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34Williamson’s Abductive Case for the Material Conditional AccountStudia Logica 111 (4): 653-685. 2023.InSuppose and Tell, Williamson makes a new and original attempt to defend the material conditional account of indicative conditionals. His overarching argument is that this account offers the best explanation of the data concerning how people evaluate and use such conditionals. We argue that Williamson overlooks several important alternative explanations, some of which appear to explain the relevant data at least as well as, or even better than, the material conditional account does. Along the w…Read more
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31Coevolution of Lexical Meaning and Pragmatic UseCognitive Science 42 (8): 2757-2789. 2018.According to standard linguistic theory, the meaning of an utterance is the product of conventional semantic meaning and general pragmatic rules on language use. We investigate how such a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics could evolve under general processes of selection and learning. We present a game‐theoretic model of the competition between types of language users, each endowed with certain lexical representations and a particular pragmatic disposition to act on them. Our mo…Read more
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26Definition 1. A Strict partial order is a structure X, P , with P a binary relation on X that is irreflexive (IR) and Transitive (TR): (IR) ∀x : ¬P (x, x). (TR) ∀x, y, v, w : (P (x, y) ∧ P (y, z)) → P (x, z).
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25Review of Joseph Almog, Paolo Leonardi (eds.), The Philosophy of David Kaplan (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (9). 2009.
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24Pragmatic Meaning and Non-monotonic Reasoning: The Case of Exhaustive InterpretationLinguistics and Philosophy 29 (2): 205-250. 2006.In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent develo…Read more
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19Language structure: psychological and social constraintsSynthese 159 (1): 99-130. 2006.In this article we discuss the notion of a linguistic universal, and possible sources of such invariant properties of natural languages. In the first part, we explore the conceptual issues that arise. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the explanatory potential of horizontal evolution. We particularly focus on two case studies, concerning Zipf’s Law and universal properties of color terms, respectively. We show how computer simulations can be employed to study the large scale, emergent…Read more
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18Why Those Biscuits Are Relevant and on the SideboardTheoria 87 (3): 704-712. 2021.In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.
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17Conditionals As Representative InferencesAxiomathes 31 (3): 437-452. 2021.According to Adams, the acceptability of an indicative conditional goes with the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. However, some conditionals seem to be inappropriate, although their corresponding conditional probability is high. These are cases with a missing link between antecedent and consequent. Other conditionals are appropriate even though the conditional probability is low. Finally, we have the so-called biscuit conditionals. In this paper we will generalize …Read more
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15Optimal assertions, and what they implicate. A uniform game theoretic approachTopoi 26 (1): 63-78. 2007.To determine what the speaker in a cooperative dialog meant with his assertion, on top of what he explicitly said, it is crucial that we assume that the assertion he gave was optimal. In determining optimal assertions we assume that dialogs are embedded in decision problems (van Rooij 2003) and use backwards induction for calculating them (Benz 2006). In this paper, we show that in terms of our framework we can account for several types of implicatures in a uniform way, suggesting that there is …Read more
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14Exhaustive Interpretation of Complex SentencesJournal of Logic, Language and Information 13 (4): 491-519. 2004.In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses’ (1984) non-monotonic theory of ‘only knowing’ to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures …Read more
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13Implicit versus explicit comparativesIn Paul Egre & Nathan Klinedinst (eds.), Vagueness and Language Use, Palgrave-macmillan. 2010.
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13Why Those Biscuits Are Relevant and on the SideboardTheoria 87 (3): 704-712. 2021.In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.
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10Strengthening conditional presuppositionsJournal of Semantics 24 (3): 289-304. 2007.In this paper it will be shown how conditional presuppositions can be strengthened to unconditional ones if we assume that the antecedent and consequent of a conditional presupposition are independent of one another. Our notion of independence is very weak, and based on Lewis' notion of orthogonality of questions. It will be argued that our way of strengthening these presuppositions does not give rise to some wrong predictions Geurts argued other proposed strengthening accounts do.
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6Game-Theoretic Pragmatics Under Conflicting and Common InterestsErkenntnis 79 (Suppl 4): 769-820. 2014.This paper combines a survey of existing literature in game-theoretic pragmatics with new models that fill some voids in that literature. We start with an overview of signaling games with a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, and show that the literature on such games can be classified into models with direct, costly, noisy and imprecise signals. We then argue that this same subdivision can be used to classify signaling games with common interests, where we fill some voids in the l…Read more
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3Grounding a Pragmatic Theory of Vagueness on Experimental Data: Semi-orders and Weber’s LawIn Richard Dietz (ed.), Vagueness and Rationality in Language Use and Cognition, Springer Verlag. pp. 153-183. 2019.One of the traditional pragmatic approaches to vagueness suggests that there needs to be a significant gap between individuals or objects that can be described using a vague adjective like tall and those that cannot. In contrast, intuitively, an explicit comparative like taller does not require fulfillment of the gap requirement. Our starting point for this paper is the consideration that people cannot make precise measures under time pressure and their ability to discriminate approximate height…Read more
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1Proceedings of the Thirteenth Amsterdam Colloquium (edited book)ILLC. 2001.Contains papers presented at the Thirteenth Amsterdam Colloquium in formal semantics, pragmatics and logic, which was held in Amsterdam, December 17-19, 2001.
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Nonmonotonicity and Knowability: As Knowable as PossibleIn Ramaswamy Ramanujam, Lawrence Moss & Can Başkent (eds.), Rohit Parikh on Logic, Language and Society, Springer Verlag. 2017.
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |