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124674.784398
Between roughly 2001 and 2018, I’ve happy to have done some nice things in quantum computing theory, from the quantum lower bound for the collision problem to the invention of shadow tomography. I hope that’s not the end of it. …
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195504.784652
Sign languages (in the plural: there are many) arise naturally as soon
as groups of deaf people have to communicate with each other. Sign
languages became institutionally established starting in the late
eighteenth century, when schools using sign languages were founded in
France, and spread across different countries, gradually leading to a
golden age of Deaf culture (we capitalize Deaf when talking
about members of a cultural group, and use deaf for the
audiological status). This came to a partial halt in 1880, when the
Milan Congress declared that oral education was superior to sign
language education (Lane 1984)—a view that is amply refuted by
research (Napoli et al.
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403493.784683
This paper proves normalisation theorems for intuitionist and classical negative free logic, without and with the operator for definite descriptions. Rules specific to free logic give rise to new kinds of maximal formulas additional to those familiar from standard intuitionist and classical logic. When is added it must be ensured that reduction procedures involving replacements of parameters by terms do not introduce new maximal formulas of higher degree than the ones removed. The problem is solved by a rule that permits restricting these terms in the rules for @, D and to parameters or constants. A restricted subformula property for deductions in systems without is considered. It is improved upon by an alternative formalisation of free logic building on an idea of Ja´skowski’s. In the classical system the rules for require treatment known from normalisation for classical logic with _ or D. The philosophical significance of the results is also indicated.
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440528.784697
Much work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has argued for continuism about remembering and imagining (see, e.g., Addis J R Soc N Z 48(2–3):64–88, 2018). This view claims that episodic remembering is just a form of imagining, such that memory does not have a privileged status over other forms of episodic simulation (esp. imagination). Large parts of contemporary philosophy of memory support continuism. This even holds for work in semantics and the philosophy of language, which has pointed out substantial similarities in the distribution of the verbs remember and imagine. Our paper argues against the continuist claim, by focusing on a previously neglected source of evidence for discontinuism: the semantics of episodic memory and imagination reports. We argue that, in contrast to imagination reports, episodic memory reports are essentially diachronic, in the sense that their truth requires a foregoing reference-fixing experience. In this respect, they differ from reports of experiential imagination, which is paradigmatically synchronic. To defend our claim about this difference in diachronicity, we study the truth-conditions of episodic memory and imagination reports. We develop a semantics for episodic uses of remember and imagine that captures this difference.
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601377.784714
Introductory note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2
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656691.784727
The evolutionary relationships between species are typically represented in the biological literature by rooted phylogenetic trees. However, a tree fails to capture ancestral reticulate processes, such as the formation of hybrid species or lateral gene transfer events between lineages, and so the history of life is more accurately described by a rooted phylogenetic network. Nevertheless, phylogenetic networks may be complex and difficult to interpret, so biologists sometimes prefer a tree that summarises the central tree-like trend of evolution. In this paper, we formally investigate methods for transforming an arbitrary phylogenetic network into a tree (on the same set of leaves) and ask which ones (if any) satisfy a simple consistency condition. This consistency condition states that if we add additional species into a phylogenetic network (without otherwise changing this original network) then transforming this enlarged network into a rooted phylogenetic tree induces the same tree on the original set of species as transforming the original network. We show that the LSA (lowest stable ancestor) tree method satisfies this consistency property, whereas several other commonly used methods (and a new one we introduce) do not. We also briefly consider transformations that convert arbitrary phylogenetic networks to another simpler class, namely normal networks.
