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CSLI Calendar, 1 February 1990, vol. 5:15


       C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
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1 February 1990                     Stanford                   Vol. 5, No. 15
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    A weekly publication of the Center for the Study of Language and
Information (CSLI), Ventura Hall, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
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          CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR THIS THURSDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 1990

12:00 noon		TINLunch
      Cordura 100	Reading: A Logical Model of Machine Learning:
			A Study of Vague Predicates 
			by Wlodek Zadrozny and Mieczyslaw Kokar
			Discussion led by Jerry Hobbs
			(hobbs@ai.sri.com)
		        Abstract in last week's Calendar

 2:15 p.m.
      Cordura 100	CSLI Seminar
			Some Aspects of Word-Retrieval Errors in the
			Speech of Aphasic Adults
			Audrey Holland
		        Professor of Otolaryngology and Communication
			and Associate Professor of Psychiatry
			Director of the Division of Speech, Language,
			and Voice Pathology, School of Medicine
			University of Pittsburgh
			(alh@med.pitt.edu)
			Abstract in last week's Calendar
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	  CSLI ACTIVITIES FOR NEXT THURSDAY, 8 FEBRUARY 1990

12:00 noon		TINLunch
      Cordura 100	Reading: Peirce on Truth
			by H. S. Thayer
			Discussion led by Tom Burke
			(burke@csli.stanford.edu)
			Abstract below
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			 NEXT WEEK'S TINLUNCH
	      Reading: Peirce on Truth, by H. S. Thayer
		     Discussion led by Tom Burke

For C. S. Peirce, truth is what would be uncovered in the ideal limit
of endless scientific inquiry.  Moore, Russell, Ayer, Quine, and
others have given numerous reasons to believe this is unacceptable as
an account of truth.  But many of these criticisms rest on a failure
to distinguish (a) what it _means_ to say, (b) how to _know_, and (c)
how one might come to _believe_, that a statement is true.  Many of
the complaints revolve around questioning the feasibility of the
notion of endless scientific inquiry.  There is also an apparent
incoherence in Peirce's saying that a statement is true if it is in
concordance with the ideal limit of endless investigation and yet, in
the very same breath, saying that an essential ingredient in this
concordance is some sort of confessed inaccuracy and one-sidedness --
as if to say that a statement isn't true unless it confesses not to
be?  Well, that isn't what Peirce was saying, and Thayer's article
helps to straighten all this out.

Peirce's view of truth is relevant to a number of topics in situation
theory.  If time permits, we might discuss various notions of
partiality, persistence and nonpersistence, and the distinction
between saturated and unsaturated infons.  The last half-dozen pages
of John Perry's "From Worlds to Situations" will be included with
the reading.
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		 SEMINAR ON ISSUES IN LOGICAL THEORY
			    Philosophy 396
			   John Etchemendy
		       (etch@csli.stanford.edu)
		 Thursday, 1 February, 3:45-5:30 p.m.
			     Cordura 100

This week, I will finish up my presentation of _The Liar_.  For those
of you who weren't at last week's meeting, I ran out of time just
after describing what we call the Russellian treatment.  I will talk
about the preferred (by us) Austinian treatment Thursday.

Bernie Linsky's presentation of Anderson's chapter on Intensional
Logic has been postponed until next week.
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			SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM
		 Verb Varieties: Syntax or Semantics?
			     Annie Zaenen
			(zaenen.pa@xerox.com)
		   Thursday, 1 February, 4:15 p.m.
			Building 60, Room 61G
         
Traditional grammars and dictionaries generally subdivide verbs into
transitive and intransitive ones.  It is, however, well known that
finer classifications are needed in linguistic description.  In this
talk, I'll discuss the differences between two classes of intransitive
verbs in Dutch and Italian and show how their syntactic differences
correlate with subtle differences in meaning.

A discussion of the differences between Italian and Dutch will raise
the problem of how word meaning corresponds with what is "out in the
real world."
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		  MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
      Unique Continuation for Elliptic Differential Inequalities
			      Tom Wolff
		  California Institute of Technology
		   Thursday, 1 February, 4:15 p.m.
		       Building 380, Room 380W

No abstract available.
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		     HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS GROUP
		The Sociolinguistic Types of Language
			     Gregory Guy
		       (guy@csli.stanford.edu)
		   Thursday, 1 February, 7:30 p.m.
			      Ventura 17

Many authors have distinguished various "types" of linguistic change.
For example, there is Labov's (1966) dichotomy between "change from
above" and "change from below," Naro and Lemle's contrast between
"natural" and "conscious imitative" changes, and Bickerton's (1980)
distinction between "spontaneous" and "nonspontaneous" changes.  These
dichotomies all depend on, among other criteria, whether or not
language or dialect contact is involved in their genesis.  More recent
works by Thomason and Kaufman (1988) and Van Coetsem (1988) provide
richer "typologies," drawing for example an important distinction
between contact-induced changes that arise through borrowing and those
that arise from the imposition of native-language habits on a second
language.

The present paper attempts to summarize and critique some of the major
proposals concerning change types, and to provide a systematic
synthesis that identifies three basic types (untargeted change,
borrowing, and imposition).  Each of these is associated with a
distinctive set of social, psychological, and linguistic
characteristics, such as the social class distribution and social
motivation of a change, whether speakers are consciously aware of the
innovation, the linguistic distribution of innovations according to
the saliency of contexts and the structural levels involved.  A number
of variable parameters that allow the characterization of intermediate
types are also explored, such as (in contact-induced change) the
degree of bilingualism and the demographic balance between the
languages, and (in untargeted change) the possible coexistence of
contrasting social interpretations of the innovation (e.g., "overt"
and "covert" norms).
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		   PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
	     Scientific Knowledge: Taking up the Feminist
		  Challenge to Philosophy of Science
			    Helen Longino
	       Department of Philosophy, Mills College
		    Friday, 2 February, 3:15 p.m.
			Building 90, Room 91A

No abstract available.
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		  LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
			Dissertation Proposal
			     John Stonham
		     (stonham@csli.stanford.edu)
		    Friday, 2 February, 3:30 p.m.
			     Cordura 100

In this proposal, I will present my ongoing research on the use of
processes in morphology.  I will describe and reanalyze several cases
of grammatically conditioned metathesis, showing that they lend
themselves better to some other form of analysis.  The metathesis is
then only a surface realization of the restructuring of the syllable,
the observance of phonotactic constraints or some other
nonmorphological effect.  I will suggest that we should never expect
to find metathesis as a grammatical marker, only as a phonological or
phonetic effect due to various factors that exist in language.
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	    COMMONSENSE AND NONMONOTONIC REASONING SEMINAR
       A Characterization of Maximum Entropy Epsilon Semantics
			     Paul Morris
			     IntelliCorp
		    Monday, 5 February, 2:30 p.m.
		       Margaret Jacks Hall 252

This is joint work with Moises Goldszmidt and Judea Pearl of UCLA.  A
solution to the Yale shooting problem due to Geffner and Pearl
represents frame axioms by means of extreme conditional probabilities,
or epsilon semantics.  However, the solution goes beyond epsilon
semantics in using a principle of irrelevance, which has been thought
to be related to maximum entropy.

We characterize maximum entropy epsilon semantics for an important
class of rule sets as a preference for worlds that minimize a specific
weighted count of rule violations.  The result shows that an
application of maximum entropy to a variant of the shooting problem
gives a counter-intuitive result, whereas the principle of irrelevance
is in accord with intuition.  Thus, the two approaches are not
identical.  We also present some relationships between probabilistic
and default reasoning that extend results of Kraus, Lehmann, and
Magidor.
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		 LANGUAGE ACQUISITION INTEREST GROUP
	       Workshop on Steve Pinker's Theory of the
		  Acquisition of Argument Structures
		    Discussion led by Jess Gropen
		  Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT
		   Tuesday, 6 February, 12:00 noon
		     Building 100, Greenberg Room

Readings:

(1) Pinker, S.  1987.  Resolving a Learnability Paradox in the
    Acquisition of the Verb Lexicon.  In _Lexicon Project Working
    Paper_ 17.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Center for Cognitive Science.
    
Workshop participants are encouraged to read the above paper before
attending the workshop.  Three copies of the paper have been put on
reserve in the Greenberg Room.

(2) Pinker, S.  1989.  _Learnability and Cognition_.  Cambridge,
    Mass.: MIT Press.
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		   PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM
		    Beyond Heuristics and Biases:
	      How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear
			   Gerd Gigerenzer
			University of Konstanz
		   Wednesday, 7 February, 3:45 p.m.
			Building 420, Room 050
				   
No abstract available.
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