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Rich Situated Attitudes

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2016)

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Abstract

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of language (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert.

We would like to thank two anonymous referees for LENLS 13, Robin Cooper, Sebastian Löbner, Markus Werning, and Dietmar Zaefferer for their valuable comments and suggestions. The research for this paper is supported by the German Research Foundation (via K. Liefke’s grant LI 2562/1-1) and by LMU Munich’s Institutional Strategy LMUexcellent within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We hereafter sometimes use the expression ‘content of a sentence’ (or ‘sentential content’), instead of ‘content of an utterance of a sentence’. This is merely a terminological shortcut. The reader is asked to keep in mind that sentences are uttered by a speaker (with certain background information) in a spatiotemporal and communicative situation, and are directed at an addressee (with a certain, likely different, background information). The relevance of the addressee’s information for the interpretation of the utterance is the central topic of this paper.

  2. 2.

    One can increase the granularity of situated sentential contents by analyzing them instead as semantically primitive (i.e. non-analyzable) propositions (cf. [8, 29, 32, 41]). The development of hyperfine-grained RSS is left for another occasion.

  3. 3.

    The inclusion of impossible worlds or situations (cf. [12, 35]) captures the possibility of agents’ misinformedness or false belief. For reasons of space, the consideration of impossible worlds or situations is left for future research.

  4. 4.

    To avoid the inclusion of information that does not regard the subject matter, we demand (contra Perry) that both conjuncts be aboutness-relevant. This also avoids the problem of obtaining aboutness-‘relevant’ conjunctions by combining an aboutness-irrelevant sentence with a trivially aboutness-relevant verum, or with falsum.

  5. 5.

    This is due to the fact that the available information about the sentence’s subject matter at these situations will include the sentence’s lexical information. Since we have excluded impossible situations from our considerations (cf. fn. 3), no situation contains both an item of information and its complement.

  6. 6.

    The identification of these sentences’ traditional contents in possible world semantics is due to the fact that, in the actual world at the current time (cf. the adjective exist-ing in (10)), groundhogs are the largest marmot species.

  7. 7.

    The ability of (11b) to extend the reasoner’s knowledge depends on this unfamiliarity.

  8. 8.

    Admittedly, the reasoner may wrongly assume that Len also knows (10). This assumption explains why the reasoner may still make the inference from (12). It can be captured by replacing the reasoner’s required awareness of the inclusion of a particular item of information in the agent’s information state by the reasoner’s belief about this inclusion (which does not entail the factivity of this inclusion).

  9. 9.

    Entailment is here defined in terms of (subset) inclusion of sets of possible worlds.

  10. 10.

    This inference assumes that the complements of the two occurrences of remember from (22) describe the same remembered situation. The intuitive validity of this type of inference is discussed in detail in [20, Sects. 4, 5].

  11. 11.

    These include Pierre’s simultaneous belief that London is pretty and that London is not pretty (cf. [16]).

  12. 12.

    This contrasts with the standard formal semantic representation of modes of presentation as sets of the object’s properties (type (et)t) (cf. [2, 27]).

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  1. Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Faculty 10, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539, Munich, Germany

    Kristina Liefke & Mark Bowker

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  1. Kristina Liefke
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Correspondence to Kristina Liefke .

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  1. Graduate School of Business Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tokyo, Japan

    Setsuya Kurahashi

  2. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kanagawa, Japan

    Yuiko Ohta

  3. Chiba University, Chiba, Japan

    Sachiyo Arai

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

  5. Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan

    Daisuke Bekki

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Liefke, K., Bowker, M. (2017). Rich Situated Attitudes. In: Kurahashi, S., Ohta, Y., Arai, S., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61572-1_4

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