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.

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)

“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.

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.

Context has emerged as a central concept in a variety of contemporary approaches to reasoning. The conference at which the papers in this volume were presented, CONTEXT 2001, was the third international, interdisciplinary conference on the topic of context, and was held in Dundee, Scotland on July 27-30, 2001.

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

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

This paper studies the context-dependence of the first-person indexical 'I,' while attempting to make the identifiability criteria for specificity and definiteness clearer for this important indexical. Having been influenced by John Perry's work on indexicals, we'll show that this (seemingly) clearest case of an indexical poses a difficulty.

According to the target article authors, initial experience with a circumstance primes a relation that can subsequently be applied to a different circumstance to draw an analogy. While I broadly agree with their claim about the role of relational priming in early analogical reasoning, I put forward a few concerns that may be worthy of further reflection.

Here, S is a sentence—or possibly a smaller or larger unit of meaningful expression for a language—that's written by an author and c is the circumstance in which S is used. R is defined as the language conventions holding between an author and a reader (or better yet, his readership). P, probably the most important part of the equation, is the content of S or, the intended meaning of the author. We assume that the communication between an author and a (...) reader is limited only to written text. Consequently, it is not possible to ask the author about his intention for writing S; that will have to be discovered by a reader. (shrink)

Founded in 1993, ELEKTRIK: Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, has gradually become better known and is fast establishing itself as a research oriented publication outlet with high academic standards. In a modest attempt to advance this trend, this special issue of ELEKTRIK brings together five papers exemplifying the state of the art in artificial intelligence (AI). Written by experts, the papers are especially aimed at readers interested in gaining a better appraisal of the applications side of the (...) AI enterprise. In all papers there is a strong emphasis on measuring the benefits of the proposed approaches in experimental contexts. The papers broadly fall into five actively researched, contemporary domains of AI: pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, fuzzy sets, intelligent design, and agents. (shrink)

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

This is a review of Vicious Circles: On the Mathematics of Non-Wellfounded Phenomena, written by Jon Barwise and Lawrence Moss and published by CSLI Publications in 1996.

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.

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.).

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)

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.

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.).

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.].

In this paper, the scientific realism/anti-realism debate, which is one of the most popular topics in the metaphysics of science, will be examined in supporting the realistic wing. In this respect, the discussion will be conducted by keeping the subjects of ‘existence of an external mind-independent world’ and ‘unobservable entities’ at the center of this paper. In the context of understanding the world, ‘Science’ activity is not the sum of the research carried out only by considering empirical data; on the (...) contrary, it will be claimed that it is an endeavor that pursues unknown but interesting things (such as protons, photons, or viruses) and tries to give meaning to the world. Thus, against the empirical rigid attitude of anti-realism –bearing in mind the views of logical positivists; it will be illustrated that scientific realism is an understanding based on metaphysics and has a philosophical basis. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to develop a problem representation technique which enables the decomposition of a problem into subproblems such that their solution in sequence constitutes a strategy for solving the problem. An important issue here is that the subproblems generated should be easier than the main problem. We propose to represent a set of problem states by a statement which is true for all the members of the set. A statement itself is just a set of atomic statements (...) which are binary predicates on state variables. Then, the statement representing the set of goal states can be partitioned into its subsets each of which becomes a subgoal of the resulting strategy. The techniques involved in partitioning a goal into its subgoals are presented with examples. (shrink)

We take em-dash as our sample punctuation mark and examine its usage from a discourse perspective, using sentences from well-known corpora. We particularly comment on how dashes can give hints on information structure, focus, and anaphora. Throughout the paper Discourse Representation Theory is used as a framework.

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)

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)

In this paper, I aim to explore Lewis’s best system analysis and how it can accommodate laws with exceptions. The Best System Account has been introduced to provide an alternative view for both minimalist and counterfactual theories of regularities. Simple regularity theory faces problems in which there is some generalization that seems to be a law or some regularities that are established accidentally. It tries to exclude the accidental generalization from the account. However, the best system analysis can solve the (...) problem of how to distinguish between laws and accidents. (shrink)

[This is a review of: Drew McDermott, Mind and Mechanism, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001.] -/- The author is interested in computational approaches to consciousness. His reason for working in the field of AI is to solve the mind-body problem, that is, to understand how the brain can have experiences. This is an intricate project because it involves elucidation of the relationship between our mentality and its physical foundation. How can a biological/chemical system (the human body) have experiences, beliefs, desires, (...) intentions, and so on? Physicists have good reasons to persuade us that ours is a material world that obeys physical laws. Once we commit ourselves to this view, it sounds quite bewildering to think that there is a place for independently existing minds in such a world. When physicists speak, McDermott listens. His hypothesis is that we are all contraptions designed by evolution. The concept of mind arises because people’s brains are biological computers. Crudely put, minds are produced by brains. The essential contribution of this rich book is an extended argument about how one can be more specific about the way this production is realized. (shrink)

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.

