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 2024 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

Recordings

Several recordings will be available, but we do not plan to record most lectures/seminars.


Time, place, credits

Time: Every Friday 13:00 - 15:15

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

  • Normally: SOC-314
  • 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.

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 in the wider fields of semantics and analytic philosophy, like philosophy of language, mind and A.I., starting from general and classical ones and moving to more specific and modern.

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 and classical analytic 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.


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. The Numeric uncertainty intro was originally made for this course.

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. Discontinued, but archives present.
  • 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.

Presentation schedule

12 september: kõik teemad allpool valikteemadest, lisaviited leiad sealt

  • Jaanus R: Kant's theory of judgement.
  • Andreas: Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus vs Philosophical Investigations.
  • Siim L: Putnam: tähendus ja osutus.
  • Indrek: Quine: empirismi kaks dogmat.
  • varu: Jane-Ly: Frege: Frege tähendusest ja osutusest

19. september: kõik teemad allpool valikteemadest, lisaviited leiad sealt

  • Aleksander: Tarski: semantiline tõekontseptsioon
  • Uku: Strawson: tähendus ja tõde (meaning and truth).
  • Kaspar: Dennett: kvaalide kvainimine (quining qualia).
  • Artem: Neurons are more complex than we thought,
  • Varu: Kerli: Mirror Neurons

26. september: kõik teemad allpool valikteemadest, lisaviited leiad sealt

  • Jaanus R: Pragmatism
  • Liis: Confirmation bias
  • Robin: Karl Friston and the free energy principle
  • Kerttu: Anil Seth on consciousness
  • varu: Siim S: Antonio Damasio and the origin of important stuff in homeostasis.

3. oktoober:

  • Kerli: Randy Gallistel on memory
  • Uku: Main points from Clark in the Andy Clark episode
  • Andreas: Donald D. Hoffman and the user interface (MUI) theory of mind.
  • Indrek: Main points of Chomsky's theories of language.

10. oktoober:

  • Siim L: Kripke semantics of modal logic

Some themes for selection

Classical analytic philosophy

Brain science and evolution

Philosophy of math

  • 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.
  • 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
  • Kripke semantics of modal logics. Also, check out the relevant materials from the section "Infinity, logic and philosophy of mathematics" above.

Specifically A.I.: in a narrow sense

  • 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.
  • About the paper "Computational irreducibility and compatibilism: towards a formalization". Free will issues connected to computation.
  • Statistical machine translation, incl major waves/paradigms of machine translation.

Complexity, probabilities, motivation, causation and friends

Various ideas about the world

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