This paper will first give an overview of the role of events in semantics against the background of Davidsonian semantics and its Neo-Davidsonian variant. Second, it will discuss some serious issues for standard views of events in contemporary semantics and present novel proposals of how to address them. These are [1] the semantic role of abstract (or Kimean) states, [2] wide scope adverbials, and [3] the status of verbs as event predicates with respect to the mass-count distinction. The paper will (...) show that abstract states as the entities described by (most) stative verbs are incompatible with Neo-Davidsonian event semantics and proposes a decompositional analysis of stative verbs that may be able to overcome the difficulty. The paper will argue that in addition to Davidsonian events, the semantics of adverbials requires events as truthmakers as well as actions as more complex entities sharply distinguished from events. The paper will also argue that the verbal domain of events sides with mass nouns rather than dividing into mass and count, unlike event nouns. (shrink)

This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and degrees (...) is considerably more marginal than generally held. (shrink)

The question whether numbers are objects is a central question in the philosophy of mathematics. Frege made use of a syntactic criterion for objethood: numbers are objects because there are singular terms that stand for them, and not just singular terms in some formal language, but in natural language in particular. In particular, Frege (1884) thought that both noun phrases like the number of planets and simple numerals like eight as in (1) are singular terms referring to numbers as abstract (...) objects. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that attitudinal objects such as claims, beliefs, judgments, and requests form an ontological category of its own sharply distinguished from that of events and states and that of propositions. Attitudinal objects play a central role in attitude reports and avoid the conceptual and empirical problems for propositions. Unlike the latter, attitudinal objects bear a particular connection to normativity. The paper will also discuss the syntactic basis of a semantics of attitude reports based on attitudinal objects.

This paper argues that the notion of a single object or 'being one' does not require worldly or perceived conditions of integrity and even less so concept-relative atomicity. It generally is based on conditions of integrity of some sort, but not strictly so. It rather is imposed by the use of count categories in natural language and thus makes a case for linguistic idealism.

We have been oversold on the base rate fallacy in probabilistic judgment from an empirical, normative, and methodological standpoint. At the empirical level, a thorough examination of the base rate literature (including the famous lawyer–engineer problem) does not support the conventional wisdom that people routinely ignore base rates. Quite the contrary, the literature shows that base rates are almost always used and that their degree of use depends on task structure and representation. Specifically, base rates play a relatively larger role (...) in tasks where base rates are implicitly learned or can be represented in frequentist terms. Base rates are also used more when they are reliable and relatively more diagnostic than available individuating information. At the normative level, the base rate fallacy should be rejected because few tasks map unambiguously into the narrow framework that is held up as the standard of good decision making. Mechanical applications of Bayes's theorem to identify performance errors are inappropriate when (1) key assumptions of the model are either unchecked or grossly violated, and (2) no attempt is made to identify the decision maker's goals, values, and task assumptions. Methodologically, the current approach is criticized for its failure to consider how the ambiguous, unreliable, and unstable base rates of the real world are and should be used. Where decision makers' assumptions and goals vary, and where performance criteria are complex, the traditional Bayesian standard is insufficient. Even where predictive accuracy is the goal in commonly defined problems, there may be situations (e.g., informationally redundant environments) in which base rates can be ignored with impunity. A more ecologically valid research program is called for. This program should emphasize the development of prescriptive theory in rich, realistic decision environments. (shrink)

This chapter gives a truthmaker-based account of the semantics of 'reifying' quantifiers like 'something' when they act as complements of intensional transitive verbs ('need', 'look for'). It argues that such quantifiers range over 'variable satisfiers' of the attitudinal object described by the verb (e.g. the need or the search).

This paper gives a perspectival overview of the semantics of potential property-referring terms and presents new and surprising generalizations about explicit property-referring terms like 'the property of being wise', which raise fundamental issues regarding ontology and learnability and a core-periphery distinction in natural language ontology.

Nominalizations are expressions that are particularly challenging philosophically in that they help form singular terms that seem to refer to abstract or derived objects often considered controversial. The three standard views about the semantics of nominalizations are [1] that they map mere meanings onto objects, [2] that they refer to implicit arguments, and [3] that they introduce new objects, in virtue of their compositional semantics. In the second case, nominalizations do not add anything new but pick up objects that would (...) be present anyway in the semantic structure of a corresponding sentence without a nominalization. In the first and third case, nominalizations in a sense ‘create’ new objects’, enriching the ontology on the basis of the meaning of expressions. I will argue that there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a quite different treatment. These are nominalizations that introduce ‘new’ objects, but only partially characterize them. Such nominalizations generally refer to events or tropes. I will explore an account according on which such nominalizations refer to truth makers. (shrink)

This paper argues for the philosophical and semantic importance of attitudinal objects, entities such as judgments, claims, beliefs, demands, and desires, as an ontological category distinct from that of events and states and from that of propositions. The paper presents significant revisions and refinements of the notion of an attitudinal object as it was developed in my previous work.

