In this paper, I attempt to argue alongside Clayton Crockett that Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects can be extended to encompass every object, not merely those that are large in comparison to human beings. However, unlike Crockett who uses the works of Derrida and Lacan to achieve this goal, I turn to Husserl’s underdeveloped theory of hyletic phenomenology and hyle. Despite Husserl’s articulation of hyletic phenomenology ending as quickly as it is announced, I argue that three lessons can be learned from what (...) Husserl does have to say about hyle. Specifically, hyle is non-intentional, it is co-constitutive of intentionality, and hyle contains the possibility of broadening our traditional understanding of objects. Taken together, I suggest that Husserl’s understanding of hyle caries considerable overlap with both Crockett and Morton’s understanding of hyperobjects. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s seminal book, Phenomenology of Perception, stands as a positive resource for articulating both trans experiences and trans identities within both a wrong-body model and a multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. I begin my paper by highlighting the complex relation between Talia Bettcher’s proposed multiple worlds of sense model and the wrong-body model. As the dismissal of either model appears undesirable, I suggest that we attempt to combine the two models. To (...) do this, I turn to Georgia Warnke’s contextual understanding of identity as I ultimately juxtapose her work with Merleau-Ponty in order to give a positive account of trans identities that will function as a bridge between Merleau-Ponty and Bettcher. I then turn to discuss the basic ideas within Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that are used to ground Rubin’s wrong-body model. As I contend that Merleau-Ponty has more to offer what Rubin attributes to him, I then turn to key passages concerning Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the sexual schema and the intrinsic ambiguity of the body. By incorporating both concepts into a discussion of trans philosophy, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a non-essentialist account of sexuality that both phenomenologically legitimates and grounds the wide spectrum of trans experiences and trans identities as well as Warnke’s contextual identity through, what I call, our ambiguous-being-in-the-world. Such an account, I conclude, makes possible a combined wrong-body model and multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. (shrink)

We investigate a basic probabilistic dynamic semantics for a fragment containing conditionals, probability operators, modals, and attitude verbs, with the aim of shedding light on the prospects for adding probabilistic structure to models of the conversational common ground.

The revisionist critique of conventional just war theory has undoubtedly scored some important victories. Walzer’s elegantly unified defense of combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity has been seriously undermined. This critical success has not, however, been matched by positive arguments, which when applied to the messy reality of war would deprive states and soldiers of the permission to fight wars that are plausibly thought to be justified. The appeal to law that is sought to resolve this objection by casting it (...) as a practical concern, a pragmatic worry about implementation, which while germane to debates over the laws of war, need not undermine our convictions in the fundamental principles the revisionists advocate. This response is inadequate. Revisionists have not shown that soldiers should obey the laws of war, in practice, when they conflict with their other moral reasons – our worries about application remain intact. Moreover, a theory of war that offers only an account of the laws of war, and a set of fundamental principles developed in abstraction from feasibility constraints, is radically incomplete. We need to know how to apply those fundamental principles, and whether, when applied, they lead to defensible conclusions. Only two options seem to remain. Perhaps the revisionists’ arguments for their chosen fundamental principles are sufficiently compelling that we should stick with them, and accept their troubling conclusions – in other words, accept pacifism. Alternatively, we need to revise our fundamental principles, so that when applied they yield conclusions that we can more confidently endorse. -/- Though it does not save the revisionist view from the responsibility dilemma and cognate objections, the appeal to law does raise an important, and previously inadequately theorized, question – or, rather, resurrects a neglected topic, discussed in depth by historical just war theorists such as Grotius and Vattel. There are good grounds for distinguishing the laws of war from the morality of war, and for adjusting the former to accommodate predictable noncompliance, that should not impact on our account of the latter. Nonetheless, I have argued that there are some profound moral insights underlying both combatant legal equality and noncombatant immunity: specifically, we cannot infer from a combatant’s side having not satisfied jus ad bellum that he may not justifiably use lethal force; and other things equal, it is more wrongful to harm a nonliable noncombatant than to harm a nonliable combatant. (shrink)