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734882.784738
This paper offers a new theory of donkey anaphora that does not include any dynamic component. Even if the approach is not dynamic, it retains a key aspect of the dynamic tradition, namely the view that information states include not just factual information about the world, but also information about discourse referents, e.g., variables. It also makes crucial use of plural assignment functions (sets of standard assigments, cf. van der Berg 1996; Nouwen 2003; Brasoveanu 2008). Unlike dynamic approaches, sentences are evaluated as true or false relative to a pair (w, G), where w is a possible world and G is a plural assignment, with no reference to contexts or information states, and compositional semantics does not refer in any way to context update. In order to predict adequate meanings and felicity conditions, I combine two ingredients that have been used to account for presupposition projection, namely Trivalence (Peters 1979; Beaver and Krahmer 2001) and Schlenker’s Transparency Principle(Schlenker 2007, 2008).
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956269.784756
Division of labor drives thriving economies, and orchestras and rock bands. The bass provides the harmony; the vocal, or a soloing guitar, sings the melody; and then there’s the beat, nailed down by the man behind the drum kit. …
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1402624.784767
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License doi.org/10.3998/phimp.2683 for example, that I’d heard that the crème caramel is delicious. Claims about deliciousness contrast here with more straightforwardly factual ones: if, for example, I tell you the crème caramel contains cardamom, you need not reach any very specific conclusion about the basis for my assertion. This observation has appeared in both the aesthetics literature and the literature on predicates of taste, and appears to have its roots in some remarks of Kant’s: For someone may list all of the ingredients of a dish for me, and remark about each one that it is otherwise agreeable to me . . . yet I am deaf to all these grounds, I try the dish with my tongue and my palate, and on that basis . . . do I make my judgment.
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1508784.784778
The formal, deductive system of ‘object theory’ (OT) has been put forward and applied in a number of papers since 1983. The canonical formulation, however, appears in Principia Logico-Metaphysica (Zalta m.s.), where it is first expressed in a 2nd-order quantified modal language.
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1692350.784789
This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence. We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between speaking a gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries. Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an individual-level analysis of the effect of speaking a gendered language on beliefs about the justifiability of intimate partner violence, controlling for a wide variety of individual level socioeconomic characteristics as well as country, religion, language family and ethnicity fixed effects. Speaking a gendered language is associated with the belief that intimate partner violence is justifiable. Our results are consistent with complementarity between the cultural and cognitive effects of language on the attitudes to intimate partner violence.
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1965642.784809
In this paper, I show how two modes of predication and quantification in a modal context allow one to (a) define what it is for an individual or relation to exist, (b) define identity conditions for properties and relations conceived hyperintensionally, (c) define identity conditions for individuals and prove the necessity of identity for both individuals and relations, (d) derive the central definition of free logic as a theorem, (e) define the essential properties of abstract objects and provide a framework for defining the essential properties of ordinary objects, and (f) derive a theory of truth. I also describe my indebtedness to the work of Terence Parsons, and take the opportunity to advance the discussion in connection with an objection raised to the theory of essential properties.
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2034080.784821
Recent research suggests that preschool (three- to six-years-old) children’s food cognition involves much more than the nutritional information usually conveyed by traditional food education programs. This review aims at collecting the empirical evidence documenting the richness of preschoolers’ conceptual knowledge about food. After introducing the relevance of the topic in the context of the research in early food rejection dispositions (Sect. 1), we draw from empirical contributions to propose the first classification of food knowledge in the field, which includes taxonomic (2.1.), relational (2.2.), and value-laden food knowledge (2.3.). Finally, in Sect. 3, we highlight some theoretical shortcomings of extant literature, suggesting that the account of food knowledge we propose could be employed to develop more effective educational strategies that mitigate early food rejection behaviors (e.g., food neophobia).
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2155875.784832
Relational quantum mechanics (RQM) is an interesting alternative to the standard responses to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. But it suffers from a distinctive kind of epistemic solipsism: an observer can’t in principle know anything beyond their immediate present experience. This makes RQM self-undermining: it takes away the evidence we have for believing in quantum mechanics in the first place. Recently, Adlam and Rovelli have proposed a solution to this problem in the form of a new postulate they call cross-perspective links. Here I argue that this postulate does indeed solve the skeptical problem, but it also removes those aspects of RQM that make it distinctively relational. Nevertheless, the result of equipping RQM with cross-perspective links is an interesting interpretation in its own right.
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2225835.784842
[Research conducted with Adam Bear.] TLDR: You exhibit hindsight bias if learning that something happened increases your estimate for how likely you thought it was. The previous post argued that Bayesians should commit hindsight bias when—and only when—their priors are ambiguous, i.e. …
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2617469.784853
A general mathematical framework, based on countable partitions of Natural Numbers [1], is presented, that allows to provide a Semantics to propositional languages. It has the particularity of allowing both the valuations and the interpretation Sets for the connectives to discriminate complexity of the formulas. This allows different adequacy criteria to be used to assess formulas associated with the same connective, but that differ in their complexity. The presented method can be adapted potentially infinite number of connectives and truth values, therefore, it can be considered a general framework to provide semantics to several of the known logic systems (eg, LC, L3 LP, FDE). The presented semantics allow to converge to different standard semantics if the separation complexity procedure is annulled. Therefore, it can be understood as a framework that allows greater precision (in complexity terms) with respect to formula satisfaction. Naturally, because of how it is built, it can be incorporated into non-deterministic semantics. The presented procedure also allows generating valuations that grant a different truth value to each formula of propositional language. As a positive side effect, our method allows a constructive proof of the equipotence between N and N for all Natural n.
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2878330.784866
Inferential expressivism makes a systematic distinction between inferences that are valid qua preserving commitment and inferences that are valid qua preserving evidence. I argue that the characteristic inferences licensed by the principle of comprehension, from x is P to x is in the extension of P and vice versa, fail to preserve evidence, but do preserve commitment. Taking this observation into account allows one to phrase inference rules for unrestricted comprehension without running into Russell’s paradox. In the resulting logic, one can derive full second-order arithmetic. Thus, it is possible to derive classical arithmetic in a consistent logic with unrestricted comprehension.
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3075549.784884
Some recent publications have made the suggestion that Large Language Models are not just successful engineering tools but also good theories of human linguistic cognition. This note reviews methodological and empirical reasons to reject this suggestion out of hand.
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3491327.784897
It is tokens/occurrences of (referring) expressions, such as ‘the king of France’, that refer to things (occurrences of ‘the king of France’ have, over the centuries, referred to different individual monarchs). Expressions themselves have a meaning. The meaning of an expression is a rule governing its representational use. In the case of a referring expression, the rule limits the things that tokens of the expression can refer to.
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3500399.784913
We begin with a brief explanation of our proof-theoretic criterion of paradoxicality— its motivation, its methods, and its results so far. It is a proof-theoretic account of paradoxicality that can be given in addition to, or alongside, the more familiar semantic account of Kripke. It is a question for further research whether the two accounts agree in general on what is to count as a paradox. It is also a question for further research whether and, if so, how the so-called Ekman problem bears on the investigations here of the intensional paradoxes. Possible exceptions to the proof-theoretic criterion are Prior’s Theorem and Russell’s Paradox of Propositions—the two best-known ‘intensional’ paradoxes. We have not yet addressed them. We do so here. The results are encouraging.
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3500462.784924
Informally rigorous mathematical reasoning is relevant. So too should be the premises to the conclusions of formal proofs that regiment it. The rule Ex Falso Quodlibet induces spectacular irrelevance. We therefore drop it. The resulting systems of Core Logic C and Classical Core Logic C can formalize all the informally rigorous reasoning in constructive and classical mathematics respectively. We effect a revised match-up between deducibility in Classical Core Logic and a new notion of relevant logical consequence. It matches better the deducibility relation of Classical Core Logic than does the Tarskian notion of consequence. It is implosive, not explosive.
