A Simple Logic of Concepts

Icard, Thomas; Moss, Lawrence S.

doi:10.1007/s10992-022-09685-1

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Duality of patterning certainly contributed to the explosion of vocabulary, and set the stage for subsequent syntactic exploration, relying on endogenous attention (Irurtzun, 2015 ; Martinez-Alvarez et al, 2017 ; Orpella et al, 2020 ). Such exploration may well have taken the form of reliance on variable binding (what some syntacticians would refer to as “internal (use of) merge,” or “abstraction,” Pietroski, 2018 and Icard and Moss, 2022 ), allowing for representation whose format suits what Bolender ( 2007 ) calls “cognition by description,” which marked a further departure from the limitations imposed by knowledge (cognition) “by acquaintance.” In this sense, symbols were the true springboard for our algebraic minds (Marcus, 2003 ). In this sense, words and syntax are linked, and the crucial relation is semantic use (pragmatics in a broad sense).…”

Section: Linguistic/cognitive Phenotypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

Boeckx

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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This paper makes three interconnected claims: (i) the “human condition” cannot be captured by evolutionary narratives that reduce it to a recent ‘cognitive modernity', nor by narratives that eliminates all cognitive differences between us and out closest extinct relatives, (ii) signals from paleogenomics, especially coming from deserts of introgression but also from signatures of positive selection, point to the importance of mutations that impact neurodevelopment, plausibly leading to temperamental differences, which may impact cultural evolutionary trajectories in specific ways, and (iii) these trajectories are expected to affect the language phenotypes, modifying what is being learned and how it is put to use. In particular, I hypothesize that these different trajectories influence the development of symbolic systems, the flexible ways in which symbols combine, and the size and configurations of the communities in which these systems are put to use.

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Section: Linguistic/cognitive Phenotypesmentioning

confidence: 99%

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

Boeckx

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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“…On Pietroski's account, the category labels on the lexical items as nested in syntax serve as their own instructions to SMPL for how to conjoin concepts accessed from individual lexical items together (see my below diagram and my last chapter). The instructions are interpreted as a command to employ two different kinds of constrained forms of concept conjunction in SMPL: "monadic -junction" and "dyadic -junction" (See Pietroski, chapter 7: See Icard and Moss (2023) for an elaboration of and revisions to the logic that SMPL concepts obey).…”

Section: Average Densitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Are There Collective or Partially Collective Interpretations of Universal Quantificational “Each” Sentences?

Leopold

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The English universal quantifier "each" is usually discussed as distributive in the literature. Yet linguists use the term "distributivity" to reference a number of different phenomena. I focus my analysis primarily on two kinds of distributivity with respect to "each": 'predicate distributivity' and 'event participation distributivity'. I explore two questions:(1) Can the meanings of any "each"-sentences be used to think about multiple referenced individuals as participating in the same events "collectively" or "partially collectively"?(2) Are there collective predicate interpretations of any "each"-sentences? I explore whether the answer to the first question might be 'yes' with respect to "partially collective" event interpretations. I claim that the question as to whether there is a "completely collective" event interpretation of "each"sentences warrants more investigation and may be open. I embed my analysis within a cognitive instructions framework, and argue for its usefulness in characterizing distributivity and quantification more generally.iii Table of Contents Introduction: Meanings are cognitive instructions, but what are cognitive instructions? .

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The Logic of Lexical Connectives

Sbardolini¹

2023

J Philos Logic

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Natural language does not express all connectives definable in classical logic as simple lexical items. Coordination in English is expressed by conjunction and, disjunction or, and negated disjunction nor. Other languages pattern similarly. Non-lexicalized connectives are typically expressed compositionally: in English, negated conjunction is typically expressed by combining negation and conjunction (not both). This is surprising: if $$\wedge $$ ∧ and $$\vee $$ ∨ are duals, and the negation of the latter can be expressed lexically (nor), why not the negation of the former? I present a two-tiered model of the semantics of the binary connectives. The first tier captures the expressive power of the lexicon: it is a bilateral state-based semantics that, under a restriction, can express all and only the distinctions that can be expressed by the lexicon of natural language (and, or, nor). This first tier is characterized by rejection as non-assertion and a Neglect Zero assumption. The second tier is obtained by dropping the Neglect Zero assumption and enforcing a stronger notion of rejection, thereby recovering classical logic and thus definitions for all Boolean connectives. On the two-tiered model, we distinguish the limited expressive resources of the lexicon and the greater combinatorial expressive power of the language as a whole. This gives us a logic-based account of compositionality for the Boolean fragment of the language.

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A Simple Logic of Concepts

Cited by 4 publications

References 40 publications

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

What made us “hunter-gatherers of words”

Are There Collective or Partially Collective Interpretations of Universal Quantificational “Each” Sentences?

The Logic of Lexical Connectives

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