In this study on deduction, the authors argue that people reason by imagining the relevant state of affairs, ie building an internal model of it, formulating a tentative conclusion based on this model and then searching for alternative models.

Situation theory is the result of an interdisciplinary effort to create a full-fledged theory of information. Created by scholars and scientists from cognitive science, computer science, AI, linguistics, logic, philosophy, and mathematics, the theory is forging a common set of tools for the analysis of phenomena from all these fields. This volume presents work that evolved out of the Second Conference on Situation Theory and its Applications. Twenty-six essays exhibit the wide range of the theory, covering such topics as natural (...) language semantics, philosophical issues about information, mathematical applications, and the visual representation of information in computer systems.Jon Barwise is a professor of philosophy, mathematics, and logic at Indiana University in Bloomington. Jean Mark Gawron is a researcher at SRI International and a consultant at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Gordon Plotkin is a professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Edinburgh. Syun Tutiya is in the philosophy department at Chiba University in Japan. (shrink)

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion (...) of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

The present volume collects some of Barwise's papers written since then, those directly concerned with relations among logic, situation theory, and situation semantics. Several papers appear here for the first time.

Preface This volume represents the proceedings of the First Conference on Situation Theory and Its Applications held by CSLI at Asilomar, California, ...

This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

Examines the findings of scientific research into the thought processes of animals and argues that animals are capable of conscious thought.

The following values have no corresponding Zotero field: PB - University of Illinois Press.

A discussion of a number of ways that information can be present in a computer program without being explicitly represented.