bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Discourse semantics
Authors: Asher Nicholas 
Published: September 2018

Discourse and its interpretation have interested philosophers since ancient times, and have been studied in different areas of philosophy such as rhetoric, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of literature. Discourse has attracted interest from philosophers working in the continental tradition, and it received considerable attention in the 1980s from analytic philosophers, philosophers of language, linguists, cognitive scientists and computer scientists; within these fields a formal, logical analysis of discourse interpretation, or discourse semantics, has emerged.
Discourse semantics arose in an attempt to solve certain problems that affected formal theories of meaning for single sentences. These problems had to do with the interpretation of pronouns and other ‘anaphoric’ elements in language. A detailed examination of the data showed that the meaning of an individual sentence in a discourse could depend upon information given by previous sentences in the discourse. To analyse this dependence, discourse semantics developed a formal analysis of a discourse context and of the interaction between the meaning of a sentence and the discourse context in which it is to be interpreted. The essential idea of discourse semantics is that the meaning of a sentence is a relation between contexts. The ‘input’ discourse context furnishes the information needed to interpret the anaphoric elements in the sentence; the information conveyed by the sentence when added to the input context yields a new, or ‘output’, discourse context that can serve to interpret the next sentence in the discourse.
Language, innateness of
Authors: Cowie Fiona 
Published: September 2018

Is there any innate knowledge? What is it to speak and understand a language? These are old questions, but it was the twentieth-century linguist, Noam Chomsky, who forged a connection between them, arguing that mastery of a language is, in part, a matter of knowing its grammar, and that much of our knowledge of grammar is inborn.
Rejecting the empiricism that had dominated Anglo-American philosophy, psychology and linguistics for the first half of this century, Chomsky argued that the task of learning a language is so difficult, and the linguistic evidence available to the learner so meagre, that language acquisition would be impossible unless some of the knowledge eventually attained were innate. He proposed that learners bring to their task knowledge of a ‘Universal Grammar’, describing structural features common to all natural languages, and that it is this knowledge that enables us to master our native tongues.
Chomsky’s position is nativist because it proposes that the inborn knowledge facilitating learning is domain-specific. On an empiricist view, our innate ability to learn from experience (for example, to form associations among ideas) applies equally in any task domain. On the nativist view, by contrast, we are equipped with special-purpose learning strategies, each suited to its own peculiar subject-matter.
Chomsky’s nativism spurred a flurry of interest as theorists leaped to explore its conceptual and empirical implications. As a consequence of his work, language acquisition is today a major focus of cognitive science research.
Scope
Authors: Richard Mark 
Published: September 2018

Scope is a notion used by logicians and linguists in describing artificial and natural languages. It is best introduced in terms of the languages of formal logic. Consider a particular occurrence of an operator in a sentence – say, that of ‘→’ in (1) below, or that of the universal quantifier ‘∀’ in (2) below.
- (1) A → (B & C)
- (2) ∀x(Bxy →∃ yAxy)
Speaking intuitively, the scope of the operator is that part of the sentence which it governs. The scope of ‘→’ in (1) is the whole sentence; this renders the whole sentence a conditional. The scope of ‘&’, on the other hand, is just ‘(B & C)’. In (2), the scope of the quantifier ‘∀’ is the whole sentence, which allows it to bind every occurrence of x. The scope of ‘∃’ is only ‘∃yAxy’. Since ‘Bxy’ is outside its scope, the ‘y’ in ‘Bxy’ is left unbound.
Semantics, possible worlds
Authors: Perry John R. 
Published: September 2018

Possible worlds semantics (PWS) is a family of ideas and methods that have been used to analyse concepts of philosophical interest. PWS was originally focused on the important concepts of necessity and possibility. Consider:
- Necessarily, 2 + 2 = 4.
- Necessarily, Socrates had a snub nose.
Intuitively, (a) is true but (b) is false. There is simply no way that 2 and 2 can add up to anything but 4, so (a) is true. But although Socrates did in fact have a snub nose, it was not necessary that he did; he might have had a nose of some other shape. So (b) is false.
Sentences (a) and (b) exhibit a characteristic known as intensionality: sentences with the same truth-value are constituent parts of otherwise similar sentences, which nevertheless have different truth-values. Extensional semantics assumed that sentences stand for their truth-values, and that what a sentence stands for is a function of what its constituent parts stand for and how they are arranged. Given these assumptions, it is not easy to explain the difference in truth-value between (a) and (b), and hence not easy to give an account of necessity.
PWS takes a sentence to stand for a function from worlds to truth-values. For each world, the function yields the truth-value the sentence would have if that world were actual. ‘2 + 2 = 4’ stands for a function that yields the truth-value ‘true’ for every world, while ‘Socrates had a snub nose’ stands for a different function that yields ‘true’ for some worlds and ‘false’ for others, depending on what Socrates’ nose is like in the world. Since these two sentences stand for different things, sentences that have them as constituents, such as (a) and (b), can also stand for different things.
This basic idea, borrowed from Leibniz and brought into modern logic by Carnap, Kripke and others, has proven extremely fertile. It has been applied to a number of intensional phenomena in addition to necessity and possibility, including conditionals, tense and temporal adverbs, obligation and reports of informational and cognitive content. PWS spurred the development of philosophical logic and led to new applications of logic in computer science and artificial intelligence. It revolutionized the study of the semantics of natural languages. PWS has inspired analyses of many concepts of philosophical importance, and the concept of a possible world has been at the heart of important philosophical systems.
Semiotics
Authors: Watt W.C. 
Published: September 2018

As the study of signification, semiotics takes as its central task that of describing how one thing can mean another. Alternatively, since this philosophical problem is also a psychological one, its job could be said to be that of describing how one thing can bring something else to mind, how on seeing ’x’ someone can be induced to think about ’y’ even though ’y’ is absent.
A person in whose head ’y’ has been brought to mind may be responding to an ’x’ someone else has transmitted with the intention of its signifying ’y’; or, mistakenly, responding to an ’x’ someone has transmitted in the guileless expectation of its signifying some ’z’; or, often, responding to an ’x’ that comes to his notice without anybody’s apparent intention at all. Words, for example, generally signify because someone intends them to, and ideally (though not always) they signify what is intended; whereas clouds signify – a coming storm, a whale – because we so interpret them, not because they shaped themselves to convey some meaning.
Obviously the study of signification forms an integral part of the study of thinking, since no object can itself enter the brain, barring fatal mischance, and so it must be represented by some mental (that is, neural) ’x’ that signifies it.
Signifiers are equally essential for creatures far lower than humans, as when a chemical signal ’x’ emitted by some bacterium signifies to one of its colleagues some ‘y’ such as ’there’s a dearth of food hereabouts’.
There are a number of ways in which an ’x’ can signify some ’y’, but for humans these are chiefly: by physical association; by physical resemblance; and/or by arbitrary convention.
When we take some ’x’ as signifying some ‘y’ we are often guessing; our guess is subject to checking by interpretative (re)appraisal.
Behaviourism, analytic
Authors: Braddon-Mitchell David 
Published: September 2018

Analytical behaviourism is the doctrine that talk about mental phenomena is really talk about behaviour, or tendencies to behave. For an analytical behaviourist, to say that Janet desires ice cream is to say that, all things being equal, she tends to seek it out. To say that Brad is now feeling jealous is to say no more than that he is now behaving in a way characteristic of jealousy, or perhaps that he would do so under appropriate provocation. Analytical behaviourism differs from methodological behaviourism in insisting that our ordinary use of mental language really is, in some sense, already about behaviour. The methodological version claims either that in doing psychology we should restrict ourselves to notions which can be defined behaviourally, or, sometimes, that our general psychological language, even if not already definable in this way, should be reformed in this general direction.
The most telling objection to this account of the mind is that it is inconsistent with the requirement that mental states are causes of behaviour. Ordinarily we might note that Brad has a tendency to display jealous behaviour with little provocation, and conjecture that this is caused by his feeling jealous (rather than, say, practising for his forthcoming part in a Jacobean tragedy). But according to analytical behaviourism his feeling jealous just is his tendency to the behaviour, and since nothing causes itself, his jealousy cannot be the cause of the pattern of behaviour.
Belief
Authors: Braddon-Mitchell David , Jackson Frank 
Published: September 2018

