Definite Descriptions Research Articles

O discurso como objeto-de-discurso em expressões nominais anafóricas

This paper focuses on anaphoric nominal expressions in order to distinguish the specific characteristics presented by expressions of metadiscursive nature in the process of textual references construction and referention progression. Such specific characteristics, related to self-reflexive peculiarity which defines the metadiscourse, differ from the comparasion between metadiscursive nominal anaphora and anaphoric nominal forms carrying informative function such as the definite and indefinite descriptions, nominalizations and associative anaphora.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Logic and Divine Simplicity

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Logic and Divine Simplicity

Donkey anaphora: the view from sign language (ASL and LSF)

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey, he beats it). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantifiers so as to allow them to bind variables that are not within their syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to existential quantifiers; recent dynamic approaches have extended it to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of E-type analyses take the pronoun to have the semantics of a definite description (with it ≈ the donkey, or the donkey that John owns). While competing accounts make very different claims about the patterns of coindexation that are found in the syntax, these are not morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are in sign language, namely through locus assignment and pointing. We make two main claims on the basis of ASL and LSF data. First, sign language data favor dynamic over E-type theories: in those cases in which the two approaches make conflicting predictions about possible patterns of coindexation, dynamic analyses are at an advantage. Second, among dynamic theories, sign language data favor recent ones because the very same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent. Going beyond this debate, we argue that dynamic theories should allow pronouns to be bound across negative expressions, as long as the pronoun is presupposed to have a non-empty denotation. Finally, an appendix displays and explains subtle differences between overt sign language pronouns and all other pronouns in examples involving ‘disjunctive antecedents’, and suggests that counterparts of sign language loci might be found in spoken language.

Factors causing overspecification in definite descriptions

Speakers often overspecify their target descriptions and include more information than necessary for unique identification of the target referent. In the current paper, we study the production of definite target descriptions, and explore several factors that might influence the amount of information that is included in these descriptions. First, we present the results of a large-scale experiment investigating referential overspecification as a function of the properties of a target referent and the communicative setting. The results show that speakers (both in written and oral conditions) tend to provide more information when a target is plural rather than singular, and in domains where the speaker has more referential possibilities to describe the target. However, written and spoken referring expressions do not differ in terms of semantic redundancy. We conclude our paper by discussing the implications of our empirical findings for pragmatic theory and for language production models.

Incomplete Symbols in Principia Mathematica and Russell’s “Definite Proof”

Early in Principia Mathematica Russell presents an argument that “‘the author of Waverley means nothing”, an argument that he calls a “definite proof”. He generalizes it to claim that definite descriptions are incomplete symbols having meaning only in sentential context. This Principia “proof” went largely unnoticed until Russell reaffirmed a near-identical “proof” in his philosophical autobiography nearly 50 years later. The “proof” is important, not only because it grounds our understanding of incomplete symbols in the Principia programme, but also because failure to understand it fully has been a source of much unjustified criticism of Russell to the effect that he was wedded to a naïve theory of meaning and prone to carelessness and confusion in his philosophy of logic and language generally. In my paper, I (1) defend Russell’s “proof” against attacks from several sources over the last half century, (2) examine the implications of the “proof” for understanding Russell’s treatment of class symbols in Principia, and (3) see how the Principia notion of incomplete symbol was carried forward into Russell’s conception of philosophical analysis as it developed in his logical atomist period after 1910.

A Computationally-Discovered Simplification of the Ontological Argument

The authors investigated the ontological argument computationally. The premises and conclusion of the argument are represented in the syntax understood by the automated reasoning engine PROVER9. Using the logic of definite descriptions, the authors developed a valid representation of the argument that required three non-logical premises. PROVER9, however, discovered a simpler valid argument for God's existence from a single non-logical premise. Reducing the argument to one non-logical premise brings the investigation of the soundness of the argument into better focus. Also, the simpler representation of the argument brings out clearly how the ontological argument constitutes an early example of a ‘diagonal argument’ and, moreover, one used to establish a positive conclusion rather than a paradox.

