Arianna Betti

• Professor (Full) at University of Amsterdam

Ensuring a faithful interaction with data and its representation for humanities can and should depend on expert-constructed ground truths.

We address the problem of creating and evaluating quality Neo-Latin word embeddings for the purpose of philosophical research, adapting the Nonce2Vec tool to learn embeddings from Neo-Latin sentences. This distributional semantic modeling tool can learn from tiny data incrementally, using a larger background corpus for initialization. We conduct tw...

We propose a novel type of low distortion radial embedding which focuses on one specific entity and its closest neighbors. Our embedding preserves near-exact distances to the focus entity and aims to minimize distortion between the other entities. We present an interactive exploration tool SolarView which places the focus entity at the center of a...

The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? I...

This paper presents the current state of development of GlamMap, a visualisation tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. The focus in the paper is on the most crucial improvement achieved in the development of the tool: GlamMapping Trove. The visualisation of Trove’s sixty-million book records is po...

This chapter fixes what compositional facts are and what they are for. Five semantic roles are distinguished that entities can play in the theoretical space at the intersection of language and world, and compositional facts are characterized as entities able to play two such roles (sentence-object, and truthmaker). A reconstruction of Armstrong’s a...

Chapter 3 shows in what way the Unity Problem can be not only solved, but dissolved. The second and last step is taken here towards dismissing Armstrong’s facts as ad hoc entities, by showing that superior alternatives are available. If a common assumption that relations are relata unspecific is dropped (where relata specificity is neither external...

This Chapter introduces the Unity Problem: what is the ontological ground of the difference between two objects taken together (their mereological sum or ‘mere aggregate’) and their real unity (the ‘really unified’ complex of the two objects)? The attempts at answering this question are presented by means of a Master Argument, and ranked using a fl...

An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theo...

According to Mulligan and Correia’s entry on facts in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘any philosophy of facts owes us an account of the form of such expressions as “the fact that Sam is sad”’. They also suggest that expressions of the form ‘the fact that p’ have the form of definite descriptions, and that one possible account of such expr...

We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace (dis)continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that histori...

Alongside a respect for philosophically informed formal work and an interest in all things Polish, Jan Woleński and I share a profound admiration for Leśniewski’s oeuvre. As Jan once told me, you can work on Leśniewski for your whole life. Indeed so. Eighteen years after I first met him, on a morning in late March at a bus stop in Sucha Bezkidzka,...

Libraries provide access to large amounts of library metadata. Unfortunately, many libraries only offer textual interfaces for searching and browsing their holdings. Visualizations provide simpler, faster, and more efficient ways to navigate, search and study large quantities of metadata. This paper presents GlamMap, a visualization tool that displ...

In a series of articles, Dale Jacquette has offered the following picture of Twardowski’s contribution to Brentano’s theory of intentionality. Brentano made no distinction between the content and the object of mental acts: he ‘seems to place the real world beyond the reach of thought’ (Jacquette 1990: 181, Jacquette 2004: 107; see also Jacquette 20...

This chapter has two aims. The first aim is to present an overview of Bolzano's universe from the point of view of his metaphysics and its relationship to logic, relying fundamentally on Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre. The author's preferred reading of Bolzano is one according to which he is a 'platonistic nominalist': a platonist about propositions...

The paper [Tarski: Les fondements de la géométrie des corps, Annales de la Société Polonaise de Mathématiques, pp. 29—34, 1929] is in many ways remarkable. We address three historico-philosophical issues that force themselves upon the reader. First we argue that in this paper Tarski did not live up to his own methodological ideals, but displayed in...

This chapter has two aims. The first aim is to present an overview of Bolzano's universe from the point of view of his metaphysics and its relationship to logic, relying fundamentally on Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre. The author's preferred reading of Bolzano is one according to which he is a 'platonistic nominalist': a platonist about propositions...

An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.

In (2006a, 2006b), Benjamin Schnieder criticizes truthmaking as a relation between entities in the world and the truths those entities 'make true'. In (2006b), his criticism exploits a notion of conceptual explanation that is very similar to Bolzano's grounding. In the first part of this paper, I offer an analysis of Bolzano's grounding. I discuss...

Throughout more than two millennia philosophers adhered massively to ideal standards of scientific rationality going back ultimately to Aristotle’s Analytica posteriora. These standards got progressively shaped by and adapted to new scientific needs and tendencies. Nevertheless, a core of conditions capturing the fundamentals of what a proper scien...

Leśniewski’s systems deviate greatly from standard logic in some basic features. The deviant aspects are rather well known, and often cited among the reasons why Leśniewski’s work enjoys little recognition. This paper is an attempt to explain why those aspects should be there at all. Leśniewski built his systems inspired by a dream close to Leibniz...