We believe that there is coffee over there; we believe the special theory of relativity; we believe the surgeon; some of us believe in God. But plausibly what is fundamental is believing that something is the case – believing a proposition, as it is usually put. To believe a theory is to believe the propositions that make up the theory, to believe a person is to believe some proposition advanced by them; and to believe in God is to believe the proposition that God exists. Thus belief is said to be a propositional attitude or intentional state: to believe is to take the attitude of belief to some proposition. It is about what its propositional object is about (God, the operation, or whatever). We can think of the propositional object of a belief as the way the belief represents things as being – its content, as it is often called.
We state what we believe with indicative sentences in ‘that’-clauses, as in ‘Mary believes that the Democrats will win the next election ’. But belief in the absence of language is possible. A dog may believe that there is food in the bowl in front of it. Accordingly philosophers have sought accounts of belief that allow a central role to sentences – it cannot be an accident that finding the right sentence is the way to capture what some person believes – while allowing that creatures without a language can have beliefs. One way of doing this is to construe beliefs as relations to inner sentences somehow inscribed in the brain. On this view, although dogs do not have a public language, to the extent that they have beliefs they have something sentence-like in their heads.
An alternative tradition focuses on the way belief when combined with desire leads to behaviour, and analyses belief in terms of behavioural dispositions or more recently as the internal state that is, in combination with other mental states, responsible for the appropriate behavioural dispositions.
An earlier tradition associated with the British empiricists views belief as a kind of pale imitation of perceptual experience. But recent work on belief largely takes for granted a sharp distinction between belief and the various mental images that may or may not accompany it.
A focus of recent discussions of belief has been the extent to which what a subject believes is a function of their surroundings. Everyone agrees that what subjects believe is causally influenced by their surroundings. The sun’s impact on my sense organs causes me to believe that it is sunny. But many argue that the role of subjects’ surroundings in determining what is believed outruns their causal effects.
Intentionality
Authors: Crane Tim 
Published: September 2018

Intentionality is the mind’s capacity to direct itself on things. Mental states like thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes (and others) exhibit intentionality in the sense that they are always directed on, or at, something: if you hope, believe or desire, you must hope, believe or desire something. Hope, belief, desire and any other mental state which is directed at something, are known as intentional states. Intentionality in this sense has only a peripheral connection to the ordinary ideas of intention and intending. An intention to do something is an intentional state, since one cannot intend without intending something; but intentions are only one of many kinds of intentional mental states.
The terminology of intentionality derives from the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages, and was revived by Brentano in 1874. Brentano characterized intentionality in terms of the mind’s direction upon an object, and emphasized that the object need not exist. He also claimed that it is the intentionality of mental phenomena that distinguishes them from physical phenomena. These ideas of Brentano’s provide the background to twentieth-century discussions of intentionality, in both the phenomenological and analytic traditions. Among these discussions, we can distinguish two general projects. The first is to characterize the essential features of intentionality. For example, is intentionality a relation? If it is, what does it relate, if the object of an intentional state need not exist in order to be thought about? The second is to explain how intentionality can occur in the natural world. How can merely biological creatures exhibit intentionality? The aim of this second project is to explain intentionality in non-intentional terms.
Perception
Authors: Martin M.G.F. 
Published: September 2018

Sense perception is the use of our senses to acquire information about the world around us and to become acquainted with objects, events, and their features. Traditionally, there are taken to be five senses: sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste.
Philosophical debate about perception is ancient. Much debate focuses on the contrast between appearance and reality. We can misperceive objects and be misled about their nature, as well as perceive them to be the way that they are: you could misperceive the shape of the page before you, for example. Also, on occasion, it may seem to us as if we are perceiving, when we do not perceive at all, but only suffer hallucinations.
Illusions and hallucinations present problems for a theory of knowledge: if our senses can mislead us, how are we to know that things are as they appear, unless we already know that our senses are presenting things as they are? But the concern in the study of perception is primarily to explain how we can both perceive and misperceive how things are in the world around us. Some philosophers have answered this by supposing that our perception of material objects is mediated by an awareness of mind-dependent entities or qualities: typically called sense-data, ideas or impressions. These intermediaries allegedly act as surrogates or representatives for external objects: when they represent aright, we perceive; when they mislead, we misperceive.
An alternative is to suppose that perceiving is analogous to belief or judgment: just as judgment or belief can be true or false, so states of being appeared to may be correct or incorrect. This approach seeks to avoid intermediary objects between the perceiver and the external objects of perception, while still taking proper account of the possibility of illusion and hallucination. Both responses contrast with that of philosophers who deny that illusions and hallucinations have anything to tell us about the nature of perceiving proper, and hold to a form of naïve, or direct, realism.
The account of perception one favours has a bearing on one’s views of other aspects of the mind and world: the nature and existence of secondary qualities, such as colours and tastes; the possibility of giving an account of the mind as part of a purely physical, natural world; how one should answer scepticism concerning our knowledge of the external world.
Pleasure
Authors: Marshall Graeme 
Published: September 2018

