The Logical Form of Descriptions

Dialogue ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-684 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Linsky
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Systematic Theory ◽  
Referential Use ◽  
Central Interest ◽  
Theory Of Descriptions ◽  
The One ◽  
Stephen Neale

Stephen Neale defends Russell's famous theory of definite descriptions against more than 40 years' worth of criticisms beginning long before Strawson's “On Referring.” Ever since Strawson's parting shot in that paper (“… ordinary language has no exact logic”), the theory of descriptions has been a battleground for the larger issue of whether a systematic theory of the semantics of natural language is really possible. Neale provides us with a sketch of part of that project as it currently stands. All of the complexities and irregularities of the use of definite descriptions in natural language can be combined, after all, in a single theory based on an “exact logic.” Neale argues that one can give a Russellian account of “incomplete descriptions” (as in ‘The table is covered with books’), generic uses of ‘the’ (‘The whale is a mammal’), plural descriptions (‘The men carried the piano’) and, of central interest, the purportedly referential uses identified by Donnellan (as in ‘The murderer of Smith is insane’ when it is Jones the accused we have in mind). Neale follows familiar answers to these objections; incorporate demonstratives into the account (to get ‘The table over there …’), distinguish the proposition expressed from the one meant (the “referential” use is what was meant not said), and point out that the problem is not unique to definite descriptions and so cannot be a fault of any particular theory of them (many expressions have generic, plural and “referential” uses).

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

scholarly journals Implicitness, Logical Form and Arguments

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (63) ◽  
pp. 405-418
Author(s):  
Martina Blečić
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Everyday Language ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Conversational Implicatures ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Rational Communication

In the paper I suggest that a loose notion of logical form can be a useful tool for the understanding or evaluation of everyday language and the explicit and implicit content of communication. Reconciling ordinary language and logic provides formal guidelines for rational communication, giving strength and order to ordinary communication and content to logical schemas. The starting point of the paper is the idea that the bearers of logical form are not natural language sentences, but what we communicate with them, that is, their content in a particular context. On the basis of that idea, I propose that we can ascribe logical proprieties to what is communicated using ordinary language and suggest a continuum between semantic phenomena such as explicatures and pragmatic communicational strategies such as (particularized) conversational implicatures, which challenges the idea that an implicatum is completely separate from what is said. I believe that this continuum can be best explained by the notion of logical form, taken as a propriety of sentences relative to particular interpretations.

scholarly journals Logical Form through Abstraction

Disputatio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (58) ◽  
pp. 251-263
Author(s):  
Zoltán Gendler Szabó
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Logical Truth ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Artificial Language ◽  
The One

Abstract In a recent book, Logical Form: between Logic and Natural Language, Andrea Iacona argues that semantic form and logical form are distinct. The semantic form of a sentence is something that (together with the meanings of its parts) determines what it means; the logical from of a sentence is something that (all by itself) determines whether it is a logical truth. Semantic form does not depend on context but logical form does: for example, whether ‘This is this’ is a logical truth depends on whether the two occurrences of ‘this’ are used to demonstrate the same individual. I respond by claiming that logical form is indifferent to reference and is sensitive only to obligatory co-reference. When the speaker intends both occurrences of ‘this’ to be interpreted the same way the logical from of ‘This is this’ is a=a, while in a context where the speaker has no such intention it is a=b. This proposal allows a much more conservative revision of the traditional picture than the one suggested by Iacona. Instead of identifying the logical form of a natural language sentence by seeking a formalization in an artificial language, we obtain it through abstraction from its syntactic analysis: replacing the non-logical expressions by schematic letters, making sure that we use identical ones if and only if the speaker intended co-reference.

scholarly journals Experimental Philosophy and the Philosophy of Language: A Defence of the Ambiguity Thesis

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Katharine Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Natural Kind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Natural Kind Terms ◽  
Kind Terms ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences

<p>In this thesis I employ the experimental method to inform three important debates within the philosophy of language. These three debates can loosely be characterised as the following: Strawsonianism vs. Russellianism about the meaning of definite descriptions (Chapter 2), Millianism vs. Descriptivism about the meaning of proper names (Chapter 3), and Internalism vs. Externalism about natural kind terms (Chapter 4). To investigate these debates I use surveys to test the intuitions of ordinary language users, that is, non-philosophers, about the meaning of various terms and phrases in natural language. This included New Zealand undergraduate students, students in China, and participants in the US in order to investigate any cross-cultural differences. The results of these three studies indicate substantial variation in the intuitions held among ordinary language users. I use this variation to defend an ambiguity thesis. According to this thesis, some terms and phrases as they occur in natural language (specifically, proper names, natural kind terms, and definite descriptions) have multiple meanings associated them. No one disambiguation is correct outside of a context of utterance. If the ambiguity thesis is accepted, various philosophical puzzles disappear. I will also address a number of objections that face the general program of this thesis.</p>

Definite descriptions, A reader, edited by Gary Ostertag, Bradford books, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1998, xii + 411 pp. - Gary Ostertag, Introduction, Pp. 1–34. - Bertrand Russell, On denoting, A reprint of 1119. Pp. 35–49. - A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, From Principia mathematica, A reprint of pp. 30–32, 66–71, 173–175 of 1941. Pp. 51–65. - Bertrand Russell, Descriptions, A reprint of pp. 167–180 of 11126. Pp. 67–77. - Stephen Neale, Grammatical form, logical form, and incomplete symbols. A reprint of LXI 1391. Pp. 79–121. - Rudolf Carnap, From Meaning and necessity, A reprint of pp. 32–42 of XIV 237. Pp. 123–133. - P. F. Strawson, On referring, A reprint of XVIII 87, Pp. 135–160. - Karel Lambert, A theory of definite descriptions, A revised reprint of XXXII 252(1, 3) with altered title, Pp. 161–171. (Reprinted from Philosophical applications of free logic, edited by Karel Lambert, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford 1991, pp. 17–27). - Keith Donnellan, Reference and definite descriptions, A reprint of XL 276(12), Pp. 173–193. - H. P. Grice, From “Vacuous names,” A reprint of pp. 138–144 of XL 479(7), Pp. 195–200. - Christopher Peacocke, Proper names, reference, and rigid designation, Pp. 201–224. (Reprinted from Meaning, reference and necessity, New studies in semantics, edited by Simon Blackburn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge etc. 1975, pp. 109–132.) - Saul Kripke, Speaker's reference and semantic reference, Pp. 225–256. (Reprinted from Contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of language, edited by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1979, pp. 6–27; also in Studies in the philosophy of language, edited by Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest studies in philosophy, vol. 2, The University of Minnesota, Morris 1977, pp. 255–276.) - Howard Wettstein, Demonstrative reference and definite descriptions, Pp. 257–273. (Reprinted from Philosophical studies, vol. 40 (1981), pp. 241–257.) - Scott Soames, Incomplete definite descriptions, Pp. 275–308. (Reprinted from Notre Dame journal of formal logic, vol. 27 (1986), pp. 349–375.) - Stephen Neale, Context and communication, Pp. 309–368. (Reprinted from Stephen Neale, Descriptions, Bradford books, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990, pp. 62–117.) - Stephen Schiffer, Descriptions, indexicals, and belief reports: some dilemmas (but not the ones you expect). Pp. 369–395. (Reprinted from Mind, n.s. vol. 104 (1995), pp. 107–131.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 1371-1374
Author(s):  
Delia Graff
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Definite Descriptions ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Christopher Peacocke ◽  
The University ◽  
Stephen Neale

Knowledge Based Expert Systems for CAD/CAM Experience of an EDM Application

1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Kiritsis ◽  
Michel Porchet ◽  
L. Boutzev ◽  
I. Zic ◽  
P. Sourdin
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
System Development ◽  
Constraint Propagation ◽  
Programming Environment ◽  
Knowledge Based ◽  
Natural Language Programming ◽  
Cad Cam ◽  
The One ◽  
Rule System ◽  
Cam Systems

Abstract In this paper we present our experience from the use of two different expert system development environments to Wire-EDM CAD/CAM knowledge based application. The two systems used follow two different AI approaches: the one is based on the constraint propagation theory and provides a natural language oriented programming environment, while the other is a production rule system with backward-forward chaining mechanisms and a conventional-like programming style. Our experience showed that the natural language programming style offers an easier and more productive environment for knowledge based CAD/CAM systems development.

scholarly journals Knowledge Graph Question and Answer System for Mechanical Intelligent Manufacturing Based on Deep Learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Miaoyuan Shi
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Intelligent Manufacturing ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Knowledge Graph ◽  
Single Entity ◽  
Question And Answer ◽  
Natural Language Query ◽  
The One ◽  
Answering Questions

