Francis Jeffry Pelletier

University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/

There are good reasons to want logics, including many-valued logics, to have usable conditionals, and we have explored this in certain logics. However, it turns out that we “accidentally” chose some favourable logics. In this paper, we look at some of the unfavourable logics and describe where usable conditionals can be added and where it is not po...

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this...

A classical viewpoint claims that reality consists of both things and stuff, and that we need a way to discuss these aspects of reality. This is achieved by using +count terms to talk about things while using +mass terms to talk about stuff. Bringing together contributions from internationally-renowned experts across interrelated disciplines, this...

In this paper, we discuss the implications for theories of the count/mass distinction that can be derived from the development of a large lexicon of English count and mass noun sense pairs, the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL). The development of a lexicon for count and mass senses makes it possible that research on the count/mass distinc...

This paper describes an ATP system, named JGXYZ, for some gap and glut logics. JGXYZ is based on an equi-provable translation to FOL, followed by use of an existing ATP system for FOL. A key feature of JGXYZ is that the translation to FOL is data-driven, in the sense that it requires only the addition of a new logic’s truth tables for the unary and...

We investigate some well-known (and a few not-so-well-known) many-valued logics that have a small number (3 or 4) of truth values. For some of them we complain that they do not have any logical use (despite their perhaps having some intuitive semantic interest) and we look at ways to add features so as to make them useful, while retaining their int...

Logics that have many truth values—more than just True and False—have been argued to be useful in the analysis of very many philosophical and linguistic puzzles (as well, sometimes, in various computational-oriented tasks). In this paper, which is a followup to (Hazen and Pelletier in K3, Ł3, LP, RM3, A3, FDE, M: How to make many-valued logics work...

The logic of paradox, LP, is a first-order, three-valued logic that has been advocated by Graham Priest as an appropriate way to represent the possibility of acceptable contradictory statements. Second-order LP is that logic augmented with quantification over predicates. As with classical second-order logic, there are different ways to give the sem...

This paper investigates the strange case of an argument that was directed against a positivist verification principle. We find an early occurrence of the argument in a talk by the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden at the 1934 International Congress of Philosophy in Prague, where Carnap and Neurath were present and contributed short rejoinders. We disc...

In light of the count/mass distinction, plural morphology has received extensive attention in the literature of linguistics and philosophy, since it is often considered as one distinctive feature that divides count nouns from mass nouns. Chierchia (1998) introduces a functional theory by means of which singulars, plurals and mass terms receive an i...

We investigate some well-known (and a few not-so-well-known) many-valued logics that have a small number (3 or 4) of truth values. For some of them we complain that they do not have any \emph{logical} use (despite their perhaps having some intuitive semantic interest) and we look at ways to add features so as to make them useful, while retaining th...

It’s no secret that different of the subfields in cognitive science dispute what the correct solution is to various problems that they each investigate in their separate ways. Sometimes this is due to differing antecedent ideas about what is the appropriate way to investigate the phenomenon, other times it is due to differing antecedent ideas about...

The AGM paradigm of belief change studies the dynamics of belief states in light of new information. Finding, or even approximating, those beliefs that are dependent on or relevant to a change is valuable because, for example, it can narrow the set of beliefs considered during belief change operations. A strong intuition in this area is captured by...

The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL 2.1), a large empirical database consisting of lemmata from Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) with added senses from WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). BECL 2.1 contains ≈ 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs, divided into four major countability classes and 18 fine-gr...

Average-NPs, such as the one in the title of this paper, have been claimed to be 'linguistically identical' to any other definite-NPs but at the same time to be 'semantically inconsistent' with these other definite-NPs. To some this is an ironclad proof of the irrelevance of semantics to linguistics. We argue that both of the initial claims are wro...

Gentzen's and JaA > kowski's formulations of natural deduction are logically equivalent in the normal sense of those words. However, Gentzen's formulation more straightforwardly lends itself both to a normalization theorem and to a theory of "meaning" for connectives (which leads to a view of semantics called 'inferentialism'). The present paper in...

Documentation of BECL 2.0

The present paper describes the construction of a resource to determine the lexical preference class of a large number of English nouns (≈ 14,000) with respect to the distinction between mass and count interpretations. In constructing the lexicon, we have employed a questionnaire-based approach based on existing resources such as the Open ANC (http...