In early 2021, a Canadian investigation revealed the discovery of over a thousand grave sites of indigenous children on the grounds of Indian residential schools across Canada. These discoveries prompted US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland to announce a similar investigation into the ongoing legacy and intergenerational impact of federally sponsored Indian boarding schools in the United States. In addition to documenting the legacy of abuse, neglect and dominance of indigenous peoples, we believe that such reflection upon the impact (...) of Indian boarding schools should also include the justifications that were used to promote the government policy of compelling indigenous children to leave family, tribe, customs and even language behind to be acculturated in remote boarding schools far from home or reservation. For while in hindsight these policies can be both deplored and regretted, they were not crafted in a philosophical vacuum. Specifically, it might come as a surprise to scholars today that Hegelian thought actually featured in the support and promotion of such policies. We propose to tell at least part of this story, by focusing on the leading American Hegelian of the time, William Torrey Harris, who—as director of the famed Concord School of Philosophy and also longtime US Commissioner of Education—was highly influential in both philosophical and educational circles. In that latter capacity, Harris penned a defence of the boarding school system, which drew upon broadly Hegelian ideas and language. So while we have elsewhere defended and lauded Harris and the St Louis Hegelians for their contributions to American philosophy and democratic educational thought, here is one respect in which this influence has not stood up well to the test of time. (shrink)

In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky offered a new vision for linguistic research and syntacticians. This chapter explores some ways in which Chomsky's linguistic work has influenced research on one domain of linguistic performance, sentence processing, over the last half century. It shows that Chomsky's claim in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is largely borne out: "the study of performance will proceed only as far as the study of the underlying competence permits". The chapter briefly addresses a question about the (...) scope of modern sentence processing research and its relationship to specific grammatical formalisms. It reviews the literature on incremental ambiguity resolution, moves to the processing of long‐distance filler‐gap dependency processing, and provides information on the processing of anaphoric relations. In order to illustrate how the phenomenon has contributed to psycholinguistic theorizing, the chapter outlines a well‐known model and then considers how other models diverge. (shrink)

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore's paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequence are investigated. The semantics is then extended to probability operators. Some problems and prospects for probabilistic representations of content and context are explored.

Wars are large-scale conflicts between organized groups of belligerents, which involve suffering, devastation, and brutality unlike almost anything else in human experience. Whatever one’s other beliefs about morality, all should agree that the horrors of war are all but unconscionable, and that warfare can be justified only if we have some compel- ling account of what is worth fighting for, which can justify contributing, as individu- als and as groups, to this calamitous endeavour. Although this question should obviously be central (...) to both philosophical and politi- cal discussion about war, it is at the forefront of neither. In recent years, philosophical discussion of warfare has bloomed, but the debate has focused on whom we may kill, on the assumption that our aims are justified.1 Political debate, meanwhile, is more concerned with matters of prudence, international law, and public justification, than with reassessing what is worth fighting for. For wars of intervention to halt or prevent massive humanitarian crises, this gap is not so troubling. When warfare is the only means to prevent the mass killing or enslavement of the innocent, the purposes of military force are clear enough (though undoubtedly many other problems remain). The problem is more pressing, how- ever, for the justification of national defence.3 Although common-sense morality and international law view national defence as the paradigm case of justified warfare, grounding this consensus is surprisingly difficult.4 We typically believe that any state is justified in using lethal force to protect its territory against any form of uninvited military incursion by any other state. And yet we lack a good argument to explain why this should be so. In this chapter, I explain why one familiar and otherwise plausible approach to the justification of killing in war cannot adequately ground common-sense views of permissible national defence.5 Reductionists believe that justified warfare reduces to an aggregation of acts that are justified under ordinary principles of interpersonal morality.6 The standard form of reductionism focuses on the principles governing killing in ordinary life, specifically those that justify intentional killing in self- and other-defence, and unintended but foreseen (for short, collateral) killing as a lesser evil. Justified warfare, on this view, is no more than the coextension of multiple acts justified under these two principles. Reductionism is the default philosophical approach to thinking through the ethics of killing in war. It makes perfect sense to ask what principles govern permissible kill- ing in general, before applying them to the particular context of war. If it cannot deliver a plausible set of conclusions about when national defence is permitted, then we must either revise our beliefs about which conclusions count as plausible, or else face the significant challenge of developing a different theoretical model for justifying war- fare—an exceptionalist model, which views war as an exception to the regular moral landscape, to which principles apply which apply to nothing else but war.7 We must show, in other words, that there is something worth fighting for in wars of national defence, which is not engaged when we use force in any other context. The chapter proceeds as follows. Section 2.2 sets out the argument against reduc- tionism.8 Section 2.3 considers and rebuts one common response to the argument, which has often been thought sufficient grounds to disregard its conclusion. Section 2.4 then asks whether a modified reductionism would survive unscathed by the argu- ment. Finally, section 2.5 sets out some desiderata on a plausible exceptionalist alterna- tive. Section 2.6 concludes. (shrink)

