I have attempted to show that many attributive adjectives can be dealt with within the framework of first-order predicate calculus by the method suggested in this paper. I've also supplied independent reasons for the claim that attributive adjectives that are not responsive to this method require a formal treatment different from the one that the adjectives successfully dealt with by that method require. Thus, if the method I've argued for is sound, then the scope of first-order predicate calculus (...) was shown to be wider than assumed by several logicians. This I take to be of interest from a logical point of view. (shrink)

Peter Geach’s distinction between logically predicative and logically attributive adjectives has gained a certain currency in philosophy. For all that, no satisfactory explanation of what an attributive adjective is has yet been provided. We argue that Geach’s discussion suggests two different ways of understanding the notion. According to one, an adjective is attributive just in case predications of it in combination with a noun fail to behave in inferences like a logical conjunction of two separate (...) predications. According to the other, an adjective is attributive just in case it cannot be applied in a truth-value-yielding fashion unless combined with a noun. The latter way of understanding the notion has been largely neglected by Geach’s critics, but we argue that taking account of it shows the misguided nature of some of their objections, and also yields a more satisfactory explanation of attributivity than does the other. (shrink)

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase (...) meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. (shrink)

It is a consequence of both Kennedy and McNally’s typology of the scale structures of gradable adjectives and Kennedy’s :1–45, 2007) economy principle that an object is clean just in case its degree of cleanness is maximal. So they jointly predict that the sentence ‘Both towels are clean, but the red one is cleaner than the blue one’ :259–288, 2004) is a contradiction. Surely, one can account for the sentence’s assertability by saying that the first instance of ‘clean’ is used (...) loosely: since ‘clean’ pragmatically conveys the property of being close to maximally clean rather than the property of being maximally clean, the sentence as a whole conveys a consistent proposition. I challenge this semantics–pragmatics package by considering the sentence ‘Mary believes that both towels are clean but that the red one is cleaner than the blue one’. We can certainly use this sentence to attribute a coherent belief to Mary: One of its readings says that she believes that the towels are clean by a contextually salient standard ; the other says that she believes that the towels are clean by her own standard. I argue that Kennedy’s semantics–pragmatics package can’t deliver those readings, and propose that we drop the economy principle and account for those readings semantically by assigning to the belief sentence two distinct truth conditions. I consider two ways to deliver those truth-conditions. The first one posits world-variables in the sentence’s logical form and analyzes those truth-conditions as resulting from two binding possibilities of those variables. The second one proposes that the threshold function introduced by the phonologically null morpheme pos is shiftable in belief contexts. (shrink)

What I have attempted to show in the foregoing is that: (1) For any frequency adjective f, there is an element of meaning common to both the adverbial and the generic usage of f; this is a function f′ from propositions to truth-values such that f′(Φ)′ is true at an interval i iff Φ′ is true at subintervals of i distributed through i in a certain way. (2) In an adverbial use of f, f′ functions like the corresponding frequency (...) adverb. (3) In a generic use of f, f′ quantifies the times intervals which a specified object is realized by some stage. (4) In their adverbial usage, frequency adjectives are not regular attributive adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place, but are perhaps determiners. And (5) in their generic usage, frequency adjectives are adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place.More generally, I hope to have suggested something of the range of uses to which frequency is put in natural language. That we effortlessly grasp what is meants by Monday, the Columbus Dispatch, autumn, the Today Show, and so on, demonstrates our fluency in interpreting certain sequences of objects, events, or states of affairs as sequences of values of some function cycling on a time-axis. Much more must ultimately be told about the psychological and anthropological significance of frequency. (shrink)

