This paper focuses on the interpretation of the Italian approximative adverb quasi 'almost' by primarily looking at cases in which it modifies temporal connectives, a domain which, to our knowledge, has been largely unexplored thus far. Consideration of this domain supports the need for a scalar account of the semantics of quasi (close in spirit to Hitzeman's semantic analysis of almost, in: Canakis et al. (eds) Papers from the 28th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 1992). When paired (...) with suitable analyses of temporal connectives, such an account can provide a simple explanation of the patterns of implication that are observed when quasi modifies locational (e. g. quando 'when'), directional (e. g. fino 'until' and da 'since'), and event-sequencing temporal connectives (e. g. prima 'before' and dopo ' after'). A challenging empirical phenomenon that is observed is a contrast between the modification of fino and da by quasi, on the one hand, and the modification of prima and dopo by the same adverb, on the other. While quasi fino and quasi da behave symmetrically, a puzzling asymmetry is observed between quasi prima and quasi dopo. To explain the asymmetry, we propose an analysis of prima and dopo on which the former has the meaning of the temporal comparative più presto 'earlier', while the latter is seen as an atomic predicate denoting temporal succession between events (Del Prete, Nat Lang Semantics 16: 157-203, 2008). We show that the same pattern of implication observed for quasi prima is attested when quasi modifies overt comparatives, and propose a pragmatic analysis of this pattern that uniformly applies to both cases, thus providing new evidence for the claim that prima is underlyingly a comparative. A major point of this paper is a discussion of the notion of scale which is relevant for the semantics of quasi', in particular, we show that the notion of Horn (entailment-based) scale is not well-suited for handling modification of temporal connectives, and that a more general notion of scale is required in order to provide a uniform analysis of quasi as a cross-categorial modifier. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Concordance to Descartes’ “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia.” by Katsuzo Murakami, Meguru Sasaki, Tetsuichi NishimuraTuomo Aho and Mikko YrjönsuuriKatsuzo Murakami, Meguru Sasaki, and Tetsuichi Nishimura. Concordance to Descartes’ “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia.” Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1995. Pp. v + 355. Cloth, DM 198.00.This is a product from the Descartes database of Tokyo University scholars. It gives an account of the occurrences and contexts of words in the Meditationes (the main (...) text only), aiming at a complete survey of vocabulary. The work keeps strictly to the form of a lexical concordance; in addition to the word lists, there is only a brief instruction. (A bibliographical note about editions might be useful.) Technical realization is excellent. But concordances like this are big and expensive books; could they possibly be published more easily in electronic format?Most words of Descartes’s text are included in the main concordance. There they are listed following the alphabetic order of standard dictionaries, and in each entry the total amount of occurrences of the word is announced. Then every occurrence is quoted in its context (one line = approximately two in the Adam-Tannery standard edition). Quotes within each entry are arranged and their places identified by digits showing the page and line in AT edition.Some function words and most indeclinables are placed in an index which gives only the numbers and locations of their occurrences. In most cases this is certainly reasonable, but some choices are problematic. For example, why have the 638 + 36 occurrences of qui in its two senses (‘who’, ‘what’; ‘how’, ‘whereby’) been printed with full contexts, while the philosophically interesting adverb plane (‘plainly’, 55 times) is to be found merely in the index?Concordances are uncommon for modern philosophy, but they are familiar and valuable tools in work with ancient texts. Obviously they function in linguistic research, and even the present Descartes book has largely the same goal: to serve the study of neo-Latin language. Undoubtedly, a rigorous case study like this is important for such [End Page 135] investigations. (There remains, however, a difficulty, as the editors point out, because the AT text differs from original editions, mainly in matters of orthography and punctuation.) But also a completely nonlinguistic philosopher can benefit from this material. It is useful to see all occurrences of a word together and at once; many careless generalizations could be avoided by checking from a concordance.One can make amusing observations at random. Thus some terms have remarkably low frequencies (notitia, qualitas occur 4 times; materia 3 times; absolutus, principium 2 times; abstractus, definire, dispositio, species 1 time; intentio, possibile not at all). On the other hand, there is an overwhelming concentration on the semantic family round cogitare, cognoscere, comprehendere, concipere, percipere. Descartes has some idiosyncratic favorites, like advertere/animadvertere. One also notices his strong liking for words of seeing and light (15 arguments from lumen naturale!). It hardly is a surprise that his most cherished favorite is ego (492 times).Tuomo Aho and Mikko Yrjönsuuri University of HelsinkiCopyright © 1998 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc... (shrink)

