Logic, Language and Information. Vol. 2 (review)

This collection brings together nineteen papers contributing to logical, linguistic, computational, and philosophical aspects of information, reflecting trends that have their roots in such theories as situation and channel theory, information flow in distributed systems, discourse representation theory, dynamic semantics, and belief revision. Such a field is bound to be utterly diverse, and it seems that a thorough philosophical re-examination of the fundamental assumptions of these differing theoretical frameworks is needed. This book nevertheless does not attempt such unifying perspectives but approaches the notion of information from almost as many different perspectives as there are papers in this volume.

In this light the essay by Thomas Ede Zimmer-Mann, discussing the epistemic role of discourse referents, is a refreshing experience in its attempt to uncover the basic assumptions of discourse representation theory and dynamic approaches to meaning, pointing out somewhat shaky foundations that these theories may have. The other foundationally strong approach is undertaken in Arthur Merin’s paper on decision-theoretic semantics as the basis for delivering a pragmatically oriented non-truth-conditional meaning of natural language, with roots in C. S. Peirce’s and F. Ramsey’s concepts of belief and disposition and R. Carnap’s concept of relevance.

Papers that do not directly rely on the current trends of information include Yoshiki Kinoshita and Koichi Takahashi’s use of category theory as an explanatory framework for proving predicates with functionally specified interface and Steven Vickers’s paper on topological spaces; both papers are based on ideas for which parallels in situation theory have been discovered only afterwards.

Such ideas nonetheless have points of contact in the ‘visualisation of logic’, an approach taken up in many essays in terms of hyperproofs (Jon Ober-Lander, Keith Stenning, and Richard Cox) and in terms of other similar diagrammatic methods such as constraint preservation (Atsushi Shimojima). In the rest of the book an interested reader finds papers on state spaces and local logics (Jon Barwise), presupposition accommodation (David Beaver), dynamic syntax-semantics interface (Tsutomu FujinamI), dynamic epistemic logic (Jelle Ger-Brandy), context-dependency of existential bare plurals and their relation to situation theory (Sheila Glasbey), concurrent contractions in belief revision (Wiebe Van Der Hoek and Maarten De Rijke), a channel-theoretic semantics of graphical representation with verisimilitude (Oliver Lemon and Ian Pratt), unresolved disjunctions (Edwin D. Mares), natural language explanations for knowledge-based systems (Denise Aboim Sande E Oliveira, Clarisse Sieckenius De Souza and Edward Hermann HaeusleR), update in belief revision by means of language splitting (Rohit Parikh), a theory of disability (John Perry, Elizabeth Macken, and David Israel), causality in Dretske’s theory of information (Paul Skokowski), and constraining the functions representing semantic information in generalized quantifier theory (R. Zuber).

This is a collection of leading work on ‘informatics’, not to be recommended en tous cas but rather as an insightful documentation of current activities in, and the coefficiency of, contemporary information sciences.