Incomplete Symbols in <em>Principia Mathematica</em> and Russell’s “Definite Proof”

Early in Principia Mathematica Russell presents an argument that "‘the author of Waverley’ means nothing", an argument that he calls a "definite proof". He generalizes it to claim that definite descriptions are incomplete symbols having meaning only in sentential context. This Principia "proof" went largely unnoticed until Russell reaffirmed a near-identical "proof" in his philosophical autobiography nearly 50 years later. The "proof" is important, not only because it grounds our understanding of incomplete symbols in the Principia programme, but also because failure to understand it fully has been a source of much unjustified criticism of Russell to the effect that he was wedded to a naive theory of meaning and prone to carelessness and confusion in his philosophy of logic and language generally. In my paper, I (1) defend Russell’s "proof" against attacks from several sources over the last half century, (2) examine the implications of the "proof" for understanding Russell’s treatment of class symbols in Principia, and (3) see how the Principia notion of incomplete symbol was carried forward into Russell’s conception of philosophical analysis as it developed in his logical atomist period after 1910.

Jón Pétursson læknir og ritverk hans II

Jón Pétursson (1733-1801) was an apprentice af the first Chief Medical Officer of Iceland. In 1765 Pétursson enrolled in the Medical Faculty at the University of Copenhagen. In 1769 with the Faculties approval he published a monograph on the so called Icelandic Scurvy. In 1770-71 Pétursson served as ship's surgeon in the Royal Danish Navy on an expedition to the Mediterranean. In 1772-1775 he served as an assistant to the Chief Medical Officer and the newly appointed apothecary, who shared premises at Nes, Reykjavík. In 1775 he was appointed surgeon (chirurgeon) to the Northern District. Pétursson wrote two medical book while serving his district, both being prepared now for republication. A. The Lækningabók fyrir almúga (Leechbook for common people) published posthumously 1834, edited by Sveinn Pálsson surgeon. It was undoubtedly inspired by the Swiss physician Tissot and his book Avis au peuple sur sa santé ou traité des maladies plus fréquentes 1761. B. A treatise on rheumatism or dirorder of the joints (Stutt ágrip um iktsýki edur lidaveiki, 1782). In Scand J Rheumatol 1996: 25; 134-7 the authors point out that Péturssons description of what he calls arthritis vaga encompasses these essential features: It is common, chronic, destructive, inflammatory polyarthritis, sometimes with systemic manifestations. It affects peope of all ages and has a female preponderance. They state that only rheumatoid arthritis fulfills these specifications. They conclude that medical history should give Pétursson credit for the first definite description of rheumatoid arthritis.

BETWEEN DE DICTO AND DE RE: DE OBJECTO ATTITUDES

Hintikka's second generation epistemic logic introduces a syntactic device allowing to express independence relations between certain logical constants. De re knowledge attributions can be reformulated in terms of quantifier independence, but the reformulation does not extend to non‐factive attitudes like belief. There, formulae with independent quantifiers serve to express a new type of attitude, intermediate between de dicto and de re, called ‘de objecto’: in each possible world compatible with the agent's belief, there is an individual with the specified property – in each world the same individual, which or who need not exist actually. The philosophical benefits of our analysis of propositional attitudes include a refined account of the behaviour of proper names as well as of indefinite and definite descriptions in attitude reports. Some remarks about perception and about the hallucination argument are also presented.

Logic and Divine Simplicity

AbstractThe paper surveys two contrasting views of first‐order analyses of classical theistic doctrines about the existence and nature of God. On the first view, first‐order logic provides methods for the adequate analysis of these doctrines, for example by construing ‘God’ as a singular term or as a monadic predicate, or by taking it to be a definite description. On the second view, such analyses are conceptually inadequate, at least when the doctrines in question are viewed against the background of classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity, for first‐order analyses presuppose an ontological complexity on the part of the propositions which they analyze, which fits ill with this doctrine.

Contextualism, Pragmatics and Definite Descriptions

Contextualism, Pragmatics and Definite Descriptions Very few philosophers and linguists doubt that definite descriptions have attributive uses and referential uses. The point of disagreement concerns whether the difference in uses is grounded on a difference in meaning. The Ambiguity Theory holds while the Implicature Theory denies that definite descriptions are ambiguous expressions, having an attributive meaning and a referential meaning. Contextualists have attempted to steer between the Ambiguity Theory and the Implicature Theory. I claim that the early contextualist account provided by Recanati and Bezuidehnout based on the idea that definite descriptions are semantically underdetermined and in need of a completion from the contextually available information through an optional top-down pragmatic process suffers from an explanatory gap.

