(No abstract is available for this citation).

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a (...) conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (shrink)

Jc Beall’s off-topic interpretation of Weak Kleene logic offers a logic of ‘true-and-topic’ preservation. However, Nissim Francez has recently argued that being ‘off-topic’ is a relational and not an _absolute_ semantic property; as such, it fails to satisfy the conditions of truth-functionality. For Francez, this means that it ‘cannot serve as an interpretation of a truth-value’. In this paper, I propose a two-layered _re_interpretation of Beall’s off-topic semantics. This two-layered framework has two crucial features: a sentential topic-tagging device and a (...) two-layered evaluation tool. I show that this framework results in a logic that preserves Beall’s key insight and addresses Francez’s concerns. (shrink)

In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf's Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent, consequences of (...) psychologically and psychologically motivated assumptions about the working of horizontal language transmission. (shrink)

Factive mental states, such as knowing or being aware, can only link an agent to the truth; by contrast, nonfactive states, such as believing or thinking, can link an agent to either truths or falsehoods. Researchers of mental state attribution often draw a sharp line between the capacity to attribute accurate states of mind and the capacity to attribute inaccurate or “reality-incongruent” states of mind, such as false belief. This article argues that the contrast that really matters for mental state (...) attribution does not divide accurate from inaccurate states, but factive from nonfactive ones. (shrink)

Reasoning research has focussed mainly on the type of cognitive processes involved when representing premises and when producing conclusions. But less is known about the factors that guide these representational and inferential processes. What premises are actually taken as input in reasoning? And what conclusions are intended? In this paper it is argued that considerations of relevance are helpful for addressing these issues as a pragmatic analysis of two sorts of tasks is carried out, Wason’s 2-4-6 problem and a conditional (...) reasoning problem . Study 1 indicates that the way this task is communicated may encourage participants to consider misleading information as highly relevant for solving it. Two experiments go on to show that when the relevance of misleading information is contextually diminished, participants are more efficient at providing the correct solution. Study 2 compares the production rate of two sorts of conclusions: logically valid but weakly relevant conclusions and invalid but relevant and pragmatically justified conclusions. This study shows that the relevance of conclusions determines to a large extent whether or not they will be produced. (shrink)

This paper presents a conceptual framework for the study of social intelligence in a real-life environment. It is focussed on the dialogue organisation in argumentation, in particular how our understanding of dialogue phenomena in mediated communication may help us to support natural interaction in classroom debates. Dialogue organisation is explored in terms of the cohesive structure of dialogue that emerges as the result of information maintenance and change, specified locally by the adjacency pair and turn-taking, and globally by topic threads. (...) We give a descriptive analysis of their interplay in real chat debates, based on lexical chains of repeated words in an attempt to clarify what feedback participants in the debate require in order to reflect on their contributions to the debate. We then show how this analysis can be used as a basis for conceptual design of a feedback adviser tool to automatically search for topics in student chat debates. Much of the data used in our analysis has been generated as part of the SCALE project SCALE (Internet-based intelligent tool to support collaborative argumentation-based learning in secondary schools) – EU Framework V project. focussed on specifying tools for computer supported argumentation in the classroom. (shrink)

Speech act theory seems to provide a promising avenue for the analysis of the functional organization of argument. The theory, however, might be taken to suggest that arguments are a homogenous class of speech act with a specifiable illocutionary force and a single set of felicity conditions. This suggestion confuses the analysis of the meaning of speech act verbs with the analysis of the pragmatic structure of actual language use. Suggesting that arguments are conveyed through a homogeneous class of linguistic (...) action overlooks the way in which the context of activity and the form of expression organize the argumentative functions performed in using language. An alternative speech act analysis would treat folk terminology as a heuristic entry point into the development of a technical analysis of the myriad argumentative functions and structures to be found in natural language use. This would lead to a thorough-going pragmatic analysis of the rational and functional design of speech acts in argumentation. (shrink)