Work that is called 'natural deduction' is carried out in two ways: first, as an object-language method to prove theorems and to demonstrate the validity of arguments; and secondly, as a metatheoretic investigation into the properties of these types of proofs and the use of properties of this sort to demonstrate results about other systems (such as...

This chapter investigates the rationale for having the lexical categories or features mass and count. Some theories make the features be syntactic; others make it be semantic. It is concluded here that none of the standard accounts of their function actually serve the purpose for which they are adopted, and that we should instead remove these featu...

In an interesting experimental study, Bonini et al. (1999) present partial support for truth-gap theories of vagueness. We say this despite their claim to find theoretical and empirical reasons to dismiss gap theories and despite the fact that they favor an alternative, epistemic account, which they call 'vagueness as ignorance'. We present yet mor...

Strawson (1959) described ‘descriptive metaphysics’, Bach (1986a) described ‘natural language metaphysics’, Sapir (1929) and Whorf (1940a,b, 1941) describe, well, Sapir-Whorfianism. And there are other views concerning the relation between correct semantic analysis of linguistic phenomena and the “reality” that is supposed to be thereby described. I...

Francis Jeffry Pelletier holds a B.S.(math) 1965 and M.A. 1966 from the University of Nebraska, a Ph.D. 1971 from UCLA. He is presently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta and is working on an M.Sc. in linguistics there. His work has appeared in Journal of Philosophical Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic, Philosophia, and o...

We might hear that marshmallows are sweet. Here, we are talking about the kind marshmallow and assert that individual instances of this kind have the property of being sweet. Strangely, we are prepared to believe these so-called generic sentences even though we are aware that there are some bad-tasting marshmallows. What can make these generic sent...

This chapter introduces the linguistic phenomena that are called "genericity" (both the socalled reference to a kind and the characterizing statement types) and shows how they have figured into a wide range of fields, such as ethics and philosophy of science (both within philosophy), commonsense reasoning and nonmonotonic logic (within artificial i...

Generic statements of the sort under consideration in this talk are those such as (1) a. Potatoes contain vitamin C b. Basketball players are tall c. Predatory animals have sharp teeth d. Birds fly Such genericity is a feature of entire sentences (or at least of entire clauses), and is not attributable to any subpart of the sentence, such as to the...

Complex phrases are also brought into the categorization, so that cutlery that is in the drawer and hot water are mass phrases while tree that is in the park and tall person are count phrases. I use 'mass term' and 'count term' to cover both nouns and more complex noun phrases. (As well, some theorists admit other grammatical categories into the co...

This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible (non-monotonic), cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates...

In this paper we explore a class of belief update operators, in which the definition of the operator is compositional with respect to the sentence to be added. The goal is to provide an update operator that is intuitive, in that its definition is based on a recursive decomposition of the update sentences structure, and that may be reasonably implem...

Psychologism in logic is the doctrine that the semantic content of logical terms is in some way a feature of human psychology. We consider the historically influential version of the doctrine, Psychological Individualism, and the many counter-arguments to it. We then propose and assess various modifications to the doctrine that might allow it to av...

In an earlier paper entitled Synonymous Logics, the authors attempted to show that there are two modal logics so that each is exactly translatable into the other, but they are not translationally equivalent. Unfortunately, there is an error in the proof of this result. The present paper provides a new example of two such logics, and a proof of the...

Ternary exclusive or is the (two valued) truth function that is true just in case exactly one of its three arguments is true. This is an interesting truth function, not definable in terms of the binary exclusive or alone, although the binary case is definable in terms of the ternary case. This article investigates the types of truth functions that...

In 'On Denoting' and to some extent in 'Review of Meinong and Others, Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie', published in the same issue of Mind (Russell, 1905a,b), Russell presents not only his famous elimination (or contextual defi nition) of defi nite descriptions, but also a series of considerations against understanding defi n...

The property of being a mixture, the concept of mixture, the predicate 'is a mixture', and the physical mixtures themselves present complicated and confusing mixtures of conflicting linguistic data, conflicting conceptual intuitions, and conflicting physical analyses of the stuffs. For example, we can find question-begging definitions in chemistry...

We propose an update operator for modifying a knowledge base. The approach differs from other belief change operators in that the definition of the operator is compositional with respect to the sentence to be added. The goal is to provide an update operator that is intuitive, in that its definition is based on a recursive decomposition of the updat...

Francis Jeffry Pelletier is a Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Professor of Philosophy and of Linguistics, as well as an Associate in Computing Science and Psychology. He has been editor of Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Linguistics and Philosophy, is an associate editor of many...

This article presents clustering experiments on German verbs: A statistical grammar model for German serves as the source for a distributional verb description at the lexical syntax-semantics interface, and the unsupervised clustering algorithm k-means ...

Default reasoning occurs whenever the truth of the evidence available to the reasoner does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion being drawn. Despite this, one is entitled to draw the conclusion “by default” on the grounds that we have no information which would make us doubt that the inference should be drawn. It is the type of conclusion we d...

Entemann (2002) defends fuzzy logic by pointing to what he calls “misconceptions” concerning fuzzy logic. However, some of these ‘;misconceptions’ are in fact truths, and it is Entemann who has the misconceptions. The present article points to mistakes made by Entemann in three different areas. It closes with a discussion of what sort of general co...

Timothy Williamson, in various places, has put forward an argument that is supposed to show that denying bivalence is absurd. This paper is an examination of the logical force of this argument, which is found wanting.

Agent communication languages (ACLs) invoke speech act theory and define individual message types by reference to particular combinations of beliefs and desires of the speaker (feasibility preconditions). Even when the mental states are restricted to a small set of nested beliefs, it seems that there might be a very large number of different possib...

This paper discusses the general problem of translation functions between logics, given in axiomatic form, and in particular, the problem of determining when two such logics are synonymous or translationally equivalent. We discuss a proposed formal definition of translational equivalence, show why it is reasonable, and also discuss its relation to...

Some utterances of sentences such as ‘Every student failed the midterm,exam’ and ‘There is no beer’ are widely held to be true in a conversation despite the facts that not every student in the world failed the midterm exam and that there is, in fact, some beer somewhere. For instance, the speaker might be talking about some particular course, or ab...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43170/1/10988_2004_Article_5089033.pdf

this paper will be with the semantic rules that define immediate logical form, although we attempt to define this form in a way that minimizes the remaining gap to the deeper representation

The results of the IJCAR ATP System Competition are presented.

Researchers who make theoretical advances also need some way to demonstrate that an advance really does have general, overall positive consequences for system performance. For this it is necessary to evaluate the system on a set of problems that is sufficiently large and diverse to be somehow representative of the intended application area as a who...

In this essay I will consider two theses that are associated with Frege,and will investigate the extent to which Frege “really” believed them.Much of what I have to say will come as no surprise to scholars of thehistorical Frege. But Frege is not only a historical figure; he alsooccupies a site on the philosophical landscape that has allowed hisdoc...

this paper, there are two types of conclusions that we would like to urge.

In this paper we report preliminary results on how people revise or update a previously held set of beliefs. When intelligent agents learn new things which conflict with their current belief set, they must revise their belief set. When the new information does not conflict, they merely must update their belief set. Various AI theories have been pro...

We report empirical results on factors that influence how people reason with default rules of the form "Most x's have property P", in scenarios that specify information about exceptions to these rules and in scenarios that specify default-rule inheritance. These factors include (a) whether the individual, to which the default rule might apply, is s...

The central concern of Knowledge in a Social World is to restore the notion of Truth to the rightful place of glory that it had before the onslaught of those pragmatic, cultural-studying, social constructing, critical legalistic and feministic postmodernists (PoMo's, for short). As G sees it, these PoMo's have never put forward any "real" arguments...

this article is to give a history of the development of this method of doing logic and to characterize what sort of thing is meant nowadays by the name. My view is that the current connotation of the term functions rather like a prototype: there is some exemplar that the term most clearly applies to and which manifests a number of characteristics....

An innovative list of 75 logic problems for testing ATP systems was introduced in 1986. The problems are presented in a natural first-order form (FOF), and most of them are also given in an equivalent negated conclusion clause normal form (CNF). However, shortly the introduction of the logic problems, some errata are presented. In particular, Probl...

. The CADE-13 ATP System Competition was the first large scale controlled competition for 1st order ATP systems. Many people have commented on various aspects of the competition, including some suggestions for future improvement. These comments, and some discussion of them, are contained in this paper. An overview of the major issues that will affe...

