Semantika ja analüütiline filosoofia

Allikas: Lambda
märgid

Code: ITV9070
Link: http://lambda.ee/wiki/Semantika_ja_anal%C3%BC%C3%BCtiline_filosoofia
Title: Semantics and Analytical Philosophy Archive: year 2023 archive
Lecturer: Tanel Tammet
Contact: tanel.tammet@ttu.ee, 6203457, ICT 426

"A sign is anything that can be used to tell a lie." --Umberto Eco

“I’m writing a book on magic,” I explain, and I’m asked, “Real magic?” By real magic people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. “No,” I answer: “Conjuring tricks, not real magic.” Real magic, in other words, refers to the magic that is not real, while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic. --Lee Siegel

NB!

6 Nov teams

We have moved all the presentations starting from 13. Nov one week later, to get space for agency experiment discussions and some previously missed talks on 13. Nov.

Recordings

Several recordings are available, but we do not plan to record all the lectures/seminars.

Time, place, credits

Time: Every Wednesday 11:40 - 13:55

Normally we will have student presentations during the lecture time, along with planning following presentations and brief intros by the lecturer. We will follow the schedule

Location:

  • Mostly: IT College building room ICO-219
  • Sometimes: telco over teams (these will be announced a week earlier)

Credits: 6

The lectures will be in English, unless everybody understands Estonian, in which case they will be in Estonian.

The presentations in practice sessions can be given in English or Estonian, as you prefer.

The contents of practice sessions are presentations by students and their discussion. For all students, presence in the practice sessions is important and is accounted for in the final grade.

We will probably succeed with saving the videos of lectures: will check out during the first weeks.

The course will finish with a written exam. The materials below marked with a red E will be critical for studying for the exam, while the materials marked with blue L are also used but less important. Materials without such marks will not be used for the exam questions.

In order to be allowed to take the exam,

  • each Ph.D student should give at least four presentations.
  • each master student should give at least two presentations. In case it turns out we will have enough time, an additional third short presentation might be asked for as a bonus.

Presentations are not graded, but when they are determined not to be satfisfactory, they should be re-done.

The lecture times will be used for both

  • Short intros to thematic blocks by Tanel
  • Student presentations

NB! Presence at student presentations will be registered: failing to participate at many presentations will have a negative effect on the final grade.

Initial course plan, materials and topics

We consider several topics, starting from general ones and moving to more specific.

The main goal of the lectures is to make it easier to understand the concepts and ideas in the topics, in order to better understand the reading materials.

Intro, semiotics, philosophy

  • Source for the first round of presentations: Tähendus, tõde, meetod.. Separate original articles can be found by googling.

Main materials:

Useful to read/listen:

About the alphabet:


Notes on structuralism, deconstruction and friends:

Notes on Propp:

Notes on the Vienna circle and logical positivism:

Evolution of brain, intelligence and society

Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and memetics.

Main material:

Recommended overviews:

Recommended books:

Important papers:

Additional notes and recommendations, not obligatory:

Brain science

Intro material

For exam:

Good general overviews:

Important podcasts:


General notes:

Read also:

Infinity, logic and philosophy of mathematics

The first topic is intro to the philosophy of mathematics, mainly the questions of infinity and unsolvability.

Materials to read:

Videos have heads down:

More about infinity and computability:

Helpful read: cardinality wikipedias. Read more about Gödel's incompleteness theorem from SEP: a part of a larger incompleteness-article.

A longer story about the philosophy of mathematics from SEP.

Nonclassical logics, related to the philosophy of mathematics:


More on nonclassical logics:

Thinking and AI

Notes for the overview talk

Classic ideas about the main questions of AI philosophy (close to the questions about functionalism):

First, a somewhat old interview with a classic:

Read the wiki pages of main issues:

Technical stuff from Graziano about neuroscience related to consciousness:

Detailed arguments and counterarguments for the

Some good core stuff


Living classics from the lex fridman podcast:


Semantics of natural language

We will look into both

  • Vector semantics
  • Semantics based on world model

Details will be added when the block starts

Dialog, pragmatics, uncertain knowledge

The first subject is dialogue pragmatics. Several related branches (have a brief look, but no need to read deeply unless you become interested):

To start, certainly look/listen these short lectures:

In case you just want to read original Grice:

Have a look at

Additionally, nice to listen and :


The next theme is uncertain information and probabilities: how to understand, write down and make conjectures.

