Search

This paper reports on the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the CLEF 2022 SimpleText track. The overall goal of removing barriers that prevent the general public from accessing scientific literature is of great importance to help users make sense of a world of misinformation and shallow opinions. We perform preliminary studies within the track’s setup, analyzing the text complexity of searching a large set of academic abstracts in the context of popular science topics emerging in the news, with a specific focus at the relation between the topical relevance and the text complexity of the retrieved information. Our main findings are the following. First, we analyzed a large corpus of scientific abstracts and confirmed that these are highly complex on average, but that the variation is large and many abstracts with accessible readability levels exist. Second, we ran retrieval experiments and found that standard search ignores readability, yet filtering on the desirable reading level still retains competitive performance while avoiding retrieving relevant but incomprehensible results. Third, we ran complexity spotting experiments and found that straightforward lexical complexity or term frequency measures are strong indicators, but have to be combined with the importance of the concept in the broader context of the information request. Fourth, we ran a GPT-2 based text simplification model in a zero-shot way, resulting in conservative rewriting of abstracts, able to significantly reduce the text complexity. More generally, our results demonstrate that text complexity is an essential aspect to consider for improving non-expert access to scientific information, and opens up new routes to develop effective scientific information access technology tailored to needs of the general public.

Quantifying determiners most and more than half are standardly assumed to have the same truth-conditional meaning. Much work builds on this assumption in studying how the two quantifiers are mentally encoded and processed (Hackl, 2009; Lidz et al., 2011; Pietroski et al., 2009; Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015; Szymanik & Zajenkowski, 2010; Talmina et al., 2017). There is however empirical evidence that most is sometimes interpreted as ‘significantly more than half’ (Ariel, 2003, 2004; Ramotowska et al., 2020; Solt, 2011, 2016). Is this difference between most and more than half a pragmatic effect, or is the standard assumption that the two quantifiers are truth-conditionally equivalent wrong? We report two experiments which demonstrate that most preserves the ‘significantly more than half’ interpretation in negative environments, which we argue to speak in favor of there being a difference between the two quantifiers at the level of truth conditions.

Free choice inferences represent a much discussed case of a divergence between logic and language (Kamp 1973, Zimmermann 2000). Grice influentially argued that the assumption that such divergence does in fact exist is a mistake originating “from inadequate attention to the nature and importance of the conditions governing conversation” (Grice 1989: 24). I will first show that when applied to free choice phenomena, the standard implementation of Grice’s view, representing semantics and pragmatics as two separate components, is empirically inadequate. I will then propose a different account: a bilateral state-based modal logic modelling next to literal meanings also pragmatic factors and the additional inferences that arise from their interaction. The pragmatic factor I will consider connects to a tendency of language users to neglect empty configurations when engaging in linguistic interpretation. The non-emptiness atom (ne) from team semantics provides a perspicuous way to formally represent this tendency and to rigorously study its impact on interpretation. In terms of ne, I will define a pragmatic enrichment function and show that, in interaction with disjunction occurring in positive contexts and only in these cases, pragmatic enrichment yields non-trivial effects including predicting free choice inferences and their cancellation under negation. The latter result relies on the adopted bilateralism, where each connective comes with an assertion and a rejection condition and negation is defined in terms of the latter notion.

Silent gesture studies, in which hearing participants from different linguistic backgrounds produce gestures to communicate events, have been used to test hypotheses about the cognitive biases that govern cross-linguistic word order preferences. In particular, the differential use of SOV and SVO order to communicate, respectively, extensional events (where the direct object exists independently of the event; e.g., girl throws ball) and intensional events (where the meaning of the direct object is potentially dependent on the verb; e.g., girl thinks of ball), has been suggested to represent a natural preference, demonstrated in improvisation contexts. However, natural languages tend to prefer systematic word orders, where a single order is used regardless of the event being communicated. We present a series of studies that investigate ordering preferences for SOV and SVO orders using an online forced-choice experiment, where English-speaking participants select orders for different events i) in the absence of conventions and ii) after learning event-order mappings in different frequencies in a regularisation experiment. Our results show that natural ordering preferences arise in the absence of conventions, replicating previous findings from production experiments. In addition, we show that participants regularise the input they learn in the manual modality in two ways, such that, while the preference for systematic order patterns increases through learning, it exists in competition with the natural ordering preference, that conditions order on the semantics of the event. Using our experimental data in a computational model of cultural transmission, we show that this pattern is expected to persist over generations, suggesting that we should expect to see evidence of semantically-conditioned word order variability in at least some languages.

