This paper discusses certain problems arising within the treatment of the senses of functions in Alonzo Church’s Logic of Sense and Denotation. Church understands such senses themselves to be “sense-functions,” functions from sense to sense. However, the conditions he lays out under which a sense-function is to be regarded as a sense presenting another function as denotation allow for certain u...

We present an approach and an associated computer program (ATT-Meta) which can interpret novel uses of familiar metaphors. ATT-Meta performs sophisticated reasoning with uncertainty of a kind that is required for reasoning about the content of metaphorical utterances. ATT-Meta’s handling of uncertainty is qualitative and handles potential conflicts between different lines of reasoning or argume...

Language may have evolved as a signal of mental fitness. However, it remains unclear what language form and topic men use to covertly signal mate quality. In this study 69 men created compliments to impress unfamiliar women they chose to either date or work with and provided hand scans to compute 2D4D ratio as a proxy for prenatal testosterone exposure and masculinity indicator. Compliments wer...

If anything is central to Cognitive Science, it is the nature of the human conceptual system. We have found that that system is fundamentally metaphorical in character. That is, it contains metaphorical as well as nonmetaphorical concepts, and the metaphorical structure is extremely rich and complex. Nonmetaphorical concepts are those that emerge directly from our experience and are defined in ...

The present study analyzes the metaphorical extensions of the Chinese spatial term zhong and the English spatial term middle. It finds that The essay finds both ZHONG and MIDDLE are found to be used in the target domains of STATES, RANK and TIME, which further provides a piece of evidence that our abstract reasoning is partly structured by our spatial thinking through schematic mapping and meta...

In this paper, I provide an account of scientific representation that makes sense of the notion both at the nanoscale and at the quantum level: the partial mappings account. The account offers an extension of a proposal developed by R. I. G. Hughes in terms of denotation, demonstration, and interpretation (DDI). I first argue that the DDI account needs some amendments to accommodate representat...