The formalisation of Natural Language arguments in a formal language close to it in syntax has been a central aim of Moss’s Natural Logic. I examine how the Quantified Argument Calculus (Quarc) can handle the inferences Moss has considered. I show that they can be incorporated in existing versions of Quarc or in straightforward extensions of it, all within sound and complete systems. Moreover, Quarc is closer in some respects to Natural Language (...) than are Moss’s systems – for instance, is does not use negative nouns. The process also sheds light on formal properties and presuppositions of some inferences it formalises. Directions for future work are outlined. (shrink)

In this article, we first present the platform and the Dislog language, designed for discourse analysis with a logic and linguistic perspective. The platform has now reached a certain level of maturity which allows the recognition of a large diversity of discourse structures including general-purpose rhetorical structures as well as domain-specific discourse structures. The Dislog language is based on linguistic considerations and includes knowledge access and inference capabilities. Functionalities of the language are presented together with a method (...) for writing discourse analysis rules. Efficiency and portability of the system over domains and languages are investigated to conclude this first part. In a second part, we analyse the different types of arguments found in several document genres, most notably: procedures, didactic texts and requirements. Arguments form a large class of discourse relations. A generic and frequently encountered form emerges from our analysis: ?reasons for conclusion? which constitutes a homogeneous family of arguments from a language, functional and conceptual point of view. This family can be viewed as a kind of proto-argument. We then elaborate its linguistic structure and show how it is implemented in . We then investigate the cooperation between explanation and arguments, in particular in didactic texts where they are particularly rich and elaborated. This article ends with a prospective section that develops current and potential uses of this work and how it can be extended to the recognition of other forms of arguments. (shrink)

In a recent paper Johan van Benthem reviews earlier work done by himself and colleagues on ‘natural logic’. His paper makes a number of challenging comments on the relationships between traditional logic, modern logic and natural logic. I respond to his challenge, by drawing what I think are the most significant lines dividing traditional logic from modern. The leading difference is in the way logic is expected to be used for checking arguments. For traditionals the checking is (...) local, i.e. separately for each inference step. Between inference steps, several kinds of paraphrasing are allowed. Today we formalise globally: we choose a symbolisation that works for the entire argument, and thus we eliminate intuitive steps and changes of viewpoint during the argument. Frege and Peano recast the logical rules so as to make this possible. I comment also on the traditional assumption that logical processing takes place at the top syntactic level, and I question Johan’s view that natural logic is ‘natural’. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a model of pathos, delineate its operationalisation, and demonstrate its utility through an analysis of natural language argumentation. We understand pathos as an interactional persuasive process in which speakers are performing pathos appeals and the audience experiences emotional reactions. We analyse two strategies of such appeals in pre-election debates: pathotic Argument Schemes based on the taxonomy proposed by Walton et al. (Argumentation schemes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008), and emotion-eliciting language based on (...) psychological lexicons of emotive words (Wierzba in Behav Res Methods 54:2146–2161, 2021). In order to match the appeals with possible reactions, we collect real-time social media reactions to the debates and apply sentiment analysis (Alswaidan and Menai in Knowl Inf Syst 62:2937–2987, 2020) method to observe emotion expressed in language. The results point to the importance of pathos analysis in modern discourse: speakers in political debates refer to emotions in most of their arguments, and the audience in social media reacts to those appeals using emotion-expressing language. Our results show that pathos is a common strategy in natural language argumentation which can be analysed with the support of computational methods. (shrink)

