Abstract:I argue that Frege Problems in thought are best modeled using graph-theoretic machinery; and that these problems can arise even when subjects associate all the same qualitative properties to the object they’re thinking of twice. I compare the proposed treatment to similar ideas by Heck, Ninan, Recanati, Kamp and Asher, Fodor, and others.
“…Charlow (2014) provides a particularly insightful study of the interplay of monads and continuations as applied to natural language semantics. There is also a potential relationship between our work and recent work by Jim Pryor on mental graphs (Pryor 2015), even though the latter does not directly concern monads. It would be interesting to explore how our monad-based approach and its results relate to the work of Barker & Shan, Charlow, and Pryor, but this must await future work.…”
This is an early access version of Asudeh, Ash and Gianluca Giorgolo. 2016. Perspectives. Semantics and Pragmatics 9(21). http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.9.21. This version will be replaced with the final typeset version in due course. NB: page numbers will change, so cite with caution. Héctor-Neri CastañedaAbstract We present a new solution to long-standing puzzles about substitution of co-referential terms. Our solution is based on a notion of perspective, where the speaker's perspective can be differentiated from the perspective of the agent whose thoughts, beliefs, etc., the speaker is reporting. Our formalization is a conservative extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus utilizing monads, a construction in category theory that provides a way to map a set of objects and functions into a more complex space of objects and functions. We offer a lexicalist analysis of perspective whereby certain lexical items introduce potential shifts of perspective while others do not. We show that this provides the means to give a general semantics of perspective with respect to substitutability, allowing us to capture not just the standard embedded cases of non-substitutability of distinct but co-referential terms, but also cases involving no embedding and no distinct terms. We also show that our semantics generalizes to cases outside the nominal domain, such as synonymous natural kind terms and other predicates.
“…Charlow (2014) provides a particularly insightful study of the interplay of monads and continuations as applied to natural language semantics. There is also a potential relationship between our work and recent work by Jim Pryor on mental graphs (Pryor 2015), even though the latter does not directly concern monads. It would be interesting to explore how our monad-based approach and its results relate to the work of Barker & Shan, Charlow, and Pryor, but this must await future work.…”
This is an early access version of Asudeh, Ash and Gianluca Giorgolo. 2016. Perspectives. Semantics and Pragmatics 9(21). http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/sp.9.21. This version will be replaced with the final typeset version in due course. NB: page numbers will change, so cite with caution. Héctor-Neri CastañedaAbstract We present a new solution to long-standing puzzles about substitution of co-referential terms. Our solution is based on a notion of perspective, where the speaker's perspective can be differentiated from the perspective of the agent whose thoughts, beliefs, etc., the speaker is reporting. Our formalization is a conservative extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus utilizing monads, a construction in category theory that provides a way to map a set of objects and functions into a more complex space of objects and functions. We offer a lexicalist analysis of perspective whereby certain lexical items introduce potential shifts of perspective while others do not. We show that this provides the means to give a general semantics of perspective with respect to substitutability, allowing us to capture not just the standard embedded cases of non-substitutability of distinct but co-referential terms, but also cases involving no embedding and no distinct terms. We also show that our semantics generalizes to cases outside the nominal domain, such as synonymous natural kind terms and other predicates.
“…First, I'm not sure whether non‐descriptive senses characterize semantic/intentional properties of attitude states; it strikes me as a largely terminological matter. Second, there are forms of Relationism which explicitly deny that the relations they posit are semantic features of attitude states ( Heck , ), ( Pryor , ); Almotahari () dubs this position Formal Relationism (for more about it see ( Gray , )). The dialectic below is independent of the distinction between Formal and Semantic Relationists, so I use ‘representational’ to encompass both sorts of relation.…”
Section: Indistinguishable Sensesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Pryor () re‐imagines the I‐S scenario, with this kind of worry in mind . He writes: Suppose Flugh is an alien whose many eyes are on long stalks, which can wriggle through the maze of twisty little passages where he lives.…”
Section: Indistinguishable Senses Againmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In fact, it may be that he' s only seeing a single sphere with a single eye, but through some signaling glitch in his brain, he now has cognitively distinct mental presentations. (, pg. 331‐2)…”
Section: Indistinguishable Senses Againmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…As I understand the landscape, the approaches in(Putnam, 1954),(Fodor, 1990), and(Fiengo and May, 2006) might be called proto-relationist. I would classify(Taschek, 1995(Taschek, , 1998,(Fine, 2009),(Pinillos, 2011(Pinillos, , 2015,(Heck, 2012),(Schroeter, 2012), and(Pryor, 2016) as Relationists proper. For an overview, see(Gray, 2017).2 Though I adopt the term 'coordination' fromFine (2009), I mean to be using in a theory-neutral way (sometimes Fine uses it in this way, and sometimes he uses it as to refer to an aspect of his Relationist apparatus).…”
Fregeanism and Relationism are competing families of solutions to Frege's Puzzle, and by extension, competing theories of propositional representation. My aim is to clarify what is at stake between them by characterizing and evaluating a Relationist argument. Relationists claim that it is cognitively possible for distinct token propositional attitudes to be, in a sense, qualitatively indistinguishable: to differ in no intrinsic representational features. The idea of an ‘intrinsic representational feature’ is not, however, made especially clear in the argument. I clarify it here and, having done so, offer reason to doubt the argument. This will put us in a position to draw some lessons about the relation between object‐directed and representation‐internal
aspects of cognitive significance.
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