Formal Philosophy of Science: Statement and Set-theoretic Approaches

The so-called received view of scientific theory, initially proposed by logical positivists, represented scientific theory as a set of statements of some formal language, ordered by syntactic relation of deductive derivability. By late 1960s this strategy had met with severe criticism which called into question the effectiveness of formal methods in philosophy of science. The set-theoretic (semantic) approach in formal philosophy of science, which can be treated as natural development of received view, is based on the concept of model in Tarski’s sense and is capable of neutralizing the most part of these objections.

Dialogue games for Dishkant’s quantum modal logic

Recently some elaborations were made concerning the game theoretic semantic of $\L_{\aleph_0}$ and its extension. In the paper this kind of semantics is developed for Dishkant’s quantum modal logic $\L$Q which is also, in fact, the specific extension of $\L_{\aleph_0}$. As a starting point some game theoretic interpretation for the S$\L$ system (extending both $\L$ukasiewicz logic $\L_{\aleph_0}$ and modal logic S5) was exploited which has been proposed in 2006 by C. Fermuller and R. Kosik. They, in turn, based on ideas already introduced by Robin Giles in the 1970th to obtain a characterization of $\L_{\aleph_0}$ in terms of a Lorenzen style dialogue game combined with bets on the results of binary experiments that may show dispersion.

PROOF-THEORETIC SEMANTIC VALUES FOR LOGICAL OPERATORS

The paper proposes a semantic value for the logical constants (connectives and quantifiers) within the framework of proof-theoretic semantics, basic meaning on the introduction rules of a meaning conferring natural deduction proof system. The semantic value is defined based on Frege’s Context Principle, by taking “contributions” to sentential meanings as determined by the function-argument structure as induced by a type-logical grammar. In doing so, the paper proposes a novel proof-theoretic interpretation of the semantic types, traditionally interpreted in Henkin models. The compositionality of the resulting attribution of semantic values is discussed. Elsewhere, the same method was used for defining proof-theoretic meaning of subsentential phrases in a fragment of natural language. Doing the same for (the simpler and clearer case of) logic sheds more light on the proposal.

Integration of Neuroimaging and Microarray Datasets through Mapping and Model-Theoretic semantic Decomposition of Unstructured phenotypes

An approach towards heterogeneous neuroscience dataset integration is proposed that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and a knowledge-based phenotype organizer system (PhenOS) to link ontology-anchored terms to underlying data from each database, and then maps these terms based on a computable model of disease (SNOMED CT®). The approach was implemented using sample datasets from fMRIDC, GEO, The Whole Brain Atlas and Neuronames, and allowed for complex queries such as “List all disorders with a finding site of brain region X, and then find the semantically related references in all participating databases based on the ontological model of the disease or its anatomical and morphological attributes”. Precision of the NLP-derived coding of the unstructured phenotypes in each dataset was 88% (n = 50), and precision of the semantic mapping between these terms across datasets was 98% (n = 100). To our knowledge, this is the first example of the use of both semantic decomposition of disease relationships and hierarchical information found in ontologies to integrate heterogeneous phenotypes across clinical and molecular datasets.

Genitive Modifiers, Sorts, and Metonymy

Our long-term goal is to contribute to the integration of formal and lexical semantics. Our more immediate theoretical starting point is the idea of “text as theory”, within a model-theoretic semantic framework. We describe a set of empirical problems in the domain of genitive modifiers that offers a challenge to theories of the integration of lexical, compositional, and contextual information. After sketching a solution, we raise the issue of metonymy in the interpretation of genitives, and examine the role of sortal information in the specification of underspecified meanings and in processes of type-shifting and sort-shifting, including metonymy.