With the growing use of the Social Web, an increasing number of applications for exchanging opinions with other people are becoming available online. These applications are widely adopted with the consequence that the number of opinions about the debated issues increases. In order to cut in on a debate, the participants need first to evaluate the opinions of the other users to detect whether they are in favour or against the debated issue. Bipolar argumentation proposes algorithms and semantics to evaluate (...) the set of accepted arguments, given the support and the attack relations among them. Two main problems arise. First, an automated framework to detect the relations among the arguments represented by the natural language (NL) formulation of the users’ opinions is needed. Our paper addresses this open issue by proposing and evaluating the use of NL techniques to identify the arguments and their relations. In particular, we adopt the textual entailment (TE) approach, a generic framework for applied semantics, where linguistic objects are mapped by means of semantic inferences at a textual level. TE is then coupled together with an abstract bipolar argumentation system which allows to identify the arguments that are accepted in the considered online debate. Second, we address the problem of studying and comparing the different proposals put forward for modelling the support relation. The emerging scenario shows that there is not a unique interpretation of the support relation. In particular, different combinations of additional attacks among the arguments involved in a support relation are proposed. We provide an NL account of the notion of support based on online debates, by discussing and evaluating the support relation among arguments with respect to the more specific notion of TE in the NL processing field. Finally, we carry out a comparative evaluation of four proposals of additional attacks on a sample of NL arguments extracted from Debatepedia. The originality of the proposed framework lies in the following point: NL debates are analysed and the relations among the arguments are automatically extracted. (shrink)

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour (...) and knowledge intensive to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language. (shrink)

In many domains of public discourse such as arguments about public policy, there is an abundance of knowledge to store, query, and reason with. To use this knowledge, we must address two key general problems: first, the problem of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck between forms in which the knowledge is usually expressed, e.g., natural language, and forms which can be automatically processed; second, reasoning with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of the knowledge. Given such complexities, it is labour (...) and knowledge intensive to conduct policy consultations, where participants contribute statements to the policy discourse. Yet, from such a consultation, we want to derive policy positions, where each position is a set of consistent statements, but where positions may be mutually inconsistent. To address these problems and support policy-making consultations, we consider recent automated techniques in natural language processing, instantiating arguments, and reasoning with the arguments in argumentation frameworks. We discuss application and “bridge” issues between these techniques, outlining a pipeline of technologies whereby: expressions in a controlled natural language are parsed and translated into a logic (a literals and rules knowledge base), from which we generate instantiated arguments and their relationships using a logic-based formalism (an argument knowledge base), which is then input to an implemented argumentation framework that calculates extensions of arguments (an argument extensions knowledge base), and finally, we extract consistent sets of expressions (policy positions). The paper reports progress towards reasoning with web-based, distributed, collaborative, incomplete, and inconsistent knowledge bases expressed in natural language. (shrink)

The precedent studies on the validity of Modus ponens and Modus tollens have been carried out with most regard to a major type of conditionals in which the conditional clause is a sufficient condition for the main clause. But we sometimes, in natural language arguments, find other types of conditionals in which the conditional clause is a necessary or necessary and sufficient condition for the main clause. In this paper I reappraise, on the basis of new definitions (...) of Modus ponens and Modus tollens, their validity/invalidity in natural language arguments in consideration of all types of conditionals. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a decision procedure for evaluating arguments expressed in natural language. I think that other instructors of informal logic and critical thinking might find this decision procedure to be a useful addition to their teaching resources.

Hauser defends the proposition that our languages of thought are public languages. One group of arguments points to the coincidence of clearly productive (novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another group relies on phenomenological experience. A third group cites practical and methodological considerations: Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle" (other things being equal, look under the lamp) that motivate looking for instantiations of outer languages in thought first.

The concept of argumentation in AI is based almost exclusively on the use of formal, abstract representations. Despite their appealing computational properties, these abstractions become increasingly divorced from their real world counterparts, and, crucially, lose the ability to express the rich gamut of natural argument forms required for creating effective text. In this paper, the demands that socially situated argumentation places on knowledge representation are explored, and the various problems with existing formalisations are discussed. Insights from argumentation theory and (...) social psychology are then adduced as key contributions to a notion of social context which is both computationally tractable and suitably expressive for handling the complexities of argumentation found in natural language. (shrink)

This article contains the results of a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of natural language understanding (NLU), as a methodological problem. The combination of structural-ontological and informational-psychological approaches provided an opportunity to describe the subject matter field of NLU, as a composite function of the mind, which systemically combines the verbal and discursive structural layers. In particular, the idea of NLU is presented, on the one hand, as the relation between the discourse of a specific speech message and (...) the meta-discourse of a language, in turn, activated by the need-motivational factors. On the other hand, it is conceptualized as a process with a specific structure of information metabolism, the study of which implies the necessity to differentiate the affective (emotional) and need-motivational influences on the NLU, as well as to take into account their interaction. At the same time, the hypothesis about the influence of needs on NLU under the scenario similar to the pattern of Yerkes-Dodson is argued. And the theoretical conclusion that emotions fulfill the function of the operator of the structural features of the information metabolism of NLU is substantiated. Thus, depending on the modality of emotions in the process of NLU, it was proposed to distinguish two scenarios for the implementation of information metabolism - reduction and synthetic. The argument in favor of the conclusion about the productive and constitutive role of emotions in the process of NLU is also given. (shrink)