Indicative conditionals—that is, sentences typically, though not exclusively, of the form “If p, (then) q,”—belong to the most puzzling phenomena of language. One of the puzzles that has recently attracted attention of psychologists of reasoning stems from the fact that on the majority of accounts of indicative conditionals, “If p, (then) q” can be true, or at least highly acceptable, even when there is no meaningful connection between p and q. Conditionals without such a connection, dubbed missing-link conditionals, however, often seem very odd. A standard pragmatic account of their oddity rests on an observation that, whenever missing-link conditionals come out as true, these are situations in which speakers are justified in asserting stronger, more informative statements. Asserting a less informative statement is odd because it is a violation of the Maxim of Quantity. This paper reports four experiments that present a challenge to the Gricean explanation of why missing-link conditionals are odd. At the same time, we will argue that these findings can be reconciled with general principles of Gricean pragmatics, if the connection is treated as a part of a conventional, “core” meaning of a conditional.

Many analyses of notion of metainferences in the non-transitive logic have tackled the question of whether can be identified with classical logic. In this paper, we argue that the primary analyses are overly restrictive of the notion of metainference. We offer a more elegant and tractable semantics for the strict-tolerant hierarchy based on the three-valued function for the material conditional. This semantics can be shown to easily handle the introduction of mixed inferences, i.e., inferences involving objects belonging to more than one (meta)inferential level and solves several other limitations of the hierarchies introduced by Barrio, Pailos, and Szmuc.

This theme issue assembles current studies that ask how and why precise synchronization and related forms of rhythm interaction are expressed in a wide range of behaviour. The studies cover human activity, with an emphasis on music, and social behaviour, reproduction and communication in non-human animals. In most cases, the temporally aligned rhythms have short—from several seconds down to a fraction of a second—periods and are regulated by central nervous system pacemakers, but interactions involving rhythms that are 24 h or longer and originate in biological clocks also occur. Across this spectrum of activities, species and time scales, empirical work and modelling suggest that synchrony arises from a limited number of coupled-oscillator mechanisms with which individuals mutually entrain. Phylogenetic distribution of these common mechanisms points towards convergent evolution. Studies of animal communication indicate that many synchronous interactions between the signals of neighbouring individuals are specifically favoured by selection. However, synchronous displays are often emergent properties of entrainment between signalling individuals, and in some situations, the very signallers who produce a display might not gain any benefit from the collective timing of their production. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

Domain extension in mathematics occurs whenever a given mathematical domain is augmented so as to include new elements. Manders argues that the advantages of important cases of domain extension are captured by the model-theoretic notions of existential closure and model completion. In the specific case of domain extension via ideal elements, I argue, Manders’s proposed explanation does not suffice. I then develop and formalize a different approach to domain extension based on Dedekind’s Habilitationsrede, to which Manders’s account is compared. I conclude with an examination of three possible stances towards extensions via ideal elements.

We present four types of neural language models trained on a large historical dataset of books in English, published between 1760-1900 and comprised of ~5.1 billion tokens. The language model architectures include static (word2vec and fastText) and contextualized models (BERT and Flair). For each architecture, we trained a model instance using the whole dataset. Additionally, we trained separate instances on text published before 1850 for the two static models, and four instances considering different time slices for BERT. Our models have already been used in various downstream tasks where they consistently improved performance. In this paper, we describe how the models have been created and outline their reuse potential., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure

This short note addresses the question whether Rietveld’s account of visual arts and adaptive behaviour be extended to literature.

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.