This takes a closer look at the actual semantic behavior of apparent truth predicates in English and re-evaluates the way they could motivate particular philosophical views regarding the formal status of 'truth predicates' and their semantics. The paper distinguishes two types of 'truth predicates' and proposes semantic analyses that better reflect the linguistic facts. These analyses match particular independently motivated philosophical views.

This chapter argues that special quantifiers such as 'something' when occurring in argument position are not ordinary or substitutional quantifiers; rather they have a reifying force introducing a domain of tropes or kinds of tropes to quantify over.

In this paper I will give an analysis of what I call ‘generalizing detached self-reference’ within a general account of reference to the first person. With generalizing detached self-reference an agent attributes properties to a range of individuals by putting himself into their shoes, or simulating them. I will show that generalizing detached self-reference plays an important role in the semantics of natural language, in particular in the English generic one and in what syntacticians call arbitrary PRO.

This paper defends a distinction between ‘abstract states’ and ‘concrete states’, following Maienborn (2005, 2007) in her account of the peculiar semantic behavior of stative verbs. The paper proposes an ontological account of the notion of an abstract state and discusses how it relates to the notion of a trope or particularized property, which has so far been neglected in the semantic literature on stative verbs.

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a property (...) to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

Nominalizations of modal predicates have received little, if any, attention in the semantic or philosophical literature. This paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects and it will outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.

This paper elaborates distinctions between a core and a periphery in the ontological and the conceptual domain associated with natural language. The ontological core-periphery distinction is essential for natural language ontology and is the basis for the central thesis of my 2013 book Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language, namely that natural language permits reference to abstract objects in its periphery, but not its core.

In diesem Band sind die nachgelassenen Schriften Moritz Schlicks zur Ethik gesammelt, ediert und kommentiert. Die Beschäftigung mit ethischen Fragen war für Schlick während seines gesamten Lebens von hoher Relevanz, daher sind in diesem Band Schriften aus vier Jahrzehnten versammelt, die die Entwicklung seines ethischen Denkens veranschaulichen. Sie beginnen mit Vorarbeiten zu der „Lebensweisheit“, einem seiner ethischen Hauptwerke, welches bereits in MSGA I/3 erschienen ist. Im Laufe seiner akademischen Laufbahn in Rostock, Kiel und Wien hielt Schlick immer wieder Vorlesungen und (...) Vorträge zu ethischen Themen. Herausstechend sind hier sicherlich „Über Ästhetik und Ethik“, eine von sehr wenigen Schriften Schlicks zur Ästhetik, weiterhin die Dokumente zur Vorlesung „Ethik und Kulturphilosophie“ vom Wintersemester 1935/6 in Wien. Letztere legen nahe, dass Schlick eine Reihe von Publikationen plante, in denen er eine systematische Darstellung seiner Philosophie entwickeln wollte. In dieser sind Ethik und Kulturphilosophie Teile eines zusammenhängenden Ganzen, neben der Geschichte der Philosophie, Logik, Naturphilosophie und Erkenntnistheorie. (shrink)

The notions of part and whole play an important role for ontology and in many areas of the semantics of natural language. Both in philosophy and linguistic semantics, usually a particular notion of part structure is used, that of extensional mereology. This paper argues that such a notion is insufficient for ontology and, especially, for the semantic analysis of the relevant constructions of natural language. What is needed for the notion of part structure, in addition to an ordering among parts, (...) is the notion of integrated whole. In the context of semantics, the notion of an integrated whole needs to be relativized to a situation, or so it is argued. (shrink)

Besonderes Augenmerk richtet Friederike Barth dabei auf den philosophischen Hintergrund dieses Werks, da die in derEthikentworfene ethische Theologie Bonhoeffers auf einem zumeist unausgewiesenen, differenzierten Rezeptions- und ...

