Minimal Propositions Research Articles

Semantic Minimalism’s Truth-Evaluability: The Minimal Proposition and Semantic Uncertainty

Semantic Minimalism’s Truth-Evaluability: The Minimal Proposition and Semantic Uncertainty

A Canonical Context-Preserving Representation for Open IE: Extracting Semantically Typed Relational Tuples from Complex Sentences

Modern systems that deal with inference in texts need automatized methods to extract meaning representations (MRs) from texts at scale. Open Information Extraction (IE) is a prominent way of extracting all potential relations from a given text in a comprehensive manner. Previous work in this area has mainly focused on the extraction of isolated relational tuples. Ignoring the cohesive nature of texts where important contextual information is spread across clauses or sentences, state-of-the-art Open IE approaches are thus prone to generating a loose arrangement of tuples that lack the expressiveness needed to infer the true meaning of complex assertions.To overcome this limitation, we present a method that allows existing Open IE systems to enrich their output with additional meta information. By leveraging the semantic hierarchy of minimal propositions generated by the discourse-aware Text Simplification (TS) approach presented in Niklaus et al. (2019), we propose a mechanism to extract semantically typed relational tuples from complex source sentences. Based on this novel type of output, we introduce a lightweight semantic representation for Open IE in the form of normalized and context-preserving relational tuples. It extends the shallow semantic representation of state-of-the-art approaches in the form of predicate-argument structures by capturing intra-sentential rhetorical structures and hierarchical relationships between the relational tuples. In that way, the semantic context of the extracted tuples is preserved, resulting in more informative and coherent predicate-argument structures which are easier to interpret.In addition, in a comparative analysis, we show that the semantic hierarchy of minimal propositions benefits Open IE approaches in a second dimension: the canonical structure of the simplified sentences is easier to process and analyze, and thus facilitates the extraction of relational tuples, resulting in an improved precision (up to 32%) and recall (up to 30%) of the extracted relations on a large benchmark corpus.

A limited defence of public health exit restrictions

AbstractExit restrictions are viewed with suspicion in the literature related to migration, citizenship, and human rights. The international human rights project is devoted to defending the minimal proposition that a person should be able to leave their own country, with few exceptions. Public health emergencies constitute one of the few limits on this mobility right in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Here, I offer a limited legal and normative defence of pandemic travel restrictions, with a focus on Australia's COVID‐19 exit control measures. I argue that public health emergency exit controls do not constitute a violation of a traveller's mobility rights, so long as they are temporary, narrowly tailored, and proportionate to the health risk posed by the traveller in question. They should be lifted when alternative measures become widely available, such as vaccination and testing requirements.

Tipper is ready but he is not strong enough: minimal proposition, question under discussion, and what is said

A standard objection to Cappelen and Lepore’s (Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005) Semantic Minimalism is that minimal propositions are explanatorily idle. But Schoubye and Stokke (Nous 50:759–793, 2016) recently proposed that minimal proposition and the question under discussion of a conversation jointly determine what is said in a systematic and explanatory way. This note argues that their account both overgenerates and undergenerates.

Semantic content and compositional context-censitivity

A variety of theorists have recently argued against the explanation of the semantic content of a sentence as a minimal proposition claiming that intentional aspects of the context are often needed to obtain a minimal proposition. Minimalists such as Borg, however, still defend intention-insensitive minimal propositions for sentences in a narrow context and provide solutions or dissolutions against incompleteness objections. In this paper, we show that these putative defences of propositionalism do not serve to avoid some additional genuine objections which arise from compositional context-sensitivity. We aim to show that there are complex expressions which compositionally demand intention-sensitive pragmatic effects in a mandatory way and, for that reason, they provide us with evidence against the type of propositionalism that substantiates the defence of semantic minimalism.

