In a very recent paper (2010), Dominic McIver Lopes has claimed that pictures perceptually ground demonstrative reference to depicted objects. If as I think Lopes is right, this has important consequences for the debate on the semantics/pragmatics divide. For one can exploit Lopes' claim in order to provide one more argument in favour of the well-known contextualist thesis that wide context has not only both a pre- and a post-semantic role, but also a semantic role – to put it (...) in Perry's (1997) terms. (shrink)

By resuming ideas originally developed in my Voltolini, I will try to show again that demonstrative reference as to pictorial matters provides good examples in favor of contextualism, the position holding that wide context, the concrete situation of discourse, may have the semantic role of fixing truthconditions for an utterance, i.e., a sentence in that context. This time I will focus on complex cases of pictorial reference, those that cases of complex pictorial experiences such as collapsed seeing-in and (...) nested seeing-in exhibit. (shrink)

This article argues that the “_qua_ problem” for purely causal theories of reference grounding is an illusion. Reference _can_ be grounded via description and fit, but purely causal reference grounding is possible too. In fact, “arguments from ignorance and error” suggest that many of our terms have had their reference grounded purely causally. If the _qua_ problem is illusory, then there is no need to adopt a “hybrid” theory of reference grounding of (...) the kind recently recommended by Amie Thomasson (Ontology made easy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015) and Ron Mallon (The construction of human kinds, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016). This opens the door to a “discovery model” of philosophical knowledge, a model we could then choose to accept. (shrink)

In Mathematics is megethology Lewis reconstructs set theory combining mereology with plural quantification. He introduces megethology, a powerful framework in which one can formulate strong assumptions about the size of the universe of individuals. Within this framework, Lewis develops a structuralist class theory, in which the role of classes is played by individuals. Thus, if mereology and plural quantification are ontologically innocent, as Lewis maintains, he achieves an ontological reduction of classes to individuals. Lewis’work is very attractive. However, the alleged (...) innocence of mereology and plural quantification is highly controversial and has been criticized by several authors. In the present paper we propose a new approach to megethology based on the theory of plural reference developed in To be is to be the object of a possible act of choice. Our approach shows how megethology can be grounded on plural reference without the help of mereology. (shrink)

아우구스티누스는 『콘트라 아카데미코스』에서 당대 인식론과 교육사상에 부정적 역할을 했던 아카데미학파의 논증을 반박하면서 ‘실재와 진리에 대한 부정’과 ‘진리를 파악할 수 있는 다양한 방식이 존재한다는 문제의식’, 그리고 여기서 파생되는 ‘종교와 종교교육의 필요성에 대한 문제’ 등을 숙고한다. 아우구스티누스는 삶의 목적은 행복이고, 행복은 진리획득을 통해 가능하다고 본다. 그리고 진리와 실재에 대한 확고함이 없다면 총체적이고 전인적인 지식도 불가능하고, 필연적으로 그러한 것을 배우거나 교육하는 일도 불가능하다고 주장한다. 아우구스티누스가 보기에 대상의 통합성을 아는 것이 행복해지는 것이며, 이것을 아는 것은 인간의 모든 이성적 활동의 궁극적 목적이다. 아우구스티누스는 사람이 행복을 (...) 추구하는 것은 당연한 순리이며, 행복을 얻기 위해서는 진리를 추구하고 진리 안에 거하는 것이 필수적이라는 전제를 갖고 있다. 여기에 더해 아우구스티누스는 진리 인식과 진리 교육의 중요성을 넘어 다양한 진리 획득 방식을 제시한다. 그는 자연학과 논리학적 앎을 비롯해 수학적 앎과 감각인상을 통한 앎을 통해 진리가 인식될 수 있음을 증명한다. 아우구스티누스는 여기에 더해 명증적 앎의 새로운 방식인 종교적 앎에 대해 소개한다. 여기서 아우구스티누스는 키케로를 인용하여 권위에 의한 앎에 대해 논의하는데, 그가 보기에 권위자가 확실히 신뢰할 수 있는 존재자라면 그 권위에서 출발한 앎은 불완전한 앎을 가진 존재들에게는 그 무엇보다 확실한 앎이 될 수 있다. 아우구스티누스가 진리획득의 방식을 다양하게 상정하면서, 그중 인간이 진리나 실재에 도달하는 가장 중요한 방식으로서 종교를 상정하는 이유가 여기에 있다. (shrink)