Abstract:Although inquiry-based instruction has been a centerpiece of progressive visions of social studies education almost since its inception as a school subject a century ago, teachers often struggle to conceptualize it in ways that make true inquiry possible for their students. In this essay I suggest that social educators strengthen their connection with John Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology as the foundation of inquiry-based teaching in social studies, arguing in support of an approach that holds the promise of advancing goals associated with (...) meaningful democratic citizenship education. (shrink)

Dragon days: introduction to the new edition -- Enter the dragon: on the vernacular of beauty 1 -- Nothing like the son: on Robert Mapplethorpe's X portfolio -- Prom night in flatland: on the gender of works of art -- After the great tsunami: on beauty and the therapeutic institution -- American beauty.

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

When I tell you that it’s raining, I describe a way the world is—viz., rainy. I say something whose truth turns on how things are with the weather in the world. Likewise when I tell you that the weatherman thinks that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I say turns on how things are with the weatherman’s state of mind in the world. Likewise when I tell you that I think that it’s raining. Here the truth of what I (...) say turns on how things are with my state of mind in the world. (shrink)

An expanded edition of Hickey's controversial and exquisitely written apologia for beauty--championed by artists, reviled by art critics, and as powerful as ever 30 years on 1993: the AIDS pandemic rages through yet another decade, leaving society and the arts devastated and bereft. Dave Hickey sits down to produce a slim volume, The Invisible Dragon. The book ignites a firestorm, and from its ashes "beauty" again rises as a dominant force in artistic life. Academics argue about theoretical minutiae. Artists pass (...) the book around like a samizdat. This 30th-anniversary edition brings back into print Dragon's four essays on beauty and commingles them with five previously uncollected essays. Hickey's 1974 profile of Dolly Parton anticipates Dolly's longevity as a cultural and feminist icon; his appreciation of Richard Pryor weaves an elegiac tapestry; his review of John Rechy's seminal gay novel Numbers outs its literary innovation in the face of a homophobia that otherwise ghettoized it; and his singular essay on Ed Ruscha, a paragon of arts writing by an extraordinary prose stylist, enjoins us to listen to art, not just look at it. An afterword by Hickey's friend and Dragon's editor "queers" the brash, heterosexual gambler as it situates the creation of Dragon squarely within the AIDS pandemic. The book was in part an attempt to make beauty visible under the looming presence of death and bodily decay. Only now can we fully appreciate how artists continue to harness beauty as a source of meaning and joy. Dave Hickey (1938-2021) was one of the preeminent arts and cultural writers of the turn of the 21st century. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellow known as the "beauty guy" in the popular press, Hickey opened A Clean, Well-Lighted Place gallery in Austin, Texas, in the 1960s, before becoming executive editor at Art in America magazine. In the 1970s, he was a songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he coined and helped create the "Outlaw country" music movement. By the 1990s, Hickey had made a home in Las Vegas, from where he regularly traveled to speak with audiences worldwide. (shrink)

Dragon days: introduction to the new edition -- Enter the dragon: on the vernacular of beauty 1 -- Nothing like the son: on Robert Mapplethorpe's X portfolio -- Prom night in flatland: on the gender of works of art -- After the great tsunami: on beauty and the therapeutic institution -- American beauty.

I develop a conception of expressivism according to which it is chiefly a pragmatic thesis about some fragment of discourse, one imposing certain constraints on semantics. The first half of the paper uses credal expressivism about the language of probability as a stalking-horse for this purpose. The second half turns to the question of how one might frame an analogous form of expressivism about the language of deontic modality. Here I offer a preliminary comparison of two expressivist lines. The first, (...) expectation expressivism, looks again to Bayesian modelling for inspiration: it glosses deontically modal language as characteristically serving to express decision-theoretic expectation (expected utility). The second, plan expressivism, develops the idea (due to Gibbard 2003) that this language serves to express 'plan-laden' states of belief. In the process of comparing the views, I show how to incorporate Gibbard's modelling ideas into a compositional semantics for attitudes and modals, filling a lacuna in the account. I close with the question whether and how plan expressivism might be developed with expectation-like structure. (shrink)

This paper defends a counterexample to Modus Tollens, and uses it to draw some conclusions about the logic and semantics of indicative conditionals and probability operators in natural language. Along the way we investigate some of the interactions of these expressions with 'knows', and we call into question the thesis that all knowledge ascriptions have truth-conditions.

This is a study in the meaning of natural language probability operators, sentential operators such as probably and likely. We ask what sort of formal structure is required to model the logic and semantics of these operators. Along the way we investigate their deep connections to indicative conditionals and epistemic modals, probe their scalar structure, observe their sensitivity to contex- tually salient contrasts, and explore some of their scopal idiosyncrasies.

A central theme in the scholarly literature on Enlightenment Europe concerns the increased focus on the role of reason in the development of European thought, especially in the development of the new science by the natural philosophers. As a consequence, there is a tendency in both philosophical scholarship and teaching to bind philosophy and science tightly together. While there is certainly much that is correct in this approach, one motivation for pluralizing philosophy’s past is that this story leaves out a (...) great deal that is important in Enlightenment views of reason. We argue, using as an example the work of figures like Margaret Cavendish, that reason was significantly broader in scope—and that developments in science were paralleled by equally important advances in music, art, literature, medicine, philosophy, and other areas. In recognizing the lack of a sharp boundary between these areas, an inclusive canon of Enlightenment philosophy gives us this richer notion of reason. Integrating figures such as Cavendish into the canon helps us to see that the narrow focus on the scientific version of reason within Enlightenment scholarship creates a false distinction between science and the humanities and misses out on the humanistic ends for which we engage in philosophy. (shrink)

This volume is a tribute to the thought of Seth Benardete by contributors who had the rare good fortune of studying with him or those who discovered the treasure of his writings. Benardete was fully immersed in the world of the ancients, starting with Homer, but their works opened up for him a way to the fundamental questions-about justice and love, nature and law, human and divine. Finding "the problem of the human good grounded in the city, and the (...) problem of being in god," he was led to the conclusion that "Political philosophy is the eccentric core of philosophy." While Benardete wrote this statement reflecting on the theological-political issue in the work of his teacher, Leo Strauss, the paradoxical notion of an "eccentric core," in giving this volume its title, is meant to capture a characteristic of his own way of thinking. The essays in this collection-on the Bible and Homer, the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman writers-indicate the range of Benardete's studies and teaching. The centrality of Plato is evident at the same time in those pieces as well as in the reviews of Benardete's books included here, along with three of his own previously unpublished essays. Book jacket. (shrink)

Social and linguistic perceptions are linked. On one hand, talker identity affects speech perception. On the other hand, speech itself provides information about a talker's identity. Here, we propose that the same probabilistic knowledge might underlie both socially conditioned linguistic inferences and linguistically conditioned social inferences. Our computational–level approach—the ideal adapter—starts from the idea that listeners use probabilistic knowledge of covariation between social, linguistic, and acoustic cues in order to infer the most likely explanation of the speech signals they hear. (...) As a first step toward understanding social inferences in this framework, we use a simple ideal observer model to show that it would be possible to infer aspects of a talker's identity using cue distributions based on actual speech production data. This suggests the possibility of a single formal framework for social and linguistic inferences and the interactions between them. (shrink)

In this paper, we suggest that affect meets the traditional definition of “cognition” such that the affect–cognition distinction is phenomenological, rather than ontological. We review how the affect–cognition distinction is not respected in the human brain, and discuss the neural mechanisms by which affect influences sensory processing. As a result of this sensory modulation, affect performs several basic “cognitive” functions. Affect appears to be necessary for normal conscious experience, language fluency, and memory. Finally, we suggest that understanding the differences between (...) affect and cognition will require systematic study of how the phenomenological distinction characterising the two comes about, and why such a distinction is functional. (shrink)

Man's place in the cosmos.--The present position of the philosophical sciences.--The "new" psychology and automatism.--A new theory of the absolute.--Mr. Balfour and his critics.

This chapter contains sections titled: Etching Awesomeness on the Top Tube in Three Pedal Strokes Free Riding with the Bhagavad Gita Coming Full Circle Notes.

Fast‐forward two hundred years to the opening sequence of Alien: Resurrection where United Systems Military (USM) science officers aboard the Auriga are toying with her DNA—salvaged from frozen blood samples on Fiorina 161—to try to create a cloned version of the alien queen that was growing inside her at the time of her death. The absurd is what links the two— Ripley's desire to make some sense out of her troubling existence and the fact that the world is unable to (...) offer her any such sense. French essayist, Albert Camus, repeatedly stresses this point in different, sometimes rather poetic, ways throughout his classic essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Ripley‐8 has one messed‐up and confusing life. When Camus talks about philosophical suicide, he is really talking about an irrational “leap of faith”. Ripley and Call are both artificial creations living a similar sort of existence. (shrink)

Despite its enduring insights, Durkheim’s theory of suicide fails to account for a significant set of cases because of its overreliance on structural forces to the detriment of other possible factors. In this paper, we develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the role of culture in vulnerability to suicide. We argue that by focusing on the cultural dynamics of excessive regulation, particularly at the meso level, a more robust sociological model for suicide could be offered that supplements structure-heavy (...) Durkheimian theory. In essence, we argue that the relevance of cultural regulation to suicide rests on the (1) degree to which culture is coherent in sociocultural places, (2) existence of directives related to prescribing or proscribing suicide, (3) degree to which these directives translate into internalized meanings affecting social psychological processes, and (4) degree to which the social space is bounded. We then illustrate how our new theory provides useful insights into three cases of suicide largely neglected within sociology: specifically, suicide clusters in high schools, suicide in the military, and suicides of “despair” among middle-aged white men. We conclude with implications for future sociological research on suicide and suicide prevention. (shrink)

We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...) the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended. (shrink)

Cancer biology features the ascription of normal functions to parts of cancers. At least some ascriptions of function in cancer biology track local normality of parts within the global abnormality of the aberration to which those parts belong. That is, cancer biologists identify as functions activities that, in some sense, parts of cancers are supposed to perform, despite cancers themselves having no purpose. The present paper provides a theory to accommodate these normal function ascriptions—I call it the Modeling Account of (...) Normal Function (MA). MA comprises two claims. First, normal functions are activities whose performance by the function-bearing part contributes to the self-maintenance of the whole system and, thereby, results in the continued presence of that part. Second, MA holds that models of system-level activities that are (partly) constitutive of self-maintenance are improved by including a representation of the relevant function-bearing part and by making reference to the activity/activities that part performs which contribute(s) to those system-level activities. I contrast MA with two other accounts that seek to explicate the ascription of normal functions in biology, namely, the organizational account and the selected effects account. Both struggle to extend to cancer biology. However, I offer ecumenical readings which allow them to recover some ascriptions of normal function to parts of cancers. So, though I contend that MA excels in this respect, the purpose of this paper is served if it provides materials for bridging the gap between cancer biology, philosophy of cancer, and the literature on function. (shrink)

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. 'Art and Postcapitalism' argues that art remains essential for thinking about the intersection of labour, capitalism and postcapitalism not insofar as it (...) merges work and pleasure but as an example of noncapitalist production. Reassessing the contemporary politics of work by revisiting debates about art, technology and in the nineteenth and twentieth century, Dave Beech challenges the aesthetics of labour in John Ruskin, William Morris and Oscar Wilde with a value theory of the supersession of capitalism that sheds light on the anti-work theory by Silvia Federici, Andre Gorz, Kathi Weeks and Maurizio Lazzarato, as well as the technological Cockayne of Srnicek and Williams and Paul Mason. Formulating a critique of contemporary postcapitalism, and developing a new understanding of art and labour within the political project of the supersession of value production, this book is essential for activists, scholars and anyone interested in the real and imagined escape routes from capitalism. (shrink)

An eye-opening tour of the political tricks that subvert scientific progress. The Butter-Up and Undercut. The Certain Uncertainty. The Straight-Up Fabrication. Dave Levitan dismantles all of these deceptive arguments, and many more, in this probing and hilarious examination of the ways our elected officials attack scientific findings that conflict with their political agendas. The next time you hear a politician say, "Well, I’m not a scientist, but…," you’ll be ready.