Comparatives are among the most extensively investigated constructions in generative grammar, yet comparatives involving attributive adjectives have received a relatively small amount of attention. This paper investigates a complex array of facts in this domain that shows that attributive comparatives, unlike other comparatives, are well-formed only if some type of ellipsis operation applies within the comparative clause. Incorporating data from English, Polish, Czech, Greek, and Bulgarian, we argue that these facts support two important conclusions. First, violations of Ross’s (...) Left Branch Condition that involve attributive modifiers should not be accounted for in terms of constraints on LF representations (such as the Empty Category Principle), but rather in terms of the principle of Full Interpretation at the PF interface. Second, ellipsis must be analyzed as deletion of syntactic material from the phonological representation. In addition, we present new evidence from pseudogapping constructions that favors an articulated syntax of attributive modification in which certain types of attributive modifiers may occur outside DP. (shrink)

I follow the distinction of predicative versus attributive adjectives introduced by P.T. Geach in 1956 and discuss Atina Knowles' arguments contra the revisions of Geach's original conception.

This paper investigates the distinction between determining and modifying expressions that played an important role in the Brentano School. The focus lies on how the distinction is applied to adjectives by Anton Marty and Kazimierz Twardowski. In ‘heavy gun’, ‘heavy’ plays a determining role: heavy guns are guns; in ‘fake gun’, ‘fake’ plays a modifying role: fake guns are no guns at all. According to Marty and Twardowski, when a modifying adjective is combined with a noun, it shifts the (...) meaning of the noun. This paper rejects this proposal and proposes a better account which was developed by Bernard Bolzano: the difference between determining and modifying adjectives must be understood in terms of how their meanings figure in meaning analyses of adjective-noun combinations. (shrink)

What semantics should we attribute to nouns like "wisdom" and "generosity", which are derived from gradable adjectives? We show that, from a morphosyntactic standpoint, these nouns are mass nouns. This leads us to consider and answer the following questions. How are these nouns interpreted in their various uses? What formal representations may one associate with their interpretations? How do these depend on the semantics of the adjective? And where lies the semantic unity of nouns like wisdom and generosity with (...) the more familiar concrete mass nouns, like wine and furniture? (shrink)

The basic idea of conversational contextualism is that knowledge attributions are context sensitive in that a given knowledge attribution may be true if made in one context but false if made in another, owing to differences in the attributors’ conversational contexts. Moreover, the context sensitivity involved is traced back to the context sensitivity of the word “know,” which, in turn, is commonly modelled on the case either of genuine indexicals such as “I” or “here” or of comparative adjectives such as (...) “tall” or “rich.” But contextualism faces various problems. I argue that in order to solve these problems we need to look for another account of the context sensitivity involved in knowledge attributions and I sketch an alternative proposal. (shrink)

Degree readings of size adjectives, as in big stamp-collector, cannot be explained away as merely the consequence of some extragrammatical phenomenon. Rather, this paper proposes that they actually reflect the grammatical architecture of nominal gradability. Such readings are available only for size adjectives in attributive positions, and systematically only for adjectives that predicate bigness. These restrictions can be understood as part of a broader picture of gradable NPs in which adnominal degree morphemes—often overt—play a key role, analogous to their (...) role in the extended AP. Size adjectives acquire degree readings through a degree morpheme similar to the one that licenses AP-modifying measure phrases. Its syntax gives rise to positional restrictions on the availability of these readings, and the semantics of degree measurement interacts with the scale structure of size adjectives to give rise to restrictions on the adjective itself. (shrink)

One of the hypotheses about mental representation of conversion (i.e. zero-derivation) claims that converted forms are a product of a costly mental process that converts a word’s category into another one when needed, i.e., depending on the syntactic context in which the word appears. The empirical evidence for the claim is based primarily on self-paced reading experiments by Stolterfoht, Gese, and Maienborn (2010) in which they explored the assumed conversion of German verbs into adjectives in two syntactic contexts with participle (...) II. In our priming study, we show that the effects that had been attributed to the conversion process are in fact frequency effects. In addition, based on our data we argue that participle II has the same word class in both syntactic contexts, as assumed by traditional German grammars. The same pattern of frequency effects was observed for German native speakers and advanced L2 German learners. (shrink)

Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Sanusi is one of the most important Ash'ari theologist in the 15th century North Africa. It is known that he wrote in most of the theological sciences which mainly in theology and mysticism. The fact that logic science is also included among these sciences, reflects the level of development in terms of "istidlal". Senûsî's booklet named "Umm al-berahin” was written with the purpose of proving the belief that "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his (...) messenger" is the source of all faith. In addition to the inferences about Allah and His attributes he also explained the attributes that must be found in the messengers based on the word "Muhammad is His messenger" and also tried to prove these features, which are considered to be truthfulness, rescript and notification, with various arguments. According to Sanusi, who defends the opinion that belief to the Hereafter, other prophets, angels, sacred books were entering this context, this is because the Prophet brought religion as a means to attest to all this. He based his inferences about the messengers adjectives on the inverse analogy in "Umm al-barahin". Besides, he used "inference by using miracle", "arrangement two original according to a result", "chained analogy", "arrangement according to two original results" and "abbreviated analogy" forms. (shrink)

Geach and Thomson have argued that nothing is just plain good, because ‘good’ is, logically, an attributive adjective. The upshot, according to Geach and Thomson, is that consequentialism is unacceptable, since its very formulation requires a predicative use of ‘good’. Reactions to the argument have, for the most part, been uniform. Authors have converged on two challenging objections . First, although the logical tests that Geach and Thomson invoke clearly illustrate that ‘good’, as commonly used, is an (...) class='Hi'>attributive, they don’t show that ‘good’ lacks an intelligible predicative interpretation. Second, even if the English word ‘good’ fails to express the property of goodness, we can just stipulate that ‘good*’ expresses goodness and thus formulate consequentialism accordingly. The second objection is one way of voicing skepticism about the method of drawing substantive philosophical conclusions from considerations about ordinary language. In this essay, we present an argument, inspired by Geach and Thomson, which isn’t susceptible to the same objections but which supports the same conclusion. The significance of our argument for ethics is obvious; it challenges the intelligibility of standard consequentialism, and even certain forms of non-consequentialism. One might be inclined to think that a more sophisticated consequentialism, which relies on ‘good {possible world/state of affairs/outcome}’ instead of just ‘good’, evades the criticism. But we explain why the criticism can’t be so easily evaded. (shrink)

G.E. Moore said that rightness was obviously a matter of maximising plain goodness. Peter Geach and Judith Thomson disagree. They have both argued that ‘good’ is not a predicative adjective, but only ever an attributive adjective: just like ‘big.’ And just as there is no such thing as plain bigness but only ever big for or as a so-and-so, there is also no such thing as plain goodness. They conclude that Moore’s goodness is thus a nonsense. However (...) attention has been drawn to a weakness in their arguments. Mahrad Almotahari and Adam Hosein have sought to plug that weakness. If their plug holds, then there is no goodness. Doing most of their work is the following premise: adjective φ is predicative only if it can be used predicatively in ‘x is a φ K’ otherwise it is attributive. In this paper I argue that this premise is false, that their plug does not hold and that if one is to reject plain goodness it will have to be for other reasons. (shrink)

In his celebrated 'Good and Evil' (l956) Professor Geach argues as against the non-naturalists that ‘good’ is attributive and that the predicative 'good', as used by Moore, is senseless.. 'Good' when properly used is attributive. 'There is no such thing as being just good or bad, [that is, no predicative 'good'] there is only being a good or bad so and so'. On the other hand, Geach insists, as against non-cognitivists, that good-judgments are entirely 'descriptive'. By a consideration (...) of what it is to be an A, we can determine what it is to be a good A, even where the ‘A’ in question is ‘human being’. These battles are fought on behalf of naturalism, indeed, of an up-to-date Aristotelianism. Geach plans to 'pass' from the 'purely descriptive' man to good/bad man, and from human act to good/bad human act. I argue: (l) That the predicative 'good' does have a genuine sense and that it is a mistake to suppose that ‘good’ is a purely attributive adjective. This does not entail that the predicative good (as used by Moore) denotes a non-natural property, but his mistake, if any is metaphysical or ontological not conceptual. (2) That the attributive 'good' cannot be used to generate a naturalistic ethic. It is difficult to extract a set of biologically based requirements out of human nature that are a) reasonably specific; b) rationally binding or at least highly persuasive; and c) morally credible. -/- On the way I protest against Geach’s tendency to try to win arguments by affecting not to understand things. -/- My views to some extent anticipate those of Kraut in *Against Absolute Goodness*. (shrink)