One of the most important social cognitive skills in humans is the ability to “put oneself in someone else’s shoes,” that is, to take another person’s perspective. In socially situated communication, perspective taking enables the listener to arrive at a meaningful interpretation of what is said and what is meant by the speaker. To successfully decode the speaker’s meaning, the listener has to take into account which information he/she and the speaker share in their common ground. We here further investigated (...) competing accounts about when and how CG information affects language comprehension by means of reaction time measures, accuracy data, event-related potentials, and eye-tracking. Early integration accounts would predict that CG information is considered immediately and would hence not expect to find costs of CG integration. Late integration accounts would predict a rather late and effortful integration of CG information during the parsing process that might be reflected in integration or updating costs. Other accounts predict the simultaneous integration of privileged ground and CG perspectives. We used a computerized version of the referential communication game with object triplets of different sizes presented visually in CG or PG. In critical trials, CG information had to be integrated while privileged information had to be suppressed. Listeners mastered the integration of CG. Yet, slower RTs, and enhanced late positivities in the ERPs showed that CG integration had its costs. Moreover, eye-tracking data indicated an early anticipation of referents in CG but an inability to suppress looks to the privileged competitor, resulting in later and longer looks to targets in those trials, in which CG information had to be considered. Our data therefore support accounts that foresee an early anticipation of referents to be in CG but a rather late and effortful integration if conflicting information has to be processed. We show that both perspectives, PG and CG, contribute to socially situated language processing and discuss the data with reference to theoretical accounts and recent findings on the use of CG information for reference resolution. (shrink)

That demonstratives often have endophoric functions marking referents outside the physical space of interaction but accessible through cognition, especially memory, is well-known. These functions are often classified as independent from exophoric ones and are typically seen as secondary with respect to spatial deixis. However, data from multiple languages show that cognitive access to referents functions alongside of perceptual access, including vision. Cognitive access is enabled by prior interactions and prior familiarity with the referents. As a result of such interactions, the (...) interlocutors share a great deal of knowledge about the referents, which facilitates reference to objects in the interactive field. The centrality of common ground in reference to an object at the interactive scene challenges the often assumed classification of demonstrative reference into exophoric and endophoric. I illustrate this idea throughout the paper by using first-hand data from Mano, a Mande language of Guinea. Adding another argument in favor of viewing demonstrative reference as a social, interactive process, the Mano data push the idea of salience of non-spatial parameters further and emphasizes the importance of short and long-term interactional history and cultural knowledge both for the choice of demonstratives in exophoric reference and for the structuring of the demonstrative paradigm. (shrink)

In this paper we address the issue of grounding for experiential concepts. Given that perceptual demonstratives are a basic form of such concepts, we examine ways of fixing the referents of such demonstratives. To avoid ‘encodingism’, that is, relating representations to representations, we postulate that the process of reference fixing must be bottom-up and nonconceptual, so that it can break the circle of conceptual content and touch the world. For that purpose, an appropriate causal relation between representations and (...) the world is needed. We claim that this relation is provided by spatial and object-centered attention that leads to the formation of object files through the function of deictic acts. This entire causal process takes place at a pre-conceptual level, meeting the requirement for a solution to the grounding problem. Finally we claim that our account captures fundamental insights in Putnam’s and Kripke’s work on “new” reference. (shrink)

