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Order effects in dynamic semantics

Topics in cognitive science 6(1)
beim Graben, P. Department of German Studies and Linguistics,
Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
2014 Physics

In their target article, Wang and Busemeyer (2013) discuss question order effects in terms of incompatible projectors on a Hilbert space. In a similar vein, Blutner recently presented an orthoalgebraic query language essentially relying on dynamic update semantics.

Here, I shall comment on some interesting analogies between the different variants of dynamic semantics and generalized quantum theory to illustrate other kinds of order effects in human cognition, such as belief revision, the resolution of anaphors, and default reasoning that result from the crucial non‐commutativity of mental operations upon the belief state of a cognitive agent.

The article was published in: Topics in cognitive science 6(1): 67-73

Full article

This work was supported (in part) by the Fetzer Franklin Fund of the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust.