True Sentences Research Articles

Long Road to Nowhere: How Southern States Struggle with Long-Term Incarceration

The Deep South is the epicenter of mass incarceration. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, with prison populations growing by 86% between 1990 and 2019. For Southern states, prison populations exploded by 127% during that same period. During this time in history, America implemented “tough on crime” policies that responded to public health issues like the drug epidemic with incarceration instead of rehabilitation. Laws for even nonviolent crimes became more punitive with longer sentences, and people of color were disproportionately pushed into prisons with little hope for parole. Today, incarceration rates for Latinx and Black people are more than two and five times the incarceration rate of whites, respectively. The commitment to the “tough on crime” narrative led to significantly overcrowded prisons, which not only put a strain on state budgets, but also created human rights challenges regarding how to maintain a safe and healthy prison environment. Three Southern states in particular — Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana — exemplify how prison populations have grown to be problematic in three unique ways. Alabama is home to the most overcrowded prisons in the country, currently at 151% of capacity. Even after sentencing reforms were passed in 2017, recent legislation concerning the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles has severely diminished the parole chances of currently incarcerated people. Florida, with over 95,000 imprisoned people, has the third-largest prison population of any state in the country, and still adheres to a “Truth in Sentencing” rule requiring incarcerated people to serve at least 85% of their sentences, regardless of any demonstration of rehabilitation. As a result, Florida has grown to have the oldest prison population in the South, a group whose care is increasingly expensive. Louisiana has been known as the “incarceration capital of the world” for consistently having incredibly high incarceration rates. A large factor is the number of people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole, including juveniles. The lack of early prison release is just one of many contributors to mass incarceration in the South. The solutions also vary — from expanding parole eligibility and making it retroactive, to increasing incentives for rehabilitation credits, to re-calibrating triggers for life without parole sentences. This report will investigate the impact that over-incarceration has had in three Southern states, and provide recommendations on how each state can address the issue through policy change.

The True Sentence: John Ashbery’s Forward Animations

The True Sentence: John Ashbery’s Forward Animations

Context and Complexity in Incremental Sentence Interpretation: An ERP Study on Temporal Quantification

The present event-related potential (ERP) study used picture-sentence verification to investigate the neurolinguistic correlates of the online processing of compositional-semantic information. To this end, we examined context effects on sentences involving temporal adverbial quantification likeJana war jeden Morgen schwimmen an den Arbeitstagen ("Jana went for a swim every morning during the working week"). We tested whether the conceptual complexity associated with quantifying over time intervals leads to delayed predictions regarding the upcoming words in a sentence. The present study replicated previous results relating to quantification over individuals, which are conceptually less complex than time intervals. Analogous to previous studies, false vs. true sentences elicited an N400 whenever contextual cues did not permit a potential revision of a locally assigned truth value. The present results are compatible with an approach under which contextual cues are immediately considered for predicting how a sentence continues. The fact that the contextual complexity did not lead to processing delays indicates that the processing system quickly abstracts away from the conceptual complexity associated with the linguistic input if such an abstraction is possible.

Aksjomat Fregego

This paper discusses the semantic assumption that Roman Suszko called “the Fregean Axiom.” According to the Fregean Axiom, a logical sentence is a name of its logical value, which means that all true sentences are names of one and the same object called “Truth,” and — by analogy — all false sentences are names of one and the same object called “False.” The Fregean Axiom is at odds with the common-sense intuition. Usually, we think that a sentence is not a name but anexpression that states that a certain state of affairs occurs. The article analyzes the presuppositions underlying the axiom. The second part of the text discusses the consequences of either adoption or rejection of the axiom.

Spontaneous cracking of thermally toughened safety glass. Part four: a case study of isothermal breakages in a building, and conclusions thereof for the heat soak test

