Drug Safety Communications are used by the Food and Drug Administration to inform health care providers, patients, caregivers, and the general public about safety issues related to FDA-approved drugs. To assess patient knowledge of the messaging contained in DSCs related to the sleep aids zolpidem and eszopiclone, we conducted a large, cross-sectional patient survey of 1,982 commercially insured patients selected by stratified random sampling from the Optum Research Database who had filled at least two prescriptions for either zolpidem or eszopiclone (...) between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013. Among the 594 respondents, two-thirds reported hearing generally about drug safety information prior to starting a new drug, with the remaining one-third “rarely” or “never” hearing such information. Providers and pharmacists were primary sources of drug safety information. Two-thirds of zolpidem users and half of eszopiclone users reported having heard about the related DSC messages, ability to accurately identify the major factual messages was limited. Respondents reacted to new drug safety information about their sleep aids by reporting that they would want to learn about alternative ways to help them sleep and seek out more information about the safety of their specific sleeping pill. Opportunities may exist for the FDA to work with providers and pharmacies to help ensure the DSC information is more widely received and is more fully understood by those taking the affected medications. (shrink)

We formulate a Curry-typed logic with fine-grained intensionality within Turner’s typed predicate logic. This allows for an elegant presentation of a theory that corresponds to Fox and Lappin’s property theory with curry typing, but without the need for a federation of languages. We then consider how the fine-grained intensionality of this theory can be given an operational interpretation. This interpretation suggests itself as expressions in the theory can be viewed as terms in the untyped lambda-calculus, which provides a model (...) of computation. (shrink)

Raquel FERN ´ ANDEZ, Jonathan GINZBURG and Shalom LAPPIN Department of Computer Science King’s College London Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK {raquel,ginzburg,lappin}@dcs.kcl.ac.uk..

On the Fregean view of NP's, quantified NP's are represented as operator-variable structures while proper names are constants appearing in argument position. The Generalized Quantifier approach characterizes quantified NP's and names as elements of a unified syntactic category and semantic type. According to the Logicality Thesis, the distinction between quantified NP's, which undergo an operation of quantifier raising to yield operator-variable structures at Logical Form and non-quantified NP's, which appear in situ at LF, corresponds to a difference in logicality status. (...) The former are logical expressions while the latter are not. Using van Benthem's [2, 3] criterion for logicality, I extend the concept of logicality to GQ's. I argue that NP's modified by exception phrases constitute a class of quantified NP's which are heterogeneous with respect to logicality. However, all exception phrase NP's exhibit the syntactic and semantic properties which motivate May to treat quantified NP's as operators at LF. I present a semantic analysis of exception phrases as modifiers of GQ's, and I indicate how this account captures the central semantic properties of exception phrase NP's. I explore the consequences of the logically heterogeneous character of exception phrase NP's for proof theoretic accounts of quantifiers in natural language. The proposed analysis of exception phrase NP's provides support for the GQ approach to the syntax and semantics of NP's. (shrink)

Intensional logic (IL) and its application to natural language, which the present monograph addresses, was first developed by Richard Montague in the late 1960s (e.g., Montague 1970a, 1970b). Through the efforts of (especially) Barbara Partee (e.g., Partee 1975, 1976), and Richmond Thomason, who edited the posthumous collection of Montague’s works (Thomason 1974), this became the main framework for those who aspired to a formal semantic theory for natural language, and these included computational linguists as early as Jerry Hobbs in the (...) late 1970s (e.g., Hobbs and Rosenschein 1977). In fact, until the advent of the current interest in statistical linguistics with its own conception of what semantics is, IL, or some variant of it, was perhaps the main theory of semantics within computational linguistics generally. And within current computational semantics it still is. But over the years, philosophers, linguists, and computational linguists have noted a variety of shortcomings in Montague’s version of IL. Montague defined intensions as functions from possible worlds to extensions in that world. But this had the effect of making logically equivalent expressions have the same intension, thus leading to the problem of “logical omniscience” (believing/knowing all the logical consequences of what is believed/known). Montague had based his IL on Church’s simple theory of types (Church 1940), supplemented with intensions of each type. But this implies that each natural language item accepts only arguments of some one fixed type. However, this is not true for natural language, where conjunctions, verbs, and pretty much any functional term that accepts arguments at all can accept arguments of different types. (For example, and can accept arguments that are of the sentence type, of the verb phrase type, of the adjective type, etc.; and indeed, it can accept arguments of differing types in its different argument.. (shrink)

