This is a short introduction to the puzzling -- even mysterious -- subject that there is a place for minds in a material world.

There is an inevitable interaction between Arabic and Turkish as word transitions occur in every language. One of the common examples of this exchange between Arabic and Turkish is the word ikhtilāf (conflict).However, it is not possible to say that the bilingual partnership about this word is meaningful. Because this word expresses the meaning of opposition, contradiction, diversity, separation of opinion between two persons or groups, opposing attitude and contradictory attitude in Arabic, all of these meanings are not transferred into (...) Turkish.In other words, the word ikhtilāf’s meaning is narrowed during its transition into Turkish. In fact, the word is almost fixed in Turkish as “the separation of opinion between two persons or groups”. This difference in the meaning of the language between the two languages ​​of the contradiction must not be construed and interpreted as “controversy” or “disagreeing” at every passing moment of the word. Because in some verses this situation can be a wrong choice.Differences in interpretation in tafsir and translation errors are the most obvious indication of this possibility. Therefore, it should be considered that the use and meaning of the word may be changed according to the text. SummaryWords and concepts are the most important tools for people to share with their interlocutors both in oral communication and in writing. Because the meaning of the preferred word and concept directly affects the increase or decrease of the power of the message to be given. So, the choice of word and concept are important in the spoken word and the used word. However, despite this importance, people are not entirely free in word selection. This is because there is no vocabulary to express everything separately. So, the words are limited, and the objects named through them are unlimited. This led people use some words that have more than one meaning, which also explains the emergence of the concept of polysemy.Polysemy is a phenomenon seen in Arabic as well as in many languages. Since the Qur'ān, which contains the messages of Allah to humanity, is in Arabic, there are many words that have two or more meanings. This situation should be taken into account to understand the Qur'ān and its context when determining the meaning of such words. Revealing all potential meanings of qur’ānic expressions is important to convey the intended meaning. In other words, the inability to detect the correct meaning of the word or to ignore the fact that it is very meaningful makes some comprehension problems inevitable.One of the words in this context that have the problem of understanding is the concept ikhtilāf(Conflict). This concept, which is used 51 times in 45 verses in different ways, does not mean the same meaning wherever it is used. It is used in more than one meaning depending on the context in which it is located. The change and diversity that points to the power of Allah, the conflict, the separation of thought and behaviour between the two groups, and the unilateral opposition attitude of a person or group are the meanings of this concept. There is no significant difference in the tafsirs of these meanings regarding the meanings of change, diversity, and contradiction. The differences seen in the exegesis (tafsīr) are in the way that the same meaning is mostly stated in a different way. This situation in the tafsirs was reflected to Turkish translations of the Qur'ān on the meaning of the concept and it was translated correctly in general. This shows that the context of determining the meaning of the concept is taken into account and that the polysemy of the concept is not an important problem in the meaning of “change,” “diversity” and “contradiction.”One of the most important meanings of the concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) is the difference of thought and behaviour between two people or groups. In this sense, the concept has two subjects and refers to the situation of these two subjects against each other. This meaning, which we see more in the use of the concept as verb, refers to the conflict and contradiction of the different thoughts and attitudes that people have to against others they face because of their personal characteristics and ideology. In this sense, ikhtilāf(Conflict) among the sides reflects a negative situation without the possibility of finding the ground and the middle way. In the verses where the concept is used in this sense, there are also elements that indicate the difference of opinion between the two subjects, such as bayna(between) preposition, the believing-disbeliever comparison. The concept has been translated into Turkish with this sense in the Qur'ān. Its meanings of conflict, conflict and conflict are also used in Turkish. Therefore, it is possible to say that this meaning has a common meaning between Arabic and Turkish. Therefore, meanings of the concept such as conflict, disagreement, etc. in Turkish translations of the Qur'an are enough to reflect the meaning of the verses in this context. So, it is possible to say that in meaning of the concept does not have a problem of understanding and interpreting in general.The concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) is also used to counter and oppose to a thought or belief in the Qur’an except for the general meaning of the above. With this meaning we encounter in the usage of ikhtalafaand mukhtalifin this sense, it is not only the mutual attitude of the two sides but the dissident, against and opposing attitude of one side towards the other. As such, the concept reflects an action of "one subject". As in the case of conflict between the two sides, there is a negative and undesirable situation in this usage. Because in the verses where the concept is used in this sense, the contradictions, and attitudes of the unbelievers about the faith revealed by Allah, religion, the book, and the prophet are generally explained. However, this meaning of the concept has not been translated into Turkish. In other words, there is no meaning in the word ikhtilāf(Conflict) used in Turkish. Therefore, there is no exact equivalence between Turkish and Arabic regarding this meaning of the word. For this reason, translations in the form of “conflict,” “dispute” for use in this sense are insufficient to reflect the meaning of it. Because, in these translations, the contraction of the concept which was experienced in the transition from Arabic to Turkish was not observed. This causes the misunderstandings of the verses in which this concept exists.The concept of ikhtilāf(Conflict) refers to the differences of tafsir in the verses that express the opposing attitude of a person or group as with other polysemy concepts, this concept also points to the need to be careful. Instead of giving the same meaning in every passage of such polysemy concepts, it is necessary to determine the correct meaning according to the context of the unity of the verse and its context. The same sensitivity should be taken into consideration in translating the concept into Turkish. So, while translating the concept passed in Turkish by narrowing, that accepting it is true in both languages and transferring to Turkish according to it is insufficient to reflect the meaning referred in the verse. (shrink)