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any (...) intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process. (shrink)

Abbott replies to each of Hauser's arguments. Problem solving by chimpanzees and evidence of recursion in the thought of a feral human being suggest that natural language is not necessary for productive thought. Communication would be trivial if the inner language were the outer language, but it is not. The decryption analogy Hauser uses is flawed, and it is not clear which way Occam's razor cuts.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity. On his view, what it is for one thing to have the same property as another is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody. Wittgenstein’s anti-platonism plays an important role in the private language sections and in his discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds. In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s views stands the contemporary doctrine of (...) natural properties, which holds that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that is completely independent of our concepts or practices. Some authors have appealed to the natural properties view to offer an explicitly anti-Wittgensteinian account of sensation concepts. The paper discusses these competing views of properties and sensation concepts. It is argued that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize that our actual classificatory practices also play a crucial role in determining which properties our concepts pick out. On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist position, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to recognize similarity or sameness of property. The correct view, it is concluded, must occupy a middle position between an extreme anti-realism about properties and an extreme version of the natural properties view. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s own view does just that. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there (...) will be interesting further questions to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

This chapter outlines a new argument for the view that language has a cognitive role. I suggest that humans exhibit two distinct kinds of belief state, one passively formed, the other actively formed. I argue that actively formed beliefs (_virtual beliefs_, as I call them) can be identified with _premising policies_, and that forming them typically involves certain linguistic operations. I conclude that natural language has at least a limited cognitive role in the formation and manipulation of (...) virtual beliefs. (shrink)

The question whether natural language can be captured in a formal system has been argued at length, and both a positive and a negative answer has been defended. The paper investigates the main lines of argument for both, and argues that the stalemate that appears to have been reached is an indication that the question itself rests on a wrong conception of the relation between natural languages and formal languages, and hence of the methodological status of formal (...) modelling of natural language. (shrink)

Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics (...) has led to some genuinely new approaches to a variety of phenomena in natural language semantics. In the way of illustration, this article includes relatively detailed overviews of a few selected areas where situation semantics has been successful: implicit quantifier domain restrictions, donkey pronouns, and exhaustive interpretations. It moreover addresses the question of how Davidsonian event semantics can be embedded in a semantics based on situations. Other areas where a situation semantics perspective has led to progress include attitude ascriptions, questions, tense, aspect, nominalizations, implicit arguments, point of view, counterfactual conditionals, and discourse relations. (shrink)

Inspired by the grammar of natural language, the paper presents a variant of first-order logic, in which quantifiers are not sentential operators, but are used as subnectors . A quantified term formed by a subnector is an argument of a predicate. The logic is defined by means of a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof-system, according to the proof-theoretic semantics program. The harmony of the I/E-rules is shown. The paper then presents a translation, called the Frege translation, from the defined (...) logic to standard first-order logic, and shows that the proof-theoretic meanings of both logics coincide. The paper criticizes Frege’s original regimentation of quantified sentences of natural language, and argues for advantages of the proposed variant. (shrink)

For Wittgenstein's supposed private language is one which it is logically impossible to teach another and similarly impossible for anyone else to understand. The global purpose of Wittgenstein's discussion of private knowledge of experience, private ownership of experience and private ostensive definition (which might be called the private language argument in a narrow sense) is not to establish that language is essentially social. Of course, human languages are shared, and are learned in social contexts from parents, elders (...) and siblings. That is an anthropological and psychological truth. What is distinctive about early modern philosophy was its unquestioned adoption of the concepts of ideas and impressions as the primary tools for explanation of the sources, nature and limits of knowledge and understanding, and as the foundations of language. What Wittgenstein aimed to show is not that sensation‐language, like the rest of language, is essentially shared, but that it is essentially shareable. (shrink)