The traditional concepts of rhetorical strategy and argumentative fallacy cannot be readily reconciled. Doing so requires escaping the following argument: All argumentation involves rhetorical strategies. All rhetorical strategies are violations of logical or dialectical ideals. All violations of logical or dialectical ideals are fallacies. Normative pragmatics provides a perspective in which rhetorical strategies can be seen to have the potential for constructive contributions to argumentation and in which fallacies are not simply violations of ideals. One kind of constructive contribution, framing (...) moves, is illustrated with the case of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 TV campaign commercial known as the Daisy ad. (shrink)

Japanese conversations are known to contain a large amount of unexpressed information. When a speaker speaks with elliptical information, he or she assumes that the addressee will understand what is not overtly expressed based on the knowledge that is supposed to be shared textually, personally or culturally. The addressee, on the other hand, must determine what is not being expressed overtly using such shared knowledge. At the heart of this kind of communication is the existence of trust assumed among the (...) interlocutors. Using the term ‘entrustment’, we will examine how one particular Japanese formulaic construction, [Noun yo Noun], ‘It’s Noun, you know, Noun’, indexes mutual trust to manage conversational interaction. We will argue that this meta-pragmatic awareness needs to be recognized beyond surface interactional patterns identified in conversation. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a semantic account of temporally mismatched past subjunctive counterfactuals. The proposal consists of the following parts. First, I show that in cases of temporal mismatch, [past] cannot be interpreted inside the proposition where it occurs at surface structure. Instead, it must be interpreted as constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation. This has the effect of shifting the time of the evaluation of the conditional to some contextually salient past time. Second, I will propose (...) specific felicity conditions (presuppositions) for subjunctive conditionals and I will argue that there is a strict correspondence between the time of evaluation in the truth conditions of a conditional and the time relevant for the felicity conditions. In other words, if the time relevant for the accessibility relation has been shifted to the past, then the conditional's presupposition will make reference to a past context. On the other hand, if no past is constraining the time argument of the accessibility relation, the conditional's felicity will make reference to the current (main) context. Third, I will argue that the intuition that the antecedent of mismatched counterfactuals is not true is a scalar implicature arising from a competition not between assertions but between presuppositions. Finally, I will investigate the repercussions of my proposal for the general theory of modality. (shrink)

Starting from the case of insurance claims, I investigate the dynamics of acceptance, rejection and denial. I show that disagreement can be more varied than one might think. I illustrate this by looking at the Warren/Sanders controversy in the 2020 democratic primaries and at religious agnosticism.

Despite intensive debates regarding action imitation and sentence imitation, few studies have examined their relationship. In this paper, we argue that the mechanism of action imitation is necessary and in some cases sufficient to describe sentence imitation. We first develop a framework for action imitation in which key ideas of Hurley’s shared circuits model are integrated with Wolpert et al.’s motor selection mechanism and its extensions. We then explain how this action-based framework clarifies sentence imitation without a language-specific faculty. Finally, (...) we discuss the empirical support for and philosophical significance of this perspective. (shrink)

Nāgārjuna, the famous founder of the Madhyamika School, proposed the positive catuṣkoṭi in his seminal work, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā: ‘All is real, or all is unreal, all is both real and unreal, all is neither unreal nor real; this is the graded teaching of the Buddha’. He also proposed the negative catuṣkoṭi: ‘“It is empty” is not to be said, nor “It is non-empty,” nor that it is both, nor that it is neither; [“empty”] is said only for the sake of instruction’ (...) and the no-thesis view: ‘No dharma whatsoever was ever taught by the Buddha to anyone’. In this essay, I adopt Gricean pragmatics to explain the positive and negative catuṣkoṭi and the no-thesis view proposed by Nāgārjuna in a way that does not violate classical logic. For Nāgārjuna, all statements are false as long as the hearer understands them within a reified conceptual scheme, according to which substance is a basic categorical concept; substances have svabhāva, and names and sentences have svabhāva. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper is that we can justify induction deductively relative to one end, and deduction inductively relative to a different end. I will begin by presenting a contemporary variant of Hume ’s argument for the thesis that we cannot justify the principle of induction. Then I will criticize the responses the resulting problem of induction has received by Carnap and Goodman, as well as praise Reichenbach ’s approach. Some of these authors compare induction to deduction. Haack compares (...) deduction to induction, and I will critically discuss her argument for the thesis that we cannot justify the principles of deduction next. In concluding I will defend the thesis that we can justify induction deductively relative to one end, and deduction inductively relative to a different end, and that we can do so in a non-circular way. Along the way I will show how we can understand deductive and inductive logic as normative theories, and I will briefly sketch an argument to the effect that there are only hypothetical, but no categorical imperatives. (shrink)

