Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by (...) internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home. (shrink)

»Chiasmen« ist ein Buch zu Platon, Sappho und Aristoteles. Das Chiasma, die diagonale Überkreuzung zweier Gegensatzpaare, hat sich als der methodologisch beste Schlüssel für deren Bearbeitung erwiesen - ein Schlüssel, der vor allem am Leib-Seele-Problem sowie an der Geschlechterfrage im Kontext der antiken Polis erprobt wurde. Dieser Schlüssel hebelt die alteingesessenen Dogmen umso besser aus, als er in den antiken Werken selbst zu finden ist. Das Chiasma legt ebenso die surreale Komik Platons inmitten seiner einfallsreichen Begriffssystematik frei, wie es (...) die genial poetischen Philosopheme Sapphos zu erschließen hilft. (shrink)

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 493-505.

INTRODUCTION There are extant six ancient lives of the philosopher Plato: the fragmentary remains of the Academicorum philosophorum index ...

Logically, weighting is transitive, but similarity is not, so clustering cannot be either. Entailments must help a child to review attribute lists more efficiently. Children's understanding of exceptions to generic claims precedes their ability to articulate explanations. So agency, as enabling constraint, may show coherent covariation with attributes, as mere extensional, observable effect of intensional entailments.

Modelling human reasoning characterizes the fundamental human cognitive capacity to describe our past experience and use it to form expectations as well as plan and direct our future actions. Natural language semantics analyzes dynamic forms of reasoning in which the real-time order determines the temporal relations between the described events, when reported with telic simple past-tense clauses. It provides models of human reasoning that could supplement ACT-R models.

In designing stratified models of human language, understanding notions of logical consequence and validity of inference require separating the aspects of meaning that vary between models from logical constants. Modelling meaning requires choices regarding the primitives, where the Fregean program is still offering us the fundamental insights on the role of truth, judgement, and grasping or sharing of thoughts.

Semantic realism fits Millikan's account of kind terms in its focus on information-theoretic abilities and strategic ways of gathering information in human communication. Instead of the traditional logical necessity, we should interpret rigid designation in a dynamic semantics as a legislative act to constrain possible ways in which our belief may change.

Building on research demonstrating relationships between well being and perceptions of aspects of life as sacred, this study describes the rationale for and development of a scale measuring perceiving sacredness in life. It then explores associations between perceptions of sacredness in life and these four domains: religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational. Participants responded to a mailing to a national random sample within the United States, completing 16 scales pertaining to the religious/spiritual, personal, social, and situational domains. While many variables were (...) correlated with perceiving sacredness in life, there were three overall predictors: intrinsic religiosity, mysticism, and community service attitude. (shrink)

We distinguish scanning switches, which only enumerate states, from function switches which transform input states into output states. For the latter we introduce a logical network symbolism. Our history of early computer switching begins with the suggestions of Ramon Lull and Gottfried Leibniz, surveys the evolution of mechanical scanning switches and the first mechanical function switches, and then describes the first electromechanical function switches. The main themes of the present paper are that William S. Jevons built the first substantial function (...) switch (his logical piano), and that his work led to the design by Allan Marquand of the first substantial electromechanical function switch, as well as to Charles S. Peirce's idea for an electrical general-purpose programmable computer. These events all occurred fifty years before the first general-purpose programmable computers were constructed (in the 1940's), but they had no influence. (shrink)