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’s “Moral Twin Earth” thought experiment allegedly undercuts virtually any form of naturalist moral realism. I argue that a neo-Aristotelian conception of moral properties defeats Moral Twin Earth. Developing themes in the work of Peter Geach, Philippa Foot, and Rosalind Hursthouse, I sketch an Aristotelian moral semantics that is unique in construing terms like ‘right’ and ‘good’ exclusively as attributive adjectives that denote relational properties. On this view, moral goodness is a relational property predicated of (...) those human beings that satisfy kind-relative criteria of goodness; i.e., morally good human beings are good qua human being. The reference of moral terms is therefore fixed by the natural properties of human beings. This account ensures that moral facts cannot differ across worlds in which the relevant natural facts do not differ and thus defeats Moral Twin Earth. (shrink)

When one wishes to formulate, evaluate and implement public policies, the existence of a plurality of social actors, with interest in the policy being assessed, generates a conflictual situation. How such a conflict should be dealt with? This paper defends the thesis articulated in the following points: Different metrics are linked to different objectives and values. To use only one measurement unit for incorporating a plurality of dimensions, objectives and values, implies reductionism necessarily. Point can be proven as a matter (...) of formal logic by drawing on the work of Geach about moral philosophy. This theoretical demonstration is an original contribution of this article. Moreover, here the distinction between predicative and attributive adjectives is formalised and definitions are provided. Predicative adjectives are further distinguished into the new categories of absolute and relative ones. The new concepts of set commensurabi... (shrink)

Geach is best known for his contributions to theoretical philosophy: Most of his more than one hundred papers and a dozen books are on logic, philosophy of language and metaphysics. But he also made significant contributions to ethics. Particularly influential were a series of short metaethics papers, which are small masterpieces, both in terms of philosophical content and style. In usually less than ten pages, Geach delivers sharp analyses and powerful objections against influential schools. His arguments are always so clear (...) and his examples so simple that they leave the reader wondering why no one before Geach detected the problems he points out. (shrink)

Predicate nominals (e.g., “is a female”) seem to label or categorize their subjects, while their adjectival correlates (e.g., “is female”) merely attribute a property. Predicate nominals also elicit essentializing inferential judgments about inductive potential and stable explanatory membership. Data from psychology and semantics support that this distinction is robust and productive. I argue that while the difference between predicate nominals and predicate adjectives is elided by standard semantic theories, it ought not be. I then develop and defend a psychologically motivated (...) semantic account on which predicate nominals attribute kind membership and trigger a presupposition that underpins our essentialist judgments. (shrink)

John MacFarlane has formulated a version of truth-relativism, and argued for its application in some cases – future contingents, knowledge attributions and epistemic modals among them. Mark Richard also defends a version of relativism, which he applies to vagueness-inducing features of the semantics of gradable adjectives. On MacFarlane’s and Richard’s characterization, truth-relativist claims posit a distinctive kind of context-dependence, the dependence of the evaluation of an assertion as true or otherwise on aspects of the context of the evaluation itself – (...) in contrast with the context of the assertion. The paper follows Evans in distinguishing two forms of truth-relativism, a moderate one concerning the evaluation of contents or propositions, an a radical one concerning the evaluation of acts; it argues against Richard’s truth-relativist proposals for gradable adjective, which is understood to be of the second kind, while accepting a form of moderate content-relativism for those cases. (shrink)

