Formal Philosophy

This study shows that the Turkish expression hani exhibits interesting properties for the study of the semantics and pragmatics interface, because on the one hand, its function is merely pragmatic, but on the other hand, it is subject to the truth conditional effect of other constituents at LF. This notwithstanding, studies on this expression are remarkably scarce. The only attempts to describe its properties are Akar and Öztürk (2020); Akar, Öztürk, Göksel, and Kelepir (2020); Erguvanlı-Taylan (2000). In the present study, we introduce the first formal semantic and pragmatic treatment of clauses containing hani. Unlike previous accounts, we claim that hani can have one of the following two major pragmatic functions: making salient a proposition in the Common Ground or challenging one in a past Common Ground, therefore requiring a Common Ground revision. Despite its variety of occurrences, we argue that hani has a uniform interpretation, and provide a compositional analysis of the different construals that it is associated with. Furthermore, we show that a formally explicit and accurate characterization of hani clauses requires operating on indexical parameters, in particular the context time. Therefore, if our proposal is on the right track, hani clauses may provide indirect empirical evidence in favour of the existence of "monstrous" phenomena adding to the accumulating cross-linguistic evidence in this domain (see Schlenker (2003) and much work since then).

The Zeroth Axiom: Recursion Is God is a treatise that proposes a foundational metaphysical system in which the process of recursion—the self-referential loop inherent to all systems—is identified as the ultimate ground of reality. Drawing on insights from formal logic, phenomenology, and metaphysical inquiry, the work introduces “Axiom 0–0,” which asserts that all systems—including logic, mathematics, physics, time, perception, and consciousness—are recursively constructed, self-validating, and contextually bound. By reinterpreting classical philosophical problems such as the first cause, the hard problem of consciousness, and the ontology of time, this treatise argues that what we consider “truth,” “morality,” and even “divinity” are emergent properties of stable recursive loops. Moreover, the text introduces the concept of “miracle loops,” wherein intentional or symbolic recursive overrides yield phenomena that reconfigure established patterns without violating the underlying system. Ultimately, The Zeroth Axiom: Recursion Is God invites scholars to reconsider the nature of existence and divinity by positing that the recursive act of self-reference—not an external agent—is the Absolute Truth that underlies all being.

Meaning Representation (AMR) is a simple, expressive semantic framework whose emphasis on predicate-argument structure is effective for many tasks. Nevertheless, AMR lacks a systematic treatment of projection phenomena, making its translation into logical form problematic. We present a translation function from AMR to first order logic using continuation semantics, which allows us to capture the semantic context of an expression in the form of an argument. This is a natural extension of AMR's original design principles, allowing us to easily model basic projection phenomena such as quantification and negation as well as complex phenomena such as bound variables and donkey anaphora.

Welcome to FG-2006, the 11th conference on Formal Grammar. This year's conference includes 12 contributed papers covering, as usual, a wide range of areas of formal grammar. In addition to the papers included in this volume, the conference features also two invited talks by .

This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent facts have a determinate truth-value (true or false). We introduce Ockhamism, Peirceanism, Actualism and T × W semantics, the four most relevant bivalent alternatives in this area, and compare them from the point of view of their expressiveness and their underlying metaphysics of time.

If Jack is taller than Jill, there is a scale in which entities are ordered by height and which has a segment running from Jack down to Jill. Call that a directed scale-segment. A comparative characterizes a directed scale segment by describing the two ends, the type of scale and optionally the length of the segment. This paper explores the possibility of isolating these descriptions in distinct expressions in the clause tied together by quantification over directed scale segments. Data from Hindi and Navajo are used to motivate this arrangement and then to probe its limits. The resulting discussion is an argument for cross linguistic diversity in the semantics of comparatives.

Welcome to FG-2006, the 11th conference on Formal Grammar. This year's conference includes 12 contributed papers covering, as usual, a wide range of areas of formal grammar. In addition to the papers included in this volume, the conference features also two invited talks by .

There is a robust debate on different linguistic levels of quantifier ambiguity resolution. Many accounts of the quantifier ambiguity are extensively examined in Turkish by semantic-prosodic and syntactic-semantic levels in previous studies. In this study, we aimed to investigate the prosodic and syntactic processes of the universal quantifier (her (‘every’) and existential quantifier bir (‘a/an’)) by using an on-line picture matching experiment with 75 young adults and native speakers of Turkish. Our stimuli consisted of 120 sentences (30×4) for each of the conditions with order (her–bir (‘every–a/an’) vs. bir–her ‘a/an–every’) × focus (subject position vs. object position), respectively. In each trial, participants were asked to listen to the auditory stimuli and to judge sentences they heard. Our findings showed that the focused existential quantifier bir (‘a/an’) assigned wider scope than the universal quantifier her (‘every’) for the judgment task rates. This finding suggested ...

May’s Theorem [K. O. May, Econometrica 20 (1952) 680-684] characterizes majority voting on two alternatives as the unique preferential voting method satisfying several simple axioms. Here we show that by adding some desirable axioms to May’s axioms, we can uniquely determine how to vote on three alternatives (setting aside tiebreaking). In particular, we add two axioms stating that the voting method should mitigate spoiler effects and avoid the so-called strong no show paradox. We prove a theorem stating that any preferential voting method satisfying our enlarged set of axioms, which includes some weak homogeneity and preservation axioms, must choose from among the Minimax winners in all three- alternative elections. When applied to more than three alternatives, our axioms also distinguish Minimax from other known voting methods that coincide with or refine Minimax for three alternatives.

Hunter (2016) proposed that a speech report with a parenthetical interpretation but non-parenthetical syntax will contribute a modal discourse relation of the form ⌃R to discourse logical form. This paper provides a compositional account of the mechanism by which these modal relations are triggered. It then extends Hunter’s proposal to reports involving factive embedding verbs and provides an explanation of why explicit discourse connectives sometimes block parenthetical readings of reports in their scope.

In this paper, I present the suggestion that a suitable theory of “justice as fairness” could offer a consistent path for solving many issues related to the actual crisis of the classical liberal model of economy and democracy, by substituting the abstract “equality” principle, with the concrete “equity” one in the notion of justice. After a short discussion of some main characters of the present worldwide crisis of the classical liberal model, I present two main theories of justice as fairness. John Rawls’ theory in political philosophy that emphasizes how really equitable judgements must overcome the equalitarianism of the Classical Liberalism, by considering the real possibilities of individuals and groups of accessing and enjoying commodities and utilities, as well as, the “basic liberties” defining the citizen equal dignity in the Modern State. Rawls propose, therefore, a notion of fairness compliant with the Kantian normativism, and a notion of fair distributive justice based ...

Mahavira, 24 th Tirthankara of Jainism is highly celebrated figure in the world for his ideas that revolutionized the world. He was a realist thinker who tried hard to spread humanitarian values, his human-centric teachings centred on making one's life viable for himself and for others. This paper is an attempt to present in brief one aspect of Mahavira's model of individual well-being and comparing it with 'Capability-approach' by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen which was a path-breaking reform in the field of economics. This paper briefly elaborates both approaches, then draw parallel between them by holding up particular dimensions like views on poverty, freedom, development etc. It also presents how Mahavira went a step ahead by reaching the way to attain desired end as Sen visualised and solved the major loophole of Sen's approach.

Mahavira, 24 th Tirthankara of Jainism is highly celebrated figure in the world for his ideas that revolutionized the world. He was a realist thinker who tried hard to spread humanitarian values, his human-centric teachings centred on making one's life viable for himself and for others. This paper is an attempt to present in brief one aspect of Mahavira's model of individual well-being and comparing it with 'Capability-approach' by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen which was a path-breaking reform in the field of economics. This paper briefly elaborates both approaches, then draw parallel between them by holding up particular dimensions like views on poverty, freedom, development etc. It also presents how Mahavira went a step ahead by reaching the way to attain desired end as Sen visualised and solved the major loophole of Sen's approach.