From Plato and beyond, pleasure has been thought to be a basic, and sometimes the only basic, reason for doing anything. Since there are many forms that pleasure can take and many individual views of what pleasure consists in, much attention has been given to how pleasures may be distinguished, what their motivational and moral significance might be, and whether there may not be some objective determination of them, whether some may be good or bad, or some better as pleasures than others.
But first there is the question of what pleasure is. It has been variously thought to be a state of mind like distress only of the opposite polarity; merely the absence or cessation of or freedom from pain; a kind of quiescence like contentment; or the experiencing of bodily sensations which, unlike sensations of pain, one does not want to stop. We also identify and class together particular sources of pleasure and call them pleasures of the table, company, sex, conversation, solitude, competition, contemplation or athletic pleasures. In this sense there may be some pleasures which we do not enjoy. But most generally pleasure is what we feel and take when we do enjoy something. This raises the questions of what is encompassed by ’something’, what it is to enjoy anything, and the extent to which theories of pleasure can accommodate both our passivity and activity in pleasure. The most influential theories have been those of Plato, Aristotle and empiricists such as Hume and Bentham.
Artificial intelligence
Authors: Boden Margaret A. 
Published: September 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) tries to make computer systems (of various kinds) do what minds can do: interpreting a photograph as depicting a face; offering medical diagnoses; using and translating language; learning to do better next time.
AI has two main aims. One is technological: to build useful tools, which can help humans in activities of various kinds, or perform the activities for them. The other is psychological: to help us understand human (and animal) minds, or even intelligence in general.
Computational psychology uses AI concepts and AI methods in formulating and testing its theories. Mental structures and processes are described in computational terms. Usually, the theories are clarified, and their predictions tested, by running them on a computer program. Whether people perform the equivalent task in the same way is another question, which psychological experiments may help to answer. AI has shown that the human mind is more complex than psychologists had previously assumed, and that introspectively ‘simple’ achievements – many shared with animals – are even more difficult to mimic artificially than are ’higher’ functions such as logic and mathematics.
There are deep theoretical disputes within AI about how best to model intelligence. Classical (symbolic) AI programs consist of formal rules for manipulating formal symbols; these are carried out sequentially, one after the other. Connectionist systems, also called neural networks, perform many simple processes in parallel (simultaneously); most work in a way described not by lists of rules, but by differential equations. Hybrid systems combine aspects of classical and connectionist AI. More recent approaches seek to construct adaptive autonomous agents, whose behaviour is self-directed rather than imposed from outside and which adjust to environmental conditions. Situated robotics builds robots that react directly to environmental cues, instead of following complex internal plans as classical robots do. The programs, neural networks and robots of evolutionary AI are produced not by detailed human design, but by automatic evolution (variation and selection). Artificial life studies the emergence of order and adaptive behaviour in general and is closely related to AI.
Philosophical problems central to AI include the following. Can classical or connectionist AI explain conceptualization and thinking? Can meaning be explained by AI? What sorts of mental representations are there (if any)? Can computers, or non-linguistic animals, have beliefs and desires? Could AI explain consciousness? Might intelligence be better explained by less intellectualistic approaches, based on the model of skills and know-how rather than explicit representation?
Methodological individualism
Authors: Segal Gabriel 
Published: September 2018

Methodological individualism (MI) is the thesis that certain psychological properties are intrinsic properties, such as ‘being made out of iron’, rather than externally relational properties, such as ‘being an aunt’. It has been challenged by influential ‘anti-individualist’ claims of, for example, Putnam and Burge, according to which the content of an individual’s words or thoughts (beliefs, desires) is determined in part by facts about their social or physical environment. Putnam, for example, imagines a planet, ‘twin earth’, which is identical to the earth in 1750 (prior to modern chemistry) in all respects except that wherever earth had H2O, twin earth had a different but superficially similar chemical, XYZ. Putnam argues that the English word ‘water’ in 1750 referred only to H2O, while the twin word ‘water’ refers only to XYZ.
Historically, the term ‘methodological individualism’ has referred to the thesis that all social explanation must be ultimately expressible in terms of facts about individual human beings; not about economic classes, nations and so on. For a treatment of this subject, see Explanation in history and social science §1.
Nativism
Authors: Samet Jerry 
Published: September 2018

Traditional empiricism claims that the mind is initially equipped only with the capacity for experience and the mechanisms that make it possible for us to learn from experience. Nativists have argued that this is not enough, and that our innate endowment must be far richer, including information, ideas, beliefs, perhaps even knowledge.
Empiricism held the advantage until recently, partly because of a misidentification of nativism with rationalism. Rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz thought nativism would explain how a priori knowledge of necessary truths is possible. However, the fact that something is innate does not establish that it is true, let alone that it is necessary or a priori.
More recently, nativism has been reanimated by Chomsky’s claims that children must have innate language-specific information that mediates acquisition of their native tongue. He argues that, given standard empiricist learning procedures, the linguistic data available to a child underdetermines the grammar on which they converge at a very young age, with relatively little effort or instruction.
The successes in linguistics have led to fruitful research on nativism in other domains of human knowledge: for example, arithmetic, the nature of physical objects, features of persons, and possession of concepts generally.