Elaborative Inferences (original) (raw)
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Minimalism and Speakers' Intuitions El minimalismo y las intuiciones de los hablantes
2011
Minimalism proposes a semantics that does not account for speakers' intuitions about the truth conditions of a range of sentences or utterances. Thus, a challenge for this view is to offer an explanation of how its assignment of semantic contents to these sentences is grounded in their use. Such an account was mainly offered by Soames, but also suggested by Cappelen and Lepore. The article criticizes this explanation by presenting four kinds of counterexamples to it, and arrives at the conclusion that minimalism has not successfully answered the above-mentioned challenge.
Compositionality and modest inferentialism
Teorema Revista Internacional De Filosofia, 2014
RESUMEN Este artículo presenta tanto una solución como un problema para la explicación de la composicionalidad en el inferencialismo modesto de Peacocke. El problema inmediato al que se enfrenta la explicación de Peacocke es que hace aparecer la composicionalidad como si sólo pudiera ser entendida al nivel de la semántica, algo que es difícil de reconciliar con el inferencialismo. Aquí, siguiendo una breve sugerencia hecha por Peacocke, presento un armazón formal dentro del cual al nivel de la relación determinante entre inferencia y semántica. Esto proporciona a su vez un "test" para la composicionalidad que, problemáticamente, el armazón de Peacocke de la deducción natural para la lógica clásica no puede superar. Para terminar, bosquejo brevemente un armazón alternativo bilateralista para el inferencialismo modesto para el que vale la composicionalidad.
Inferences in the Comprehension of Language
Previous research in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) states that listeners and readers make many inferences in their attempts to understand oral and written discourse. This paper tries to explore the types of inference listeners / readers make to understand language. It also investigates the role of each type in the course of understanding a text. Introduction Inferences serve a variety of functions in language comprehension. The main function of inference is linking information from different parts of a text in order to establish its literal meaning. Among other things, they can be used to identify an unclearly pronounced word, to resolve a lexical ambiguity, to determine the referent of a pronoun, and to compute an intended message from a literal meaning. To some extent, exploring the inferences listeners / readers make and their roles in the comprehension of language comes from common sense and from research in experimental psychology and artificial intelligence(AI). Garnham (1989) states that although there is some truth in answers from these sources, they are to a greater or lesser extent misleading. Common sense is never a very good source of psycholinguistic theories because we simply do not have conscious access to most of the processes of language understanding. Since the discourse analyst, like the hearer / reader, has no direct access to a speaker's / writer's intended meaning in producing a text, he often has to rely on a process of inference to arrive at an interpretation for oral and written texts or for connections between utterances / sentences. Inferences that achieve the coherence of the representation by making backward links are deductive inferences made during reading, whereas inferences that do not create coherence, often called elaborative or forward inferences, are not made, are less likely to be made or are made under specific. Therefore, such inferences appear to be of different types. Mainly they are deductive or backward inferences and elaborative or forward inferences.
Inferentialism on Meaning, Content, and Context
In this paper, I show how normative inferentialism could be used to explain several phenomena related to natural languages. First, I show how the distinction between the inferential potential and the inferential significance fits the standard distinction between the meaning of a sentence and the content of an utterance. Second, I show how the distinction could be used to explain ambiguity and free pragmatic enrichment from the perspective of normative inferentialism. The aim of this paper is to establish theoretical foundations that enable normative inferentialism to enter the discussions within the literalism-contextualism debate. As I argue, the biggest advantage of inferentialism is that it provides one general framework for the representation of meaning/content that naturally incorporates contextual information and so it can be used to represent meanings of various types of context-dependent sentences.
Cognitiva, 1988
This research studies the pragmatic reasoning of the subjects in conditional inference tasks. Three experiments are reported in which the content (Formal or Ternatic) and the quality of the premises were manipulated; as well as the time of presentation and the Blocks of presentation of the problems. The results are consistent with previous investigations with quasi-deductive tasks (Valiña, 1988; Valiña and de Vega, 1988) and support the current models on pragmatic reasoning, compared to syntactic or competition models. Keywords: reasoning, conditional inference, microgenesis. Abstract The purpose of this investigation is to explore pragmatic reasoning in the conditional inference tasks. This paper report of three experiments; the content (Formal vs. Thematic) and the quality of the premises was manipulated, as well as the time of the exposition and the bloks of the problem presentation. The results are consistent with another investigations with quasi-deductive tasks (Valiña, 1988; Valiña y de Vega, 1988) and support the current pragmatic models of reasoning, instead of the syntactic or competence models. Thanks toJA GARCÍA MADRUGA and MANUEL de Vega, as well as those of an anonymous reviewer of the magazine COGNITIVA. The request for reprints of this article should be addressed to María Dolores Valiña. Depto. Social and Básic Psychology.Faculty of Psychology.University of Santiago de Compostela.
Language Concepts and the Nature of inference
2023
Traditionally, analytic philosophy has been affiliated with a formalist conception of inference which understands reasoning as a process that exploits syntactic properties of natural language according to a set of formal rules that are insensitive to conceptual content. This chapter discusses an alternative approach that takes semantic properties as the underlying forces driving rational inference. Building on Wilfird Sellars' notion of material inference and analytic tools from cognitive linguistics, I will show how parts of the inferential structure of natural language can be explained in terms of semantic relations between extra-logical concepts. In the end, I will outline a strategy for explicating some of these inference-types using Peter Gärdenfors' theory of conceptual spaces.
Anales de Psicología, 2015
In two experiments we investigated the role that activation of emotional inferences when readers represent fictional characters' emotional states using an affective lexical decision task. Subjects read short stories that described concrete actions. In the first experiment, we analyzed whether the valence (positive or negative) was an important factor of inference´s activation. The results showed that valence was determinant factor in the moment that emotional inference was generated, being the positive valence faster than negative. In the second experiment we studied whether the emotion inference activation was influenced by the causal direction of the story, where the causal direction of the text was manipulated in order to induce towards an emotional inference predictive (the reader looking for a consequence that promote a particular emotion) or inducing an explanatory inference (reader looking for a cause that "explain" a particular emotion). The results suggest that emotional inferences are made online, and that valence and causal directions are two decisive components of emotional trait, but only positive valence increase their processing.