No natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, this means that there is a major asymmetry between contrafactives and factives. We previously hypothesised that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we test this hypothesis by using a production-oriented computational experiment that overcomes two limitations of our previous experiments. We find that our results do not support our previous hypothesis.

Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experiment using an (...) artificial neural network. The results of this experiment support our hypothesis. (shrink)

Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. Because factives are universal across natural languages, Holton’s universal is part of a major asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. We previously proposed that this asymmetry arises partly because the meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. Here we extend our work by describing an additional computational experiment that further supports our hypothesis.

Frege begins his discussion of factives in ‘On Sense and Reference’ with an example of a purported contrafactive, that is, a verb that entails, or presupposes, the falsity of the complement sentence. But the verb he cites, ‘wähnen’, is now obsolete, and native speakers are sceptical about whether it really was a contrafactive. Despite the profusion of factive verbs, there are no clear examples of contrafactive propositional attitude verbs in English, French or German. This paper attempts to give an explanation (...) of this, and to use this to shed light on the behaviour of factives more generally. The suggestion is that factive propositional attitude verbs take facts, not propositions, as the referents of their complement sentences; and that as there are no contra-facts, there can be no contra-factives. This claim is also used to help explain Timothy Williamson's observation that there is no stative propositional attitude factive that requires only belief. Various conclusions are drawn within a broadly ‘knowledge first’ approach. (shrink)

La concepción clásica de la empatía sostiene que comprender al otro involucra la habilidad para identificarse con él imaginariamente. Hay varias versiones de esta tesis, pero el elemento común parece ser que, para que la comprensión sea posible, el intérprete debe tener la capacidad de simular los estados mentales del agente o de simular ser él, bajo condiciones contrafácticas. En este artículo, intentaré mostrar, en primer lugar, que esta concepción de la empatía ha estado usualmente comprometida con un modelo intencionalista, (...) transposicional y monádico de lo mental. En segundo lugar, me propongo explorar las posibilidades de reformular el concepto de empatía, eliminando esos elementos que puedan sobrevivir en él. La propuesta de esta contribución es que resulta preferible ver la comprensión como la creación de un espacio compartido, según el cual quien comprende expande creativamente su propia subjetividad, constituida intersubjetivamente, dejando un espacio para albergar al otro, lo cual es también, en un importante sentido, un proceso de transformación. Esta manera de concebir la comprensión pretende explicitar y desarrollar algunas intuiciones que se encuentran implícitas en algunos filósofos contemporáneos, integrándolas con discusiones recientes en filosofía de la mente y psicología experimental. --- “Understanding, imagination, and transformation”. The classical conception of empathy holds that to understand another person involves the ability to identify with him in imagination. There are different versions of this thesis, but the common element seems to be that for understanding to be possible, the interpreter must have the ability to simulate the mental states of the agent, or to simulate being him under contrafactic conditions. I will try to show, in the first place, that this conception of empathy has been usually committed to an intentional, transpositional and monadic model of the mind. In the second place, I will try to explore a way to reformulate the concept of empathy, eliminating these elements that might survive in it. This contribution holds that it is better to see understanding as the creation of a shared space in which the person who understands expands creatively his or her own subjectivity, making space for the other, which is also in an important way a process of transformation. This way of looking at understanding tries to explicit and develop some intuitions that can be found implicit in some contemporary philosophers, integrating them with recent discussions in the philosophy of mind and in experimental psychology. (shrink)