This study presents the results of an experiment we performed to measure the coverage of Digital Humanities (DH) publications in mainstream open and proprietary bibliographic data sources, by further highlighting the relations among DH and other disciplines. We created a list of DH journals based on manual curation and bibliometric data. We used that list to identify DH publications in the bibliographic data sources under consideration. We used the ERIH-PLUS list of journals to identify Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) publications. We analysed the citation links they included to understand the relationship between DH publications and SSH and non-SSH fields. Crossref emerges as the database containing the highest number of DH publications. Citations from and to DH publications show strong connections between DH and research in Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, and Pedagogical & Educational Research. Computer Science is responsible for a large part of incoming and outgoing citations to and from DH research, which suggests a reciprocal interest between the two disciplines. This is the first bibliometric study of DH research involving several bibliographic data sources, including open and proprietary databases. The list of DH journals we created might be only partially representative of broader DH research. In addition, some DH publications could have been cut off from the study since we did not consider books and other publications published in proceedings of DH conferences and workshops. Finally, we used a specific time coverage (2000–2018) that could have prevented the inclusion of additional DH publications.

Natural languages exhibit many semantic universals, that is, properties of meaning shared across all languages. In this paper, we develop an explanation of one very prominent semantic universal, the monotonicity universal. While the existing work has shown that quantifiers satisfying the monotonicity universal are easier to learn, we provide a more complete explanation by considering the emergence of quantifiers from the perspective of cultural evolution. In particular, we show that quantifiers satisfy the monotonicity universal evolve reliably in an iterated learning paradigm with neural networks as agents.

The COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to the obvious implications for public health and the economy at a global scale, has also had significant social and cultural effects: the partial or complete lockdown of public life breaks social and cultural networks and habits, and necessitates the invention of new forms of communication, contact, and inspiration. Over the course of the pandemic, various initiatives have emerged that have tried to capture this unique moment in history by collecting documentation on the social and cultural impact of the pandemic on people’s daily lives. Most of these collections were created bottom-up, either by actively approaching individuals or communities to contribute or be interviewed, or by opening platforms where citizens could directly contribute documentation. In this paper, we analyse two such citizen-generated collections of experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic: the ‘Corona in the City’ collection, assembled by the Amsterdam Museum for an online exhibition with the same title, and the ‘Dagboek Corona’ (Corona Diary) collection of diary contributions, assembled by the Dutch public historian and journalist José Boon. The paper discusses the background of these citizen-generated COVID-19 collections, assessing their scope and accessibility, and presenting a first, qualitative analysis of their content. We conclude with a reflection on the implications of the findings for people’s social life and identity, indicating how the datasets can be explored in further research and how the findings may benefit effective policy making.

COVID-19 has revealed that science needs to learn how to better deal with the irreducible uncertainty that comes with global systemic risks as well as with the social responsibility of science towards the public good. Further developing the epistemological principles of new theories and experimental practices, alternative investigative pathways and communication, and diverse voices can be an important contribution of history and philosophy of science and of science studies to ongoing transformations of the scientific enterprise.

In this paper, I explain how concepts, methods, and values are entangled. While the argument can be applied widely across the sciences, I focus here on the sciences of health and disease, and on public health. I will argue, on top of well-established arguments, not only that scientific methods and concepts are value-laden, but also value-promoting, and so any normative questions cannot be asked at the end or outside of the scientific process, but should be an integral part of it. Ultimately, this is to provide an argument for the urgent need to synergistically combine epistemology and ethics, in public health as well as in other scientific and policy contexts.

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.

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 distributions for assessing the diversity of documents: distributions of words within documents, words within topics, and topics within documents. Topic models play a central role in this approach and, hence, their quality is crucial to the efficacy of measuring topical diversity. The quality of topic models is affected by two causes: generality and impurity of topics. General topics only include common information of a background corpus and are assigned to most of the documents. Impure topics contain words that are not related to the topic. Impurity lowers the interpretability of topic models. Impure topics are likely to get assigned to documents erroneously. We propose a hierarchical re-estimation process aimed at removing generality and impurity. Our approach has three re-estimation components: (1) document re-estimation, which removes general words from the documents; (2) topic re-estimation, which re-estimates the distribution over words of each topic; and (3) topic assignment re-estimation, which re-estimates for each document its distributions over topics. For measuring topical diversity of text documents, our HiTR approach improves over the state-of-the-art measured on PubMed dataset., Comment: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

We present an inferentialist account of the epistemic modal operator might. Our starting point is the bilateralist programme. A bilateralist explains the operator not in terms of the speech act of rejection; we explain the operator might in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence we argue for on the basis of linguistic evidence. We show that our account of might provides a solution to certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of modal vocabulary whilst retaining classical logic. This demonstrates that an inferentialist approach to meaning can be successfully extended beyond the core logical constants.