The temporal structure for motivating, monitoring, and making sense of agency depends on encoding, maintaining, and accessing the right contents at the right times. These functions are facilitated by memory. Moreover, in informing action, memory is itself often active. That remembering is essential to and an expression of agency and is often active suggests that it is a type of action. Despite this, Galen Strawson (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 103, 227–257, 2003) and Alfred Mele (2009) deny that remembering is (...) an action. They claim that memory fails to admit of control. Remembering is automatic—once remembering starts, the process can neither be stopped nor intervened on. Moreover, the agent does not initiate remembering. An agent has control over an event or process if and only if she has the capacity and opportunity to initiate and intervene on that event or process. Actions are events over which an agent has control. Since it is automatic, we fail to have control over remembering. Thus, remembering is not an action. In this paper, I draw out an assumption of Strawson’s and Mele’s accounts: an event-type whose tokens exhibit automaticity cannot, for that reason, be an action (§2). Against this assumption, I draw parallels between skilled bodily action and memory. I show that memory exhibits two defining features of skill: it can be learned with practice and it admits of attributions of excellence (§3). These features reveal how intelligent control is exerted in the exercise of skill despite apparent automaticity—control is gained over time (§4). Since exercises of skill are by definition actions and since memory exemplifies the defining features of skill, memory is a skill and instances of remembering are actions too. (shrink)

Spoken word recognition involves a perceptual tradeoff between the reliance on the incoming acoustic signal and knowledge about likely sound categories and their co-occurrences as words. This study examined how adult second language (L2) learners navigate between acoustic-based and knowledge-based spoken word recognition when listening to highly variable, multi-talker truncated speech, and whether this perceptual tradeoff changes as L2 listeners gradually become more proficient in their L2 after multiple months of structured classroom learning. First language (L1) Mandarin Chinese listeners and (...) L1 English-L2 Mandarin adult listeners took part in a gating experiment. The L2 listeners were tested twice—once at the start of their intermediate/advanced L2 language class and again two months later. L1 listeners were only tested once. Participants were asked to identify syllable-tone words that varied in syllable token frequency (high/low according to a spoken word corpus) and syllable-conditioned tonal probability (most probable/least probable in speech given the syllable). The stimuli were recorded by 16 different talkers and presented at eight gates ranging from onset-only (gate 1) through onset+40 ms increments (gates 2 through 7) to the full word (gate 8). Mixed-effects regression modeling was used to compare performance to our previous study which used single-talker stimuli (Wiener, Lee, & Tao, 2019). The results indicated that multi-talker speech caused both L1 and L2 listeners to rely greater on knowledge-based processing of tone. L1 listeners were able to draw on distributional knowledge of syllable-tone probabilities in early gates and switch to predominantly acoustic-based processing when more of the signal was available. In contrast, L2 listeners, with their limited experience with talker range normalization, were less able to effectively transition from probability-based to acoustic-based processing. Moreover, for the L2 listeners, the reliance on such distributional information for spoken word recognition appeared to be conditioned by the nature of the acoustic signal. Single-talker speech did not result in the same pattern of probability-based tone processing, suggesting that knowledge-based processing of L2 speech may only occur under certain acoustic conditions, such as multi-talker speech. (shrink)

Focusing on cases which involve binding into epistemic modals with definite descriptions and quantifiers, I raise some new problems for standard approaches to all of these expressions. The difficulties are resolved in a semantic framework that is dynamic in character. I close with a new class of problems about de re readings within the scope of modals.

From its beginnings, some of German film's most prominent genres and directors have focused on the natural world and its transformations by humans. Heimat films, "city symphonies," mountain films, and rubble films all blend the boundary between landscape documentary and fiction film. Yet German film studies has been slow to adopt an environmental focus, concentrating (understandably) on its subject matter's political implications. This book reveals critical connections between German film, sociopolitical context, and environment, showing it to have been a creative (...) catalyst for the social and ecological transformation of the Anthropocene. The book first considers the interplay between German film and environmental history in films and discourses of Heimat. Weimar-era films such as E. A. Dupont's Die Geierwally (1921), Carl Ludwig Achaz-Duisberg's Sprengbagger 1010 (1929), and Phil Jützi's Hunger in Waldenburg (1929) document and create a forum for discussing environmental change. The book then looks at film as a visual archive of and catalyst for infrastructure development, focusing on Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927), the mountain films of Arnold Fanck, and the Berlin films Stadt der Millionen (Adolf Trotz, 1925), Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and Menschen am Sonntag (1930). Nazi-era and postwar films are also examined. By exploring German film history alongside environmental history and theory, this book provides a case study of the power of film within processes of environmental transformation. (shrink)