The present paper continues the publication of the R&D work already published by Saint-Gobain in 2018. The focus of the present publication is to overcome a widespread but, however, erroneous and momentous presumption concerning HS testing, namely that the transformation speed of the nickel sulphide inclusions would define the time-to-breakage curve devolution in the heat soak test (HST). According to our previous papers, on the one hand, refractory stones proven can lead to breakage in HST. On the other hand, also $$\text {Ni}_9\text {S}_8$$ inclusions, proven not to be subjected to a phase transformation, cause breakages on heating to HST temperature. Now, in the present paper, we publish and thermodynamically evaluate an example of an isothermal breakage series in a building’s lobby. By this, we produce evidence for that almost every critical nickel sulphide inclusion is transformed in the HST, but this transformation is, in comparison with the time-to-breakage curve of the test, much faster and does explain nor breakages before neither c. Three hours after completion of the transformation. Even if other obvious impact factors, such as thermal expansion on heating and the variability of the heating-up rate, are taken into calculation, a significant difference between the real (recorded) time-to-breakage curve and the simulation remains. We conclude that at least one significant impact factor is missing in this simulation, namely the mechanical load induced by the principally inhomogeneous heating-up of the panes in any HST. Hot air first heats up the glass rims, therewith inducing additional tensile stress into the whole pane’s surface and volume; this procedure always keeps the rims hotter than the inner of the stack. The breakages stop when the heating-up process is completed, but this is significantly later than formally reaching the holding step of the HST. This effect would explain both pre-tailing (i.e., some inclusions turn to be critical before maturity) and tailing (i.e., additional breakages due to less critical inclusions occur during the holding period) in comparison with the simulation. Another effect could be faster under-critical crack growth at increased temperature; however, this effect would only cause tailing of the real curve (or, contribute to its tailing), but no pre-tailing. In other words, the transformation of the nickel sulphide inclusions, be it on a facade or in HST, is a necessary condition for breakages caused by this kind of inclusions. However, transformation alone is not a sufficient condition for a breakage event. Just like the true sentence “A King is a Man”, the argumentation “Transformation is necessary” is not reversible. Additional explanations have to be quantified to substantiate the highly visible difference between transformation kinetics and the recorded time-to-breakage curve, and this is the main theme of the present paper. On the other hand, the interpretation of the present finding in terms of thermodynamics shows a way how to more correctly derive the safety of HS-tested glass from the transformation kinetics of the nickel sulphide and other known impact factors of the HST. It might become the basis of a sound “bottom up” simulation that does more than simply extrapolating the time-to-breakage curve recorded in the HST. In summary, also this finding reinforces our standpoint that the HST, if correctly carried out, produces glass panes that are extremely safe against spontaneous failure.

Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda (review)

Reviewed by: Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding ed. by Frederic J. Svoboda Joy Landeira Frederic J. Svoboda, ed. Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Kent State UP, 2019. 136p. "All you have to do is write one true sentence; write the truest sentence that you know," counselled Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, his memories of 1920s Paris. Heeding his advice for truth telling, the truest sentence I can write about Kent State's "Teaching Hemingway" series is that it will make you want to teach and read Hemingway in new ways and in old ways, again and again. Boasting over nine volumes, the collection, edited by Mark P. [End Page 85] Ott and Susan F. Beegel, has been featured in our recent Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature book review sections of issues 73.2 and 74.1. This fitting testimony to the impact of the series and the significance of Hemingway for many RMMLA scholars also has an ulterior motive to pique your interest in preparation for our upcoming 2020 convention in October in Boulder, Colorado. The featured Keynote speaker will be Hemingway's great-granddaughter, Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, author of Ernest's Way: An International Journey through Hemingway's Life. The biography and travel guide explores the influence of the places where he lived and worked upon his life and writing. To encourage you and your students on your own journey through Hemingway's short stories, I enthusiastically recommend Editor Frederic J. Svoboda's newest volume in the series, Hemingway's Short Stories: Reflections on Teaching, Reading, and Understanding. Whether you are a veteran teacher who includes Hemingway in every syllabus or a reader who hasn't studied him since high school, these thirteen approachable essays by master teachers from secondary, post-secondary, and post-graduate levels will inspire you to return to the master storyteller once again. Several essays walk teachers through a typical—or not so typical—lesson and illustrate how to guide students through dialogue and details to elicit and incite their participation and critical thinking. For example, Peter Hays's lead essay "First Things, Teaching 'Indian Camp'" travels through the classic initiation tale of how a young Nick Adams watches his father Dr. Adams perform a cesarean operation late at night. Here, the importance of questioning techniques—not just what to ask, but when and how to pose them, and how to raise more questions, demonstrates how discussion unfolds and prompts continued debate. Careful, deep reading and attention to thematic and technical components address both touchy and touching subjects. Commentary and reflections about "The Battler" spark contemporary approaches to race relations in two timely articles by Marc Dudley and John Beall. Beall's suggestions for group free writing and Donald A. Daikor's use of pre-writing model teaching strategies that entice students to discover for themselves the importance of "story showing," not just story telling. Kinetic learners will literally jump out of their seats to heft [End Page 86] Frederic J. Svoboda's 60-plus-pound backpack filled with the list of supplies that Nick mentions in "Big Two-Hearted River." This clever realia and reality approach resonates with his students who are familiar with fishing and camping in upper Michigan. Another form of reality—Reality TV and the Discovery Channel—serves Patrick Bonds well for teaching "The Last Good Country" virtually and for stimulating students to write their own conclusions to the unfinished novella. Verna Kale solves real-time conundrums by having students perform texts. They experience palpable tension by reading the scene about a couple contemplating an abortion in "Hills Like White Elephants" out loud, acting out the motions, and duplicating the awkward pauses and prolonged silences of a 5-minute dialogue spread across a 35-minute wait for the train to arrive. Likewise, acting out the waiters' dialogue in "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," illustrates the much-contested question about which one is speaking. An emphasis on writing—not just Hemingway's style, but on developing the student's own prowess—resurfaces throughout most of the essays, including up-to-date usage of digital resources and electronic databases to...