We began by distinguishing Tarskian and Fitchean notions of universality in such a way that the claim that no language is universal in the sense of Tarski is compatible with accepting Fitchean universality. Then we examined a proposal involving two truth concepts — one that fit the Fitchean notion and another that followed Tarski's views on truth — finding little advantage in such generosity. We attempted a reformulation of Herzberger's argument for the negative view — the view that no (...) language is universal in Tarski's sense — but found it unsuccessful when the language of the argument's formulation was brought under consideration. A more persuasive argument for EI was found, free of the defect of the previous one. EI was then shown to have unsettling consequences, prompting us to inquire about avoiding it. We found this possible, noting that EI is itself a solution to the semantic paradoxes, to which there are alternatives that avoid the unwelcome aspects of EI. However, whether any such alternative is ultimately preferable to EI remains to be seen. (shrink)

The paper presents a proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) for a fragment of natural language, providing an alternative to the traditional model-theoretic (Montagovian) semantics (MTS), whereby meanings are truth-condition (in arbitrary models). Instead, meanings are taken as derivability-conditions in a dedicated natural-deduction (ND) proof-system. This semantics is effective (algorithmically decidable), adhering to the meaning as use paradigm, not suffering from several of the criticisms formulated by philosophers of language against MTS as a theory of meaning. In particular, Dummett’s (...) manifestation argument does not obtain, and assertions are always warranted, having grounds of assertion. The proof system is shown to satisfy Dummett’s harmony property, justifying the ND rules as meaning conferring. The semantics is suitable for incorporation into computational linguistics grammars, formulated in type-logical grammar. (shrink)

The paper sets out to offer an alternative to the function/argument approach to the most essential aspects of natural language meanings. That is, we question the assumption that semantic completeness (of, e.g., propositions) or incompleteness (of, e.g., predicates) exactly replicate the corresponding grammatical concepts (of, e.g., sentences and verbs, respectively). We argue that even if one gives up this assumption, it is still possible to keep the compositionality of the semantic interpretation of simple predicate/argument structures. In our opinion, (...) compositionality presupposes that we are able to compare arbitrary meanings in term of information content. This is why our proposal relies on an ‘intrinsically’ type free algebraic semantic theory. The basic entities in our models are neither individuals, nor eventualities, nor their properties, but ‘pieces of evidence’ for believing in the ‘truth’ or ‘existence’ or ‘identity’ of any kind of phenomenon. Our formal language contains a single binary non-associative constructor used for creating structured complex terms representing arbitrary phenomena. We give a finite Hilbert-style axiomatisation and a decision algorithm for the entailment problem of the suggested system. (shrink)

Owen Griffiths has recently argued that Etchemendy’s account of logical consequence faces a dilemma. Etchemendy claims that we can be sure that his account does not overgenerate, but that we should expect it to undergenerate. Griffiths argues that if we define the relationship between formal and natural language as being dependent on logical consequence, then Etchemendy’s claims are not true; and if we define the relationship as being independent of logical consequence, then we cannot assess the truth of (...) the claims without further information. I argue that Griffiths misconstrues Etchemendy’s theory and overstates the first horn of the dilemma: Etchemendy does see the relationship as being dependent on logical consequence, but that does not mean that his claims are not true. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of (...) natural language meaning. From this perspective, disparity between the scientific model and its real-world target is to be expected. I elaborate on what such an approach to semantics would look like. (shrink)

Semantic noise, the effect ensuing from the denotative and thus functional variability exhibited by different terms in different contexts, is a common concern in natural language processing (NLP). While unarguably problematic in specific applications (e.g., certain translation tasks), the main argument of this paper is that failing to observe this linguistic matter of fact as a generative effect rather than as an obstacle, leads to actual obstacles in instances where language model outputs are presented as neutral. Given (...) that a common and long-standing challenge in NLP is the interpretation of ambiguous – i.e., semantically noisy – cases, this article focuses on an exemplar ambiguity-resolution task in NLP: the problem of anaphora in Winograd schemas. The main question considered is: to what extent is the standard approach to disambiguation in NLP subject to a stagnant “image of language”? And, can a transdisciplinary, dynamic approach combining linguistics and philosophy elucidate new perspectives on these possible conceptual shortcomings? In order to answer these questions we explore the term and concept of noise, particularly in its presentation as semantic noise. Owing to its definitional plurality, and sometimes even desirable unspecificity, the term noise is thus used as proof of concept for semantic generativity being an inherent characteristic in linguistic representation, and its concept is used to interrogate assumptions admitted in the resolution of Winograd schemas. The argument is speculative and theoretical in method, and the result is an analysis which provides an account of the fundamentally dialogical and necessarily open-ended effects of semantic noise in natural language. (shrink)

My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplan’s (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality but, unfortunately, do not provide (...) a proof, or an argument in favor of their position. The aim of this paper is to do precisely that. Additionally, I provide a new proof that compositionality for propositional content (intension) is a proper generalization of compositionality for character (hyper-intensions). (shrink)

The origins of these essays -- Introduction -- Presupposition -- A projection problem for speaker presupposition -- Language and linguistic competence -- Linguistics and psychology -- Semantics and psychology -- Semantics and semantic competence -- The necessity argument -- Truth, meaning, and understanding -- Truth and meaning in perspective -- Semantics and pragmatics -- Naming and asserting -- The gap between meaning and assertion : why what we literally say often differs from what our words literally mean -- Drawing (...) the line between meaning and implicaturem and relating both to assertion -- Descriptions -- Incomplete definite descriptions -- Donnellan's referential/attributive distinction -- Why incomplete descriptions don't refute Russell's theory of descriptions -- Meaning and use : lessons for legal interpretation -- Interpreting legal texts : what is and what is not special about the law. (shrink)

In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to 'inner' experience. In this (...) light, Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

: This article deals with the relationship between language and thought, focusing on the question of whether language can be a vehicle of thought, as, for example, Peter Carruthers has claimed. We develop and examine a powerful argument—the “argument from explicitness”—against this cognitive role of language. The premises of the argument are just two: the vehicle of thought has to be explicit, and natural languages are not explicit. We explain what these simple premises mean and why (...) we should believe they are true. Finally, we argue that even though the argument from explicitness shows that natural language cannot be a vehicle of thought, there is a cognitive function for language. (shrink)

In a recent article, “Logical Consequence and Natural Language”, Michael Glanzberg claims that there is no relation of logical consequence in natural language (2015). The present paper counters that claim. I shall discuss Glanzberg’s arguments and show why they don’t hold. I further show how Glanzberg’s claims may be used to rather support the existence of logical consequence in natural language.