During the 1990s, the Berlin women’s prison was reformed to do justice to female inmates. This redesigning of space and programs was intended to meet women-specific conditions and needs. The present paper engages with this prison reform as transformation in the name of gender justice. Based on interviews with prison reformers, criminologists, and policymakers, as well as on the analysis of historical documents, we illuminate how a specific figure of the “criminalized woman” helps to translate the abstract notion of social (...) justice into situated practice. From the 1970s onward, a new knowledge of women’s crime would emerge: it constituted female offenders as victims of patriarchal oppression and victimization, allowing the prison system to be criticized as androcentric and discriminatory against women. We argue that subsequent reform pursued gender justice in the form of difference-based, gender-responsive programs and spaces targeting individual inmates’ character and mindset. Thereby, the reformers’ initial critique of social justice would be unintentionally depoliticized and so gender, economic, and political inequalities remained unaddressed. Our purpose is hence twofold: first, to review the recent history of women’s incarceration in Germany, and second, to add a social justice focus to the international criminological debate on gender, prison, and reform. (shrink)

_Published by Taylor & Francis Group for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education_ This _Handbook_ addresses the concept and implementation of technological pedagogical content knowledge -- the knowledge and skills that teachers need in order to integrate technology meaningfully into instruction in specific content areas. Recognizing, for example, that effective uses of technology in mathematics are quite different from effective uses of technology in social studies, teachers need specific preparation in using technology in each content area they will (...) be teaching. Offering a series of chapters by scholars in different content areas who apply the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework to their individual content areas, the volume is structured around three themes: What is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge? Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Specific Subject Areas Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Teacher Education and Professional Development The _Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Educators_ is simultaneously a mandate and a manifesto on the engagement of technology in classrooms based on consensus standards and rubrics for effectiveness. As the title of the concluding chapter declares, "It’s about time!" The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is a national, voluntary association of higher education institutions and related organizations. Our mission is to promote the learning of all PK-12 students through high-quality, evidence-based preparation and continuing education for all school personnel. For more information on our publications, visit our website at: www.aacte.org. (shrink)

Negative compatibility effects in the masked-prime paradigm are usually obtained when primes are masked effectively. With ineffective masks—and primes above the perceptual threshold—positive compatibility effects occur. We investigated whether this pattern reflects a causal relationship between conscious awareness and low-level motor control, or whether it reflects the fact that both are affected in the same way by changes in physical stimulus attributes. In a 5-session perceptual learning task, participants learned to consciously identify masked primes. However, they showed unaltered NCEs that (...) were not different from those produced by participants in a control group without equivalent perceptual learning. A control experiment demonstrated that no NCEs occur when prime identification is made possible by ineffective masking. The results suggest that perceptual awareness and low-level motor control are affected by the same factors, but are fundamentally independent of each other. (shrink)

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review (...) of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we callonline engagement with scientific informationis introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information. (shrink)

In 'Aboutness' (MIT Press 2014), Yablo argues for the importance of the notions of partial content and of partial truth. This paper argues that those notions are involved in a much greater range of entities than acknowledged by Yablo. The paper also argues that some of those entities involve a notion of partial satisfaction as well as partial existence (and partial validity).

This my 3am interview with Richard Marshall about my work and its inspirations. It focuses on my research on parst and wholes, tropes, and abstract objects.

Introduction -- Historical background : schools and politics -- Major representatives : Daoists of the Liang and Tang -- The sources : commentaries and scriptures -- Key concepts : mystery, Dao, and the greater cosmos -- Salvation : Dao-nature and the sage -- The teaching : mysticism, cultivation, and integration -- Changes in the Pantheon : Laozi and the heavenly deities -- The body of the sage : the three-in-one and the three- -- Fold body of the Buddha.

The quest for the one "Truth" in a pluralist society seems to have become as redundant as it is problematic - in much the same way that the idea of one "God" being the all-determining reality has. Yet we have not given up searching and the word "God" still continues to polarize, whether in society, theology or philosophy. In view of this seeming paradox, Friederike D. Rass seeks an alternative route that goes off the beaten track and beyond the (...) temptation to resignedly retreat to relativist or fundamentalist positions. She argues that it is precisely the supposedly futile quest for a single "Truth" as well as the continuous questioning of the meaning of the word "God" that provide an essential guide to responsible action today. (shrink)

