I want to discuss a certain argument for the claim that definite descriptions are ambiguous between a Russellian quantificational interpretation and a predicational interpretation.1 The argument is found in James McCawley’s (1981) book Everything Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic (but were ashamed to ask). The argument has also been resuscitated by Richard Larson and Gabriel Sega...

The degree to which you expect others to behave in a trustworthy manner is crucial for your willingness to trust. An interesting question, however, is whether your expectation (if manifested) can affect the likelihood that your trust is repaid. The answer to this question has important implications for the stability of trust (or lack thereof). To observe whether expectations impact the repaymen...

This paper develops a semantic analysis of the three constructions: (i) the subjectoriented adverb construction (Wisely, John left early), (ii) the ‘Adj. + to Inf.’ construction (John was wise to leave early), and (iii) the ‘Adj. + of NP’ construction (It was wise of John to leave early), which all involve three semantic components: (i) an individual a (John), (ii) a property P1 that describes ...

The AI field started out with grand dreams of human-level artificial general intelligence. During the last half-century, enthusiasm for these grand AI dreams – both within the AI profession and in society at large -has risen and fallen repeatedly, each time with a similar pattern of high hopes and media hype followed by overall disappointment. Throughout these fluctuations, though, research and...

There are two types of neural phenomena that have been called working memory. The first is a selective, attention demanding process. In this process, until the interrupted, memory trace has high fidelity over time. second non-selective, non-attention process where all events seem to form traces each decaying with generally thought as true in humans. We started out study substrates these monkeys...

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult participants completed simple, computer-based tests of ...