In my view, meanings are instructions to construct monadic concepts that can be conjoined with others, given a few thematic relations and an operation of existential closure. For example, ‘red ball’ is understood as—and has the semantic property of being—an instruction to fetch and conjoin two concepts that are linked, respectively, to ‘red’ and ‘ball’. Other expressions are more complex. But to a first approximation, ‘I stabbed it violently with this’ is an instruction to construct and existentially close a six-conjunct (...) concept of the form indicated below; AGENT(E, S) & STAB(E) & BEFORE(E, T) & PATIENT(E, 1) & VIOLENT(E) & INSTRUMENT(E, 2) where ‘S’, ‘T’, ‘1’ and ‘2’ stand for concepts of the relevant speaker, time, and things demonstrated. The verb and adverb correspond directly to conjoinable concepts of events. The pronouns correspond to such concepts via certain relational notions, reflected with the tense, preposition, and grammatical relations that ‘stab’ bears to its subject and object. I have argued elsewhere that this neo-Davidsonian conception of semantics is descriptively adequate, and yet. (shrink)

This reviews, motivates, and extends the event analysis of action sentences and shows how it explains the compositionally of adverbial modification of action verbs and event verbs more generally. It includes a treatment of intensional adverbs like 'intentionally' and how it can be extended to the collective reading of plural action sentences.

modal adverbs and discourse implicatures semantics.

This paper highlights some connections between work on truth approximation and work in social epistemology, in particular work on peer disagreement. In some of the literature on truth approximation, questions have been addressed concerning the efficiency of research strategies for approximating the truth. So far, social aspects of research strategies have not received any attention in this context. Recent findings in the field of opinion dynamics suggest that this is a mistake. How scientists exchange and take into account information about (...) each others’ beliefs may greatly influence the accuracy and speed with which the scientific community as a whole approximates the truth. On the other hand, social epistemologists concerned with peer disagreement have so far neglected the question of how practices of responding to disagreements with peers fare with respect to the goal of approximating the truth. Again, work on opinion dynamics shows that this may be a mistake, and that how we ought to respond to disagreements with our peers may depend on the specific purposes of our investigations. (shrink)

This article discusses the logical form of action sentences with particular attention to the role of adverbial modification, reviewing and extending the event analysis of action sentences.

Nous abordons, dans cet article, le fonctionnement discursif des adverbiaux de localisation spatiale dehors et au dehors. Notre objectif est de mettre en valeur leur rôle dans la structuration du discours. Nous proposons aussi un examen des propriétés combinatoires et des conditions d’emploi de ces deux expressions dans les séquences narratives.. Nous montrerons enfin que, dans certains contextes, la valeur spatiale liée à l’emploi de ces adverbiaux peut être dédoublée d’une valeur temporelle.

In this volume leading researchers present new work on the semantics and pragmatics of adjectives and adverbs, and their interfaces with syntax. Its concerns include the semantics of gradability; the relationship between adjectival scales and verbal aspect; the relationship between meaning and the positions of adjectives and adverbs in nominal and verbal projections; and the fine-grained semantics of different subclasses of adverbs and adverbs. Its goals are to provide a comprehensive vision of the linguistically significant structural (...) and interpretive properties of adjectives and adverbs, to highlight the similarities between these two categories, and to signal the importance of a careful and detailed integration of lexical and compositional semantics. The editors open the book with an overview of current research before introducing and contextualizing the remaining chapters. The work is aimed at scholars and advanced students of syntax, semantics, formal pragmatics, and discourse. It will also appeal to researchers in philosophy, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition interested in the syntax and semantics of adjectives and adverbs. (shrink)

This paper introduces two languages and associated logics designed to afford perspicuous representations of a range of natural language arguments involving adverbs and the like: first-order logic with basic adverbs (FOL-BA) and first-order logic with scoped adverbs (FOL-SA). The guiding logical idea is that an adverb can come between a term and the rest of the statement it is a part of, resulting in a logically stronger statement. I explain various interesting challenges that arise in the attempt (...) to implement the guiding idea, and provide solutions for some but not all of them. I conclude by outlining some directions for further research. (shrink)

Suppose that scientific realists believe that a successful theory is approximately true, and that constructive empiricists believe that it is empirically adequate. Whose belief is more likely to be false? The problem of underdetermination does not yield an answer to this question one way or the other, but the pessimistic induction does. The pessimistic induction, if correct, indicates that successful theories, both past and current, are empirically inadequate. It is arguable, however, that they are approximately true. Therefore, scientific realists overall (...) take less epistemic risk than constructive empiricists. (shrink)

Hájek (Erkenntnis 70(2):211–235, 2009) argues that probabilities cannot be the limits of relative frequencies in counterfactual infinite sequences. I argue for a different understanding of these limits, drawing on Norton’s (Philos Sci 79(2):207–232, 2012) distinction between approximations (inexact descriptions of a target) and idealizations (separate models that bear analogies to the target). Then, I adapt Hájek’s arguments to this new context. These arguments provide excellent reasons not to use hypothetical frequencies as idealizations, but no reason not to use them as (...) approximations. (shrink)