아우구스티누스의 『질서론』(De ordine)은 카펠라의 저작에 앞서 7자유교과를 체계적으로 다룬 최초의 작품이다. 아우구스티누스는 이 저작에서 3학(trivium)과 4과(quadrivium)의 기본 형태를 제시하고 7자유교과의 의미와 정당성을 철학과 기독교적 가치로 입증하는 데 천착한다. 그에게 있어 7자유교과는 총체적 지식, 즉 우주적 질서에 도달하기 위한 방법임과 동시에 우주적 질서(ordo universitatis)의 일부분이다. 아우구스티누스는 보편적 우주의 질서에 도달하기 위해서는 자유교과가 반드시 가르침의 올바른 순서(ordo eruditionis)에 의해 확장해야만 한다고 말한다. 그는 7자유교과를 언어 분과와 수학분과로 나누는데, 이렇게 나눌 수 있는 근거도 필연적 발달 단계에 따른 것이다. 또한 그는 7자유교과가 이성적 활동에 (...) 최적화된 교과로 구성되었기 때문에 개별 교과는 이성(ratio)의 활동 여부에 따라 우선순위를 갖는다고 강조한다. 아우구스티누스의 7자유교과는 철학과 기독교적 가치를 강조한다는 점에서 로마의 학자들과 구분되며, 자유교과를 표준화하려고 노력한다는 점에서 그리스 학자들과 구분된다. 또한 자유교과의 위상을 신적 질서의 일부분으로 상정한다는 점에서 이전 기독교 학자들과도 구분된다. 아우구스티누스의 7자유교과는 단순히 로마의 자유교과를 기독교적으로 변용한 것이 아니라, 전문화된 로마의 자유교과 체제에 신적 질서와 그리스의 철학적 정당화를 종합하여 독특한 자유교과 체제를 구성한 것이다. 중세 학자들은 카펠라의 문학적인 내용을 적극 수용하여 7자유교과를 발전시켰지만, 자유교과의 존재 이유를 밝혀주는 아우구스티누스가 없었다면 800년 동안 7자유교과에 천착하는 일은 없었을 것이다. (shrink)

Past research has sought to elucidate how speakers and addressees establish common ground in conversation, yet few studies have focused on how visual cues such as co-speech gestures contribute to this process. Likewise, the effect of cognitive constraints on multimodal grounding remains to be established. This study addresses the relationship between the verbal and gestural modalities during grounding in referential communication. We report data from a collaborative task where repeated references were elicited, and a time constraint was imposed (...) to increase cognitive load. Our results reveal no differential effects of repetition or cognitive load on the semantic-based gesture rate, suggesting that representational gestures and speech are closely coordinated during grounding. However, gestures and speech differed in their execution, especially under time pressure. We argue that speech and gesture are two complementary streams that might be planned in conjunction but that unfold independently in later stages of language production, with speakers emphasizing the form of their gestures, but not of their words, to better meet the goals of the collaborative task. (shrink)

This article discusses two puzzles regarding identity questions: (i) certain definites cannot occur in the post-copular position of identity questions; and (ii) the same definites are the only possible answers to identity questions with post-copular names. We demonstrate that the range of these definites crucially depends on interlocutors' shared assumptions about how entities in the physical surroundings are perceived and categorized. We propose that these definites are directly referential in the sense of Kaplan (1989a,b), and only contribute the referent itself (...) to the semantic composition. To explain the asymmetry between perceptually grounded descriptions and proper names, we draw on Gupta's (1980) framework of relative identity. This analysis suggests that direct reference is not always determined lexically, but is—at least in part—a pragmatic phenomenon. More generally, this phenomenon shows that natural language is sensitive to the source of information in the common ground. (shrink)

The current paper argues for synchronising spatial frames of reference for achieving effective multiparty communication in collaborative virtual environments. Synchronising nonverbal behaviour from different modalities is an important step for simulating face-to-face-interaction where all nonverbal cues are available. Such synchronisation also serves as an effective basis for building multimodal interfaces especially if these have to be deployed for multiparty communication. It is argued that common spatial reference frames are helpful in coordinating different points of attention and facilitating work (...) by serving as the springboard for joint attention among members of the team. Consequently, it is desirable to aim for such common grounds and not just focus on coordinating disjointed virtual spaces for facilitating decision-making by reducing felt collaborative effort. Implementing the synchronisation of spatial reference frames for modern technologies thus serves dual purposes by achieving common grounds in communication and maintaining autonomy of each member at the same time. Towards this end, the current paper proposes the concept of decentred egocentric frame, the origin of which is one’s own body and the spatial relation between two objects is defined with respect to this origin. This frame seems to be important for separating each member’s focus from his own body (self/activities) and also helps in coordinating one’s focus with those of the others whether interacting verbally or nonverbally. This is an important conceptual development as the proposed classification is hypothesised to function in a similar manner across different sensory modalities. The paper concludes with issues on implementation and other future conceptual developments. (shrink)

Prawitz has recently developed a theory of epistemic grounding that differs in many respects from his earlier semantics of arguments and proofs. An innovative approach to inferences yields a new conception of the intertwinement of the notions of valid inference and proof. We aim at singling out three reasons that may have led Prawitz to the ground-theoretic turn, i.e.: a better order in the explanation of the relation between valid inferences and proofs; a notion of valid inference based on (...) which valid inferences and proofs are recognisable as such; a reconstruction of the deductive activity that makes inferences capable of yielding justification per se. These topics are discussed by Prawitz with reference to a very general and ancient question: why and how correct deduction has the epistemic power to compel us to accept its conclusions, provided its premises are justified? We conclude by remarking that, in spite of some improvements, the ground-theoretic approach shares with the previous one a problem of vacuous validity which, as Prawitz himself points out, blocks in both cases a satisfactory explanation of epistemic compulsion. (shrink)

Leading experts and rising stars in the field explore whether cosmopolitanism becomes impossible in the theoretical framework that assumed the absence of a final ground. The questions that the volume addresses refer exactly to the foundational predicament that characterizes cosmopolitanism: How is it possible to think cosmopolitanism after the critique of foundations? Can cosmopolitanism be conceived without an ‘ultimate’ ground? Can we construct theories of cosmopolitanism without some certainties about the entire world or about the cosmos? Should we continue to (...) look for foundations of cosmopolitan rights, norms and values? Alternatively, should we aim towards cosmopolitanism without foundations or towards cosmopolitanism with ‘contingent foundations’? Could cosmopolitanism be the very attempt to come to terms with the failure of ultimate grounds? Written accessibly and contributing to key debates on political philosophy, and social and political thought, this volume advances the concept of post-foundational cosmopolitanism by bridging the polarised approaches to the concept. (shrink)

Most authors on metaphysical grounding have taken full grounding to be an internal relation in the sense that it's necessary that if the grounds and the grounded both obtain, then the grounds ground the grounded. The negative part of this essay exploits empirical and provably nonparadoxical self-reference to prove conclusively that even immediate full grounding isn't an internal relation in this sense. The positive, second part of this essay uses the notion of a “completely satisfactory explanation” (...) to shed light on the logic of ground in the presence of self-reference. This allows us to develop a satisfactory logic of ground and recover a sense in which grounding is still an internal relation. (shrink)

Evidence from cognitive science supports the claim that humans and other animals see the world as divided into objects. Although this claim is widely accepted, it remains unclear whether the mechanisms of visual reference have representational content or are directly instantiated in the functional architecture. I put forward a version of the former approach that construes object files as icons for objects. This view is consistent with the evidence that motivates the architectural account, can respond to the key arguments (...) against representational accounts, and has explanatory advantages. I draw general lessons for the philosophy of perception and the naturalization of intentionality. (shrink)

The debate over rival conceptions of political legitimacy tends to focus on first-order considerations—for example, on the relative importance of procedural and substantive values. In this essay, I argue that there is an important, but often overlooked, distinction among rival conceptions of political legitimacy that originates at the meta-normative level. This distinction, which cuts across the distinctions drawn at the first-order level, concerns the source of the normativity of political legitimacy, or, as I refer to it here, the grounds of (...) political legitimacy. If we focus on the grounds of political legitimacy, there are three main conceptions of political legitimacy: will-based, belief-based, and fact-based conceptions. I present an objection to each of those main conceptions and defend a hybrid account of the grounds of political legitimacy. (shrink)

Grounding refers to expressions that establish a connection between the ground and the content evoked by a nominal or finite clause. In this paper we report on two grammatical implementations of nominal grounding in Argentine Sign Language: pointing and placing. For pointing constructions, we also examine distal-proximal pointing and directive force. We introduce the concept of placing, in which a sign is produced at a specific meaningful location in space. Two types of placing are discussed: Placing-for-Creating, in which (...) a new meaningful location is created, and Placing-by-Recruiting, which recruits an existing meaningful location. We suggest that our analysis of pointing and placing provides an account of nominal grounding unified by general cognitive principles as described within the theory of Cognitive Grammar. Pointing is known to occur in all signed languages studied to date. Although previously undocumented, we suggest that placing is also common to many, perhaps all, signed languages. (shrink)