Znaczenie językowe i kontekst z perspektywy kontekstualizmu i minimalizmu semantycznego

Artykuł nawiązuje do jednej z najbardziej intensywnych dyskusji we współczesnej filozofii języka, jaką jest spór o zasięg i charakter wpływu kontekstu wypowiedzi na znaczenie użytych w niej wyrażeń, gdzie kontekst jest rozumiany bardzo ogólnie, jako „zewnętrzne okoliczności, które wykorzystywane są przez uczestników sytuacji komunikacyjnej do określenia pewnej własności pewnej jednostki językowej”. Jest to w istocie spór o autonomię semantyki. Spornymi stanowiskami w toczonej debacie są kontekstualizm i minimalizm semantyczny. Zaproponowane ujęcie wypowiedzi jako celowego i racjonalnego aktu komunikacji, w którym wyrażenie językowe i kontekst stanowią odrębne źródła informacji będącej przedmiotem interpretacji wypowiedzi, pozwoliło bardziej szczegółowo określić rolę kontekstu i znaczenia językowego w determinowaniu treści wypowiedzi. Z tej perspektywy została przeprowadzona analiza wypowiedzi zdania ‘Jan jest wysoki’ w trzech różnych kontekstach, co pozwoliło lepiej ocenić siłę argumentów badanych stanowisk. Rozważania zostały przeprowadzone jako próba obrony minimalizmu semantycznego, który utrzymuje, że grupa wyrażeń, których znaczenia zależą od kontekstu, ogranicza się do typowych wyrażeń okazjonalnych. Wpływ kontekstu na wyrażenia spoza tej grupy zaznacza się jedynie na płaszczyźnie pragmatycznej. Procesy pragmatyczne nie zmieniają znaczenia językowego wyrażeń użytych do sformułowania wypowiedzi, a jedynie wpływają na interpretację wypowiedzi. Zdania języka po usunięciu typowych wyrażeń okazjonalnych wyrażają sądy minimalne i nie wymagają dodatkowej informacji kontekstowej. Minimalizm semantyczny pozostaje w opozycji do stanowiska kontekstualizmu głoszącego, że niemal wszystkie wyrażenia języka naturalnego są wrażliwe na kontekst, który moduluje ich znaczenie na poziomie semantycznym. Zgodnie ze stanowiskiem kontekstualizmu zdania języka, takie jak np. ‘Jan jest wysoki’, nie mają określonych warunków prawdziwości, gdyż warunki prawdziwości można przypisać tylko konkretnym wypowiedziom, a nie zdaniom rozumianym jako wyrażenia językowe. Przeprowadzona analiza użycia w różnych kontekstach zdania należącego do spornej grupy dostarcza argumentów na rzecz minimalizmu semantycznego. Pokazuje ona, że zarówno samo słowo ‘wysoki’ posiada pewną treść wspólną dla wszystkich kontekstów i odniesień, jak też zdanie ‘Jan jest wysoki’ formułuje pewien sąd minimalny o określonych warunkach prawdziwości.

On Occasion: Invisible Minimalism and the Pragmatic Frame

In the debate between literalism and contextualism in semantics, Kent Bach’s project is often taken to stand on the latter side of the divide. In this paper I argue that this is a misleading assumption and justify this by contrasting Bach’s assessment of the theoretical eliminability of minimal propositions arguably expressed by well-formed sentences with standard minimalist views, and by further contrasting his account of the division of interpretative processes ascribable to the semantics and pragmatics of a language with a parallel analysis carried out by the most radical opponent to semantic minimalism, i.e., by occasionalism. If my analysis proves right, the sum of its conclusions leaves Bach’s proposal in an invisible region of the literalism/contextualism debate.

Contexts, non-specificity, and minimalism

Atlas (2007) argues that semantic minimalism (as defended by Cappelen & Lepore 2005) fails because it cannot deal with semantic non-specificity. I argue that thereis a plausible version of minimalism-viz., situated minimalism-which doesn't succumb to the non-specificity charge insofar as non-specificity can be dealt with at a postsemantic level. Thus, pragmatics plays no rolewhen it comes to determining the (minimal) proposition expressed. Instead, pragmatic and other extra-semantic considerations enter the scene in characterizing the situation vis-a-vis which the proposition is evaluated. For this reason a plausible form of minimalism must embrace a form of truth-relativism: a proposition is not universally true/false, but true/false only relative to a situation. I show how the position defended is not only (i) more cognitively plausible than either (semantic) minimalism as proposed by Cappelen & Lepore or the positions appealing to pragmaticintrusion into the proposition expressed, but is also (ii) in accordance with ordinary people's intuitions.

