Papers by Francis Pelletier
Things and Stuff
The Count–Mass Distinction – henceforth, abbreviated as CMD – is a morphological and syntactic di... more The Count–Mass Distinction – henceforth, abbreviated as CMD – is a morphological and syntactic distinction that can be made for noun phrases (“determined phrases”) in a language, and as such it varies from language to language. Indeed, it can be argued that there are some languages that do not manifest such a morpho-syntactic distinction. This distinction is also usually correlated with a conceptual or ontological distinction between “things” and “stuff”. In English (a language that does manifest such a distinction), it is common to categorize the underlined NPs in the following sentences as being count NPs:
Essays on Timaeus, Parmenides, Philebus, and other dialogues are included here. Plato's theor... more Essays on Timaeus, Parmenides, Philebus, and other dialogues are included here. Plato's theory of justice, his accusation against poetry, the third man argument, and the theory of relations are discussed, along with other topics. Contents: Plato and Pericles on Freedom and Politics; The Craft of Justice; Plato's Greatest Accusation against Poetry; Belief, Knowledge and Learning in Plato's Middle Dialogues; Plato's Timaeus; Mass Terms, Sortal Terms, and Identity through Time in the Phenomenal World; Timaeus 48e-52d and the Third Man Argument; Plato's Parmenides Theory of Relations; Philebus 55c-62a and Revisionism; Knowledge in Philebus 55c-62a: A Response.
This paper describes a system for automated reasoning in the dialetheic logic RM3. A dialetheic l... more This paper describes a system for automated reasoning in the dialetheic logic RM3. A dialetheic logic allows formulae to be true, or false, or (differently from classical logic) both true and false, and the connectives are interpreted in terms of these three truth values. Consequently some inference rules of classical logic are invalid in RM3, and some theorems of classical logic are not theorems of RM3. An automated theorem prover for first-order RM3 has been developed, based on translations of RM3 formulae to classical first-order logic, and use of existing first-order reasoning systems to reason over the translated formulae. Examples and results are provided to highlight the differences between reasoning in RM3 and classical
This paper compares features of the classical logics that are commonly used in the TPTP-based aut... more This paper compares features of the classical logics that are commonly used in the TPTP-based automated reasoning community for representing chosen aspects of “the world”, and the consequent implications for reasoning about these representations. The paper argues that increases in complexity in terms of representation and reasoning force users to compromise between the reliability of the representation and the reliability of the reasoning.
The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL ... more The present paper describes the current release of the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL 2.1), a large empirical database consisting of lemmata from Open ANC (http://www.anc.org) with added senses from WordNet (Fellbaum 1998). BECL 2.1 contains ≈ 11,800 annotated noun-sense pairs, divided in four major countability classes and 18 fine-grained subclasses. In the current version, BECL also provides information on nouns whose senses occur in more than one class allowing a closer look on polysemy and homonymy with regard to countability. Further included are sets of similar senses using the Leacock and Chodorow (LCH) score for semantic similarity (Leacock & Chodorow 1998), information on orthographic variation, on the completeness of all WordNet senses in the database and an annotated representation of different types of proper names. The further development of BECL will investigate the different countability classes of proper names and the general relation between semantic simi...
Handbook of Philosophical Logic, 1986
ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the general problem of translation functions between logics, given... more ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the general problem of translation functions between logics, given in axiomatic form, and in particular, the problem of determining when two such logics are synonymous or translationally equivalent. We discuss a proposed formal ...
Genericity, 2012
In we presented a modal conditional analysis of the semantic interpretation of characterizing gen... more In we presented a modal conditional analysis of the semantic interpretation of characterizing generics (in the terminology of . Since that time there have been a number of advances to our understanding of this area: Cohen (1999aCohen ( ,b, 2005)), Leslie (2007, 2008), Nickel (2010), . However, some of these advances have been seen as overthrowing the modal conditional analysis, and we think this is not correct. The present paper is a defense of the modal conditional analysis when it is augmented with information about prosody.