The double function of language, as a social/communicative means, and as an individual/cognitive capability, derives from its fundamental property that allows us to internally re-represent the world we live in. This is possible through the mechanism of symbol grounding, i.e., the ability to associate entities and states in the external and internal world with internal categorical representations. The symbol grounding mechanism, as language, has both an individual and a social component. The individual component, called the “Physical Symbol (...) class='Hi'>Grounding“, refers to the ability of each individual to create an intrinsic link between world entities and internal categorical representations. The social component, called “Social Symbol Grounding“, refers to the collective negotiation for the selection of shared symbols and their grounded meanings. The paper discusses these two aspects of symbol grounding in relation to distributed cognition, using examples from cognitive modeling research on grounded agents and robots. (shrink)

The concept of supervenience and a regimented concept of grounding are often taken to provide rival explications of pre-theoretical concepts of dependence and determination. Friends of grounding typically point out that supervenience claims do not entail corresponding grounding claims. Every fact supervenes on itself, but is not grounded in itself, and the fact that a thing exists supervenes on the fact that its singleton exists, but is not grounded in it. Common lore has it, though, that (...) class='Hi'>grounding claims do entail corresponding supervenience claims. In this article, I show that this assumption is problematic. On one way of understanding it, the corresponding supervenience claim is just an entailment claim under a different name. On another way of understanding it, the corresponding claim is a distinctive supervenience claim, but its specification gives rise to what I call the "reference type problem": to associate the classes of facts that are the relata of grounding with the types of facts that are the relata of supervenience. However it is understood, supervenience rules out prima facie possibilities: alien realizers, blockers, heterogeneous realizers, floaters, and heterogeneous blockers. Instead of being rival explications of one and the same pre-theoretical concept, grounding and supervenience may be complementary concepts capturing different aspects of determination and dependence. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new theory of grounding. The theory has it that grounding is a job description that is realized by different properties in different contexts. Those properties play the grounding role contingently, and grounding is the property that plays the grounding role essentially. On this theory, grounding is monistic, but ‘grounding’ refers to different relations in different contexts. First, I argue against Kit Fine’s monist univocalism. Next, I argue against (...) Jessica Wilson’s pluralist multivocalism. Finally, I introduce monist multivocalism, explicate three versions of it (of which the above is one), and show its advantages. (shrink)

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. In this collection of writings on images and visual art, the author explores this through an extraordinary range of references.

This paper discusses critically a proposal by David Kaplan and others to ground reference in an antecedent having in mind and it examines the commitments of a conception of reference freed of cognition.

Linguistics and philosophy have provided distinct views on the nature of reference to individuals in language. In philosophy, in particular in the tradition of direct reference, the distinction is between reference and description. In linguistics, in particular in the tradition of generative grammar, the distinction is between pronouns and R-expressions. I argue for a third conception, grounded in dynamic semantics, in which the main watershed is between definites, which trigger presuppositions that want to be bound, and indefinites, (...) which set up new discourse referents. On this view, proper names, indexicals, and definite descriptions are all analyzed as presupposition triggers. (shrink)

While speakers have been shown to adapt to the knowledge state of their addressee in choosing referring expressions, they often also show some egocentric tendencies. The current paper aims to provide an explanation for this “mixed” behavior by presenting a model that derives such patterns from the probabilistic combination of both the speaker's and the addressee's perspectives. To test our model, we conducted a language production experiment, in which participants had to refer to objects in a context that also included (...) a visually misleading object whose function was either known to both partners, or known just to the speaker but not the addressee. Modeling results indicate that the experimental findings cannot be explained by assuming that speakers tailor a referring expression solely to their own perspective or to the perspective of their addressee. Instead, accounting for the behavioral pattern requires an approach where both perspectives influence the choice of referring expressions. Nevertheless, in our situation, speakers consider their partner's perspective more than their own. (shrink)

The idea that reference is multiply grounded allows causal-historical theories of reference to account for reference change. It also threatens the stability of reference in light of widespread error and confusion. I describe the problem, so far unrecognised, and provide a solution based on the phenomenon of semantic deference, which I differentiate from reference-borrowing. I conclude that deference has an authentic foundational semantic role to play.

