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Newsletter September 19, No. 46

***** Sorry for the delay but SU-CSLI crashed just as I was about to send
the Newsletter yesterday.******



                      C S L I   N E W S L E T T E R
_____________________________________________________________________________
September 19, 1985              Stanford                       Vol. 2, No. 46
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     A weekly publication of The Center for the Study of Language and
     Information, Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305
                              ____________
         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *THIS* THURSDAY, September 19, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``Some Remarks on the Relationship of Mind to 
     Conference Room    Meaning and Language''
			Discussion led by Daniel Isaacson, Oxford University

   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	No talk this week
     Seminar Room	

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall		
                              ____________
         CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR *NEXT* THURSDAY, September 26, 1985

   12 noon		TINLunch
     Ventura Hall       ``The Concept of Supervenience''
     Conference Room    Discussion led by Carol Cleland
			(Abstract on page 1)
			
   2:15 p.m.		CSLI Talk
     Ventura Hall	No talk this week
     Seminar Room	

   3:30 p.m.		Tea
     Ventura Hall
                              ____________
                    ABSTRACT FOR NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
                    ``The Concept of Supervenience''

      Traditionally the notion of supervenience has been associated with
   moral philosophy (particularly, value theory).  In recent years,
   however, there has been a growing interest among philosophers in
   developing a concept of supervenience that could be employed in the
   analysis of certain problematic relations, e.g., between the mental
   and the physical, between macrostates of the world and microstates of
   the world.
      The appeal of the concept of supervenience for philosophers
   involves several factors.  First, supervenience is a weaker relation
   that the relation of so-called ``reducibility.''  While reducibility
   is traditionally taken to involve the presence of bi-conditional
   correlations between every ``reduced'' property and every ``reducing''
   property, supervenience does not.  Yet, like reducibility,
   supervenience appears to be able to provide us with a robust notion of
   the determination of one family of properties by another.
      The question is: Can supervenience live up to its promise?
							--Carol Cleland

Page 2                     CSLI Newsletter                 September 19, 1985
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                                  TALK
                           ``Proto-Language''
       Professor C. B. Martin, Dept. of Philosophy, U. of Calgary
           Friday, September 20, 2:15, Ventura Conference Room

      C. B. Martin has done a lot of important work in the philosophy of
   religion, but also he wrote an extremely important paper on memory
   with Max Deutscher, defending a causal theory of memory when this was
   quite unfashionable.  I think this paper played an important role in
   setting the stage for causal theories of reference and action.  Martin
   is now doing work that sounds extremely interesting to me on the
   semantics of non-verbal behavior.  This following paragraph from his
   paper gives a good indication of what it is about.
   	``The time is long overdue for the recognition of the semantic
   	import of non-verbal behaviour.  Such behaviour is procedural
   	and projective for an outcome (that may or may not have
   	satisfaction).  Though ``true'' and ``false'' may be reserved
        for the verbal cases, there is a basic rightness and wrongness
   	about the non-verbal behavioural, procedural, projective
   	representations.  Such behaviour is formed in inter-related
   	patterns strikingly and importantly analogous to that of
   	verbal language.  I shall call such semantic non-verbal
   	behaviour ``proto-language''.''			--John Perry
                              ____________
                                  TALK
    ``Crossing the Rubicon: From a Physics of Dead Coordinate Spaces
               to a Physics of Living Coordinate Spaces''
   Dr. Peter Kugler, The Crump Institute for Medical Engineering, UCLA
            Monday, September 23, 1985, 2:15pm, Ventura Hall

      This talk will be about self-organizing systems that involve
   low-energy (nonforce) coupling and the nature of the predicates that
   constitute the low-energy descriptors, and will be organized around
   issues pertaining to general problems of language and information.
   The emphasis will be on systems that generate (self-assemble) new
   levels of description.  These new levels constitute new languages
   parasitic on the lower level languages but not reducible to their
   predicates.  In the self-organizing systems of interest it is the
   ``coordinate spaces,'' which are themselves evolving, that become the
   important objects of study.  Instead of assuming a fixed coordinate
   space, when the interest focuses on trajectories, attention is devoted
   to the coordinate space itself, since this is what provides the semantics.
      This approach is very similar to developments in computer
   architecture that focus on parallel processing.  In these machines
   (connection machines, Boltzmann, etc.) the machine language
   self-organizes (e.g. programs itself through the emergence of new
   stable configurations), and the new predicate descriptions play the
   role of symbols in terms of their opacity with respect to the lower
   level language.  The machine language `gives birth' to the symbolic
   level of description.  This situation contrasts dramatically with that
   of von Neumann machines, for which the symbolic language is
   ontologically independent of the machine language.  A symbolic
   language can run on any of an infinite variety of mechanistic
   substrates, the primacy of the symbol prevailing over the substrate
   machine.  The approach advocated here, puts the focus on the machine
   level of interaction, thus preserving an ontological continuity and
   avoiding mind/body, syntactic/semantic, etc. problems.

Page 3                     CSLI Newsletter                  September 19, 1985
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      SUMMARY OF A TALK TO THE DISCOURSE INTENTION AND ACTION GROUP
           ``Reference and Denotation: The Descriptive Model''
                      Ami Kronfeld, AI Center, SRI
                         Tuesday, September 10.

      The descriptive approach to the problem of reference has
   recently been challenged. One of the most devastating weapons
   against it has been the Referential/Attributive distinction.  I
   argue that this distinction is defined by two criteria which are
   independent of each other.  The first is the ability to refer using
   the ``wrong'' description; the second is based on the notion of
   ``having a particular object in mind.''  The first criterion is
   explained in terms of a distinction between a functionally relevant
   description (where the description is used only to identify), and a
   conversationally relevant description (where the description takes
   part in a Gricean implicature).  The second criterion is explained
   in terms of the de-re/de-dicto distinction.  I examine the claim
   that an individual concept is neither necessary nor sufficient for
   a de-re belief, and I argue that a Russellian notion of
   acquaintance and a theory of the pragmatics of reporting beliefs
   can provide a descriptive account of de-re thought.  The discussion
   that followed the talk focused on (a) the ability of the
   descriptive model to handle reference to objects that were
   perceived in the past, (b) the role of the self in the
   individuation of beliefs, and (c) whether the concept of ``simple''
   reference, where the description is only functionally relevant, is
   really necessary.				--Ami Kronfeld

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