Frege and Natural Language

Philosophy ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 60 (234) ◽  
pp. 513-524 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Rein
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Formal Language ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Optical Instrument ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Scientific Endeavour

It is a commonplace that Frege thought ordinary language to be seriously defective. Yet his remarks about ordinary language are not always unflattering. Comparing the relation between his formal language and ordinary language to the relation between the microscope and the eye, Frege remarked: ‘[the eye], because of the range of its applicability and because of the ease with which it can adapt itself to the most varied circumstances, has a great superiority over the microscope’. The point, of course, is that, for Frege, the deficiencies of ordinary language arise in connection with the scientific endeavour: ordinary language is not an acceptable medium in which to pursue truth. As he goes on to observe: ‘… viewed as an optical instrument [the eye] reveals many imperfections … as soon as scientific purposes place strong requirements upon sharpness of resolution, the eye proves to be inadequate. On the other hand, the microscope is perfectly suited for just such purposes’.

Tense

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ludlow
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Good Case ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Insight Into

While most approaches to the semantics of tense have attempted to regiment tense away in a tenseless metalanguage, a good case can be made that this is not without cost (the same case could be made for regimentation of modality and other aspects of natural language as well). On the other hand, it is pretty clear that attempts to treat tense in a tensed metalanguage introduce serious complications. It is probably not so important which of these positions is correct at this point (we may be some distance from resolving that question), as it is that we understand the costs of the respective positions. Perhaps, by having a firm enough grasp on both approaches we afford ourselves a deeper insight into the nature of tense itself.

Natural Shell

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiao Liu ◽  
Yufei Jiang ◽  
Lawrence Wu ◽  
Dinghao Wu
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
End Users ◽  
The Other ◽  
Prototype System ◽  
Online Forums ◽  
Skill Levels ◽  
Scripting Languages ◽  
Other Hand

Scripting is a widely-used way to automate the execution of tasks. Despite the popularity of scripting, it remains difficult to use for both beginners and experts: because of the cryptic commands for the first group, and incompatible syntaxes across different systems, for the latter group. The authors introduce Natural Shell, an assistant for enabling end-users to generate commands and scripts for various purposes. Natural Shell automatically synthesizes scripts for different shell systems based on natural language descriptions. By interacting with Natural Shell, new users can learn the basics of scripting languages without the obstacles from the incomprehensible syntaxes. On the other hand, the authors' tool frees more advanced users from manuals when they switch shell systems. The authors have developed a prototype system and demonstrate its effectiveness with a benchmark of 50 examples of popular shell commands collected from online forums. In addition, the authors analyzed the usage of Natural Shell in a lab study that involves 10 participants with different scripting skill levels. Natural Shell effectively assists the users to generate commands in assigned syntaxes and greatly streamlines their learning and using experience.

Negative Predicates

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Jacques Moeschler
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Metalinguistic Negation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Negative Feature ◽  
Language Needs ◽  
Semantic Properties

The main goal of this chapter is to explain why natural language needs negative predicates to express negative contents. In contrast with syntactic negation, negative predicates exhibit some semantic properties, which are not expressed syntactically: they are complete semantically, restricted to lexical categories, and encode a negative feature. On the other hand, negative predicates are motivated pragmatically: they are stronger statements than syntactic negation; they realize, under syntactic negation, mitigated assertions; they cannot express metalinguistic negation, as syntactic negation does. One relevant semantic proposal (Horn 1989) is the distinction between two negation operators: ¬, realized syntactically, and ©, realized lexically. This chapter does not only give arguments supporting these properties, but also provides an explicit account of the relation between syntactic negation and negative predicates.

scholarly journals What is Wrong with Deductivism?

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-316
Author(s):  
Lilian Bermejo-Luque
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One

In “Deductivism as an Interpretative Strategy: A Reply to Groarke’s Defense of Reconstructive Deductivism,” David Godden (2005) distinguished two notions of deductivism. On the one hand, as an interpretative thesis, deductivism is the view that all-natural language argumentation must be interpreted as being deductive. On the other hand, as an evaluative thesis, deductivism is the view that for a conclusion to follow, it has to follow of necessity from the premises—or, in other words, that being a good inference implies being deductive. The main goal of this paper is to show that evaluative deductivism is wrong.

scholarly journals Den intima ledaren?: Om ledarartiklar, informalisering och språklig förändring

2019 ◽  
Vol NF 28 (2018) ◽  
pp. 78-111
Author(s):  
Sanna Skärlund
Keyword(s):  
Formal Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Western World ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Second Person ◽  
Public Language ◽  
The Past ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Time Period

Public language is generally considered to have become more informal in the Western world in the past few decades. The same holds true for Swedish public language and the language of Swedish newspapers in particular. However, two former studies of opinion articles in five Swedish newspapers revealed that the language used in this genre was surprisingly unchanged during the time period 1945–2000. This article replicates the two former studies by analysing 36 Swedish opinion articles from 2015 from a quantitative perspective. The results of the analysis are then compared to those of the earlier studies to see if, and to what extent, tendencies of informalization have now become noticeable in the opinion articles. It is demonstrated that there are indeed signs of informalization in the articles from 2015. Words and sentences have become shorter, colloquial expressions (such as swear words) are used, and both incomplete sentences and personal pronouns in first and second person are more frequent than before. On the other hand, subordinate clauses are more common in the articles from 2015 than in 1985–2000. Since subordinate clauses in former studies of Swedish have been considered a formal trait, this is quite unexpected. In the article, it is argued that the connection between subordination and formal language is more complex than has sometimes previously been acknowledged –, and that subordinate clauses have different functions, not all of them characterizing a formal style.

scholarly journals Natural Language Processing in Serious Games: A state of the art.