Historians of science have described various cases of disciplines influencing one another. Such exchanges across disciplinary boundaries often signal innovation, intellectual change, and breakthroughs. A satisfactory framework from which the historical phenomenon of epistemic transfer between disciplines can be studied systematically, however, has not yet been proposed. This essay introduces the notion of “cognitive goods,” a tool of knowledge making that can be transferred across disciplinary boundaries. Cognitive goods include, for example, methods, concepts, and instruments. The essay proposes to study historical interactions between disciplines as instances of the “flow” of cognitive goods. The notion of cognitive goodsmay serve as a springboard for a systematic analysis of flows occurring throughout the history of the disciplines. Such an analysis could be instrumental for an integrated historiography of knowledge, including the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

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.

A prominent objection against the logicality of second-order logic is the so-called Overgeneration Argument. However, it is far from clear how this argument is to be understood. In the first part of the article, we examine the argument and locate its main source, namely, the alleged entanglement of second-order logic and mathematics. We then identify various reasons why the entanglement may be thought to be problematic. In the second part of the article, we take a metatheoretic perspective on the matter. We prove a number of results establishing that the entanglement is sensitive to the kind of semantics used for second-order logic. These results provide evidence that by moving from the standard set-theoretic semantics for second-order logic to a semantics which makes use of higher-order resources, the entanglement either disappears or may no longer be in conflict with the logicality of second-order logic.

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.

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

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.

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.

This article provides a systematic and pluralistic theory of causation that fits the kind of reasoning commonly found in mixed methods research. It encompasses a variety of causal concepts, notions, approaches, and methods. Each instantiation of the theory is like a mosaic, where the image appears when the tiles are appropriately displayed. This means that researchers should carefully construct a causal mosaic for each research study, articulating what is causally relevant given their particular research questions, purposes, contexts, methods, methodologies, paradigms, and resources. Our theory includes 11 propositions that can guide researchers addressing causation.

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.

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.

In this paper, new evidence is presented for the assumption that the reason-relation reading of indicative conditionals ('if A, then C') reflects a conventional implicature. In four experiments, it is investigated whether relevance effects found for the probability assessment of indicative conditionals (Skovgaard-Olsen, Singmann, & Klauer, 2016a) can be classified as being produced by (a) a conversational implicature, (b) a (probabilistic) presupposition failure, or (c) a con- ventional implicature. After considering several alternative hypotheses, and the accumulating evidence from other studies as well, we conclude that the evidence is most consistent with the Relevance Effect being the outcome of a conventional implicature. This finding indicates that the reason-relation reading is part of the semantic content of indicative conditionals, albeit not part of their primary truth-conditional content.

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.

Two-dimensional accounts of speech and thought make use of so-called ‘diagonal’ propositions. If diagonals are indeed propositions, they can be negated: an ‘anti-diagonal’ is the negation of a diagonal. However, the existence of anti-diagonals is inconsistent with very natural assumptions to which two-dimensionalists like Chalmers and Stalnaker are committed, as shown by an argument that closely resembles more familiar paradoxes.

This themed issue brings together introductions to some of the important texts that shaped the modern humanities. We argue that these texts are foundational for the humanities, and yet they are rarely read. Our collection starts in the predisciplinary realm of the Enlightenment, moves on to the increasing specialization and professionalization of the nineteenth century, and follows with early twentieth-century texts that aimed to overcome academic compartmentalization. The collection ends with the introduction of new digital methods in the decades after World War II.

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.

The paper focuses on a recent challenge brought forward against the interventionist approach to the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. According to this objection, interventionism cannot in general account for the interpretation of right-nested counterfactuals, the problem being its strict interventionism. We will report on the results of an empirical study supporting the objection, and we will extend the well-known logic of actual causality with a new operator expressing an alternative notion of intervention that does not suffer from the problem (and thus can account for some critical examples). The core idea of the alternative approach is a new notion of intervention, which operates on the evaluation of the variables in a causal model, and not on their functional dependencies. Our result provides new insights into the logical analysis of causal reasoning.

