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In Suppose and Tell, Williamson makes a new case for the material conditional account. He tries to explain away apparently countervailing data by arguing that these have been misinterpreted because researchers have overlooked the role of heuristics in the processing of conditionals. Cases involving the receipt of apparently conflicting conditionals play an important dialectical role in Williamson’s book: they are supposed to provide evidence for the material conditional account as well as for the defeasibility of a key procedure underlying our everyday assessments of conditionals. We argue that they can serve neither of these purposes and that Williamson overestimates the reach of heuristics. We specifically challenge Williamson’s assumption that, in the kind of cases centrally at issue in his book, the recipient of conflicting conditionals will typically accept those at face value, even granting Williamson that conditionals can be freely passed among speakers under normal conditions of testimony.

A.J. Cotnoir has argued that we should distinguish between two notions of proper parthood: outstripped part and non-identical part. Outstripped parthood is an asymmetric relation, but non-identical parthood is not. We argue, first, that the intuitions Cotnoir uses to motivate these notions do not always give the right verdict; and, second, that systematic reasons for distinguishing these two notions of parthood have further counter-intuitive consequences. This means the distinction between two notions of proper parthood currently lacks adequate motivation.

The experimental revolution in the social sciences is one of the most significant methodological shifts undergone by the field since the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the nineteenth century. One of the often valued features of social science experimentation is precisely the fact that there are (alleged) clear methodological rules regarding hypothesis testing that come from the methods of the natural sciences and from the methodology of RCTs in the biomedical sciences, and that allow for the adjudication among contentious causal claims. We examine critically this claim and argue that some current understandings of the practices that surround social science experimentation overestimate the degree to which experiments can actually fulfil this role as “objective” adjudicators, by neglecting the importance of shared background knowledge or assumptions and of consensus regarding the validity of the constructs involved in an experiment. We take issue with the way the distinction between internal and external validity is often used to comment on the inferential import of experiments, used both among practitioners and among philosophers of science. We describe the ways in which the more common (dichotomous) use of the internal/external distinction differs from Cook and Campbell’s original methodological project, in which construct validity and the four-fold validity typology were all important in assessing the inferential import of experiments. We argue that the current uses of the labels internal and external, as applied to experimental validity, help to encroach a simplistic view on the inferential import of experiments that, in turn, misrepresents their capacity to provide objective knowledge about the causal relations between variables.

This article shows how a machine can employ a network view to reason about complex social relations of news reliability. Such a network view promises a topic-agnostic perspective that can be a useful hint on reliability trends and their heterogeneous assumptions. In our analysis, we depart from the ever-growing numbers of papers trying to find machine learning algorithms to predict the reliability of news and focus instead on using machine reasoning to understand the structure of news networks by comparing it with our human judgements. Understanding and representing news networks is not easy, not only because they can be extremely vast but also because they are shaped by several overlapping network dynamics. We present a machine learning approach to analyse what constitutes reliable news from the view of a network. Our aim is to machine-read a network’s understanding of news reliability. To analyse real-life news sites, we used the Décodex dataset to train machine learning models from the structure of the underlying network. We then employ the models to draw conclusions how the Décodex evaluators came to assess the reliability of news.

Citation impact is commonly assessed using direct, first-order citation relations. We consider here instead the indirect influence of publications on new publications via citations. We present a novel method to quantify the higher-order citation influence of publications, considering both direct, or first-order, and indirect, or higher-order citations. In particular, we are interested in higher-order citation influence at the level of disciplines. We apply this method to the whole Web of Science data at the level of disciplines. We find that a significant amount of influence—42%—stems from higher-order citations. Furthermore, we show that higher-order citation influence is helpful to quantify and visualize citation flows among disciplines, and to assess their degree of interdisciplinarity.

Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglects the important role played by the mathematical and axiomatic model of science in the emergence of biology as a special science. We show that several major actors involved in the emergence of biology as a science in Germany were working with an axiomatic conception of science that goes back at least to Aristotle and was popular in mid-eighteenth-century German academic circles due to its endorsement by Christian Wolff. More specifically, we show that at least two major contributors to the emergence of biology in Germany—Caspar Friedrich Wolff and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus—sought to provide a conception of the new science of life that satisfies the criteria of a traditional axiomatic ideal of science. Both C.F. Wolff and Treviranus took over strong commitments to the axiomatic model of science from major philosophers of their time, Christian Wolff and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, respectively. The ideal of biology as an axiomatic science with specific biological fundamental concepts and principles thus played a role in the emergence of biology as a special science.

According to Adams (Inquiry 8:166–197, 1965), 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 analyses of Douven (Synthese 164:19–44, 2008) and others to account for the appropriateness of conditionals in terms of evidential support. Our generalization involves making use of Value, or intensity. We will show how this generalization helps to account for biscuit conditionals and conditional threats and promises. Finally, a link is established between this analysis of conditionals and an analysis of generic sentences.

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενο. This volume presents a special issue on the 2017 edition of the theory and practice of digital libraries (TPDL) conference, held in Thessaloniki, Greece. We provide a brief overview of TPDL 2017 and introduce the selected papers that make up the rest of this volume. The papers cover different aspects of current digital library research, highlighting the important and multidisciplinary nature of the field.

Core principles of mereology have been questioned by appealing to time travel scenarios. This paper questions the methodology of employing time travel scenarios to argue against mereology. We show some time travel scenarios are structurally equivalent to more standard ones not involving time travel; and that the three main theories about persistence through time (i.e., endurantism, perdurantism, and stage theory) can each solve both the time travel scenario as well as the structurally similar classical scenario. Time travel scenarios that are not similar to more standard arguments are instead problematic because they are open to different, incompatible interpretations. We conclude that compared to the classical arguments against mereological principles, time travel scenarios do not add anything new.

GR's research is supported by the Australian Research Council Grant DP150103801. We present and defend the Australian Plan semantics for negation. This is a comprehensive account, suitable for a variety of different logics. It is based on two ideas. The first is that negation is an exclusion-expressing device: we utter negations to express incompatibilities. The second is that, because incompatibility is modal, negation is a modal operator as well. It can, then, be modelled as a quantifier over points in frames, restricted by accessibility relations representing compatibilities and incompatibilities between such points. We defuse a number of objections to this Plan, raised by supporters of the American Plan for negation, in which negation is handled via a many-valued semantics. We show that the Australian Plan has substantial advantages over the American Plan. Publisher PDF

There is no unified theory of causality in the sciences and in philosophy. In this paper, we focus on a particular framework, called structural causal modelling (SCM), as one possible perspective in quantitative social science research. We explain how this methodology provides a fruitful basis for causal analysis in social research, for hypothesising, modelling, and testing explanatory mechanisms. This framework is not based on a system of equations, but on an analysis of multivariate distributions. In particular, the modelling stage is essentially distribution-free. Adopting an SCM approach means endorsing a particular view on modelling in general (the hypothetico-deductive methodology), and a specific stance on exogeneity (namely as a condition of separability of inference), on the one hand, and in interpreting marginal–conditional decompositions (namely as mechanisms), on the other hand.

Objects have dispositions. Dispositions are normally analyzed by providing a meaning to disposition ascriptions like ‘This piece of salt is soluble’. Philosophers like Carnap, Goodman, Quine, Lewis and many others have proposed analyses of such disposition ascriptions. In this paper we will argue with Quine (‘Natural Kinds’, 1970) that the proper analysis of ascriptions of the form ‘x is disposed to m (when C)’, where ‘x’ denotes an object, ‘m’ a manifestation, and ‘C’ a condition, goes like this: (i) ‘x is of natural kind k’, and (ii) the generic ‘ks are m (when C)’ is true. For the analysis of the generic, we propose an analysis in terms of causal powers: ‘ks (when C) have the causal power to m’. The latter, in turn, is analyzed in a very precise way, making use of Pearl’s probabilistic graphical causal models. We will show how this natural kind-analysis improves on standard conditional analyses of dispositions by avoiding the standard counterexamples, and that it gives rise to precise observable criteria under which the disposition ascription is true.

Anti-realism is plagued by Fitch’s paradox: the remarkable result that if one accepts that all truths are knowable, minimal assumptions about the nature of knowledge entail that every truth is known. Dorothy Edgington suggests to address this problem by understanding p is knowable to be a counterfactual claim, but her proposal must contend with a forceful objection by Timothy Williamson. I revisit Edgington’s basic idea and find that Williamson’s objection is obviated by a refined understanding of counterfactual knowability that is grounded in possible courses of inquiry. I arrive at a precise definition of knowability that is not just a technical avoidance of paradox, but is metaphysically sound and does justice to the anti-realist idea.

