A growing body of literature has investigated whether the ability to contend with false belief (Wimmer and Perner 1983) is dependent upon the acquisition of the language that reports false beliefs (de Villiers, 2000, 2004, de Villiers and de Villiers 2000, de Villiers and Roeper (in prep)). de Villiers and her colleagues maintain that certain linguistic developments are precursors to a child’s ...

Real dialogues often feature conflicting beliefs and goals between the participants. In such cases, it is often necessary for one participant to reason about the nature of the conflict and respond appropriately. This paper presents a brief outline of a computational theory of dialogue understanding which can deal with such conflicts. Our theory is capable of distinguishing between cases of prag...

The paper aims at mining a richly annotated treebank for features relevant in automatic annotation/detection of attribution – ascription of text contents to agents who expressed them. We find three such features, implement an automatic procedure to detect attribution relations in our data and evaluate its results.

I argue that ascribing duties to the poor better realizes Deveaux’s methodological and normative commitments; address some of concerns such ascription raises; indicate how rich description collective individual agency-building can contribute theorizing moral agency in non-ideal circumstances more generally.

Suppose that Ann says, “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” Her audience may well agree. Her knowledge ascription may seem true. But now suppose that Ben—in a different context—also says “Keith knows that the bank will be open tomorrow.” His audience may well disagree. His knowledge ascription may seem false. Indeed, a number of philosophers have claimed that people’s intuitions a...

Searle’s Connection Principle says that “the ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness”. In this paper I want to defend the thesis that Searle’s theory of mind, and especially the Connection Principle, does not offer a coherent picture of unconscious mental states and, a fortiori, of the intentional li...