ON MODELS FOR CROSS-WORLD PREDICATION

Author(s):  
Константин Геннадьевич Фролов

Я выдвигаю два методологических возражения против концепции кросс-мировой предикации, которую предлагает Е. Борисов: (1) Данный подход не учитывает того обстоятельства, что истинностный статус утверждений модального дискурса, как правило, интересует нас не в теоретико-модельном смысле, а в смысле истинности simpliciter. При этом данный подход не оставляет нам никакой возможности говорить о модальной эпистемологии и содержательном обосновании модальных утверждений. (2) Данный подход не учитывает роли воображения и ментального моделирования в том, что Е. Борисовым называется «интуитивным пониманием» рассматриваемых им утверждений. Учёт воображения и ментального моделирования, в свою очередь, переводит содержание подавляющего числа рассматриваемых Евгением примеров в разряд эпистемической модальности говорящего. При этом корректный переход от субъективной эпистемической модальности говорящего к любым типам объективных модальностей в рамках подхода Евгения попросту не может быть осуществлён, поскольку такой переход предполагает наличие внятной концепции модальной эпистемологии, чего Евгений нам не предлагает. Истинность любых рассматриваемых им примеров - это истинность на моделях говорящих, то есть на фреймах, в рамках которых говорящие полагают некоторые миры достижимыми из актуального. I raise two objections to E. Borisov’s methodology for building the theory of cross-world predication: (1) This approach does not take into account the fact that usually we are interested in truth values of modal claims not in the model-theoretical sense, but in the sense of truth simpliciter. However, this approach does not leave us any opportunity to talk about modal truths simpliciter, modal epistemology and substantive truth conditions for modal claims. (2) This approach does not take into account the role of imagination and mental modeling in what E. Borisov calls the ‘intuitive meaning’ of the analysed claims. However, taking into account imagination and mental modeling shows that the vast majority of the cases under consideration deal with epistemic and not alethic modality. In the absence of any modal epistemology we cannot simply postulate the validity of modal truths. Such postulation would be puzzling and unexplainable. And without such postulation of factuality, all the modalities we consider turn out epistemic.

Author(s):  
Stephen Yablo

Aboutness has been studied from any number of angles. Brentano made it the defining feature of the mental. Phenomenologists try to pin down the aboutness features of particular mental states. Materialists sometimes claim to have grounded aboutness in natural regularities. Attempts have even been made, in library science and information theory, to operationalize the notion. However, it has played no real role in philosophical semantics, which is surprising. This is the first book to examine through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning. A long-standing tradition sees meaning as truth conditions, to be specified by listing the scenarios in which a sentence is true. Nothing is said about the principle of selection—about what in a scenario gets it onto the list. Subject matter is the missing link here. A sentence is true because of how matters stand where its subject matter is concerned. This book maintains that this is not just a feature of subject matter, but its essence. One indicates what a sentence is about by mapping out logical space according to its changing ways of being true or false. The notion of content that results—directed content—is brought to bear on a range of philosophical topics, including ontology, verisimilitude, knowledge, loose talk, assertive content, and philosophical methodology. The book represents a major advance in semantics and the philosophy of language.


2007 ◽  
Vol 88 (12) ◽  
pp. 1893-1898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil A. Stuart ◽  
David M. Schultz ◽  
Gary Klein

The Second Forum on the Future Role of the Human in the Forecast Process occurred on 2–3 August 2005 at the American Meteorological Society's Weather Analysis and Forecasting Conference in Washington, D.C. The forum consisted of three sessions. This paper discusses the second session, featuring three presentations on the cognitive and psychological aspects of expert weather forecasters. The first presentation discussed the learning gap between students (goal seekers) and teachers (knowledge seekers)—a similar gap exists between forecasters and researchers. In order to most effectively train students or forecasters, teachers must be able to teach across this gap using some methods described within. The second presentation discussed the heuristics involved in weather forecasting and decision making under time constraints and uncertainty. The final presentation classified the spectrum of forecasters from intuitive scientists to the disengaged. How information technology can best be adapted so as not to inhibit intuitive scientists from their mental modeling of weather scenarios is described. Forecasters must continuously refine their skills through education and training, and be aware of the heuristic contributions to the forecast process, to maintain expertise and have the best chance of ensuring a dynamic role in the future forecast process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 736-767 ◽  
Author(s):  
EMMANUEL CHEMLA ◽  
PAUL ÉGRÉ

