Colleen Crangle

During his long and continuing scholarly career, Patrick Suppes contributed significantly both to the sciences and to their philosophies. The volume consists of papers by an international group of Suppes colleagues, collaborators, and students in many of the areas of his expertise, building on or adding to his insights. Michael Friedman offers an overview of Suppes accomplishments and of his unique perspective on the relation between science and philosophy. Paul Humphreys, Stephen Hartmann, and Tom Ryckman present essays in the philosophy of physics. Jens-Erik Fenstad, Harvey Friedman, and Jaako Hintikka consider problems in the foundations of mathematics, while the late Duncan Luce, Jean-Claude Falmagne, Brian Skyrms, and Hannes Leitgeb have contributed essays in theory of measurement, decision theory and probability. Foundations of economics and political theory are addressed by Adolfo Garcia de la Sienra, Russell Hardin, and Kenneth Arrow. Psychology, language, and philosophy of language are addressed by Elizabeth Loftus, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Willem Levelt, Dagfinn Follesdal, and Marcos Perreau-Guimares and some of Suppes most recent research in neurobiology is addressed in essays by Colleen Crangle, Acadio de Barros and Claudio Carvalhes. Finally Nancy Cartwright and Alexandre Marcelles consider the alignment (or misalignment) of method and policy. Each of the essays is accompanied by a response from Suppes."

This dissertation asks how words have meaning. It acknowledges that when we inquire into what words mean, we find an irreducible complexity, one which insists on recognizing the uniqueness of each occasion of a word's use. It rejects the idea that words have determinate meanings and the idea that definitions have a role to play in theories of meaning. Support for this stand is found in the theory of definition, in the problems facing current proposals which posit determinate meanings, and in our public conceptions of what words mean, as revealed by their commonly accepted definitions. It advocates, instead, providing an account of how we use words meaningfully--without, however, identifying anything functioning as the meaning of a word even for each person individually. A retreat into total sceptism--where everyone speaks her own ever-changing language--is averted by letting procedure executions characterize utterances. With each occasion of a word's use demanding its own uniquely determined computations for speaker and hearer, a picture emerges of private procedures constantly modulating under pressures of usage. This approach has to recognize, however, that there are principles operating to constrain our use of words; consequently, in the computational account each procedure for a word is understood to meet the constraints provided by the public conception of what that word means. These constraints circumscribe the procedures' operations, but still permit inexhaustible variations at the level of fine detail. An account of how we learn words will be concerned with how newly created procedures comply with these constraints. This dissertation offers an illustration, worked out in detail with supporting computer programs, of procedures for the word 'cadence' being synthesized from already existing procedures for the word 'melody'. The illustration is given in support of the computational account of semantic development, and as a first step towards a theory of word acquisition