
	Where results make sense

Topic: Inferential role semantics

	Inferential role semantics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Inferential role semantics (also: conceptual role semantics, functional role semantics, procedural semantics) is an approach to the theory of meaning heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy in that it identifies meaning with use.
		Inferential role semantics can be seen as opposed to truth-conditional semantics.
		The approach is related to accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in the semantics of logic which associate meaning with the reasoning process.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Inferential_role_semantics (157 words)

	Paradoxology
		Semantics is often opposed to syntax, in which case the former pertains to what something means while the latter pertains to the formal structure/patterns in which something is expressed (for example written or spoken).
		Semantics is distinguished from ontology (study of existence) in being about the use of a word more than the nature of the entity referenced by the word.
		Semantics is a subfield of linguistics that is traditionally defined as the study of meaning of (parts of) words, phrases, sentences, and texts.
	mysite.verizon.net /vzeehbro/index.html (1612 words)

	Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Semantics
		Semantics is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts.
		In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as borne on the syntactic levels of words, phrases, sentences, and sometimes larger units of discourse, generically referred to as texts.
		In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience, while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience.
	www.reference.com /browse/wiki/Semantics (563 words)

	Brandom & Kripke
		Commitments and entitlements The original contribution of Brandom to the inferential approach to meaning is an highly normative definition of inferential role in term of entitlements and commitments.
		It is easy to define an inferential role for predicates (let us think, for instance, to a semantic network given via meaning postualtes); but it is really hard to define an infernetial role for indexicals and proper names.
		This general attitude is embedded is the strongly normative inferential role semantics (see before), where a great importance is given to the substitutional role of linguistic items.
	www.dif.unige.it /epi/hp/penco/pub/bpuz.htm (4864 words)

	Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore: Why Meaning (Probably) Isn't Conceptual Role's (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		It is proposed that we reconcile New Testament Semantics with the compositionality of meaning by identifying the meaning of an expression with its role in analytic inferences.
		A lot of the attraction of identifying meaning with inferential role lies in,the thought that the inferential role of an expression might in turn be identified with causal role, thereby conceivably providing the basis for a naturalistic solution to Brentano's problem.
		Conclusion, Semantic Holism: The meaning of an expression is constituted by all of its inferential relations, hence by all of its role in a language.
	ruccs.rutgers.edu /faculty/lepore/WhyMeaning.html (6302 words)

	Inferential role semantics biography .ms (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Inferential role semantics is an approach to the theory of meaning associated closely with accounts of proof-theoretic semantics in the semantics of logic into work as the foundational formalism of logic.
		Gerhard Gentzen, Dag Prawitz and Michael Dummett are generally seen as the founders of this approach; it is heavily influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, especially his aphorism "meaning is use".
		It can be seen as opposed to truth-conditional semantics, just as proof-theoretic semantics is usually seen as opposed to Tarski's semantic theory of truth.
	www.biography.ms /Inferential_role_semantics.html (111 words)

	[No title]
		According to an inferential role account, a (mental) term's meaning for an individual is identical to its role in the totality of inferences that the individual is disposed to draw, or accept or reject.
		It may seem, then, that the inferential role semanticist should define the meaning of a terms as the term's role in the class of statement-transition patterns that are truth-preserving according to some sort of warrant.
		But inferential role semantics seeks to naturalize semantic assignments, which obviously involve truth conditions (perhaps they are just truth conditions.) So this account is flatly circular, since in order to analyze truth conditions, the inferential role theorist must pre-suppose a characterization of truth conditions.
	csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu /philosophyProject/LOT/KAYEASA.html (860 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - semantics, functional role (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		semantics, functional role - The meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent.
		functional role semantics], the meaning of a representation is the role of that representation in the cognitive life of the agent, e.g.
		The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where it is sometimes called "inferential," or "functional" role semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes called "procedural semantics").
	artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/semantics-fr.html (275 words)

	[No title]
		On the roles of causation, inner-route explanations, belief-desire-action triangles, teleology, unity, the presumption of simplicity, and evolution.
		Conceptual role semantics isn't compatible with compositional semantics and the denial of an analytic/synthetic distinction, as full conceptual roles aren't compositional, and there's no way to specify a relevant subset.
		The role of denotational semantics as a defense is unclear.
	www.cogsci.indiana.edu /pub/chalmers.bib.2 (7519 words)

	Defaults in Semantics and Pragmatics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		They should not be regarded as part of semantics as, for example, in Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993), nor should they be seen as a result of context-dependent inference performed by the hearer in the process of the recovery of the speaker's intention.
		In Default Semantics (Jaszczolt, e.g., 2005), utterance meaning is the outcome of merging of information that comes from four sources: (i) word meaning and sentence structure (WS); (ii) (conscious) pragmatic inference (CPI); (iii) cognitive defaults (CD); (iv) social-cultural defaults (SCD).
		The natural concomitant of reducing the role of the logical form (WS) to one of four equally potent constituents of utterance meaning is a revised view of compositionality.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/defaults-semantics-pragmatics (6554 words)

	Psyche 8(07): 'How to Compose Contents: A Review of Jerry Fodor's In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on ...
		The inferential role of "British cow" is not determined by the inferential roles of "British" and "cow".
		To reconcile the principle of compositionality with the view, that inferential role constitutes meaning, one cannot but fall back on the distinction between inferences that are constitutive for meaning and those that are not.
		The causal role of a complex state is entirely determined by, and solely dependent on, the causal role of its proper constituents and their relations to each other.
	psyche.cs.monash.edu.au /v8/psyche-8-07-werning.html (3313 words)

	Two-Dimensional Semantics
		It is this sort of inferential role that grounds the primary intension of an arbitrary expression (as used by an arbitrary speaker).
		The inferential roles in question will exist whether or not the term is definable and whether or not it is equivalent to a description (for more on this, see Chalmers and Jackson 2001 and Chalmers 2002a).
		A semantic pluralist view tends to suggest that there are numerous entities which can play some of the explanatory roles that propositions are supposed to play, and that there is no need to settle which of these best deserves the label 'proposition'.
	consc.net /papers/twodim.html (14816 words)

	What's in a Name?
		The concern, nevertheless real, is that semantic content frequently transcends the immediate grasp of either the speaker’s or her audience’s awareness: and on such occasions, often will not only fail to obscure the meaning of the utterance, but may in fact facilitate its clarity.
		This may be achieved in the ideational context by moving semantic content away from the ideas “commonly” or “predominantly” expressed by the use of some term or sign; and toward the ideas “proprietarily” or “customarily” expressed by the use of that term or sign.
		And if semantic holism necessarily entailed that local meaning (the meaning of a term or phrase) could only be communicated if the speaker’s comprehension of that term (taken as the system of associated terms, ideas, images, etc.) were also communicated, then it would seem that authentic communication almost never occurs.
	www.shlobin-foss.net /papers/name.html (6983 words)

	Logical positivism & Bertrand Russell (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Even though few of its tenets are still agreed with, its role in forming contemporary philosophy should not be underestimated; many subsequent commentators on "logical positivism" tend to attribute to it more of a singular purpose and creed than it in fact adhered to, overlooking the complex disagreements among the logical positivists themselves.
		semantic theory of truth: it consists of a recursive set of rules yielding an infinite set of sentences "'p' is true if and only if p", covering the whole language.
		truth-conditional semantics presented by Davidson; instead he argued that basing semantics on assertion conditions avoids a number of difficulties with truth-conditional semantics, such as the transcendental nature of certain kinds of truth condition.
	dks.thing.net /Logico-Philosophicus.html (6183 words)

