284 research outputs found
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
Predication and cognitive context: Between minimalism and contextualism
In this paper, we suggest a strategy for modelling cognitive context within a truth\u2010conditional 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\u2010conditional content. More specifi\u2010cally, we suggest that this model of predication produces a notion of truth\u2010conditional meaning where the cognitive context fixes a set of lexical restrictions and forced modifi\u2010cations. We conclude that this model might offer an inter\u2010mediate position between Minimalism and Contextualism: an account that provides intuitive truth conditions within a formal semantic theory
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
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%
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
Immunity to Error through Misidentification and (Direct and Indirect) Experience Reports
In this contribution, we address the issues concerning the semantic value of Wittgenstein’s subject “I”, as in (i) “I have a toothache”, resulting from the use of predicates that involve first-person knowledge of the mental states to which they refer. As is well-known, these contexts give rise to the phenomenon of ‘immunity to error through misidentification’ (IEM): the utterer of (i) cannot be mistaken as to whether he is the person having a toothache. We provide a series of arguments in favor of a principled distinction between a de facto IEM, grounded in perceptual and proprioceptive judgments, and a de iure IEM, grounded in experience reports whereby the experience wears the experiencer on its sleeve. From this perspective, the no-referent account of subject “I” advocated by Wittgenstein/Anscombe is correct. In fact, we show how this analysis can be made compatible with a Kaplanian account of first-person indexicals, by identifying the speaker in the context of utterance with the person who has access to the reported private experience
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.
Good for the heart, good for the Earth: proposal of a dietary pattern able to optimize cardiovascular disease prevention and mitigate climate change
Background and aims: Human and planetary health are inextricably interconnected through food systems. Food choices account for 50% of all deaths for cardiovascular diseases (CVD) - the leading cause of death in Europe - and food systems generate up to 37% of total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Methods and results: Based on a systematic revision of meta-analyses of prospective studies exploring the association between individual foods/food groups and the incidence of CVD, we identified a dietary pattern able to optimize CVD prevention.. This dietary pattern was compared to the current diet of the European population. The nutritional adequacy of both diets was evaluated according to the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) recommended nutrient intake for the adult population, and their environmental impact was evaluated in terms of carbon footprint (CF). As compared to the current diet, the desirable diet includes higher intakes of fruit, vegetables, wholegrains, low glycemic index (GI) cereals, nuts, legumes and fish, and lower amounts of beef, butter, high GI cereals or potatoes and sugar. The diet here identified provides appropriate intakes of all nutrients and matches better than the current Europeans' one the EFSA requirements. Furthermore, the CF of the proposed diet is 48.6% lower than that of the current Europeans' diet. Conclusion: The transition toward a dietary pattern designed to optimize CVD prevention would improve the nutritional profile of the habitual diet in Europe and, at the same time, contribute to mitigate climate change by reducing the GHG emissions linked to food consumption almost by half
Team Reasoning and Collective Intentionality
Different versions of the idea that individualism about agency is the root of standard game theoretical puzzles have been defended by Regan 1980, Bacharach (Research in Economics 53: 117–147, 1999), Hurley (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26: 264–265, 2003), Sugden (Philosophical Explorations 6(3):165–181, 2003), and Tuomela 2013, among others. While collectivistic game theorists like Michael Bacharach provide formal frameworks designed to avert some of the standard dilemmas, philosophers of collective action like Raimo Tuomela aim at substantive accounts of collective action that may explain how agents overcoming such social dilemmas would be motivated. This paper focuses on the conditions on collective action and intention that need to be fulfilled for Bacharach’s “team reasoning” to occur. Two influential approaches to collective action are related to the idea of team reasoning: Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intention and Raimo Tuomela’s theory of a we-mode of intending. I argue that neither captures the “agency transformation” that team reasoning requires. That might be an acceptable conclusion for Bratman but more problematic for Tuomela, who claims that Bacharach’s results support his theory. I sketch an alternative framework in which the perspectival element that is required for team reasoning - the ‘we-perspective’ - can be understood and functionally characterized in relation to the traditional distinction between mode and content of intentional states. I claim that the latter understanding of a collective perspective provides the right kind of philosophical background for team reasoning, and I discuss some implications in relation to Tuomela’s assumption that switching between individual and collective perspectives can be a matter of rational choice
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
- …