FREGE’S PUZZLE IS HERE TO STAY: TRIVIALITY AND INFORMATIVITY IN NATURAL LANGUAGES

Abstract Frege’s puzzling remarks on the beginning of On Sense and Reference challenge us to explain how true identity sentences of the form a = a can differ in cognitive value from sentences of the form a = b when they are made true by the same object’s self-identity. Some philosophers (e.g. Almog, Glezakos and Paganini) suggest that the puzzle cannot be set up in the context of natural languages since natural sentences, unlike those of regimented formal ones, do not wear their logical properties on their sleeves. In this paper we argue that, on the contrary, there exists a notion of coordination between names which is apt to track the relevant logical properties of natural sentences and therefore to set up the puzzle in natural languages. Frege’s puzzle is here to stay.

Disjunction and the Logic of Grounding

Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea of using the logical form of a true sentence as a guide to the metaphysical grounds of the fact stated by that sentence. This paper looks at a particular instance of that idea: the widely accepted principle that disjunctions are grounded in their true disjuncts. I will argue that an unrestricted version of this principle has several problematic consequences and that it’s not obvious how the principle might be restricted in order to avoid them. My suggestion is that, instead of trying to restrict the principle, we should distinguish between metaphysical and conceptual grounds and take the principle to apply exclusively to the latter. This suggestion, if correct, carries over to other prominent attempts at using logical form as a guide to ground.

The Representation of Coordinate Relations in Lexical Semantic Memory.

Two experiments examined the size of the typicality effect for true items in a category verification task as a function of the type of false item used. In Experiment 1, compared to the case where false items paired unrelated concepts (“carrot–vehicle”), the typicality effect was much larger when false items paired an exemplar with a category coordinate to its proper category (“carrot–fruit”). In contrast, when false items paired coordinate concepts (“carrot–pea”) or reversed the ordering of subject and predicate terms (“All vegetables are carrots”), the typicality effect did not change in size. Further, the time to verify true sentences did not increase monotonically with the semantic similarity of the two terms used in false sentences. Experiment 2 showed that the pattern of results for coordinate items reflected semantic processing, not simply task difficulty. A combined analysis examined data across multiple experiments, increasing the power of the statistical analysis. The size of the typicality effect when coordinate false items were used was again the same as when false items paired unrelated concepts. The most straightforward explanation of this pattern of results seems to be in terms of a sparse semantic network model of lexical semantic memory, in which labeled links are used to indicate the semantic relation that exists between pairs of words.

The search for truth: Appositives weigh in

The semantic and pragmatic contribution of appositives to their containing sentence is a subject of continuing debate. While unidimensional semantic accounts propose that appositives contribute their truth conditions to their containing sentence, multidimensional accounts predict that they do not. In three experiments, we directly compared judgments of the truth of sentences containing appositives and sentences containing conjunctions. Our findings contribute both a method- ological and a theoretical point. First, we show that no conclusions about the truth-conditional contributions of appositives can be drawn from experimental work without further investigation of how participants provide truth value judgments for complex sentences. Second, we show that while appositives appear to contribute truth values to their containing sentences, participants are highly sensitive to task features when they compute the truth value of sentences with appositives and also, crucially, with conjunctions. Specifically, we show that both sentences containing appositives and those containing conjunctions can be judged true even when the appositive or one conjunct is patently false. We conclude that it is unlikely that these results reflect semantic judgments, and suggest that they reflect truth only at the speech-act level.