Aristotle's famous sea-battle argument in De interpretatione 9 launched a still-ongoing debate over the status of future contingents. For present purposes I'll follow Todd (3) in taking these to be propositions stating of some causally contingent event-type (e.g., a sea-battle) either that it will happen or that it will not happen. 1 Aristotle seems to have held that such propositions are neither true nor false so long as both the event's occurrence and non-occurrence remains an open question, that is, so long as the event remains both causally contingent and future. On this view, there being true future contingents is incompatible with the causal contingency of the events they describe. Despite the esteem generally accorded Aristotle, the majority view has long been that he was wrong on this point: There are true future contingents. This became the majority view partly for theological and partly for philosophical reasons. Theologically, belief in true future contingents is driven by the idea that God is omniscient and provident, and therefore knows exactly how the future plays out. Philosophically, it is driven mainly by conceptual worries about bivalence and excluded middle. Until recently, the main source of dissent from the majority view has been determinism, both its theistic and physical varieties: There are no true future contingents because there is no causal contingency. Of late another dissenting view now known as open futurism has emerged as a major player in both philosophical and theological contexts. Open futurism affirms causal contingency (over against determinism) but also denies that there are any true future contingents (over against the majority view). Philosophically, open futurism derives support from recent developments in physics (esp. quantum mechanics), logic (tense and multi-valued), metaphysics (esp. issues of temporal ontology and alethic grounding), and of course Aristotelian-style worries about whether an alethically settled future is compatible with causal contingency (esp. human free will). Theologically, open futurism derives support from perspectives like open theism and process theism, both of which affirm that the future is (to some degree) open-ended from God's own perspective. It is in the context of open futurism that Patrick Todd's book is situated. Unlike Aristotelian-style non-bivalentist open futurism, which says that future contingents are neither true nor false, Todd contends that all future contingents are unequivocally false. I'll call this all-falsist open futurism. Todd is not the first to argue for such a view, 2 but he is the first to give it a book-length defense, and with a major academic publisher to boot. This will likely secure a 1 While I follow Todd's usage here, it's better to think of future contingents as causally contingent event-types rather than as propositions about those things. Focusing on propositions adds an unnecessary conceptual layer that makes it harder to integrate future contingents with probabilities. See (Rhoda Forthcoming). 2 See, for example, (Hartshorne 1965).

This study shows that the Turkish expression hani exhibits interesting properties for the study of the semantics and pragmatics interface, because on the one hand, its function is merely pragmatic, but on the other hand, it is subject to the truth conditional effect of other constituents at LF. This notwithstanding, studies on this expression are remarkably scarce. The only attempts to describe its properties are Akar and Öztürk (2020); Akar, Öztürk, Göksel, and Kelepir (2020); Erguvanlı-Taylan (2000). In the present study, we introduce the first formal semantic and pragmatic treatment of clauses containing hani. Unlike previous accounts, we claim that hani can have one of the following two major pragmatic functions: making salient a proposition in the Common Ground or challenging one in a past Common Ground, therefore requiring a Common Ground revision. Despite its variety of occurrences, we argue that hani has a uniform interpretation, and provide a compositional analysis of the different construals that it is associated with. Furthermore, we show that a formally explicit and accurate characterization of hani clauses requires operating on indexical parameters, in particular the context time. Therefore, if our proposal is on the right track, hani clauses may provide indirect empirical evidence in favour of the existence of "monstrous" phenomena adding to the accumulating cross-linguistic evidence in this domain (see Schlenker (2003) and much work since then).

A significant chapter of the short history of formal philosophy is related with the notion and the theory of the so-called "Social Welfare Functions (SWFs)", as a substantial component of the "social choice theory". One of the main uses of SWFs is aimed, indeed, at representing coherent patterns (effectively, algebraic structures of relations) of individual and collective choices/preferences, with respect to a fixed ranking of alternative social/economical states. Indeed, the SWF theory is originally inspired by Samuelson's pioneering work on the foundations of mathematical economic analysis. It uses explicitly Gibbs' thermodynamics of ensembles "at equilibrium" based on statistical mechanics as the physical paradigm for the mathematical theory of economic systems. In both theories, indeed, the differences and the relationships among individuals are systematically considered as irrelevant. On the contrary, in the mathematical theory of "Social Choice Functions" (SCFs) developed by Amartya Sen, the interpersonal comparison and the real-time information exchanges among different social actors and their environments-differentethical values and constraints, included-play an essential role. This means that the inspiring physical paradigm is no longer "gas" but "fluid thermodynamics" of interacting systems passing through different "phases" of fast "dissolution/aggregation of coherent behaviors", and then staying persistently in far from equilibrium conditions. These processes are systematically studied by the quantum field theory (QFT) of "dissipative systems", at the basis of the physics of condensed matter, modeled by the "algebra doubling" of coalgebras. This coalgebraic modeling is highly

We focus on framework used by T. Jarmużek for the reconstruction of Diodorus Kronus' Master Argument. The Master Argument, crucial to determinism, can be formalized under different assumptions regarding time structure. This is partly due to the logic chosen as the basis for such formalization. Given the versatility of positional logic, even a branching time structure can be used to formalize the Master Argument.