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.

The digital transformation is turning archives, both old and new, into data. As a consequence, automation in the form of artificial intelligence techniques is increasingly applied both to scale traditional recordkeeping activities, and to experiment with novel ways to capture, organise, and access records. We survey recent developments at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and archival thinking and practice. Our overview of this growing body of literature is organised through the lenses of the Records Continuum model. We find four broad themes in the literature on archives and artificial intelligence: theoretical and professional considerations, the automation of recordkeeping processes, organising and accessing archives, and novel forms of digital archives. We conclude by underlining emerging trends and directions for future work, which include the application of recordkeeping principles to the very data and processes that power modern artificial intelligence and a more structural—yet critically aware—integration of artificial intelligence into archival systems and practice.

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.

Expressivists about epistemic modals deny that ‘Jane might be late’ canonically serves to express the speaker’s acceptance of a certain propositional content. Instead, they hold that it expresses a lack of acceptance (that Jane isn’t late). Prominent expressivists embrace pragmatic expressivism: the doxastic property expressed by a declarative is not helpfully identified with (any part of) that sentence’s compositional semantic value. Against this, we defend semantic expressivism about epistemic modals: the semantic value of a declarative from this domain is (partly) the property of doxastic attitudes it canonically serves to express. In support, we synthesize data from the critical literature on expressivism—largely reflecting interactions between modals and disjunctions—and present a semantic expressivism that readily predicts the data. This contrasts with salient competitors, including: pragmatic expressivism based on domain semantics or dynamic semantics; semantic expressivism à la Moss (Semant Pragmat 8(5):1–81, 2015. 10.3765/sp.8.5); and the bounded relational semantics of Mandelkern (Philos Rev 128(1):1–61, 2019. 10.1215/00318108-7213001).

Modern information access systems hold the promise to give users direct access to key information from authoritative primary sources such as scientific literature, but non-experts tend to avoid these sources due to their complex language, internal vernacular, or lacking prior background knowledge. Text simplification approaches can remove some of these barriers, thereby avoiding that users rely on shallow information in sources prioritizing commercial or political incentives rather than the correctness and informational value. The CLEF 2021 SimpleText track will address the opportunities and challenges of text simplification approaches to improve scientific information access head-on. We aim to provide appropriate data and benchmarks, starting with pilot tasks in 2021, and create a community of NLP and IR researchers working together to resolve one of the greatest challenges of today.

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.

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because (members of) kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account.

Communication facilitates coordination, but coordination might fail if there's too much uncertainty. I discuss a scenario in which vagueness-driven uncertainty undermines the possibility of publicly sharing a belief. I then show that asserting an epistemic modal sentence, 'Might p', can reveal the speaker's uncertainty, and that this may improve the chances of coordination despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. This provides a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic modality. The account draws on a standard relational semantics for epistemic modality, Stalnaker's theory of assertion as informative update, and a Bayesian framework for reasoning under uncertainty., Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2021, arXiv:2106.10886

What is an object? In this thesis it is this seemingly trivial concept which is up for investigation. Inspired by insights of Immanuel Kant, the concept of object is given a transcendentalist treatment, the central idea of which is that the practice of viewing all of reality in terms of objects, having properties and being related in certain ways, is a human mode of understanding, inherent in our cognitive system. It is argued that first-order logic should be seen as an expression of the main principles guiding human cognition. These principles are intended to describe what I call ‘the draft ontology’, our intuitive picture of the world. It is argued that the study of the human cognitive system is an essential element of the methodology to arrive at a more systematic ontology. The transcendentalist approach is worked out in the form of what will be called ‘image theory’, a theory centred around the modules of the human cognitive system (‘images’) that perform procedures on what is perceptually available to us. It is these that determine properties and thereby effect the ‘emergence’ of the objects themselves. These ideas are put to work for analysis of two major ways in which new objects arise out of existing ones: mereological fusion and abstraction. Abstraction—the emergence of objects like ‘the’ tiger and whiteness out of tigers and white things respectively—is a phenomenon showing many similarities with mereological fusion. Image theory also turns out to be relevant for the conditions of being real, being unreal, and being halfway, as they figure in issues like existence, fiction, imagination, and modality.