Article défini, pronoms personnels de 3e personne et démonstratifs : approche comparée de l’accès à la référence

In the study of anaphora, one major issue is that of the access modes provided by full NPs and pronouns. An access mode is understood not as the whole process of anaphor resolution, but as the set of procedural and qualitative information common to all NPs of a given type (for instance, common to all definite descriptions). The present study proposes a comparative approach to those access modes, focusing more specifically on demonstratives, definite descriptions and third-person pronouns. About demonstratives, which can be either pronouns or determiners, it confirms that, as stated in the utterer-centred approach to language, each has a single core value, and therefore encodes a single access mode, whether it is used as a determiner or as a pronoun in context. The study seeks to determine on what grounds a simple demonstrative is preferred over a complex one. The other question raised is whether such pairing between a determiner and a pronoun can also occur with members of the determiner and pronoun paradigms that do not share a form. To that end, the study compares the access modes coded by the definite article and third-person pronouns. It argues that they, too, form a pair.

An Intensional Solution to the Bike Puzzle of Intentional Identity

In a 2005 paper Olafur Pall Jonsson presents a puzzle that turns on intentional identity and definite descriptions. He considers eight solutions and rejects them all, thus leaving the puzzle unsolved. In this paper I put forward a solution. The puzzle is this. Little Lotta wants most of all a bicycle for her birthday, but she gets none. Distracted by the gifts she does receive, she at first does not think about the bike. But when seeing her tricycle, she is reminded of the bike. The question is how we are to analyse these two occurrences of ‘the bike’ in the absence of a unique bike that Lotta wants. So the semantics of ‘the bike’ needs to be spelt out, and it must be made explicit what the complements of Lotta’s attitudes are. My analysis shows that the attributer’s usage of ‘the bike’ blurs the distinction between a second-order and a first-order intension (a property concept and a property, respectively). My solution can be summed up in this two-premise argument. (a) In the state-of-affairs S, the property of being a bike is the extension of the property concept the property such that Lotta wants an instance of it more than any other; (b) in S, Lotta does not think about/is reminded of the property that she wants an instance of more than any other; (c) therefore, in S Lotta does not think about/is reminded of the property of being a bike. This solution requires looking beyond the confines of denotational semantics, which all of Jonsson’s eight solution candidates belong to.

An Empirical Investigation of Typicality and Uniqueness Effects on Article Choice in Attributive-Possession NPs

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:Previous analyses of the use of English definite descriptions have generally taken one of two approaches, loosely characterizable as familiarity and uniqueness. That is, felicitous use of the definite article has been argued to require that the referent of the NP be either known to the hearer within the current context of utterance (e.g. Heim 1983, Prince 1992) or uniquely identifiable to the hearer (e.g. Gundel et al. 1993, Birner & Ward 1994, inter alia). What is common to all previous analyses is that the explanatory principle is presented as categorical; i.e. a referent is familiar or not, unique or not. There is generally no provision for gradience within the theory. In what follows we will investigate how familiarity- and uniqueness-based accounts of definiteness fare in accounting for the class of EMBEDDED DEFINITES known as ATTRIBUTIVE-POSSESSION constructions (McKercher 2001) and how the gradient notion of typicality impacts article choice in these constructions.

On the acquisition of maximality in free relative clauses and plural definite descriptions

Plural definite descriptions (e.g. 'the things on the plate') and free relative clauses (e.g. 'what is on the plate') have been argued to share the same semantic properties, despite their syntactic differences: both are non-quantificational expressions referring to the maximal element of a given set (e.g. the set of things on the plate). Experimental support for this semantic analysis is provided by the first investigation ever of children's interpretation of both constructions. A Truth-Value Judgment task, an Act-Out task, and a corpus study of children's linguistic input show that children are aware that the two constructions are different from quantificational nominals (e.g. 'all the things on the plate', 'some of the things on the plate') very early on (4 years old), despite the major difference in frequency in the input. Children acquire the adult interpretation of both constructions at the very same time, around 6-7 years old. We suggest that this relative delay depends on children's difficulties with the concept of the maximal element of a set or its association with specific linguistic constructions.