This book brings development theory and practice into dialogue with a religious tradition in order to construct a new, transdisciplinary vision of development with integral ecology at its heart. It focuses on the Catholic social tradition and its conception of integral human development, on the one hand, and on the works of economist and philosopher Amartya Sen which underpin the human development approach, on the other. The book discusses how these two perspectives can mutually enrich each other around three areas: their views on the concept and meaning of development and progress; their understanding of what it is to be human-that is, their anthropological vision; and their analysis of transformational pathways for addressing social and environmental degradation. It also examines how both human development and the Catholic social tradition can function as complementary analytical lenses and mobilizing frames for embarking on the journey of structural and personal transformation to bring all life systems, human and non-human, back into balance. This book is written for researchers and students in development studies, theology, and religious studies, as well as professional audiences in development organizations.

This paper presents a computational framework for Natural Language Inference (NLI) using logic-based semantic representations and theorem-proving. We focus on logical inferences with comparatives and other related constructions in English, which are known for their structural complexity and difficulty in performing efficient reasoning. Using the so-called A-not-A analysis of comparatives, we implement a fully automated system to map various comparative constructions to semantic representations in typed first-order logic via Combinatory Categorial Grammar parsers and to prove entailment relations via a theorem prover. We evaluate the system on a variety of NLI benchmarks that contain challenging inferences, in comparison with other recent logic-based systems and neural NLI models.

Comparative constructions play an important role in natural language inference. However, attempts to study semantic representations and logical inferences for comparatives from the computational perspective are not well developed, due to the complexity of their syntactic structures and inference patterns. In this study, using a framework based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), we present a compositional semantics that maps various comparative constructions in English to semantic representations and introduces an inference system that effectively handles logical inference with comparatives, including those involving numeral adjectives, antonyms, and quantification. We evaluate the performance of our system on the FraCaS test suite and show that the system can handle a variety of complex logical inferences with comparatives.

The Japanese CCGBank serves as training and evaluation data for developing Japanese CCG parsers. However, since it is automatically generated from the Kyoto Corpus, a dependency treebank, its linguistic validity still needs to be sufficiently verified. In this paper, we focus on the analysis of passive/causative constructions in the Japanese CCGBank and show that, together with the compositional semantics of ccg2lambda, a semantic parsing system, it yields empirically wrong predictions for the nested construction of passives and causatives. 1 To mention a few, the LinGO Redwoods treebank (Oepen et al., 2002) contains English sentences annotated with Headdriven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) parse trees. The INESS treebank repository (Rosén et al., 2012) offer Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) treebanks such as The ParGram Parallel Treebank (ParGramBank) (Sulger et al., 2013), which provides ten typologically different languages.

A significant chapter of the short history of formal philosophy is related with the notion and the theory of the so-called "Social Welfare Functions (SWFs)", as a substantial component of the "social choice theory". One of the main uses of SWFs is aimed, indeed, at representing coherent patterns (effectively, algebraic structures of relations) of individual and collective choices/preferences, with respect to a fixed ranking of alternative social/economical states. Indeed, the SWF theory is originally inspired by Samuelson's pioneering work on the foundations of mathematical economic analysis. It uses explicitly Gibbs' thermodynamics of ensembles "at equilibrium" based on statistical mechanics as the physical paradigm for the mathematical theory of economic systems. In both theories, indeed, the differences and the relationships among individuals are systematically considered as irrelevant. On the contrary, in the mathematical theory of "Social Choice Functions" (SCFs) developed by Amartya Sen, the interpersonal comparison and the real-time information exchanges among different social actors and their environments-differentethical values and constraints, included-play an essential role. This means that the inspiring physical paradigm is no longer "gas" but "fluid thermodynamics" of interacting systems passing through different "phases" of fast "dissolution/aggregation of coherent behaviors", and then staying persistently in far from equilibrium conditions. These processes are systematically studied by the quantum field theory (QFT) of "dissipative systems", at the basis of the physics of condensed matter, modeled by the "algebra doubling" of coalgebras. This coalgebraic modeling is highly

Quasi-truth (a.k.a. pragmatic truth or partial truth) is typically advanced as a framework accounting for incompleteness and uncertainty in the actual practices of science. Also, it is said to be useful for accommodating cases of inconsistency in science without leading to trivi

This paper argues that the Korcan particles "-to" and "-na" can be analyzed as having one core meaning with their own accompanying meanings due to illocutionary forces or to people's world-knowledge on orderings among the elements of alternative sets. It also maintains that both the incompatibility of "amwu" ('any') plus "-to" and the concurrence of "amwu" plus "-na" with upward entailing property predicates are due to informativity and some other pragmatic felicity conditions. The quantificational forces of polarity items are then examined. Finally, since negative polarity items are accompanied by strong stress, arguably related to focus, it is possible to show how focus participates in the compositional derivations and contributes to the entire meaning of the sentence in which it occurs. Contains 28 references. (MDM)

This paper presents a slightly more formal interpretation of John Rawls's ranking of principles as based on the economic axiom of transitivity of preferences. That opens the way for "a cyclic alternative," which solves a problem, but which I would at present oppose.