AbstractSuszko’s problem is the problem of finding the minimal number of truth values needed to semantically characterize a syntactic consequence relation. Suszko proved that every Tarskian consequence relation can be characterized using only two truth values. Malinowski showed that this number can equal three if some of Tarski’s structural constraints are relaxed. By so doing, Malinowski introduced a case of so-called mixed consequence, allowing the notion of a designated value to vary between the premises and the conclusions of an argument. In this article we give a more systematic perspective on Suszko’s problem and on mixed consequence. First, we prove general representation theorems relating structural properties of a consequence relation to their semantic interpretation, uncovering the semantic counterpart of substitution-invariance, and establishing that (intersective) mixed consequence is fundamentally the semantic counterpart of the structural property of monotonicity. We use those theorems to derive maximum-rank results proved recently in a different setting by French and Ripley, as well as by Blasio, Marcos, and Wansing, for logics with various structural properties (reflexivity, transitivity, none, or both). We strengthen these results into exact rank results for nonpermeable logics (roughly, those which distinguish the role of premises and conclusions). We discuss the underlying notion of rank, and the associated reduction proposed independently by Scott and Suszko. As emphasized by Suszko, that reduction fails to preserve compositionality in general, meaning that the resulting semantics is no longer truth-functional. We propose a modification of that notion of reduction, allowing us to prove that over compact logics with what we call regular connectives, rank results are maintained even if we request the preservation of truth-functionality and additional semantic properties.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-87
Author(s):  
Richard Vallée

“Imported” is a member of a large family of adjectives, including “enemy”, “domestic”, “local”, “exported”, “foreign”. Call these terms contextuals. Contextuals are prima facie context-sensitive expressions in that the same contextual sentence can have different truth-values, and hence different truth-conditions, from utterance to utterance. I use Perry’s multipropositionalist framework to get a new angle on contextuals. I explore the idea that the lexical linguistic meaning of contextual adjectives introduces two conditions to the cognitive significance of an utterance. These conditions contain a variable, y, that does not correspond to any lexical component in the sentence. This is the available tool for letting the speakers’ intentions, or what the speakers have in mind, play a semantic role. My view focuses on the complex condition that linguistic meaning (as type) sometimes semantically determines.


Author(s):  
Graham Harman

Bruno Latour is a French philosopher whose work and influence have been mainly in the social sciences, and he is one of the world’s most cited authors in this field. Along with Michel Callon and John Law he is considered one of the founders of actor-network theory (ANT), a method of avoiding abstract terms such as ‘society’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘the economy’ by focusing on the role of individual actors in building up any collective. ANT is thus a ‘flat ontology’ that places humans, nonhumans, concepts and fictional characters on the same footing. All entities are equally real, though not equally strong: neutrons simply have more or better allies attesting to their existence than Popeye, square circles or white ravens. Entities are termed ‘actors’ or ‘actants’, since they can be known and understood only by the effects they have on other things: there is no substance or thingly surplus hidden behind their concrete actions. From the late 1990s Latour partly renounced ANT due to its inability to distinguish between the truth conditions of differing modes of reality, a problem he tried to address in his new ‘modes of existence’ project. Among the chief influences on his work are the semiotics of A.J. Greimas, the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead, the pragmatism of William James, and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.


Author(s):  
Ian Rumfitt

This chapter assesses the prospects of a pragmatist theory of content. It begins by criticizing the theory presented in D. H. Mellor’s essay ‘Successful Semantics’, then identifies problems and lacunae in the pragmatist theory of meaning sketched in chapter 13 of Dummett’s The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. It contends that the prospects are brighter for a tempered pragmatism, in which the theory of content is permitted to draw upon irreducible notions of truth and falsity. It sketches the shape of such a theory and illustrates the role of its pragmatist elements by showing how they point towards a promising account of the truth conditions of indicative conditionals. A feature of the account is that it validates Modus Ponens whilst invalidating Modus Tollens.


2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Copp

Moral realism and antirealist-expressivism are of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, a cognitive state of mind; she has or expresses a belief that represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might be accurate or inaccurate. The view of antirealist-expressivism is that such a person is in, or expresses, a conative state of mind, one that consists in a certain kind of attitude or motivational stance toward something, such as an action or a person. Realism holds that moral thoughts have truth conditions and that in some cases these truth conditions are satisfied so that our moral thoughts are true. Antirealist-expressivism holds, to a first approximation, that the distinctive moral content of a moral thought does not have truth conditions.


