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19This chapter sets up the upcoming chapters of the book and introduces four essential aspects of value. The topic of value has personal, social, and cultural dimensions, and value considerations are related to conceptual and metaphysical questions. These four dimensions of value correspond to four crucial academic disciplines that have focused their theoretical and empirical attention on value(s): psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. These four disciplines developed their own valu…Read more
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17Philosophers ask fundamental questions about values and valuing. Some of the philosophical debates about these fundamental questions have repercussions for the value theories of other disciplines. This chapter focuses on crucial conceptual distinctions and philosophical positions about value. For instance, the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic value. The chapter also reviews important metaphysical positions concerning the nature of value, like objectivism and subjectivism. It also touch…Read more
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20Previous chapters considered value theories of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. These disciplines can benefit and learn from one another, and closer interaction between disciplines will lead to better value theory. To facilitate an interdisciplinary understanding of value, this chapter will highlight the overlap between the different disciplines and what they can learn from one another. Each section of this chapter compares two disciplines and highlights overlaps, similaritie…Read more
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7Quantifiers satisfying semantic universals have shorter minimal description lengthCognition 232 (C): 105150. 2023.
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21Uncovering the Structure of Semantic Representations Using a Computational Model of Decision‐MakingCognitive Science 47 (1). 2023.According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague concepts. For a case study, we selected two natural language quantifiers most and more than half. We conducted two online experiments, each with 90 native…Read more
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35Beyond Anthropocentrism in Comparative Cognition: Recentering Animal LinguisticsCognitive Science 46 (12). 2022.
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17Indefinite Pronouns Optimize the Simplicity/Informativeness Trade‐OffCognitive Science 46 (5). 2022.Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 5, May 2022.
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20Philosophy of emotions has become an established sub-discipline of philosophy, and emotions are no longer exclusively seen as disturbances that threaten our rational faculties. Philosophers now take seriously the multi-facetted relation between emotion, knowledge, and reason. Laura Candiotto's edited volume on emotions and their role in epistemic practice brings together texts that look at this relation from different angles and from different traditions. The volume includes texts that zoom in o…Read more
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20Monotone Quantifiers Emerge via Iterated LearningCognitive Science 45 (8). 2021.Natural languages exhibit manysemantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers s…Read more
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17Referential and general calls in primate semanticsLinguistics and Philosophy 44 (6): 1317-1342. 2021.In recent years, the methods of formal semantics and pragmatics have been fruitfully applied to the analysis of primate communication systems. Most analyses therein appeal to a division of labor between semantics and pragmatics which has the following three features: calls are given referential meanings, some calls have a general meaning, and the meanings of calls in context are enriched by competition with more informative calls, along the lines of scalar implicatures. In this paper, we develop…Read more
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12Toward the Emergence of Nontrivial CompositionalityPhilosophy of Science 87 (5): 897-909. 2020.All natural languages exhibit a distinction between content words and function words. Yet surprisingly little has been said about the e...
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427Semantic expressivism for epistemic modalsLinguistics and Philosophy 44 (2): 475-511. 2020.Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance. Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a decl…Read more
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41Iterating semantic automataLinguistics and Philosophy 36 (2): 151-173. 2013.The semantic automata framework, developed originally in the 1980s, provides computational interpretations of generalized quantifiers. While recent experimental results have associated structural features of these automata with neuroanatomical demands in processing sentences with quantifiers, the theoretical framework has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, after presenting some classic results on semantic automata in a modern style, we present the first application of semantic automata …Read more
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109An Explanation of the Veridical Uniformity UniversalJournal of Semantics. forthcoming.A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifi…Read more
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80Learnability and Semantic UniversalsSemantics and Pragmatics. forthcoming.One of the great successes of the application of generalized quantifiers to natural language has been the ability to formulate robust semantic universals. When such a universal is attested, the question arises as to the source of the universal. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that many semantic universals arise because expressions satisfying the universal are easier to learn than those that do not. While the idea that learnability explains universals is not new, explicit accounts of lea…Read more
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17Natural language expressions fall into two categories: content and function words. While function words are essential to compositional semantics, surprisingly little has been said about their emergence. In this paper, I will show that most extant approaches to the emergence of compositional signaling fail to account for the emergence of functional vocabulary. After providing a result that explains why this is so,, I will present a model and simulation results exhibiting conditions under which su…Read more
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29Some Properties of Iterated LanguagesJournal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (2): 191-213. 2016.A special kind of substitution on languages called iteration is presented and studied. These languages arise in the application of semantic automata to iterations of generalized quantifiers. We show that each of the star-free, regular, and deterministic context-free languages are closed under iteration and that it is decidable whether a given regular or determinstic context-free language is an iteration of two such languages. This result can be read as saying that the van Benthem/Keenan ‘Frege B…Read more
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75Informational dynamics of epistemic possibility modalsSynthese 195 (10): 4309-4342. 2018.We investigate, in a logical setting, the expressivist proposal that assertion primarily functions to express and coordinate doxastic states and that ‘might’ fundamentally expresses lack of belief. We provide a formal model of an agent’s doxastic state and novel assertability conditions for an associated formal language. We thereby prove that an arbitrary assertion always succeeds in expressing a well-defined doxastic state, and propose a fully general and intuitive update operation as a model o…Read more
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43Compositional Signaling in a Complex WorldJournal of Logic, Language and Information 25 (3-4): 379-397. 2016.Natural languages are compositional in that the meaning of complex expressions depends on those of the parts and how they are put together. Here, I ask the following question: why are languages compositional? I answer this question by extending Lewis–Skyrms signaling games with a rudimentary form of compositional signaling and exploring simple reinforcement learning therein. As it turns out: in complex worlds, having compositional signaling helps simple agents learn to communicate. I am also abl…Read more
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46Iterating semantic automataLinguistics and Philosophy 36 (2): 151-173. 2013.The semantic automata framework, developed originally in the 1980s, provides computational interpretations of generalized quantifiers. While recent experimental results have associated structural features of these automata with neuroanatomical demands in processing sentences with quantifiers, the theoretical framework has remained largely unexplored. In this paper, after presenting some classic results on semantic automata in a modern style, we present the first application of semantic automata …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Language |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |