George Lakoff (in his book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things(1987) and the paper "Cognitive semantics" (1988)) champions some radical foundational views. Strikingly, Lakoff opposes realism as a metaphysical position, favoring instead some supposedly mild form of idealism such as that recently espoused by Hilary Putnam, going under the name "internal realism." For what he takes to be connected reasons, Lakoff also rejects truth conditional model-theoretic semantics for natural language. This paper examines an argument, given by Lakoff, against realism and MTS. (...) We claim that Lakoff's argument has very little, if any, impact for linguistic semantics. (shrink)

Some presuppositions seem to be weaker than others in the sense that they can be more easily neutralized in some contexts. For example some factive verbs, most notably epistemic factives like know, be aware, and discover, are known to shed their factivity fairly easily in contexts such as are found in (1). (1) a. …if anyone discovers that the method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected (...) to stop use of the route… c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars…. (The examples in (1) are all naturally occurring ones, discovered by David Beaver with the aid of Google; cf. Beaver 2002, exx. 32, 43, and 51, respectively.) On the other hand some other factives, e.g. regret, matter, and be surprised, do not exhibit the same type of behavior: (2) a. If any of the students regrets behaving badly, they’ll let us know. b. It doesn’t matter that the chimpanzees escaped. c. Was Bill surprised that spinach was included? Unlike the examples in (1), those in (2) could not be used appropriately in contexts where the speaker was not assuming that the complement clause was true. Our main concern will be trying to find the cause of this difference. However, before we get to that, we will look more closely at the concept “presupposition” itself, as well as its close neighbor in the linguistic literature, “conventional implicature” (section 2), and also at various ways of getting rid of presuppositions (section 3). In section 4 we will investigate two possible explanations for differences in presupposition triggering – the “lexical alternative” approach of Abusch (2002, 2005), and a suggestion of Ladusaw’s involving detachability of presuppositions. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