Pragmatic Minimalism vs. Maximalism: A Reply to Hansen (2008)

Yoon, YoungEun. 2012. Pragmatic Minimalism vs. Maximalism: A Reply to Hansen (2008). Korean Journal of Linguistics, 37-1, 179-198. Bach (2001, 2005) argues for a clear division between semantics and pragmatics. In the same vein, he proposes that the so-called minimal notion of ‘what is said’ is available to language users. On the other hand, Recanati (2001, 2004) argues that the minimal notion of what is said, i.e., the so-called minimal proposition, is not what the sentence says and has no position in the actual process of understanding the utterance. That is, the semantically underdetermined literal meaning cannot be available to language users at any point in communication. In this context, Hansen (2008) claims that if real-life data such as courtroom conversations are taken into consideration, the literal meanings of utterances are revealed to be available to ‘non-linguistically trained’ ordinary language users. Given all these, this paper revisits the two contrasting views on ‘what is said,’ i.e., pragmatic minimalism and maximalism, dubbed by Recanati (2001), and represented by Bach (2001, 2005) and Recanati (2001, 2004) respectively, among others. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the validity of Hansen’s (2008) proposal based on courtroom data, and to argue that the availability of the literal meaning to language users seems to be a myth. (Ewha Womans University)

The Agreement-Based Tests for Context Sensitivity

The Agreement-Based Tests for Context Sensitivity In my paper, I present and discuss Cappelen and Lepore's context sensitivity tests, which appeal to says-that reports. In Relativism and Monadic Truth (2009) Cappelen and Hawthorne criticize those tests and propose agreement-based tests instead. I argue that such tests do not fare much better. The original Cappelen and Lepore's tests presupposed a minimal notion of says-that. One might postulate a parallel notion of "thin" agreement, according to which people agree that p if they all believe the minimal proposition that p . In this sense we might say - as opposed to what Cappelen and Hawthorne say - that A and B agree that Nicola is smart, even though A thinks that she is smart because she stands way back against strong servers, while B thinks that she is smart because she invested all her money in penny stocks. The paper ends with a critical gloss concerning the case in which Joe Coach predicates tall of people who are over six-foot-eight and Joe Normal, who applies tall to anyone over six-foot tall. I conclude that agreement and disagreement tests are poor indicators of context sensitivity, since their result depends on the prior theoretical standpoint one adopts.

Speech act pluralism, minimal content and pragmemes

As speech acts in contexts, pragmemes serve to illustrate speech act pluralism. What is less clear is whether they play an important role in determining primary truth conditions of sentences. Semantic contextualism is the view according to which word meaning or sentence meaning cannot be detached from a conversational practice. The presence of the context of utterance is a necessary condition for sentences to express semantic properties. The true meanings are those that are expressed by verbal or mental occurrences. According to this view, pragmemes do play a role in determining the primary truth conditions of sentences. Semantic minimalism suggests another way of conceiving the relationship between truth conditions and pragmemes. Sentence-types enjoy a certain semantic autonomy relative to their occurrences in particular conversational contexts. According to this picture, some sentence-types express minimal propositions and do not require a verbal event in order express primary truth conditions. Other sentence-types may express only “proposition-radicals”, as suggested by Kent Bach. Pragmemes in this case serve to determine the missing ingredients in the primary truth conditions. However, these sentences are not counterexamples for minimalism, if the recourse to contextual features is prescribed by the very semantic rules of the sentence. Are there pragmemes that determine primary truth conditions and that are not prescribed by the very semantic features of the sentence? Carston and Recanati both argue that there are. There are cases of enrichment, loosening and transfer. They argue that pragmemes are cancelable. However, cancelability reveals the presence of a minimal content that could be expressed without these additional features. Are there pragmemes determining primary truth conditions that are not prescribed by semantic features and that are not cancelable? In this paper, I argue that there are no such examples. Pragmemes may contribute to the determination of the content of certain assertions, but they do not contribute to the determination of minimal content of the sentence-types used in these utterances. I conclude that a proper appreciation of the role of pragmemes forces us to accept speech act pluralism and bifurcationism, the idea that there are two levels of content: minimal and maximal. That is, different pragmemes produce different inferential augmentations of a minimal level of linguistic meaning. But this is precisely what semantic minimalism is all about.