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.

The notion of context arises in assorted areas of artificial intelligence (AI), including knowledge representation, natural language processing, intelligent information retrieval, etc. Although the term ‘context’ is frequently employed in descriptions, explanations, and analyses of computer programs in these areas, its meaning is frequently left to the reader’s understanding. -/- My aim in this paper is to offer a swift review of context in AI. I will first identify the role of context in various fields of AI. I will then (...) consider the enterprise of formalising context. The focus of my discussion will be McCarthy's (1993) proposal – a landmark study that inspired almost every logical theory of context since then – and its close variants, studied by his students. -/- (The author is grateful to Prof. Carlo Penco for his invaluable assistance with this work.). (shrink)

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)

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

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.

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)

On Crimmins and Perry’s account of propositional attitude ascription (1989), beliefs are concrete cognitive structures—particulars ("things in the head") that belong to an agent and that have a lifetime. They are related to the world and to other cognitive structures and abilities, allowing one to classify the latter by propositional content. Containing ideas and notions as constituents, beliefs are structured entities. The difference between notions and ideas is the difference between an agent’s ways of thinking about individuals vs. properties.

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.

From the 1920’s onwards in Yozgat and its vicinity in the interior of Asia Minor field surveys and excavations have been increasingly undertaken. One recent project is an archaeological survey of the whole province of Yozgat which began in 2017 with the participation of many academics from different universities and disciplines. Through this survey, which covers a large area, research in just a few regions has been completed. In this article, seventeen Christian epitaphs discovered at and around the village of (...) Güneşli (east of Tavium), Aydıncık, Basilika Therma (Sarıkaya) and Çayıralan, mostly dating from the Vth–VIth centuries A.D. are presented. Three of them are fragmentary and a few are badly damaged. A carved bilingual Latin/Greek inscription records the «running» metaphor frequently employed by the Apostle Paul, all the other inscriptions introduced are Greek. There are interesting differences and analogies for the motifs on these gravestones and for the formulas employed in the epitaphs within the surrounding region. ****** Yozgat İlinden Yeni Hıristiyan Mezar Yazıtları Yozgat ve çevresindeki arkeoloji yüzey araştırmaları ve kazılar çalışmaları 1920’li yıllardan itibaren artış göstererek devam etmektedir. Bu bağlamda son projelerden bir tanesi de farklı üniversitelerden ve disiplinlerden pek çok akademisyenin katılımıyla 2017 yılında başlatılan ve Yozgat ilinin tamamını kapsayan arkeolojik yüzey araştırmalarıdır. Tüm il sınırlarını kapsayan bu araştırmadaki sistematik çalışmalar bazı bölgelerde tamamlanmış durumdadır. Makalede ise Güneşli Köyü, Aydıncık, Sarıkaya ve Çayıralan’da bulunan ve çoğunluğu MS V.–VI. yüzyıllara tarihlenen Hıristiyan mezar yazıtları tanıtılmaktadır. Yazıtlarının bir kısmı sadece fragman halinde ele geçmişken, bazıları ise oldukça tahrip olmuş durumdadır. Bunlardan birisinin üzerine, Aziz Paulus’un sıkça dile getirdiği «koşmak» metaforu Latince ve Yunanca çift dilli olarak kazınmıştır. Diğer yazıtların tamamı Yunancadır. Söz konusu mezar taşları üzerindeki betimlemelerin ve mezar yazıtlarındaki formüllerin bölgeler arasındaki farklılıkları ise ilgi çekicidir. Anahtar Sözcükler: Yozgat, Tavium, Hıristiyan Mezar Yazıtı, Koşucu, Aziz Paulus, Bizans Epigrafisi. (shrink)

Bu makalede Antalya Müzesi tarafından yürütülen 2016 yılı Perge kazıları kapsamında Batı Nekropo-lisi’nden ele geçen üç Hellence mezar yazıtı tanıtılmaktadır. MS II. yüzyılın sonu ile MS III. yüzyılın başına tarihlenen yazıtların ilk ikisi lahit, üçüncüsü ise bir mezar odası üzerinde yer almaktadır. Söz konusu belgeler öncelikli olarak mezarların uygunsuz kullanımı sonucunda tahsil edilecek olan ceza miktarları ile bu miktar-ların ödeneceği kasalara ilişkin yapılacak olan çalışmalarda bir veri oluşturabilecek niteliktedir. Ayrıca yazıt-larda yer alan kişilerin hem kent hem de bölgede nadiren görülen (...) ya da hiç karşılaşılmamış olan isimleri ise onomastik çalışmalara katkı sunacaktır. (shrink)

This article presents a newly discovered votive inscription found during the course of the 2013 survey conducted at the ancient city of Phaselis and in its territory. The inscription was found where the stairs to the acropolis from the southwest of the theatre end, in front of the west wall of the tower structure give access to the acropolis. This inscription in the Doric dialect, on a limestone block measuring 0.315 x 0.77 x 0.61 m., records a dedication to Athena (...) Polias. The letters 0.03 m. high, exhibit Late Archaic - Early Classical Period features ( - - - - ) and, consequently the inscription can be dated to the Vth century B.C. -/- Phaselis and its Chief Goddess Athena Polias From the earliest times of Athena worship, especially in the Aegean Islands and Hellas, this goddess was the protectress of cities, institutions and mythological heroes and she manifested this function in various ways. In one of the earliest recorded examples she carries the epithet ἐρυσίπτολις (guardian of the cities), and in another example, in a Linear B inscription discovered in the Palace of Knossos on Crete as Atana Potnia (a-ta-na-po-ti-ni-ja), the mistress of the palace. But perhaps the most striking myth relating to this role of Athena is undoubtedly that of the Palladion statue, the reason for the fall of Troy and for defeat in the Trojan War. In this context, Troy could resist the Achaeans for as long as it was protected by the Palladion, but after it was stolen by Odysseus and Diomedes, the city was captured by the Achaeans. Subsequently, Athens, Argos and Sparta, the most powerful Greek cities, as later the city of Rome, in order to obtain Athena’s protection and so to gain legitimization for the expansion of their empires, invented their own myths claiming that the Palladion statue from Troy was brought to their cities. In another myth the Goddess became the protectress of Tegea through giving Medusa’s hair as a protective image to a hero of the city. Athena’s frequently used epithets, Polias (Πολιάς), Poliouchos (Πολιοῦχος), and the epithet the protectress of the Athenians (Ἀθηνᾶ Ἀθηνῶν μεδέουσα), employed as a means of religious propaganda by the city of Athens when it established the Delian League which subsequently evolved into an empire, clearly indicate Athena was regarded as guardian of the cities. Particularly during the Archaic and Classical Periods, it was this aspect of Athena that, politically placed the Goddess amongst the most important of deities with Zeus and Apollo, and she is most commonly found with the epithet Polias. The epithet Polias or similar, refers in particular to the heart of these cities, to their acropoleis, where Athena Polias was usually worshipped. Her temples located on the heights of the cities made her role particularly visible as the main protecting goddess. One of the best examples of this “visibility”concerns the earliest record of the epithet Polias as, although she wasn’t the chief deity of Argos, within the sanctuary of Athena Polias located on Larisa hill an inscription was found which supplies us with the text of a cult regulation which is datable to the VIth century. B.C.. The Anatolian goddess of Malija, equal to Athena (in Lycia), was attested in Hittite texts from IInd millennium B.C.. This goddess worshipped in Lycia, close to the city of Phaselis, is similarly in a relationship with cities and acropoleis. The Inscribed Pillar of Ksanthos dating from the Vth century B.C. records that many acropoleis were seized with the help of Athena ptoliporthos (πτολίπορθος) “Sacker of Cities”. In the same inscription the city of Patara was named together with Malija and it may refer to the Patara of Malija as in the example of the Lindian Athena (Lindos, city of Athena). Moreover, the goddess Malija was named with the epithet Wedrẽñni (regional, municipal) the equivalent of the epithet Polias in Rhodiapolis. During the great colonization movements (750-550 B.C.) the colonists brought the cult of Athena Polias to many Mediterranean cities, as was the case for example for Lindos on the island of Rhodos. As a matter of fact the strongest ties between Lindos and the colonies which Rhodes founded was the cult of Athena. In consequence, these cities offered precious gifts to the Temple of Athena in Lindos as a demonstration of both their veneration of the goddess and of loyalty. According to myth, the city of Phaselis was colonized in 691/690 B.C. by a group under the leadership of Lakios from Lindos and the Athena cult of the mother city was brought to Phaselis. Thereafter the Phaselitai dedicated the helmets and sickles to Athena Lindia upon which was inscribed, “Having taken them from the Solymoi, the Phaselitai offered them to Athena Lindia, when Lakios was the leader of the colonists”. In addition to this, the other evidence concerning the presence of Athena in the city confirms that this deity was the chief goddess of Phaselis. During the Classical, and especially in the Hellenistic Period, depictions of Athena’s owl, of her Palladion and of Athena Promachos are found. As mentioned above, the epithet Polias usually draws attention to a city’s acropolis with the temple of Athena Polias located there. In the case of Phaselis, the find spot of these votive inscriptions, reused in a wall of a tower that was built in defense of the acropolis, provides an additional indication for the localization of Athena’s temple to the acropolis. This temple most probably was on the acropolis where there are the ruins of a columned building and large ashlar blocks possibly indicating the site of a temple; however, due to the dense vegetation and in the absence of excavations, at present this localisation cannot be stated with certainty. Another reference indicating that Athena Polias was the chief deity of the city was the presence of a holy relic in the Temple of Athena, the spear of the hero of the Trojan War Achilles. During his campaign against the Persians, Alexander the Great stayed in Phaselis in the winter of 334/333 B.C. and he left Achilles’ spear in the Temple of Athena at Phaselis. During the Hellenistic Period, Hellenistic Kings were mentioned with the chief deities of the Archaic and Classical periods as were the emperors in Roman Imperial Period. And according with this practice, the boule and demos of Phaselis worshipped Athena Polias together with the deified emperors, known from an honorific inscription for a certain Ptolemaios. Evidence from the Late Roman Period, especially from the IIIrd century A.D., records the Palladeios agons (ἀγὼν Παλλάδειος) were held in the city in honour of the Goddess Athena. Consequently, philological, epigraphic as well as numismatic evidence shows the Goddess Athena was the chief deity of the city of Phaselis from the Archaic Period into the Late Roman Period. As the epithet Polias on this votive inscription indicates, the goddess had a temple which should be located on the acropolis where the holy relic (Achilles’ spear) was kept and where the officials of the goddess conducted their functions. This new votive inscription provides record of the role Athena occupied in this early post-colonisation period of the city’s political and socio-cultural history. Further, it is also a physical document dating from the city’s Late Archaic-Early Classical Period, aiding in the evaluation of both Phaselis and of the wider region’s history of settlement. (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)