Detecting falsehood relies on mismatch detection between sentence components

How do people process and evaluate falsehood of sentences? Do people need to compare presented information with the correct answer to determine that a sentence is false, or do they rely on a mismatch between presented sentence components? To illustrate, when confronted with the false sentence ‘trains run on highways’, does one need to know that trains do not run on highways or does one need to know that trains run on tracks to reject the sentence as false? To investigate these questions, participants were asked to validate sentences that were preceded by images (Experiments 1–3) conveying a truth-congruent or a falsehood-congruent component of the sentence (e.g., an image of tracks/highway preceding the sentence ‘trains run on tracks/highways’) or by words (Experiment 4) that were either sentence-congruent, truth-congruent, or both (e.g., the word ‘train/tracks’ preceding the sentence ‘trains run on tracks/highways’). Results from four experiments showed that activating sentence-congruent concepts facilitates validation for both false and true sentences but that activating truth-congruent concepts did not aid the validation of false sentences. The present findings suggest that a detection of falsehood relies on a mismatch detection between sentence’s components, rather than on the activation of true content in the context of a particular sentence.

Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

Psychophysiological approach to the Liar paradox: Jean Buridan’s virtual entailment principle put to the test

This article presents an empirical examination of the consequences of the virtual entailment principle proposed by Jean Buridan to resolve the Liar paradox. This principle states that every sentence in natural language implicitly asserts its own truth. Adopting this principle means that the Liar sentence is not paradoxical but false, because its content is contradictory to what is virtually implied. As a result, humans should perceive the Liar sentence the same way as any other false sentence. This solution to the Liar paradox received criticism for making ad hoc claims about the natural language. However, thanks to modern advancements in psychophysiology, it became possible to empirically investigate if the human brain really perceives the Liar sentence like a false sentence. We designed and conducted an experiment to examine brain activity in response to true sentences, false sentences and self-referential sentences (including the Liar and the Truthteller). Our results provide support for the Buridan’s hypothesis and show that the Liar sentence is processed by the human brain identically to false sentences, while the Truthteller sentence is perceived identically to true sentences. This agrees with predictions derived from the virtual entailment principle and supports the idea that humans think with the logic of truth—a logic for which the truth is a designated value of its adequate semantics.

Jalāl ad-Dīn ad-Dawānī’s Solution to the Liar Paradox and Its Reception in Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Mubīn

AbstractI examine the views of Jalāl ad-Dīn ad-Dawānī (d. 1502) on the Liar paradox and their reception in the work of Qāḍī Mubārak (d. 1748) and Mullā Mubīn (d. 1810). Dawānī argues that the Liar sentence is neither true nor false since it is not the kind of utterance that is capable of bearing a truth-value (i.e., it is not truth-apt). In the course of justifying this view, he proposes a criterion for a sentence’s being truth-apt and attempts to counter a number of objections. I address two of these: one involves certain intuitively true or false self-referential sentences and the other is the ‘strengthened Liar.’ I then argue that both Qāḍī Mubārak and Mullā Mubīn present a version of the solution Dawānī gives in his Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb and, moreover, that Dawānī does not endorse this solution in all his other works. Furthermore, the solution they attribute to Dawānī differs slightly from the one he gives in his Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb in terms of how the major premise is justified. I present evidence which shows that this modification was inspired by Mīr Zāhid al-Harawī’s (d. 1689) gloss on Dawānī’s Sharḥ at-Tahdhīb.

Quine’s Substitutional Definition of Logical Truth and the Philosophical Significance of the Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays Theorem

The Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays theorem states that, for an arithmetical first-order language L, if S is a satisfiable schema, then substitution of open sentences of L for the predicate letters of S results in true sentences of L. For two reasons, this theorem is relevant to issues relative to Quine’s substitutional definition of logical truth. First, it makes it possible for Quine to reply to widespread objections raised against his account (the lexicon-dependence problem and the cardinality-dependence problem). These objections purport to show that Quine’s account overgenerates: it would count as logically true sentences which intuitively or model-theoretically are not so. Second, since this theorem is a crucial premise in Quine’s proof of the equivalence between his substitutional account and the model-theoretic one, it enables him to show that, from a metamathematical point of view, there is no need to favour the model-theoretic account over one in terms of substitutions. The purpose of that essay is thus to explore the philosophical bearings of the Löwenheim-Hilbert-Bernays theorem on Quine’s definition of logical truth. This neglected aspect of Quine’s argumentation in favour of a substitutional definition is shown to be part of a struggle against the model-theoretic prejudice in logic. Such an exploration leads to reassess Quine’s peculiar position in the history of logic.