This article explores the complementary strengths and weaknesses of grounded and abstract representations in the domain of early algebra. Abstract representations, such as algebraic symbols, are concise and easy to manipulate but are distanced from any physical referents. Grounded representations, such as verbal descriptions of situations, are more concrete and familiar, and they are more similar to physical objects and everyday experience. The complementary computational characteristics of grounded and abstract representations lead to trade‐offs in problem‐solving performance. In prior research with (...) high school students solving relatively simple problems, Koedinger and Nathan (2004) demonstrated performance benefits of grounded representations over abstract representations—students were better at solving simple story problems than the analogous equations. This article extends this prior work to examine both simple and more complex problems in two samples of college students. On complex problems with two references to the unknown, a “symbolic advantage” emerged, such that students were better at solving equations than analogous story problems. Furthermore, the previously observed “verbal advantage” on simple problems was replicated. We thus provide empirical support for a trade‐off between grounded, verbal representations, which show advantages on simpler problems, and abstract, symbolic representations, which show advantages on more complex problems. (shrink)

On some formulations of Direct Reference the semantic value, relative to a context of utterance, of a rigid singular term is just its referent. In response to the apparent possibility of a difference in truth value of two sentences just alike save for containing distinct but coreferential rigid singular terms, some proponents of Direct Reference have held that any two such sentences differ only pragmatically. Some have also held, more specifically, that two such sentences differ by conveying distinct (...) conversational implicata, and that a conflation of implicatum with semantic content leads speakers to judge such sentences capable of differing in truth value. It is argued here that this latter defense of Direct Reference employs false explanans, on the ground that speakers conflate semantic content with implicatum only in quite special cases, and we have independent grounds for thinking that sentences reporting speech acts and attitudes are not cases of this sort. (shrink)

This article investigates the concept of the ground truth as both an epistemic and technical figure of knowledge that is central to discussions of machine vision and media techniques of visuality. While ground truth refers to a set of remote sensing practices, it has a longer history in operational photography, such as aerial reconnaissance. Building on a discussion of this history, this article argues that ground truth has shifted from a reference to the physical, geographical ground to the surface (...) of the images echoing earlier points raised by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy that there is a ground of the image that is central to the task of analysis beyond representational practices. Furthermore, building on the practices of pattern recognition, composite imaging, and different interpretational techniques, we discuss contemporary practices of machine learning that mobilizes geographical earth observation datasets for experimental purposes, including tests such as “fake geography” as well as artistic practices, to show how ground truth is operationalized in such contexts of AI and visual arts. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that (...) they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words ; they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words ; they were presented as new labels for these real words ; and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words. In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding the corresponding aspects of word meaning. (shrink)

Resistance movements have traditionally posited a logocentric reality to counter the prevailing structure of dominance. This element of opposition--in the humanities it has been a transhistorical nature and self--is characterized as a preideological essence. Whether this identity is a worker, a woman, the coherent individual, or nature, the tendency has been to use it as a cultural critique as well as an ontologically superior source for representation in literature and for recasting the shape of society. In the process, however, resistance (...) movements tend to replicate--by their participation in logocentricity--the problems of exclusion, hierarchy, mystification, and authority that they initially oppose. ;Examining the use that Emerson, Melville, Jeffers and Snyder make of the term "nature" provides a structure for discussing the problem of attempting to establish a point outside of the text. In addition, the use of nature has a specific role in relation to particular historical moments--nineteenth-century expansion; World War II; and Vietnam--in the works of these writers. ;Emerson is an often referenced source as an example of the oppositional spirit. One finds, however, that his attempt to depoliticize nature results in a centering of anthropocentric concerns. His treatment of the term exposes the criss-crossing of cultural currents and the attempt to locate power. As a result, Emerson inadvertently serves the interests of empire within a rhetoric of freedom. ;Melville probes the possibilities of nature as a ground and finds that the aesthetics of doubleness suggests political contradiction, epistemological relativity, and the will to power. Melville also explores the political and particularly male usages of metaphor. ;Jeffers and Snyder continue to work against a human centered form of resistance and representation. Jeffers posits women and nature against a patriarchal world of violence and narcissism. While tending to posit an essentialist concept of nature, Jeffers nevertheless sets the stage for a nonfoundationalist ecofeminism. Snyder appropriates this framework and, with the help of Hopi myth and Buddhist teachings, moves closer to a resistance that challenges without reference to authority. (shrink)

