The paper outlines the analysis of certain question types in the Commitment Space framework, as presented in Krifka (2015). The two basic ideas are: Assertions and most questions involve commitments of speaker and addressee to the truth of a proposition, and questions consist in restricting the continuation of the conversation to answers to the question. The main focus is on breadth, not depth and the detailed comparison with alternative approaches, and on semantic modelling, not on the syntactic and prosodic realizations. (...) Topics are polar questions and their bias, alternative questions, constituent questions, high negation in questions, declarative questions, root vs. embedded questions, and deliberative questions. (shrink)

Este artículo intenta identificar los acuerdos y desacuerdos entre Benjamin Constant y Alexis de Tocqueville en torno a la pregunta de cómo fundar un orden político respetuoso de las libertades y que, al mismo tiempo, asuma y proyecte la ruptura revolucionaria. En otras palabras, cómo articular orden, libertad y política. nuestra tesis es que la diferencia en el modo de aproximarse a la cuestión encuentra su origen en diversas concepciones de la historia. Para los efectos de evaluar los procesos históricos, (...) Constant nunca abandona del todo ciertas intuiciones progresistas. Tocqueville, por su parte, se mantiene siempre a distancia de las distintas versiones de la filosofía de la historia. Para ilustrar el argumento, nuestro trabajo se divide en cuatro partes. En la primera, exponemos la relación entre ambos autores y su concepción del movimiento histórico. Luego, examinamos cómo entiende cada uno de ellos el concepto de perfectibilidad, siempre a la luz de la primera diferencia. En la tercera parte, exploramos la noción de anacronismo empleada por Constant, y las críticas —más o menos implícitas— de Tocqueville a esa idea. Por último, analizaremos las distintas concepciones de política que se deducen de cada uno de los sistemas. (shrink)

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed1 which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the (...) mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events. (shrink)

Quantified NPs in questions may lead to an interpretation in which the NP quantifies into the question. Which dish did every guest bring? can be understood as: 'For every guest x: which dish did x bring?'. After a review of previous approaches that tried to capture this quantification formally or to explain it away, it is argued that such readings involve quantification into speech acts. As the algebra of speech acts is more limited than a Boolean algebra – it only (...) contains conjunction, not disjunction or negation – it is predicted that only universal quantifiers can scope out of questions or other speech acts. The approach is extended to indirect questions, which either are embedded speech acts or coerced to denote the true answers, depending on the embedding verb; in the latter case a Boolean structure results, and we find wide-scope readings of non-universal quantifiers. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Brief History of Developmental Explanations of Phenotypic Evolution Research Questions of Evo‐Devo Unifying Themes of the Conceptual Basis of Evo‐Devo Conclusion: A Mechanistic Theory of Evo‐Devo Challenges the Modern Synthesis Postscript: Counterpoint References.

The classical analysis of donkey sentences like (1.a,b) in Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982) assigns them truth conditions as given in (2.a). That is, they are treated as quantifications over farmer-donkey pairs. Partee (1984) and Kadmon (1987) have pointed out that the proper reading of (1.b), and a preferred reading of (1.a), is rather a quantification over farmers, as illustrated in (2.b).

Meanings are the most elusive objects of linguistic research. The article summarizes the type of evidence we have for them: various types of metalinguistic activities like paraphrasing and translating, the ability to name entities and judge sentences true or false, as well as various behavioral and physiological measures such as reaction time studies, eye tracking.

The biological sciences have become increasingly reliant on so-called ‘model organisms’. I argue that in this domain, the concept of a descriptive model is essential for understanding scientific practice. Using a case study, I show how such a model was formulated in a preexplanatory context for subsequent use as a prototype from which explanations ultimately may be generated both within the immediate domain of the original model and in additional, related domains. To develop this concept of a descriptive model, I (...) focus on use of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and the wiring diagrams that were developed as models of its neural structure. In addition, implications of the concept of a descriptive model, particularly its relevance for the data-phenomena distinction as well as its relation to long-standing debates on realism, are briefly examined. (shrink)

This influence of accent has been taken as evidence that adverbial quantification is focus sensitive (cf. Rooth (1985)) or presupposition sensitive (cf. von Fintel (1994), Rooth (1995)). I will discuss a problem that has been identified by von Fintel and Rooth, the requantifiation problem. Roughly stated, standard accounts of indefinites as NPs that introduce new discourse referents are at odds with standard accounts of the focus sensitivity or presupposition sensitivity of (1), which force us to assume that indefinites may pick (...) up existing discourse referents and “requantify” over them. I will argue for a special class of indefinites that pick up existing discourse referents, which I will call non-novel indefinites, to explain the nature.. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process--such as adaptation by means of natural selection--depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

This article1 deals with a well-known but still ill-explained fact about German, namely scope inversion under a particular accent contour, as illustrated with the following examples, where “/” and “\” stand for rising and falling accent: (a) Mindestens ein Stu- dent hat jeden Roman gelesen, lit. ‘at least one student has every novel read’, with the reading “For at least one student x: x read every book”, and (b) Mindestens /EIN Student hat \JEDen Roman gelesen, with the additional reading “For (...) every novel y: at least one student read y”. I will derive the scope inversion in this reading from general principles of scope assignment and focus marking in German. In particular, I will argue that focus is assigned to constituents that precede the verbal predicate, which leads to syntactic configurations that in turn result in ambiguous interpretations. This explanation must be couched in a framework of derivational economy that favors shorter derivations. It is argued that the relevant comparison class is defined with respect to phonological form, not, as has been suggested for English, with respect t o identity of semantic interpretation, and that this may be a general property of “free” word order languages. (shrink)

Equational intensional ‘reconstruction’ relatives. Submitted.