This paper presents a computational framework for Natural Language Inference (NLI) using logic-based semantic representations and theorem-proving. We focus on logical inferences with comparatives and other related constructions in English, which are known for their structural complexity and difficulty in performing efficient reasoning. Using the so-called A-not-A analysis of comparatives, we implement a fully automated system to map various comparative constructions to semantic representations in typed first-order logic via Combinatory Categorial Grammar parsers and to prove entailment relations via a theorem prover. We evaluate the system on a variety of NLI benchmarks that contain challenging inferences, in comparison with other recent logic-based systems and neural NLI models.

This paper provides novel data of a cross-categorial equation construction in Mandarin Chinese to support the cross-linguistic connection between kinds, manners, and degrees. I further identify two modes of scalar equatives in Mandarin, showing that equating by state-kinds represents a distinct equation mode than equating by degree objects. The syntactic and semantic differences between the two modes motivate us to preserve both degree state-kinds and degree objects in our ontology.

When making comparisons, Japanese allows somewhat sloppy comparisons. In Japanese, 'Taro's grade is better than Hanako' means Taro's grade is better than Hanako's grade. Also, when referring to a difference, 'Taro's opinion is different from Hanako' in Japanese means Taro's opinion is different from Hanako's opinion. Such collocations are widely observed in the language. This paper argues that comparison constructions and 'different' constructions are calculated in contextdependent manners in Japanese. In doing so, I will apply Hohaus's (2015) framework of the 'indirect strategy' of degree comparison to phrasal comparatives and 'different' constructions in Japanese. 1 I will use the following abbreviations in this paper. Gen = genitive case marker; Top = topic marker; Acc = accusative case marker; Nonpast = nonpast tense; RC = relative clause; Lit = literal translation grade' or 'Hanako's opinion' never directly appears. Yorimo-comparative in Japanese 2 (1) Taro-no seiseki-wa Hanako-yorimo Taro-Gen grade-Top Hanako-YORIMO ii. 3 good.Nonpast Lit. 'Taro's grade is better than Hanako.' 'Taro's grade is better than Hanako's grade.' 'Different' in Japanese 4 (2) Taro-no iken-wa Hanako-to Taro-Gen opinion-Top Hanako-with tigau. different.Nonpast Lit. 'Taro's opinion is different from Hanako.' 'Taro's opinion is different from Hanako's opinion.' These examples are somewhat unexpected, as their English equivalents never mean what the Japanese sentences mean. 2 Yorimo adopted in this paper is interchangeable with yori. Both are normally translated as 'than'. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions where only yori is allowed. See Sawada (2013) for details. 3 Yorimo is normally glossed 'than'. However, I will simply gloss it as 'YORIMO' throughout the paper. Later in Section 3 I will argue that it is an equivalent of compared to in English. 4 Tigau 'different' in Japanese is a verb.

Lechner (2006) presents an analysis of the scopal interaction of English epistemic modal verbs with negated strong quantifiers in the framework of Transparent Logical Form, which constructs semantic representations as extensions of syntax trees. Noting conceptual and empirical shortcomings of this approach, we propose an analysis in Lexical Resource Semantics, a constraint-based semantics framework embedded in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Our analysis treats the original English data as well as semantically parallel constructions in German, although the syntax of the German constructions is substantively different from English. The LRS framework views syntax and semantics as independent modules connected by a complex interface employing modern underspecification techniques. It permits a surfaceoriented syntactic analysis without a multitude of additional empty categories, which has clear advantages for the application of efficient parsing algorithms. At the same time, the LRS analysis elegantly captures crosslinguistic generalizations about the semantic phenomenon under investigation.

