Intensionality

Since their inception, the Perspectives in Logic and Lecture Notes in Logic series have published seminal works by leading logicians. Many of the original books in the series have been unavailable for years, but they are now in print once again. This volume, the twenty-second publication in the Lecture Notes in Logic series, will launch a discussion about the concept of intensionality in philosophy, logic, linguistics and mathematics. These articles grew out of a workshop held at the University of Munich in October, 2000. Some articles address philosophical issues raised by the possible worlds approach to intensionality; others are devoted to technical aspects of modal logic. The volume highlights the particular interdisciplinary nature of intensionality with articles spanning philosophy, linguistics, mathematics and computer science.

This book offers a comprehensive primer for the study of intensionality. It explores and assesses those key theories of intensionality which have been developed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each of the examined theories is tested as to whether it can account for the problems associated with (A) the intersubstitution salva veritate of co-extensional expressions, and (B) existential generalisation. All of these theories are subsequently compared so as to determine which of them comes closest to successfully solving these problems. The book examines four kinds of intensionalist approaches: the Fregean approach (including Church's formalisation of Frege's theory); the possible-worlds approaches of Carnap, Montague and Cresswell; the theory of properties relations and propositions devised by Bealer; and the Meinongian approaches put forward by Zalta and Priest. The book also proposes an alternative to intensionalism: sententialism. Sententialists argue that the problems of intensionality could be solved by appealing to linguistic items (usually sentences) rather than intensional entities. Drawing on the works of Quine, Davidson, Scheffler and R. M. Martin, it explores the viability and value of sententialism as an alternative to intensionalism.

This dissertation describes a computer simulation model of paranoia. The model mimics the behavior of a patient participating in a psychiatric interview by answering questions, introducing its own topics, and responding to negatively-valued (e. g., threatening or shame-producing) situations. The work focuses on the motivational mechanisms required to instigate and direct the modelled behavior. Major components of the model are: (1) A production system (PS) formalism accounting for the instigation and guidance of behavior as a function of internal (affective) and external (real-word) environmental factors; (2) A model of affects (emotions) as an anticipation mechanism based on a small number of basic pain-pleasure factors; and (3) a formalism for intensional behavior (directed by internal models) requiring a dual representation of symbol and concept. An intensional object (belief) can be accessed either by sensing it in the environment (concept) or by its name (token). Similarly, an intensional action (intention) can be specified either by its conditions in the immediate environment (concept) or by its name (token). Issues of intelligence, psychopathological modelling, and artificial intelligence programming are discussed. The paranoid phenomenon is found to be explainable as an extremely skewed use of normal processes. Applications of these constructs are found to be useful in AI programs dealing with error recovery, incompletely specified input data, and natural language specification of tasks to perform.

Did mankind evolve unusually large brains simply in order to gossip? Primates differ from other animals by the intensity of their social relationships, by the amount of time they spend grooming one another. Not just a matter of hygiene, grooming is all about cementing bonds, making friends and influencing your fellow ape. Early humans, in their characteristic large groups of 150 or so, would have had to spend almost half their time in mutual grooming. Instead, Professor Robin Dunbar argues, they evolved a more efficient mechanism: language. It seems there is nothing idle about idle chatter. Having a good gossip ensures that a dynamic group - of hunter-gatherers, soldiers, workmates - remains cohesive.Men and women 'gossip' equally, but men tend to talk about themselves, while women talk more about other people, working to strengthen the female-female relationships that underpin both human and primate societies. Until now, most anthropologists have assumed that language developed in male-male relationships, during activities such as hunting. Dunbar's intriguing research suggests that, to the contrary, language evolved among women.

Intentionality provides the philosophical foundations for Searle's earlier works, Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning.

This book introduces the properties of conservative extensions of First Order Logic (FOL) to new Intensional First Order Logic (IFOL). This extension allows for intensional semantics to be used for concepts, thus affording new and more intelligent IT systems. Insofar as it is conservative, it preserves software applications and constitutes a fundamental advance relative to the current RDB databases, Big Data with NewSQL, Constraint databases, P2P systems, and Semantic Web applications. Moreover, the many-valued version of IFOL can support the AI applications based on many-valued logics.

This book examines linguistic expressions of emotion in intensional contexts and offers a formally elegant account of the relationship between language and emotion. The author presents a compelling case for the view that there exist, contrary to popular belief, logical universals at the intersection of language and emotive content. This book shows that emotive structures in the mind that are widely assumed to be not only subjectively or socio-culturally variable but also irrelevant to a general theory of cognition offer an unusually suitable ground for a formal theory of emotive representations, allowing for surprising logical and cognitive consequences for a theory of cognition. Challenging mainstream assumptions in cognitive science and in linguistics, this book will appeal to linguists, philosophers of the mind, linguistic anthropologists, psychologists and cognitive scientists of all persuasions.

This collection of studies by leading scholars in the field focuses on the semantics of non-definite (bare and indefinite) plural NPs. The contributions in the first part concentrate on bare plurals and their cross-linguistic counterparts. They discuss applicability of the notion of 'semantic incorporation' to bare plurals by contrasting them to bare singulars, with the aim of accounting for the interaction between the semantics of number and the degree of (in)dependency of the NP with respect to the verb. The articles in the second part examine the relationship between the semantics of number and the semantics of aspect. The contributions in the third part concentrate on non-definite numerical noun phrases by addressing a range of fundamental questions such as: the semantics of indefinite time-phrases, numericals in classifier- and non-classifier languages, scope interactions, the at least- and exactly-readings, referential properties of numericals. The volume will be welcomed by linguists interested in the semantics of number in non-definite NPs.