“It’s so hard to be a saint in the city,” sings Bruce Springsteen in a ballad released 35 years ago. Judging from the national popular sentiment about the matter, he could have been talking about the complexity of being a philosopher in Turkey.

Having been influenced by John Perry's 1997 article, "Indexicals and Demonstratives," in this paper I take a closer look at contexts for indexicals, more specifically the indexical "I." (N.B. The adjective in the title is not misspelt; it is used in the sense of the leading brand of premium vodka.).

Bilkent Üniversitesi'nde bu yıl [2003] açılan Felsefe Bölümü’nün başkanlığını yürüten ve ana ilgi alanı yapay zekâ olan Prof. Dr. Varol Akman, yapay zekâyla felsefenin ilişkisini ve Felsefe Bölümü'nün özelliklerini anlattı. (An interview published in Bilkent Magazine about the then new Bilkent Philosophy Department.).

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to 'interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Wendell (...) Harris, enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two recent approaches to interpretation, due to Jon Barwise and Jerry Hobbs, are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. It must be noted that there has been a considerable body of contributions connecting linguistic structure with social context. For example, anthropological linguistics, from Bronislaw Malinowski onwards, has underlined the cultural context of discourse as essential to meaning. This viewpoint became prominent with the emergence of the ethnography of speaking in anthropology. Thus, conversation analysis represents a consistent formal effort to contribute to an analysis of the nature of context. While this paper emphasizes and reviews the literary theory approach, it makes various contacts with works of the latter kind (e.g., the landmark contributions of Erving Goffman, John Gumperz, William Hanks, John Heritage, Dell Hymes, et al.) in order to deliver a more balanced and complete study of the dimensions of context. (shrink)

An information-based approach to natural language semantics. Formulated by Jon Barwise and John Perry in their influential book Situations and Attitudes (1983), it is built upon the notion of a 'situation' --- a limited part of the real world that a cognitive agent can individuate and has access to. A situation represents a lump of information in terms of a collection of facts. It is through the actualist ontology of situations that the meaning of natural language utterances can be elucidated.

John Perry argued that the clearest case of an indexical that relies only on the narrow context is 'I,' whose designation depends on the agent and nothing else. In this presentation, I give some examples which show that this view, while essentially correct, may have problems in some rare divergent cases.

Logical connectives (otherwise known as 'logical constants' or 'logical particles') have seemed challenging to philosophers of language. This article gives a concise account of logical connectives.

Future robots should have common sense about the world in order to handle the problems they will encounter. A large part of this commonsense knowledge must be naive physics knowledge, since carrying out even the simplest everyday chores requires familiarity with physics laws. But how should one start codifying this knowledge? What kind of skills should be elicited from the experts (each and every one of us)? This paper will attempt to provide some hints by studying the mental models of (...) force and motion. (shrink)

In a paper published in 1992, Dennis Kurzon shows that silence does not necessarily mean lack of power: the silent response to a question may well be aiming at gaining control of a situation, viz. exercising power. I would like to extend Kurzon's analysis and argue that at times silence may mean derision or ridicule.

This article first appeared in "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd Edition," Keith Brown, ed., pp. 398-401, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2006.

Vagueness, 'the quality or condition of being vague' (OED), has kept philosophers busy since ancient times. This article gives a concise account of vagueness.

Planlama --- bir amaca ulaşmak üzere bir aksiyonlar bütünü tasarlamak --- yapay zekadaki en temel problemlerden biridir. Bu yazıda, robotikte planlama konusuna mantıkçı (logicist) yaklaşım ele alınmaktadır. [Planning --- devising a plan of action to reach a given goal --- is a fundamental problem in AI. This paper reviews the logicist approach to planning in robotics.].