The study reported here, building on the research methods of Conversation Analysis, Politeness Theory, and Relevance Theory, attempts to examine the distribution of Mandarin qishi and shishishang across two different discourse modes in formal speech settings: formal lectures and TV panel news discussions. The results indicate that qishi is prevalent in TV panel news discussion data, which fall into the interactional mode, whereas shishishang is more prevalent in formal speech data, which fall into the transactional mode. The study shows that (...) in interaction, qishi is addressee-oriented and signals alignment or divergence, whereas shishishang is message-oriented and asserts a proposition with a tone of certainty. In addition, the study suggests that although the literal meanings of qishi and shishishang, which are concerned with factuality, are seemingly unrelated to emotive expressivity, they offer a rhetorical strategy for expressing the speaker’s attitudinal position, and can both serve to indicate the speaker’s epistemic inference. (shrink)

An adequate evaluation of argumentation requires identification of the object to which the argumentation pertains: the point of view. What are the distinguishing features of this object? In the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory, the object of argumentation is referred to by means of the notion ‘standpoint’. In other theories concerned with argumentation, reasoning, convincing or persuading, notions are used such as ‘thesis’, ‘conclusion’, ‘opinion’ and ‘attitude’. This paper is a survey of the characterisations of the object of argumentation given in the (...) various theories. It discusses the pragma-dialectical argumentation theory, socio-psychological research on persuasion, cognitive research on reasoning, argumentative discourse analysis, two variants of informal logic, advocacy and debate, and the theory of communicative action. Next, it explores some relations between the notions used in these theories. Finally, it outlines some starting points for further research into the problems of identification. (shrink)

Social interactions are essential aspects of social relationships. Despite their centrality, there is a lack of a standardized approach to systematize social interactions. The present research developed and tested a taxonomy of social interactions. In Study 1, we combined a bottom-up approach based on the grounded theory with a top-down approach integrating existing empirical and theoretical literature to develop the taxonomy. The resulting taxonomy comprises the components Actor, Partner, Relation, Activities, Context, and Evaluation, each specified by features on three levels (...) of abstraction. A social situation can be described by a combination of the components and their features on the respective abstraction level. Study 2 tested the APRACE using another dataset with 1,899 descriptions of social interactions. The index scores of the six components, the frequencies of the features on the most abstract level, and their correlations were largely consistent across both studies, which supports the generalizability of the APRACE. The APRACE offers a generalizable tool for the comprehensive, parsimonious, and systematic description of social interactions and, thus, enables networked research on social interactions and application in a number of practical fields. (shrink)

A plausible principle about the felicitous use of indicative conditionals says that there is something strange about asserting an indicative conditional when you know whether its antecedent is true. But in most contexts there is nothing strange at all about asserting indicative conditionals like ‘If Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else did’. This paper argues that the only compelling explanation of these facts requires the resources of contextualism about knowledge.