The approaches in question here are exhibited in examinations of specific problems, rather than surveyed or generally summarized. Most of the volume should interest philosophers. Recent linguistic theory has been torn between the generative semanticists, who fuse syntax and semantics in maintaining that "the rules of grammar are identical to the rules relating surface forms to their corresponding logical forms", and the interpretive semanticists, who find syntactic deep structure a well-defined notion and who believe that the semantic interpretation of sentences (...) derives from inputs from several levels of linguistic structure. J. Bresnan, in "Sentence Stress and Syntactic Transformations," gives a clear and elegant version of her defense of one aspect of the interpretivist position. She argues that aspects of the stress pattern of sentences can be easily and compactly explained only if lexical items are inserted at the level of syntactic deep structure before the application of syntactical transformations. W. C. Watt’s "Late Lexicalizations" argues the generativist position that the lexical peculiarities of natural languages tend to be introduced at various stages in the application of syntactical transformations. Bresnan’s paper is particularly helpful to philosophers who want to make sense of linguist’s current arguments: her evidential appeals, reasoning, and terminology can be grasped by someone with little background in technical linguistics. The volume also includes three papers, two by Hamburger and Wexler and one by Peters and Ritchie, on the abstract theory of grammar, which has come some distance since Chomsky’s contributions. These papers follow out various aspects of the realization that, when abstractly considered, transformational, and even somewhat less powerful rules, are too powerful to allow nonarbitrary solutions to the problem of identifying the grammars of particular languages. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s ideas are a common ground for developers of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and linguists working on Language Acquisition and Mastery (LAM) models (Mills 1993; Lowney, Levy, Meroney and Gayler 2020; Skelac and Jandrić 2020). In recent years, we have witnessed a fast development of NLP systems capable of performing tasks as never before. NLP and LAM have been implemented based on deep learning neural networks, which learn concepts representation from rough data, but are nonetheless very (...) effective in tasks such as question answering, textual entailment, and translation (Devlin et al. 2019; Kitaev, Cao and Klein 2019; Wang et al. 2019). In this paper, I will debate some Wittgensteinian concepts that impact the architectures of many NLP deep-learning systems. I will focus, in particular, on the attempt to build a specific kind of architecture to model a private language. The discussion, I think, helps extract philosophical assumptions leading the research and development of AI systems capable of language modelling. In this paper, I will address some of the main features of NLP systems2 used for word embedding and one proposal to manipulate through a neural network a form of private language (Lawney et al. 2020). In §2, I will reconstruct the complex path of the private language argument (PLA). In §3, I will discuss connectivist language models and introduce notions about NPL systems' architecture. An overview of this kind of model is helpful to introduce the work of Lowney, Levy, Meroney and Gayler (2020). They submit that their model can respond to the issues raised by Wittgenstein in the notorious Private Language Argument (PLA). This argument unexpectedly turned out to be relevant not only for the philosophy of language but also for NLP and LAM modellers. I will describe the language game concept in NLP, how it is embedded, and its role in inductive systems development. This central concept in Wittgenstein’s work is relevant to describe the role of context in understanding the meanings of words. In §4, I present the Wittgensteinian main concepts in play in the connectivist paradigm. I argue that the connectionist theoretical framework can better catch the dependency of word meaning on context. There seems to be a correlation between Wittgenstein's invitation to look, an invitation to dismiss the aim of theorizing about languages, and the absence of theory-ladenness in deep learning technologies involved in NLP. In §5, I criticize Lowney and colleagues’ claim, whose model does not successfully capture Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box case. Moreover, I argue that even if we can distinguish a strong and a weak definition of a private language, Wittgenstein’s argument also holds for deep-learning models, and his worries are still a good guide for NLP developers. (shrink)

This article deals with the relationship between language and thought, focusing on the question of whether language can be a vehicle of thought, as, for example, Peter Carruthers has claimed. We develop and examine a powerful argument—the "argument from explicitness"—against this cognitive role of language. The premises of the argument are just two: (1) the vehicle of thought has to be explicit, and (2) natural languages are not explicit. We explain what these simple premises mean and (...) why we should believe they are true. Finally, we argue that even though the argument from explicitness shows that natural language cannot be a vehicle of thought, there is a cognitive function for language. (shrink)

Abstract The explosion of interest in large language models (LLMs) has been accompanied by concerns over the extent to which generated outputs can be trusted, owing to the prevalence of bias, hallucinations, and so forth. Accordingly, there is a growing interest in the use of ontologies and knowledge graphs to make LLMs more trustworthy. This rests on the long history of ontologies and knowledge graphs in constructing human-comprehensible justification for model outputs as well as traceability concerning the impact of (...) evidence on other evidence. Understanding the nature of arguments and argumentation is critical to each, especially when LLM output conflicts with what is expected by users. The central contribution of this article is to extend the Arguments Ontology (ARGO) - an ontology specific to the domain of argumentation and evidence broadly construed - into the space of LLM fact-checking in the interest of promoting justification and traceability research through the use of ARGO-based ‘blueprints’. (shrink)

I first criticize strawson's account of the transcendental deduction, And then argue that wittgenstein's considerations (in his later work) of the rule-Governed nature of judgment can be used to reconstruct a valid argument for a certain kind of objectivity, Which excludes solipsims. I suggest how kant's talk of synthesis can be reinterpreted in the light of this, As indeed can the doctrine of empirical realism and transcendental idealism.