Last year (2005) marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of Russell’s classic ‘On denoting’. It should not cast any shadow on that great work to note that the problems it provided solutions to are still the subject of controversy. Two of those problems involved noun phrases (NPs) which fail to denote. Russell’s examples (1a) and (1b) (1) a. The king of France is bald. b. The king of France is not bald. are puzzling because they have the form of (...) simple contradictories, and yet we are not inclined to say either one is true. Example (2) (2) Pegasus does not exist. is even more problematic; the lack of denotation for Pegasus, which makes the sentence true, also seems to rob it of a meaningful constituent. Once the king of France is unpacked according to Russell’s analysis, (1b) is revealed to be ambiguous. It’s logical forms are given in (3). (3) a. ∃x[Kx ∧ ∀y[Ky ↔ y=x] ∧ ¬Bx] b. ¬∃x[Kx ∧ ∀y[Ky ↔ y=x] ∧ Bx] (3a) says that there is a unique (French) king who is not bald (obviously false), but (3b), the logical contradictory of (1a) says that it is not the case that there is a unique king who is bald (which is true). We can apply the analysis to sentence (2) once we recognize Pegasus as a concealed definite description, e.g. the winged horse of Greek mythology. (2) can then be unpacked as (4) (4) ¬∃x[Wx ∧ ∀y[Wy ↔ y=x]] which seems both meaningful and true, as required. Problems solved. Well, not quite. Strawson (1950) challenged the first solution above, arguing that neither (1a) nor (1b) could be used to assert the existence of a king of France. Rather, use of such sentences presupposes the existence of a king of France, and failing that existence, neither of (1a) or (1b) could be used to make either a true or a false statement – in Strawson’s words, “the question of whether it’s true or false simply doesn’t arise” (Strawson 1950, 330).1 In an extended series of essays, and one book, Jay Atlas (1977, 1978, 1979, 1989, 2004) has taken issue with the work of both Russell and Strawson.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wonder, Imagination, and the Matter of Theatre in The TempestMary MooreAriel occurs. Recounting his performance of "the tempest" in Act I, scene 1 of The Tempest, he presents himself as being and action, fracturing grammar, spatial and temporal logic in ways that amaze and confound:I boarded the King's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide, And (...) burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join...(1.2.195–201) 1"I flamed" means that Ariel emits or is flames, which in the normal order of things would consume him. His very narration, however, proves his survival, evoking wonder through the utterance itself. Forceful and compacted syntax, a recognized source of wonder in Classical and Renaissance accounts of style (Biester, pp. 14; 35–40), magnifies this effect. 2 Shakespeare's transitive use of the usually intransitive verb flame reflects a not uncommon practice, as E. A. Abbott shows; 3 but this syntactic device also reflects The Tempest's own logic. Ariel crosses boundaries between [End Page 496] deed and being, verb and noun, subject and object, matter and spirit: he both is and does flames. What could be more jarring to syntax and semantics than a singular subject whose utterance claims that he can flame, divide, meet and join? Just as "a" fire consists of many flames yet functions grammatically as a singular substance in English, just as the Christian Trinity is both singular and multiple, Ariel burns in many places at once. Meanwhile, this extraordinary language seems belied by the actor's very embodiment. Ariel cannot have done what he claims; yet the prior scene has represented the very storm in which Ariel flamed. In that sense, the actor's embodiment represents what we imagine to be matter's intractability, while Ariel's claims, coupled with the storm we have just witnessed, reveal matter's fluidity and permeability to imagination. Fluidity and intractability co-exist, another source of wonder. Sound mimics these paradoxes: the assonance and consonance in flame and amazement create a near rhyme that echoes the near identity of fire and human amazement. If, as Gurr and Ichikawa observe, a Renaissance audience expected to hear more than see a play, this echo calls attention to Ariel's marvelous powers. 4 Lest the noises and pleasures of the Renaissance theatre, which recent scholarship deems to be considerable, distract audience members from this bit of language, similar moments reinforce Ariel's play in and with language and matter throughout the play. Marvelous poetic language is of a piece with a "fever" that is of "the mind," with music that "creeps," actors who vanish, new found goddesses who speak the discoverers' own language.Amazement provides our cue: it and its cognates name the appropriate response to Ariel, his language, and to The Tempest itself. Attention to Ariel's poetic language reveals that it, like the plot, conforms to the marvels of the play and to the period's well documented love for marvels in several ways. Wonder, an aesthetic "'object of desire'" in itself, and a response to the inexplicable in classical and early modern views, may be evoked by the unexpected in style (and through other strategies that the era's handbooks taught). 5 The clause "I flamed amazement" epitomizes the unexpected in syntax as well as differing from one of the few sources found for The Tempest, William Strachey's 1610 letter, which describes just such a storm. 6 While St. Elmo's fire itself may elicit wonder, Shakespeare's syntax and diction reinforce that marvel. And no wonder: rhetoric and theatre alike depend upon audience attention, and wonders naturally evoke it. Jarring language also harmonizes with The Tempest's structural marvels—loose ends, disrupted actions, unforeseen futures—issues several critics explore. 7 [End Page 497]The wonders of The Tempest, however, also involve imagination—in early modern psychology, the human faculty that permits perception of the world and invention of images. 8 Wonder responds to how the perceived differs from the expected, how the imagined supplants the usual, how an... (shrink)

