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Reasoning with an (Experiential) Attitude

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2019)

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Abstract

This paper gives a compositional semantics for attitude reports with nominal, gerund, and that-clause complements that captures the intuitive entailment relations between these reports (e.g. Ida sees/imagines a penguin diving \(\Rightarrow \) Ida sees/imagines a penguin). These relations are identified through the familiar diagnostic tests. We observe that entailments that are licensed by counterfactual attitude verbs (here: imagine) are largely different from the entailments between veridical vision reports that are described in (Barwise 1981). To capture this difference, we give a non-clausal syntax for gerund attitude reports and assign factive clausal complements a different semantics from non-factive and gerund complements. The resulting account captures the entailment patterns of imagination and vision reports without assuming special axioms in the lexical semantics of see or imagine. On our account, the ‘logic’ of the above reports thus falls directly out of their semantics.

I thank three anonymous referees for valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. The paper has profited from discussions with Sebastian Bücking, Kai von Fintel, Carla Umbach, & Ede Zimmermann. The research for this paper is supported by the German Research Foundation (via Ede Zimmermann’s grant ZI 683/13-1).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This last possibility relies on the non-existence of unicorns and griffins in the actual world, such that the set of unicorns and the set of griffins are the same set (i.e. \(\emptyset \)).

  2. 2.

    In linguistic semantics, the term experiential attitude only appears in the handout version of [41]. Anand [1] calls the relevant attitudes imagistic attitudes.

  3. 3.

    Higginbotham [16, p. 120] has pointed out that imagine – unlike see – does not accept bare infinitival complements. In view of this fact, we focus on gerund complements.

  4. 4.

    To allow for minimal pairs of reports, we mark the complement in F for progressive aspect. For the same reason, we include the material in round brackets in B when B is contrasted with a gerund or clausal report.

  5. 5.

    For a color version of the table, please consult the online copy of this paper.

  6. 6.

    In what follows, we use a partial variant, TY\(^{3}_{2}\), of Gallin’s type logic TY\(_{2}\) with basic types for individuals (type e), situations (type s), and (partial) truth-values (type t). Functions from objects of type \(\alpha \) to objects of type \(\beta \) are written ‘\((\alpha \beta )\)’, or ‘\(\alpha \beta \)’.

  7. 7.

    We thus contradict van der Does’ claim that “no semantical reason has been found to reject Small Clauses” (see  [8, p. 246]).

  8. 8.

    We hereafter adopt the following naming convention for variables: x, y, z are variables over individuals; i, j, k are variables over situations (or events); e is an event variable; p, q are variables over propositions (type st). P, Q are variables over type-s(et) properties (incl. XP-denotations). \(\mathcal {Q}\) is a variable over type-s((s(et))t) quantifiers (i.e. DP-denotations). A function’s simultaneous application to a sequence of arguments indicates successive application in the reverse order of these arguments (‘Currying’). Index arguments will be written in subscript.

  9. 9.

    Since none of the relevant differences between A–E turns on the aspectual properties of the verb, we here neglect aspect.

  10. 10.

    (23) is reminiscent of Montague’s [33] interpretation of extensional verbs like find:

    .

  11. 11.

    Since these lexical entries have a common semantic core, see is not ambiguous.

  12. 12.

    This is particularly problematic in view of competing philosophical analyses of imagination, like imagine seeing, seeming to see, and pretending (to oneself) to see.

  13. 13.

    This nature is supported by the observation (corroborated by a corpus study by Carla Umbach) that even reports like F.i allow for experiential modification (see (\(\ddagger \))):

    (\(\ddagger \))   Ida vividly imagines that a penguin is diving into the sea.

  14. 14.

    The latter is the case if Ida’s perceived visual scene includes information beyond the fact that the penguin is diving into the sea, e.g. that the penguin has a black face and/or that its feet are covered in dirt.

  15. 15.

    Alternatively, one could try to capture this non-validity by combining (51) with a see-variant of (35). However, the resulting account would counterintuitively interpret the complement in F.ii as a single fact (with a specific spatio-temporal location in \(w_{i}\)), rather than as a sets of facts (with different spatio-temporal locations in \(w_{i}\)). Since this account would further need to explain C.ii \(\not \Rightarrow \) F.ii through the (dubious) non-inclusion of the fact \(f_{e}(\varPi (\lambda j. \textit{dive}_{j}(x)))\) in the situation, \(f_{e}(\lambda j. \textit{dive}_{j}(x))\), of which this fact is true, we refrain from adopting this account.

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  1. Institute for Linguistics, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Kristina Liefke

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  1. The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan

    Maki Sakamoto

  2. Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoaki Okazaki

  3. Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

    Koji Mineshima

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

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Liefke, K. (2020). Reasoning with an (Experiential) Attitude. In: Sakamoto, M., Okazaki, N., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58790-1_18

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