I advocate a theory of syntactic semantics as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax – a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) – and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of understanding one domain (by modeling (...) it) in terms of another, can be viewed recursively: The base case of semantic understanding –understanding a domain in terms of itself – is syntactic understanding. (3) An internal (or narrow ), first-person point of view makes an external (or wide ), third-person point of view otiose for purposes of understanding cognition. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they (...) argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

Argumentation mining is an application of natural language processing (NLP) that emerged a few years ago and has recently enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by a series of international workshops and by a rising number of publications at the major conferences and journals of the field. Its goals are to identify argumentation in text or dialogue; to construct representations of the constellation of claims, supporting and attacking moves (in different levels of detail); and to characterize the patterns of (...) reasoning that appear to license the argumentation. Furthermore, recent work also addresses the difficult tasks of evaluating the persuasiveness and quality of arguments. Some of the linguistic genres that are being studied include legal text, student essays, political discourse and debate, newspaper editorials, scientific writing, and others. The book starts with a discussion of the linguistic perspective, characteristics of argumentative language, and their relationship to certain other notions such as subjectivity. Besides the connection to linguistics, argumentation has for a long time been a topic in Artificial Intelligence, where the focus is on devising adequate representations and reasoning formalisms that capture the properties of argumentative exchange. It is generally very difficult to connect the two realms of reasoning and text analysis, but we are convinced that it should be attempted in the long term, and therefore we also touch upon some fundamentals of reasoning approaches. Then the book turns to its focus, the computational side of mining argumentation in text. We first introduce a number of annotated corpora that have been used in the research. From the NLP perspective, argumentation mining shares subtasks with research fields such as subjectivity and sentiment analysis, semantic relation extraction, and discourse parsing. Therefore, many technical approaches are being borrowed from those (and other) fields. We break argumentation mining into a series of subtasks, starting with the preparatory steps of classifying text as argumentative (or not) and segmenting it into elementary units. Then, central steps are the automatic identification of claims, and finding statements that support or oppose the claim. For certain applications, it is also of interest to compute a full structure of an argumentative constellation of statements. Next, we discuss a few steps that try to 'dig deeper': to infer the underlying reasoning pattern for a textual argument, to reconstruct unstated premises (so-called 'enthymemes'), and to evaluate the quality of the argumentation. We also take a brief look at 'the other side' of mining, i.e., the generation or synthesis of argumentative text. The book finishes with a summary of the argumentation mining tasks, a sketch of potential applications, and a—necessarily subjective—outlook for the field. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Argumentative Language / Modeling Arguments / Corpus Annotation / Finding Claims / Finding Supporting and Objecting Statements / Deriving the Structure of Argumentation / Assessing Argumentation / Generating Argumentative Text / Summary and Perspectives / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies / Index. (shrink)

The present collection of essays honours John Woods on the occasion of his eightieth birthday from contributors who wish to pay homage to this remarkable researcher whom they see not only as a scholar of prodigious energy and insight, but as a friend, colleague, collaborator, or former teacher. All of the essays touch upon topics Woods has taken a direct or indirect interest in, ranging from technical problems of mathematical logic and applications of formal methods through philosophical logic, philosophy of (...) language, epistemology and history of ancient and modern logic. The sections themselves of the book cover relevance, paradoxes, inconsistency, fallacies, abduction, fictions, logic naturalized, law, argumentation and narratives, and many other topics: and represent the main research areas which have profited from Woods' reflections. (shrink)

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time much of Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker's seminal research explores the workings of language and its connections to cognition, perception, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. This eclectic collection spans Pinker's thirty-year career, exploring his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. It includes thirteen of Pinker's classic articles, ranging over topics such as (...) class='Hi'>language development in children, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the computational architecture of the mind, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature-nurture debate, and the logic of innuendo and euphemism. Each outlines a major theory or takes up an argument with another prominent scholar, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this collection reflects essential contributions to cognitive science by one of our leading thinkers and public intellectuals. (shrink)

Previous research into the formalisation of statute law identified a number of uses of language which posed problems for formalisation. A previous paper argued that these uses establish the requirement that a formalisation be isomorphic, but noted that this has odd consequences. This paper expands on what these consequences are and argues that they undermine the very idea of formalisation. Therefore, the whole argument constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of formalising statute law. (...) The paper provides reasons why this activity is impossible and places the conclusion in the context of the development of modem logic, in which context it appears uncontroversial. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they (...) argue; how cognitive processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

While agent-based modelling languages naturally implement concurrency, the currently available languages for argumentation do not allow to explicitly model this type of interaction. In this paper we introduce a concurrent language for handling agents arguing and communicating using a shared argumentation space. We also show how to perform high-level operations like persuasion and negotiation through basic belief revision constructs, and present a working implementation of the language and the associated web interface.

