystem conservation lies in the forefront and represent a source of alternative income (e.g., Payment for Ecosystem Services). Given this context, the present work aims at assessing the contribution of agriculture in tackling deforestation and the loss of forest diversity. This is achieved by formulating an optimization problem for the selection of a plant species for a given agricultural area, taking into account their evolution over the years. We define: (i) a set of objectives covering the dimensions of sustainability (maximization of income, income stability, biodiversity, and carbon storage), and (ii) a system of constraints to guarantee the coexistence between species and their productivity. We run the solver to identify the best solutions that either optimize the single objective problems or evaluate their the trade-offs: a clear conflict between short term economic objective and environmental ones has emerged, but it can be compensated by the ecological performance of the most forest-like agroecosystems