INTRODUCTION WERNER ABRAHAM, LACI MARÁCZ, SJAAK DE MEY & WIM SCHERPENISSE University of Groningen The Groningen Conference on Topic, ...

A Selection of Papers Contributed to Sections IV, VI, and XI of the Fourth International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Bucharest, September 1971.

Selected Contributed Papers of the Tenth International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Florence, August 1995.

Saint Jerome was a prominent figure in the Hungarian-language literature prepared mainly for nuns in the last decade of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth century. A Dominican codex contains two legends about him (one of them is the translation of Pseudo-Augustine’s Epistola ad Cyrillum de magnificentiis beati Hieronymi), while a Franciscan manuscript preserved the Hungarian version of the Regula monachorum attributed to Jerome. The Franciscan András Nyujtódi represented the Church Father as a model (...) teacher and translator when quoting the great biblical philologist’s dedicatory lines to the Book of Judith in his translation of the same biblical book, which this Transylvanian friar prepared as a private reading for his sister, a Franciscan tertiary. Another self-proclaimed follower of Jerome’s translating activity was an anonymous Carthusian monk, who mentioned the Slavic Bible and liturgy prepared by the saintly scholar. – The paper presents the texts by and about Jerome, which can be found in the not very extensive late medieval Hungarian-language literature, and traces the image of the saintly author as represented for the audience of the corpus produced for Observant Dominican and Franciscan nuns, tertiaries, and in a few cases perhaps laypersons. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates the defective verbal paradigms in the Hungarian language. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of the defectiveness in Hungarian, with emphasis on the systematic, phonotactically motivated defectiveness of the paradigms of some verbal stems. The aim of this section is to be as theoretically neutral and descriptive as possible to facilitate a good comparison with other types of defectiveness in other languages. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of (...) the experiments which are conducted in order to determine the various aspects of the defectiveness in the verbal paradigm. Some of the aspects tested include: the gap locations such as the occurrence and variation of forms in other designated cells of the verbal paradigm, and the correlations between the occurrence of forms in some designated cells; and the gap properties such as the differences in the classification of some verb stems into various stem-classes, and the range of variation exhibited by the forms that native Hungarian speakers accept as fill-ins for the gaps that are present in the paradigms of the defective verbs. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the syntax of inverse scope in Hungarian, a language that largely disambiguates quantifier scope at spell-out. Inverse scope is attributed to alternate orderings of potentially large chunks of structure, but with appeal to base-generation, as opposed to nonfeature-driven movement as in Kayne 1998. The proposal is developed within mirror theory and conforms to the assumption that structures are antisymmetrical. The paper also develops a matching notion of scope in terms of featural domination, (...) as opposed to c-command, and applies it to otherwise problematic cases of pied piping. Finally, the interaction of different quantifier types is examined and the patterns are explained invoking morphological considerations on one hand and A-bar reconstruction on the other. (shrink)

The comparative study of Romanian and Hungarian Neopagan organizations with an ethnocentric or "Ethno-pagan" ideology is an exploratory research aimed at mapping the similarities and the differences between these religious minorities, with a highlight on their level of institutionalization, their core values and degree of political mobilization. Zalmoxian groups and organizations promote the revival of Romanian spirituality through a process of reconnection to its ancient, supposedly Dacian and Thracian roots; by the same token, Hungarian Shamanist movements are aimed (...) at recovering a supposedly lost spirituality, built-in into the deepest layers of Hungarian language and cultural practices. A web rhetoric analysis of these organizations is carried out in order to assess audience involvement, communication style and the use of multimedia tools to convey their messages. (shrink)

Language was never studied by linguists (or philologists) alone. The greater part of the languages of the world was first known in the West through the reports of missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators, and what they documented reflected their specific interests. Missionaries wrote catechisms, primers, dictionaries, and Bible translations (especially Lord's Prayers); for explorers and administrators, language was one aspect among many to cover in their accounts of faraway regions. Peoples were identified by their language; toponyms served (...) for geographic description; names of plants and animals were gathered together with specimens and images of plants and animals. In this context, linguistic materials were equally described as “specimens.” This article investigates the various ways in which language material was used and conceived of as a specimen, and the global trajectories of these “specimens.” Especially the role of naturalist explorers deserves closer attention in this regard. What they did, throughout the late 18th and 19th century, was gathering language material as one kind of specimen among others, Forster in the Pacific, Humboldt, Martius, and d'Orbigny in South America, and Peters in Mozambique. Two large‐scale expeditions from the mid‐19th century stand out as examples: the U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838–1842), whose collections later filled the Smithsonian Institution, and the Austrian‐Hungarian Novara expedition (1857–1859). (shrink)

The use of an elaborate system of co-verbial constructions is the hallmark of the Hungarian language and one of the biggest challenges a translator or a learner of this language has to face. Co-verbial constructions consist of verbs, or their derivates, accompanied by a limited number of prefixes or particles that modify their meanings. They not only perform numerous syntactic and lexical functions, which is important in terms of language production, but also are able to change (...) the meaning of the verb completely. The aim of this study is to trace the cognitive motivation behind the use of Hungarian co-verbial constructions with össze/szét and to show that the meanings developed by these constructions can be organized with reference to prototypical scenes structured in the form of a radial category. (shrink)

Participants in this study were ethnic Hungarian secondary students attending high schools in Romania in which Hungarian was the primary language of instruction. Attitudes of participants toward ethnic and cultural groups were measured using a variation of the Bogardus (1933) Scale of Social Distance. Results were consistent with predictions based on Allport's intergroup contact theory. Students reported a wide range of tolerance levels for majority and minority ethnic groups with which they were likely to have contact in (...) Romania. However, the students reported little difference in tolerance levels for groups that are not a recognized part of the Romanian cultural landscape, such as people of Hispanic origin, and Native Americans. (shrink)

The main concern of this contribution is Focus in Hungarian. The first section reviews the arguments in Roberts (1998) that Hungarian Focus does not encode a discourse function that is independent from the discourse function of intonationally marked Focus in languages like English (contra ´.

There are three elements in this paper. One is what we shall call ‘the Hungarian project’. This is the collected work of Andréka, Madarász, Németi, Székely and others. The second is Molinini’s philosophical work on the nature of mathematical explanations in science. The third is my pluralist approach to mathematics. The theses of this paper are that the Hungarian project gives genuine mathematical explanations for physical phenomena. A pluralist account of mathematical explanation can help us with appreciating the (...) significance of the Hungarian project. The significance consists in the fruitfulness and spread of the project. The spread is wide because the explanations are written in the very familiar language of first-order logic with identity. For this reason, the explanation is understandable to many mathematicians. Because of the methodology adopted in the Hungarian project, the explanations are fruitful in another sense. In the Hungarian project certain questions are asked that would not be asked with a more usual methodology. The Hungarians are distinguished from other scientists in asking logical and mathematical questions, and these both deepen our understanding of the physical theories and induce further spread to mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper offers a semantically-based solution to the problem of predicting whether a verb will display the subjective conjugation or the objective conjugation in Hungarian. This alternation correlates with the definiteness of the object, but definiteness is not a completely reliable indicator of the subjective/objective alternation, nor is specificity. A prominent view is that the subjective/objective alternation is conditioned by the syntactic category of the object, but this view has also been shown to be untenable. This paper offers a (...) semantic solution: If the referential argument of a phrase is lexically specified as familiar/new, then the phrase bears the feature [+DEF]/[−DEF], and this feature governs the conjugations. The notions of novelty and familiarity are made precise using a compositional version of DRT in the context of a suitably large fragment of Hungarian, including local and non-local personal pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite articles, quantifiers, wh-words, numerals, and possessives. (shrink)

Transylvania is a multiethnic society that was part of the Hungarian legal space for centuries. Still, after the WWI, this territory became part of Romania, alongside with a significant number of Hungarian-speaking minority population. What happened with Hungarian as a legal language after the annexation of Transylvania to Romania? The article deals with the history and current status of Hungarian legal language in Romania, emphasizing the frequent contradictions between legal texts and realities, the importance (...) of political context, and fluctuations in the minority rights. The focus is on two problems: the language of legal education and the language of the court proceedings. There are arguments brought to prove the conditionality between these two at the intersection of history of legal education and minority rights. (shrink)

Mérleg is an interesting quarterly selection of articles of general interest translated from the major Western languages into Hungarian. It is a Catholic publication for a general intellectual public and it contains besides the longer studies review articles, reviews, interviews and also short summaries. The most important articles of the two issues we are reviewing: A. Greeley, "The Sacred and the Psychedelic"; A. Plé, "The affective life of the consecrated celibate"; K. Franke, "Apology for the protection of the unborn (...) life"; "Basic issues of the Abortion Problem"; "Catechesis according to the Council"; R. Schnackenburg, "The birth of Christ without legends and Myths"; P. Caspers, "The role of the Church in Asia"; C. Aguiar, "Latin-American Catholicism"; "The Memory of Mauriac." The very difficulty of publishing in Hungarian a theologically orientated digest makes this selection dramatically sparing and it seems to give us a more coherent and more essential view of the "happenings" of the West than many of the reviews of America, France or Germany.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This article deals with some phenomena of the Hungarian legal language from a historical point of view, with special regard to the terminology of private law going back to Roman law tradition. The author aims, on the one hand, to present the historical background of the current terminology of Hungarian private law by means of some representative examples. On the other hand, it is attempted at demonstrating that “false friends” and some further misunderstandings in the current terminology (...) of Hungarian private law can be led back to the historical determination of the concepts/terms in question. A certain Hungarian legal language existed already in the 16th c., however it reached the common European level by the middle of the 19th c. This development took place mainly under the influence of the Austrian and German law and legal science. Due to the translation of foreign legal terms to Hungarian since the 19th c. there emerged some “global” difficulties of legal terminology also in the Hungarian legal language. As the most important example, the reception of bona fides can be mentioned. It was an amendment of the Hungarian Civil Code in 2006 which tried to eliminate the misunderstandings as regards the principle of good faith conceived formerly by many Hungarian jurists exclusively in subjective sense. The history of reception of the German notions of Gültigkeit and Wirksamkeit in Hungary is extremely intriguing, too. Hungarian jurists did not follow the pattern of the German BGB but developed this pair created by Windscheid by drawing a clear distinction between the validity and effectiveness of legal transactions, similar to the Italian terminology. Sometimes the reception of German notions happened in a less successful way. Despite the important foreign, especially German impacts, the Hungarian legal language is an autonomous one having several remarkable features which deserve attention also in comparison with terminology of the Western legal cultures. (shrink)

In recent years interest in the thought of Kierkegaard has grown dramatically, and with it the body of secondary literature has expanded so quickly that it has become impossible for even the most conscientious scholar to keep pace. The problem of the explosion of secondary literature is made more acute by the fact that much of what is written about Kierkegaard appears in languages that most Kierkegaard scholars do not know. Kierkegaard has become a global phenomenon, and new research traditions (...) have emerged in different languages, countries, and regions. The present volume is dedicated to trying to help to resolve these two problems in Kierkegaard studies. Its purpose is, first, to provide book reviews of some of the leading monographic studies in the Kierkegaard secondary literature so as to assist the community of scholars to become familiar with the works that they have not read for themselves. The aim is thus to offer students and scholars of Kierkegaard a comprehensive survey of works that have played a more or less significant role in the research. Second, the present volume also tries to make accessible many works in the Kierkegaard secondary literature that are written in different languages and thus to give a glimpse into various and lesser-known research traditions. The six tomes of the present volume present reviews of works written in Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. (shrink)

"Each animal in its own psychological setting . . / 1 Gerard Piel Scientific American, New York TC Schneirla was more interested in questions than in ...

The present paper—taking the example of the English translation of the Hungarian Civil Code of 2013—aims to give an overview on the legal and terminology-related challenges and pitfalls that might occur during the process of translating a civil code with civil law traditions into the language of the common law world. An attempt is made to categorise terminology-related conceptual problems and elaborate how the different types of translation methods could be applied; moreover, how a kind of legal-linguistic checks-and-balances (...) can be achieved through the well-dosed combination, having also the ratio of similarities to differences of legal concepts behind the respective terms in mind. Legal translators must act beyond the role of a simple translator: they must be comparatists, being aware of the legal origin of the relevant concepts and using the methods of comparative private law and translation studies at the same time, since both law and language are system-bound and are heavily influenced by the cultural and social environment. The authors strive to identify the significance of those problems from the perspective of how language-related aspects can perform some fine-tuning on the comparative methodology and findings, whether they are barriers only or provide also an opportunity to verify or refute prima facie comparative results. Comparative law—no doubt—supports legal translation, but their relationship is reciprocal: legal-linguistic subjects and problems emerging in the course of legal translation supply valuable feedback and further sources of inspiration. (shrink)

A volume of studies in natural language semantics which brings together work by philosophers, logicians and linguists. The main topics treated are: quantification and reference in natural language; the relations between formal logic, programming languages and natural language; pragmatics and discourse meaning; surface syntax and logical meaning. The volume derives from a colloquium organised in 1973 by the Kings College Research Centre, Cambridge and the papers have been edited for publication by Professor Keenan. It is hoped that (...) the collection will make available some of the best work in this fast-moving field and will stimulate further progress by juxtaposing the different approaches and interests represented here. (shrink)

Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of Hungarian subject- and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs, respectively). We capitalize on the syntactic properties of Hungarian that allow for a variety of word orders (...) within RCs, which helps us to delineate the processing costs associated with memory demand and violated expectations. Results showed a processing cost at the RC verb for structures that have longer verb-argument distances, despite those structures being more frequent in the corpus. These findings thus support theories that attribute processing difficulty to memory limitations, rather than theories that attribute difficulty to less expected structures. (shrink)

Ms. Neumer and her team began their project with a critical analysis of the various theories of the relationship between language and thought. Their aim was to develop a theoretical position concerning the issue of universalism versus relativism. This issue is closely bound up with one of the main questions of the history of East and Central Europe, namely, the question of the nation, and the possibility of mutual understanding between national cultures. The team attempted to avoid falling into (...) an all-too-common trap, that of allowing a political perspective to obscure the central theoretical issues. In a project whose outcome totalled over 1000 pages of manuscript in German, English and Hungarian, they touched on cognitive psychological, linguistic, semiotic, socio-semiotic, and other such themes. Their experience has convinced them of the fruitful heuristic possibilities of the interaction of scientific and philosophical approaches in this area of research. A preliminary analysis of the history of philosophy and inquiries into conceptual fields revealed that, in order to reach strong relativist conclusions concerning the unity of thought and language, it is required to take as a point of departure the widest possible sense of these concepts. But in fact, such an option ends up refuting itself: pursuing the premises to their final conclusion one arrives at the restriction of relativism. The team outlined a theory of the understanding of the Other which, borrowing from analytical as well as continental-hermeneutic trends, does not underestimate, on the one hand, the difficulties of understanding between various forms of life, cultures, and languages, but, on the other hand, can provide an alternative solution to the theory of incommensurabiltiy. Within the boundary of this problematic the team studied the problems of translatability, the acquisition of the mother and foreign languages, and natural or cultural determinacy of kind terms. The team regards its most original contribution to be the association of the problem of relativism-universalism and the language-thought relation with contemporary investigations into the question of orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Their conclusion was that, although certain connections can be revealed both between forms of communication and the thesis of the unity of language and thought, and between periods in the history of communication and the predominance of relativistic or universalistic tendencies, forms of communication do not unequivocally determine the answers to these questions. (shrink)

Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (1915-1975) was one of the leading intellectuals of Israel and of the world. His work ranged over mathematics, applied logic, communication theory, analytic philosophy, philosophy of science, and linguistics. Creative, patient, attentive, and critical, Bar-Hillel was a superb philosopher. In addition, how humane he was may be learned from the memorial tributes to him which initiate this volume. Bar-Hillel was born in Vienna, and came to Israel, then Palestine, in 1933. He took his M. A. (1938) and Ph. (...) D. (1949) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his subsequent career continued, as Research Fellow (1949-53), Senior Lecturer in Philosophy (1953-58), Associate Professor of Philosophy (1958-61), and Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Sci ence (1961-75). He was often abroad as visiting professor (Berkeley, 1960- 61; Michigan, 1965; La Jolla, 1966-67; Konstanz, 1971; Berlin, 1972), or as a research scholar, notably at the M. lT. Research Laboratory for Elec tronics during the early 1950's. Bar-Hillel was the Secretary and guiding spirit of the Organizing Committee for the 3rd International Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, held in Jerusalem in 1964. During 1966-68, he was President of the Division of Logic, Method ology and Philosophy of SCience of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, and in 1967 President of the International Union. From 1963 he was a Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. (shrink)

It is the goal of this essay to challenge the belief that one never transcends language — that all one knows, indeed all one can meaningfully experience, is defined within language. My challenge lies not in words, but in the use of words to evoke what is beyond language and to invite a lived experience of it. If one accepts this use of language as not only possible, but primary, we ultimately see meaning not within (...) class='Hi'>language, but through it. Under the 'rule of evocation' language need not in any way within itself express, reproduce, re-present, or capture what it evokes. It need simply evoke it, and such an evocation is not a re-presentation in language of what is evoked. It is a presentation of the thing itself. (shrink)

The article presents a case study of ethno-linguistic policy in the ethnic Republics of Central Russia (the Chuvash Republic and the Republic of Tatarstan), with special emphasis on the analysis of language acts and correlated legislation. It raises an important problem concerning the efficacy of the Language Laws and their conceptual foundations. One of the main assets in facing this problem is adequate reflection on the actual ethno-linguistic situation by the legislature, ensuring peaceful and productive social development. Analysis (...) of the conceptual fundamentals and the concrete language laws in action as well as instrumental interaction shows a wide range of factors influencing the efficacy of policies. Acknowledgement of the bilingual situation by the legislatures of the Republics manifests a valuable perspective on productive development, provided the language laws are implemented intelligently and supported in the educational and cultural spheres. Multilingualism as a universal form of socialization should be recognized as a valuable opportunity and receive the necessary legislative support. (shrink)

There existed in Greek a multitude of words denoting or connoting sexual congress. The list of verbs given by Pollux only skims the surface. In what follows I discuss words which with one exception are absent from this list and belong, as will be seen from their distribution, to the lower register of the Greek language. They are all demonstrably direct expressions, blunt and non-euphemistic. Only one of them, κιν, is at all common in non-sexual contexts. As for the (...) rest, if they originated through metaphor like many more respectable verbs of intercourse, this had long since been forgotten by native speakers. They rarely undergo any significant weakening, retaining their basic sexual denotation. (shrink)

The article presents a case study of ethno-linguistic policy in the ethnic Republics of Central Russia (the Chuvash Republic and the Republic of Tatarstan), with special emphasis on the analysis of language acts and correlated legislation. It raises an important problem concerning the efficacy of the Language Laws and their conceptual foundations. One of the main assets in facing this problem is adequate reflection on the actual ethno-linguistic situation by the legislature, ensuring peaceful and productive social development. Analysis (...) of the conceptual fundamentals and the concrete language laws in action as well as instrumental interaction shows a wide range of factors influencing the efficacy of policies. Acknowledgement of the bilingual situation by the legislatures of the Republics manifests a valuable perspective on productive development, provided the language laws are implemented intelligently and supported in the educational and cultural spheres. Multilingualism as a universal form of socialization should be recognized as a valuable opportunity and receive the necessary legislative support. (shrink)

There are many different views on what role language plays in ethnic identification. This article is focused on the given issue based on the sample of the Cuban minority living in Slovakia. The topic is analyzed on a sample of Cubans living in the territory of Slovakia in a time frame ranging from 1 to 37 years as well as their descendants who come from mixed Slovak-Cuban families. In this article I am dealing with the impact of the Spanish, (...) Slovak, Hungarian, and English language. (shrink)

The 1950s were a frenetic moment in the European integration process during which the European Economic Community (EEC), the ultimately abortive Free Trade Area (FTA), and subsequently the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) were all negotiated. Trade unions showed keen interest in these schemes; moreover, their own highly institutionalised cooperation suggested they might come to play a key role in shaping them. And yet scholars have argued how divergent traditions and domestic pressures precluded the emergence of a coherent trade union (...) platform on European unity. While not rejecting the structural weaknesses of union internationalism in this regard, this article asks why union centres nevertheless continued to engage with one another on the integration question. Focusing on the British Trade Unions Congress (TUC) and deploying a transnational approach to best understand the interaction between the national and international levels, it shows that union linkages still offered the TUC and its counterparts a valuable chance to learn from and persuade others – and even their governments – of their views, objectives and affairs. Such trade union diplomacy was thus in and of itself valuable despite wider union spats and misgivings, and did at times impact the broader language and approach of the countries involved. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to point out the logical priority of the existential grounds of picturing reality by means of scientific representations, hypotheses as such. Also, to clarify the meaning of the inscribing and reading of the picture in terms of the existential conditions and facts of the human being who acts and reacts for survival, and who interprets its surroundings in connection with the train of consequences that connects up with this human action. The surrounding world thus (...) is recognized and interpreted in terms of playing and operating with signs, the significations of which make up the horizons of the world of the human being. This clarification is needed to throw light on how concepts mean in the application of words in language. And the clarity reached at this stage helps for us to clarify further the meaning of thinking and its relation to language-use in terms of playing and operating with signs in the conditions of the surrounding world, the action of the human body in its existential situation. Hence, the logical priority of the human condition in terms of the use and application of signs in the existential world of human being differs from the analytical representations of the world in science for scientific purposes. Which means that the representations of science are tools of the language, and that they are to be treated and interpreted as signs used to represent reality only in the scientific contexts, for the purposes of the language of science and scientific culture. Without such clarity, representations of science, scientific descriptions of reality are open to misinterpretation even by scientists and philosophers, let alone layman, to be so generalized to extend the bounds of its meaningful application in the scientific context of explaining or describing phenomena experimented, or observed under certain experimental conditions. (shrink)

