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Do inferential roles compose?

2005· article· en· W2061231795 on OpenAlex
Mark McCullagh

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuedialectica · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicClassical Philosophy and Thought
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEpistemologyComputer sciencePhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have argued that inferential roles are not compositional.It is unclear, however, whether the theories at which they aim their objection are obliged to meet the strong compositionality requirement they have in mind.But even if that requirement is accepted, the data they adduce can in fact be derived from an inferential-role theory that meets it.I explain this in terms of Robert Brandom's substitutional conception of inferential roles.The several objections the proposal invites are worth discussing because they rest, I think, on neglect of some interesting and important facts about inferential roles.Whether Fodor's and Lepore's strong compositionality requirement is justified or not, then, inferential-role theories do not have the problem that they claim to have identified.Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore have argued -"frequently, loudly, and in many places" 1that inferential roles are not compositional.If they are right then things look grim for any semantic theory that incorporates a notion of inferential role.One problem with their argument is that it is unclear whether the theories at which they aim their objection are obliged to meet the strong compositionality requirement they have in mind.But even if that requirement is accepted, the data they adduce can in fact be derived from an inferential-role theory thats meets it.I explain this in terms of Robert Brandom's (1994) substitutional conception of inferential roles.The several objections the proposal invites are worth discussing because they rest, I think, on neglect of some interesting and important facts about inferential roles.Whether Fodor's and Lepore's strong compositionality requirement is justified or not, then, inferential-role theories do not have the problem that they claim to have identified. The objectionFodor and Lepore support their objection on examples such as the following.Suppose... that you happen to think that brown cows are dangerous; then it's part of the inferential role of "brown cow" for you that it does (or can) figure in inferences of the form "brown cow → dangerous."But, at first blush anyhow, this fact about the inferential role of "brown cow" doesn't seem to derive from facts about the inferential roles of its constituents in the way that, for example, the validity of inferences like "brown cow → brown animal" or "brown cow → not green cow"

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.929
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.038
GPT teacher head0.249
Teacher spread0.211 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it