Las consideraciones del filósofo Herbert Paul Grice en el campo de la pragmática marcaron un punto de inflexión en la historia de la filosofía. Ellas siguen siendo de enorme utilidad, y la interpretación de sus escritos está abierta a discusión. Sin embargo, el análisis de Grice en términos de las intenciones de los hablantes ha dado pie a que se interprete su programa como una postura compatible con el naturalismo de la intencionalidad. Sin embargo, esta interpretación tiene serios problemas. En (...) el presente trabajo presentaremos la posición de Grice y la interpretación naturalista de su diagnóstico, señalaremos las objeciones a esta última desde el expresivismo clásico, y defenderemos que puede hacerse una interpretación de Grice más consistente con su pensamiento y capaz de esquivar las críticas del expresivismo. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to propose a model that distinguishes between irony and humor in the context of literary texts. The comparative model was constructed based on existing models, and elaborated on them, substantiating the model through textual analysis focusing on cues for irony and cues for humor . The research was based on four conceptual paradigms: pragmatic studies of irony, pragmatic studies of humor, a pragmatic approach to the study of literary texts, and theories of text interpretation. (...) The textual analysis was based on an existing model for the interpretation of indirect speaker's meanings , and on the concepts “cues“ and “clues“ as employed in that model. (shrink)

In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint that makes no reference to knowledge, and that (...) practical reasoning has more to do with rational degrees of belief than with states of knowledge. (shrink)

Presupposition is the semantic-pragmatic phenomenon whereby a statement contains an implicit precondition that must be taken for granted for that statement to be felicitous. This article discusses the role of presupposition in legislative texts, using examples from Swiss constitutional and administrative law. It illustrates how presuppositions are triggered in these texts and what functions they come to serve, placing special emphasis on their constitutive power. It also demonstrates how legislative drafters can distinguish between “good” presuppositions and “bad” presuppositions by weighing (...) their main advantage, conciseness, against their main flaw, reduced transparency. The present study argues that, if employed carefully, presuppositions can be a useful stylistic means to keep legislative texts free from unnecessary clutter that merely elaborates on the obvious; however, it also suggests that, if applied wrongly, presuppositions can camouflage the duties and obligations placed on the subjects of a law and thus impede its accessibility and its efficient and effective implementation. (shrink)

The context of a linguisticexpression is defined as everything outside theexpression itself that is necessary forunambiguous interpretation of the expression.As meaning can be conveyed either by theimplicit, shared context or by the explicitform of the expression, the degree ofcontext-dependence or ``contextuality'' ofcommunication will vary, depending on thesituation and preferences of the languageproducer. An empirical measure of thisvariation is proposed, the ``formality'' or``F-score'', based on the frequencies ofdifferent word classes. Nouns, adjectives,articles and prepositions are more frequent inlow-context or ``formal'' types of (...) expression;pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections aremore frequent in high-context styles. Thismeasure adequately distinguishes differentgenres of language production using data forDutch, French, Italian, and English. Factoranalyses applied to data in 7 differentlanguages produce a similar factor as the mostimportant one. Both the data and thetheoretical model suggest that contextualitydecreases when unambiguous understandingbecomes more important or more difficult toachieve, when the separation in space, time orbackground between the interlocutors increases,and when the speaker is male, introvertedand/or academically educated. (shrink)

Testing the validity of knowledge requires formal expression of that knowledge. Formality of an expression is defined as the invariance, under changes of context, of the expression's meaning, i.e. the distinction which the expression represents. This encompasses both mathematical formalism and operational determination. The main advantages of formal expression are storability, universal communicability, and testability. They provide a selective edge in the Darwinian competition between ideas. However, formality can never be complete, as the context cannot be eliminated. Primitive terms, observation (...) set-ups, and background conditions are inescapable parts of formal or operational definitions, that all refer to a context beyond the formal system. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Theorem provide special cases of this more universal limitation principle. Context-dependent expressions, on the other hand, have the benefit of being more flexible, intuitive and direct, and putting less strain on memory. It is concluded that formality is not an absolute property, but a context-dependent one: different people will apply different amounts of formality in different situations or for different purposes. Some recent computational and empirical studies of formality and contexts illustrate the emerging scientific investigation of this dependence. (shrink)