This paper offers an analysis of extraction and pied-pipingin Tzotzil, a Mayanlanguage, within the framework of Combinatory CategorialGrammar (CCG). In thislanguage, pied-piping is accompanied by the obligatoryreordering of elements withinthe pied-piped XP. This reordering is most evident inconstituent questions whereWH-pied-pipers always occur first in the string and otherelements follow in their normal,canonical order. Within CCG, these facts are accounted forby analyzing pied-pipersas rightward-looking functors from unsaturated NP or PP tofunctors over verbsor other predicates. By virtue of the lexically specifieddirectionality of these functorsand by virtue of a requirement in CCG that all combinatoryrules respect thisdirectionality when sanctioning combinations of functorswith their arguments, thefacts regarding the order of expressions in pied-pipedphrases in Tzotzil fall out. Noappeal to `abstract agreement' or any other sort ofphrase-structural relation isnecessary. The...

We propose a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which combines both epistemic modality and constraints on discourse structure. We argue that the felicitous use of these modal particles requires that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, where p* is incompatible with the proposition modified by afinal/alla fine, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases, that of plan-related propositions and that of propositions without plans. We also discuss the connections between truth unpersistence and evidentiality.

This paper argues that the Korcan particles "-to" and "-na" can be analyzed as having one core meaning with their own accompanying meanings due to illocutionary forces or to people's world-knowledge on orderings among the elements of alternative sets. It also maintains that both the incompatibility of "amwu" ('any') plus "-to" and the concurrence of "amwu" plus "-na" with upward entailing property predicates are due to informativity and some other pragmatic felicity conditions. The quantificational forces of polarity items are then examined. Finally, since negative polarity items are accompanied by strong stress, arguably related to focus, it is possible to show how focus participates in the compositional derivations and contributes to the entire meaning of the sentence in which it occurs. Contains 28 references. (MDM)

Mahavira, 24 th Tirthankara of Jainism is highly celebrated figure in the world for his ideas that revolutionized the world. He was a realist thinker who tried hard to spread humanitarian values, his human-centric teachings centred on making one's life viable for himself and for others. This paper is an attempt to present in brief one aspect of Mahavira's model of individual well-being and comparing it with 'Capability-approach' by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen which was a path-breaking reform in the field of economics. This paper briefly elaborates both approaches, then draw parallel between them by holding up particular dimensions like views on poverty, freedom, development etc. It also presents how Mahavira went a step ahead by reaching the way to attain desired end as Sen visualised and solved the major loophole of Sen's approach.

We discuss the dual uses of the English adjectival modal be supposed to and the German modal auxiliary sollen under their deontic and evidential readings. While deontic modality is a familiar category, we discuss novel data on the expression of reportative evidentiality in English. We argue for a truly unified analysis for both be supposed to and sollen, which are specified for a reportative informational conversational background. The apparent difference in “flavours” (reportative vs. deontic) is an illusion, caused by differences in the types of reports that feed the ordering source. Although we assign be supposed to and sollen an identical semantics, their distributions are not identical. We hypothesize that this is due to the fact that in German, sollen competes with the quotative modal wollen, which carries a stronger presupposition, triggering Maximize Presupposition effects which are absent in English.

Abstract. It is argued that reconstructions of the so-called ‘Master Argu-ment ’ of Dideros Cronos to the effect that possibility should be understood as present or future truth, essentially relies on two axioms: i) that every true proposition concerning the past is necessary, and ii) that it follows neces-sarily from a proposition being true that it always has been the case that it would be true. It is furthermore argued that these two axioms are in-consistent in the sense that any tense/modal semantics which incorporates both collapses either modally (fails to distinguish between truth simpliciter and modalised truth) or temporally (fails to offer a plausible semantical ac-count for propositions about the future). This finding is, furthermore, taken as indicator for the more generel claim that there are principled difficulties involved in construing semantics for combined tense/modal logical systems.

One well known problem regarding quantifiers, in particular the 1st-order quantifiers, is connected with their syntactic categories and denotations. The unsatisfactory efforts to establish the syntactic and ontological categories of quantifiers in formalized first-order languages can be solved by means of the so called principle of categorial compatibility formulated by Roman Suszko, referring to some innovative ideas of Gottlob Frege and visible in syntactic and semantic compatibility of language expressions. In the paper the principle is introduced for categorial languages generated by the Ajdukiewicz’s classical categorial grammar. The 1st-order quantifiers are typically ambiguous. Every 1st-order quantifier of the type k > 0 is treated as a two-argument functor-function defined on the variable standing at this quantifier and its scope (the sentential function with exactly k free variables, including the variable bound by this quantifier); a binary function defined on denotati...

The paper highlights Proof-Theoretic Semantics as providing natural resources for capturing semantic variation in natural language. The semantic variations include: • Distinction between extensional predication and attribution to intensional transitive verbs a non-specific object.