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Picca ◽  
Dominique Jaccard ◽  
Gérald Eberlé
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Serious Games ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Serious Game ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
High Level

In the last decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP) has obtained a high level of success. Interactions between NLP and Serious Games have started and some of them already include NLP techniques. The objectives of this paper are twofold: on the one hand, providing a simple framework to enable analysis of potential uses of NLP in Serious Games and, on the other hand, applying the NLP framework to existing Serious Games and giving an overview of the use of NLP in pedagogical Serious Games. In this paper we present 11 serious games exploiting NLP techniques. We present them systematically, according to the following structure:  first, we highlight possible uses of NLP techniques in Serious Games, second, we describe the type of NLP implemented in the each specific Serious Game and, third, we provide a link to possible purposes of use for the different actors interacting in the Serious Game.

Multiple colorimetry of the Sun

1966 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 254-255
Author(s):  
G. E. Kron
Keyword(s):  
Full Moon ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Optical Instrument ◽  
Electric System ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Color System ◽  
Tungsten Ribbon ◽  
Standard Lamp ◽  
Modern Standard

In spite of the importance of knowing the color of the Sun on a modern standard photo-electric system, only two efforts have been made during recent times to measure this quantity. These are by Stebbins and Kron (1) who measured the Sun on the six-color system of Stebbins and Whitford, and by Louis Gallouët (2) who measured the Sun on theUBVsystem of Johnson and Morgan. Stebbins and Kron compared the light from the Sun after it had been dimmed with a special “reducing” device with the light from a tungsten ribbon filament standard lamp, which, in turn, had been compared with the light of distant stars. Gallouët, on the other hand, measured both the Sun and stars by means of an extremely ingenious optical instrument that acted as a light gatherer when used on the distant stars, and as a light reducer when used in its inverted optical sense on the Sun. Gallouët also measured the magnitude of the Sun, as well as the color and magnitude of the full Moon.

Invariants of Translation (May 29, 1970)

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-114
Author(s):  
Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini ◽  
Ernie Lepore
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Object Language ◽  
Recursive Structure ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
The One

In his final lecture, Davidson turns away from the project of providing semantic analyses for particular natural language constructions. He outlines his theory of radical translation—that is, his theory of how one can come to know that a candidate T-theory for a given object language is correct. By assuming (on the one hand) that whenever an object-language speaker accepts a sentence, that sentence is true, and (on the other hand) that we as theoreticians generally have correct beliefs about the world, Davidson argues that we can arrive at a correct T-theory for an object language. He concludes with some reflections on the fact that this procedure seems to make it inevitable that we will discover the recursive structure of our own language in the languages of others, as well as the preponderance of our beliefs in the minds of our peers.

scholarly journals Onomastyczny spacer ścieżkami belgradzkiego ogrodu zoologicznego

2019 ◽  
Vol 170 ◽  
pp. 159-170
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kołodziej
Keyword(s):  
Mass Culture ◽  
Formal Language ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Formal Models ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
The One

Onomastic walk through the streets of the Belgrad zooThis article discusses urban names found in the zoo in Belgrad. The article is an attempt to find out why the managers of the zoo decided to transpose urban names into the area of the zoo and in what categories we can perceive this choice.The body of material, including 36 onymic units, was subject to semantic and formal analysis. The material includes commemorative names referring i.a. to the first names and surnames of the zoo directors, figures connected with science and culture, or the names of institutions supporting the zoo. The vast majority of them are formal language structures, especially genitive forms.The presented semantic and formal models follow the convention of the contemporary nomenclature of streets in Belgrad. The very transposition must be regarded as innovative, determined on the one hand by the development of mass culture and on the other hand by political reasons, which can be perceived in the category of patriotism with a slightly nationalistic tinge.Onomastička šetnja stazama Beogradskog zoološkog vrtaČlanak se bavi gradskim nazivima koji su zabeleženi na terenu Beogradskog zoološkog vrta. U članku se probalo odgovoriti na pitanja zbog čega se direkcija zoološkog vrta odlučila na transpoziciju gradskih naziva u arelu zoološkog vrta kao i kojim kategorijama se to može analizirati.Ispitivani korpus se sastoji od 36 onimične jedinice, analizirane semantički i formalno. Sakupljeni materijal predstavlja nazive koji su svojevrsna vrsta sećanja, a čija se motivacija, između ostalog, odnosi na imena i prezimena direktora zoološkog vrta, osoba povezanih sa naukom, kulturom, kao i nazivi institucija koje podržavaju zoološki vrt. Uglavnom su to strukture sa formalnojezičkom kreacijom, usred kojih dominiraju forme genitiva.Predstavljeni semantički i formalni modeli uklapaju se u konvenciju savremenih naziva beogradskih ulica. Samu transpoziciju bi trebalo smatrati za inovatorsku koja je sa jedne strane determinisana razvojem masovne kulture, a sa druge političkim povodima koji se mogu analizirati u patriotskim kategorijama sa izvesnom dozom nacionalizma.

Metaphor

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ted Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Figurative Language ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Unified Description

Metaphor is one of a variety of uses of language in which what is communicated is not what the words mean literally. It is, therefore, so to speak, a way of speaking of something by talking about something else. Thus, one has said (or written) X and thereby communicated Y. This characteristic of ‘indirectness’ is not alone sufficient to distinguish metaphors from other non-standard uses of language, but there is also a question as to whether metaphors in general are sufficiently similar to one another to permit a single, unified description of them. On one hand, metaphor has been a feature of poetry for centuries, conspicuous in the work of Homer and Shakespeare and countless other poets. But on the other hand, metaphor is pervasive in ordinary language, both in speech and in writing. It is not obvious that a single account of metaphor could be adequate to both poetic and more prosaic uses of figurative language.

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