Technologies have always been bearers of profound changes in science, society, and any other aspect of life. The latest technological revolution—the digital revolution—is no exception in this respect. This paper presents the revolution brought about by digital technologies through the lenses of a specific approach: the philosophy of information. It is argued that the adoption of an informational approach helps avoiding utopian or dystopian approaches to (digital) technology, both expressions of technological determinism. Such an approach provides a conceptual framework able to address the ethical challenges that digital technologies pose, without getting stuck in the dichotomous thinking of technological determinism, and to bring together ethics, ontology, and epistemology into a coherent account.

We study the learning power of iterated belief revision methods. Successful learning is understood as convergence to correct, i.e., true, beliefs. We focus on the issue of universality: whether or not a particular belief revision method is able to learn everything that in principle is learnable. We provide a general framework for interpreting belief revision policies as learning methods. We focus on three popular cases: conditioning, lexicographic revision, and minimal revision. Our main result is that conditioning and lexicographic revision can drive a universal learning mechanism, provided that the observations include only and all true data, and provided that a non-standard, i.e., non-well-founded prior plausibility relation is allowed. We show that a standard, i.e., well-founded belief revision setting is in general too narrow to guarantee universality of any learning method based on belief revision. We also show that minimal revision is not universal. Finally, we consider situations in which observational errors (false observations) may occur. Given a fairness condition, which says that only finitely many errors occur, and that every error is eventually corrected, we show that lexicographic revision is still universal in this setting, while the other two methods are not.

This paper presents a new approach to the class-theoretic paradoxes. In the first part of the paper, I will distinguish classes from sets, describe the function of class talk, and present several reasons for postulating type-free classes. This involves applications to the problem of unrestricted quantification, reduction of properties, natural language semantics, and the epistemology of mathematics. In the second part of the paper, I will present some axioms for type-free classes. My approach is loosely based on the Gödel–Russell idea of limited ranges of significance. It is shown how to derive the second-order Dedekind–Peano axioms within that theory. I conclude by discussing whether the theory can be used as a solution to the problem of unrestricted quantification. In an appendix, I prove the consistency of the class theory relative to Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.

In this paper, we propose a unified logical framework for representing and analyzing various forms of correlated information change. Our main thesis is that "logical dynamics," in the sense of van Benthem (Exploring logical dynamics. CSLI Publications, Stanford, 1996; Logical dynamics of information and interaction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011), and in particular dynamic epistemic notions of conditional, as developed in Baltag and Smets (Electron Notes Theor Comput Sci 165:5---21, 2006a; Stud Log 89:185---209, 2008a; Texts in logic and games. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp 9---58, 2008b), play a central role in understanding and modeling a wide range of apparently very different information-gathering phenomena which do have one specific feature in common, namely the very act of learning new information may directly change the reality that is being learned. On the one hand, we focus on the way in which an introspective agent changes her beliefs when learning new higher-order information, i.e., information that may refer to her own beliefs. On the other hand, we analyze situations in which an observer learns about a phenomenon by performing observations that may perturb the very phenomenon under study, as in the case of quantum measurements, or observations in social sciences, psychology and medicine. Our formal techniques are based on ideas from dynamic logic and on the modeling of "dynamic conditionals." We offer a semantics based on "test frames," i.e., Kripke frames labeled by propositional formulae which yields a unified setting for the two types of correlated information change under study. We show how this framework can be used to analyze the ontic and epistemic---informational aspects of quantum measurements and to compare them with other types of observation, testing, belief revision, counterfactual conditionals, etc.

This paper is published within the project “The Logic of Conceivability”, funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), grant number 681404. I want to model a finite, fallible cognitive agent who imagines that p in the sense of mentally representing a scenario—a configuration of objects and properties—correctly described by p. I propose to capture imagination, so understood, via variably strict world quantifiers, in a modal framework including both possible and so-called impossible worlds. The latter secure lack of classical logical closure for the relevant mental states, while the variability of strictness captures how the agent imports information from actuality in the imagined non-actual scenarios. Imagination turns out to be highly hyperintensional, but not logically anarchic. Section 1 sets the stage and impossible worlds are quickly introduced in Sect. 2. Section 3 proposes to model imagination via variably strict world quantifiers. Section 4 introduces the formal semantics. Section 5 argues that imagination has a minimal mereological structure validating some logical inferences. Section 6 deals with how imagination under-determines the represented contents. Section 7 proposes additional constraints on the semantics, validating further inferences. Section 8 describes some welcome invalidities. Section 9 examines the effects of importing false beliefs into the imagined scenarios. Finally, Sect. 10 hints at possible developments of the theory in the direction of two-dimensional semantics. Publisher PDF

Sitting too much is unhealthy, but a widespread habit in many societies. Realizing behavioral change in this area is hard. Our societies promote being seated via the way its places are structured: they are filled with chairs for example. How can we make healthier environments that invite people to move around more? This article shows how philosophical research in the area of embodied/enactive cognitive science let to a built vision for the office of the future, of 2025. Multidisciplinary studio RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances] and visual artist Barbara Visser built this world without chairs, titled The End of Sitting. This large rock-like landscape integrates many affordances for standing. Affordances are the possibilities for action provided by the environment. This landscape of standing affordances allows people to work standing while being supported by the material structure of the environment. This unorthodox working landscape is both an enactive art installation and the materialization of a philosophical worldview that understands people as embodied minds situated in a landscape of affordances. It stimulates reflection on the way built environments can naturally invite more active and healthy behavior.

With this paper I aim to demonstrate that a look beyond the Aristotelian square of opposition, and a related non-conservative view on logical determiners, contributes to both the understanding of Aristotelian syllogistics as well as to the study of quantificational structures in natural language.

Many languages allow for “fake” uses of their past tense marker: the marker: can occur in certain contexts without conveying temporal pastness. Instead it appears to bear a modal meaning. Iatridou (Linguist Inq 31(2):231–270, 2000) has dubbed this phenomenon Fake Tense. Fake Tense is particularly common to conditional constructions. This paper analyzes Fake Tense in English conditional sentences as a certain kind of ambiguity: the past tense morphology can mark the presence of a temporal operator, but it can also signal a specific modal operator. The ambiguity is proposed to be the result of recategorization: the Simple Past develops a second, modal meaning because of structural similarities between the temporal and the modal/epistemic domain. The proposal is spelled out in the generative semantics framework (Heim and Kratzer, Semantics in generative grammar, 1998), using the restrictor approach to conditionals (Kratzer, in: R. Bäuerle et al. (eds.) Semantics from different points of view, 1979; in: A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich (eds.) Semantics: an international handbook of contemporary research, 1991), and building on von Stechows et al.’s recent work on the English tense system (von Stechow, in: W. Klein (ed.) The expression of time in language, 2010; Romero and von Stechow, Tense: introduction, 2008).

The paper explores the cognitive mechanisms involved in the verification of sentences with proportional quantifiers (e.g., "More than half of the dots are blue"). The first study shows that the verification of proportional sentences is more demanding than the verification of sentences such as: "There are seven blue and eight yellow dots". The second study reveals that both types of sentences are correlated with memory storage, however, only proportional sentences are associated with the cognitive control. This result suggests that the cognitive mechanism underlying the verification of proportional quantifiers is crucially related to the integration process, in which an individual has to compare in memory the cardinalities of two sets. In the third study we find that the numerical distance between two cardinalities that must be compared significantly influences the verification time and accuracy. The results of our studies are discussed in the broader context of processing complex sentences.

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives, and usually assign different types of semantic values to these two types of sentences. A different approach has been taken in recent work on inquisitive semantics. This approach does not take the basic syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives as its starting point, but rather a new notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content in an integrated way. The standard way to treat the logical connectives in this approach is to associate them with the basic algebraic operations on these new types of meanings. For instance, conjunction and disjunction are treated as meet and join operators, just as in classical logic. This gives rise to a hybrid system, where sentences can be both informative and inquisitive at the same time, and there is no clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. It may seem that these two general approaches in the existing literature are quite incompatible. The main aim of this paper is to show that this is not the case. We develop an inquisitive semantics for a logical language that has a clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. We show that this language coincides in expressive power with the hybrid language that is standardly assumed in inquisitive semantics, we establish a sound and complete axiomatization for the associated logic, and we consider a natural enrichment of the system with presuppositional interrogatives.

We reopen the investigation into the formal and conceptual relationship between bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner in J Semant 15(2):115–162, 1998, J Semant 17(3):189–216, 2000) and game theory. Unlike a likeminded previous endeavor by Dekker and van Rooij (J Semant 17:217–242, 2000), we consider signaling games not strategic games, and seek to ground bidirectional optimization once in a model of rational step-by-step reasoning and once in a model of reinforcement learning. We give sufficient conditions for equivalence of bidirectional optimality and the former, and show based on numerical simulations that bidirectional optimization may be thought of as a process of reinforcement learning with lateral inhibition.