We present a systematic procedure for interrater disagreement resolution. The procedure is general, but of particular use in multiple-annotator tasks geared towards ground truth construction. We motivate our proposal by arguing that, barring cases in which the researchers’ goal is to elicit different viewpoints, interrater disagreement is a sign of poor quality in the design or the description of a task. Consensus among annotators, we maintain, should be striven for, through a systematic procedure for disagreement resolution such as the one we describe.

The thesis characterises logic as a formal presentation of a guide to undertaking a rational practice, a guide which is itself constituted by epistemic norms and their consequences. There in general may be more than one "good" presentation, more than one "good" practice, and more than one way to conceive of the practice. This is a pragmatic conception of logical pluralism we call thoroughgoing logical pluralism. The thesis consists in a defence of thoroughgoing logical pluralism, and a case for how such a characterisation of logic is helpful in addressing problems in logical revision, semantic paradoxes, and the incommensurability of logical theories. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the aforementioned view of logic (clarifying what is meant by "formal" and "epistemic norms"), and defends it against the usual objections to logical pluralism and treats of a few rival approaches to logical pluralism. The second chapter of the thesis defends the view that logical revision is a form of narrow reflective equilibrium with respect to the norms which constitute the practice that the logic is formalising, and the formalisation itself. The third chapter of the thesis outlines a family of pragmatic solutions to the liar paradox along the lines of the practitioner identifying the norms they wish to keep, and changing their practice or formalisation in accordance with either keeping a truth predicate in her logical language or not. Either way, paradoxical statements do not appear in the extension of a truth predicate in this language. This comes about through identifying the existence of paraconsistent (dual) Kripke fixed point-defined truth predicate extensions of a family of languages of arithmetic, starting from simply that of arithmetic and stretching into a hierarchy of predicates: the truth predicate, and a proper class of ordinal-indexed "paradoxicality" predicates. Such a language is defined and the existence of fixed points for the extensions of a hierarchy of predicates for paraconsistent models of arithmetic is proven. The fourth chapter of the thesis outlines how, through a modification of Craige Roberts' Questions Under Discussion framework, one can provide an account of how practitioners of different logics may understand and learn from each-other's proofs—to the extent that a formal translation sufficient to do this is allowed, given linguistic constraints. This is managed on the basis of a characterisation of the potential ability of the formal mathematician to make the relevant inferences. This account of logic provides the beginning of an answer to the question of how logic is normative for thought. A terse response to the question in light of this account is that logics are normative for thought insofar as they outrun the mental capacities of practitioners to think through the consequences of their norm-following. Further suggestions of how to elaborate on this response, particularly in how to amend it for applications of logics outside of descriptive languages, are provided at the end of the thesis.

The Overgeneration Argument is a prominent objection against the model-theoretic account of logical consequence for second-order languages. In previous work we have offered a reconstruction of this argument which locates its source in the conflict between the neutrality of second-order logic and its alleged entanglement with mathematics. Some cases of this conflict concern small large cardinals. In this article, we show that in these cases the conflict can be resolved by moving from a set-theoretic implementation of the model-theoretic account to one which uses higher-order resources.

This chapter develops a novel solution to the negation version of the Frege–Geach problem by taking up recent insights from the bilateral programme in logic. Bilateralists explain the meaning of negation in terms of a primitive B-type inconsistency involving the attitudes of assent and dissent. Some may demand an explanation of this inconsistency in simpler terms, but here it is argued that bilateralism’s assumptions are no less explanatory than those of A-type semantics that only require a single primitive attitude, but must stipulate inconsistency elsewhere. A version of B-type expressivism called inferential expressivism—a novel semantic framework that characterizes meanings by inferential roles that define which attitudes one can infer from the use of terms—is developed. This framework is applied to normative vocabulary, thereby solving the Frege–Geach problem generally and comprehensively. The chapter includes a semantics for epistemic modals, thereby also explaining normative terms under epistemic modals.