General intro here as a part of this course.


Read this intro: Numeric uncertainty (L as explained next):

  • Certainly up the the section "Different ways to encode confidences in logic", also looking at the wikipages pointed to
  • Briefly look into the following sections, but do not focus or spend much time on these

Then read the first parts and have brief looks at the SEP articles:

Here are some of our papers on our system, about confidence and reasoning with exceptions.


Recommended podcasts

  • The Gradient: a good AI podcast, relatively deep, several philosophical themes / episodes
  • Brain Inspired: real neuroscience with focus on AI related themes.
  • Philosophy bites: real philosophers conveying ideas rather clearly in ca 15 minutes
  • Robinsons podcast: Really good stuff with famous philosophers and related thinkers. One example: Donald Hoffman.
  • Making sense by Sam Harris sometimes does deep interviews with philosophers, like the following highly recommended Andy Clark episode (predictive brain, embodied cognition, and the extended mind) full version. If that does not work for some reason, check out the shorter version here.
  • Highly popular Lex Fridman podcast has sometimes deep interviews with AI and comp sci peaople. Specifically about AI I'd recommend some widely different views from Francois Chollet, Yann LeCun, Gary Marcus, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Ben Goertzel.
  • The Mindscape podcast of an important physicist has often quite philosophically interesting or cognitive science and AI interviews. Some recommendations: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, David Krakauer, Christoph Adami, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Yejin Choi, Hugo Mercier, Andrew Pontzen.

Random extra stuff


Presentation schedule

  • 18. sept:
    • Andres (tõstsin üle 11. septembrilt): Putnam: tähendus ja osutus. Meaning and reference. Lisaks tasub vaadata ülevaadet. Vaata ka Social_constructionism wikis ja ntx siin ja taustaks kindlasti Functionalism (SEP), Functionalism (wiki): Googelda artiklile juurde seletusi/analüüse.
    • Danyil: neurons are more complicated than we thought.
    • Viktoria: Strawson: tähendus ja tõde (meaning and truth). One fulltext here. Look at SEP about Strawson. There is a Robinson's podcast video episode about the Strawson approach (at ca 1:21) and another podcast episode about the context of Strawson/Austin debate on theme.
    • Liisi: Intuitsionistlik loogika: näited teoreemidest, mis kehtivad klassikaliselt, kuid mitte intuitsionistlikult. Näiteid tõestustest, millel lihtne klassikaline, kuid keeruline intuitsionistlik tõestus (standardnäide: ruutjuur kahest on irratsionaalne, vt näiteks siit ja googelda juurde). Vaata intuitsionisliku loogika kohta wikist ja SEPist. NB! Intuitsionistlik loogika on oluline teema matemaatika filosoofias: Tanel teeb sellele hilisemates loengutes eraldi sissejuhatuse.
  • 9 okt
    • Mihkel: pragmatism. Start with the SEP article and search for more.
    • Anzelika: infinity: Ordinaalid ja kardinaalid. Maybe start with a good exposition at in this discussion. Continue with cardinals and ordinals in wiki, check out Russell's paradox, read about transfinite ordinals
    • Otto: main points of Chomsky's theories of language. This is so widely discussed that it is easy to google. You may want to listen to some podcasts with Chomsky himself: for example, this and this. Certainly read about criticism. You may want to listen to this episode with a critical analysis of Chomsky.
    • Enrico: Paul Grice: "meaning" and overview of other important parts of Grice claims and theory. This is also so widely discussed that it is easy to google. Start with SEP. Some nice intros to implicatures: here and this wikipage. Grice himself about this stuff. More detailed stuff. Check also the relevance theory. Certainly look through a very nice video about flouting/violating the maxims in relation to irony, sarcasm and jokes.
  • 16 okt
    • Viktor: Frame problem. Good stuff to read, maybe in that order SEP, Dennett, Blocks world example, Morgenstern. Beware that none of the various "solutions" are not really satisfactory: they should be considered as possible approaches, not solutions.
    • Lulof: Kant's theory of judgement.
    • Enrico: statistical machine translation, incl major waves/paradigms of machine translation.
  • 23 okt
    • Lulof: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus vs Philosophical Investigations. Also: background and influences (like, for PI pragmatism via Ramsey). Tanel has done a very brief intro to the topic, so we can continue from there. I.e recall Tractatus, but do not spend much time there, assuming we have already looked into this. Spend more time on PI and especially the comparison between the Tractatus phase (early Wittgenstein) and PI phase (late Wittgenstein). This is a popular topic, easy to google.
    • Enrico: Kripke semantics of modal logics. Also, check out the relevant materials from the section "Infinity, logic and philosophy of mathematics" above.
    • Georg: Dennett: kvaalide kvainimine (quining qualia). Full text here. About the views of Dennett by himself (search for e.g. "Welcome to Strong Illusionism") and others. Some discussion on reddit. Wikipedia about qualia.
    • Hannaliina: How do bacteria and simple organisms communicate. Start with this TED talk and search for more. For example, a SciAm article, this (alternatively here) is an in-depth paper, this handles bacteria working through insects.
  • 6. November, biology/evolution focused themes:


  • 13. November, agency & extras:
    • Tanel will present the draft of agency questionnaire and we will discuss and improve it interactively.
    • Danyil, moved from 30 Oct: Main points from Clark in the Andy Clark episode (predictive brain, embodied cognition, and the extended mind) full version from the Making sense podcast by Sam Harris. If the full version link does not work for some reason, check out the shorter version here and ask Tanel for help. You may also want to google papers by Andy Clark and/or select for reading some papers from the scholar site or his own site.
    • Otto, moved from 6 Nov: Randy Gallistel on memory interview 1 and maybe also interview 2. Some additional background: here
    • If we have time, Tanel will speak about various current AI philosophy themes and about the neurosymbolic reasoning research area.


  • 11. December: reserve.
    • Probably some presentations planned for earlier will be moved here, for various reasons
    • Tanel will speak about several themes
    • The agency questionnaire: current state / results / etc
  • 18. December: exam stuff
    • Q&A about the exam
    • We will quickly go over main exam materials, possible questions etc

Initial ideas for the agency experiment

Agency / Intelligence / consciousness / sentience

Agency measure: social question?? Let us make a questionnaire and ask students!

facets/dimensions

  • more intelligent has more agency
  • more money, then more agency
  • more free, more agency
  • physically strong
  • ability is not the same as will (avoid free will issue)
  • more facets??

comparisons for objects like

  • rocks/waterfall/earth/virus/bacteria/worm/dog/human/computer/clock/phone ... / country
  • small rock / meteorite / flying rock
  • different software kinds?
  • short term / long term
  • rock / sculpture
  • effect of environment on people

What to do:

  • google about agency discussions
  • questionnaire suggestions

Important: sensible comparison items for different facets; also how to ask?

Agency questionnaire draft development

Some themes for selection

Ideas for the first rounds from this book (search originals from the web):

  • Putnam: tähendus ja osutus. (Meaning and reference)
  • Quine: empirismi kaks dogmat. (Two dogmas of empiricism)
  • Dummett: Truth.
  • Tarski: semantiline tõekontseptsioon.
  • Strawson: tähendus ja tõde
  • Ramsey subjektiivne tõenäosusteooria.

Further:

  • Analytic / synthetic vs apriori / aposteriori (Kant etc)
  • Frege: Frege tähendusest ja osutusest.
  • Dennett: kvaalide kvainimine (quining qualia).
  • Paul Grice: "meaning" and overview of other important parts of Grice claims and theory.
  • Nick Boström "are we living in simulation". http://www.simulation-argument.com/ and http://www.nickbostrom.com/
  • Evolution of morals. alusta siit ja otsi ise edasi.


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