3 ms·

What is the Davidsonian sense, then, if you can help explain? (The original essay/primary source is probably too dense for me as a hobbyist to read.)

adastra22 4y ago
I would start with some of the people currently doing research in that field. It is more computational linguistics than it is philosophy, imho. Maybe start with this guy, in particular some of the NYU summer schools he has hosted: https://champollion.com/research/ https://champollion.com/research/ But the tl;dr is that event semantics is a way of parsing sentences to logical assertions about whether specific events or classes of events have/had/will occur, and that this is a general way of understanding nearly all forms of spoken or written communication (the "nearly" being only due to relatively uninteresting things like interjections and fillers). It wasn't always the case that Davidsonian event semantics was considered complete as a formal framework, but more recent work by Champollion and others have helped fill in the gaps. I'm thinking of this paper in particular: https://champollion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2015-interaction-paper.pdf https://champollion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2015-inte... So a Davidsonian way of understanding a sentence is to turn it into a formal logic statement about the past/present/future or even counter-factual state of the world. And the truth of a statement lies in how well that formal logic matches up with actual reality. To understand a sentence in this framework is to have worked through the logical consequences of that interpretation and know what conditions would make it true and what conditions would make it false. On the other hand if I tell you "The king of Thailand is riding on an elephant." there is a sense in which you intuitively understand this sentence as soon as you hear it without having worked through all the various edge cases in which it might be true or false. (Am I talking about a painting of the king riding an elephant? Or a movie on YouTube? Or is the king actually riding the elephant right now, at this very moment? etc.) The problem with your original question is that you are conflating these two meanings of "to understand." When you hear a spoken utterance or read a written sentence, you form a temporary and contextual model in your mind linking its constituent concepts together. A LLM does exactly the same thing. Davidson's event semantics provides a formal framework for clarifying, refining, and extending that understanding with rigorous logical analysis, but that's not something you, I, or a LLM normally do. It is still a valuable thing to do, but shouldn't be conflated with the natural everyday sense of "understanding."
- dsubburam 4y ago
  I looked at the links and found them too heavy going--I guess they would count as "analytical philosophy"? But I do understand your subsequent explanation, the distinction between event semantics and everyday understanding, at least to some extent. Thank you. It reminds me of Frege's distinction between sense and reference, which I've read about second-hand.

adastra22 4y ago

I would start with some of the people currently doing research in that field. It is more computational linguistics than it is philosophy, imho. Maybe start with this guy, in particular some of the NYU summer schools he has hosted: https://champollion.com/research/ https://champollion.com/research/ But the tl;dr is that event semantics is a way of parsing sentences to logical assertions about whether specific events or classes of events have/had/will occur, and that this is a general way of understanding nearly all forms of spoken or written communication (the "nearly" being only due to relatively uninteresting things like interjections and fillers). It wasn't always the case that Davidsonian event semantics was considered complete as a formal framework, but more recent work by Champollion and others have helped fill in the gaps. I'm thinking of this paper in particular: https://champollion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2015-interaction-paper.pdf https://champollion.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2015-inte... So a Davidsonian way of understanding a sentence is to turn it into a formal logic statement about the past/present/future or even counter-factual state of the world. And the truth of a statement lies in how well that formal logic matches up with actual reality. To understand a sentence in this framework is to have worked through the logical consequences of that interpretation and know what conditions would make it true and what conditions would make it false. On the other hand if I tell you "The king of Thailand is riding on an elephant." there is a sense in which you intuitively understand this sentence as soon as you hear it without having worked through all the various edge cases in which it might be true or false. (Am I talking about a painting of the king riding an elephant? Or a movie on YouTube? Or is the king actually riding the elephant right now, at this very moment? etc.) The problem with your original question is that you are conflating these two meanings of "to understand." When you hear a spoken utterance or read a written sentence, you form a temporary and contextual model in your mind linking its constituent concepts together. A LLM does exactly the same thing. Davidson's event semantics provides a formal framework for clarifying, refining, and extending that understanding with rigorous logical analysis, but that's not something you, I, or a LLM normally do. It is still a valuable thing to do, but shouldn't be conflated with the natural everyday sense of "understanding."

dsubburam 4y ago
I looked at the links and found them too heavy going--I guess they would count as "analytical philosophy"? But I do understand your subsequent explanation, the distinction between event semantics and everyday understanding, at least to some extent. Thank you. It reminds me of Frege's distinction between sense and reference, which I've read about second-hand.