Most, if not all, philosophers agree that computers cannot learn what words refers to from raw text alone. While many attacked Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, no one seemed to question this most basic assumption. For how can computers learn something that is not in the data? Emily Bender and Alexander Koller ( 2020 ) recently presented a related thought experiment—the so-called Octopus thought experiment, which replaces the rule-based interlocutor of Searle’s thought experiment with a neural language model. The Octopus (...) thought experiment was awarded a best paper prize and was widely debated in the AI community. Again, however, even its fiercest opponents accepted the premise that what a word refers to cannot be induced in the absence of direct supervision. I will argue that what a word refers to _is_ probably learnable from raw text alone. Here’s why: higher-order concept co-occurrence statistics are stable across languages and across modalities, because language use (universally) reflects the world we live in (which is relatively stable). Such statistics are sufficient to establish what words refer to. My conjecture is supported by a literature survey, a thought experiment, and an actual experiment. (shrink)

This paper aims to propose a version of the description theory of reference –for short, descriptivism– on natural kind terms. This version is grounded on some proposals of descriptivists, such as Searle and Strawson, about proper names, which will be extended to natural kind terms. According to Searle and Strawson the reference of a proper name is determined by a sufficient number of the descriptions that speakers associate with the name, but among the sorts of descriptions admitted by (...) these authors are those in which the average speaker defers the reference of a term to other speakers. In this regard, descriptivism can accept Putnam’s thesis of the division of linguistic labour and claim that some of the descriptions associated by non-experts have the function of deferring the reference of natural kind terms to their reference in the use by experts. Thus, descriptivism can maintain that the reference of a natural kind term is determined by a sufficient number of the descriptions that experts concerning a natural kind associate with the term. I will argue that this version of descriptivism, which grants more weight to social links than to historical links, can explain better than Kripke’s theory the reference of the use of natural kind terms by the average speaker. (shrink)

A substantial amount of recent work in natural language generation has focused on the generation of ‘‘one‐shot’’ referring expressions whose only aim is to identify a target referent. Dale and Reiter's Incremental Algorithm (IA) is often thought to be the best algorithm for maximizing the similarity to referring expressions produced by people. We test this hypothesis by eliciting referring expressions from human subjects and computing the similarity between the expressions elicited and the ones generated by algorithms. It turns out that (...) the success of the IA depends substantially on the ‘‘preference order’’ (PO) employed by the IA, particularly in complex domains. While some POs cause the IA to produce referring expressions that are very similar to expressions produced by human subjects, others cause the IA to perform worse than its main competitors; moreover, it turns out to be difficult to predict the success of a PO on the basis of existing psycholinguistic findings or frequencies in corpora. We also examine the computational complexity of the algorithms in question and argue that there are no compelling reasons for preferring the IA over some of its main competitors on these grounds. We conclude that future research on the generation of referring expressions should explore alternatives to the IA, focusing on algorithms, inspired by the Greedy Algorithm, which do not work with a fixed PO. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of intermedial references, the matters of conditions, necessity and relevance of their interpretation. It discusses the question of semantic value of an intermedial reference rather than of its aesthetic, pragmatic, modal or other aspects. It considers the lack of coherence between the theoretical propositions of intermedial studies, grounded in the studies of intertextuality, and the practice of analysis. In theory, every intermedial reference configures semantic dialogue between qualified media (configurations), thus requires conceptualisation. (...) Yet, the practice of analysis reveals that some of them perform exclusively aesthetic function and invite to keep reception within the limits of perception. Therefore I make an attempt to define the criteria of textual request for conceptualisation/interpretation set up in a text as such. I propose to revise the relevant insights of different intertextual and semiotic approaches, to perform their revision, modification and extension, to articulate possible solution and exemplify it by filmic references to painting. (shrink)

Reference groups and complaints about inequality Although influence of reference population on assessment of individual position is well recognized on the ground of sociology, its impact is rarely taken into account in economic analysis of inequality. Few analyses that are concerned with issue of reference groups in the context of inequality and relative deprivation measurement deal, however, with single reference group. The aim of the paper is consideration on how concept of reference populations of different (...) kind may be applied to assessment of aggregated complaint that results from inequality in income distribution. (shrink)

