Intentions are an important concept in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We present a formal theory of intentions...

Abstract. This paper is part of a broader project whose aim is to present a coherent unified approach to natural language dialogue semantics using tools from type theory. Here we explore aspects of our approach which relate to situation theory and situation semantics. We first point out a relationship between type theory and the Austinian notion of truth. We then consider how records in type theory might be used to represent situations and how dependent record types can be used to model constraints on situations. We then sketch treatments of attitude phenomena for which Barwise and Perry proposed situation semantic analyses (perception complements, belief, the Pierre puzzle) as well as two other intensional phenomena (intensional verbs and intentional identity). Finally we give a characterisation of the type theory used and a small illustrative fragment of English.

Evolution brought brains and minds into a world initially devoid of inteUlgent life. The evolutionary process designed the neural machinery that generates in-tehgent behavior, and important insights into how this machinery works can be gained by understanding how evolution constructs organisms. This is the ratio-nale that underlies research in evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology was founded on interloclang contributions from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, and neuro-science. It reflects an attempt to think through, from first principles, how cur-rent knowledge from these various fields can be integrated into a single, consistent, sciennfic framework for the study of the mind and brain (Cosmides

this paper I shall sketch a view of information updates in dialogue as opposed to the classical view of updating in monologic discourses. I will suggest that the semantic analysis of attitudes (such as belief and knowledge) are central to updates in dialogue and point to some parallels between traditional puzzles that have been addressed within the philosophical literature on the attitudes and phenomena that arise in dialogue semantics. Finally, I will present a sketch of a way of representing information states that appears to meet requirements for both analyses of the attitudes and dialogue updates. Our view of information states (which is a revision of that presented in Cooper, 1996, Cooper and Ginzburg, 1996) blends together ideas from computer science, linguistics and logic. 2 Updates The notion of information update has become standard in a number of modern semantic theories including work by Irene Heim (Heim, 1982), discourse representation theory (DRT) (Kamp and Reyle, 1993), and dynamic semantics as it has been developed in Amsterdam and elsewhere (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991, Dekker, 1993). For a recent paper bringing these approaches together see van Eijck and Kamp (1997). The classical view of information update as presented in these papers is of update in a text or monologue which can be represented diagramatically as in (1). (1) Information state 1 + utterance

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As a post-Gricean pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory (RT) takes as its starting point the question of how hearers bridge the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. That there is such a gap has been a given of linguistic philosophy since Grice’s (1967) Logic and Conversation. But the account that relevance theory offers of how this gap is bridged,

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Recent work in philosophy of language has raised significant problems for the traditional theory of propositions, engendering serious skepticism about its general workability. These problems are, I believe, tied to fundamental misconceptions about how the theory should be developed. The goal of this paper is to show how to develop the traditional theory in a way which solves the problems and puts this skepticism to rest. The problems fall into two groups. The first has to do with reductionism, specifically, attempts to reduce propositions to extensional entities—either extensional functions or sets. The second group concerns problems of fine-grained content—both traditional “Cicero”/“Tully ” puzzles and recent variations on them which confront scientific essentialism. After characterizing the problems, I outline a non-reductionist approach—the algebraic approach—which avoids the problems associated with reductionism. I then go on to show how the theory can incorporate non-Platonic (as well as Platonic) modes of presentation. When these are implemented nondescriptively, they yield the sort of fine-grained distinctions which have been eluding us. The paper closes by applying the theory to a cluster of remaining puzzles, including a pair of new puzzles facing scientific essentialism. 1.

One way of looking at extending states of knowledge is in terms of dynamic semantics, where new information is used to update or change a set of semantic states representing current knowledge. An alternative perspective is the viewpoint of theory extension, where a state of knowledge is represented by a theory (a set of sentences of some language). Dynamic systems of theory extension are compared to dynamic systems of state update or change. We assume throughout that the theories are deductively closed. For theories in the language of propositional logic, we propose two systems that turn out to be related to Update Logic and a close relative of this. For theories in the language of predicate logic we get a straightforward connection with dynamic predicate logic on the assumption that the theories we consider are complete. We get a connection with dynamic modal predicate logic if we replace this assumption by the assumption that the theories are full with respect to a set of constants C...

Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a commitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the objects (and properties) that her beliefs are about. Consequently, it is widely supposed that an ascription of the relevant sort will be true just in case it specifies either directly or indirectly both what the ascribee believes and how she believes it. The class of “notionally sensitive ” ascriptions has been variously characterized. Quine (1956) calls the class I have in mind the class of notional ascriptions and distinguishes it from the class of relational ascriptions. Others call the relevant class the class of de dicto ascriptions and distinguish it from the class of de re ascriptions. More recently, it has been called the class of notionally loaded ascriptions (Crimmins 1992, 1995). So understood, the class