The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics
01 Jan 1996-
About: The article was published on 1996-01-01 and is currently open access. It has received 211 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Semantic theory of truth & Logical truth.
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14 May 2004
TL;DR: The similarity between Fixpoint and fix makes it easier to understand the need for the various parts of this construct, and the construction of higher-order types and simple inductive types defined inside a section is helpful to understanding the form of the induction principle.
Abstract: ion makes it possible to build non-recursive functions directly inside Calculus of Constructions terms, without giving a name to them, but for recursive functions the Fixpoint command always gives a name to the defined function. It mixes the two operations: first the description of a recursive function, second the definition of a constant having this function as value. With the fix construct, we can have only the first operation; in this sense, it is similar to the abstraction construct. Here is the syntax for this construct: As with the Fixpoint command, the {struct ai} is not mandatory if p = l. In the particular case where one defines only one recursive function the two occurrences of the identifier f must coincide. This identifier is used to denote the recursive function being defined but it can only be used inside the expression expr. The similarity between Fixpoint and fix makes it easier to understand the need for the various parts of this construct. For instance, the mul t2 function could also have been declared in the following manner: Definition mult2' : nat~nat := fix f (n:nat) : nat .= match n with 0 =} 0 I S p =} S (S (f p)) end. Here we have willingly changed the name given to the recursive function inside the fix construct to underline the fact that f is bound only inside the construct. Thus, this identifier has no relation with the name under which the function will be known. 6.4 Polymorphic Types 175 6.4 Polymorphic Types Among the operations that one can perform on binary trees carrying integer values, many rely only on the tree structure, but are independent of the fact that the values are integer values. For instance, we can compute the size or the height of a tree without looking at the values. It is sensible to define a general type of tree, in which the type of elements is left as a parameter, and use instances of this general type according to the needs of our algorithms. This is similar to the polymorphic data structures available in conventional functional languages, or the generic data structures of Ada. We describe this notion of polymorphism on lists, pairs, etc. 6.4.1 Polymorphic Lists The Coq system provides a theory of polymorphic lists in the package List. Require Import List. Print list. Inductive list (A : Set) : Set := nil : list A / cons : A -+ list A -+ list A For nil: Argument A is implicit For cons: Argument A is implicit For list: Argument scope is [type_scope] For nil: Argument scope is [type_scope] For cons: Argument scopes are [type_scope __ ] The Coq system provides a notation for lists, so that the expression" cons a l" is actually denoted "a: : l." We see here that the inductive type being defined does not occur as a simple identifier, but as a dependent type with one argument. The value of this argument is always A, the parameter of the definition, as given in the first line of the definition. This definition behaves as if we were actually defining a whole family of inductive types, indexed over the sort Set. This illustrates the construction of higher-order types that we saw in Chap. 4. There may be several parameters in an inductive definition. When parameters are provided, they must appear at every use of the type being defined. Everything happens as if the inductive type had been declared in a section, with a context where A is bound as a variable. Thus, the definition above is equivalent to a definition of the following form: Section define_lists. Variable A : Set. Inductive list' : Set := I nil' : list' I cons' : A -+ list' -+ list'. End define_lists. 176 6 Inductive Data Types This analogy between polymorphic inductive types and simple inductive types defined inside a section is helpful to understand the form of the induction principle. Let us first study the type of the induction principle as it would have been constructed inside the section: list'_indO : 'v'P : list' --+Prop, P nil' --+ ('v'(x:A)(l:list'), P 1 --+ P (cons' x 1»--+ 'v'x:list', P x. When the section is closed, the variable A is discharged, the type list' must be abstracted over A, the constructors, too, and the induction principle must take these changes into account: Check list'. list' : Set--+Set Check nil'. nil' : 'v' A:Set, list' A Check cons'. cons' : 'v' A:Set, A --+ list' A --+ list' A Check list'_ind. list' ind: 'v' (A:Set)(P:list' A --+ Prop), P (nil' A) --+{V (a:A)(l:list' A), P l--+ P (cons' A a l)) --+ 'v' l:list' A, P l From a practical point of view, an important characteristic of parametric inductive definitions is that the universal quantification appears before the universal quantification over the property that is the object of the proof by induction. This characteristic will be important in comparison with the inductive principles for inductive definitions of variably dependent types (see Sect. 6.5.2) Recursive functions and pattern matching on polymorphic types can be performed in the same manner as for the inductive types of the previous sections. However, there is an important difference; the parameters must not appear in the left-hand side of pattern matching clauses. For instance, the function to concatenate polymorphic lists is defined by an expression of this form: Fixpoint app (A:Set) (1 m:list A){struct I} : list A := match 1 with I nil :::} m I cons a 11 :::} cons a (app A 11 m) end. In this pattern matching construct, nil appears in the left-hand side of its clause without its Set argument. The same occurs for the cons constructor, 6.4 Polymorphic Types 177 even though cons normally has three arguments; the pattern only has two. The reasoh for removing the parameter arguments from the constructors is that these parameters cannot be bound in the pattern. The type A for the values is already fixed because an expression of type "list A" is being analyzed by the pattern matching construct. In the right-hand side of the second clause, cons also appears with two arguments, but this is because the function is defined with the first argument being implicit (see Sect. 4.2.3.1). Use of implicit arguments for functions manipulating polymorphic types is frequent. For instance, the function app also has its first argument as an implicit argument. For this function, the Coq system also provides an infix notation, where "app h h" is actually denoted "h++h." Exercise 6.34 Build a polymorphic function that takes a list as argument and returns a list containing the first two elements when they exist. Exercise 6.35 Build a function that takes a natural number, n, and a list as arguments and returns the list containing the first n elements of the list when they exist. Exercise 6.36 Build a function that takes a list of integers as argument and returns the sum of these numbers. Exercise 6.37 Build a function that takes a natural number n as argument and builds a list containing n occurrences of the number one. Exercise 6.38 Build a function that takes a number n and returns the list containing the integers from 1 to n, in this order. 6.4.2 The option Type Polymorphic types need not be truly recursive. A frequent example is the option type that is well-adapted to describe a large class of partial functions. This type is also present in conventional functional programming languages. Its inductive definition has the following form: Print option. Inductive option (A:Set) : Set := Some: A-+option A / None: option A For Some: Argument A is implicit For None: Argument A is implicit For option: Argument scope is [type_scope] For Some: Argument scopes are [type_scope _] For None: Argument scope is [type_scope] 178 6 Inductive Data Types When we need to define a function that is not total from a type A to a type B, it is often possible to describe it as a total function from A to "option B," with the convention that the value "None" is the result when the function is not defined and the value is "Some y" when the function would have been defined with value y. For instance, the Coq library contains a pred function of type nat---+nat that maps any natural number to its predecessor (when it exists) and maps zero to itself. A partial function could have been defined that does not have a value for the number zero. The definition would have been as follows: Definition pred_option (n:nat) : option nat := match n with 0 => None I S P => Some pend. To use a value of the option type, a case analysis is necessary, to express explicitly how the computation proceeds when no true value is given. For instance, the function that returns the predecessor's predecessor can be defined as follows: Definition pred2_option (n:nat) : option nat := match pred_option n with I None => None I Some p => pred_option p end. As a second example, we can consider the function that returns the nth element of a list. The Coq library provides a function called nth for this requirement but that function takes an extra argument which is used for the result when the list has less than n elements. An alternative could be to define a function whose result belongs in the option type. This function can be defined using simultaneous pattern matching on the number and the list. Both arguments decrease at each recursive call, so that the principal recursion argument could be either of them. Here is one of the two possible versions: Fixpoint nth_option (A:Set) (n:nat) (l:list A){struct l} : option A := match n, 1 with I 0, cons a tl => Some a I S p, cons a tl => nth_option A p tl I n, nil => None end. Exercise 6.39 Define the other variant "nth_option'." The arguments are given in the same order, but the principal argument is the number n. Prove that both functions always give the same result when applied on the same input. Exercise 6.40 * Prove V(A:Set)(n:nat)(l:list A), nth_option A n 1 = None ---+ length 1 < n. 6.4 Polymorphic Types 179 Exercise 6.41 * Define a function that maps a type A in sort Set, a function f of type A---+booL, and a list L to the first element :z: in L such that "f x" is true. 6.4.3 The Type of Pairs Pairs prov
1,025 citations
Cites methods from "The Semantic Conception of Truth an..."
