This paper discusses the occurrence of certain polarity items (PIs) in the complements of factive verbs and only, which are not downward entailing (DE). Two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity are discussed: Strawson DE, von Fintel 1999; and weak DE, Hoeksema 1986. Both rely on the idea that monotonicity is computed only after the inference to the subset is made part ...

The paper outlines a semantic ontology as a minimal set of top-level conceptual distinctions underlying natural language communication. A semantic ontology can serve as the basis for the specification of the meaning, as the logical form, of agent messages couched in natural language. It represents a general and reusable module in the architecture of multi-agent systems involving human as well a...

The paper deals with empirical questions that come attached with a presupposition. In case that the presupposition is not true, there is no unambiguous direct answer. In such a case an adequate complete answer is a negated presupposition. Yet these simple ideas are connected with a bunch of problems. First, we must distinguish between a pragmatic and semantic presupposition, and thus also betwe...

When I was in graduate school, I recall hearing “One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist”.1 I don’t know where this comes from, but I think the idea was something like this. First, one starts impressed by the successes of science, endorsing materialism about everything and so about the mind. Second, one is moved by problem of c...

1 Attention & Performance 2006 Sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition The concept of self lacks of clear definition and boundaries and is still widely debated in the philosophical community. Positions oscillate between an elimination of the notion of self and the extension of the list of different forms of self. Following Strawson, one can easily quote up to 25 forms of self: "it is diffi...

This book marks the beginning of a new phase in the philosophical investigation of classical and contemporary accounts of the self: canonical boundaries have been crossed and doctrinal justification abandoned in favor of a cosmopolitan ideal of syncretic, theoretically perspicuous, and historically informed systematic reflection. That such reflection bears on so central a concept as the self is...

Splitting of the self and self disturbances were important to Bleuler's concept of schizophrenia (Bleuler, 1911), and a distorted, even loss of a sense of self appears to be a core feature of the disorder (Nasrallah, 2012; Lysaker and Lysaker, 2010). Furthermore, aberrant self experiences are highly salient to those who are diagnosed with schizophrenia (Saks, 2008; Kean, 2009, 2011) from the pr...

The language of classical propositional iog-Ic is extended by functorial variables as a new syntactical category. Functorial variables render to be a possible integrating representation of both assertion and presup-position in one and the same logical formula different from such using classical conjunction. O~ Introduction From a computational point of vlew there is an important difficulty of a...

— ABSTRACT I argue that, because fundamental scientific theories are attempts to tell us something about reality, we are required to take into account the metaphysical features of those theories. I claim that a guarded realism is the proper stance to take toward fundamental scientific theories: philosophically, one must guard against accepting every posit at face value. Laws of nature are one o...

Freedom and moral responsibility have one foot in the practical realm of human affairs and the other in the esoteric realm of fundamental metaphysics—or so we believe. This has been denied, especially in the metaphysics-bashing era occupying the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, traces of which linger in the present day. But the reasons for this denial seem to us quite implausibl...