In order to investigate whether addressees can make immediate use of speaker‐based constraints during reference resolution, participant addressees' eye movements were monitored as they helped a confederate cook follow a recipe. Objects were located in the helper's area, which the cook could not reach, and the cook's area, which both could reach. Critical referring expressions matched one object (helper's area) or two objects (helper's and cook's areas), and were produced when the cook's hands were empty or full, which defined (...) the cook's reaching ability constraints. Helper's first and total fixations showed that they restricted their domain of interpretation to their own objects when the cook's hands were empty, and widened it to include the cook's objects only when the cook's hands were full. These results demonstrate that addressees can quickly take into account task‐relevant constraints to restrict their referential domain to referents that are plausible given the speaker's goals and constraints. (shrink)

The symbol grounding problem (SGP) proposed by Stevan Harnad in 1990, originates from Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” and refers to the problem of how a pure symbolic system acquires its meaning. While many solutions to this problem have been proposed, all of them have encountered inconsistencies to different extents. A recent approach for resolving the problem is to divide the SGP into hard and easy problems echoing the distinction between hard and easy problems for resolving the enigma of consciousness. (...) This however turns out not to be an ideal strategy: Everything related to consciousness that cannot be well-explained by present theories can be categorized as a hard problem which as a consequence would doom the SGP to irresolvability. We therefore argue that the SGP can be regarded as a general problem of how an AI system can have intentionality, and develop a theoretical direction for its solution. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the conception of “institutional moral theory” that Allen Buchanan lays out in his work. I argue that it moves within a trilemma of grounding. The trilemma arises because the three routes to grounding we find in Buchanan’s works – the anthropological route appealing to human nature, the liberal route appealing to liberal values and the institutionalist route appealing to practice-immanent values – are mutually exclusive. But more than that, each horn of the trilemma (...) encounters counterarguments from within Buchanan’s own thought, not only from the perspective of the other horns. Finally, I suggest a fourth alternative that refers to a notion of “justificatory responsibility” that Buchanan also suggests. (shrink)

Abstract‘Structure’ is the term whose proper use is exemplified by an expression like ‘the structure of a diesel-engine,’ in which what is referred to is accessible to immediate observation. It is also used figuratively like ‘social structure.’ While unobservable, what is referred to is empirically accessible. By contrast, molecules are neither observable nor empirically accessible. What philosophical grounds enable us to design invisible structure of molecules? Our cognition of objects becomes realized as phenomena when objects are given to our phenomenal (...) fields. (Ochiai, Found Chem 22:77–86, 2020a, Found Chem 22:457–465, 2020b, A philosophical essay on molecular structure, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp 147–174, 2021) A phenomenal field is a pictorial representation of the mind’s self-transcending character and shows the relation between ‘self’ and ‘world.’ Molecular structure becomes realized as an affordance of molecules in a phenomenal field proper to organic chemists. It is a context-sensitive dispositional attribute of an {organic chemist-world} complex. Although designing molecules presupposes molecular structure, the latter is not sufficient for the former to make sense. Molecules must be designable as well. Designing molecules aims to create or modify molecular structure in order to provide compounds with certain chemical and/or physical properties. That is, designable molecules make sense in contexts in which they serve as a means to achieve this purpose and become realized as an affordance. Given that molecular structure and designable molecules are affordances of molecules, the fact that there are contexts in which they make sense provides grounds for conceiving and designing invisible structure of molecules. Heidegger’s arguments in Being and Time about characteristics of the being of beings corroborate our argument that what becomes realized as an affordance exists as what he calls a useful thing for us. (shrink)

What does it mean to say that one experience is synthesized with others? This study is a speculative-exegetical Husserlian account of the ground, the mechanisms, and the results of synthesis. A detailed, rigorous and systematic analysis of Husserl's Logical Investigations, it argues that synthesizing consciousness must be a self-explicating system of interpretive acts driven by ongoing forward and backward references, grounding its structures as it proceeds and positing its origins as that which must have been given `in advance'. It (...) thus develops a dialectical phenomenology grounded in Husserl's largely untreated category of `referring backward'. This book provides the first systematic examination of synthesis in Husserl's major early work. It offers Husserl scholars a wide range of original interpretations, on issues ranging from closed and unclosed linguistic expressions, to the indeterminacy of perspective, to the ego's return to itself. At the same time, it contributes a new model for dialogue among phenomenology, dialectics, and deconstruction, by incorporating a metaphysics of subjectivity and a structure of open-ended interpretation into a phenomenological framework. (shrink)