	Against Informational Atomism
		One reason for this preoccupation stems from the role of concepts in what is commonly called the Classical view of cognition: the view that knowledge is represented and manipulated through a symbolic language of thought.
		The primary thesis of Inferential Role Semantics is that having a primitive concept is partially a case of having the inferential relations that help to constitute that concept.
		Informational Atomism, his alternative account, is defined by two theses: first, informational semantics, that for a mind to have a concept is for that mind to be in some sort of relationship to the world; and second, conceptual atomism, that primitive concepts--which make up the bulk of Fodor's conceptual taxonomy--have no internal structure.
	www.stanford.edu /group/dualist/vol10/frank.html (2468 words)

	Charles Stewart, Research Interests (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		The relationship between the geometry of interaction semantics of linear logic, and the context semantics of Gonthier, Abadi and Lèvy.
		My doctoral thesis was concerned with the relationship between inferential role semantics (IR semantics) and proof theoretic semantics.
		However, while both proof theory and IR semantics have received great attention in the literature of philosophy, mathematics, cognitive science and linguistics, the relationship between these two theories has not been given a satisfactory formal and conceptual foundation.
	www.linearity.org /cas/research.html (467 words)

	Professor Murat Aydede - FODOR ON CONCEPTS AND FREGE PUZZLES - MURAT AYDEDE May 1998 - The University of Chicago ...
		Fodor obviously thinks that it does, because one of his reasons why inferential role accounts of concepts ought to be abandoned in favor of his own account is that they fail to satisfy PC.
		It may be that there is something like a Mentalese alphabet in each head with a common orthography, and different vehicles involved in different concepts correspond to alphabetically distinct types on the basis of their syntactic/orthographic roles, regardless of whether those types have the same meaning roles.
		The only plausible avenue is to take the functional roles of such particular vehicle tokens as specified in terms of their causal relations to other tokens and perhaps to certain perceptual input and behavioral output (all specified non-semantically).
	evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com /aydede.htm (2896 words)

	How to Be a Meaning Holist - Eric Lormand
		So holism threatens to lead to meaning instability, and (according to the all-or-none considerations to be developed in sections 3 and 4) inferential role semantics threatens to lead to holism.
		If we accept a restriction that is not psychologically natural, we risk compromising the potential role of meaning in psychological explanation, and so we compromise the main reason to accept inferential role semantics rather than purely referential semantics.
		The most natural way for an inferential role semanticist to avoid meaning holism is to appeal to so-called "classical" categorization procedures, restricted tests that might be supposed to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of a representation.
	www-personal.umich.edu /~lormand/phil/meaning/holism.htm (9277 words)

	9 Dispositionalist higher-order thought theory (2): feel
		In framing this explanation I have been careful to speak of ‘consumer semantics’ in general, understood as embracing various forms of teleosemantics and also various forms of functional and inferential role semantics.
		And inferential role semantics, too, comes in so-called ‘long-arm’ varieties, where causal relationships with the world are considered to form part of the inferential role of a given state.
		At issue, is the extent to which perceptual content is determined by input-relations, and the extent to which it is determined by down-stream inferential role, or by ‘consumer-relations’.
	www.philosophy.umd.edu /Faculty/pcarruthers/PC-9.htm (13170 words)

	[No title]
		Mental spaces, in particular, facilitate reasoning: while logic-based semantics (logical form, Montague's, situation semantics) assume that language provides a meaning that can be used for reasoning, Fauconnier assumes that language builds the same kind of mental spaces from the most basic level of meaning construction all the way up to discourse and reasoning.
		Fodor discriminates between "narrow content" and "broad content" of a mental representation: the former is a semantic representation, is purely mental and does not depend on anything else; the latter is a function that yields the referent in every possible world, and depends on the external world.
		His opponents' claim that referential semantics cannot provide a robust theory of intentional explanation is rebuffed by positing that psychological laws are intentional, psychological processes are computational and the semantic properties of mental representations are referential (semantics is purely informational).
	www.thymos.com /mind/f.html (3143 words)