Rough sets are used in numerous knowledge representation contexts and are then empowered with varied ontologies. These may be intrinsically associated with ideas of rationality under certain conditions. In recent papers, specific granular generalisations of graded and variable precision rough sets are investigated by the present author from the perspective of rationality of approximations (and the associated semantics of rationality in approximate reasoning). The studies are extended to ideal-based approximations (sometimes referred to as subsethood-based approximations). It is additionally shown that (...) co-granular or point-wise approximations defined by σ-ideals/filters (for an arbitrary relation σ) fit easily into the entire scheme. Concepts of the rationality of objects (vague or crisp) and their types are introduced and are shown to be applicable to most general rough sets by the present author. Surprising results on these are proved on these by her in this part of the research paper. The present paper is the first of a three part study on the topic. (shrink)

It is proposed that we use the term “approximation” for inexact description of a target system and “idealization” for another system whose properties also provide an inexact description of the target system. Since systems generated by a limiting process can often have quite unexpected, even inconsistent properties, familiar limit systems used in statistical physics can fail to provide idealizations, but are merely approximations. A dominance argument suggests that the limiting idealizations of statistical physics should be demoted to approximations.

In this article, we offer a detailed study of two important episodes in the early history of high-energy physics, namely the development of the Chew and the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio models. Our study reveals that both models resulted from the combination of an old Hamiltonian, which had been introduced by earlier researchers, and two new approximation methods developed by Chew and by Nambu and Jona-Lasinio. These new approximation methods, furthermore, were the key component behind the models’ success. We take this historical investigation (...) to support two philosophical theses about the manner in which scientific modelling operates in high-energy physics. Both of these theses run counter to a view that is commonly accepted among philosophers of science: the view that all approximations can be embedded within an equivalent idealized system, and that whatever role the former might play in scientific modelling is therefore parasitic on the much more substantial work performed by the latter. Our first thesis, which we call “Distinctness,” states that approximation methods constitute an independent category of theoretical output from idealized systems. We thus believe that approximations and idealized systems constitute two independent types of objects, both of which are essential to the practice of modelling. Our second, more radical thesis is called “Content Determination.” Our claim here is that approximation methods can in fact be essential to assigning determinate physical content to the idealized systems with which they jointly operate. As we show, this is due to the fact that quantum field theory allows for a very thin characterization of idealized systems only, making the use of approximations necessary to supply additional content. We conclude the paper with a few reflections about the manner in which our two theses can be used to articulate David Kaiser’s views on the “vanishing of scientific theory” in physics after WWII. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the problem of truth approximation via belief merging, i.e., we ask whether, and under what conditions, a group of inquirers merging together their beliefs makes progress toward the truth about the underlying domain. We answer this question by proving some formal results on how belief merging operators perform with respect to the task of truth approximation, construed as increasing verisimilitude or truthlikeness. Our results shed new light on the issue of how rational (dis)agreement affects the (...) inquirers’ quest for truth. In particular, they vindicate the intuition that scientific inquiry, and rational discussion in general, benefits from some heterogeneity in opinion and interaction among different viewpoints. The links between our approach and related analyses of truth tracking, judgment aggregation, and opinion dynamics, are also highlighted. (shrink)

The main question addressed in this paper is whether some false sentences can constitute evidence for the truth of other propositions. In this paper it is argued that there are good reasons to suspect that at least some false propositions can constitute evidence for the truth of certain other contingent propositions. The paper also introduces a novel condition concerning propositions that constitute evidence that explains a ubiquitous evidential practice and it contains a defense of a particular condition concerning the possession (...) of evidence. The core position adopted here then is that false propositions that are approximately true reports of measurements can constitute evidence for the truth of other propositions. So, it will be argued that evidence is only quasi-factive in this very specific sense. (shrink)

David Wiggins; XIV*—Verbs and Adverbs, and Some Other Modes of Grammatical Combination, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s De intepretatione, Ammonius criticises the view, which he ascribes to Alexander of Aphrodisias, that epirrhêmata, ‘adverbs’, fall under the rubric of onoma. While it is difficult to establish Alexander’s view on the basis of Ammonius’s criticism, I argue that an intelligible view can be reconstructed, mainly based on evidence in Alexander’s commentary on the Topics, about different types of adverbs. In particular, I suggest that Alexander, apparently unlike Ammonius, may have drawn a distinction (...) between two classes of adverbs Aristotle deals with in his logical writings: tropoi (modal operators); and ptôseis, i.e. the specific type of ‘inflections’ (adverbs in -ôs derived from a noun – usually an abstract noun) playing a prominent role in several of the topoi Aristotle gives in the Topics. (shrink)

