We explored the influence of negation on cognitive dynamics, measured using mouse‐movement trajectories, to test the classic notion that negation acts as an operator on linguistic processing. In three experiments, participants verified the truth or falsity of simple statements, and we tracked the computer‐mouse trajectories of their responses. Sentences expressing these facts sometimes contained a negation. Such negated statements could be true (e.g., “elephants are not small”) or false (e.g., “elephants are not large”). In the first experiment, as predicted by (...) the classic notion of negation, we found that negation caused more discreteness in the mouse trajectory of a response. The second experiment induced a simple context for these statements, yet negation still increased discreteness in trajectories. A third experiment enhanced the pragmatic context of sentences, and the discreteness was substantially diminished, with one primary measure no longer significantly showing increased discreteness at all. Traditional linguistic theories predict rapid shifts in cognitive dynamics occur due to the nature of negation: It is an operator that reverses the truth or falsity of an interpretation. We argue that these results support both propositional and contextual accounts of negation present in the literature, suggesting that contextual factors are crucial for determining the kind of cognitive dynamics displayed. We conclude by drawing broader lessons about theories of cognition from the case of negation. (shrink)

The paper deals with the conception of logical empiricism developed by Eino Kaila. Eino Kaila, being a thinker close to the Vienna Circle, departs from some of the central ideas of logical positivism. He identifies a limited number of problems in metaphysics that are meaningful and need to be solved, but he declares the rest of metaphysics to be a logical fallacy. For Eino Kaila, it is not the principle of verification (as a criterion of meaning) but the principle (...) of testability that plays the most important role. In addition, he revises the principle of translatability, insisting that it is impossible to translate a single sentence into the language of experience, but it is possible to translate the whole theory to which the sentence belongs. This is related to his structuralist position in the philosophy of science and his understanding of scientific theories as ‘rationalisations’ as opposed to simple inductive generalisations. The paper compares Eino Kaila’s views expressed during the period of his active interaction with the Vienna Circle be regarded as a predecessor of later critics of logical positivism (in particular, W.V.O. Quine). (shrink)

There is substantial support for the general idea that a formalization of comprehenders' expectations about the likely next word in a sentence helps explaining data related to online sentence processing. While much research has focused on syntactic, semantic, and discourse expectations, the present event‐related potentials (ERPs) study investigates neurolinguistic correlates of pragmatic expectations, which arise when comprehenders expect a sentence to conform to Gricean Maxims of Conversation. For predicting brain responses associated with pragmatic processing, we introduce a (...) formal model of such Gricean pragmatic expectations, using an idealized incremental interpreter. We examine whether pragmatic expectancies derived from this model modulate the amplitude of the N400, a component that has been associated with predictive processing. As part of its parameterization, the model distinguishes genuine pragmatic interpreters, who expect maximally informative true utterances, from literal interpreters, who only expect truthfulness. We explore the model's non‐trivial predictions for an experimental setup which uses picture‐sentence verification with ERPs recorded at several critical positions in sentences containing the scalar implicature trigger some. We find that Gricean expectations indeed affect the N400, largely in line with the predictions of our model, but also discuss discrepancies between model predictions and observations critically. (shrink)

Fetzer famously claims that program verification is not even a theoretical possibility, and offers a certain argument for this far-reaching claim. Unfortunately for Fetzer, and like-minded thinkers, this position-argument pair, while based on a seminal insight that program verification, despite its Platonic proof-theoretic airs, is plagued by the inevitable unreliability of messy, real-world causation, is demonstrably self-refuting. As I soon show, Fetzer is like the person who claims: ‘My sole claim is that every claim expressed by an English (...) sentence and starting with the phrase “My sole claim” is false’. Or, more accurately, such thinkers are like the person who claims that modus tollens is invalid, and supports this claim by giving an argument that itself employs this rule of inference. (shrink)