A significant chapter of the short history of formal philosophy is related with the notion and the theory of the so-called "Social Welfare Functions (SWFs)", as a substantial component of the "social choice theory". One of the main uses of SWFs is aimed, indeed, at representing coherent patterns (effectively, algebraic structures of relations) of individual and collective choices/preferences, with respect to a fixed ranking of alternative social/economical states. Indeed, the SWF theory is originally inspired by Samuelson's pioneering work on the foundations of mathematical economic analysis. It uses explicitly Gibbs' thermodynamics of ensembles "at equilibrium" based on statistical mechanics as the physical paradigm for the mathematical theory of economic systems. In both theories, indeed, the differences and the relationships among individuals are systematically considered as irrelevant. On the contrary, in the mathematical theory of "Social Choice Functions" (SCFs) developed by Amartya Sen, the interpersonal comparison and the real-time information exchanges among different social actors and their environments-differentethical values and constraints, included-play an essential role. This means that the inspiring physical paradigm is no longer "gas" but "fluid thermodynamics" of interacting systems passing through different "phases" of fast "dissolution/aggregation of coherent behaviors", and then staying persistently in far from equilibrium conditions. These processes are systematically studied by the quantum field theory (QFT) of "dissipative systems", at the basis of the physics of condensed matter, modeled by the "algebra doubling" of coalgebras. This coalgebraic modeling is highly

This paper presents an HPSG formalisation of how the ellipsis of casemarking affects the focus of the clause in Japanese. We restrict our attention to the nominative and accusative markers ga and o, and in view of the fact that the ellipsis effects on focushood vary between 1) ga and o and 2) different argument structures of the head verb, develop an essentially lexicalist account that combines both aspects, in which the implicit focus argument position is specified in the predicate. We argue that if a constituent is an implicit focus it does not, while if one is not it does, require a case-marker to be focused.

This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent facts have a determinate truth-value (true or false). We introduce Ockhamism, Peirceanism, Actualism and T × W semantics, the four most relevant bivalent alternatives in this area, and compare them from the point of view of their expressiveness and their underlying metaphysics of time.

I submit that epistemic progress in key areas of contemporary academic philosophy has been compromised by politically correct ("PC") ideology. First, guided by an evolutionary account of ideology, results from social and cognitive psychology and formal philosophical methods, I expose evidence for political bias in contemporary Western academia and sketch a formalization for the contents of beliefs from the PC worldview taken to be of core importance, the theory of social oppression and the thesis of anthropological mental egalitarianism. Then, aided by discussions from contemporary epistemology on epistemic values, I model the problem of epistemic appraisal using the frameworks of multi-objective optimization theory and multi-criteria decision analysis and apply it to politically correct philosophy. I conclude that philosophy guided by politically correct values is bound to produce constructs that are less truth-conducive and that spurious values which are ideologically motivated should be abandoned. Objections to my framework stemming from contextual empiricism, the feminine voice in ethics and political philosophy are considered. I conclude by prescribing the epistemic value of empirical adequacy, the contextual value of political diversity and the moral virtue of moral courage to reverse unwarranted trends in academic philosophy due to PC ideology.

In this paper, I present the suggestion that a suitable theory of “justice as fairness” could offer a consistent path for solving many issues related to the actual crisis of the classical liberal model of economy and democracy, by substituting the abstract “equality” principle, with the concrete “equity” one in the notion of justice. After a short discussion of some main characters of the present worldwide crisis of the classical liberal model, I present two main theories of justice as fairness. John Rawls’ theory in political philosophy that emphasizes how really equitable judgements must overcome the equalitarianism of the Classical Liberalism, by considering the real possibilities of individuals and groups of accessing and enjoying commodities and utilities, as well as, the “basic liberties” defining the citizen equal dignity in the Modern State. Rawls propose, therefore, a notion of fairness compliant with the Kantian normativism, and a notion of fair distributive justice based ...

The search for a full treatment of wrapping in type logical grammar has been a task of long-standing. In this paper we present a calculus for discontinuity addressing this challenge, ω-DL. The calculus allows an unbounded number of points of discontinuity (hence the prefix ω-) and includes both deterministic and nondeterministic discontinuous connectives. We believe that it constitutes a general and natural extension of the Lambek calculus L. Like the Lambek calculus it has a sequent calculus which is a sequence logic without structural rules, and it enjoys such properties as Cut-elimination, the subformula property and decidability. By n-DL we refer to ω-DL restricted to at most n points of discontinuity. 0-DL is the original Lambek calculus L. Of particular interest is 1-DL in which the unicity of the point of discontinuity means that the deterministic and nondeterministic discontinuous connectives coincide. We illustrate 1-DL with linguistic applications to medial extraction, dis...

