Gut microbiome plays a significant role in defining the health status of subjects, and recent studies highlight the importance of using time series strategies to analyse microbiome dynamics. In this paper, we develop a Bayesian model for microbiota longitudinal data, based on Dirichlet distribution with time-varying parameters, that take into account the compositional paradigm and consider principal balances. The proposed model can be effective for predicting the future dynamics of a microbial community in the short term and for analysing the (...) microbial interactions using the value of the estimated parameters. The usefulness of the proposed model is illustrated with six different datasets, and a comparison study with four alternative models is provided. (shrink)

E. Machery, R. Mallon, S. Nichols and S. Stich, have argued that there is empirical evidence against Kripke’s claim that names are not descriptive. Their argument is based on an experiment that compares the intuitions about proper name use of a group of English speakers in Hong Kong with those of a group of non-Chinese American students. The results of the experiment suggest that in some cultures speakers use names descriptively. I argue that such a conclusion is incorrect, for the (...) experiment does not prove what it is purported to prove. (shrink)

Føllesdal (1966 and 1969) claims that modal distinctions collapse, that is that p and Necessarily p are equivalent, in any system of modal logic that incorporates a standard theory of definite descriptions, like the one proposed by Carnap in M&N. I argue that his argument fails.

According to Donnellan the characteristic mark of a referential use of a definite description is the fact that it can be used to pick out an individual that does not satisfy the attributes in the description. Friends and foes of the referential/attributive distinction have equally dismissed that point as obviously wrong or as a sign that Donnellan's distinction lacks semantic import. I will argue that, on a strict semantic conception of what it is for an expression to be a genuine (...) referential device, Donnellan is right: if a use of a definite description is referential, it must be possible for it to refer to an object independently of any attributes associated with the description, including those that constitute its conventional meaning. (shrink)

This study examines whether character strengths predict resilience (operationalized as stable or higher mental health and subjective well-being despite an adverse event) over a period of approximately one month during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in Spain. Using a longitudinal design, participants (N = 348 adults) completed online measures of sociodemographic data, information regarding their situation in relation to the COVID-19, character strengths, general mental health, life satisfaction, positive affect and negative affect. All variables were measured at Time 1 and Time (...) 2, except for sociodemographic and most COVID-related information (Time 1 only). Time 1 data collection was conducted between March 21, 2020 and April 2, 2020, i.e., approximately the second week of lockdown in Spain. Time 2 data collection was conducted between April 24, 2020 and May 18, 2020, after the Spanish government announced ita intention to progressively release the lockdown. A principal component analysis of character strengths was conducted. Five character strength factors were extracted: fortitude, goodness, intellectual, interpersonal, and restraint. Factor structures at Times 1 and 2 were highly consistent. All character strength factors at Time 1 correlated positively with life satisfaction and positive affect, and negatively with negative affect and mental health at T2 (higher scores in the mental health measure indicate poorer mental health). Fortitude strengths showed the highest correlations. We conducted a series of regression analyses with strength factors at Time 1 as predictors, and mental health, life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect as dependent variables, controlling for their baseline levels. To test the directionality of the relationship between strengths and the dependent variables, all analyses were reversed. All character strength factors predicted an increase in mental health. They also predicted positive affect, with the exception of strengths of restraint. Fortitude, intellectual and interpersonal strengths predicted an increase in life satisfaction. Finally, fortitude strengths, interpersonal strengths, and strengths of restraint, predicted a decrease in negative affect. None of the reversed analyses yielded significant effects. Limitations, implications, and possible character strengths-based interventions aimed at promoting mental health in the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. (shrink)

I argue that the debate on the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, at least as it pertains to pragmatic free enrichment, needs to be better grounded empirically. Often, only a reduced set of facts from English is used to substantiate claims regarding pragmatic free enrichment. But considering a reduced set of facts from a single language can only afford limited (and, sometimes, wrong) results, because we can merely see whatever this one language chooses to express. Two cases studies (...) are presented: adjectival fragments, and implicit indefinite objects. A grammatical analysis is defended for them. (shrink)

John Hawthorne and David Manley (The Reference Book, OUP 2012) endorse a unified treatment of the semantics of four kinds of expressions that can be said to have referential uses: specific indefinite descriptions, definite descriptions, demonstratives and proper names. The semantic theory the authors propose treats all these expressions as having a quantificational structure that achieves uniqueness of application via the presence of covert material contributing to the restriction of the domain of quantification. I argue that there are reasons to (...) postulate disunity; reasons to set apart a class of purely referential expressions that do not just apply uniquely to an object via overt or covert restrictors, but that refer to it. (shrink)

It took a very long time before I encountered the systematic study of religious processes and dynamics as a distinctive and expansive area of scholarship. Using an autobiographical account, I trace the development of my scholarship in the social scientific study of religion. I have now experienced a great diversity of approaches to the study of religion. Driven by insatiable curiosity and knowing that no one can capture religion comprehensively, I now am committed to stimulating imaginative, rigorous, and wide-ranging developments (...) in religious scholarship. We require new, inventive, and even incompatible approaches to our study of religion if we ever hope to try adequately grasping the richness of religion. (shrink)

I show the relevance of feminist thought to some of the major debates within the field of environmental ethics. The feminist vision of a holistic universe is contrasted with the dualistic notions inherent in both the “individual rights” and traditionally defined “holist” camps. I criticize the attempt in environmental ethics to establish universal, hierarchical rules of conduct for our dealing with nature (an up-down dualism) as weIl as the attempt to derive an ethic from reason alone (the dualism of reason (...) and emotion). I maintain that the division between the “holist” and “individual rights” camps is yet another form of dualist thinking, and propose in its stead a holistic vision that concerns itself both with the individual and with the whole of which the individual is apart. (shrink)

In the semantic revolution that has led many philosophers of language away from Fregeanism and towards the acceptance of direct reference, the notion of rigidity introduced by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity has played a crucial role. The notions of rigidity and direct reference are indeed different, but proponents of new theories of reference agree that there is a one way connection between them: although not all rigid terms are directly referential (witness rigid definite descriptions), all directly referential terms (...) are rigid. My purpose in this paper is to contest this widely held view. I will argue that, on a certain conception of what direct reference is (a conception present in the works of the main proponents of the theory), the fact that a term is directly referential does not entail that it is rigid. From this conclusion, I will argue, we can learn some substantial lessons about the assumptions and commitments of new theories of reference. (shrink)

A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took. The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra. These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance (...) appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo :473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which free choice appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox, we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s account coming from the conflicting presupposed ignorance triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of exclusivity, ignorance, and free choice. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels :31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels. (shrink)

Studying cartoons about the economic crisis and focusing on a pair of scissors as a symbol, I prove how they first turn into unambiguous metaphor for the economic crisis and then experience an evolution in order to adapt to new communication contexts. Along these processes, they undergo more complex changes such as coadaptation and speciation. This has allowed for the scissors meme as a symbol of economic cutbacks to permeate society, and for its metaphorical use to occupy many disparate communication (...) scenarios, unlike other symbolic elements that were also used, but turned out to be less cognitively efficient and therefore offered fewer evolutionary possibilities. (shrink)

In this article I study the genesis of metaphors from an evolutionary perspective. Analyzing 414 cartoons published after the death of the cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I propose a metaphoric founder effect with the metaphors “PENCIL IS A WEAPON,” “PENCIL IS A CARTOONIST,” and “PENCIL IS FREEDOM,” and a subsequent metaphor drift that creates many related metaphors. Additionally, the success of these metaphors turns the pencil meme into a very efficient and fast-spreading item representing not only (...) the work of cartoonists, but also the fundamental values of Western culture, such as freedom of expression. (shrink)

An important debate in the current literature is whether “all truth-conditional effects of extra-linguistic context can be traced to [a variable at; LM] logical form” (Stanley, ‘Context and Logical Form’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 23 (2000) 391). That is, according to Stanley, the only truth-conditional effects that extra-linguistic context has are localizable in (potentially silent) variable-denoting pronouns or pronoun-like items, which are represented in the syntax/at logical form (pure indexicals like I or today are put aside in this discussion). According to (...) Recanati (‘Unarticulated Constituents’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25 (2002) 299), extra-linguistic context can have additional truth-conditional effects, in the form of optional pragmatic processes like ‘free enrichment’. This paper shows that Recanati’s position is not warranted, since there is an alternative line of analysis that obviates the need to assume free enrichment. In the alternative analysis, we need Stanley’s variables, but we need to give them the freedom to be or not to be generated in the syntax/present at logical form, a kind of optionality that has nothing to do with the pragmatics-related optionality of free enrichment. (shrink)

In this paper I demonstrate that there is an explanation of the number marking we see on nouns when they combine with the numeral _zero_ which combines Martí’s (Semant. Pragmat., 2020a, https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.3 ) account of the morphosyntax and semantics of the numeral-noun construction with Bylinina and Nouwen’s (Glossa 3(1):98, 2018 ) semantics for _zero_ and which does not need to appeal to any further principles (e.g., agreement).

We have witnessed a fundamental change of perspective in the conception of reference. What the proponents of the new approach criticized and what they proposed to abandon is relatively clear; it is much less clear though what is at the heart of the philosophy that inspired the change. The proponents of the new approach all agreed in disagreeing with Frege: natural languages may, and in fact do, contain expressions that refer without the mediation of a Fregean sense. The core motto (...) of the revolution can thus be summarized in a phrase: there are linguistic devices of pure reference. It is difficult though to put one's finger on a clear characterization of what pure reference consists in. This is so, I believe, because, underlying the anti-Fregean slogans, there are two different ideas which are not just two conceptually different ways of characterizing the same phenomenon. The two conflict in the classifications that they generate, because they rely on different conceptions of the essence of pure, genuine reference. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMetaphors are a genuinely human construction. They are used to improve communication and they are a very powerful tool that might have an influence in human evolution. In this article I argue that metaphors, transformed in powerful memes, adapt to a new communicative niche and contribute to transform it. In order to prove this hypothesis, I study 319 cartoons published in the wake of the Germanwings air crash, where I inventory 144 metaphors. The study shows the conceptual metaphor evolution for (...) a period of 2 weeks, and how the metaphors changed as a result of the variations in the communicative niche, becoming much more efficient communicatively. (shrink)

Some of the fundamental lessons of the so-called revolution against descriptivism that occurred in the 70s are negative and it is not immediately apparent what kind of semantic theory should emerge as regards proper names, the alleged paradigms of genuinely referential terms. Some of the claims about names, most notably Ruth Barcan Marcus’ characterization of names as tags, appear to be too picturesque to provide the basis for a positive theory and, without a theory, it would seem that the referential (...) link between name and bearer is established by pure magic. Some authors have appealed to the causal-historical picture to construct a positive theory, and have endorsed causal descriptivism, a variety of descriptivism that incorporates causal factors. I argue against causal descriptivism and I assess the demand for a positive semantic theory of names. (shrink)

This article surveys the discursive turns of a conventional historical trope: the change in the valence of alcohol (and drugs) from happy to miserable. This change is commonly told as the story of a golden age of drinking and a fall into addiction (although there is a confused relationship in many of the stories between a condition called medical alcoholism and the social behavior of drunkenness). This fall is variously dated from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries (both the (...) conceptualization and the fact of alcoholism). Is this real historical change or only nominal change? Was alcoholism unknown in previous ages or has it always been around? Certain material factors (supply, absence of alternative drinks) may have impeded the visibility of alcoholism. The theory of nominal change is involved with factors like conspiratorial behavior, the conditions of scientific knowledge (i.e., the structure of investigation itself ), the baffles of categorization (heavy drinking was hidden within gluttony for most of history). Real change involves various facets of modernity and industrial capitalism: individualism and privacy, temperance, respectability, and rigid class formation, etcetera. But this shift is also a movement across class lines, from middle to lower-class drinkers. (shrink)