Descartes famously argued, on purely conceptual grounds, that even an extremely powerful being could not trick him into mistakenly judging that he was thinking. Of course, it is not necessarily true that Descartes is thinking. Still, Descartes claimed, it is necessarily true that if a person judges that she is thinking, that person is thinking. Following Tyler Burge (1988) we call such judgments ‘self-verifying.’ More exactly, a judgment j performed by a subject S at a time t is selfverifying if (...) and only if the fact that S has made j at t entails that j is true at t.2 Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, ‘I am thinking that p’. We call such judgments ‘cogito’ judgments. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Theorists have tried to account for the self-verifying status of cogito judgments by arguing that the second-order judgment that one is thinking that p contains the thought that p as a part of it. I argue (§1) that the accuracy of the containment model is entailed by a Russellian view of content (according to which ‘‘belief’’ contexts are both extensional and transparent) when the Russellian view is attached to some fairly uncontroversial assumptions. The accuracy of the containment model is also entailed by non-hierarchical Fregean views of content according to which expressions in oblique contexts both denote and express first-level senses (§2), but there are compelling arguments against non-hierarchical Fregean views (§3). Moreover, the extremely plausible account of self-verification provided by Russellianism is not entailed by theories that follow Frege in accepting a hierarchy of senses and so allow that expressions in oblique contexts express senses that are not identical to the senses they there denote (§4).. (shrink)

Burge follows Descartes in claiming that the category of conceptually self-verifying judgments includes (but is not restricted to) judgments that give rise to sincere assertions of sentences of the form, 'I am thinking that p'. In this paper I argue that Burge’s Cartesian insight is hard to reconcile with Fregean accounts of the content of thought. Burge's intuitively compelling claim that cogito judgments are conceptually self-verifying poses a real challenge to neo-Fregean theories of content.

The question of basic and incorrigible sentences has appeared in connection with certain recent attempts to refine and re-define the meaning of Empiricism. More directly still, the question appears in connection with the problem of verification. It is noteworthy that the question of protocols, more than any other issue, has served to draw out the philosophical differences between the original Wiener Kreis and the Cambridge Analysts. Yet despite their differences both schools are agreed that basic sentences in some sense (...) of the word, are epistemologically necessary.But if one takes the view, say of the Instrumentalists, that all perceptual knowledge is interpretation based upon accepted theories, and corrected in the light of such theories then basic sentences are quite unnecessary. But among those who employ the term “basic” there is little agreement as to its meaning. The common use of the term has not resulted in a common understanding. And instead of drawing Empiricists together it has succeeded only in driving them apart. (shrink)

Kotek et al. argue on the basis of novel experimental evidence that sentences like ‘Most of the dots are blue’ are ambiguous, i.e. have two distinct truth conditions. Kotek et al. furthermore suggest that when their results are taken together with those of earlier work by Lidz et al., the overall picture that emerges casts doubt on the conclusions that Lidz et al. drew from their earlier results. We disagree with this characterization of the relationship between the two studies. Our (...) main aim in this reply is to clarify the relationship as we see it. In our view, Kotek et al.’s central claims are simply logically independent of those of Lidz et al.: the former concern which truth condition a certain kind of sentence has, while the latter concern the procedures that speakers choose for the purposes of determining whether a particular truth condition is satisfied in various scenes. The appearance of a conflict between the two studies stems from inattention to the distinction between questions about truth conditions and questions about verification procedures. (shrink)

The present event‐related potential (ERP) study used picture–sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional‐semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen (“Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week”). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present (...) study replicated previous results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible. (shrink)

If the truth of a given sentence, ‘P’ depends upon a certain non-linguistic fact, P then, how is the P without inverted commas involved in the statement, “ ‘P’ is true when P“? How is ‘P’ related to P? My answer suggests that any discussion of these questions leads inevitably to the ancient problem of particulars and universals.

In this paper, we study natural language constructions which were first examined by Barwise: The richer the country, the more powerful some of its officials. Guided by Barwise’s observations, we suggest that conceivable interpretations of such constructions express the existence of various similarities between partial orders such as homomorphism or embedding. Semantically, we interpret the constructions as polyadic generalized quantifiers restricted to finite models. We extend the results obtained by Barwise by showing that similarity quantifiers are not expressible in elementary (...) logic over finite models. We also investigate whether the proposed readings are sound from the cognitive perspective. We prove that almost all similarity quantifiers are intractable. This leads us to first-order variants, which only approximate the strong readings, but are cognitively more plausible. Driven by the question of ambiguity, we recall Barwise’s argumentation in favour of strong readings, enriching it with some arguments of our own. Given that Barwise-like sentences are indeed ambiguous, we use a generalized Strong Meaning Hypothesis to derive predictions for their verification. Finally, we propose a hypothesis according to which conflicting pressures of communication and cognition might give rise to an ambiguous construction, provided that different semantic variants of the construction withstand different pressures involved in its usage. (shrink)