Es geht nicht darum, die Religion wieder auferstehen zu lassen [...]. Sondern es geht darum, die blosse Vernunft auf die Unbegrenztheit hin zu offnen, die ihre Wahrheit ausmacht. Im vielbehaupteten Trend einer Ruckkehr zur Religion erweist sich Jean-Luc Nancys Philosophie als widerstandig: Einerseits steht die Frage nach der Bedeutung von Religion und insbesondere des Christentums im Mittelpunkt seiner Uberlegungen, andererseits stellt er sich nicht in die Tradition einer neuen (De-)Legitimation von Religion. In Auseinandersetzung mit Jean-Luc Nancy, insbesondere mit seinem Projekt (...) einer Dekonstruktion des Christentums, widmen sich die Beitrage dieses Bandes der allgemeinen Verortung des Phanomens der Religion in pluralistischen Gemeinschaften aus theologischer und philosophischer Sicht. (shrink)

Among the extensive literature on the first Critique, very few commentators offer a thorough analysis of Kant's conception of inner sense. This is quite surprising since the notion is central to Kant's theoretical philosophy, and it is very difficult to provide a consistent interpretation of this notion. In this paper, I first summarize Kant's claims about inner sense in the Transcendental Aesthetic and show why existing interpretations have been unable to dissolve the tensions arising from the conjunction of these claims. (...) Secondly, I present my own reconstruction of Kant's model of inner sense, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction. My main idea is that inner sense, for Kant, is a passive faculty that gets affected by the understanding performing its figurative synthesis on material given in outer sense. In the remainder of the paper, I highlight a few consequences of my interpretation and outline ways to deal with some objections. (shrink)

The concept of self-generated action is controversial, despite extensive study of its neural basis. Why is this concept so troublesome? We analyse the concept of self-generated action as employed by and. There are two definitions of self-generated action; as operant action and as underdetermined action. The latter draws on subjective experience. Experiments on action awareness suggest that experience may not be a good guide for defining self-generated action. Nevertheless, we agree with Passingham and colleagues that self-generated actions exist distinct from (...) operant actions. But defining ‘self-generated’ by the degree of involvement of an endogenous process risks regress. We sketch an alternative account of self-generated action that tries to avoid these problems to make self-generated actions accessible to experimental science. (shrink)

One of the goals of computerized tutoring systems is to optimize the learning of facts. Over a hundred years of declarative memory research have identified two robust effects that can improve such systems: the spacing and the testing effect. By making optimal use of both and adjusting the system to the individual learner using cognitive models based on declarative memory theories, such systems consistently outperform traditional methods. This adjustment process is driven by a continuously updated estimate of the rate of (...) forgetting for each item and learner on the basis of the learner's accuracy and response time. In this study, we investigated to what extent these estimates of individual rates of forgetting are stable over time and across different materials. We demonstrate that they are stable over time but not across materials. Even though most theories of human declarative memory assume a single underlying rate of forgetting, we show that, in practice, it makes sense to assume different materials are forgotten at different rates. If a computerized, adaptive fact-learning system allowed different rates of forgetting for different materials, it could adapt to individual learners more readily. (shrink)

This chapter develops a semantics for 'reifying terms' of the sort 'the proposition that S', 'the fact that S', 'the property of being P', 'the number eight', 'the concept horse', 'the truth value true', 'the kind humane being'. This semantics is developed within the broader perspective of the ontology of natural language involving abstract objects only at its periphery, not its core.

Commentators agree that simple conclusions about a general base rate fallacy are not appropriate. It is more constructive to identify conditions under which base rates are differentially weighted. Commentators also agree that improving the ecological validity of the research is desirable, although this is less important to those interested exclusively in psychological processes. The philosophers and ecologists among the commentators offer a kinder perspective on base rate reasoning than the psychologists. My own perspective is that the interesting questions (both psychological (...) and normative/prescriptive) are best answered through empirical studies that use real-world performance standards. (shrink)

We prove a theorem about models with indiscernibles that are cofinal in a given linear order. We apply this theorem to obtain new independence results for Quine's set theory New Foundations, thus solving two open problems in this field.

Within The Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant deals with the social institution of household, the Domestic Society, next to Property Right and Contract Right as part of the Private Right. The juridical problem to solve is the question to what extent human beings can be entitled to dispose persons as a “belonging” at all. This problem of Reification insistently arises with regard to the relation of partners in a marriage: According to Kant, Sexuality as a consumption (...) by which human beings make use of themselves as of things is reconcilable with the dignity of humanity only under the condition of marriage. By marrying, persons acquire one another reciprocally, so that they aren't in an external relation to one another any more. However, in contrast to this strict juridical reciprocity of the sexes in a marriage there is no corresponding equality concerning the regime of the household. Hence, with his anthropology of the sexes Kant unintentionally implements teleological patterns of argumentation into the Right of pure practical reason. (shrink)