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One of the more persistent debates in mereology is whether distinct wholes can have the same parts. Extensional mereologists hold that if there is no part that makes the difference, then there is nothing to distinguish the wholes, so sameness of parts implies identity. Non-extensionalists, however, do think there are cases where distinct wholes share all their parts. This paper argues that the kind of argument non-extensionalists employ can also be levelled against a widely accepted extensionality principle of plural logic. Non-extensionalists thus face a dilemma: either give up the argument for non-extensional mereology, or deny both the extensionality principle of mereology and the analogous principle for plural logic.

Modified numerals, such as at least three and more than five, are known to sometimes give rise to ignorance inferences. However, there is disagreement in the literature regarding the nature of these inferences, their context dependence, and differences between at least and more than. We present a series of experiments which sheds new light on these issues. Our results show that (a) the ignorance inferences of at least are more robust than those of more than, (b) the presence and strength of the ignorance inferences triggered by both at least and more than depends on the question under discussion (QUD), and (c) whether ignorance inferences are detected in a given experimental setting depends partly on the task that participants are asked to perform (e.g., an acceptability task versus an inference task). We offer an Optimality Theoretic account of these findings. In particular, the task effect is captured by assuming that in performing an acceptability task, participants take the speaker’s perspective in order to determine whether an expression is optimal given a certain epistemic state, while in performing an inference task they take the addressee’s perspective in order to determine what the most likely epistemic state of the speaker is given a certain expression. To execute the latter task in a fully rational manner, participants have to perform higher-order reasoning about alternative expressions the speaker could have used. Under the assumption that participants do not always perform such higher-order reasoning but also often resort to so-called unidirectional optimization, the task effect finds a natural explanation. This also allows us to relate our finding to asymmetries between comprehension and production that have been found in language acquisition.

Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have been derivative of trends and patterns. By contrast, genealogical methods attend to the entanglement of continuity and discontinuity, and focus on contingency and singularity. This article proposes to develop methods of computational genealogy to analyze multiple temporalities in historical discourses. We experiment with our proposed computational genealogy using the archive of Inaugural speeches by US presidents. In particular, we show that there is neither a linear advance to Trump’s rhetoric nor an exceptional rupture. Our analysis shows that Trump’s speech is much more the struggle of the Republicans with their own past ideas than struggles with Democrats.

While function modeling has been around in engineering design research since the 1960s, there have been no systematic, comparative studies devoted to assessing the adequacy of function modeling frameworks in light of engineering design objectives. This systematic assessment and comparison – called benchmarking – is now recognized as a central research issue in current function modeling research, but insight into how this benchmarking can be done is at present limited. In this paper, we attempt to improve our insight into how benchmarking can be done for a specific but important engineering context: function optimization of reverse-engineered systems. We argue that the capacity to produce technical advantage predictions, viz. predictions concerning the improved functional performance of a redesigned technical system, is an important benchmark criterion in this context. We subsequently illustrate the utility of the criterion by assessing two prominent function modeling frameworks in terms of it. Throughout the paper, we use a case study of the design of an electric wok to clarify and illustrate our ideas.

Wikipedia is one of the main sources of free knowledge on the Web. During the first few months of the pandemic, over 5,200 new Wikipedia pages on COVID-19 have been created and have accumulated over 400M pageviews by mid June 2020.1At the same time, an unprecedented amount of scientific articles on COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic have been published online. Wikipedia’s contents are based on reliable sources such as scientific literature. Given its public function, it is crucial for Wikipedia to rely on representative and reliable scientific results, especially so in a time of crisis. We assess the coverage of COVID-19-related research in Wikipedia via citations to a corpus of over 160,000 articles. We find that Wikipedia editors are integrating new research at a fast pace, and have cited close to 2% of the COVID-19 literature under consideration. While doing so, they are able to provide a representative coverage of COVID-19-related research. We show that all the main topics discussed in this literature are proportionally represented from Wikipedia, after accounting for article-level effects. We further use regression analyses to model citations from Wikipedia and show that Wikipedia editors on average rely on literature which is highly cited, widely shared on social media, and has been peer-reviewed.

Considerable variability has been observed in sentence comprehension abilities in both native speakers and second language (L2) learner populations. While it has long been established that, in native speakers, this variability is closely linked to individual differences (IDs) in verbal working memory (vWM), previous research on the role of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension has produced mixed results. Moreover, there is an accumulating body of evidence demonstrating that the relationship between vWM and native language comprehension abilities is mediated by language experience. However, to our knowledge, until now, no attempt has been made to integrate language experience measures into the vWM-L2 sentence comprehension relationship. The goal of the present study is twofold: (1) to determine whether and to what extent vWM – as gauged by a reading span (RSPAN) task – correlates with IDs in two proxy estimates of L2 experience and (2) to investigate the effects of vWM on L2 comprehension of three different types of complex sentences. Thirty-four German advanced learners of English participated in this study. Significant positive correlations were found between the RSPAN scores and both proxy estimates of L2 experience. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that vWM exerted a significant effect on L2 sentence comprehension that was not modulated by sentence type. Taken together, these results provide additional evidence in support of the involvement of vWM in L2 sentence comprehension and, to our knowledge, first evidence for the contribution of L2 experience to RSPAN task performance.

