Recent research on the semantics of quantificational expressions has taken on the task of relating the truth-conditional import of quantifiers with their impact on verification procedures. In particular, the semantic analysis and verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most have been studied in a variety of ways in an effort to reveal the correct semantic analysis of...

Advocacy of ‘methodological individualism’ is a widespread, especially among economists. However, the term is rarely defined with adequate precision and some crucial ambiguities are explored in this article. Among these is the commonplace ambivalence over whether explanations should be in terms of individuals alone, or in terms of individuals plus relations between them. It is shown that a grea...

But doing this requires fairly complex inference, because the words “block”, “enter”, “can”, “not” and “deliver” carve up the world in different ways.1 Words describe the world, so if we are going to draw the appropriate inferences in understanding a text, we must have underlying theories of aspects of the world and we must have axioms that link these to words. This includes domain-dependent kn...

Interactive learning deals with the problem of learning and solving tasks using human instructions. It is common in human-robot interaction, tutoring systems, and in human-computer interfaces such as brain-computer ones. In most cases, learning these tasks is possible because the signals are predefined or an ad-hoc calibration procedure allows to map signals to specific meanings. In this paper,...

Meanings matter to people. Meanings are our symbolic representation of the world, helping us make sense of life and communicate with one another. We constantly define, interpret, translate, and express meanings— often unconsciously, usually implicitly. Many philosophers and psychologists would say that meaning-making is an intrinsically human activity, maybe even the defining human activity. Bu...

If we focus on ‘relevance’, the textual metafunction creates relevance by adding prominence through assigning relative value to parts of the clause (Matthiessen 1992). The Theme, for instance, functions to select meaning(s) from the clause (Hannay & Martínez Caro, 2008) and to assign them thematic prominence, which has consequences for the thematic development of the text (Fries, 1992) in contr...