We study the performance of ChatGPT interpreting prompts that require legal expertise to answer. Our inputs are very close adaptations from the "Contextual Canons" section of Scalia and Garner's Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (Thomson West: 2012). We report our findings for the entire section (comprising 14 canons) of the book. We conclude that ChatGPT is exceptionally successful in taking the contextual canons into account.

In Strawson’s Entity and Identity, there are two essays (Chapters 11 and 12), which study the notion of context. In these essays, Strawson advances a threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. -/- In this paper, we'll (i) review the original scheme of Strawson and summarize his improvements to his own scheme, and (ii) add our own improvements to make it even more thoroughgoing. We'll also show that unless it (...) is elaborated with several considerations (mostly based on our work regarding context as a social construct and contextualizing as a form of social action) it cannot function as a realistic initiative towards building common sense models of how intended meaning is achieved. (shrink)

We describe an experimental approach toward implementing a commonsense "microtheory" for buying and selling. Our prototype system characterizes how intelligent agents hold items and money, how they buy and sell items, and the way money and items are transferred. The ontology of the system includes money (cash, check, credit card), agents (people, organizations), items (movable, real estate, service), barter, and the notions of transfer, loan, buying by installments, profit, and loss.

This is a short piece of humor (I hope) on nonstandard set theories. An earlier version appeared in Bull. EATCS 45: 146-147 (1991).

We consider an objection of Hans Kamp (based on an example by Barbara Partee) to Robert Stalnaker's model of context.

In logic, the law (or principle) of identity states simply: 'A is A'. This article gives a concise account of identity.

Some recent studies in computational linguistics have aimed to take advantage of various cues presented by punctuation marks. This short survey is intended to summarise these research efforts and additionally, to outline a current perspective for the usage and functions of punctuation marks. We conclude by presenting an information-based framework for punctuation, influenced by treatments of several related phenomena in computational linguistics.

This is a review of Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence, edited by John Haugeland and published by The MIT Press in 1997.

The work described in this report is motivated by the desire to test the expressive possibilities of action language C+. The Causal Calculator (CCalc) is a system that answers queries about action domains described in a fragment of that language. The Zoo World and the Traffic World have been proposed by Erik Sandewall in his Logic Modelling Workshop—an environment for communicating axiomatizations of action domains of nontrivial size. -/- The Zoo World consists of several cages and the exterior, gates between (...) them, and animals of several species, including humans. Actions in this domain include moving within and between cages, opening and closing gates, and mounting and riding animals. The Traffic World includes vehicles moving continuously between road crossings subject to a number of restrictions, such as speed limits and keeping a fixed safety distance away from other vehicles on the road. We show how to represent the two domains in the input language of CCalc, and how to use CCalc to test these representations. (shrink)

The importance of contextual reasoning is emphasized by various researchers in AI. (A partial list includes John McCarthy and his group, R. V. Guha, Yoav Shoham, Giuseppe Attardi and Maria Simi, and Fausto Giunchiglia and his group.) Here, we survey the problem of formalizing context and explore what is needed for an acceptable account of this abstract notion.

The standard propositional exposition of necessary and sufficient conditions, as available in introductory logic texts, leads to a contradiction. It should be abolished.

We extend causal theories and study actions in domains involving multiple agents. Causal theories, invented by Yoav Shoham, are based on a temporal nonmonotonic logic and have computationally tractable aspects. Since Shoham's formalism does not provide an adequate mechanism for representing simultaneous actions and specifying their consequences, we introduce the notion of counteractions while preserving the efficiency and model-theoretic properties of causal theories.

This is a review of Quantifiers, Logic, and Language, edited by Jaap van der Does and Jan van Eijk, published by CSLI (Center for the Study of Language and Information) Publications, Stanford, CA, in 1996.

Papers in this special issue were written upon invitation. They were then subjected to the usual refereeing process of the Journal of Pragmatics. While we have attempted to cover almost all important areas in which context is employed as a conceptual apparatus, our coverage is clearly limited in scope. Accordingly, instead of a general updated overview of the use of context in every conceivable specific field (let's say the state-of-the-art of interdisciplinary research on context: a colossal/impossible enterprise!), we will offer (...) the readers of this special issue an introduction to the problems involved in the study of context by way of eight papers encompassing eight different areas. These are (in alphabetical order): artificial intelligence, bilingualism, child development, cognitive science, conversation analysis, neuroscience, philosophy of language, and pragmatics. Our goal is to propose a multi-faceted view of context, and to stimulate further investigations of this fertile topic, which permeates our lives. (shrink)

At the heart of natural language processing is the understanding of context dependent meanings. This paper presents a preliminary model of formal contexts based on situation theory. It also gives a worked-out example to show the use of contexts in lifting, i.e., how propositions holding in a particular context transform when they are moved to another context. This is useful in NLP applications where preserving meaning is a desideratum.

Serious thinking about the computational aspects of situation theory is just starting. There have been some recent proposals in this direction (viz. PROSIT and ASTL), with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of the theory. We believe that a programming environment incorporating bona fide situation-theoretic constructs is needed and describe our very recent BABY-SIT implementation. A detailed critical account of PROSIT and ASTL is also offered in order to compare our system with these pioneering and influential frameworks.

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their 'computational' aspects has just started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics to (...) artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs. (shrink)

Strawson proposed in the early seventies an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears on the meaning of 'what is said' when a sentence is uttered. The proposed scheme is somewhat crude and, being aware of this aspect, Strawson himself raised various points to make it more adequate. In this paper, we review the scheme of Strawson, note his concerns, and add some of our own. However, our main point is to defend the essence of Strawson's approach and to recommend (...) it as a starting point for research into intended meaning and context. (shrink)

Commonsense reasoning about the physical world, as exemplified by "Iron sinks in water" or "If a ball is dropped it gains speed," will be indispensable in future programs. We argue that to make such predictions (namely, envisioning), programs should use abstract entities (such as the gravitational field), principles (such as the principle of superposition), and laws (such as the conservation of energy) of physics for representation and reasoning. These arguments are in accord with a recent study in physics instruction where (...) expert problem solving is related to the construction of physical representations that contain fictitious, imagined entities such as forces and momenta (Larkin 1983). We give several examples showing the power of physical representations. (shrink)

Situated semantics can be regarded as an attempt at placing situational context (context of situation) at the center of all discussions of meaning. Situation theory is a theory of information content that takes context very seriously. Individuals, properties, relations, and spatiotemporal locations are basic constructs of situation theory. Individuals are conceived as invariants; having properties and standing in relations, they tend to persist in time and space. An anchoring function binds the location parameters to appropriate objects present in the grounding (...) situation. Anchoring plays a major role in the working of constraints that include nomic constraints, conventional constraints and conditional constraints. Situation semantics develops a theory of meaning that is based on relations between situations. Situation semantics provides a fundamental framework for realistic semantics. The ideas emerging from research into situation semantics have been combined with linguistic work and have led to numerous useful proposals. (shrink)

A logical formalization of emotions is considered to be tricky because they appear to have no strict types, reasons, and consequences. On the other hand, such a formalization is crucial for commonsense reasoning. Here, the so-called "object directedness" of emotions is studied by using Helen Nissenbaum's influential ideas.

The papers you will find in this special issue of JoLLI develop letter and spirit of Turing’s original contributions. They do not lazily fall back into the same old sofa, but follow – or question – the inspiring ideas of a great man in the search for new, more precise, conclusions. It is refreshing to know that the fertile landscape created by Alan Turing remains a source of novel ideas.

The merits of set theory as a foundational tool in mathematics stimulate its use in various areas of artificial intelligence, in particular intelligent information systems. In this paper, a study of various nonstandard treatments of set theory from this perspective is offered. Applications of these alternative set theories to information or knowledge management are surveyed.

Deflationism, one of the influential philosophical doctrines of truth, holds that there is no property of truth, and that overt uses of the predicate "true" are redundant. However, the hypothetical examples used by theorists to exemplify deflationism are isolated sentences, offering little to examine what the predicate adds to meaning within context. We oppose the theory not on philosophical but on empirical grounds. We collect 7,610 occurrences of "it is true that" from 10 influential periodicals published in the United States. (...) We classify and annotate these with respect to the positions of coordinating and subordinating conjunctions that they contain. This way we investigate the contextual relationships between the proposition following "it is true that" with its surroundings. Overall, 34 different syntactical patterns are encountered. In some occurrences of "true", the predicate acts in the same manner as a performative verb does. These occurrences, having been observed in linguistically reliable media, constitute pragmatic counter-examples to deflationism. (shrink)

This is a brief reply to Herbert A. Simon's fine paper "Literary Criticism: A Cognitive Approach," Stanford Humanities Review, Special Supplement (Bridging the Gap: Where Cognitive Science Meets Literary Criticism), vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-26, Spring 1994.

This is the guest editor's introduction to a JETAI special issue on philosophical foundations of AI.