Decision theorists tend to treat indicative conditionals with reservation, because they can easily lead a deliberating agent astray. However, many indicatives can be very helpful in contexts of deliberation, so denying them all a role in such contexts seems to be overkill. We show that a recently revived inferential view on conditionals provides a straightforward explanation of why some indicatives are unassertable in contexts of deliberation and hints at a way of telling “deliberationally useless” and “deliberationally useful” conditionals apart.

We present a dynamic logic for inductive learning from partial observations by a “rational” learner, that obeys AGM postulates for belief revision. We apply our logic to an example, showing how various concrete properties can be learnt with certainty or inductively by such an AGM learner. We present a sound and complete axiomatization, based on a combination of relational and neighbourhood version of the canonical model method.

This paper is part of a series of proposals for using logic to analyse social networks. It studies the intertwining of two forms of information dynamics: social influence, through which an agent’s behaviour, opinions or features are affected by those of her social connections, and friendship selection, through which an agent chooses her social connections based on their common behaviour, opinions or features. The text provides a logical analysis of the two forms of dynamics (the main ingredients in the phenomenon known as homophily) as well as of their interaction, discussing also some of their variations.

Epistemic diversity is the ability or possibility of producing diverse and rich epistemic apparati to make sense of the world around us. In this paper we discuss whether, and to what extent, different conceptions of knowledge—notably as ‘justified true belief’ and as ‘distributed and embodied cognition’—hinder or foster epistemic diversity. We then link this discussion to the widespread move in science and philosophy towards monolingual disciplinary environments. We argue that English, despite all appearance, is no Lingua Franca, and we give reasons why epistemic diversity is also deeply hindered is monolingual contexts. Finally, we sketch a proposal for multilingual academia where epistemic diversity is thereby fostered.

The article argues for a contextualised reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It analyses in detail the role that use and application play in the text and how that supports a conception of transcendentality of logic that allows for contextualisation. The article identifies a tension in the text, between the requirement that sense be determinate and the contextual nature of application, and suggests that it is this tension that is a major driver of Wittgenstein’s later ideas.

The two target articles address the origins of music in complementary ways. However, both proposals focus on overt musical behaviour, largely ignoring the role of perception and cognition, and they blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. To resolve this, an alternative research strategy is proposed that focuses on the core cognitive components of musicality.

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787 ). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world ever be motivated to seek out novelty? Novelty for such an agent would arrive in the form of sensory and physiological states that are unexpected. Such an agent ought therefore to avoid novel and surprising interactions with the world one might think. Yet humans and many other animals find play and other forms of novelty-seeking and exploration hugely rewarding. How can this be understood in frameworks for studying the mind that emphasise prediction error minimisation? This problem has been taken up in recent research concerned with epistemic action—actions an agent engages in to reduce uncertainty. However that work leaves two questions unanswered, which it is the aim of our paper to address. First, no account has been given yet of why it should feel good to the agent to engage the world playfully and with curiosity. Second an appeal is made to precision-estimation to explain epistemic action, yet it remains unclear how precision-weighting works in action more generally, or active inference. We argue that an answer to both questions may lie in the bodily states of an agent that track the rate at which free energy is being reduced. The recent literature on the predictive brain has connected the valence of emotional experiences to the rate of change in the reduction of prediction error (Joffily and Coricelli in PLoS Comput Biol 9(6):e1003094, 2013. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094 ; Van de Cruys, in Metzinger and Wiese (eds) Philosophy and predictive processing, vol 24, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017. doi: 10.15502/9783958573253 ). In this literature valenced emotional experiences are hypothesised to be identical with changes in the rate at which prediction error is reduced. Experiences are negatively valenced when overall prediction error increases and are positively valenced when the sum of prediction errors decrease. We offer an ecological-enactive interpretation of the concept of valence and its connection to rate of change of prediction error. We show how rate of change should be understood in terms of embodied states of affordance-related action readiness. We then go on to apply this ecological-enactive account of error dynamics to provide an answer to the first question we have raised: It may explain why it should feel good to an agent to be curious and playful. Our ecological-enactive account also allows us to show how error dynamics may provide an answer to the second question we have raised regarding how precision-weighting works in active inference. An agent that is sensitive to rates of error reduction can tune precision on the fly. We show how this ability to tune precision on the go can allow agents to develop skills for adapting better and better to the unexpected, and search out opportunities for resolving uncertainty and progressing in its learning.

