During the perinatal period, the establishment of the attachment relationship with the fetus and subsequently with the real child is crucial for the parents' and the child's well-being. Coherently with the assumption that the attachment relationship starts to develop during pregnancy, this systematic review aims to analyze and systematize studies focused on the association between pre-natal attachment and parent-to-infant attachment, in order to clarify the emerging results and provide useful information for clinical purposes. Nineteen studies were included. Sixteen researches identified (...) a positive relationship between pre-natal attachment and parent-to-infant attachment, and three articles highlighted a negative association between antenatal attachment and post-partum bonding disorders. These results were found both in women and men, in normative and at-risk pregnancies, adopting different assessment approaches. However, only small or moderate associations were found. Future studies are needed to further confirm these findings across different populations and with different methodological approaches. Moreover, studies would be needed in order to clarify mechanisms through which pre-natal attachment influences parent-to-infant attachment, as well as protective and risk factors which intervene between these two variables. (shrink)

A large number of studies, including single case and case series studies, have shown that patients with different types of frontotemporal dementia are characterized by the emergence of artistic abilities. This led to the hypothesis of enhanced creative thinking skills as a function of these pathological conditions. However, in the last years, it has been argued that these brain pathologies lead only to an augmented “drive to produce” rather than to the emergence of creativity. Moreover, only a few studies analyzed (...) specific creative skills, such as divergent thinking, by standardized tests. This Mini-Review aimed to examine the extent to which DT abilities are preserved in patients affected by FTD. Results showed that DT abilities are altered in different ways according to the specific anatomical and functional changes associated with the diverse forms of FTD. On the one hand, patients affected by the behavioral form of FTD can produce many ideas because of unimpaired access to memory stores, but are not able to recombine flexibly the information to produce original ideas because of damages in the pre-frontal cortex. On the other hand, patients affected by the semantic variant are impaired also in terms of fluency because of the degradation of their semantic memory store. Potential implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

The idea of classical recapture has played a prominent role for non-classical logicians. In the specific case of non-classical theories of truth, although we know that it is not possible to retain classical logic for every statement involving the truth predicate, it is clear that for many such statements this is in principle feasible, and even desirable. What is not entirely obvious or well-known is how far this idea can be pushed. Can the non-classical theorist retain classical logic for every (...) non-paradoxical statement? If not, is she forced to settle for a very weak form of Classical Recapture, or are there robust versions of classical recapture available to her? These are the main questions that I will address in this paper. As a test case I will consider a paracomplete account of the truth-theoretic paradoxes and I will argue for two claims. First, that it is not possible to retain the law of excluded middle for every non-paradoxical statement. Secondly, that there are no robust versions of classical recapture available to the paracomplete logician. (shrink)

Gödei's Theorem seems to me to prove that Mechanism is false, that is, that minds cannot be explained as machines. So also has it seemed to many other people: almost every mathematical logician I have put the matter to has confessed to similar thoughts, but has felt reluctant to commit himself definitely until he could see the whole argument set out, with all objections fully stated and properly met. This I attempt to do.

The present article states that the development of Fichte’s philosophy of Right stands in contradiction with the way that he founded the metaphysical ground of his system: morality as I’s rational and practical search to overcome the check of reality and to unify with itself. Thus, the paper exposes the impossibility to reconcile two texts: Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre and Grundlage des Naturrechts. In the latter, Fichte presents the Doctrine of Right and the State as mediums for the individual to (...) reach its telos. But this affects the consistency of his thought. Although there is a hermeneutic background for this idea, it is groundbreaking as it exhibits Fichtean argumentative problems within Jena’s works. The article also takes into consideration the text: Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. Here Fichte incorporates several aspects from GWL and GNR that help to think on those contradictions. (shrink)

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage (...) in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es analizar el concepto de mentira moderna u organizada en la obra de Hannah Arendt. Con agudeza, Arendt pone de relieve una experiencia particular del Mundo Moderno, aquella en la que una comunidad puede falsear deliberadamente realidades conocidas por todos y tener la mentira como principio político. Esta comprensión pone al concepto en un registro diferente del tradicional de los arcana dominationis. Nuestro argumento intenta clarificar analíticamente el concepto, señalar su pertinencia y vincularlo a una (...) idea de auto-institución de las sociedades entendidas como colectividades históricamente activas. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that, at least from a historical point of view and during the period addressed, different philosophical traditions within the University of Buenos Aires had their own political inscriptions. Thus, these study areas were established in the Faculty through important theoretical and political discussions. The article highlights moments of conflict and also determines four theoretical-political traditions to be considered: one neo-tomist and nationalist, one phenomenological and liberal, one metaphysical and corporative, and a fourth (...) scientific and filo-communist. (shrink)

Platón procura establecer en el Fedro una estrecha vinculación entre la poesía y el ámbito eidético propio del saber filosófico, o al que accede el filósofo mediante una ejercitada captación sinóptico-dialéctica. Tal tipo de poesía filosófica aparece ilustrada a la perfección en la propia palinodia socrática, la cual erige a Sócrates – y en última instancia a Platón – como paradigma de filósofo poeta, palinodia que ha sido obligada a pronunciarse “con ciertos términos poéticos”. Partiendo de esa palinodia como modelo, (...) Platón se propone abordar el tema del éros con discursos filosóficos que se nutran de términos poéticos, o sea, a través de una explícita mixtura de elementos filosóficos y poéticos, cuyo ejemplo más claro es el Fedro en su conjunto, o, en términos más generales, el género dialógico platónico en tanto este pone en escena una interacción entre los registros filosófico y poético. Teniendo en cuenta esta relación de compatibilidad que Platón establece en el Fedro entre su paradigma poético-filosófico y el de tipo tradicional – paradigmas que en los libros II, III y X de la República aparecían claramente en tensión –, en este artículo me interesa apoyar tal relación en la anécdota del sueño relatada por Sócrates al comienzo del Fedón, en la cual el filósofo confiesa ante Simmias y Cebes haber compuesto desde su encierro en la cárcel – ya que anteriormente jamás lo había hecho – poemas basados en la versificación o musicalización de las fábulas de Esopo y un himno a Apolo. (shrink)

Non‐classical logicians do not typically reject classically valid logical principles across the board. In fact, they sometimes suggest that their preferred logic recovers classical reasoning in most circumstances. This idea has come to be known in the literature as ‘classical recapture’. Recently, classical logicians have raised various doubts about it. The main problem is said to be that no rigorous explanation has been given of how is it exactly that classical logic can be recovered. The goal of the paper is (...) to address this problem. First, I discuss a number of different ways to characterize the idea of classical recapture and I examine how far it can be pushed. Secondly, I argue that a palatable form of classical recapture is given by the thought that classical logic can be retained for statements that are grounded (in Kripke’s sense). To substantiate this view I provide a formal fixed‐point semantics for a language containing a predicate standing for the concept of groundedness and I address a couple of objections that have been deployed against the claim that classical recapture can aid the non‐classical logician’s cause. (shrink)

Proclus, head of the Philosophy School at Athens for fifty years, was one of the leading philosophical figures in Late Antiquity. Lucas Siorvanes here introduces Proclus to English-language readers, discussing his metaphysics and theory of knowledge and focusing in particular on his Neo-Platonism. Proclus lived in the turbulent fifth century A.D., a time of struggles among Christians, Jews, and pagans, the invasion of Attila the Hun, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the rise of the Eastern Roman (...) Empire in Byzantium. While Late Antiquity has been regarded as a time of superstition and forbiddingly complex philosophies, recent scholarship has shown it to be full of cultural and intellectual vigor. During Proclus's tenure as head of the Philosophy School, he systematized Neo-Platonism as the summit of ancient Greek thought, brought it to its peak of influence, and became responsible for the form in which it was transmitted to the Byzantine, Western European, and Islamic civilizations. Siorvanes's extensive original research presents Proclus as much more than just a metaphysician. He surveys all of Proclus's philosophical interests—including religion, physics, astronomy, mathematics, and poetry—revealing the philosopher's central concern with the problems of being and knowledge and relating the ideas of Proclus to those of such other major thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy. To help the newcomer, Siorvanes supplies more than 200 quotations from Proclus's works. He also traces the impact of Proclus's Neo-Platonism across cultures, religions, and centuries, in such diverse areas as Christian and Islamic theologies, Renaissance art, Kepler's astronomy, Romantic poetry, Emerson's thought, modern philosophy and science, and current popular phrases. (shrink)

While courtroom examinations are often recognized as a distinct speech-exchange system, little is known about how participants do an examination beyond its unique turn-taking system. This article attempts to shed some light on this issue by studying the question design during the direct examination in an American criminal court case using Conversation Analysis. It shows that attorneys use different question forms compared to casual conversation: declaratives are far less prevalent and questions are often designed as requests for action. In addition, (...) attorneys make use of forms that are not found in other types of interaction, such as the tag correct. The way in which attorneys design their questions additionally shows that the rules of the courtroom have procedural consequences for how the interaction is done. But these rules have to be enacted, and it is in their violation that participants bring about categories such as leading questions. (shrink)

Children show a remarkable degree of consistency in learning some words earlier than others. What patterns of word usage predict variations among words in age of acquisition? We use distributional analysis of a naturalistic corpus of child‐directed speech to create quantitative features representing natural variability in word contexts. We evaluate two sets of features: One set is generated from the distribution of words into frames defined by the two adjacent words. These features primarily encode syntactic aspects of word usage. The (...) other set is generated from non‐adjacent co‐occurrences between words. These features encode complementary thematic aspects of word usage. Regression models using these distributional features to predict age of acquisition of 656 early‐acquired English words indicate that both types of features improve predictions over simpler models based on frequency and appearance in salient or simple utterance contexts. Syntactic features were stronger predictors of children's production than comprehension, whereas thematic features were stronger predictors of comprehension. Overall, earlier acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for nouns and verbs, and by thematic content related to food and face‐to‐face play topics; later acquisition was predicted by features representing frames that select for pronouns and question words, and by content related to narratives and object play. (shrink)

Information and communication technology is changing many aspects ofhuman endeavour and existence. This is beyond dispute for most. Whatare contested are the social and ethical implications of thesechanges. Possible sources of these disputes are the multiple ways inwhich one can conceptualize and interpret the informationtechnology/society interrelationship. Each of these ways ofconceptualization and interpretation enables one to see theinformation technology/society relationship differently and thereforeconstrue its social and ethical implications in a different manner. Atthe center of this technology/society interrelationship we find manycomplex (...) questions about the nature of the human, the technical,agency, autonomy, freedom and much more. This is indeed a vastintellectual landscape, which can obviously not be explored here inits fullness. This entry is about just one particular perspective onthis landscape. It is primarily concerned with the phenomenologicalapproach to interpreting information technology and its social andethical implications. It should be noted from the start that there isnot a unified phenomenological tradition or approach to informationtechnology in particular, or other phenomena more generally. Thephenomenological tradition consists of many different approaches thatshare certain characteristics but not all. We may however suggest, with Don Ihde,that they all accept that “phenomenology investigates theconditions of what makes things appear as such [as that which we takethem to be].” Differently stated, phenomenology suggests thatthere is a co-constitutive relationship between us and the phenomenawe encounter in our engagement with the world. In this sensephenomenologists would suggest that to understand thetechnology/society relationship we need to reveal how theyco-constitute each other—i.e. draw on each other for theirongoing meaning and sense. We will elaborate more precisely what thismeans in section 2 below. However, in order to understand the distinctiveness of thephenomenological approach other possible ways of interpreting thistechnology/society relationship will also be outlined brieflybelow., It can be said that information technology has become in a very realsense ubiquitous. Most everyday technologies such as elevators,automobiles, microwaves, watches, and so forth depend onmicroprocessors for their ongoing operation. Most organizations andinstitutions have become reliant on their information technologyinfrastructure to a lesser or greater degree. Indeed informationtechnology is seen by many as a cost-efficient way to solve amultitude of problems facing our complex contemporary society. One canalmost say that information technology has become construed as thedefault technology for solving a whole raft of technical and socialproblems such as health provision, security, governance, etc. Onecould also argue that it has become synonymous with society’sview of modernization and progress. For most it seems obvious thatinformation technology has made it possible for humans to continue toconstruct increasingly complex systems of coordination and socialordering—systems without which contemporary society would not beable to exist in its present form. To say the least, we, ascontemporary human beings, have our manner of being made possiblethrough a rather comprehensive entanglement with information andcommunication technology. Indeed, the economic, organizational andsocial benefit of information technology is not widely disputed. Thedispute is more often about the way information technology is changingor transforming the social domain, and in particular, the ethicaldomain. This dispute is largely centered around different ways ofconceptualizing and interpreting the nature of our entanglement withinformation technology. This debate is not merely an academic debateabout different and competing theoretical ‘models.’Rather, these different ways of conceptualizing it is central to ourunderstanding of how we go about managing our increasingly entangledrelationship with information technology. (shrink)

Public participation in scientific research has gained prominence in many scientific fields, but the theory of participatory research is still limited. In this paper, we suggest that the divergence of values and goals between academic researchers and public participants in research is key to analyzing the different forms this research takes. We examine two existing characterizations of participatory research: one in terms of public participants' role in the research, the other in terms of the virtues of the research. In our (...) view, each of these captures an important feature of participatory research but is, on its own, limited in what features it takes into account. We introduce an expanded conception of norms of collaboration that extends to both academic researchers and public participants. We suggest that satisfying these norms requires consideration of the two groups' possibly divergent values and goals, and that a broad characterization of participatory research that starts from participants' values and goals can motivate both public participants’ role in the research and the virtues of the research. The resulting framework clarifies the similarities and differences among participatory projects and can help guide the responsible design of such projects. (shrink)

This chapter has two main sections. In the first section I briefly sketch Immanuel Kant’s moral theory as laid out in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). I explain Kant’s claim that morality must be grounded on what he calls a categorical imperative and examine his three formulations of this categorical imperative. In the second section I explain the distinction between “deontological” and “teleological” ethical theories. Kantian ethics is often presented as the paradigm example of a deontological ethical (...) theory, but I question whether Kant’s ethics should be understood as purely deontological. (shrink)

The traditional answer is: they must be atelic. But as we will see, this notion is imprecise. We will improve on it, without rejecting it. (Basically we’ll end up with temporally vs. spatially telic.).

John Danaher and Sven Nyholm have argued that automation, especially of the sort powered by artificial intelligence, poses a threat to meaningful work by diminishing the chances for meaning-conferring workplace achievement, what they call “achievement gaps”. In this paper, I argue that Danaher and Nyholm’s achievement gap thesis suffers from an ambiguity. The weak version of the thesis holds that automation may result in the appearance of achievement gaps, whereas the strong version holds that automation may result on balance loss (...) in possibilities for workplace achievements, i.e., in the appearance of an overall gappier work landscape. Against the strong version of the achievement gap thesis, I characterize situations where automation may result in boons to meaning-conferring workplace achievements: the appearance of what I call achievement spread and achievement swaps. Nevertheless, Danaher and Nyholm are right to worry about some uses of automation whereby human workers become subservient to AI. But these situations are better framed, I argue, as autonomy gaps rather than achievement gaps. (shrink)

Das muitas aproximações perpetradas nas últimas nove décadas entre Sigmund Freud e Espinosa, talvez nenhuma seja tão problemática quanto o cotejamento entre o conatus – esforço de perseveração no ser que, na Ética de Espinosa, constitui a essência atual das coisas – e aquela força autodestrutiva a que Freud, em Além do Princípio do Prazer, dá o nome de Todestrieb, ou pulsão de morte. De que forma, à luz de uma ontologia absolutamente positiva como a de Espinosa – uma na (...) qual a destruição de uma coisa será sempre extrínseca à mesma –, devemos receber a asserção de Freud de que há algo na constituição do sujeito que o destrói? Partindo desta questão, o intento do presente trabalho é realizar uma apresentação detida dos conceitos, a fim de determinar em que registro se dá a contradição, e até que ponto a mesma nos constrange a suprimir nossa aquiescência a um ou outro dos mesmos. (shrink)

