Carlo Penco

The cognitive load of presupposition triggers: mandatory and optional repairs in presupposition failure

If a speaker utters a sentence p containing a presupposition trigger that activates a presupposition q, and q does not belong to the common ground of presuppositions, it is a case of presupposition failure. If this occurs, speakers are required to repair the failure to make sense of the utterance. According to Glanzberg, two subcategories of being infelicitous may emerge in the case of presupposition failure: one is that strong presuppositions lead to obligatory repair, and the other is that weak presuppositions lead only to an optional repair. Following Glanzbergs suggestion, in this paper we present the results of an experiment supporting the idea that, depending on the kind of trigger, processing the information conveyed by a presupposition can be either optional or mandatory in case of presupposition failure. The conclusion of this paper is that the cognitive demands of different presupposition triggers do not primarily depend on whether they optionally or obligatorily lead to process the presuppositions activated. Rather, their cognitive demands seem to be related with the complexity of the mental representation of the presupposition required.

Holism in Artificial Intelligence

Before Fodor and Lepore’s criticism, holism was a very widely accepted position both in philosophy and in A.I. Fodor and Lepore claim that A.I. is “almost everywhere holistic”.2 I disagree with such a sweeping contention and I will give some evidence for such disagreement. I will not consider connectionist systems, but I will confine my remarks to symbolic A.I.3 Contrary to what Fodor and Lepore claim, I will suggest that mainstream symbolic A.I. is an attempt at implementing molecularist theories of meaning (theories where the meaning of an expression is determined not by the overall system of language to which the expression belongs, but by subparts of it). I will consider three classical cases of A.I. research: (1) procedural semantics as implemented in toy worlds, (2) semantic networks and frames, (3) contextual reasoning. I will try to show that in all these cases we find evidence against an holistic view of meaning, and hints towards a molecularist view that does not degenerate into holism.

Dummett and Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics

in §§1, 2, 3 I will give a reconstruction of Dummett’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. Then, in §§4 and 5 I will analyse the development of Wittgenstein’s ideas to sustain two theses: (a) some aspects of Dummett’s interpretation (especially the idea of decision as fundamental in philosophy of mathematics) are a reconstruction of ideas held by Wittgenstein in his early period, and later discarded. (b) Wittgenstein somehow entertained a position similar to Dummett’s pattern-recognition strategy and abandoned it, or at least gave to it a different focus (somehow linked it with the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification). Relying then mostly on Wittgenstein’s latest remarks, in §6 I will give a slightly different assessment of rule following consideration. In §§7 and 8 I will try some criticism of Dummett’s interpretation and of his general views on philosophy of mathematics.

Wittgenstein, olismo ed esperimenti mentali:l'influenza di Einstein

Wittgenstein, Holism and Mental Experiments. Einstein’s Influence - In this paper I analyse the possible influence of Einstein on Wittgenstein. The starting point of the discussion is the problem of holism, and of two paradoxes which stem from it: the paradox of communication for semantic holism and the para dox of conceptual relativism for epistemological holism. After having introducing the two paradoxes, I make a comparison between Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s answers. From this comparison and from the analysis of Wittgenstein’s answers we are brought to see different tensions in Wittgenstein’s treatment of language games. Language games are sometimes used in a constructive mood, some other times in a very provocative way, as something we cannot properly understand. Especially some of his famous thought experiments have been notoriously interpreted in opposite ways, as a sign of relativism or as a search for a transcendental point of view. My suggestion is that some remarks on Einstein may help to better understand this apparent tension in Wittgenstein. Abstracts 205

Contexts in philosophy: pragmatic competence as filter

This programmatic paper is an attempt to connect some worries in the philosophy of language with some traditional views in artificial intelligence. After a short introduction to the notion of context in philosophy (§1), starting from the inventor of mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege, I list three debates in the philosophy of language where the solution is strongly undecided: §2 treats the debate between holism and molecularism; §3 describes the debate on the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics; §4 hints at a solution of the debate between explicit and implicit view of incomplete descriptions. These debates may be considered case studies on what is happening to the notion of context in philosophy in the first two decades of XXI century; they push us to look for a unifying framework in which to frame those worries: I propose to shift the attention towards a representation of the basic abilities required to navigate across contexts (§5). In the conclusion, I use some suggestions from computer sciences as a contribution towards a better definition of what is meant by “pragmatic competence”, strictly connected to the philosophical enterprise (§6).

Semiotics’ Internal Conflict. The role of pragmatic processing in the constitution of meaning

The aim of this paper is to give a short overview of the debate on the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics, and to point out both its origins and the main problem behind: the definition of what is said. Many participants in the debate challenge the standard view proposed by Paul Grice between literal (semantic) meaning given by conventions and speaker’s meaning given by intentions. In 1. we will trace the origin of the problem in some early definitions of semiotics and in the development of Kaplan’s theory of demonstratives; in 2. we will then give a general assessment of what is at stake: the notion of what is said, or propositional content; in 3. we present some of the main alternatives on the market; in 4. we will claim that the rigid distinction between metaphysical and epistemological aspects of meaning is not so rigid after all, and there is space for pragmatic processing in the constitution of meaning – of what is said.

Philosophy of Language and Mind

In this paper I will give some remarks on the intersection between Agazzi’s work and some topics in philosophy of language and mind. In Sect. 1 I give an introduction to the approach to meaning in Agazzi’s works, and to his recent idea of general semiotics. In describing Agazzi’s treatment of meaning and understanding it appears that some of his papers antedate arguments later become fundamental in the philosophy of language and mind, mainly by Putnam and Searle . In Sect. 2 I describe his discussion of the limits of intensional logics, which antedates analogous criticism made by Putnam; in Sect. 3 I focus on the link between the operational aspects of meaning and the idea of three level semantics; eventually in Sect. 4 I present what can be considered a forerunner of Searle’s argument of the Chinese room in a different setting.

Context Dependence, MOPs, WHIMs and Procedures

After presenting Kripke’s criticism to Frege’s ideas on context dependence of thoughts, I present two recent attempts of considering cognitive aspects of context dependent expressions inside a truth conditional pragmatics or semantics: Recanati’s non-descriptive modes of presentation (MOPs) and Kaplan’s ways of having in mind (WHIMs). After analysing the two attempts and verifying which answers they should give to the problem discussed by Kripke, I suggest a possible interpretation of these attempts: to insert a procedural or algorithmic level in semantic representations of indexicals. That a function may be computed by different procedures might suggest new possibilities of integrating contextual cognitive aspects in model theoretic semantics.