MS IV. yüzyılda yaşayan Decimus Magnus Ausonius, Roma İmparatorluğu'nun özellikle batı yakasını yakından tanıyan önemli bir alim ve devlet adamıydı. Onu mühim biri haline getiren en önemli husus; çeşitli bilimler özelindeki bilgi birikiminin derinliği yanında başarılı bir eğitmen olmasıydı. Ayrıca, son derece stratejik mevkilere erişebilmiş bir devlet adamıydı. Yaşamının son yıllarında kaleme aldığı şiirlerinden olan Ordo Urbium Nobilium, Geç Antikçağ dünyasına dair önemli veriler içermektedir. Bu kapsamda, söz konusu çalışma kendisinin özellikle coğrafya, tarih, filoloji ve Latin edebiyatı-kültürü gibi çeşitli alanlarda (...) Geç Antikçağ eğitim kurumlarının ders içeriğine dâhil edilmiş şiirini konu edinmektedir. Öyle ki, Ortaçağdan günümüze değin Ausonius’un neredeyse her eseri hakkında yüzlerce çalışma gerçekleştirilmiş ve bunların birçoğu da ya yayımlanmış ya da yayımlanmayı bekler niteliktedir. Bu makalenin kurgusu da; Ausonius'un Ordo Urbium Nobilium başlıklı şiirinin içeriğinin ve kapsamının değerlendirilmesine odaklanmaktadır. Bu değerlendirme bağlamında öncelikle şiirde bahsi geçen kentler, şiir içerisinde aktarılan özellikleriyle incelenmekte, ayrıca Ausonius'un bu yerleşim birimleriyle şahsi ve resmi münasabetlerinin eserindeki yansıması irdelenecektir. (shrink)

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.

This is the proceedings of the "1st Turkish Conference on AI and ANNs," K. Oflazer, V. Akman, H. A. Guvenir, and U. Halici (editors). The conference was held at Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara on 25-26 June 1992. -/- Language of contributions: English and Turkish.