Reference annotation datasets containing harmony annotations are at the core of a wide range of studies in music information retrieval (MIR) and related fields. The majority of these datasets contain single reference annotations describing the harmony of each piece. Nevertheless, studies showing differences among annotators in many other MIR tasks make the notion of a single ‘ground-truth’ reference annotation a tenuous one. In this paper, we introduce and analyse the Chordify Annotator Subjectivity Dataset (CASD) containing chord labels for 50 songs from 4 expert annotators in order to gain a better understanding of the differences between annotators in their chord label choice. Our analysis reveals that annotators use distinct chord-label vocabularies, with low chord-label overlap across all annotators. Between annotators, we find only 73 percent overlap on average for the traditional major–minor vocabulary and 54 percent overlap for the most complex chord labels. A factor analysis reveals the relative importance of triads, sevenths, inversions and other musical factors for each annotator on their choice of chord labels and reported difficulty of the songs. Our results further substantiate the existence of a harmonic ‘subjectivity ceiling’: an upper bound for evaluations in computational harmony research. Current state-of-the-art chord-estimation systems perform beyond this subjectivity ceiling by about 10 percent. This suggests that current ACE algorithms are powerful enough to tune themselves to particular annotators' idiosyncrasies. Overall, our results show that annotator subjectivity is an important factor in harmonic transcriptions, which should inform future studies into harmony perception and computational models of harmony.

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

Stalnaker (Philosophical Studies, 128(1), 169–199 2006) introduced a combined epistemic-doxastic logic that can formally express a strong concept of belief, a concept of belief as ‘subjective certainty’. In this paper, we provide a topological semantics for belief, in particular, for Stalnaker’s notion of belief defined as ‘epistemic possibility of knowledge’, in terms of the closure of the interior operator on extremally disconnected spaces. This semantics extends the standard topological interpretation of knowledge (as the interior operator) with a new topological semantics for belief. We prove that the belief logic KD45 is sound and complete with respect to the class of extremally disconnected spaces and we compare our approach to a different topological setting in which belief is interpreted in terms of the derived set operator. We also study (static) belief revision as well as belief dynamics by providing a topological semantics for conditional belief and belief update modalities, respectively. Our setting based on extremally disconnected spaces, however, encounters problems when extended with dynamic updates. We then propose a solution consisting in interpreting belief in a similar way based on hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces, and axiomatize the belief logic of hereditarily extremally disconnected spaces. Finally, we provide a complete axiomatization of the logic of conditional belief and knowledge, as well as a complete axiomatization of the corresponding dynamic logic.

The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well (cf. Douven in Synthese 164:19–44, 2008, The epistemology of indicative conditionals. Formal and empirical approaches. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2016; Skovgaard-Olsen et al. in Cognition 150:26–36, 2016). In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential (or diagnostic) reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s (Cognition 117:302–318, 2010) empirical observations.

Even large citation indexes such as the Web of Science, Scopus or Google Scholar cover only a small fraction of the literature in the humanities. This coverage sensibly decreases going backwards in time. Citation mining of humanities publications — defined as an instance of bibliometric data mining and as a means to the end of building comprehensive citation indexes— remains an open problem. In this contribution we discuss the results of two recent projects in this area: Cited Loci and Linked Books. The former focused on the domain of classics, using journal articles in JSTOR as a corpus; the latter considered the historiography on Venice and a novel corpus of journals and monographs. Both projects attempted to mine citations of all kinds— abbreviated and not, to all types of sources, including primary sources— and considered a wide time span (19th to 21st century). We first discuss the current state of research in citation mining of humanities publications. We then present the various steps involved into this process, from corpus selection to data publication, discussing the peculiarities of the humanities. The approaches taken by the two projects are compared, allowing us to highlight disciplinary differences and commonalities, as well as shared challenges between historiography and classics on this respect. The resulting picture portrays humanities citation mining as a field with a great, yet mostly untapped potential, and a few still open challenges. The potential lies in using citations as a means to interconnect digitized collections at a large scale, by making explicit the linking function of bibliographic citations. As for the open challenges, a key issue is the existing need for an integrated metadata infrastructure and an appropriate legal framework to facilitate citation mining in the humanities.

Kant's views on animals have received much attention in recent years. According to some, Kant attributed the capacity for objective perceptual awareness to non-human animals, even though he denied that they have concepts. This position is difficult to square with a conceptualist reading of Kant, according to which objective perceptual awareness requires concepts. Others take Kant's views on animals to imply that the mental life of animals is a blooming, buzzing confusion. In this article I provide a historical reconstruction of Kant's views on animals, relating them to eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition. I reconstruct the views of Buffon and Reimarus and show that (i) both Buffon and Reimarus adopted a conceptualist position, according to which concepts structure the cognitive experience of adult humans, and (ii) that both described the mental life of animals as a blooming, buzzing confusion. Kant's position, I argue, is virtually identical to that of Reimarus. Hence Kant's views on animals support a conceptualist reading of Kant. The article further articulates the historical antecedents of the Kantian idea that concepts structure human cognitive experience and provides a novel account of how the ideas of similarity and difference were conceptualized in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition.

We examine a prominent naturalistic line on the method of cases (MoC), exemplified by Timothy Williamson and Edouard Machery: MoC is given a fallibilist and non-exceptionalist treatment, accommodating moderate modal skepticism. But Gettier cases are in dispute: Williamson takes them to induce substantive philosophical knowledge; Machery claims that the ambitious use of MoC should be abandoned entirely. We defend an intermediate position. We offer an internal critique of Macherian pessimism about Gettier cases. Most crucially, we argue that Gettier cases needn’t exhibit ‘disturbing characteristics’ that Machery posits to explain why philosophical cases induce dubious judgments. It follows, we show, that Machery’s central argument for the effective abandonment of MoC is undermined. Nevertheless, we engineer a restricted variant of the argument—in harmony with Williamsonian ideology–that survives our critique, potentially limiting philosophy’s scope for establishing especially ambitious modal theses, despite traditional MoC’s utility being partially preserved.

In this paper we investigate how inference to the best explanation (IBE) works in engineering science, focussing on the context of malfunction explanation. While IBE has gotten a lot of attention in the philosophy of science literature, few, if any, philosophical work has focussed on IBE in engineering science practice. We first show that IBE in engineering science has a similar structure as IBE in other scientific domains in the sense that in both settings IBE hinges on the weighing of explanatory virtues. We then proceed to show that, due to the intimate connection between explanation and redesign in engineering science, there is a further engineering domain-specific virtue in terms of which engineering malfunction explanations are evaluated, viz. the virtue of redesign utility. This virtue entails that the explanatory information offered by a malfunction explanation should be instrumental in predicting counterfactual dependencies in redesigned systems. We illustrate and elaborate these points in terms of a number of engineering examples, focussing in particular on the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447. Our extension of analyses of IBE and explanation to engineering science practice offers new insights by identifying a new explanatory virtue in malfunction explanation: redesign utility.

Author(s): van de Pol, Iris; Lodder, Paul; van Maanen, Leendert; Steinert-Threlkeld, Shane; Szymanik, Jakub | Abstract: Despite wide variation among natural languages, there are linguistic properties thought to be universal to all or almost all natural languages. Here, we consider universals at the semantic level, in the domain of quantifiers, which are given by the properties of monotonicity, quantity, and conservativity. We investigate whether these universals might be explained by differences in complexity. We generate a large collection of quantifiers, based on a simple yet expressive grammar, and compute both their complexities and whether they adhere to these universal properties. We find that quantifiers satisfying semantic universals are less complex: they have a shorter minimal description length.

Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much-perhaps most-of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others' assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning - a challenge which no account presently fully meets.

Item does not contain fulltext The Speech-to-Song Illusion (STS) refers to a dramatic shift in our perception of short speech fragments which, when repeatedly presented, may start to sound-like song. Anecdotally, once it is perceived as a song, it is difficult to unhear the melody of a speech fragment, and such temporal dynamics of the STS illusion has theoretical implications. The goal of the current study is to capture this temporal effect. In our experiment, speech fragments that initially did not elicit the STS illusion were manipulated to have increasingly stable F0 contours to strengthen the perceived 'song-likeness' of a fragment. Over the course of trials, the speech fragments with manipulated contours were repeatedly presented within blocks of decreasing, increasing, or random orders of F0 manipulations. Results showed that a presentation order where participants first heard the sentence with the maximum amount of F0 manipulations (decreasing condition) resulted in participants continuously giving higher overall song-like ratings than other presentation orders (increasing or random conditions). Our results thus capture the commonly reported phenomenon that it is hard to 'unhear' the illusion once a speech segment has been perceived as song. 9 p.

This paper studies the relation between persuasive argumentation and the speaker’s epistemic attitude. Dung-style abstract argumentation and dynamic epistemic logic provide the necessary tools to characterize the notion of persuasion. Within abstract argumentation, persuasive argumentation has been previously studied from a game-theoretic perspective. These approaches are blind to the fact that, in real-life situations, the epistemic attitude of the speaker determines which set of arguments will be disclosed by her in the context of a persuasive dialogue. This work is a first step to fill this gap. For this purpose we extend one of the logics of Schwarzentruber et al. with dynamic operators, designed to capture communicative phenomena. A complete axiomatization for the new logic via reduction axioms is provided. Within the new framework, a distinction between actual persuasion and persuasion from the speaker’s perspective is made. Finally, we explore the relationship between the two notions.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is one of the most visited sites on the Web and a common source of information for many users. As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not a source of original information, but was conceived as a gateway to secondary sources: according to Wikipedia's guidelines, facts must be backed up by reliable sources that reflect the full spectrum of views on the topic. Although citations lie at the very heart of Wikipedia, little is known about how users interact with them. To close this gap, we built client-side instrumentation for logging all interactions with links leading from English Wikipedia articles to cited references during one month, and conducted the first analysis of readers' interaction with citations on Wikipedia. We find that overall engagement with citations is low: about one in 300 page views results in a reference click (0.29% overall; 0.56% on desktop; 0.13% on mobile). Matched observational studies of the factors associated with reference clicking reveal that clicks occur more frequently on shorter pages and on pages of lower quality, suggesting that references are consulted more commonly when Wikipedia itself does not contain the information sought by the user. Moreover, we observe that recent content, open access sources and references about life events (births, deaths, marriages, etc) are particularly popular. Taken together, our findings open the door to a deeper understanding of Wikipedia's role in a global information economy where reliability is ever less certain, and source attribution ever more vital., Comment: The Web Conference WWW 2020, 10 pages

A growing volume of heritage data is being digitized and made available as text via optical character recognition (OCR). Scholars and libraries are increasingly using OCR-generated text for retrieval and analysis. However, the process of creating text through OCR introduces varying degrees of error to the text. The impact of these errors on natural language processing (NLP) tasks has only been partially studied. We perform a series of extrinsic assessment tasks — sentence segmentation, named entity recognition, dependency parsing, information retrieval, topic modelling and neural language model fine-tuning — using popular, out-of-the-box tools in order to quantify the impact of OCR quality on these tasks. We find a consistent impact resulting from OCR errors on our downstream tasks with some tasks more irredeemably harmed by OCR errors. Based on these results, we offer some preliminary guidelines for working with text produced through OCR.

Historical newspapers provide a lens on customs and habits of the past. For example, recipes published in newspapers highlight what and how we ate and thought about food. The challenge here is that newspaper data is often unstructured and highly varied. Digitised historical newspapers add an additional challenge, namely that of fluctuations in OCR quality. Therefore, it is difficult to locate and extract recipes from them. We present our approach based on distant supervision and automatically extracted lexicons to identify recipes in digitised historical newspapers, to generate recipe tags, and to extract ingredient information. We provide OCR quality indicators and their impact on the extraction process. We enrich the recipes with links to information on the ingredients. Our research shows how natural language processing, machine learning, and semantic web can be combined to construct a rich dataset from heterogeneous newspapers for the historical analysis of food culture.

This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering heat shock—the heat shock response (HSR) system—in Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation.

I would like to attack a certain view: the view that the concept of identity can fail to apply to some things although, for some positive integer n, we have n of them. The idea of entities without self-identity is seriously entertained in the philosophy of quantum mechanics (QM). It is so pervasive that it has been labelled the Received View (French and Krause 2006. Identity in Physics: A Historical, Philosophical, and Formal Analysis. Oxford: Oxford UP: 105). I introduce the Received View in Section 1. In Section 2 I explain what I mean by “entity” (synonymously, by “object” and “thing”), and I argue that supporters of the Received View should agree with my characterization of the corresponding notion of entity (object, thing). I also explain what I mean by “identity”, and I show that supporters of the Received View agree with my characterization of that notion. In Section 3 I argue that the concept of identity, so characterized, is one with the concept of oneness. Thus, it cannot but apply to what belongs to a collection with n elements, n being a positive integer. In Section 4 I add some considerations on the primitiveness of identity or unity and the status of the Identity of Indiscernibles. In Section 5 I address the problem of how reference to indiscernible objects with identity can be achieved.

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

Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these naturalists alluded to while justifying their position. These theoretical virtues have received little to no attention in the literature on eighteenth-century animal cognition, but figure prominently in the justification of the mechanist, instinctive, and sensationalist theories of animal behavior. Through my philosophical study of the role of theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition, we obtain a deeper understanding of how theoretical virtues were conceptualized in eighteenth-century science and how they influenced the justification of theories of animal cognition.

This paper offers an account of the fact that certain verbs license wh-questions as their complement but not whether-questions. For instance, it is felicitous to say It is surprising who Bill had invited but not to say It is surprising whether Bill had invited his wife. We refer to this contrast as the *whether puzzle. We propose an account which crucially rests on the assumption that the relevant kind of verbs are sensitive to the semantic objects that their complement clause brings into salience, rather than just its truth/resolution conditions. It has been argued in previous work that the semantic objects that matrix questions bring into salience are important to understand the role of such questions in discourse. The present paper is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to argue that this aspect of meaning is also crucial for understanding the role of embedded questions in grammar.

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between complexity and informativeness (Kemp & Regier 2012). The argument has been based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work extends this analysis to a category of function words: indefinite pronouns (e.g. someone, anyone, no-one, cf. Haspelmath 2001). We build on previous work to establish the meaning space and featural make-up for indefinite pronouns, and show that indefinite pronoun systems across languages optimize the complexity/informativeness trade-off. This demonstrates that pressures for efficient communication shape both content and function word categories, thus tying in with the conclusions of recent work on quantifiers by Steinert-Threlkeld (2019). Furthermore, we argue that the trade-off may explain some of the universal properties of indefinite pronouns, thus reducing the explanatory load for linguistic theories.

In advocating the use of a global auxiliary language, Van Parijs forms part of a tradition that stretches back to the seventeenth century. However, he differs from this tradition in promoting the use of English rather than an artificial language of some sort. This paper examines the theoretical situation that van Parijs proposes as the most fair, in which English functions worldwide as the preferred auxiliary language and in which certain measures have been taken to counterbalance injustices of three types. I draw attention to injustices of each of these types done to speakers of English in that situation. This leads to the conclusion that proposals to use an artificial language as a global lingua franca that were made in the seventeenth and later centuries have a stronger case than van Parijs has argued.

In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception as unconscious inference. If our interpretation is right, however, a Helmholtzian view of perception is incompatible with Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle. We argue that the free energy principle and the ecological and enactive approach to mind and life make for a much happier marriage of ideas. We make our argument based on three points. First we argue that the free energy principle applies to the whole animal–environment system, and not only to the brain. Second, we show that active inference, as understood by the free-energy principle, is incompatible with unconscious inference understood as analagous to scientific hypothesis-testing, the main tenet of a Helmholtzian view of perception. Third, we argue that the notion of inference at work in Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle is too weak to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception. Taken together these points imply that the free energy principle is best understood in ecological and enactive terms set out in this paper.

Semantic universals are properties of meaning shared by the languages of the world. We offer an explanation of the presence of such universals by measuring simplicity in terms of ease of learning, showing that expressions satisfying universals are simpler than those that do not according to this criterion. We measure ease of learning using tools from machine learning and analyze universals in a domain of function words (quantifiers) and content words (color terms). Our results provide strong evidence that semantic universals across both function and content words reflect simplicity as measured by ease of learning.

Charles Darwin suggested the perception of rhythm to be common to all animals. While only recently experimental research is finding some support for this claim, there are also aspects of rhythm cognition that appear to be species-specific, such as the capability to perceive a regular pulse (or beat) in a varying rhythm.In the current study, using EEG, we adapted an auditory oddball paradigm that allows for disentangling the contributions of beat perception and isochrony to the temporal predictability of the stimulus. We presented two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) with a rhythmic sequence in two versions: an isochronous version, that was acoustically accented such that it could induce a duple meter (like a march), and a jittered version using the same acoustically accented sequence but that was presented in a randomly timed fashion, as such disabling beat induction.The results reveal that monkeys are sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, but not its metrical structure. The MMN was influenced by the isochrony of the stimulus, resulting in a larger MMN in the regular (isochronous) as opposed to the jittered condition. However, the MMN for both monkeys showed no interaction between metrical position and isochrony. So, while the monkey brain appears to be sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, we find no evidence in support of beat perception.We discuss these results in the context of the gradual audiomotor evolution (GAE) hypothesis (Merchant & Honing, 2014) that suggests beat-based timing to be omnipresent in humans but only weakly so or absent in nonhuman primates.

Perception of a regular beat in music is inferred from different types of accents. For example, increases in loudness cause intensity accents, and the grouping of time intervals in a rhythm creates temporal accents. Accents are expected to occur on the beat: when accents are “missing” on the beat, the beat is more difficult to find. However, it is unclear whether accents occurring off the beat alter beat perception similarly to missing accents on the beat. Moreover, no one has examined whether intensity accents influence beat perception more or less strongly than temporal accents, nor how musical expertise affects sensitivity to each type of accent. In two experiments, we obtained ratings of difficulty in finding the beat in rhythms with either temporal or intensity accents, and which varied in the number of accents on the beat as well as the number of accents off the beat. In both experiments, the occurrence of accents on the beat facilitated beat detection more in musical experts than in musical novices. In addition, the number of accents on the beat affected beat finding more in rhythms with temporal accents than in rhythms with intensity accents. The effect of accents off the beat was much weaker than the effect of accents on the beat and appeared to depend on musical expertise, as well as on the number of accents on the beat: when many accents on the beat are missing, beat perception is quite difficult, and adding accents off the beat may not reduce beat perception further. Overall, the different types of accents were processed qualitatively differently, depending on musical expertise. Therefore, these findings indicate the importance of designing ecologically valid stimuli when testing beat perception in musical novices, who may need different types of accent information than musical experts to be able to find a beat. Furthermore, our findings stress the importance of carefully designing rhythms for social and clinical applications of beat perception, as not all listeners treat all rhythms alike.

Contains fulltext : 193071.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Establishing non-native phoneme categories can be a notoriously difficult endeavour - in both speech perception and speech production. This study asks how these two domains interact in the course of this learning process. It investigates the effect of perceptual learning and related production practice of a challenging non-native category on the perception and/or production of that category. A four-day perceptual training protocol on the British English /æ/-/ɛ/ vowel contrast was combined with either related or unrelated production practice. After feedback on perceptual categorisation of the contrast, native Dutch participants in the related production group (N = 19) pronounced the trial's correct answer, while participants in the unrelated production group (N = 19) pronounced similar but phonologically unrelated words. Comparison of pre- and post-tests showed significant improvement over the course of training in both perception and production, but no differences between the groups were found. The lack of an effect of production practice is discussed in the light of previous, competing results and models of second-language speech perception and production. This study confirms that, even in the context of related production practice, perceptual training boosts production learning. 12 p.

Why do people make deontological decisions, although they often lead to overall unfavorable outcomes? One account is receiving considerable attention: deontological judgments may signal commitment to prosociality and thus may increase people’s chances of being selected as social partners–which carries obvious long-term benefits. Here we test this framework by experimentally exploring whether people making deontological judgments are expected to be more prosocial than those making consequentialist judgments and whether they are actually so. In line with previous studies, we identified deontological choices using the Trapdoor dilemma. Using economic games, we take two measures of general prosociality towards strangers: trustworthiness and altruism. Our results procure converging evidence for a perception gap according to which Trapdoor-deontologists are believed to be more trustworthy and more altruistic towards strangers than Trapdoor-consequentialists, but actually they are not so. These results show that deontological judgments are not universal, reliable signals of prosociality.

Advances in molecular technologies make it possible to pinpoint genomic factors associated with complex human traits. For cognition and behaviour, identification of underlying genes provides new entry points for deciphering the key neurobiological pathways. In the past decade, the search for genetic correlates of musicality has gained traction. Reports have documented familial clustering for different extremes of ability, including amusia and absolute pitch (AP), with twin studies demonstrating high heritability for some music-related skills, such as pitch perception. Certain chromosomal regions have been linked to AP and musical aptitude, while individual candidate genes have been investigated in relation to aptitude and creativity. Most recently, researchers in this field started performing genome-wide association scans. Thus far, studies have been hampered by relatively small sample sizes and limitations in defining components of musicality, including an emphasis on skills that can only be assessed in trained musicians. With opportunities to administer standardized aptitude tests online, systematic large-scale assessment of musical abilities is now feasible, an important step towards high-powered genome-wide screens. Here, we offer a synthesis of existing literatures and outline concrete suggestions for the development of comprehensive operational tools for the analysis of musical phenotypes.

The direct perception theory of empathy claims that we can immediately experience a person’s state of mind. I can see for instance that my neighbour is angry with me in his bodily countenance. I develop a version of the direct perception theory of empathy which takes this perceptual capacity to depend upon recognising in what way the other person is responsive to the affordances the environment provides. By recognising which possibilities for action are relevant to a person, I can thereby understand something about the meaning they give to the world. I come to share something of their perspective on the world, and this allows me to grasp based on my perception of them something about their current state of mind. I argue that shared affect plays a central role in this perceptual capacity. Shared affect allows me to orient my attention to possibilities for action that matter to the other person. I end by briefly discuss the implications of this view of empathy for the disturbances in so-called “cognitive empathy” that are found in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

In the field of early music, the urge to realize historically informed interpretations has led to new perspectives about our musical legacy from scholars and performers alike. Consequently, different schools of early music performance practice have been developed through the 20th and 21st centuries. Analysing the development of performance practice and aesthetics from the perspective of cognitive and computational musicology can potentially provide insights into interrelations between musicology, performance practice and cognition.In the field of performance analysis we may therefore aim to find out which aspects are involved in the categorization of performances or in the identification and understanding of possible performance trends that change over time. For instance, are sudden changes in tempo within the performance of a piece representative of certain musicologically informed interpretations? Is this approach communicated by the performance itself? Do perception and cognition play a role in the aesthetic choices involved in performance?This article concentrates on applying three state-of-the-art quantitative methodologies in expressive performance analysis to elucidate possible relations among musicological and cognitive interpretations. It is shown how a particular methodology may serve (or constrain) the ability to compare different interpretations and define ‘expressiveness’. For this purpose, an analysis and comparison is presented of seven performances of the Prelude from J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite no.1 in G major, BWV1007, played by three different performers.

One of the main assumptions of usage-based constructionist approaches is that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as a repository of constructions, which emerge from experience with language and whose strength of mental representation (entrenchment) is a function of their usage frequency. On the basis of a multistep statistical procedure geared to identify patterns of adverbial clause constructions in two distinct registers, we argue that a model of language that generalizes over situational contexts is implausible. Instead, a more adequate model of linguistic knowledge comprises a set of subrepositories that are adapted to the discourse-functional needs of situational contexts, in which constructions have register-specific entrenchment values.