...The first approach, proposed by Tarski [80], consists in assigning to every variable a denotation, a truth value t (true) or f (false)....
[...]
01 Jul 2006
TL;DR: This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies.
Abstract: This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies. It will be applied to several fields of medicine, biomedicine, and biology, and a number of applications are carried out in collaboration with the Center for Clinical Trials at the University of Leipzig, with the MaxPlanck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and with the ICCAS at the University of Leipzig. The General Formal Ontology (GFO) is a component of the Integrated System of Foundational Ontologies (ISFO), and ISFO is a part of the Integrated Framework for the Development and Application of Ontologies (IFDAO). The predecessor of IFDAO was the GOL project which was launched in 1999 as a collaborative research effort of the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) and the Institute of Informatics (IfI) at the University of Leipzig.
150 citations
Cites background from "The Semantic Conception of Truth an..."
...The most important semantic mappings are interpretations in the sense of logic and model theory [59]....
[...]
Book•
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: For instance, this paper found that people miss apparently obvious visual discontinuities, a phenomenon known as "change blindness" when watching a brief film of a conversation between two actors.
Abstract: Experimental research has shown that people miss apparently obvious visual discontinuities -- a phenomenon known as "change blindness." For example, in one experiment, subjects watching a brief film of a conversation between two actors did not notice that in some shots one actor appeared wearing a large, colorful scarf and in other shots she wore no scarf; in another experiment, subjects did not even notice when one actor was replaced by another between shots. Moreover, when told what they had missed, many subjects were incredulous, and occasionally even insisted that the film they had seen had not included anything unusual ("change blindness blindness"). This kind of conflict between actual and presumed cognitive functioning has been analyzed in other areas of metacognition; the contributors to Thinking and Seeing explore the implications for vision, which have remained largely unexamined. Doing so, they make important connections among diverse areas in cognitive science and provide a starting point for new research on how people think about seeing.Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of the work in this field, the contributors draw on developing theories of the mind to explore the foundations of metacognitive understanding in children and metacognition errors by adults; on traditional metacognition research to analyze potential connections between research on problem solving and vision; on research in folk psychology and concepts to examine "the illusion of explanatory depth" and how systematic our understanding of seeing is; and on an understanding of the relationship between consciousness and cognitive control of ongoing tasks.
131 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors argue that Tarski's work on truth is actually most consonant with a primitivist perspective on truth; hence, his views should not be thought to lend support to either correspondence or deflationary theories.
Abstract: The view that truth is a primitive, indefinable notion was of central importance to the originators of analytic philosophy. Moore and Russell adopted the view after abandoning their idealism (though they soon turned to correspondence accounts), and Frege subscribed to it until the end of his life.1 But save for some attention given to the view by Davidson (1990, 1996), primitivism about truth has laid low for the last century. During that time, by far the dominant force in the theory of truth has been Tarski, and much subsequent discussion has been focused around the question of whether Tarski’s work better motivates a robust, correspondence-style theory of truth,2 or a more deflationary approach.3 I reject this dichotomy, and argue in this paper that Tarski’s work on truth is actually most consonant with a primitivist perspective on truth; hence, his views should not be thought to lend support to either correspondence or deflationary theories. Given that Tarski shows how to offer a definition of truth, the congeniality between his views and primitivism may not be immediately obvious, and my aim is to draw the appropriate connections. I do not argue that Tarski himself subscribed to a primitivist conception of truth, though I shall show how the view is open to him, and is more amenable to his views on truth than are the more familiar theories of truth.
113 citations
01 Jan 2012
TL;DR: In this article, Braun et al. present a survey of the main issues in the history of the philosophy of language and its application to the field of natural language, including the following: 1.1 Extensions, Intensions, Character, and Beyond.
Abstract: Preface Part 1: Core Topics 1.1 Extensions, Intensions, Character, and Beyond David Braun 1.2 Semantics and Pragmatics Christopher Gauker 1.3 Logical Form Kirk Ludwig 1.4 Presupposition Paul Dekker 1.5 Implicature Laurence Horn 1.6 Pragmatic Enrichment and Conversational Implicature Francois Recanati 1.7 Meaning and Communication Kent Bach 1.8 Compositionality Josh Dever 1.9 Focus and Intonation Daniel Buring 1.10 Context-Sensitivity Ernie Lepore and Tom Donaldson 1.11 Relativism John MacFarlane 1.12 Vagueness J. Robert G. Williams 1.13 Empty Names Sarah Sawyer 1.14 Relevance Theory Robyn Carston 1.15 Truth and Reference in Fiction Stavroula Glezakos Part 2: Foundations of Semantics 2.1 Reference Teresa Robertson 2.2 Theories of Truth Matti Eklund 2.3 Propositions Scott Soames 2.4 Concepts Christopher Peacocke 2.5 Analytic Truth Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis 2.6 Possible Worlds Semantics Daniel Nolan 2.7 Dynamic Semantics Seth Yalcin 2.8 Event Semantics Barry Schein 2.9 Skepticism about Meaning Michael McDermott Part 3: Parts of Speech 3.1 Names Barbara Abbott 3.2 Verbs Zoltan Gendler Szabo 3.3 Adjectives Chris Kennedy 3.4 Quantifiers and Determiners Robert May and Aldo Antonelli 3.5 Generics Sarah-Jane Leslie 3.6 Anaphora Jeffrey King 3.7 Descriptions Peter Ludlow 3.8 Plurals Bernhard Nickel 3.9 Adverbs Delia Graff Fara 3.10 Mass Terms Jeff Pelletier 3.11 Indexicals and Demonstratives Allyson Mount 3.12 Indicative Conditionals Anthony Gillies 3.13 Subjunctive Conditionals Kai von Fintel 3.14 Questions Paul Hagstrom Part 4: Methodology 4.1 The Role of Experiment in the Philosophy of Language Steve Stich and Edouard Machery 4.2 The Role of Linguistics in the Philosophy of Language Sarah Moss 4.3 The Role of Psychology in the Philosophy of Language Robert Stainton 4.4 The Role of Mathematical Methods in the Philosophy of Language Laurence S. Moss 4.5 The Role of Artificial Languages in the Philosophy of Language Martin Stokhof 4.6 The Role of Intuitions in the Philosophy of Language Michael Devitt Part 5: Logic for Philosophers of Language 5.1 Model Theory: What it Is and What it Isn't John P. Burgess 5.2 Logical Quantifiers Gila Sher 5.3 The Logic of Time and Tense Anthony Galton 5.4 Modal Logic and its Applications to the Philosophy of Language Kit Fine 5.5 Two-Dimensional Logics and Two-Dimensionalism in Philosophy Steven Kuhn 5.6 Many-valued Logics Nicholas J.J. Smith 5.7 Dynamic Logic in Natural Language Johan van Bentham 5.8 Intuitionism Allen Hazen 5.9 Richard Montague's Approach to the Semantics of Natural Languages Rich Thomason Part 6: Philosophy of Language for the Rest of Philosophy 6.1 Philosophy of Language for Epistemology Ram Neta 6.2 Philosophy of Language for Metaethics Mark Schroeder 6.3 Philosophy of Language for Metaphysics 6.3.1 Case Study 1: The Language of Causation Eric Swanson 6.3.2 Case Study 2: Dispositional Expressions Alexander Bird 6.4 Philosophy of Language for Normative Ethics 6.4.1 Language, Gender, and Sexuality Sally McConnell-Ginet 6.4.2 Language and Race Rae Langton, Sally Haslanger and Luvell Anderson 6.5 Apriority Sinan Dogramaci 6.6 Necessity and Meaning Gillian Russell 6.7 Propositional Attitude Reports David Shier Part 7: Historical Perspectives 7.1 Ancient Philosophy of Language Luca Castagnoli and Valentina Di Lascio 7.2 Medieval Philosophy of Language Gyula Klima 7.3 Modern Philosophy of Language Michael Losonsky 7.4 Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein Michael Potter 7.5 Logical Positivism and Quine Sanford Shieh 7.6 Ordinary Language Philosophy Michael Beaney 7.7 Pragmatics and Context: The Development of Intensional Semantics Jason Stanley 7.8 A Brief History of Generative Grammar Robert Freidin
110 citations
References
More filters
Book•
14 May 2004
TL;DR: The similarity between Fixpoint and fix makes it easier to understand the need for the various parts of this construct, and the construction of higher-order types and simple inductive types defined inside a section is helpful to understanding the form of the induction principle.
Abstract: ion makes it possible to build non-recursive functions directly inside Calculus of Constructions terms, without giving a name to them, but for recursive functions the Fixpoint command always gives a name to the defined function. It mixes the two operations: first the description of a recursive function, second the definition of a constant having this function as value. With the fix construct, we can have only the first operation; in this sense, it is similar to the abstraction construct. Here is the syntax for this construct: As with the Fixpoint command, the {struct ai} is not mandatory if p = l. In the particular case where one defines only one recursive function the two occurrences of the identifier f must coincide. This identifier is used to denote the recursive function being defined but it can only be used inside the expression expr. The similarity between Fixpoint and fix makes it easier to understand the need for the various parts of this construct. For instance, the mul t2 function could also have been declared in the following manner: Definition mult2' : nat~nat := fix f (n:nat) : nat .= match n with 0 =} 0 I S p =} S (S (f p)) end. Here we have willingly changed the name given to the recursive function inside the fix construct to underline the fact that f is bound only inside the construct. Thus, this identifier has no relation with the name under which the function will be known. 6.4 Polymorphic Types 175 6.4 Polymorphic Types Among the operations that one can perform on binary trees carrying integer values, many rely only on the tree structure, but are independent of the fact that the values are integer values. For instance, we can compute the size or the height of a tree without looking at the values. It is sensible to define a general type of tree, in which the type of elements is left as a parameter, and use instances of this general type according to the needs of our algorithms. This is similar to the polymorphic data structures available in conventional functional languages, or the generic data structures of Ada. We describe this notion of polymorphism on lists, pairs, etc. 6.4.1 Polymorphic Lists The Coq system provides a theory of polymorphic lists in the package List. Require Import List. Print list. Inductive list (A : Set) : Set := nil : list A / cons : A -+ list A -+ list A For nil: Argument A is implicit For cons: Argument A is implicit For list: Argument scope is [type_scope] For nil: Argument scope is [type_scope] For cons: Argument scopes are [type_scope __ ] The Coq system provides a notation for lists, so that the expression" cons a l" is actually denoted "a: : l." We see here that the inductive type being defined does not occur as a simple identifier, but as a dependent type with one argument. The value of this argument is always A, the parameter of the definition, as given in the first line of the definition. This definition behaves as if we were actually defining a whole family of inductive types, indexed over the sort Set. This illustrates the construction of higher-order types that we saw in Chap. 4. There may be several parameters in an inductive definition. When parameters are provided, they must appear at every use of the type being defined. Everything happens as if the inductive type had been declared in a section, with a context where A is bound as a variable. Thus, the definition above is equivalent to a definition of the following form: Section define_lists. Variable A : Set. Inductive list' : Set := I nil' : list' I cons' : A -+ list' -+ list'. End define_lists. 176 6 Inductive Data Types This analogy between polymorphic inductive types and simple inductive types defined inside a section is helpful to understand the form of the induction principle. Let us first study the type of the induction principle as it would have been constructed inside the section: list'_indO : 'v'P : list' --+Prop, P nil' --+ ('v'(x:A)(l:list'), P 1 --+ P (cons' x 1»--+ 'v'x:list', P x. When the section is closed, the variable A is discharged, the type list' must be abstracted over A, the constructors, too, and the induction principle must take these changes into account: Check list'. list' : Set--+Set Check nil'. nil' : 'v' A:Set, list' A Check cons'. cons' : 'v' A:Set, A --+ list' A --+ list' A Check list'_ind. list' ind: 'v' (A:Set)(P:list' A --+ Prop), P (nil' A) --+{V (a:A)(l:list' A), P l--+ P (cons' A a l)) --+ 'v' l:list' A, P l From a practical point of view, an important characteristic of parametric inductive definitions is that the universal quantification appears before the universal quantification over the property that is the object of the proof by induction. This characteristic will be important in comparison with the inductive principles for inductive definitions of variably dependent types (see Sect. 6.5.2) Recursive functions and pattern matching on polymorphic types can be performed in the same manner as for the inductive types of the previous sections. However, there is an important difference; the parameters must not appear in the left-hand side of pattern matching clauses. For instance, the function to concatenate polymorphic