This book explores the systematic and formal study of reasoning. It introduces the core systems of logic, discusses a portion of its extensions, and illustrates the application of logic in philosophy and linguistics utilizing classical and contemporary sources. In doing so, it provides the students with a rich set of tools along with first-hand experience regarding their applications in the study of rationality and meaning. With lots of exercises, and study and discussion questions, it provides a complete set of materials for courses for a variety of audiences at different levels.

Everything we do is driven by information, but the dynamic process of acquiring information and adjusting our views based on it has seldom been put at the center place in logic, and there are few textbooks introducing readers to this line of work. The present book introduces the reader to major logical techniques for studying information dynamics and interaction between agents, based on a variety of intuitive scenarios as well as recent research. Readers will learn styles of modeling, as well as the basic features of the new logical systems emanating from this line of work. All the separate strands in the book are brought together in a comprehensive study of information flow and action in games, forming a logic-based complement to standard perspectives in game theory.

Donald E. Knuth's influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics that are often given credit for shaping the field, and his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide variety of topics. The present volume is the eighth in a series of his collected papers.

This book is a French translation of seventeen papers by Donald Knuth on algorithms both in the field of analysis of algorithms and in the design of new algorithms. They cover fundamental concepts and techniques and numerous discrete problems such as sorting, searching, data compression, theorem-proving, and cryptography, as well as methods for controlling errors in numerical computations.

Each chapter of Relevant Linguistics leads students through descriptive analysis, helps them grasp linguistic concepts, and provides them with the reference materials necessary for their own teaching. This second edition contains more exercises as well as expanded and clarified explanations of the issues discussed in the first edition. Also included are more references to areas such as the history of English and semantics.

Holographic Reduced Representations (HRRs) are introduced here to model how the brain distributes each piece of information among thousands of neurons. It had been previously thought that the grammatical structure of a language cannot be encoded practically in a distributed representation, but HRRs can overcome the problems of earlier proposals. Thus this work has implications for psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and computer science, and engineering.

Through a modified Kantian approach to epistemology and philosophy of science, this book opposes both Quinean naturalistic holism and the post-Kuhnian conceptual relativism that has dominated recent literature in science studies. Focussing on the development of scientific philosophy from Kant to Rudolf Carnap, along with the parallel developments taking place in the sciences during the same period, the author articulates a new dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles. This idea applied within the physical sciences aims to show that rational intersubjective consensus is intricately preserved across radical scientific revolutions or paradigm-shifts and how this is achieved.

This book closes the gap in research on this subject. By developing the frameworks of Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Situation Semantics, the authors provide an account that rigorously integrates syntactic, semantic, and contextual dimensions of interrogatives. The challenge of providing exhaustive coverage of the interrogative constructions of English, including various constructions that occur solely in dialogue interaction, leads to new insights about a variety of contentious theoretical issues. These include matters of semantic ontology, the quantificational status of wh-phrases, the semantic effect of wh-fronting, the status of constructions in grammatical theory, the integration of illocutionary information in the grammar, and the nature of ellipsis resolution in dialogue. The account is stated with sufficient rigor to enable fairly direct computational implementation.