Some of the fundamental lessons of the so-called revolution against descriptivism that occurred in the 70s are negative and it is not immediately apparent what kind of semantic theory should emerge as regards proper names, the alleged paradigms of genuinely referential terms. Some of the claims about names, most notably Ruth Barcan Marcus’ characterization of names as tags, appear to be too picturesque to provide the basis for a positive theory and, without a theory, it would seem that the referential (...) link between name and bearer is established by pure magic. Some authors have appealed to the causal-historical picture to construct a positive theory, and have endorsed causal descriptivism, a variety of descriptivism that incorporates causal factors. I argue against causal descriptivism and I assess the demand for a positive semantic theory of names. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Aufsatz vertrete ich die These, dass Poppers Konversion zum naiven Realismus seine eigene Theorie der Falsifikation aushöhlt. Tarskis Definition der Wahrheit ist eine semantische; wir dürfen sie nicht so interpretieren, als ob sie uns ein erkenntnistheoretisches Kriterium fur die Wahrheit lieferte. Poppers Wahrheitsbegriff hat keine semantische Funktion und bietet uns kein brauchbares Kriterium für die Beurteilung von Theorien. Seine Einführung markiert meines Erachtens nur einen Rückzug in die Metaphysik.SummaryIn this paper I have tried to show that Popper's conversion (...) to naive realism undermines his own idea of falsification. Tarski's definition of truth is a semantical notion and therefore should not be interpreted as having something to do with the epistemological question regarding the criteria of truth. Since Poppers notion of truth has no semantical function and does not provide us with a criterion for judging the truth of theories, I think it fosters a retreat into metaphysics.RésuméJ'ai essayé de montrer, dans cet article, que la conversion de Popper au réalisme naïf vide de sa substance sa propre théorie de la falsification. La définition tarskienne de la vérité est une définition sémantique; on ne peut pas ľinterpréter comme fournissant un critère épistémologique de vérité Le concept de vérité de Popper n'a pas de fonction sémantique et n'apporte pas de critère utilisable pour juger les théories. Son introduction ne représente, à mon avis, qu'une régression vers la métaphysique. (shrink)

In the second part of these aphorisms, starting at about Aphorism 121, Schelling sketches the traits of his Naturphilosophie. The total of the two hundred and twenty-four aphorisms can rightly bear the title of an Introduction to Naturphilosophie. But when I here present a translation of only the first eighty, I ought to warn the reader that she or he will not find Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, but rather an emphatic introduction to the method of philosophizing and more especially a short “negative (...) theology,” that is, an instruction in what not to do when theologizing. I hope that theologians unfamiliar with the German original will find my translation useful, and that it will challenge philosophers to revise a still current notion that Fichte provides one half of philosophy and Schelling the other. (shrink)

This paper is an extended response to Machery, Olivola and De Blanc (2009). I argue that the concerns I raised about Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich (2004) in Marti (2009) still stand.

I. El hombre y la epoca.--II. Las doctrinas.--III. Notas. Apendices. Bibliografía.

I-BLOCKS are an innovative concept of building blocks allowing users to manipulate conceptual structures and compose atomic actions while building physical constructions. They represent an example of enabling technologies for tangible interfaces since they emphasise physicality of interaction through the use of spatial and kinaesthetic knowledge. The technology presented in this paper is integrated in physical building blocks augmented with embedded and invisible microprocessors. Connectivity and behaviour of such structures are defined by the physical connectivity between the blocks. These are (...) general purpose, constructive, tangible user interface devices that can have a variety of applications. Unlike other approaches, I-BLOCKS do not only specify a computation that is performed by the target system but perform at the same time the computation and the associated action/functionality. Manipulating I-BLOCKS do not only mean constructing physical or conceptual structures but also composing atomic actions into complex behaviours. To illustrate this concept, the paper presents different scenarios in which the technology has been applied: storytelling performed through the construction of physical characters exhibiting emotional states, and learning activities for speech therapy in cases of dyslexia and aphasia. The scenarios are presented; discussing both the features of the technology used and the related interaction design issues. The paper concludes by reporting about informal trials that have been conducted with children. It should be noted that, even if both trials represent application scenarios for children, the I-BLOCKS technology is in principle open to different kinds of applications and target users like, for example, games for adults or brainstorming activities. (shrink)

In this paper I examine two ways of defining the rigidity of general terms. First I discuss the view that rigid general terms express essential properties. I argue that the view is ultimately unsatisfactory, although not on the basis of the standard objections raised against it. I then discuss the characterisation in terms of sameness of designation in every possible world. I defend that view from two objections but I argue that the approach, although basically right, should be interpreted cautiously.

Este libro trata de moral social, pero no es un tratado sobre la materia. Sí afronta cuestiones como la globalización, los derechos humanos, la caridad, la justicia social, la solidaridad, la opción por los pobres, la ecología, la investigación social o la cultura de la virtualidad real. Y lo hace siempre buscando la clave de la espiritualidad que alimenta y sostiene las opciones cristianas ante tales asuntos. En el tratamiento de esos temas, las encíclicas del Papa Benedicto XVI Deus caritas (...) est y Caritas in veritate ocupan un lugar especialmente destacado, y en la construcción del hogar espiritual de la moral social cuenta sobre todo con la espiritualidad ignaciana y los Ejercicios Espirituales. Si el Concilio Trento puso las bases para la separación entre moral y espiritualidad, el Vaticano II recuperó la relación entre ambas. Desde planteamientos como la llamada universal a la santidad o la tarea de la moral de «mostrar la excelencia de la vocación de los fieles en Cristo y su obligación de producir frutos en la caridad para la vida del mundo», carece de sentido pensar que la Teología espiritual tiene que estudiar el comportamiento positivo de los fieles, relacionado con la gracia de Dios, y que la Teología moral debe centrarse en el comportamiento negativo, asociado a la ley, las normas y el pecado. Al contrario, la vida moral es también expresión práctica de la gracia divina actuando en cada persona, y por eso necesita conectarse con la dimensión teologal y espiritual de horizonte de sentido, donde se alimentan las motivaciones y actitudes básicas. Por su parte, la espiritualidad ha de encontrar los cauces adecuados para interpretar y expresar el compromiso intramundano. Ambas perspectivas son constitutivas y esenciales de la vida y la existencia teologal de las comunidades y de cada uno de los cristianos, y permitir que se encuentren y «conspiren» es una obligación irrenunciable a la que también deben ayudar los teólogos. En eso está esta sencilla obra. JULIO L. MARTÍNEZ, jesuita, es profesor de Teología moral en la Universidad Pontificia Comillas, donde actualmente desempeña además el cargo de Vicerrector de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, y antes fue director de la Cátedra de Bioética y del Instituto de Estudios sobre Migraciones. Su campo de investigación tiene como foco la religión en la vida pública. En esa materia ha escrito sus principales libros, entre los que destacan Consenso público y moral social, Ciudadanía, migraciones y religión y Libertad religiosa y dignidad humana, así como buena parte de sus abundantes artículos. (shrink)

