Translating Natural Language to First-Order Logic for Logical Fallacy Detection

Even beyond that you have a ton of pragmatics post-grice to deal with. Computing implicatures is complex and requires a lot of knowledge about context etc. The truth value of a statement and the 'truth value' of a speech act are pretty different things - not sure it's really feasible to convert between them.

It looks like classic models of NLP semantics mostly punt on the "logical" point of view precisely due to these difficulties, and focus mostly on the more surface level problem of describing how each word of the source text correlates with a deeper description of the "meaning" of the text as a whole. So it is simply assumed that the meaning of the text as a whole must be derived compositionally from the meaning of each part (usually described by a somewhat ad-hoc "frame" structure), but exactly what that entails in a "logical" sense is left unspecified. UMR (Universal Meaning Representations) seems to be a typical example of such a system https://github.com/umr4nlp/umr-guidelines/blob/master/guidel... The expected use case seems to be something like building a common intermediate language for an automated translation system; individual meaning elements can then be "mapped" in a useful way, even across different languages, but there's not much interest apparently in "inferring" further knowledge from what one already has, or even on verifying that any given inference is valid (as proposed by OP).

It wouldn't be useful if, as the parent comment is saying, it won't do a decent job of translating natural language.

I have a pet theory that most inefficiency is about self-consistency (or lack thereof), whether that's in human-human or human-machine communications (e.g. program code).

Those axioms can still be evaluated, quantified and compared, and eventually calculated.

>Ethics are reached via consensus

This is probably too big a topic for a whole side-branch on this, but modern meta-ethics teaches a range of possible approaches. Some notions of ethics are relativist, and are about the fact that moral norms are produced by some given society. But under some constructions that's just a procedural truism rather than a position on the content or the nature of morality itself.

Then you have moral realism, a perfectly respected position, which can encompass things like utilitariansim and other ism's. And this might seem silly derail, and I'm trying not to, but this is important at the end of the day, because "ethics is reached via consensus" can mean a lot of things that cash out with completely different practical implications. It's the difference between, for instance, deciding we need to be consensus oriented and vote, or be research oriented and concerned with deepening our scientific understanding of things like insect consciousness and whether the physical effects of sleep deprivation fall under the traditional definition of torture.

>And good luck calculating some of these axioms

Not wrong, they can easily get computationally intractable. So I think one has to account to some degree for uncertainty. Here again, I worry that the intended upshot is supposed to be that we simply give up or treat the project of moral understanding like a cosmically impossible non-starter. I like to think there's a middle ground between where we presently stand and the hypothetical future where we've got perfect knowledge.

> Ethics are reached via consensus.

Absolutely not! This is cultural relativism, and frankly, it would be circular: how exactly are we converging on a consensus if not from some preexisting sense of the good?

The only defensible objective basis for the good is the nature of a thing and what actualizes the potentials determined by that nature, thus actualizing the thing as the kind of thing it is. Morality, only possible for things that have the capacity to comprehend their options for action (intellect) and choose freely among them (will) on the basis of that understanding, therefore concerns the question of whether an act performed by a thing furthers or frustrates the actualization of that thing.

By cutting off my arm for no proportionate reason, I do an immoral thing, because it is my nature to have that arm, but if I have gangrene in that arm that threatens my life, then removing the gangrene with the undesirable side effect of losing an arm is morally justifiable, even if the loss of the arm is not good per se.

Murdering a human being is gravely immoral, because it directly contradicts my nature as a social human being in a very profound and profoundly self-destructive way. However, killing a would-be murderer in defense of my life or that of another is a morally very good deed; it is in accord with my social nature, and indeed can be said to actualize it more fully in some respect.

> The rest of us derive our principles from functioning mammalian emotional circuits

Please refrain from making such silly pseudoscientific and pseudophilosophical statements.

That being said, calculation is insufficient, because such calculation is formal: it explicitly excludes the conceptual content of propositions. But concepts are the material "carriers" of comprehension of what things are. We can also analyze concepts. Now, we can say that we can calculate a formal deduction according to formal rules, but we cannot calculate a concept or its analytical products. This is the produce of abstraction from concreta. Formal systems abstract from these. They are blind to conceptual content, on purpose. And having used a formalism to derive a conclusion, we must interpret the result, that is, we must reassign concepts to symbols that stand in for them. So formal systems are useful tools, but they are tools.

Nice prompt, I've been doing something similar but not this robust. I'll give this a spin.

Thanks again!

You can require that factual statements require source reference.

Statement that "pit bulls are the most dangerous problem in America" requires source data (ie. cause of death or serious injuries in 2024 in USA).

Publications can be signed by authorities (ie. university or government body).

IMHO sooner or later we will (have to) end up with system like that.

Every information will be signed and level of trust will be automatically established based on your preference who you trust.

So maybe the solution is to have these FOL capabilities close to the user and far from the information source.

FOL values analysis of information streams, that manifest as user interface for configuring the algorithms that decide what information is surfaced to you in media.

This is why I said this sort of thing might be part of a solution. The whole solution would involve other significant parts.

You mention the world being (at least subjectively) stochastic. This brings to mind the idea that a model of probability rather than just logic, might be more beneficial?

The example you gave of focusing excessively on some topic in order to make it seem like a bigger deal…

hm, is there a way we could formalize such things in a way like how formal fallacies are formalized?

It seems more difficult than classifying common formal fallacies.

But, might it be possible?

I disagree with your first point. People are far more rational than you are making them out to be, it's just that they are rational within their own value system, not yours.

Also today's propaganda is capable of adapting itself to each audience member's value system to make it more palatable, and then gradually nudge the audience towards the desired narrative/beliefs/values. The systems that distribute the propaganda are already analyzing people's values and using that information to manipulate people. I think that information asymmetry is part of the problem. I could be wrong, but I think flipping that dynamic around so the public can see the true values of the subjects of propaganda may help neutralize a lot of propaganda.

As far as what impact this specific project will have, I have no idea. You may be right. I'm curious about its limitations and how it can be applied.

Humans are not fully rational, but they're more rational than many assume. For instance, many thought the illusory truth effect showed that people are biased towards believing things they hear many times over, which is great for propagandists, but it turns out this is only true when they are in a "high quality information" environment. This is quite rational! They should update towards believing repeated statements when the environment they're in has shown itself to be reliable. When the environment they're in has shown itself to be unreliable, the illusory truth effect basically disappears.

[1] https://x.com/ROrchinik/status/1885820697160859951

I think you're envisioning this in a pessimistic way.

I totally agree that the end conclusion "this statement is fallacious" is pretty useless. But I assume that a working process would also yield the chain of judgements (A is right, B is right, C is wrong, etc). I think that would be VERY useful.

People who become captured by propaganda and lies generally are not sold on 100% of the propaganda. There are certain elements they care more about and others they can ignore. A way to deprogram people through conversation is to just ask them to explain things about their views and ask them to reconcile them with reality. The reconciliation is painful for them and that pain keeps people "in" irrational beliefs - but it's also how people find their way out. Once they no longer associate themselves with the conspiracy, they can discard beliefs associated with it...provided they can think through them.

I think being able to automatically decompose a fact check into the elements of what "is true" and "is false" in a statement would be HUGE. An essential tool in helping people escape from information swamps.

That's for --model_name, not --nli_model_name:

https://github.com/lovishchopra/NL2FOL/blob/4635a81f216da2ad...

    nli_tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(args.nli_model_name)
    nli_model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(args.nli_model_name)