lists is defined by an expression of this form: Fixpoint app (A:Set) (1 m:list A){struct I} : list A := match 1 with I nil :::} m I cons a 11 :::} cons a (app A 11 m) end. In this pattern matching construct, nil appears in the left-hand side of its clause without its Set argument. The same occurs for the cons constructor, 6.4 Polymorphic Types 177 even though cons normally has three arguments; the pattern only has two. The reasoh for removing the parameter arguments from the constructors is that these parameters cannot be bound in the pattern. The type A for the values is already fixed because an expression of type "list A" is being analyzed by the pattern matching construct. In the right-hand side of the second clause, cons also appears with two arguments, but this is because the function is defined with the first argument being implicit (see Sect. 4.2.3.1). Use of implicit arguments for functions manipulating polymorphic types is frequent. For instance, the function app also has its first argument as an implicit argument. For this function, the Coq system also provides an infix notation, where "app h h" is actually denoted "h++h." Exercise 6.34 Build a polymorphic function that takes a list as argument and returns a list containing the first two elements when they exist. Exercise 6.35 Build a function that takes a natural number, n, and a list as arguments and returns the list containing the first n elements of the list when they exist. Exercise 6.36 Build a function that takes a list of integers as argument and returns the sum of these numbers. Exercise 6.37 Build a function that takes a natural number n as argument and builds a list containing n occurrences of the number one. Exercise 6.38 Build a function that takes a number n and returns the list containing the integers from 1 to n, in this order. 6.4.2 The option Type Polymorphic types need not be truly recursive. A frequent example is the option type that is well-adapted to describe a large class of partial functions. This type is also present in conventional functional programming languages. Its inductive definition has the following form: Print option. Inductive option (A:Set) : Set := Some: A-+option A / None: option A For Some: Argument A is implicit For None: Argument A is implicit For option: Argument scope is [type_scope] For Some: Argument scopes are [type_scope _] For None: Argument scope is [type_scope] 178 6 Inductive Data Types When we need to define a function that is not total from a type A to a type B, it is often possible to describe it as a total function from A to "option B," with the convention that the value "None" is the result when the function is not defined and the value is "Some y" when the function would have been defined with value y. For instance, the Coq library contains a pred function of type nat---+nat that maps any natural number to its predecessor (when it exists) and maps zero to itself. A partial function could have been defined that does not have a value for the number zero. The definition would have been as follows: Definition pred_option (n:nat) : option nat := match n with 0 => None I S P => Some pend. To use a value of the option type, a case analysis is necessary, to express explicitly how the computation proceeds when no true value is given. For instance, the function that returns the predecessor's predecessor can be defined as follows: Definition pred2_option (n:nat) : option nat := match pred_option n with I None => None I Some p => pred_option p end. As a second example, we can consider the function that returns the nth element of a list. The Coq library provides a function called nth for this requirement but that function takes an extra argument which is used for the result when the list has less than n elements. An alternative could be to define a function whose result belongs in the option type. This function can be defined using simultaneous pattern matching on the number and the list. Both arguments decrease at each recursive call, so that the principal recursion argument could be either of them. Here is one of the two possible versions: Fixpoint nth_option (A:Set) (n:nat) (l:list A){struct l} : option A := match n, 1 with I 0, cons a tl => Some a I S p, cons a tl => nth_option A p tl I n, nil => None end. Exercise 6.39 Define the other variant "nth_option'." The arguments are given in the same order, but the principal argument is the number n. Prove that both functions always give the same result when applied on the same input. Exercise 6.40 * Prove V(A:Set)(n:nat)(l:list A), nth_option A n 1 = None ---+ length 1 < n. 6.4 Polymorphic Types 179 Exercise 6.41 * Define a function that maps a type A in sort Set, a function f of type A---+booL, and a list L to the first element :z: in L such that "f x" is true. 6.4.3 The Type of Pairs Pairs prov
1,025 citations
TL;DR: Multi-Entity Bayesian Networks is presented, a first-order language for specifying probabilistic knowledge bases as parameterized fragments of Bayesian networks, and a proof is given that MEBN can represent a probability distribution on interpretations of any finitely axiomatizable first- order theory.
281 citations
01 Jul 2006
TL;DR: This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies.
Abstract: This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies. It will be applied to several fields of medicine, biomedicine, and biology, and a number of applications are carried out in collaboration with the Center for Clinical Trials at the University of Leipzig, with the MaxPlanck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and with the ICCAS at the University of Leipzig. The General Formal Ontology (GFO) is a component of the Integrated System of Foundational Ontologies (ISFO), and ISFO is a part of the Integrated Framework for the Development and Application of Ontologies (IFDAO). The predecessor of IFDAO was the GOL project which was launched in 1999 as a collaborative research effort of the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) and the Institute of Informatics (IfI) at the University of Leipzig.
150 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2004
TL;DR: For instance, this paper found that people miss apparently obvious visual discontinuities, a phenomenon known as "change blindness" when watching a brief film of a conversation between two actors.
Abstract: Experimental research has shown that people miss apparently obvious visual discontinuities -- a phenomenon known as "change blindness." For example, in one experiment, subjects watching a brief film of a conversation between two actors did not notice that in some shots one actor appeared wearing a large, colorful scarf and in other shots she wore no scarf; in another experiment, subjects did not even notice when one actor was replaced by another between shots. Moreover, when told what they had missed, many subjects were incredulous, and occasionally even insisted that the film they had seen had not included anything unusual ("change blindness blindness"). This kind of conflict between actual and presumed cognitive functioning has been analyzed in other areas of metacognition; the contributors to Thinking and Seeing explore the implications for vision, which have remained largely unexamined. Doing so, they make important connections among diverse areas in cognitive science and provide a starting point for new research on how people think about seeing.Demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of the work in this field, the contributors draw on developing theories of the mind to explore the foundations of metacognitive understanding in children and metacognition errors by adults; on traditional metacognition research to analyze potential connections between research on problem solving and vision; on research in folk psychology and concepts to examine "the illusion of explanatory depth" and how systematic our understanding of seeing is; and on an understanding of the relationship between consciousness and cognitive control of ongoing tasks.
131 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors argue that Tarski's work on truth is actually most consonant with a primitivist perspective on truth; hence, his views should not be thought to lend support to either correspondence or deflationary theories.
Abstract: The view that truth is a primitive, indefinable notion was of central importance to the originators of analytic philosophy. Moore and Russell adopted the view after abandoning their idealism (though they soon turned to correspondence accounts), and Frege subscribed to it until the end of his life.1 But save for some attention given to the view by Davidson (1990, 1996), primitivism about truth has laid low for the last century. During that time, by far the dominant force in the theory of truth has been Tarski, and much subsequent discussion has been focused around the question of whether Tarski’s work better motivates a robust, correspondence-style theory of truth,2 or a more deflationary approach.3 I reject this dichotomy, and argue in this paper that Tarski’s work on truth is actually most consonant with a primitivist perspective on truth; hence, his views should not be thought to lend support to either correspondence or deflationary theories. Given that Tarski shows how to offer a definition of truth, the congeniality between his views and primitivism may not be immediately obvious, and my aim is to draw the appropriate connections. I do not argue that Tarski himself subscribed to a primitivist conception of truth, though I shall show how the view is open to him, and is more amenable to his views on truth than are the more familiar theories of truth.
113 citations