With the development of deep learning and its wide application in the field of natural language, the question and answer research of knowledge graph based on deep learning has gradually become the focus of attention. After that, the natural language query is converted into a structured query sentence to identify the entities and attributes in the user’s natural language query and the specified entities and attributes are used to retrieve answers to the knowledge graph. Using the advantage of deep learning in capturing sentence information, it incorporates the attention mechanism to obtain the semantic vector of the relevant attributes in the query and uses the parameter sharing mechanism to insert candidate attributes into the triple in the same model to obtain the semantic vector of typical candidates. The experiment measured that under the 100,000 RDF dataset, the single entity query of the MIQE model does not exceed 3 seconds, and the connection query does not exceed 5 seconds. Under the one-million RDF dataset, the single entity query of the MIQE model does not exceed 8 seconds, and the connection query will not be more than 10 seconds. Experimental data show that the system of knowledge-answering questions of engineering of intelligent construction based on deep learning has good horizontal scalability.

scholarly journals From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-500 ◽  
Author(s):  
STEVEN JAN
Keyword(s):  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Logical Form ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Information Encoding ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Initial Support ◽  
The One ◽  
Universal Darwinism

abstractSteven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF).

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 245-246
Author(s):  
Oskari Kuusela
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Philosophical Methodology ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Philosophy Of Logic ◽  
Logical Models ◽  
The Status ◽  
Specific Sense ◽  
Bold Claim

In the Introduction I made the bold claim that Wittgenstein transforms Frege’s and Russell’s logical and methodological ideas in a way that ‘can be justifiably described as a second revolution in philosophical methodology and the philosophy of logic, following Frege’s and Russell’s first revolution’. This claim was meant in a specific sense relating to the use of logical methods in philosophy, a discipline where we are often dealing with complex and messy concepts and phenomena, and having to clarify highly complicated and fluid uses of natural language. The situation is not quite the same in metamathematics, for example, and my claim was not intended to concern the employment of logical methods there, i.e. that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of logic would constitute a revolution in this area too. For, while his later philosophy of logic has no difficulty explaining the possibility of the employment of calculi to clarify other calculi, in metamathematics there is perhaps no similarly pressing need for idealization as in philosophy, when we clarify complex concepts originating in ordinary language, since the targets of clarification in metamathematics are systems governed by strict rules themselves. Thus, this area of the employment of logical methods seems not as significantly affected. But I hope that my claim concerning the use of logical methods in philosophy can now be recognized as justified, or at least worth considering seriously, on the basis of what I have said about 1) the later Wittgenstein’s account of the status of logical clarificatory models, and how this explains the possibility of simple and exact logical descriptions, thus safeguarding the rigour of logic, 2) how his account of the function of logical models makes possible the recognition of the relevance of natural history for logic without compromising the non-empirical character of the discipline of logic, and 3) in the light of Wittgenstein’s introduction of new non-calculus-based logical methods for the purpose of philosophical clarification, such as his methods of grammatical rules, the method of language-games, and quasi-ethnology....

The Grammar of Subjectivity

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-65
Author(s):  
Jonardon Ganeri
Keyword(s):  
Logical Form ◽  
Conscious State ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Phenomenological Interpretation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Affected Subject

There is a commonly agreed way to articulate the logical form of a conscious state: it a state such that there is something it is like for a subject to be in it. This formula has the important virtue that it enables us to separate out two distinct aspects in the phenomenology of an experience: what is experienced, the ‘quality’ of the experience; and how it is experienced, that it is experienced as being for-a-subject. A careful examination of the syntax of the ‘what it’s like …’ construction reveals that the colloquial phrase ‘subject of experience’ is polysemic. On the one hand it might mean the subject in whom the experience is occurring. Let me call this the ‘locative of manifestation’. This host self, an inhabited self, is more commonly identified with the physical human being, or the human being’s brain or neuropsychological state, but Pessoa gives instead a phenomenological interpretation of the notion. The phrase might also mean the subject affected by the experience. The affected subject is the one to whom the experience is addressed, so I will call this the ‘accusative of manifestation’. The accusative of manifestation is, evidently, conceptually distinct from the locative of manifestation. Finally, the phrase might mean the subject who is undergoing the experience, the one who lives through the experience, the ‘dative of manifestation.’

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