We present a computational evaluation of three hypotheses about sources of deficit in sentence comprehension in aphasia: slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction. The ACT-R based Lewis and Vasishth model is used to implement these three proposals. Slowed processing is implemented as slowed execution time of parse steps; intermittent deficiency as increased random noise in activation of elements in memory; and resource reduction as reduced spreading activation. As data, we considered subject vs. object relative sentences, presented in a (...) self-paced listening modality to 56 individuals with aphasia and 46 matched controls. The participants heard the sentences and carried out a picture verification task to decide on an interpretation of the sentence. These response accuracies are used to identify the best parameters that correspond to the three hypotheses mentioned above. We show that controls have more tightly clustered parameter values than IWA; specifically, compared to controls, among IWA there are more individuals with slow parsing times, high noise, and low spreading activation. We find that individual IWA show differential amounts of deficit along the three dimensions of slowed processing, intermittent deficiency, and resource reduction, overall, there is evidence for all three sources of deficit playing a role, and IWA have a more variable range of parameter values than controls. An important implication is that it may be meaningless to talk about sources of deficit with respect to an abstract verage IWA; the focus should be on the individual's differential degrees of deficit along different dimensions, and on understanding the causes of variability in deficit between participants. (shrink)

The problem of identity across possible worlds is raised with the following questions: What does it mean to say of something in one possible world that it is identical with something in another possible world? How are we to decide whether an individual in one possible world is identical with an individual in another?1 Because the questions concern meaning and verification, it appears to be the case that they presuppose that there are one or more sentences whose meaning and (...) method of verification are in need of explanation. However, although it has been generally presumed to be easy, it turns out to be very difficult to produce a sentence that enables us to formulate the problem and that is not merely supposed to say, but really does say, of an individual in one world and of an individual in another world that the first individual is identical with the second. (shrink)

In three experiments, we investigated the computational complexity of German reciprocal sentences with different quantificational antecedents. Building upon the tractable cognition thesis (van Rooij, 2008) and its application to the verification of quantifiers (Szymanik, 2010) we predicted complexity differences among these sentences. Reciprocals with all-antecedents are expected to preferably receive a strong interpretation (Dalrymple et al., 1998), but reciprocals with proportional or numerical quantifier antecedents should be interpreted weakly. Experiment 1, where participants completed pictures according to their preferred interpretation, (...) provides evidence for these predictions. Experiment 2 was a picture verification task. The results show that the strong interpretation was in fact possible for tractable all but one-reciprocals, but not for exactly n. The last experiment manipulated monotonicity of the quantifier antecedents. (shrink)

Many studies showed that comprehenders monitor changes in protagonists’ emotions and actions. This article reports two experiments that explored how focusing comprehenders’ attention on a particular property of the protagonist dimension affects the accessibility of information about target objects mentioned in the sentence. Furthermore, the present research examined whether participants’ attitudes toward the issues described in the sentence can modulate comprehension processes. To this end, we asked participants to read sentences about environmental issues that focused comprehenders’ attention on (...) different mental and physical attributes of the same entities and then self-report their own thoughts on the topic of environment by responding to the items assessing their environmental awareness. Importantly, we manipulated the task requirements across two experiments by administering a self-report task, which required the participants to rate the seriousness and the frequency of the problem mentioned in a sentence; and administering a sentence-picture verification paradigm, which required the participants to merely indicate if the object depicted in the picture was mentioned in the preceding sentence. The results of these experiments suggest that the focus of a sentence on the environmental problem enhances the accessibility of information about environmental issues ; that the comprehender’s level of environmental awareness influences one’s attention during sentence processing; and that comprehender characteristics significantly modulate comprehension processes only when the measures tap into explicit processes. (shrink)

The verification theory of meaning aims to characterise what it is for a sentence to be meaningful and also what kind of abstract object the meaning of a sentence is. A brief outline is given by Rudolph Carnap, one of the theory's most prominent defenders: If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. [...] thus the meaning of a sentence is (...) in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. [4: 420] In short, the verification theory of meaning claims that the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Allergy to absolute truth Provisionality and truth Truth versus verification Truth and fixity Transparency, Tarski, and Carnap Truth and certainty Sentences as truth candidates Theoretical terms Varieties of instrumentalism Pragmatism and instrumentalism Systems, simplicity, reduction Crises in science Reduction and expansion.