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2012
Journal of Philosophical Logic, May 30, 2007
Vagueness is a phenomenon whose manifestation occurs most clearly in linguistic contexts. And som... more Vagueness is a phenomenon whose manifestation occurs most clearly in linguistic contexts. And some scholars believe that the underlying cause of vagueness is to be traced to features of language. Such scholars typically look to formal techniques that are themselves embedded within language, such as supervaluation theory and semantic features of contexts of evaluation. However, when a theorist thinks that the ultimate cause of the linguistic vagueness is due to something other than language-for instance, due to a lack of knowledge or due to the world's being itself vague-then the formal techniques can no longer be restricted to those that look only at within-language phenomena. If, for example a theorist wonders whether the world itself might be vague, it is most natural to think of employing many-valued logics as the appropriate formal representation theory. I investigate whether the ontological presuppositions of metaphysical vagueness can accurately be represented by (finitely) many-valued logics, reaching a mixed bag of results.
Things and Stuff, 2021
In this paper, we discuss the implications for theories of the count/mass distinction that can be... more In this paper, we discuss the implications for theories of the count/mass distinction that can be derived from the development of a large lexicon of English count and mass noun sense pairs, the Bochum English Countability Lexicon (BECL). The development of a lexicon for count and mass senses makes it possible that research on the count/mass distinction moves away from individual nouns and takes lexical variation into account. We focus on different types of ambiguity. The most important finding is that English shows a rather small class of nouns which are truly ambiguous with regard to the count/mass distinction, but not in any other respect. We suggest that these nouns show how the count/mass distinction is introduced into a language (which rests on the plausible assumption that all nouns begin their lives as mass nouns). The addition of denotational structure to provide individuation leads to an eventual petrification, which accounts for the somewhat surprising fact that there are many more count than mass nouns.
New Essays on Belnap-Dunn Logic, 2019
closes h is article (" Th e Strange Modal Logic o f Indeterminacy" Logique et Analyse #100 :44344... more closes h is article (" Th e Strange Modal Logic o f Indeterminacy" Logique et Analyse #100 :443446) with But indeterminacy generates a strange modal logic. The semantical business o f there being classes o f indeterminate worlds accessible to no worlds not even to themselves is strange and not intuitively attractive.
Ejerhed (1980) sets out to prove three claims: (I) past and future tense induce opacity, (II) in ... more Ejerhed (1980) sets out to prove three claims: (I) past and future tense induce opacity, (II) in addition to NPs, tensed that-clauses
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The author presents an algorithm for enumerating the verifying truth-value assignments to the var... more The author presents an algorithm for enumerating the verifying truth-value assignments to the variables of a wff of two-valued propositional logic that purports to be significantly more economical than testing seriatim each possible value assignment. When 1 and 0 are truth and falsehood respectively and a fixed order of value assignments to variables is adopted, one can represent the full disjunctive normal form of a wff in n variables as a sequence of 2" zeros and ones which is called a selector. Ingenious matrix-like arrays abbreviate selectors by telescoping repetitive patterns together and reducing patternless stretches of digits to single digits. In outline, the algorithm is: Beginning with a wff B in variables p x. • • • ,p n , one associates with each p t a multi-tiered array for a wff in variables Pi .• • •. p n that is equivalent to p,. Rules are given for determining the array for B by operating successively on the tiers in the arrays for variables beginning w ith the bottom tiers. The result is an array, or a disjunction or conjunction of arrays, from which one can read off the selector for B. For wffs that fall exclusively under thesis (8), the algorithm is quite economical when large numbers of variables are involved. For other wffs, however, it is not evident that the algorithm is as economical as the method of reading off verifying value assignments from the branches of a semantic tableau.. The informality and brevity of the elegant exposition often frustrates comprehension. Algorithm rule S4, for example, can be read in several ways and none of the unintended readings is ruled out by the author's examples. (S4 should be read as stipulating that the ones that terminate calculation rows that are exactly alike with respect to occurrences of K, L, and M shall be grouped together to consitute, when gaps have been filled with zeros, a distinct outcome component.) The author's terminology is sometimes unexplained and misleading. For example, selectors are called mutually exclusive if they correspond to mutually exclusive wffs. But without further explanation the author speaks of mutually exclusive arrays which are not arrays that abbreviate mutually exclusive selectors but rather are arrays having mutually exclusive selectors on those tiers that cause the construction of an array to split into several arrays. Justification of the eleven theses on which the algorithm depends is reduced to two fundamental theses (6) and (7) which are formulated too restrictedly. They must be understood so that, if a and b are selectors of degree m and n respectively, then a(a) is a function of the first m variables while b(fi) is a function of the next /; variables. The unexplained function J on page 197 is NE. The variable u in the penultimate formula on page 203 should be v. None of the other misprints impedes comprehension. GERALD J. MASSEY and CARL J. POSY
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Papers by Francis Pelletier