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3500484.784935
In this note we extend a remarkable result of Brauer [2024] concerning propositional Classical Core Logic. We show that it holds also at first order. This affords a soundness and completeness result for Classical Core Logic. The ℂ -provable sequents are exactly those that are uniform substitution instances of perfectly valid sequents, i.e. sequents that are valid and that need every one of their sentences in order to be so. Brauer [2020] showed that the notion of perfect validity itself is unaxiomatizable. In the Appendix we use his method to show that our notion of relevant validity in Tennant [2024] is likewise unaxiomatizable. It would appear that the taking of substitution instances is an essential ingredient in the construction of a semantical relation of consequence that will be axiomatizable—and indeed, by the rules of proof for Classical Core Logic.
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3500507.784948
This study seeks to reveal the proper source of the (correct ) rules of natural deduction (and their associated rules of the sequent calculus). Perhaps surprisingly, this source consists of just the familiar truth tables (deriving from Frege). These tables can be construed inferentially. The primitive steps of value-computation correspond to primitive steps of ‘inference’. We shall call them, however, primitive steps (or rules) of evaluation. These can be steps of verification or of falsification. The rules of evaluation constitute the inductive clauses in a metalinguistic co-inductive definition of model-relative verifications and falsifications.
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3500552.78496
We furnish a core-logical development of the ‘Godel-numbering’ framework that allows metamathematicians to attain limitative results about arithmetical truth without incorporating a genuine truth-predicate into the language in a way that would lead to semantic closure. We show how Tarski’s celebrated theorem on the arithmetical undefin-ability of arithmetical truth can be established using only Core Logic in both the object language and the metalanguage. We do so at a high level of abstraction, by augmenting the usual first-order language of arithmetic with a primitive predicate Tr and then showing how it cannot be a truth-predicate for the augmented language.
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3959233.784972
People frequently face decisions that require making inferences about withheld information. The advent of large language models coupled with conversational technology, e.g., Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and the Google Assistant, is changing the mode in which people make these inferences. We demonstrate that conversational modes of information provision, relative to traditional digital media, result in more critical responses to withheld information, including: (1) a reduction in evaluations of a product or service for which information is withheld and (2) an increased likelihood of recalling that information was withheld. These effects are robust across multiple conversational modes: a recorded phone conversation, an unfolding chat conversation, and a conversation script. We provide further evidence that these effects hold for conversations with the Google Assistant, a prominent conversational technology. The experimental results point to participants’ intuitions about why the information was withheld as the driver of the effect.
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4012027.78499
A ‘tritone substitution’ is a popular trick for making your music sound more sophisticated. I’ll show you a couple of videos with lots of examples. But since I’m mathematician, let me start with the bare-bones basics. …
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4199892.785002
Ethics is easy when autonomy and beneficence converge: of course people should be allowed to do good things.1 And I’m enough of a Millian to think that in general, promoting human capacities and individual autonomy may be our most robustly secure route to creating a better future. …
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4266542.785012
It has been recently debated whether world branching in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI) is global or local. In this paper, I present a new analysis of the branching process in MWI. First, I argue that branching is not global. Next, I argue that branching is not necessarily local either, and it can be nonlocal for particles being in an entangled state. Third, I argue that for nonlocal branching there is action at a distance in each branching world, and as a result, there is also a preferred Lorentz frame in the world. However, the action at a distance in each world is apparent in the sense that there is no action at a distance and resulting preferred Lorentz frame in the whole worlds, and thus MWI is consistent with special relativity.
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4462753.785022
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published March 17, 2022. Spoiler Alert: the following lines reveal important details of the story told by Ken Follett in his novel Never. …
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4498772.785032
A principal would like to decide which of two parties deserves a prize. Each party privately observes the state of nature that determines which of them deserves the prize. The principal presents each party with a text that truthfully describes the conditions for deserving the prize and asks each of them what the state of nature is. The parties can cheat but the principal knows their cheating procedure. The principal “magically implements” his goal if he can come up with a pair of texts satisfying that in any dispute, he will recognize the cheater by applying the “honest-cheater asymmetry principle”. According to this principle, the truth is with the party satisfying that if his statement is true, then the other party (using the given cheating procedure) could have cheated and made the statement he is making, but not the other way around. Examples are presented to illustrate the concept.