Disputatio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (54) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Elisa Paganini

Abstract It is usually taken for granted that a necessary condition for knowing that P is the truth of P. It may therefore be claimed that if we assume that we gain some kind of knowledge through fiction (let us call it fictional knowledge) of P*, then P* should be true—in at least a certain sense. My hypothesis is that this assumption grounds the different ways adopted by philosophers for attributing truth-conditions to fictional sentences. My claim in this work is that fictional sentences do not have truth-values and truth-conditions, but I want to maintain that we gain some kind of knowledge through fiction: to this aim, I will characterize the objective content of fictional sentences not in terms of truth-conditions (which are usually described by appealing to rules of the language or rules of interpretation of language independent of the actual users), but in dispositional terms and I will define a necessary condition for fictional knowledge accordingly.


Author(s):  
А.А. Артеменков

Цель исследования. Анализ факторов риска и патогенетических механизмов развития дезадаптивных расстройств (ДР) у человека в процессе обучения. Методика. В работе использованы общенаучные методы теоретического познания: абстрагирование, анализ и синтез, аналогия, индукция и дедукция, мысленное моделирование. Результаты. Показано, что пограничные расстройства адаптации имеют бифункциональную природу и характеризуются бессимптомным течением. Установлена роль социогенных факторов среды в возникновении ДР. Акцентируется, что ДР часто формируются в процессе обучения под воздействием неблагоприятных факторов среды и образа жизни. Рассмотрена роль этиологических факторов риска в развитии ДР, обсуждаются особенности течения психосоматических расстройств у студентов, их психофизиологический статус и особенности проявления у них дезадаптации. Детально анализируются современные представления об организации ДР при различных вариантах приспособления организма человека к условиям учебной среды. Обсуждается влияние типологии на уровень адаптации (дезадаптации) организма и системная организация психических функций. Показано ведущее значение в патогенезе ДР активации лимбико-ретикулярных образований, дисфункции срединно-стволовых структур мозга и дезинтеграции корково-подкорковых взаимоотношений. Заключение. Сделан вывод, что понимание механизмов развития ДР позволяет применять различные методы профилактики ДР. Обсуждаются некоторые немедикоментозные и фармакологические средства коррекции ДР и санаторная реабилитация обучающихся. Установление истинных механизмов развития дезадаптивных расстройств обеспечит решение многих вопросов патофизиологии интегративной деятельности мозга. Это в свою очередь позволит найти пути нормализации психосоматических нарушений, применять более эффективные методы медико-психологической помощи населению. Aim. Based of published reports to analyze risk factors for development of disadaptive disorders (DD) and to elucidate pathogenetic mechanisms of DD development during education for their timely prevention and correction. Methods. In this study, general scientific methods of theoretical knowledge were used, such as abstraction, analysis and synthesis, analogy, induction and deduction, and mental modeling. Results. This review examined the literature on development of DD in people during training. We presented evidence that borderline disorders of adaptation are bifunctional and characterized by an asymptomatic course. The role of sociogenic, environmental factors in the occurrence of DD was established. Emphasis was placed on the fact that DD often develop in the process of learning under the influence of adverse environmental factors and lifestyle. Opinions on the role of etiologic risk factors in the development of DD were presented. Features of psychosomatic disorders, psychophysiological status, and manifestations of maladaptation in students were discussed. Current ideas about the DD organization and different types of body adaptation to the conditions of educational environment were analyzed in detail. The author focused on the effect of typology on the level of adaptation (maladaptation) in the body and the systemic organization of mental functions. Activation of limbic-reticular formations, dysfunction of mid-brain stem structures, and disintegration of cortical-subcortical relationships were shown to play a leading role in the pathogenesis of DD. Conclusion. A detailed understanding of DD mechanisms allows to use different methods for prevention of DD. Some non-drug and pharmacological methods for DD correction and sanatorium rehabilitation of students were discussed in this review. Identifying true mechanisms for development of maladaptive disorders will provide a solution of many issues in pathophysiology of brain integrative activity. This, in turn, will help finding ways to correct psychosomatic disorders and to use more effective methods in medical and psychological care.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-111
Author(s):  
Lei Ma

Abstract The paper presents a method of truth-graph by truth-tables. On the one hand, the truth-graph constituted by truth value coordinate and circumference displays a more visual representation of the different combinations of truth-values for the simple or complex propositions. Truth-graphs make sure that you don’t miss any of these combinations. On the other hand, they provide a more convenient tool to discern the validity of a complex proposition made up by simple compositions. The algorithm involving in setting up all the truth conditions is proposed to distinguish easily among tautologous, contradictory and consistent expressions. Furthermore, the paper discusses a certain connection between the truth graphs and the symbols for propositional connectives proposed by Stanisław Leśniewski.


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