In [Erkenntnis 64, No. 1, 61–74 (2006; Zbl 1098.03518); Synthese 152, No. 1, 21–46 (2006; Zbl 1244.03033)], B. Schnieder criticizes truthmaking as a relation between entities in the world and the truths those entities ‘make true’. In [Zbl 1244.03033], his criticism exploits a notion of conceptual explanation that is very similar to Bolzano’s ground...

The systems of Leśniewski, like Frege’s, have an unmistakably old-fashioned flavour. They stand to, say, post-Tarskian, post-Gödelian, post-Hilbertian logic like traditional peasant Tuscan bread soup stands to molecular fusion kitchen. Why is that? According to suggestions recently put forward, which rely on van Heijenoort’s opposition “Logic as La...

According to Vallicella's‘Relations, Monism, and the Vindication of Bradley's Regress’ (2002), if relations are to relate their relata, some special operator must do the relating. No other options will do. In this paper we reject Vallicella's conclusion by considering an important option that becomes visible only if we hold onto a precise distincti...

This chapter surveys Tarski's relationship, both personal and philosophical, with his dissertation advisor Stanislaw Lesniewski. Tarski's philosophical and mathematical background in Warsaw is surveyed, and the history of Tarski's relationship with Lesniewski is set out, focusing on the divergence between Lesniewski's and Tarski's views on metamath...

When Twardowski came to Lvov in 1895, his aim was to establish a philosophical trend heavily inspired by Brentanism, although peppered with Bolzanian ideas. As shows from a comparison between the lectures in logic he gave in Vienna in 1894/5 and in Lvov in 1895/6, Twardowski's teaching activity in Poland was even more Brentanian than in Vienna, I T...

Dans la philosophie analytique contemporaine, les faits sont des entités plutôt populaires. Pourtant les arguments en leur faveur paraissent plutôt légers. On défend habituellement les faits sur la base d'arguments a priori sémantiques ou épistémologiques et suivant une stratégie argumentative abductive à la meilleure application, tel l'argument du...

Twardowski's On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894) is one of the most influential works that Austrian philosophy has left to posterity. The manuscript Logik (1894–1895) supplements that work and allows us to reconstruct Twardowski's theory of judgement. These texts raise several issues, in particular whether Twardowski accepts propositi...

Twardowski's On the Content and Object of Presentations (1894) is one of the most influential works that Austrian philosophy has left to posterity. The manuscript Logik (1894-1895) supplements that work and allows us to reconstruct Twardowski's theory of judgement. These texts raise several issues, in particular whether Twardowski accepts propositi...

A Bilingual International Conference on the History and Actuality of the Polish Contribution, from the Lvov-Warsaw school to phenomenology, to Twentieth Century Philosophy. Colloque international bilingue portant sur l'histoire et l'actualité de la contribution polonaise, de l'école de Lvov-Varsovie à la phénoménologie, à la philosophie du vingtièm...

In several manuscripts, written between 1894 and 1897, Twardowski developed a new theory of judgement with two types of judgement: existential and relational judgements. In Zur Lehre he tried to stay within a Brentanian framework, although he introduced the distinction between content and object in the theory of judgement. The introduction of this...

This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of Tarski's semantic background in the light of the ideas of his master, Stanisław Leśniewski. Although in his 1933 monograph Tarski credits Leśniewski with crucial negative results on the semantics of natural language, the conceptual relationship between the two logicians has never been investigat...

this paper It was in 1911 that #ukasiewicz and Le#niewski met. Le#niewski himself reported that at that time he had read #ukasiewicz's masterpiece On the Principle of Contradiction in Aristotle (1910), and, as Lejewski knew from #ukasiewicz, he said he had come to criticize the author

this paper is: what theory of judgement did Twardowski develop during that period? Two of the manuscripts are in Polish, the short Teoria s#dw (Theory of Judgement, Twardowski 1897a) and the much longer Logika (Twardowski 1895/6), containing the The authors wish to thank Prof. Jacek J. Jadacki, custodian of the Twardowski archives in Warsaw, and Dr...

Jan Łukasiewicz is first and foremost associated with the rejection of the prin- ciple of bivalence and the discovery of many-valued logics. The story of both the rejection and the discovery is, however, incomplete in many senses, the most obvious being that it has not been told in its entirety. There are specific questions, especially regarding th...

In ‘De Veritate: Austro-Polish contributions to the theory of truth from Brentano to Tarski’ Jan Wolenski and Peter M. Simons related an intriguing story of the “Austro-Polish obsession with truth”.1 Woleński and Simons mention the Bohemian philosopher Bernard Bolzano several times, with particular reference to absoluteness and sempiternity of trut...

In virtue of what do relations relate? Suppose that finding an answer to this question is a genuine metaphysical task. As known, some answers ignite Bradley's Relation Regress (Bradley 1893, 27-8). Some other answers don't ignite the regress but fall prey to another problem instead, the so-called Glue Problem. In fact, following Vallicella 2000, th...