Verificationism has been a hallmark of logical empiricism. According to this principle, a sentence is insignificant in a certain sense if its truth value cannot be determined. Although logical empiricists strove for decades to develop an adequate principle of verification, they failed to resolve its problems. This led to a general abandonment of the verificationist project in the early 1960s. In the last 50 years, this view has received tremendously bad press. Today it is mostly regarded as an (...) outdated historical concept. Theories that have evolved since the abandonment of verificationism can, however, help overcome some of its key problems. More specifically, an adequate criterion of significance can be derived from a combination of modern theories of justification and belief revision, along with a formal semantics for counterfactuals. In view of these potential improvements, the abandonment of verificationism appears premature. Half a century following its decline, it might be about time to revisit this disreputable view. The author argues in favor of a weak form of verificationism. This approach could be referred to as minimal verificationism, as it involves a weakening of traditional verificationist principles in various respects while maintaining their core idea. (shrink)

We report two experiments which tested whether cognitive capacities are limited to those functions that are computationally tractable (PTIME-Cognition Hypothesis). In particular, we investigated the semantic processing of reciprocal sentences with generalized quantifiers, i.e., sentences of the form Q dots are directly connected to each other, where Q stands for a generalized quantifier, e.g. all or most. Sentences of this type are notoriously ambiguous and it has been claimed in the semantic literature that the logically strongest reading is preferred (Strongest (...) Meaning Hypothesis). Depending on the quantifier, the verification of their strongest interpretations is computationally intractable whereas the verification of the weaker readings is tractable. We conducted a picture completion experiment and a picture verification experiment to investigate whether comprehenders shift from an intractable reading to a tractable reading which should be dispreferred according to the Strongest Meaning Hypothesis. The results from the picture completion experiment suggest that intractable readings occur in language comprehension. Their verification, however, rapidly exceeds cognitive capacities in case the verification problem cannot be solved using simple heuristics. In particular, we argue that during verification, guessing strategies are used to reduce computational complexity. (shrink)

We consider two versions of truth as grounded in verification procedures: Dummett's notion of proof as an effective way to establish the truth of a statement and Hintikka's GTS notion of truth as given by the existence of a winning strategy for the game associated with a statement. Hintikka has argued that the two notions should be effective and that one should thus restrict one's attention to recursive winning strategies. In the context of arithmetic, we show that the two (...) notions do not coincide: on the one hand, proofs in PA do not yield recursive winning strategies for the associated game; on the other hand, there is no sound and effective proof procedure that captures recursive GTS truths. We then consider a generalized version of Game Theoretical Semantics by introducing games with backward moves. In this setting, a connection is made between proofs and recursive winning strategies. We then apply this distinction between two kinds of verificationist procedures to a recent debate about how we recognize the truth of Gödelian sentences. (shrink)

This paper purports to analyze the verificationist theory of meaning proposed by logical positivism. According to this theory, only sentences verifiably by means of empirical observation have meanings. Our purpose is to show the reasons why the verificationist theory collapses. In order to do so, we will examine both the internal and external critiques to it. Among the internal critiques, we will show the logical positivists’ failed attempts to formulate an adequate weak verification criterion. Among the external critiques, we (...) will focus on the ones formulated by J.L. Austin on the basis of his theory of performative utterances. (shrink)

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its (...) meaning, before we can try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

The verification of a sentence against a visual display in experimental conditions reveals a procedure that is driven solely by the properties of the linguistic input and not by the properties of the context (the set-up of the visual display) or extra-linguistic cognition (operations executed to obtain the truth value). This procedure, according to the Interface Transparency Thesis (ITT) (Lidz et al. in Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011), represents the meaning of an expression at the interface with the (...) ‘conceptual-intentional’ system (Chomsky in The minimalist program. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995). My experiments provide support for the ITT by replicating in Polish and in Bulgarian the findings of Lidz et al. (Nat Lang Semant 19(3):227–256, 2011) for the English quantifier most. We also obtain new evidence that participants are prompted to switch between verification procedures by a change in the linguistic input (a different superlative quantifier entailed by most), but not by a change in the visual input. Thus, the motivation for the subconscious switch in procedures is not to maximize efficiency. Participants use the procedure associated with each quantifier, and in effect, the same display is verified differently depending on which information the visual system is instructed to use by the semantic representation of the sentence. (shrink)