Should the practice of the historic preservation of built and landscape heritage necessarily be based on conservation? Monuments, listed buildings, landscapes, and other forms of built heritage, are typically regarded as immutable and untouchable—objects to be “conserved”—and as a result tend to fade from public imagination and memory (Rietveld et al., 2017). Current conservative preservation practices tend to fixate built heritage into an arbitrary historical state (choosing for example the building's early seventeenth century state as the reference), which negates both the historical process that shaped it (and followed it), as well as any possibility for rendering it relevant for the present or to bring us further into the future. Instead of just halting decay, we argue that one should aim at generating meaning from the old for current and future generations. In order to achieve this, we need a radically new perspective on built cultural heritage, which can only be reached by approaching heritage in a different way: one that conceives of preservation as an effort toward imagination and activation, rather than conservation.This view has been the motivation behind RAAAF's radical interventions in the field of heritage. RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances] is a multidisciplinary studio operating at the intersection of architecture, visual art and philosophy. One example (Figure 1) of such a new perspective on cultural heritage is Bunker 599, where RAAAF|Atelier de Lyon cut through a bunker that is part of the UNESCO World Heritage-nominated New Dutch Waterline. In a radical way this intervention sheds new light on the Dutch and UNESCO policies on cultural heritage. At the same time, it makes people look at their surroundings in a new way. The bunker becomes the entrance to an 80 km long potential park of the twenty-first century, the New Dutch Waterline Park. A seemingly indestructible bunker with monumental status is sliced open. Paradoxically, after the intervention Bunker 599 became a Dutch national monument, so it “increased” in monumental value. The strategic intervention (Rietveld E. et al., 2014) offers a new perspective on the other 700 bunkers in the New Dutch Waterline.

Enculturation is known to shape the perception of meter in music but this is not explicitly accounted for by current cognitive models of meter perception. We hypothesize that the induction of meter is a result of predictive coding: interpreting onsets in a rhythm relative to a periodic meter facilitates prediction of future onsets. Such prediction, we hypothesize, is based on previous exposure to rhythms. As such, predictive coding provides a possible explanation for the way meter perception is shaped by the cultural environment. Based on this hypothesis, we present a probabilistic model of meter perception that uses statistical properties of the relation between rhythm and meter to infer meter from quantized rhythms. We show that our model can successfully predict annotated time signatures from quantized rhythmic patterns derived from folk melodies. Furthermore, we show that by inferring meter, our model improves prediction of the onsets of future events compared to a similar probabilistic model that does not infer meter. Finally, as a proof of concept, we demonstrate how our model can be used in a simulation of enculturation. From the results of this simulation, we derive a class of rhythms that are likely to be interpreted differently by enculturated listeners with different histories of exposure to rhythms.

A high degree of topical diversity is often considered to be an important characteristic of interesting text documents. A recent proposal for measuring topical diversity identifies three elements for assessing diversity: words, topics, and documents as collections of words. Topic models play a central role in this approach. Using standard topic models for measuring diversity of documents is suboptimal due to generality and impurity. General topics only include common information from a background corpus and are assigned to most of the documents in the collection. Impure topics contain words that are not related to the topic; impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models and impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a hierarchical re-estimation approach for topic models to combat generality and impurity; the proposed approach operates at three levels: words, topics, and documents. Our re-estimation approach for measuring documents’ topical diversity outperforms the state of the art on PubMed dataset which is commonly used for diversity experiments.

There is an accumulating body of evidence that knowledge of the statistics of multiword phrases (MWP) facilitates native language learning and processing both in children and adults. However, less is known about whether adult second language (L2) learners are able to develop native-like sensitivity to the statistics of MWP, and more importantly up until now no attempt has been made to determine to what extent variation in this ability is related to individual differences (IDs) in cognitive and affective factors. Using a within-subject design embedded in an individual-differences framework, the aim of the present study was twofold: (1) to replicate the MWP frequency effect reported in Hernandez et al. [1] with another sample of L2 learners, and (2) to determine to what extent variation in online L2 processing of MWP can be accounted for by two IDs measures, working memory (WM) and personality. We could replicate the frequency effect for MWP from the high frequency band but not for MWP from the low frequency band. Our findings revealed that while there was no main effect of WM, the Openness personality trait had a statistically significant impact on online L2 processing of MWP. However, subsequent analyses yielded three significant two-way interactions indicating that the relationship between WM, personality and online L2 processing of MWP is a complex one. Taken together our findings underscore the importance of further investigation of L2 learners’ ability to keep track of and build up knowledge of the statistics of MWPs as well as the interrelationships between the cognitive and affective IDs that impact the development of such ability.