This paper explores an understudied and poorly understood phenomenon of morphological syncretism in which a morpheme otherwise used to mark the head of a possessive NP appears on words naming property concept (PC) states (states named by adjectives in languages with that lexical category; Dixon, Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in Semantics and Syntax, 1982) in predicative and attributive contexts. This phenomenon is found across a variety of unrelated languages. We examine its manifestation in Ulwa, (...) an endangered Misumalpan language of Nicaragua, where diachronic evidence clearly shows that a single affix is involved. We propose an explanation for the syncretism based on an explicit syntactic and semantic analysis of the relevant constructions. On the proposed explanation, the syncretism arises out of a combination of semantic and morphosyntactic facts of Ulwa grammar. Specifically, we propose that the Ulwa pattern exemplifies a possessive strategy of predication. Intuitively, this strategy is a manifestation in grammar of the idiomatic equivalence between the property of being F and the property of having F-ness. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that while truth-conditional semantics in generative linguistics provides lots of good semantic explanations, truth-conditions do not play an important role in these explanations. That is, the fact that expressions have the particular truthconditional contents they have does not even partly explain facts about semantic phenomena. Rather, explanations of semantic phenomena appeal to extra-truth-conditional properties attributed to expressions via their lexical entries. Focusing on recent truth-conditional work on gradable adjectives and degree modifiers by Kennedy and McNally, (...) I show that the best explanations of semantic anomaly and entailment for these expressions are non-truth-conditional—they do not depend on the fact that these expressions have the truth-conditional contents they have. I then provide reasons for thinking that the point generalizes beyond gradable adjectives and degree modifiers to other expressions, and beyond anomaly and entailment to other semantic phenomena. Truth-conditional content, generally, is extrasemantic. (shrink)

Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. An outstanding question is how to compositionally derive CIC from coherence relations. This paper takes strides in answering this question. It first provides experimental support for the existence of CIC (...) via offline evidence that attributive (non-)deverbal adjectives can trigger the same causal inferences within clauses that their predicative counterparts can trigger across clauses, albeit more weakly. To explain the experimental results, we use tools in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which allows us to show that causal inferences can be derived in various ways, depending on whether deverbal adjectives are used attributively or predicatively. If the former, they are presupposition triggers and the coherence relations Elaboration/Continuation compete with Background; if the latter, Explanation/Result compete with Background. These different competitions -- cashed out in terms of interaction between default axioms -- correlate with the difference in the relative salience of the causal inferences. (shrink)

Frank Sibley was one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics of the last fifty years, whose published papers are required reading for serious students of the subject. Approach to Aesthetics will be welcomed both for bringing together these well known papers, and for its inclusion of new, previously unpublished papers. This timeless body of work will continue to demand and reward the attention of scholars and students.

The articles in this volume showcase the potential richness of frame representations. The presentation includes introductory articles on the application of frames to linguistics and philosophy of science, offering readers the tools to conduct the interdisciplinary investigation of concepts that frames allow. * Introductory articles on the application of frames to linguistics and philosophy of science * Frame analysis of changes in scientific concepts * Event frames and lexical decomposition * Properties, frame attributes and adjectives * Frames in concept composition (...) * Nominal concept types and determination "This volume deals with frame representations and their relations to concept types in linguistics and philosophy of science. It aims at reviving concepts and frames as a common model across disciplines for representing semantic and conceptual knowledge. Departing from the general assumption that frames are not just an arbitrary format of representation but essential to human cognition, a number of case studies apply frames as an analytical tool to a wide range of phenomena, from changes in scientific concepts to particular linguistic phenomena. This provides new insights into long-standing semantic issues, such as the lexical representation of verbs (as predicative frames specifying particular event descriptions or situation types and their participants), adjectives and nominals (as concept frames, which provide attributes and properties of an entity), as well as modification, complementation, possessive constructions, compounding, nominal concept types, determination, or definiteness marking." Bert Gehrke, Pompeu, Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain. (shrink)

