On a Semantic Structure for Belief Logic
Author: Anthony S. Maida
Publisher:
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 10
ISBN-13:
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Objects and Modalities
Author: Tero Tulenheimo
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2017-03-14
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 3319531190
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book develops a novel generalization of possible world semantics, called ‘world line semantics’, which recognizes worlds and links between world-bound objects (world lines) as mutually independent aspects of modal semantics. Addressing a wide range of questions vital for contemporary debates in logic and philosophy of language and offering new tools for theoretical linguistics and knowledge representation, the book proposes a radically new paradigm in modal semantics. This framework is motivated philosophically, viewing a structure of world lines as a precondition of modal talk. The author provides a uniform analysis of quantification over individuals (physical objects) and objects of thought (intentional objects). The semantic account of what it means to speak of intentional objects throws new light on accounts of intentionality and singular thought in the philosophy of mind and offers novel insights into the semantics of intensional transitive verbs.
Structures for Semantics
Author: Fred Landman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 381
ISBN-13: 9401132127
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFormalization plays an important role in semantics. Doing semantics and following the literature requires considerable technical sophistica tion and acquaintance with quite advanced mathematical techniques and structures. But semantics isn't mathematics. These techniques and structures are tools that help us build semantic theories. Our real aim is to understand semantic phenomena and we need the technique to make our understanding of these phenomena precise. The problems in semantics are most often too hard and slippery, to completely trust our informal understanding of them. This should not be taken as an attack on informal reasoning in semantics. On the contrary, in my view, very often the essential insight in a diagnosis of what is going on in a certain semantic phenomenon takes place at the informal level. It is very easy, however, to be misled into thinking that a certain informal insight provides a satisfying analysis of a certain problem; it will often turn out that there is a fundamental unclarity about what the informal insight actually is. Formalization helps to sharpen those insights and put them to the test.
Semantics: A View to Logic of Language
Author: Kisno
Publisher: LLC Publishing
Published:
Total Pages: 106
ISBN-13: 6029126350
DOWNLOAD EBOOKI see semantics as one branch of linguistics, which is the study of language: as an area of study parallel to, and interacting with, those syntax and phonology, which deal respectively with the formal patterns of language, and the way in which these are translated into sounds. While syntax and phonology study the structure of expressive possibilities in language, semantics study the meanings that can be expressed. It may convincingly be claimed that viewing semantics as a component discipline of linguistics is the most fruitful and exciting point of departure at the present time. The book of this kind cannot attempt an overall survey of the field of semantics or at least, if it does, it will end up as a superficial compendium of what others have thought about meaning. The only sensible course is to give evidence that linguistics does exist in our life and it is hypocritical not to acknowledge that linguistics is difficult to understand due to its scientificity. Semantics is a non-fiction science through its unique approach to find the meaning of language not by guessing or judging something subjectively. The strength of the integrated view is that it makes possible a transfer to semantics of techniques of analysis which have proved successful with other aspects of language. It has to be conceded that the primary appeal of semantics is an intellectual one, similar in some respects to that of mathematics or any pure science. Only after seeking understanding for understanding’s sake can one acquire the wisdom which consists in using that understanding for good ends.
Processes, Beliefs, and Questions
Author: S. Peters
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 9401576688
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSECTION I In 1972, Donald Davison and Gilbert Hannan wrote in the introduction to the volume Semantics of Natural Language: "The success of linguistics in treating natural languages as formal ~yntactic systems has aroused the interest of a number of linguists in a parallel or related development of semantics. For the most part quite independently, many philosophers and logicians have recently been applying formal semantic methods to structures increasingly like natural languages. While differences in training, method and vocabulary tend to veil the fact, philosophers and linguists are converging, it seems, on a common set of interrelated problems. " Davidson and Harman called for an interdisciplinary dialogue of linguists, philosophers and logicians on the semantics of natural language, and during the last ten years such an enterprise has proved extremely fruitful. Thanks to the cooperative effort in these several fields, the last decade has brought about striking progress in our understanding of the semantics of natural language. This work on semantics has typically paid little attention to psychological aspects of meaning. Thus, psychologists or computer scientists working on artificial intelligence were not invited to join the forces in the influential introduction of Semantics of Natural Language. No doubt it was felt that while psychological aspects of language are important in their own right, they are not relevant to our immediate semantic concerns. In the last few years, several linguists and logicians have come to question the fundamental anti-psychological assumptions underlying their theorizing.
Thought-Contents
Author: Steven E. Boër
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2006-11-23
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 1402050852
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.
Rational Belief Systems
Author: Brian David Ellis
Publisher:
Published: 1979
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA Compositional Semantic Structure for Multi-Agent Systems Dynamics
Author:
Publisher: Pascal van Eck
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 409
ISBN-13: 9090147462
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStructured Meanings
Author: M. J. Cresswell
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1985
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780262031080
DOWNLOAD EBOOKM. J. Cresswell is a logician and philosopher of language who has been a major continuing influence on the growth and development of formal semantics over the past 15 years or more. This book is the outgrowth of years of work on propositional attitudes, the hardest problem in semantics. In it, he traces the problem to the foundations of semantics and solves it by distinguishing between the result of the composition of the simple parts of complex expressions and structure consisting of the uncomposed parts. Cresswell explains the basis of the great intuitive appeal of structured meanings, and why previous attempts, from Carnap's notion of intensional isomorphism on, to use them to solve the propositional attitudes problem have been unsuccessful. His own formalization is integrated into a model-theoretic framework which is capable of incorporating and extending all the insights obtained from Montague's semantics. M. J. Cresswell is Professor of Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Logics and Languages, in which he developed an alternative version of Montague Grammar, as well as many articles on possible-worlds semantics; and coauthor with G. E. Hughes of An Introduction to Modal Logicand A Companion to Modal Logic, the standard works in the field. A Bradford Book.
Approaches to Natural Language
Author: Jaakko Hintikka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 535
ISBN-13: 9401025061
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe papers and comments published in the present volume represent the proceedings of a research workshop on the grammar and semantics of natural languages held at Stanford University in the fall of 1970. The workshop met first for three days in September and then for a period of two days in November for extended discussion and analysis. The workshop was sponsored by the Committee on Basic Research in Education, which has been funded by the United States Office of Education through a grant to the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council. We acknowledge with pleasure the sponsorship which made possible a series oflively and stimulating meetings that were both enjoyable and instructive for the three of us, and, we hope, for most of the participants, including a number of local linguists and philosophers who did not contribute papers but actively joined in the discussion. One of the central participants in the workshop was Richard Montague. We record our sense of loss at his tragic death early in 1971, and we dedicate this volume to his memory. None of the papers in the present volume discusses explicitly problems of education. In our view such a discussion is neither necessary nor sufficient for a contribution to basic research in education. There are in fact good reasons why the kind of work reported in the present volume constitutes an important aspect of basic research in education.