Powerful transformer models based on neural networks such as GPT-4 have enabled huge progress in natural language processing. This paper identifies three challenges for computer programs dealing with metaphors. First, the phenomenon of Twice-Apt-Metaphors shows that metaphorical interpretations do not have to be triggered by syntactical, semantic or pragmatic tensions. The detection of these metaphors seems to involve a sense of aesthetic pleasure or a higher-order theory of mind, both of which are difficult to implement into computer programs. Second, the (...) contexts relative to which metaphors are interpreted are not simply given but must be reconstructed based on pragmatic considerations that can involve presuppositional pretence. If computer programs cannot produce or understand such a form of pretence, they will have problems dealing with certain metaphors. Finally, adequately interpreting and reacting to some metaphors seems to require the ability to have internal, first-personal experiential and affective states. Since it is questionable whether computer programs have such mental states, it can be assumed that they will have problems with these kinds of metaphors. (shrink)

This study investigates the effects of cultural orientation and the degree of disdain for robots on the preferred conversational styles in human-to-robot interactions. 203 participants self-reported on questionnaires through a computer-based online survey. The two requesting situations were intended to simulate the participants' interactions with humanoid social robots through an Internet video-phone medium of communication. Structural equation modeling was performed to examine the mediating role of mechanistic disdain between multicultural orientation and conversational constraints. The findings reveal that between the two (...) dimensions of multicultural orientation, only open-mindedness inversely influences mechanistic disdain. Mechanistic disdain, in turn, negatively affects three face-related conversational constraints, thereby leading to a lesser concern for robots' feelings, for minimizing impositions on robots, and for avoiding robots' negative evaluations. The implications of our findings on humans' relations with virtual robot entities and on the future development of humanoid robots are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, a survey is presented of the main approaches to the structure of argumentation. The paper starts with a historical overview of the distinctions between various types of argument structure. Next, the main definitions given in the various approaches are discussed as well as the methods that are proposed to deal with doubtful cases.

The aim of this article is to investigate whether choosing the appropriate referring expression requires taking into account the hearer’s perspective, as is predicted under some versions of bidirectional Optimality Theory but is unexpected under other versions. We did this by comparing the results of 25 young and 25 elderly adults on an elicitation task based on eight different picture stories, and a comprehension task based on eight similar written stories. With respect to the elicitation task, we found that elderly (...) adults produce pronouns significantly more often than young adults when referring to the old topic in the presence of a new topic. With respect to the comprehension task, no significant differences were found between elderly and young adults. These results support the hypothesis that speakers optimize bidirectionally and take into account hearers when selecting a referring expression. If the use of a pronoun will lead to an unintended interpretation by the hearer, the speaker will use an unambiguous definite noun phrase instead. Because elderly adults are more limited in their processing capacities, as is indicated by their smaller working memory capacity, as speakers they will not always be able to reason about the hearer’s choices. As a result, they frequently produce non-recoverable pronouns. (shrink)

The notion of common ground is important for the production of referring expressions: In order for a referring expression to be felicitous, it has to be based on shared information. But determining what information is shared and what information is privileged may require gathering information from multiple sources, and constantly coordinating and updating them, which might be computationally too intensive to affect the earliest moments of production. Previous work has found that speakers produce overinformative referring expressions, which include privileged names, (...) violating Grice’s Maxims, and concluded that this is because they do not mark the distinction between shared and privileged information. We demonstrate that speakers are in fact quite effective in marking this distinction in the form of their utterances. Nonetheless, under certain circumstances, speakers choose to overspecify privileged names. (shrink)

An -ever free relative is felicitous only when the speaker doesn’t know, or doesn’t care about, the identity of the entity denoted. In this paper we investigate what it means to identify an entity by examining the non-identification condition on -ever free relatives. Following Dayal (In A. Lawson (Ed.), Proceedings of SALT VII, 1997 ), we analyze -ever free relatives as definites with a modal dimension. We show that the variation in the identity of the entity across the possible worlds (...) in the modal dimension cannot be captured in a model where transworld identity is expressed using a single trivial principle of identity, and present an analysis within a model where transworld identity is relativized to noun meanings, which has been proposed in the philosophical literature for other reasons (Geach 1968 ; Gupta, The logic of common nouns: an investigation in quantified modal logic, 1980 ). The analysis thus shows that natural language semantics is sensitive to relative identity in the sense of Geach and Gupta; furthermore, it sets the stage for a new typology of referring expressions based on which expression types contribute principles of transworld identity. (shrink)