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its (...) meaning, before we can try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a semantic analysis of the well-known knowability paradox stemming from the Church–Fitch observation that the meaningful knowability principle /all truths are knowable/, when expressed as a bi-modal principle F --> K♢F, yields an unacceptable omniscience property /all truths are known/. We offer an alternative semantic proof of this fact independent of the Church–Fitch argument. This shows that the knowability paradox is not intrinsically related to the Church–Fitch proof, nor to the Moore sentence upon which (...) it relies, but rather to the knowability principle itself. Further, we show that, from a verifiability perspective, the knowability principle fails in the classical logic setting because it is missing the explicit incorporation of a hidden assumption of /stability/: ‘the proposition in question does not change from true to false in the process of discovery.’ Once stability is taken into account, the resulting /stable knowability principle/ and its nuanced versions more accurately represent verification-based knowability and do not yield omniscience. (shrink)

Dummettian anti-realism repudiates the realist's notion of verification-transcendent truth. Perhaps the most crucial element in the Dummettian attack on realist truth is the critique of so-called realist semantics, which assigns verification-transcendent truth-conditions as the meanings of (some) sentences. The Dummettian critique charges that realist semantics cannot serve as an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language, and that, consequently, the realist conception of truth must be rejected as well. In arguing for this, Dummett and his followers have (...) appealed to a certain conception of linguistic knowledge. This paper examines closely the appeal to speakers' knowledge of linguistic meaning, its force and limitations. (shrink)

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native English speakers. In the first (...) experiment, we tested between-subjects variability in meaning representations. In the second experiment, we tested the stability of meaning representations over time by testing the same group of participants in two experimental sessions. In both experiments, participants performed the verification task. They verified a sentence with a quantifier (e.g., “Most of the gleerbs are feezda.”) based on the numerical information provided in the second sentence, (e.g., “60% of the gleerbs are feezda”). To investigate between-subject and within-subject differences in meaning representations, we proposed an extended version of the Diffusion Decision Model with two parameters capturing truth conditions and vagueness. We fit the model to responses and reaction times data. In the first experiment, we found substantial between-subject differences in representations of most as reflected by the variability in the truth conditions. Moreover, we found that the verification of most is proportion-dependent as reflected in the reaction time effect and model parameter. In the second experiment, we showed that quantifier representations are stable over time as reflected in stable model parameters across two experimental sessions. These findings challenge semantic theories that assume the truth-conditional equivalence of most and more than half and contribute to the representational theory of vague concepts. The current study presents a promising approach to study semantic representations, which can have a wide application in experimental linguistics. (shrink)

This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from a psycholinguistic experiment examining (...) adult judgments concerning ‘Most of the dots are blue’. This sentence is true if and only if the number of blue dots exceeds the number of nonblue dots. But this leaves unsettled, e.g., how the second cardinality is specified for purposes of understanding and/or verification: via the nonblue things, given a restriction to the dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x) & ~Blue(x)}|’; via the blue things, given the same restriction, and subtraction from the number of dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x)}| – |{x: Dot(x) & Blue(x)}|’; or in some other way. Psycholinguistic evidence and psychophysical modeling support the second hypothesis. (shrink)

One might poetically muse that computers have the essence both of logic and machines. Through the case of the history of Separation Logic, we explore how this assertion is more than idle poetry. Separation Logic works because it merges the software engineer’s conceptual model of a program’s manipulation of computer memory with the logical model that interprets what sentences in the logic are true, and because it has a proof theory which aids in the crucial problem of scaling the reasoning (...) task. Scalability is a central problem, and some would even say the central problem, in appli- cations of logic in computer science. Separation Logic is an interesting case because of its widespread success in verification tools. For these two senses of model—the engineering/conceptual and the logical—to merge in a genuine sense, each must maintain their norms of use from their home disciplines. When this occurs, both the logic and engineering benefit greatly. Seeking this intersection of two different senses of model provides a strategy for how computer scientists and logicians may be successful. Furthermore, the history of Separation Logic for analysing programs provides a novel case for philosophers of science of how software engineers and computer scientists develop models and the components of such models. We provide three contributions: an exploration of the extent of models merging that is necessary for success in computer science; an introduction to the technical details of Separation Logic, which can be used for reasoning about other exhaustible resources; and an introduction to the problems, process, and results of computer scientists for those outside the field. (shrink)