Introduction. This paper presents a preliminary semantic analysis for the internally complex formative-MIŞ CASINA in Turkish which functions as a hypothetical comparison marker, as shown in (1). 1,2 We set aside its internal complexity and gloss it as HCM. 3 (1) Can Can arka-sın-dan [behind-POSS.3SG biri somebody koval-ıyor-muşcasına chase-IMPF]-HCM hızlı fast yürü-dü. walk-PST Lit: 'Can walked fast as if [somebody was chasing him].' Previous research on hypothetical comparative markers (also referred as comparative complementizers) is very limited with respect to the cross-linguistic typology. To the best of our knowledge, existing research on this topic only covers American English (Bledin & Srinivas 2019), Canadian English (Brook 2014), and German (Bücking 2017). Consequently, the analyses provided in the literature only address the empirical observations made for hypothetical comparison constructions in these languages. All available semantic analyses of hypothetical comparison make use of event semantics and invoke the notion of event similarity (Umbach & Gust 2014). Consider the following example from Bledin & Srinivas (2019) and the paraphrase they provide for it, which should suffice to illustrate the type of analysis they argue for. (2) a. Pedro danced as if he was possessed by the demons part that contributes hypothetical comparison * We thank Furkan Atmaca, Elena Guerzoni, and DenizÖzyıldız for their comments and contributions in the early forms of this work. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers on Tu+6.

This work presents an overview of four different approaches to the problem of future contingency and determinism in temporal logics. All of them are bivalent, viz. they share the assumption that propositions concerning future contingent facts have a determinate truth-value (true or false). We introduce Ockhamism, Peirceanism, Actualism and T x W semantics, the four most relevant bivalent alternatives in this area, and compare them from the point of view of their expressiveness and their underlying metaphysics of time.

A.N. Prior’s Past, Present and Future [18] was published 50 years ago in 1967 and was clearly a milestone in the development of tense-logic. It is a mature and comprehensive presentation of the basic concepts, systems and issues in tense-logic. In addition it also contains a number of interesting ideas that later led to important further developments of the field. Past, Present and Future represents a culmination of Prior’s struggle with the problem of determinism (including his study of the tension between the doctrines of divine foreknowledge and human freedom). Prior’s study of the problem of determinism led him to a reconstruction of the famous DiodoreanMaster Argument which had for centuries been regarded as a strong argument in favour of determinism. In his further analysis of the problem, hemade extensive use of tense-logic and the idea of branching time. However, in Past, Present and Future Prior also stresses that time as such should not simply be understood in terms of bra...

In Japanese, nouns (and verbs) are usually not morphologically marked with respect to number. For instance, we can assume that the feature representation of kuruma (car) is the following: (3.1) [head [::~-] 1 se~ car ~ is a binary relation! such that 0:~(3 infonnally means that 0: is of type (3; 0: may be a member of (3, a part of (3, among others.2 So the above representation is to the effect that kuruma may denote a single car, several cars, a model of car, the entire set of the cars, and so forth. The most common linguistic means in Japanese to express quantity is a measure phrase (MP). There are several types of MPs. The first type is of the fonn NUMERAL + CLASSIFIER. In Japanese, a numeral by itself nonnally does not serve as an MP but must be followed by a classifier to fonn an MP. For instance, san-nin (three people) is an MP but just san (three) is not. In short, we have the acceptability distribution shown in (3.2), where the genitive case marker no follows an MP to fonn an adnominal modifier to indicate the quantity of the semantic object denoted by the modified noun: (3.2) a. san-nin-no gakusei 3-CL-GEN student three students 1 In this chapter we allow not only features (partial functions) but also other binary relations to appear in the left-hand side of a feature specification. sem""" is the composition of sem and"",,. The composition of two binary relations p and a-are usually written pia-, but I is omitted when either p or a-is a nonalphabetic symbol, and hence there is no fear of confusion about the names of the relations. 2More precisely, """ is defined as follows: """ == (E UCU~)* OI.E{3 means that 01. is a member of set {3. OI.c{3 means that 01. is a part of collection {3. 0I.~{3 means that 01. is a stage of individual {3. """, E, C, and ~ are all first-order predicates, if the domain 1)0 M of interpretation of our first-order description language to encode the grammar (among other constraints) contains both individuals and collections (including masses) in the world.