Truthmaker maximalism and the truthmaker paradox

According to truthmaker maximalism, each truth has a truthmaker. Peter Milne has attempted to refute truthmaker maximalism on mere logical grounds via the construction of a self-referential truthmaker sentence M “saying” of itself that it doesn’t have a truthmaker. Milne argues that M (similar to a Godel sentence and different from a paradox-generating Liar sentence) turns out to be a true sentence without a truthmaker and thus provides a counterexample to truthmaker maximalism. In this paper, I show that Milne’s refutation of truthmaker maximalism does not succeed. In particular, I argue that the notion of truthmaker meets two structural principles which, if added to a formal language of a theory (that allows for diagonalization), are already sufficient to produce a provable contradiction—a contradiction that gives rise to a socalled “Truthmaker paradox”. I also address the question of how to possibly resolve the Truthmaker paradox. I thereby show that the Truthmaker paradox, just as the strengthened Liar paradox, yields a “revenge problem” for paracomplete theories and might lead to triviality for Priest’s dialetheist account LP if the notion of truthmaker is defined as a certain semantic predicate within LP. But regardless of how one tries to cope with the Truthmaker paradox, this paradox is surely interesting in its own right. However, its significance is completely orthogonal to the question of whether truthmaker maximalism is a philosophically sound view.

FIRST‐ORDER LOGICAL VALIDITY AND THE HILBERT‐BERNAYS THEOREM

AbstractWhat we call the Hilbert‐Bernays (HB) Theorem establishes that for any satisfiable first‐order quantificational schema S, there are expressions of elementary arithmetic that yield a true sentence of arithmetic when they are substituted for the predicate letters in S. Our goals here are, first, to explain and defend W. V. Quine's claim that the HB theorem licenses us to define the first‐order logical validity of a schema in terms of predicate substitution; second, to clarify the theorem by sketching an accessible and illuminating new proof of it; and, third, to explain how Quine's substitutional definition of logical notions can be modified and extended in ways that make it more attractive to contemporary logicians.

Revision Without Revision Sequences: Self-Referential Truth

The model of self-referential truth presented in this paper, named Revision-theoretic supervaluation, aims to incorporate the philosophical insights of Gupta and Belnap’s Revision Theory of Truth into the formal framework of Kripkean fixed-point semantics. In Kripke-style theories the final set of grounded true sentences can be reached from below along a strictly increasing sequence of sets of grounded true sentences: in this sense, each stage of the construction can be viewed as an improvement on the previous ones. I want to do something similar replacing the Kripkean sets of grounded true sentences with revision-theoretic sets of stable true sentences. This can be done by defining a monotone operator through a variant of van Fraassen’s supervaluation scheme which is simply based on ω-length iterations of the Tarskian operator. Clearly, all virtues of Kripke-style theories are preserved, and we can also prove that the resulting set of “grounded” true sentences shares some nice features with the sets of stable true sentences which are provided by the usual ways of formalising revision. What is expected is that a clearer philosophical content could be associated to this way of doing revision; hopefully, a content directly linked with the insights underlying finite revision processes.

Sellars, Second-order Quantification, and Ontological Commitment

Sellars [1960. ‘Grammar and existence: A preface to ontology’, Mind, 69 (276), 499–533; 1979. Naturalism and Ontology, Reseda, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company] argues that the truth of a second-order sentence, e.g. , does not incur commitment to there being any sort of abstract entity. This paper begins by exploring the arguments that Sellars offers for the above claim. It then develops those arguments by pointing out places where Sellars has been unclear or ought to have said more. In particular, Sellars's arguments rely on there being a means by which language users could come to understand sentences of a second-order language wherein the truth of sentences of the form do not require there to be abstract entities. In addition to this, as Sellars [1979. Naturalism and Ontology, Reseda, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company] notes, a formal account of quantification is required that does not make use of the apparatus of sequences. Both a translation of and a formal account of quantification are provided by this paper.

Simple Trinitarianism and empty names

AbstractAccording to Simple Trinitarianism, God is mereologically simple, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identified with any entities in our ontology. Thus the Simple Trinitarian is able to avoid conflating Persons or multiplying Gods, and does not have to identify the Persons with minor entities or entities partly disjoint from God. However, to maintain that Trinitarian sentences are nonetheless true, the Simple Trinitarian will need a non-standard semantics. I explore one option for this, involving taking ‘the Father’, ‘the Son’, and ‘the Holy Spirit’ to be empty names. By adopting a positive, Free Logic, we can take these names to make semantic contributions and play roles in true sentences, while blocking problematic inferences.