Objects 2.3: Prototypes 2.4: Stereotypes 2.5: Modal Conditional Approaches 2.6: Situation Semantics 2.7: Default Reasoning Approaches 3: Default Approaches and Generics 3.1: A General Characterization of Nonmonotonicity and Patterns of Nonmonotonic Reasoning 3.2: Evaluation of Default Approaches I: Default Logic and Update Semantics 3.3: Evaluation...

this article is to give a history of the development of this method of doing logic and to characterize what sort of thing is meant nowadays by the name. My view is that the current connotation of the term functions rather like a prototype: there is some exemplar that the term most clearly applies to and which manifests a number of characteristics....

this paper was conceived and written. We would also like to thank Julius Moravcsik and Mohan Matten for insightful discussions about the content of the paper.

We investigate the notion of relevance as it pertains to ‘commonsense’, subjunctive conditionals. Relevance is taken here as a relation between a property (such as having a broken wing) and a conditional (such as birds typically fly). Specifically, we explore a notion of ‘causative’ relevance, distinct from ‘evidential’ relevance found, for example...

Dans son article intitule From compositional semantics to systematic semantics (1994), W. Zadrozny prouve mathematiquement que toute semantique peut etre encodee en tant que semantique compositionnelle, ce qui signifie essentiellement que la definition standard de la compositionnalite est formellement vide de sens. Les As. critiquent ici cette opin...

A certain direction in cognitive science has been to try to “ground” public language statements in some species of mental representation. A central tenet of this trend is that communication—that is, public language—succeeds (when it does) because the elements of this public language are in some way correlated with mental items of both the speaker a...

DISCOURSE, INTERACTION, AND COMMUNICATION Co-organized by the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science and the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Infonnation (ILCLI) both from the University of the Basque Country, tlle Fourth International Colloquium on Cognitive Science (ICCS-95) gathered at Donostia - San Sebastian ti'om May 3 to...

This study examines the problem of belief revision, defined as deciding which of several initially accepted sentences to disbelieve, when new information presents a logical inconsistency with the initial set. In the first three experiments, the initial sentence set included a conditional sentence, a non-conditional (ground) sentence, and an inferre...

We report empirical results on factors that influence human default reasoning, both in feature-inheritance type problems and in problems that specify information about exceptions to default rules. These factors include similarity between instances that are reasoned about and whether the classes of the instances are naturallyoccurring or classes of...

this paper is to consider how the AI field defines the phenomenon of default reasoning is, and what it presents as the underlying point or purpose of constructing formal accounts of it. We were motivated to reconsider these issues at this high level in part to ground our own research agenda in the concerns of the field, and in part to find a unifyi...

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation...

RamsayAllan. Formal methods in artificial intelligence. Cambridge tracts in theoretical computer science, no. 6. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge etc. 1988, ix + 279 pp. - Volume 61 Issue 1 - Francis Jeffry Pelletier

Fuzzy logic methods have been used successfully in many real-world applications, but the foundations of fuzzy logic remain under attack. Taken together, these two facts constitute a paradox. A second paradox is that almost all of the successful fuzzy logic applications are embedded controllers, while most of the theoretical papers on fuzzy methods...

The Principle of Semantic Compositionality (sometimes called ‘Frege's Principle’) is the principle that the meaning of a (syntactically complex) whole is a function only of the meanings of its (syntactic) parts together with the manner in which these parts were combined. This principle has been extremely influential throughout the history of formal...

Fuzzy logic methods have been used successfully in many real-world applications, but the foundations of fuzzy logic remain under attack. Taken together, these two facts constitute a paradox. A second paradox is that almost all of the successful fuzzy ...

James Higginbotham (1986) presents a theory of semantic in-terpretation which violates the principle of semantic compositionality. He gives an argument by means of an example construction in favor of his con-tention. I show that compositioinal theories have more resources than some researchers give it credit for, and that these can be used in two d...

Entemann (2002) defends fuzzy logic by pointing to what he calls 'miscon-ceptions' concerning fuzzy logic. However, some of these 'misconceptions' are in fact truths, and it is Entemann who has the misconceptions. The present article points to mistakes made by Entemann in three different areas. It closes with a discussion of what sort of general co...

THINKER is an automated natural deduction first-order theorem proving program. This paper reports on how it was adapted so as to prove theorems in modal logic. The method employed is an indirect semantic method, obtained by considering the semantic conditions involved in being a valid argument in these modal logics. The method is extended from prop...

Default reasoning occurs when the available information does not deductively guarantee the truth of the conclusion; and the conclusion is nonetheless correctly arrived at. The formalisms that have been developed in Artificial Intelligence to capture this mode of reasoning have suffered from a lack of agreement as to which non-monotonic inferences s...