The International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP) is the oldest international association of psychologists, founded in 1920. Since that year the IAAP has sponsored a long series of influential International Congresses . The proceedings of these Congresses provide an invaluable resource of information about the history of psychology in general and applied psychology in particular. Until now these Proceedings have been exceptionally difficult to locate; this collection reproduces the rarest and most inaccessible volumes (the first 13 Congresses, (...) 1920-1958), which document international activity in applied psychology between the wars and during the post-War reestablishment of international scientific collaboration. Individual prefaces highlight the content and importance of key Congresses. The collection has a new 76 page Index in English, which will appear only in Volume1. This is an invaluable guide to the Proceedings, which are in a variety of languages, including German, Italian, Spanish, French, English and Russian. The set is also available as individual volumes at £85.00 per volume (except Volume 1 which is £55.00). (shrink)

Although the Greek Catholic Church was not a decisive factor in national self-determination in Galicia, it made a significant contribution to overcoming the crisis of national identity in the nineteenth century. The Eastern rite was one of the most advanced factors that distinguished Greek Catholics from Roman Catholics, Ukrainians from the Poles. Language differences were not so great as to distinguish Galician Ukrainians from Galician Poles. Both languages ​​borrowed so much from one another over centuries that became mutually comprehensible, (...) close, that threatened the Rusyns of Galicia not only linguistic, but also ethnic assimilation. At the beginning of the nineteenth century. The most comprehensible thing was the interpretation of the Rusyn language of the Galician as a dialect of the Polish. Therefore, in the nineteenth century. an attempt was made to force the Ukrainians to switch to the Latin alphabet. (shrink)

AN INTENSIONAL INTERPRETATION OF TRUTH-VALUES* 1. Introduction In a profound and seminal paper of 1956 'Begrundung einer strengen Implikation', JSL), ...

Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of language is shaped by his attention to Parmenides’ paradox of false propositions and the problem of the unity of the proposition. Wittgenstein (dis)solves these two (pseudo)problems through his discussion of the “internal pictorial relation” between propositions and states of affairs, which is an artifact of language and the world being “constructed according to a common logical pattern” (TLP 4.014). After examining these issues, I argue that this treatment points to a further problem, namely, the (...) question of the agency responsible for this construction, and in the paper I briefly explore this byconsidering a parallel set of problems as they arise for Kant. For Kant, the question is what guarantees that nature conforms to our concepts and their logic, which he answers through his account of the normative authority we exercise in our cognitive activities. Wittgenstein, I argue, faces a parallel question, which he fails to face in his early work, and only begins to address in his later work on rule-following. (shrink)

In a series of 5 experiments, we investigated whether the processing of phonologically assimilated utterances is influenced by language learning. Previous experiments had shown that phonological assimilations, such as /lean#bacon/→ [leam bacon], are compensated for in perception. In this article, we investigated whether compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule using automatic event-related potentials. Our first experiment indicated that Dutch listeners compensate for a Hungarian assimilation rule. Two subsequent experiments, however, failed to show compensation (...) for assimilation by both Dutch and Hungarian listeners. Two additional experiments showed that this was due to the acoustic properties of the assimilated utterance, confirming earlier reports that phonetic detail is important in compensation for assimilation. Our data indicate that compensation for assimilation can occur without experience with an assimilation rule, in line with phonetic-phonological theories that assume that speech production is influenced by speech-perception abilities. (shrink)

This is a collection of outstanding contributed papers presented at the 11th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science (Kraków, 1999). The articles address current issues in logic, metamathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and cognitive science, as well as philosophical problems of biology, chemistry and physics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, logicians and scientists interested in foundational problems.