Next SectionIn recent years, the interpretation of scalar terms in embedded environments has been investigated extensively. Some experimentalists have been concerned with sentences like (1), in which a scalar term is embedded under a universal quantifier. The controversy involves the question whether ‘some’ in these sentences is interpreted as ‘some but not all’, thus leading to the embedded upper-bounded inference that no square is connected to all of the circles. (1) All the squares are connected with some of the circles.Geurts (...) & Pouscoulous (2009) conducted a verification task that seemed to prove that the inference is not licensed. In response, Clifton & Dube (2010) and Chemla & Spector (2011) gathered evidence suggesting the opposite conclusion. By experimentally investigating the typicality structure of complex quantified sentences like (1) above, I show how the results of the latter two experiments can be explained as typicality effects. Typicality plays a significant role in the comprehension of quantified sentences, thus complicating the interpretation of data from the kinds of experiments that have been employed to test between theories of upper-bounded inferences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth CenturyA. P. MartinichScott Soames. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1, The Dawn of Analysis. Pp. xix + 411. Vol. 2, The Age of Meaning. Pp. xxii + 479. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Cloth, $35.00, each volume.This two-volume work treats Anglo-American analytic philosophy from 1900 to roughly 1970. This means that the views of Michael Dummett, John Rawls and others are (...) not treated. Soames explains the omission in an epilogue to the second volume. Too much good philosophy on too many topics has been done recently—much of it using technical devices—to allow him or anyone else, to master more than a few parts. That seems right to me.The first volume consists of five parts: One: G. E. Moore on Ethics, Epistemology, and Philosophical Analysis; Two: Bertrand Russell on Logical and Linguistic Analysis; Three: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus; and Four: Logical Positivism, Emotivism, and Ethics; and Five: The Post-Positivist Perspective of the Early W. V. Quine. The great figure associated with twentieth-century analytic philosophy who is missing from Volume 1, Gottlob Frege, Soames omits, because Frege's "concerns were, on the whole, more specialized and technical than the others, and for many years this limited his influence" (1:xiii n. 1). The second volume consists of seven parts: One: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations; Two: Classics of Ordinary Language Philosophy: Truth, Goodness, the Mind, and Analysis; Three: More Classics of Ordinary Language Philosophy: The Response to Radical Skepticism; Four: Paul Grice and the End of Ordinary Language Philosophy; Five: The Philosophical Naturalism of Willard Van Orman Quine; Six: Donald Davidson on Truth and Meaning; Seven: Saul Kripke on Naming and Necessity.What does twentieth-century analytic philosophy come to? Soames thinks its "two most important achievements" are (i) the recognition that philosophical speculation must be grounded in pre-philosophical thought, and (ii) the success achieved in understanding, and separating one from another, the fundamental methodological notions of logical consequence, logical truth, necessary truth, and apriori truth" (1:xi; see also 1:298-99 and 2:252). He admirably succeeds in making the case for these judgments, although many philosophers will think that these two together do not amount to a great deal, considering all the effort expended by analytic philosophers. I think that analytic philosophy has done more; it has given philosophers many techniques for attacking conceptual problems, a great deal of information about the structure and nature of language, and has decisively refuted various theses that were once thought attractive and even obviously true. In any case, those who think that analytic philosophy, especially conceptual analysis, accomplished nothing are, I think, refuted by these volumes. In his discussion of G. E. Moore's article, "A Defense of Common Sense," Soames explains what he takes to be the first great result of analytic philosophy. Moore showed that the beliefs of common sense should often be accepted "with more confidence" than any philosophical beliefs or propositions that conflict with them, and in these cases cannot be overthrown by philosophical beliefs. For example, "The skeptic assumes that we can be certain about what knowledge is before we decide whether what we all ordinarily take to be paradigmatic cases of knowledge really are genuine" [End Page 125] (23, entire sentence is bold in the original). (Soames uses boldface type to mark all of the significant propositions discussed in the book, a nice pedagogical device.)In his discussion of Bertrand Russell's theory of descriptions, Soames gives the impression that linguistic interests primarily motivated Russell. I think the motivation was primarily ontological. Russell wanted to justify ridding philosophy of nonexistent entities. The doctrines of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Logical Positivism were two ways in which philosophical analysis developed. For Soames, what is most important in the Tractatus is the theory of names, and he holds, I believe, the minority belief (which I share) that properties are reducible to configurations of objects (1:206-6). What is most important in Logical Positivism is the verification theory of meaning. Strongly verifiable sentences "were supposed to be those the truth of which could, in principle, be completely established... (shrink)

In the human cognitive economy there are four grades of epistemic involvement. Knowledge partitions into distinct sorts, each in turn subject to gradations. This gives a fourwise partition on ignorance, which exhibits somewhat different coinstantiation possibilities. The elements of these partitions interact with one another in complex and sometimes cognitively fruitful ways. The first grade of knowledge I call “anselmian” to echo the famous declaration credo ut intelligam, that is, “I believe in order that I may come to know”. As (...) construed here, one knows in this anselmian way that E = mc2 just in case one knows that sentence expresses a true statement, but without having to understand the proposition it expresses. Most epistemologists ignore the significance of this grade of epistemic involvement. In a second grade of epistemic involvement, knowing that E = mc2 is knowing what that sentence means and understanding the proposition it express. This is knowledge in the propositional or semantic sense, and is the dominant target of epistemological investigation. Tacit and implicit knowledge occupies another tier. A typical example would be something that someone has “known all along” but, until now, hasn’t had occasion to put her mind to it or formulate in words. TI-knowledge remains a minority interest in today’s epistemology. Operating at a fourth grade of epistemic involvement is what I call “impact”-knowledge, which is the knowledge of a matter at its deepest and most widespread. An example, to be discussed below, is the knowledge that was generated by the Wiles proof of Fermat’s last theorem. Its true importance lies not only, or even mainly, in its verification of a commonly accepted fact about numbers, but rather in its enrichment of the mathematics of elliptical curves and the promise it holds for greater advancement into the mathematical unknown. Knowledge of this fourth grade has yet to find a seat in the parliaments of epistemology. Knowledge of the anselmian sort is independent of the other three. Tacit and implicit knowledge is incompatible with anselmian and semantic knowledge but coinstantiable with impact-knowledge. Semantic knowledge is incompatible with tacit and implicit knowledge but coinstantiable with the others. Impact-knowledge is pairwise coinstantiable with the others. Below I will bring the ignorance partitions into such alignment as they have with these ones. In doing so, I’ll propose a naturalized causal response epistemology designed to give these interactive distinctions the theoretical air they need to breathe. (shrink)

PART I The first chapter contains some arguments in favour of four general requirements on a theory of meaning which Michael Dummett has formulated: connection between meaning and understanding, distinction between sense and force, compositionality, and manifestability. The second chapter contains a condensed account of the theory of meaning centered on bivalent truth-conditions, and a detailed analysis of Dummett's argument against such a theory and against classical logic. The third chapter is a description of Dummett's theory of meaning centered on (...) the notion of direct verification, and of Prawitz's semantics which can be embedded in the latter theory of meaning so as to justify intuitionistic logic. The weakest points of Dummett's idea are two: 1) it is difficult to make verificationism compatible with the holistic character of justification; 2) logical revisionism may involve a too drastic disagreement between verificationism and linguistic practice. -/- PART II. The second part contains a presentation of a theory of meaning centered on the notion which I have called immediate argumental role. The fundamental idea of the theory is that the sense of a word is given by all the argumentation rules concerning the word. Chapters IV-VII make precise the basic idea by explaining the notion of "argumentation rule" and by defining the notion of "concerning", and other notions among which "immediate argumental role of a sentence" and "global argumental role". Chapters VIII-X deal with the main philosophical features of the theory: 1) the theory satisfies the four requirements considered in the first chapter; 2) despite its compositionality, the theory is compatible with epistemological holism; 3) the theory admits the possibility of meaningful paradoxical languages; 4) the theory distinguishes between the understandability of a language and its correctness in a given epistemic situation (understandability does not imply correctness); 5) the theory is pluralist with respect to the understandability of different logics and neutral with respect to their validity. (shrink)

Currents expositions of game-theoretical semantics two lines of interpretation are mixed. On the one hand, the theory provides a way of extending truht-conditions from atomic to non-atomic sentences. On the other hand, the theory analyze meaning by allowing us to describe a certain kind of compIex activities: verification games against Nature. In this paper, both inteperpretations are sorted out and their respective emphasized.