Experimental semanticists have concluded that there is wide variation in referential intuitions among speakers, for it appears that some speakers display referential intuitions that are in line with descriptivism, whereas other speakers’ intuitions are in line with the predictions of the causal-historical picture. In this chapter, I first situate the debate by comparing descriptivist and non-descriptivist approaches to reference. After examining some of the experimental results, I argue that the tests conducted do not elicit data that are relevant for semantic (...) theorizing and, hence, that the results should not have an impact in the theory of reference. (shrink)

I examine two sets of experimental results about the semantics of general terms, by Genone and Lombrozo (2012) and by Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon (forthcoming) that allegedly reveal significant variations in semantic intuitions as regards the correct application of general terms. The two sets of authors propose two entirely different semantic treatments: Genone and Lombrozo espouse a hybrid semantics whereas Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon are inclined towards an appeal to ambiguity. I cast some doubts on the coherence of a hybrid (...) theory and argue in favor of the ambiguity approach. But I also argue that the sort of ambiguitiy Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon postulate is easy to incorporate to non-descriptivist approaches. (shrink)

Noel and Amanda Sharkey have written an insightful paper on the ethical issues concerned with the development of childcare robots for infants and toddlers, discussing the possible consequences for the psychological and emotional development and wellbeing of children. The ethical issues involving the use of robots as toys, interaction partners or possible caretakers of children are discussed reviewing a wide literature on the pathology and causes of attachment disorders. The potential risks emerging from the analysis lead the authors to promote (...) a multidisciplinary debate on the current legislation to deal with future robot childcare. As a general first consideration, the questions arising from the paper are extremely timely since current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and sustained socialization with human toddlers. The evolution of robot technology has been so speedy in the last few years that even if a discipline like Human-machine Interaction has only recently welcomed human-robot interaction within its disciplinary scope, a variety of social robots have started to populate our life and daily activities. In the past five years human-robot interaction has received a significant and growing interest leading to the development of the so-called robots companions, a term that emphasizes a constant interaction and co-operation between human beings and robotic machines. While Noel and Amanda Sharkey in their paper take a critical stance on the consequences of the use of robots as companions or caretakers, others researchers seem more keen to highlight the potential of caregiver robots in particular in educational settings. In this commentary I’ll try to offer my personal viewpoint on the consequences of using robot companions or caretakers of children on learning and education, and the effects of technologies on cognitive skills development, a controversial area of research where different findings show how little is known. (shrink)

Three-valued logics are standardly used to formalize gappy languages, i.e., interpreted languages in which sentences can be true, false or neither. A three-valued logic that assigns the same truth value to all gappy sentences is, in our view, insufficient to capture important semantic differences between them. In this paper we will argue that there are two different kinds of pathologies that should be treated separately and we defend the usefulness of a four-valued logic to represent adequately these two types of (...) gappy sentences. Our purpose is to begin the formal exploration of the four-valued logics that could be used to represent the phenomena in question and to show that these phenomena are present in natural language, at least according to some semantic theories of natural language. (shrink)

We present sound and complete sequent calculi for the modal mu-calculus with converse modalities, aka two-way modal mu-calculus. Notably, we introduce a cyclic proof system wherein proofs can be represented as finite trees with back-edges, i.e., finite graphs. The sequent calculi incorporate ordinal annotations and structural rules for managing them. Soundness is proved with relative ease as is the case for the modal mu-calculus with explicit ordinals. The main ingredients in the proof of completeness are isolating a class of non-wellfounded (...) proofs with sequents of bounded size, called slim proofs, and a counter-model construction that shows slimness suffices to capture all validities. Slim proofs are further transformed into cyclic proofs by means of re-assigning ordinal annotations. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decompositional analysis of three kinds of plural indefinites in two related languages, European Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. The three indefinites studied are bare plurals, the unos (Spanish)/uns (Portuguese) type, and the algunos (Spanish)/alguns (Portuguese) type. The paper concentrates on four properties: semantic plurality, positive polarity, partitivity, and event distribution. The logic underlying the analysis is that of compositionality, applied at the subword level: as items become bigger in form (with the addition of morphemes), they (...) also acquire more semantic properties. The paper proposes the “indefinite hierarchy", which establishes a set of components for languages to build their indefinites with, in a particular order. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that the scope of indefinites is island insensitive, i.e., that, generally, an indefinite inside of a syntactic island, such as an adjunct clause, is capable of taking scope outside of that island. This paper challenges this assumption by studying the scope behaviour of the Spanish plural indefinite algunos ’). It presents an experimental study that shows that the scope of algunos is not free and depends on its syntactic environment, at least in the dialect of Spanish (...) studied here. The paper discusses some of the implications of the study for current theories of indefinite scope: it points out the problems that choice functions and singleton indefinites have with the Spanish data, and it also discusses the implications for Schwarzschild's solution to the so-called ‘Donald Duck’ problem. (shrink)

This book presents the philosophical subject as a self-in-loss structured in continuous openness to the other-than-self: I welcome, therefore I am. With Marion and Derrida for foil, Martis examines Cartesian-Augustinian self-based substantiality, discovering a self jointly constituted in Kantian transcendentality and phenomenological givenness.

In this paper I discuss two approaches to rigidity. I argue that they differ in the general conception of semantics that each embraces. Moreover, I argue that they differ in how each explains the rigidity of general terms, and in what each presupposes in that explanation.

In this article I show why investment practices matter for a property-owning democracy (POD) and how political philosophers can analyse them. I begin by documenting how investment practices influence income distribution. Empirical research suggests that investments that force corporations to maximise shareholder value, which I refer to as ‘shareholder value investing/ increase income inequality. By contrast, there is evidence that socially responsible investing (SRI) could bring society closer to a POD. Following that., I sketch how financial regulation fosters investment practices (...) and discuss how SRI could be boosted if regulation attempted to influence investment decisions, although many people in the public discourse would see this as exceedingly patronising. Finally, I outline how political philosophers can evaluate financial regulation. I argue that drawing on Hegel or Rawls helps to justify efforts to influence investment decisions and that proponents of a POD should therefore develop and support regulatory ideas which foster SRI. (shrink)

This is an announcement, not a review. A review would require a study in depth, an item by item checking of all passages in a widespread literature to which the 1550 footnotes refer and, above all, a thorough familiarity with the work of Schelling and a lot of his contemporaries. I believe it would mean the work of a year. Then only could the reviewer offer a reasoned though perhaps concise evaluation of this book, whose printing was finished September 18, (...) 1973. (shrink)

Stavroula Glezakos (2009) argues that Frege himself could not pose Frege’s puzzle without relying on the distinction between sense and reference, a distinction that the puzzle was supposed to motivate, not presuppose. In this paper I argue that there are still some puzzling questions about the informativeness of identity sentences, and I discuss a problem generated by the Fregean contention that one and the same proper name can have different senses for different speakers an issue that, in my view, Frege (...) should have puzzled more about. (shrink)

This dissertation examines critically the assumptions of extensionalism and the traditional doctrine of substitutivity, according to which codesignativeness or coextensionality of terms should be a sufficient condition to guarantee intersubstitution of expression salva veritate. First, the discussion focuses on the traditional justifications of the extensionalist principles of substitutivity. The following alleged sources of support for extensionalism are examined: the claim that the extensionalist approach to substitutivity relies on fundamental principles outside the domain of semantics, like the Law of Indiscernibility of (...) Identicals and Leibniz's Law of Substitutivity; the assumption that all sentences that exhibit failures of substitutivity have in common a certain structure, that they include explicit or implicit intensional operators, which cause failures of substitutivity; the presumption that the extensionalist principles of substitutivity follow from a thesis of compositionality of meaning,according to which the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its components and the mode of composition. Second, the intuitive foundations of a theory about the contributions of terms to the assertions expressed by uses of sentences are explored. I claim that this theory provides strong reasons to reject the extensionalist approach to substitutivity. (shrink)