We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument-adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations (...) that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser. (shrink)

Genetic explanation of complex human behavior presents an excellent test case for pluralism. Although philosophers agree that successful scientific investigation of behavior is pluralistic, there remains disagreement regarding integration and elimination—is the plurality of approaches here to stay, or merely a waystation on the road to monism? In this paper we introduce an issue taken very seriously by scientists yet mostly ignored by philosophers—the missing heritability problem—and assess its implications for disagreement among pluralists. We argue that the missing heritability problem, (...) which isn’t going anywhere any time soon, implies that pluralism in behavior genetics is both practically ineliminative and theoretically non-integrative. (shrink)

Neste artigo procuro expor a forma pela qual aparece o conceito de beatitude ( _Seligkeit_ - _beatitudo_ ) no pensamento de Fichte e de Espinosa. Tendo isso em vista, ressalto a importância de considerar os fundamentos metafísicos dos seus sistemas filosóficos para poder compreender suas implicações práticas - em particular as morais e políticas - a respeito do sentido que aquele conceito adota. Assim, pretendo analisar a metafísica fichteana do ansiar ( _Sehnen_ ) como base da sua concepção da beatitude (...) em um sentido moral, ao mesmo tempo que buscarei, em um sentido filosófico-histórico, confrontar essa perspectiva com a ideia espinosana de uma _beatitudo,_ que, deixando de lado a moralidade, uma vez que para ele a política assume um papel primário na existência humana, de um ponto de vista fichteano só poderia ser considerada como irracional e dogmática. O confronto entre ambos os pensadores pretende favorecer a compreensão tanto de suas posições sobre o tema como dos seus sistemas filosóficos _per se._. (shrink)

Tradução de Die Aktualität Schopenhauers, de Max Horkheimer, artigo publicado em 1961 no Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch da Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft.

The assumption that coercion is largely responsible for our legal systems’ efficacy is a common one. I argue that this assumption is false. But I do so indirectly, by objecting to a thesis I call “(Compliance)”, which holds that most citizens comply with most legal mandates most of the time at least partly in virtue of being motivated by legal systems’ threats of sanctions and other unwelcome consequences. The relationship between (Compliance) and the efficacy of legal systems is explained in (...) section 1. There I also show that (Compliance) must be rejected for it relies on unsubstantiated empirical assumptions. In section 2, I claim that an alternative, and more refined, formulation of (Compliance) also lacks adequate support. I conclude with a few general remarks about the centrality of coercion in our thought and talk about legal systems. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This book explores the diverse understandings of the archaeological record in both historical and contemporary perspective, while also serving as a guide to reassessing current views. Gavin Lucas argues that archaeological theory has become both too fragmented and disconnected from the particular nature of archaeological evidence. The book examines three ways of understanding the archaeological record - as historical sources, through formation theory, and as material culture - then reveals ways to connect these three domains through a reconsideration of (...) archaeological entities and archaeological practice. Ultimately, Lucas calls for a rethinking of the nature of the archaeological record and the kind of history and narratives written from it. (shrink)

The paper generalizes Van McGee's well-known result that there are many maximal consistent sets of instances of Tarski's schema to a number of non-classical theories of truth. It is shown that if a non-classical theory rejects some classically valid principle in order to avoid the truth-theoretic paradoxes, then there will be many maximal non-trivial sets of instances of that principle that the non-classical theorist could in principle endorse. On the basis of this it is argued that the idea of classical (...) recapture, which plays such an important role for non-classical logicians, can only be pushed so far. (shrink)

Norm theory (Kahneman & Miller, 1986) described a tendency for people to associate stronger regret with a negative outcome when it is a result of an exception (abnormal behavior) compared to when it is a result of routine (normal behavior). In two pre-registered studies, we conducted a replication and extension of three classic experiments on past behavior exception/routine contrasts (N = 684). We successfully replicated Kahneman and Miller’s (1986) experiments with the classic hitchhiker-scenario (Part 1) and car accident-scenario (Part 2). (...) In both cases, participants examined negative outcomes and tended to indicate a protagonist who deviated from own past behavior as more regretful than another who followed routine. Pre-registered extensions also showed effects for ratings of social norms, negative affect, and perceived luck. We did not find support for the Miller and McFarland (1986) experiment robbery scenario (Part 3) using a compensation measure, in that compensation to a victim of a robbery was not significantly different comparing exceptional and routine circumstances. However, a pre-registered extension showed that robbery under exceptional circumstances was regretted more than robbery under routine circumstances. We discuss implications for current and future research. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspirations by companies have been identified as a motivating factor for active employee participation in CSR implementation. However, a failure to practise what one preaches can backfire and lead to attribution of hypocrisy. Drawing on a qualitative study of an award-winning sustainability pioneer in the cosmetics sector, we explore the role of moral judgement in how and when employees interpret word–deed misalignment in CSR implementation as hypocritical. First, our case reveals that high CSR aspirations by companies (...) raise employees’ moral expectations. Second, we develop a framework that explains variations in employees’ hypocrisy interpretations based on consequentialist and deontological forms of moral judgement. Our research advances a contextual view of hypocrisy, not as an objective characteristic of an organisation, but as an outcome of interpretative processes of perceived motives and results in CSR implementation. Our framework thereby explains why even highly committed organisations may face accusations of hypocrisy. (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...) play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

This document describes my dissertation proposal, “Aspect, plurality and quantification”, for a nonlinguist audience for the purposes of Penn’s SAS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The dissertation proposal is available online on my website, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~champoll/, as well as a handout with a description targeted at a linguist audience.

It is not uncommon among theorists favoring a deviant logic on account of the semantic paradoxes to subscribe to an idea that has come to be known as ‘classical recapture’. The main thought underpinning it is that non-classical logicians are justified in endorsing many instances of the classically valid principles that they reject. Classical recapture promises to yield an appealing pair of views: one can attain naivety for semantic concepts while retaining classicality in ordinary domains such as mathematics. However, Julien (...) Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi have recently suggested that revisionary approaches to truth breed revenge paradoxes when they are coupled with the thought that classical reasoning can be recaptured in certain circumstances. What’s novel about the paradoxes they put forward is that they cannot be dismissed so easily. The concepts used to generate these paradoxes—those of paradoxicality and unparadoxicality—are concepts that non-classical theorists need in order to offer a diagnosis of the truth-theoretic paradoxes. My goal in this paper is to argue that non-classical theorists can represent the concept of paradoxicality without falling prey to revenge paradoxes. In particular, I will show how to provide a formal fixed-point semantics for a language extended with a paradoxicality predicate that adequately expresses the non-classical logician’s notion of paradoxicality. (shrink)

One of the most fruitful applications of substructural logics stems from their capacity to deal with self-referential paradoxes, especially truth-theoretic paradoxes. Both the structural rules of contraction and the rule of cut play a crucial role in typical paradoxical arguments. In this paper I address a number of difficulties affecting noncontractive approaches to paradox that have been discussed in the recent literature. The situation was roughly this: if you decide to go substructural, the nontransitive approach to truth offers a lot (...) of benefits that are not available in the noncontractive account. I sketch a noncontractive theory of truth that has these benefits. In particular, it has both a proof- and a model-theoretic presentation, it can be extended to a first-order language, and it retains every classically valid inference. (shrink)

A DOUTRINA NEOFUNCIONALISTA DE INTEGRAÇÃO REGIONAL E A NECESSIDADE DE ADOÇÃO DO MECANISMO ELETIVO DIRETO NO ÂMBITO DO PARLASUL: A TEORIA DE ERNST HAAS NA CONSOLIDAÇÃO PARLAMENTAR SUPRANACIONAL.

In this talk, I first systematize the analogies and complete the picture in some corners. Then, I formally relate the three constructions, and I derive their properties from a single operator. Previous analyses were not designed to account for all three constructions at the same time. Accordingly, I not only assess how well they generalize beyond their intended purpose, but I also evaluate them in their own right. Even so, this analysis improves on previous accounts in several ways. Although I (...) will not focus on this in the talk, the analysis of distributive quantification is compatible with more general analyses of cumulative and collective quantification such as Landman (2000). (shrink)