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This thesis presents, discusses, and evaluates the philosophical motivations for proof-theoretic harmony - one of the central concepts of logical inferentialism - and relates them to the corresponding formal notions. It will be argued that the principle of innocence manages the objections against...
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The purpose of this thesis is to examine in which cases context-free processes and push-down processes are the same. In particular, we depart from the well-known case of language-equivalence and instead look at processes using process theory and more fine-grained equivalences, such as bisimulatio...
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We will present a natural logic (NQL) for reasoning with generalized quantifiers that aims to predict mean human success on syllogistic and related reasoning tasks. Natural logics provide inference rules that operate directly on natural language representations, thereby gaining flexibility and ex...
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This thesis gives a formal logical analysis of a social phenomenon; gossip. Gossip can be used to serve many goals. The Sherlock Holmes’ of our society -always looking for an explanation- might use gossip to find an explanation for a surprising observation. Also for the agents that are not so eag...
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In this thesis, we construct and investigate a topos for Kreisel’s modified realizability. The topos, like Kreisel’s modified realizability, is characterized by the axiom of choice in all finite types and the principle of independence of premise. The model is constructed by a general method known...
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The following investigation is focused on the intersection of symbolic and distributional approaches to natural language semantics. Broadly speaking, we analyze symbolic approaches to semantics in order to learn how the performance of distributional models can be improved that are applied to comp...
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Blockchains are structures that allow to establish trust by relying on cryptographic primitives to ensure that the information encoded in them cannot be changed. Bitcoin is the first example of a blockchain and an important amount of the research is concerned with replicating its advantages in ot...
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It has been suggested that our understanding of numbers is rooted in the perception of numerosities. A capacity, that of assessing the approximate number of objects in a scene, which is believed to be available also to other species. The present work fits within the current debate on whether a ‘t...
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In Beyond the Limits of Thought Graham Priest presents the Inclosure Schema as the underlying structure of the paradoxes of self-reference. I argue that while the paradoxes fit the Inclosure Schema, (i) in case of Burali-Forti, Mirimanoff, 5th Antinomy, Richard, König and Berry one premise of the...
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Dynamic communication is the field that describes the spread of information throughout a network of agents. More specifically, it assumes that every agent has a secret and investigates how agents should decide, based on their own knowledge about the network, what calls to make so that ultimately ...
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In the 1950s, James Cooke Brown created an artificial language, in an attempt to use this language to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The language was called Loglan, short for ‘logical language’. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis expresses, roughly, that the language one speaks influences the way one t...