	How to Be a Meaning Atomist - Eric Lormand
		Of course, any arbitrary method of ordering the inferential relations of a representation, coupled with any arbitrary method of dividing the series in two, could be used to generate a meaning-relevant vs. meaning-irrelevant distinction.
		Intuitively, we would expect two synonymous or semantically equivalent representations to be "treated the same" in inference, i.e., for the system to include an actual or idealized disposition (to a degree, on balance, given time, interest, etc.) to "substitute" them for each other in a suitably specified range of mental contexts (see ch.
		This yields for [belief] the semantic equivalent [thing that is B and explains behavior with a thing that is D and explains behavior with something] or, eliminating the redundancy, [thing that is B and explains behavior with a thing that is D].
	www-personal.umich.edu /~lormand/phil/meaning/atomism.htm (10144 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Block (1993) defends holistic inferential role semantics by claiming that while inferences specified in terms of narrow content (i.e., inferential roles) will all be analytic, wide content will delineate analytic from non-analytic inferences.
		Thus, Block seems to be defending an inferential role theory only by making it a relatively unimportant part of a theory of meaning.
		Moreover, there would seem to be a burden of proof on Block to show what sort of wide relations he has in mind and how it is that they can meet the concerns over holism and analyticity, i.e., how wide relations can work with inferential roles to achieve this.
	csmaclab-www.uchicago.edu /philosophyProject/LOT/kayeas17.html (124 words)

	Information and Content (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Mental states differ from most other entities in the world in having semantic or intentional properties: they have meanings, they are about other things, they have satisfaction- or truth-conditions, they have representational content.
		Mental states are not the only entities that have intentional properties - so do linguistic expressions, some paintings, and so on; but many follow [Grice, 1957] in supposing that we could understand the intentional properties of these other entities as derived from the intentional properties of mental states (viz., the mental states of their producers).
		In addition to the theories discussed in the present essay, McLaughlin and Rey consider two-factor theories - those that construe the semantic value of expressions in terms of both a referential factor (given by an informational theory) and a sense factor (given by an inferential role theory).
	aardvark.ucsd.edu /~joncohen/mind/informational_semantics.html (6731 words)

	Peter Carruthers, Reply to Seager
		The thought is this: if intentional content depends, in part, on the powers of the ‘consumer systems’ which use or draw inferences from it, then first-order analog perceptual contents can be rendered AT THE SAME TIME as higher-order, by virtue of their availability to a HOT-wielding consumer system.
		Now, consumer semantics embraces a number of different varieties of theory, of which there are two main sorts -- teleosemantics, on the one hand, and various forms of inferential role semantics, on the other.
		And I suspect that inferential role semantics is not yet well enough developed to fix a determinate answer.
	www.swif.uniba.it /lei/mind/forums/002_0006.htm (2642 words)

	Welcome to Adobe GoLive 5
		And the simple informational semantics he endorses shuts the door on functional connections or relations among concepts, which, along with informational content, fixes the meaning of concepts, at least according to many cognitive scientists.
		On his view, informational atomism, a concept is basically a semantic BB (see Dietrich, in press), a chunk of mental information caused by the environment (to repeat, Fodor's theory of semantics is causal and informational).
		This seems true, but not because DOG has unique, universal existence conditions, but rather because you could just make a mistake for local, uninteresting reasons, like your attention was on something else (after all, all of you is in the uncluttered environment too; perhaps you attention is drawn to your big toe).
	www.cognitivesciencesociety.org /newsletter/June01/FodRev.html (3490 words)

	Research (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-21)
		Once the parallel is appreciated, much of the standard commentary on the open question argument and its role in the case for nonnaturalism is inadequate.
		I argue that given the best explanation of our logical understanding, some version of inferential role semantics must be the correct account of the determinants of logical content.
		We outline a conceptual role semantics for color perception and give an intentionalist reduction of color phenomenology in terms of color content so conceived.
	www.kalderon.demon.co.uk /research.html (686 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)