CONTENTS David Vessey: Who was Gadamer's Husserl? Daniel Dahlstrom: The Intentionality of Passive Experience: Husserl and a Contemporary Debate Ulrich Melle: The Enigma of Expression: Husserl's Doctrines of Sign and Expression in the Manuscripts for the Revision of the VIth Logical Investigation John Noras: A Reconsideration of Husserl's Notion of Transcendental Reflection from a Merleau-Pontian Perspective Rochus Sowa: Essences and Eidetic Laws in Edmund Husserl's Descriptive Eidetics Kevin Aho: Logos and the Poverty of Animals: Rethinking Heidegger's Humanism Joeseph Schear: (...) Judgment and Ontology in Heidgger's Phenomenology Ivo De Gennaro: Why Being Itself and not just Being? Joe Sachs: An Informal Talk about Forms Texts and Documents Gerhard Kruger: The Origin of Philosophical Self-Consciousness (1933) Oskar Becker: The Diairetic Generation of Platonic Ideal Numbers (1934) Jacob Klein: Plato's Republic (1967) Dorion Cairns: Some Applications of Husserl's Theory of Sense-Transfer In Review James Despres: Walter Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being. (shrink)

What is it that semanticists think they are doing when using formalisation? What kind of endeavour is the formal semantics of natural language: scientific; linguistic; philosophical; logical; mathematical? If formal semantics is a scientific endeavour, then there ought to be empirical criteria for determining whether such a theory is correct, or an improvement on an alternative account. The question then arises as to the nature of the evidence that is being accounted for. It could be argued that the empirical questions (...) are little different in kind to other aspects of linguistic analysis, involving questions of performance and competence (Chomsky 1965; Saussure 1916). But there are aspects of formal accounts of meaning that appear to sit outside this scientific realm. One key issue concerns the precise nature of the formalisation that is adopted; what criteria are to be used to decide between accounts that are founded on different formal systems, with different ontological assumptions? Indeed, is it necessary to judge semantic frameworks on such grounds? In other words, are two theoretical accounts to be treated as equivalent for all relevant purposes if they account for exactly the same linguistic data? Broadly speaking, there are two related perspectives on the analysis of propositional statements, one “truth conditional” — reducing sentence meaning to the conditions under which the sentence is judged to be true (e.g. Montague 1973) — the other “proof theoretic” — reducing sentence meanings to patterns of entailments that are supported (e.g. Ranta 1994, Fox & Lappin 2005 ,Fox 2000). Variations of these perspectives might be required in the case of non-assertoric utterances. We may wonder what critieria might be used to decide between these approaches. This brings us back to the nature of the data itself. If the data is (merely) about which arguments, or truth conditions, subjects agree with, and which they disagree with, then the terms in which the theory is expressed may be irrelevant. But it may also be legitimate to be concerned with either (a) the intuitions that people have when reasoning with language, or (b) some technical or philosophical issues relating to the chosen formalism. The truth-conditional vs proof-theoretic dichotomy might broadly be characterised as model-theoretic vs axiomatic, where the model-theoretic tend to be built around a pre-existing formal theory, and the axiomatic involves formulating rules of behaviour “from scratch”. In some sense, fitting an analysis of a new problem into an existing framework could be described as providing some kind of “explanatory” power, assuming that the existing framework has some salient motivation that is independent of the specific details of the phenomena in question. In contrast, building a new theory that captures the behaviour might then be characterised as “descriptive”, as — superficially at least — it does not show how an existing theory “already” accounts for the data in some sense. Here we observe instead that the argument can be run in the other direction. that a reductive model-theoretic account merely “describes” how some aspects of a problem can be reduced to some formalisation, but may fail to capture a subject’s understanding or intuitions about meaning. It is surely appropriate for the formal theory itself to be at least sympathetic to the ontological concerns and intuitions of its subjects — if not inform them (Dummett 1991). The alternative amounts to little more than carving out otherwise arbitrary aspects of a system that mimics the required behaviour, without a coherent explanation of why some aspects of a formal theory characterise, or capture, the intended meaning, but not others (cf. Benacerraf 1965). That seems an impoverished approach, weakening any claim to “explain”. Any constraint this imposes on what is it to be an explanatory account of meaning then faces the same problem as naive notions of compositionality (Zadrozny 1994) — that is, what appears to be a meaningful restriction is, in reality, a mirage. (shrink)

Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of structurally (...) diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)

A breathtaking detective story, this book charts the adventure of Whitehead's ideas in a remarkably detailed and careful reconstruction of his metaphysical views.

Parkinson schreibt, es sei nicht klar, daß Alexander selbst von Geburt an Merkmale oder Zeichen des Ortes seines zukünftigen Todes in sich getragen haben müsse, weil der vollständige Begriff von Alexander den Begriff des in Babylon Sterbens enthält. Die vorliegende Interpretation des Prinzips der Vorherbestimmtheit der Geschichte verdeutlicht dies mit Hilfe der bildlichen Ausdrücke, Pläne und Dispositionen und mit Hilfe einer aristotelischen Unterscheidung zwischen "going to be" und "will be" , fur welche ein formaler chronologischer Apparat ausgearbeitet ist. Die Arbeit (...) gibt ebenfalls Einblick in den Gedanken, daB die Gegenwart schwanger mit der Zukunft ist, und antwortet auf Reschers Kritik, daß Leibniz' Metaphysik von Grund auf statisch sei. (shrink)