Even though it is not very often admitted, partial functions do play a significant role in many practical applications of deduction systems. Kleene has already given a semantic account of partial functions using three-valued logic decades ago, but there has not been a satisfactory mechanization. Recent years have seen a thorough investigation of the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. However, strong Kleene logic, where quantification is restricted and therefore not truthfunctional, does not fit the framework directly. We solve this problem (...) by applying recent methods from sorted logics. This paper presents a resolution calculus that combines the proper treatment of partial functions with the efficiency of sorted calculi. (shrink)

In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus (...) occurs in syntactic islands. (shrink)

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization—the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established—do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.

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One of the difficult areas for persons learning a foreign language is to grasp the range of usages of syntactic patterns that exist in the foreign language. It is not sufficient to learn how passive formation works, or how pre- or postpositional phrases are constructed, or how perfect tenses are expressed. One also has to learn which verbs can passivize at all, which verbs go with which pre- or postpositions, and, in case perfect tenses are expressed, as in a number (...) of European languages, with different auxiliaries like ‘have’ and ‘be’, which verb needs which auxiliary. For English, Levin (1993) distinguishes no less than 57 verb classes, most of them with a number of subclasses, that show distinct syntactic behavior. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:25. HUME'S ANTINOMIES I There are many contradictions in Hume. So much is readily admitted by all Hume scholars. But there is little agreement on what these contradictions show about Hume's thought in general. Many interpretations are based upon the view that Hume's contradictions are signs of his carelessness or lack of thoroughness. He is seen either as having lost all interest in giving a comprehensive or consistent account (...) of human nature or as not having pushed far enough his analysis of the philosophical problems facing him. Other interpretations suggest that Hume, the "skeptic," has recklessly introduced these contradictions in order to confuse us. He is perhaps not altogether serious and is laughing at those who take too serious a view of the "science" of metaphysics and his own contribution 2 to it. Others again argue that the contradictions (or some fundamental class of them) are the consequence of Hume's philosophical presuppositions or his psychological method. Given his particular beliefs and his method, these contradictions had to arise with logical necessity. However, the general opinion seems to be that, if Hume is not to be dismissed as a merely negative skeptic whose philosophy is of no great consequence, he needs to be excused or defended, i.e. his contradictions, which are 4 seen as "inconsistencies," have to be explained away. His discussions of the self, causality, substance, or the relationship of reason and the passions must be, and — it is believed — can be shown not to be contradictory, if all the relevant factors are considered. However, reconstructions of Hume's analysis of the self or causality, for instance, which involve the explaining away of contradictions soon find themselves in a rather peculiar quandary, since they also have to show that Hume's own admissions of the contradictory nature of his analysis is mistaken. Such "defenses" issue only in other 26. accusations, namely that Hume, in addition to not having expressed himself very clearly in his writings, failed to understand them himself when he referred back to them. If only for this reason, I think that interpretations which involve an explaining away or minimizing of the contradictions in Hume are suspect. It is my opinion that Hume needs no such defenses or excuses -- at least not in so far as the most important contradictions are concerned. On the contrary, I believe that Hume can be understood properly, only if we take full account of them. I want in this paper to argue that there is in Hume a fundamental class of contradictions which he believed were neither accidental nor created by his analysis, but were essential characteristics of the human mind. The contradictions uncovered by his analysis can be understood only if they are recognised as one aspect of a more complex problematic. They must have a "deeper" significance for Hume because they are the symptoms of the infirmities... which are common to human nature (T265). These are 'Hume's 7 "antinomies. " In this analysis I have allowed myself to be guided by a more or less Kantian conception of "antinomy" and "antinomical." In fact, I believe that there is a definite similarity between Kant's doctrine of the "Antinomy of Pure Reason" and Hume's "operations" which are equally natural and necessary in the human mind, yet in some circumstances... directly contrary (T266). But the present paper is not so much a sustained comparison of Hume and Kant in this regard as it is an attempt to elucidate the g peculiar nature of several contradictions in Hume. For I believe that, if we have a better understanding of the nature of these contradictions, we will also be able to say something more definite about Hume's theory of mental activity and certain aspects of the relationship of skepticism and naturalism (or: Pyrrhonism and Newtonianism, destructive and constructive side, negative and positive phase, etc.) in his thought. To this end, I shall first 27. explain what I mean by "antinomy" here. Secondly, I shall show in what sense Hume was aware of having discovered something very much like an antinomical dimension in human nature, and, finally, I shall offer some suggestions as to the relevance of this... (shrink)

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process—such as adaptation by means of natural selection—depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

Here we argue that the concept of strategies, as it was introduced into biology by John Maynard Smith, is a prime illustration of the four dimensions of theoretical biology in the post-genomic era. These four dimensions are: data analysis and management, mathematical and computational model building and simulation, concept formation and analysis, and theory integration. We argue that all four dimensions of theoretical biology are crucial to future interactions between theoretical and empirical biologists as well as with philosophers of biology.

Even though it is not very often admitted, partial functions do play a significant role in many practical applications of deduction systems. Kleene has already given a semantic account of partial functions using a three-valued logic decades ago, but there has not been a satisfactory mechanization. Recent years have seen a thorough investigation of the framework of many-valued truth-functional logics. However, strong Kleene logic, where quantification is restricted and therefore not truthfunctional, does not fit the framework directly. We solve this (...) problem by applying recent methods from sorted logics. This paper presents a tableau calculus that combines the proper treatment of partial functions with the efficiency of sorted calculi. (shrink)

(2012). Reasoning without believing: on the mechanisation of presuppositions and partiality. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 295-317. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.705962.