Deduction Graphs with Universal Quantification

Deduction Graphs are meant to generalise both Gentzen-Prawitz style natural deductions and Fitch style flag deductions. They have the structure of acyclic directed graphs with boxes. In [Herman Geuvers and Iris Loeb. Natural Deduction via Graphs: Formal Definition and Computation Rules. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (Special Issue on Theory and Applications of Term Graph Rewriting), Volume 17(03):485–526, 2007.] we have investigated the deduction graphs for minimal proposition logic. This paper studies the extension with first-order universal quantification, showing the robustness of the concept of deduction graphs.

The Excluded Middle: Semantic Minimalism without Minimal Propositions

Insensitive Semantics is mainly a protracted assault on semantic Contextualism, both moderate and radical. Cappelen and Lepore argue that Moderate Contextualism leads inevitably, like marijuana to heroin or masturbation to blindness, to Radical Contextualism and in turn that Radical Contextualism is misguided. Assuming that the only alternative to Contextualism is their Semantic Minimalism, they think they’ve given an indirect argument for it. But they overlook a third view, one that splits the difference between the other two. Like Contextualism it rejects Propositionalism, the conservative dogma that every indexicalfree declarative sentence expresses a proposition. Unlike Contextualism, it does not invoke context to fill semantic gaps and, indeed, denies that filling those gaps is a semantic matter. In rejecting Propositionalism, it is more radical, indeed, more minimalist than Cappelen and Lepore’s brand of Semantic Minimalism. It does not imagine that sentences that intuitively seem not to express propositions at least express “minimal propositions.” Radical Semantic Minimalism, or simply Radicalism, says that the sentences in question are semantically incomplete – their semantic contents are not propositions but merely “propositional radicals.” [PPR commentary on Cappelen and Lepore, Insensitive Semantics] The Excluded Middle: Semantic Minimalism without Minimal Propositions

Pragmemes (a study with reference to English and Italian)

In this paper I shall argue that we have to focus on units of pragmatic analysis such as the pragmeme. A pragmeme is a situated speech act in which the rules of language and of society combine in determining meaning, intended as a socially recognized object sensitive to social expectations about the situation in which the utterance to be interpreted is embedded. Given a sequence of utterances, literally interpretable as having certain meanings and goals, features of the situation are utilized to produce pragmatic inferences, thus completing or expanding a minimal proposition vocalized by an utterance; other features of the context of utterance, in the form of defeasible or otherwise non-cancellable aspects of meaning, will transform the literal signification of an utterance, imposing the stamp of the situation on it, making certain rules of interpretation relevant to it, and constituting a set of constraints that strictly enforce certain readings by discarding or eliminating others. In this paper, after expatiating on studies that advocate the importance of studying the context of use of a speech act, I offer analytic considerations on what seem to me interesting cases of pragmemes.

Literal meaning, minimal propositions, and pragmatic processing

Relevance theorists and others have argued that what a speaker ‘says’ is determined by contextual factors to a greater extent than allowed for by Grice. This dispute has consequences for what Grice called generalized conversational implicatures. Contextualists have argued that the propositions that Grice thinks of as implicated in a generalized way should be treated as part of what is said. Griceans, on the other hand, by insisting that these are conversationally implicated, are committed to postulating more minimal propositions for the role of what is said. This paper examines whether such minimal propositions play a role in utterance understanding. Three pragmatic processing models, which embody some of the assumptions of the rival philosophical views, are postulated. The results of a series of experiments designed to test the predictions of these processing models are reported. Our results lend some initial support to a model in which minimal and contextually enriched interpretations are constructed in parallel, with a bias towards the enriched interpretations. However, the final section of the paper suggests a number of ways in which the issue of the role of minimal propositions still remains open for empirical exploration.