We investigate the logical and conceptual connections between abductive reasoning construed as a process of belief change, on the one hand, and truth approximation, construed as increasing (estimated) verisimilitude, on the other. We introduce the notion of ‘(verisimilitude-guided) abductive belief change’ and discuss under what conditions abductively changing our theories or beliefs does lead them closer to the truth, and hence tracks truth approximation conceived as the main aim of inquiry. The consequences of our analysis for some recent discussions concerning (...) belief revision aiming at truth approximation and inference to the best explanation are also highlighted. (shrink)

This paper describes a theory of accuracy or approximate truth and applies it to problems in the realist interpretation of scientific theories. It argues not only that realism requires approximate truth, but that an adequate theory of approximation also presupposes some elements of a realist interpretation of theories. The paper distinguishes approximate truth from vagueness, probability and verisimilitude, and applies it to problems of confirmation and deduction from inaccurate premises. Basic results are cited, but details appear elsewhere. Objections are surveyed, (...) including arguments by Miller, Laymon, and Laudan. Comparison is made with Niiniluoto's theory of verisimilitude, and the utility of his theory for realism assessed. (shrink)

In “Descriptions as Predicates” (Fara 2001) I argued that definite and indefinite descriptions should be given a uniform semantic treatment as predicates rather than as quantifier phrases. The aim of the current paper is to clarify and elaborate one of the arguments for the descriptions-aspredicates view, one that concerns the interaction of descriptions with adverbs of quantification.

David Wiggins; XIV*—Verbs and Adverbs, and Some Other Modes of Grammatical Combination, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 86, Issue 1, 1 June 1986.

I might summarize this section by saying that the English tenses, according to this analysis, form quite a motley group. PAST, PRES and FUT serve to relate reference time to speech time, while WOULD and USED-TO behave like Priorian operators, shifting the point of evaluation away from the reference time. HAVE also shifts the point of evaluation away from the reference time, but in a more complicated way. And FUT, in contrast to PRES and PAST, is a substitution operator, putting (...) the reference time of its clause in the plate of the speech time of subordinate clauses. (shrink)

The so-called Preface Paradox seems to show that one can rationally believe two logically incompatible propositions. We address this puzzle, relying on the notions of truthlikeness and approximate truth as studied within the post-Popperian research programme on verisimilitude. In particular, we show that adequately combining probability, approximate truth, and truthlikeness leads to an explanation of how rational belief is possible in the face of the Preface Paradox. We argue that our account is superior to other solutions of the paradox, including (...) a recent one advanced by Hannes Leitgeb (Analysis 74.1). (shrink)

Traditional theories construe approximate truth or truthlikeness as a measure of closeness to facts, singular facts, and idealization as an act of either assuming zero of otherwise very small differences from facts or imagining ideal conditions under which scientific laws are either approximately true or will be so when the conditions are relaxed. I first explain the serious but not insurmountable difficulties for the theories of approximation, and then argue that more serious and perhaps insurmountable difficulties for the theory of (...) idealization force us to sever its close tie to approximation. This leads to an appreciation of lawlikeness as a measure of closeness to laws, which I argue is the real measure of idealization whose main purpose is to carve nature at its joints. (shrink)

Research on the cognitive abilities involved in decision making has shown that, under objective risk conditions (i.e., when explicit information about possible outcomes and risks is available), superior decisions are especially predicted by executive functions and exact number processing skills, also referred to as objective numeracy. So far, decision-making research has mainly focused on exact number processing skills, such as performing calculations or transformations of symbolic numbers. There is evidence that such exact numeric skills are based on approximate number processing (...) (ANP) skills, which enable quick and accurate processing of non-symbolic numbers (e.g. Chen and Li, 2014). Very few studies, however, have investigated ANP skills in the context of risky decision making and have analyzed direct associations among the aforementioned sub functions. Possible interactions between the closely related skills have not been considered. The current study (N = 128) examines interactions of ANP skills with executive functions and objective numeracy, in predicting risky choice behavior. ANP skills are represented by the accuracy in a dot-comparison task. Decision making is measured by two versions of the Game of Dice Task (GDT), which place different emphases on the reflection of potential risks. The results show two-way as well as three-way interactions between the measures of ANP skills, executive functions, and objective numeracy in predicting risky decisions in both GDT versions. The riskiest decisions were most frequently made in case of low scores in all of the three competencies, while good performance in any one of them resulted in significant reductions of disadvantageous decisions. The findings indicate that high ANP skills can positively affect choice behavior in individuals who have weaknesses in reflectively attributed skills, namely executive functions and objective numeracy. Potential compensatory effects and mechanisms of ANP in decision making are discussed. (shrink)