Micromechanically derived lowest threshold stress intensity factor for macroscopic stress-corrosion cracking in unidirectional GFRP composites

Observation by scanning electron microscopy of a typical fracture surface in glass fiber-reinforced polymer (GFRP) composites shows that the fracture surface of each fiber is characterized by a mirror region surrounded by a hackle region. This indicates a two-stage fracture process: (1) a ‘‘slow’’ (meaning time-dependent) fracture of a portion of the glass fiber is followed by (2) a ‘‘fast’’ unstable fracture across the remainder of the glass fiber. On the premise that the time-dependent failure of GFRP composites in acid environments is controlled by the initiation and slow growth of a crack from a pre-existing inherent surface flaw in a glass fiber, a micromechanical model of stress-corrosion crack growth (sometimes called the Sekine–Miyanaga–Beaumont model) was constructed [1–3]. Using this model, an equation was derived for the macroscopic crack growth rate as a function of the apparent crack tip stress intensity factor for the mode I. If tougher and more ductile matrices are used, there exists a lowest threshold value of the stress intensity factor. By assuming that the polymeric fibrils of matrix or ligaments stretched between the crack surfaces behave according to an ideal cohesive force model, i.e., the Dugdale model [4], the lowest threshold stress intensity factor was given in an explicit form [3]. However, the examination in the case of a more general cohesive force model, i.e., the Barenblatt model [5], has been left until now, although this examination will give a physically definite description of the lowest threshold stress intensity factor. We begin this examination with a brief review of our previous article [3]. In bulk glass, the stable crack growth rate due to stresscorrosion cracking da/dt can be given by

The syntactic structure of English clefts

In this paper I argue that English clefts are an example of an apparent syntax/semantics mismatch, in that the cleft clause (the relative clause appearing at the end of the matrix clause) semantically modifies the initial pronoun it, but syntactically modifies (that is, is underlyingly adjoined to) the clefted XP, as proposed by Hedberg (2000). This renders suspect both ‘specificational analyses’, on which the cleft clause both semantically and syntactically modifies it, and ‘expletive analyses’, on which the cleft clause and clefted XP are both semantically and syntactically composed directly. I provide new evidence for Hedberg's type of analysis. The first set of evidence suggests that cleft it is non-expletive, thus arguing in favour of treating it and the cleft clause as a discontinuous definite description. The second set of evidence shows that, with respect to various tests, the cleft clause behaves as if the clefted XP, rather than it, is its antecedent.

Relations Versus Functions at the Foundations of Logic: Type-Theoretic Considerations

Though Frege was interested primarily in reducing mathematics to logic, he succeeded in reducing an important part of logic to mathematics by defining relations in terms of functions. In contrast, Whitehead and Russell reduced an important part of mathematics to logic by defining functions in terms of relations (using the definite description operator).We argue that there is a reason to prefer Whitehead and Russell’s reduction of functions to relations over Frege’s reduction of relations to functions. There is an interesting system having a logic that can be properly characterized in relational type theory (RTT) but not in functional type theory (FTT). This shows that RTT is more general than FTT. The simplification offered by Church in his FTT is an over-simplification: one cannot assimilate predication to functional application.

Shallow Analysis and the Slingshot Argument

According to the standard opinions in the literature, blocking the unacceptable consequences of the notorious slingshot argument requires imposing constraints on the metaphysics of facts or on theories of definite descriptions (or class abstracts). This paper argues that both of these well-known strategies to rebut the slingshot overshoot the mark. The slingshot, first and foremost, raises the question as to the adequate logical formalization of statements about facts, i.e. of factual contexts. It will be shown that a rigorous application of Quine’s maxim of shallow analysis to formalizations of factual contexts paves the way for an account of formalizing such contexts which blocks the slingshot without ramifications for theories of facts or definite descriptions.

Accent and description: An account of anaphoric epithets

Anaphoric epithets are definite descriptions that achieve reference anaphorically. They also convey some expressive content. Potts (2003) analyzes the expressive component as a Conventional Implicature. He proposes that the expressive component is provided by the nominal, reference is provided by a phonologically null variable adjacent to the nominal, and the definite article is semantically contentless. The current analysis agrees that the nominal provides the attitudinal meaning. Rather than positing a null syntactic element reference is achieved by incorporating Elbourne's (2005) proposal that the definite determiner takes an index argument and a nominal argument.