An evolutionary model for the origin of non-randomness, long-range order and fractality in the genome.

We present a model for genome evolution, comprising biologically plausible events such as transpositions inside the genome and insertions of exogenous sequences. This model attempts to formulate a minimal proposition accounting for key statistical properties of genomes, avoiding, as far as possible, unsupportable hypotheses for the remote evolutionary past. The statistical properties that are observed in genomic sequences and are reproduced by the proposed model are: (i) deviations from randomness at different length scales, measured by suitable algorithms, (ii) a special form of size distribution (power law distribution) characterising different levels of genome organisation in the non-coding, and (iii) extensive resemblance in the alternation of coding and non-coding regions at several length scales (self-similarity) in long genomic sequences of higher eukaryotes.

An evolutionary model for the origin of non‐randomness, long‐range order and fractality in the genome

We present a model for genome evolution, comprising biologically plausible events such as transpositions inside the genome and insertions of exogenous sequences. This model attempts to formulate a minimal proposition accounting for key statistical properties of genomes, avoiding, as far as possible, unsupportable hypotheses for the remote evolutionary past. The statistical properties that are observed in genomic sequences and are reproduced by the proposed model are: (i) deviations from randomness at different length scales, measured by suitable algorithms, (ii) a special form of size distribution (power law distribution) characterising different levels of genome organisation in the non-coding, and (iii) extensive resemblance in the alternation of coding and non-coding regions at several length scales (self-similarity) in long genomic sequences of higher eukaryotes. BioEssays 23:647–656, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Dispersion free weights, maximal refinement ideals, and atomicity in certain generalized sample spaces

An HD space is a generalized sample space each of whose subspaces has, as its logic, an orthomodular poset. W e study HD spaces which allow full sets of dispersion free weights: in a sense, these sample spaces can be said to admit hidden variables. For such a space, we show that any proposition in the logic contains a minimal proposition, and that any maximal refinement ideal of operations is generated by a single While the former ensures that the logic is atomic, the latter provides a generalized analog of the classical grand canonical operation. In fact, we obtain a stronger result concerning atomicity, namely, that the logic of any HD space in which all maximal refinement ideals are principal is

Utopia's Children: an Interpretation of Three Political Novels

IN RECENT YEARS there has been some trend away from the atomization of knowledge arising out of specialization This trend makes itself felt in graduate programs for prospective political scientists, who are now urged to partake of training in the other social sciences, as well as to learn such special technique as statistics. Political scientists whose formal years of study are behind them, are alive to these possibilities, and in many cases are conscientiously racing to fill the gaps left by their own overspecialized educations. In the midst of these pressures, less and less time and attention, and even course-work, are given to the humanities. This lack is characteristic not only of programs for present-day undergraduate and graduate students; it is also characteristic of the training and background of practicing political scientists who matured during the rage for specialization, and whose acquaintance with belleslettres is even more meagre than their contact with the sister-disciplines. It was not so with students of government of fifty years ago, who ingested literature in large draughts, and whose quotations of the political observations of Horace, or Shakespeare, or Goethe, or Racine in some cases provide their younger colleagues their only brush with great literature. Yet great literature has not disappeared with this neglect; and great (as well as merely good) fictional works which are rich in political ideas and insights have kept pace or, often, run before the changing political scene, as a look at The Magic Mountain, Fathers and Sons, Man's Fate, The Possessed, and dozens of other distinguished modern novels can quickly testify. If we ask ourselves what political scientists are about, no outcry can be expected against the minimal proposition that it is an attempt to gain a better understanding of the political process. Nor will it be denied that the political process cannot be understood without some understanding of writ large, and the human beings who make up society, in all the richness and complexity of their interpersonal relations. How is such an understanding to be gained? One avenue is the exhaustive study of man in society through each of the relatively narrow disciplines: economic man; political man; socio-psychological man, and so on. An obvious difficulty with this approach is the limitation set by time and energy; this is a particularly severe problem where technical skills are needed, and where failure to master them properly can and has resulted in some disastrously half-baked conclusions. But even supposing longevity and genius sufficient to grasp and employ each of the separate disciplines, the question of synthesis remains.