A focus on the lawmaking process, I submit, permits us to explore a particular dimension of justice, namely the relationship between law and liberty. Laws that reflect the arbitrary whims of the lawmaker are presumptively unjust, because they constrain liberty for no good reason. A strategy for making arbitrary laws less likely involves recognizing checks on the lawmaker's powers and grounding those checks in processes that allow the governed to express their disapproval. The system of checks and balances employed in (...) the U.S. Constitution embodies this strategy, although reasonable people can debate its efficacy. As A.O. Hirschman observed, regimes that permit free movement of persons and property similarly restrict the force of arbitrary rules by allowing exit from unwanted restrictions. I want to inquire into the role of checks in international lawmaking. At first blush, it might appear that the fundamental principle of state consent provides all the checking that international lawmaking needs. This principle maintains that a state (and by extension, its subjects) can be bound by a rule of international law only if that state manifests its consent to the rule. As long as states have a real choice, itself subject to internal checks on official decisionmaking, the adoption of the rule should meet basic criteria of procedural justice. Indeed, the correlate of this principle—that each state has a veto over the adoption of international law, at least as applied to itself and its subjects—suggests that international lawmaking poses less of a threat to liberty than do conventional municipal lawmaking processes based on majority rule. One might think that, as a result of this principle, no rule will attain the status of international law unless its adoption makes some states better off and no state worse off. This first impression, however, is wrong. First, international lawyers argue for the existence of jus cogens norms that apply regardless of state consent. Second, the concept of state consent is artful, and opportunistic decisionmakers have some freedom to construe consent in ways that circumvent conventional checking processes. Third, political and economic coercion can reduce state consent to a meaningless formality. I discuss each of these points in turn. Once state consent ceases to constrain international lawmaking, the question role of alternative checks to protect liberty looms. Under what circumstances does the international lawmaking process as currently constituted present a threat of arbitrary force? What kinds of resistance to the results of international lawmaking can process values justify? I address these questions in three steps. First, I explore whether international law does carry a threat of coercion. If not, concerns about arbitrary restrictions of liberty are misplaced. Second, I discuss the problems arising from delegations of lawmaking authority to international institutions, with specific reference to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court. Third, I discuss the process-value issues associated with judicial lawmaking. None of these concerns justifies blanket opposition to international lawmaking. Rather, those interested in making and enforcing international rules need to grapple with these issues and provide another layer of justification for their efforts. a Footnotesa I am indebted to Ken Abbott, Jean Cohen, Larry Helfer, Robert Hockett, Sean Murphy, Phil Nichols, Ed Swaine, Joel Trachtman, the other contributors to this volume, and participants in a workshop at the University of Virginia School of Law for comments and criticism. Shortcomings are mine alone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wonder, Imagination, and the Matter of Theatre in The TempestMary MooreAriel occurs. Recounting his performance of "the tempest" in Act I, scene 1 of The Tempest, he presents himself as being and action, fracturing grammar, spatial and temporal logic in ways that amaze and confound:I boarded the King's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide, And (...) burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join...(1.2.195–201) 1"I flamed" means that Ariel emits or is flames, which in the normal order of things would consume him. His very narration, however, proves his survival, evoking wonder through the utterance itself. Forceful and compacted syntax, a recognized source of wonder in Classical and Renaissance accounts of style (Biester, pp. 14; 35–40), magnifies this effect. 2 Shakespeare's transitive use of the usually intransitive verb flame reflects a not uncommon practice, as E. A. Abbott shows; 3 but this syntactic device also reflects The Tempest's own logic. Ariel crosses boundaries between [End Page 496] deed and being, verb and noun, subject and object, matter and spirit: he both is and does flames. What could be more jarring to syntax and semantics than a singular subject whose utterance claims that he can flame, divide, meet and join? Just as "a" fire consists of many flames yet functions grammatically as a singular substance in English, just as the Christian Trinity is both singular and multiple, Ariel burns in many places at once. Meanwhile, this extraordinary language seems belied by the actor's very embodiment. Ariel cannot have done what he claims; yet the prior scene has represented the very storm in which Ariel flamed. In that sense, the actor's embodiment represents what we imagine to be matter's intractability, while Ariel's claims, coupled with the storm we have just witnessed, reveal matter's fluidity and permeability to imagination. Fluidity and intractability co-exist, another source of wonder. Sound mimics these paradoxes: the assonance and consonance in flame and amazement create a near rhyme that echoes the near identity of fire and human amazement. If, as Gurr and Ichikawa observe, a Renaissance audience expected to hear more than see a play, this echo calls attention to Ariel's marvelous powers. 4 Lest the noises and pleasures of the Renaissance theatre, which recent scholarship deems to be considerable, distract audience members from this bit of language, similar moments reinforce Ariel's play in and with language and matter throughout the play. Marvelous poetic language is of a piece with a "fever" that is of "the mind," with music that "creeps," actors who vanish, new found goddesses who speak the discoverers' own language.Amazement provides our cue: it and its cognates name the appropriate response to Ariel, his language, and to The Tempest itself. Attention to Ariel's poetic language reveals that it, like the plot, conforms to the marvels of the play and to the period's well documented love for marvels in several ways. Wonder, an aesthetic "'object of desire'" in itself, and a response to the inexplicable in classical and early modern views, may be evoked by the unexpected in style (and through other strategies that the era's handbooks taught). 5 The clause "I flamed amazement" epitomizes the unexpected in syntax as well as differing from one of the few sources found for The Tempest, William Strachey's 1610 letter, which describes just such a storm. 6 While St. Elmo's fire itself may elicit wonder, Shakespeare's syntax and diction reinforce that marvel. And no wonder: rhetoric and theatre alike depend upon audience attention, and wonders naturally evoke it. Jarring language also harmonizes with The Tempest's structural marvels—loose ends, disrupted actions, unforeseen futures—issues several critics explore. 7 [End Page 497]The wonders of The Tempest, however, also involve imagination—in early modern psychology, the human faculty that permits perception of the world and invention of images. 8 Wonder responds to how the perceived differs from the expected, how the imagined supplants the usual, how an... (shrink)

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

This would have been a better book if Sampson had argued his main point, the usefulness of the Simonian principle as an explanation of the evolution, structure, and acquisition of language, on its own merits, instead of making it subsidiary to his attack on ‘limited-minders’ (e.g., Noam Chomsky). The energy he has spent on the attack he might then have been willing and able to employ in developing his argument at reasonable length and detail. He might then have found that (...) argument faulty, or even wrong. Underdeveloped as it is, however, his point about the Simonian principle does seem to have thepossibility of some significance in understanding the empirical issues of this book (and the dichotomy of ‘limited’ and ‘creative’ minds is certainly not one of these).What Sampson has done inMaking Sense has the appearance of science, and theoretical linguistics, and therefore it is somewhat puzzling to find the conclusions that the human mind cannot be scientifically studied (p. 10), and that theoretical linguistics is a “mirage” (p. 210). His statement that It may still seem worthwhile to some to work out the exact implications for present-day linguistic structure of the fact that languages are evolved systems, but I cannot see that there is much glamour or, indeed, much substance in this task (p. 210) would surely be surprising to a geneticist or ethologist. We hope his apparent misunderstanding on this point will not lead him to give up his profession, in which he seems willing and able to make a significant contribution.What in particular is required is a clear indication of how the Simonian principle imposes itself in the ontogenesis of language. Consider Chomsky's example of the rule for forming questions in English. For sentence (1) below, children able to deal with such examples would give (2) but not (3) as the corresponding question (Chomsky, 1975, p. 31).The man who is tall is in the room.Is the man who is tall in the room?*Is the man who tall is in the room?Now compare Sampson's evolutionary explanation for the structure-dependence of rules which is illustrated in (1)-(3): “once a behavior-pattern has become thoroughly established, it will tend to be treated as a fixed given when used as a constituent of a more complex, later-learned behavior-pattern” (p. 183). In order for this to account for Chomsky's example it would have to be the case that children learn relative clauses before they learn questions, which simply isn't true.In conclusion, we wish not to seem unaware of the problems with the position Sampson is attacking, or unaware of the sometimes dogmatic way it too has been presented. Chomsky's hypothesis of innate linguistic ideas seems, fundamentally, to derive from the claimed rapidity and uniformity of language acquisition in the face of limited and degenerate data. Chomsky appears to have been unwilling to argue these points directly or to show their relation to others, for which he has argued, for example, the implausibility of some abstract constraint's having been learned (cf. 1971, pp. 22–44; 1975, pp. 30–33; 1980, pp. 35–52). And almost from his first invoking of rationalism in support of his linguistic method, Chomsky has himself resorted to an unnecessarily polemical attack on empiricism (cf. 1965, p. 58, n. 33). The innateness issue is just not clear or simple enough to justify so much animus, or even conviction. (shrink)

Board books with padded covers Full-color 24 pages 6-1/2 (16.5 cm) square Ages 0+. - Adorable illustrated characters introduce important first concepts to your baby or toddler. - First concepts are reinforced with full-color photographs to provide real-world images and context. - Fosters image and word recognition as well as speaking and motor skills. Perfect primers for babies and toddlers! 20 pages.

This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami's films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work. Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami's later films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will (...) Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love"--Back cover. (shrink)

Why are bookstore shelves filled with mysteries, horror stories, romances, Westerns and other genre fiction? Why should one spend time reading narratives that are so similar? Why, for that matter, should one write works that are so similar to those of other authors? One philosopher, Noel Carroll, in fact, refers to the phenomenon as the ?paradox of junk fiction?. Are there works in political theory as well that share characteristics with these genres? And is there also a paradox involved among (...) both these readers and authors? This essay reviews both the criticisms and defenses of popular generic texts focusing on arguments that defend the complexity of genre texts and those that deny the distinction between generic works and others. Utopias are identified as counterparts in political theory and are applied to this genre debate. I conclude by revising the genre paradox. (shrink)

Four models are outlined for describing and analysing the role of teachers in the formulation of educational policy and the resulting processes of change. The model of teachers as partners in education policy making draws on a pluralist view of political processes and an assumption of a degree of autonomy for teachers and schools. A model of teachers as implementers of change draws a sharp distinction between the processes of policy making and policy execution and excludes teachers from an involvement (...) in the former. A model of teachers as resisting change has been put forward both by those most opposed to and those most supportive of current educational policy developments. Finally, a model of teachers as policy makers in practice is proposed to describe the way in which the reality of teaching situations can lead to the independent actions of individual teachers having systematic policy effects. The applicability of these models is considered in the context of contemporary educational changes drawing on empirical research evidence, in particular that of the PACE study of the implementation of the National Curriculum at KS1 and KS2. (shrink)

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

I årtusenden har människan försökt definiera livet – hur levande djur och växter skiljer sig från död materia. Problemet är dock att livet är mångfacetterat, och varje regel har sitt undantag. Vi försöker möta kommande utmaningar med nya livsformer, genom att lyfta fram en ny definition av liv.

What is morally permissible, and what is morally obligatory? These questions form the core of a vast amount of philosophical reasoning. In his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant developed a basis for the answers. In this landmark work, the German philosopher asks what sort of maxim might function as a guide to appropriate action under a given set of circumstances. By universalizing such a maxim, would morally permissible behavior not become clear? Suppose that everyone were to (...) behave in accordance with this maxim. If everyone followed the maxim in the same way without harm to civilized culture, then the behavior would be morally permissible. But what if no one followed the maxim? Would civilization thereby be at risk? In such a case, the behavior would be morally obligatory. Kant's test, known as the Categorical Imperative, is a logical proof of the Golden Rule and the centerpiece of this work. It constitutes his best-known contribution to ethical discussion, and a familiarity with his reasoning in this book is essential to students of philosophy, religion, and history. (shrink)

This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the "careers" of entities are largely independent, (...) and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, consider standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives. (shrink)

Introduction: the figure of this world -- 1. The question of political ontology -- 2. The poetic experience of the world -- 3. The myth of the earth -- 4. The unbearable -- 5. The creature before the law -- 6. The animal for which animality is an issue -- 7. Understanding the happy -- 8. The picture and its captives -- 9. The passing of the figure of this world.

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as (...) new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)