Nonfamiliarity and indefinite descriptions

Perceptual Anchoring with Indefinite Descriptions

Anchoring is the problem of how to connect, inside an artificial system, the symbol-level and signallevel representations of the same physical object. In most previous work on anchoring, symbol-level representations were meant to denote one specific object, like ‘the red pen p22’. These are also called definite descriptions. In this paper, we study anchoring in the case of indefinite descriptio...

The indefinite article – Indefinite ? – Article ?

Perlmutter (1970) argued that the indefinite article is categorically different from the definite article and proposed that it is a clitic version of the numeral "one". But there are, as Perlmutter himself pointed out, instances of "a" as well as of "one" that don't seem to have the semantics of the numeral. Hence a divorce of "a" (and of "one") from "numeral"-hood is called for. Furthermore, t...

Indefinite and GCWA Inference in Indefinite Deductive Databases

This paper presents several basic results on compiling indefinite and GCWA(Generalized Closed World Assumption) inference in IDDB(Indefinite Dedutive Databases). We do not allow function symbols, but do allow non-Horn clauses. Further, although the GCWA is used to derive negative assumptions, we do also allow negative clauses to occur explicitly. We show a fundamental relationship between indef...

Indefinite Divisibility

Some hold that the lesson of Russell’s paradox and its relatives is that mathematical reality does not form a “definite totality” but rather is “indefinitely extensible”. There can always be more sets than there ever are. I argue that certain contact puzzles are analogous to Russell’s paradox this way: they similarly motivate a vision of physical reality as iteratively generated. In this pictur...

Indefinite Composites and Word-coinage