In natural language understanding, a crucial goal is correctly interpreting open-textured phrases. In practice, disagreements over the meanings of open-textured phrases are often resolved through the generation and evaluation of interpretive arguments, arguments designed to support or attack a specific interpretation of an expression within a document. In this paper, we discuss some of our work towards the goal of automatically generating and evaluating interpretive arguments. We have curated a set of rules from the code (...) of ethics of various professional organizations and a set of associated scenarios that are ambiguous with respect to some open-textured phrase within the rule. We collected and evaluated arguments from both human annotators and state-of-the-art generative language models in order to determine the relative quality and persuasiveness of both sets of arguments. Finally, we performed a Turing test-inspired study in order to assess whether human annotators can tell the difference between human arguments and machine-generated arguments. The results show that machine-generated arguments, when prompted a certain way, can be consistently rated as more convincing than human-generated arguments, and to the untrained eye, the machine-generated arguments can convincingly sound human-like. (shrink)

A growing body of recent work in informal logic investigates the process of argumentation. Among other things, this work focuses on the ways in which individuals attempt to understand written or verbalised arguments in light of the fact that these are often presented in forms that are incomplete and unmarked. One of its aims is to develop general procedures for natural language argument recognition and reconstruction. Our aim here is to draw on this growing body of knowledge (...) in informal logic in order to take preliminary steps towards developing an architecture for computer systems that are able to recognise and reconstruct natural language arguments. This architecture aims to structure research of an applied and computational nature that strives to implement linguistic systems of various sorts, and to analyse problems in a way that both yields manageable and relatively independent components and also highlights how implementations can interact with existing resources from natural language processing. (shrink)

Since 1976 Hilary Putnam has on many occasions proposed an argument, founded on some model-theoretic results, to the effect that any philosophical programme whose purpose is to naturalize semantics would fail to account for an important feature of every natural language, the determinacy of reference. Here, after having presented the argument, I will suggest that it does not work, because it simply assumes what it should prove, that is that we cannot extend the metatheory: Putnam appears to think (...) that all we may determinately say about the relations between words and entities in the world is what the model theory tells us, but he has never offered justifications for that. At the end of the article, I will discuss the apparently reliable intuition that seems to me to be at the root of the argument, that is that, given a formal theory, there is an infinite number of ways of connecting it to, or of projecting it onto, the world. I will suggest that we should resist this intuition, because it rests on a very doubtful notion of world, which assumes that for any class of objects there is a corresponding property. (shrink)

_Hailed by the _New York Times_ as a book that “examines the role that argument has played throughout history and how it has shaped human existence”__ “An invigorating reflection on the nature and value of disagreement.... Sharp and taut.... A lesson in a well-constructed argument itself.”—_Publishers Weekly_, starred review__ “Perhaps more than any other commentary, _Why Argument Matters_ illuminates the root causes of our partisan, venomous, irrational times—and yet somehow rescues from the morass the true nature of argument, its power (...) and beauty.”—Michael Wolff, author of ___Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House__ From Eve’s crafty exchange with the serpent, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring, subtle ultimatums, to the throes of Twitter—argument’s drainpipe—the human desire to prevail with words has been not just a moral but an existential compulsion. In this dazzling reformulation of argument, renowned critic Lee Siegel portrays the true art of argument as much deeper and far more embracing than mere quarrel, dispute, or debate. It is the supreme expression of humanity’s longing for a better life, born of empathy and of care for the world and those who inhabit it. With wit, passion, and striking insights, Siegel plumbs the emotional and psychological sources of clashing words, weaving through his exploration the untold story of the role argument has played in societies throughout history. Each life, he maintains, is an argument for that particular way of living; every individual style of argument is also a case that is being made for that person’s right to argue. Argument is at the heart of the human experience, and language, at its most liberated and expressive, inexorably bends toward argument. (shrink)