The study deals with some of the central issues concerning the notion of death as discussed in Theravāda (Pāli Buddhism) as well as Mahāyāna Buddhism. What is the sense that death is regarded as an instance of duḥkha (Sanskrit) or dukkha (Pāli)? The research claims that here, firstly, the word duḥkha/dukkha is used as an adjective (which means ‘unsatisfactory’) rather than a noun (which means 'pain' or 'suffering'). Secondly, by death, the Buddha did not mean the act of dying (...) but the experience of someone's death or the idea of death. The Buddha also talked about deathlessness as the goal. Here, deathlessness does not amount to accepting something eternal but developing a proper perspective towards death by meditations such as that on impurity ( аśubhabhāvanā ) and contemplation on death ( maraṇānussati ). If the cessation of the cycle of rebirths and re-deaths ( punarmṛtyu ) is the ultimate goal that the arhat (Sanskrit), or arahant (Pāli), achieves, then the same should apply to Tathāgata. In that case, the problem suggests itself: how could the question of Tathāgata’s existence after death be accounted for as an unanswerable ( avyākṛta )? The study opines that the reason behind this is the profound, immeasurable, unfathomable nature attributed to Tathāgata. The research also discusses the basic difference between the attitudes on death in Śrāvakayāna and Mahāyāna. Lastly, it deals with the question of whether termination of one’s own life is permissible in Buddhism under certain conditions. (shrink)

Social theory has a discovered and discoverable past and a complex, contested, dynamic, and anxious present. All of these adjectives save the last one-anxious-are reflected in various ways and with differing emphases throughout this handbook. I will say something about "anxious" below, but before doing so will offer a rationale for producing this multi-authored, two-volume overview reflecting the diversity of theory work in sociology and offering a sense of both where the discipline has come and where it is today. There (...) is no univocal answer to the question, What does social theory mean? Since the institutionalization of sociology in the academy and its development of subfields, theory has found a place in the overall educational structure of the discipline, in a manner akin to the way that methodology has. That is to say, both theory and methodology have been viewed in some fashion as essential to sociological inquiry, and thus relevant to all of the substantive subfields within it. At the same time, it became clear early on that consensus regarding the meaning of theory has proven elusive. As World War II came to an end and the rapid expansion in higher education was about to commence, Robert K. Merton (1945), the protégé of Talcott Parsons, claimed that six types of analysis had come to be described as sociological theory. Over six decades later, Gabriel Abend (2008) identified seven distinct though sometimes overlapping meanings attributed to theory-a figure that Omar Lizardo (2014) thinks is at the lower end of the actual number of different meanings. (shrink)

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that (...) number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting. (shrink)

A complete collection of Frank Sibley's articles on philosophical aesthetics, this volume includes five, remarkable, hitherto unpublished papers written in Sibley's later years. It addresses many topics, among them the nature of aesthetic qualities versus non-aesthetic qualities, the relation of aesthetic description to aesthetic evaluation, the different levels of evaluation, and the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. The later papers constitute both a significant development of Sibley's individual approach to aesthetics, such as his discussion of the distinction between attributive and (...) predicative uses of adjectives and of the aesthetic significance of tastes and smells, a topic Sibley considered to be much neglected. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs Moore's Open Question Argument (OQA) and discusses its rise and fall. There are three basic objections to the OQA: Geach's point, that Moore presupposes that ?good? is a predicative adjective (whereas it is in fact attributive); Lewy's point, that it leads straight to the Paradox of Analysis; and Durrant's point that even if 'good' is not synonymous with any naturalistic predicate, goodness might be synthetically identical with a naturalistic property. As against Geach, I argue that (...) 'good' has both predicative and attributive uses and that in moral contexts it is difficult to give a naturalistic account of the attributive 'good'. To deal with Lewy, I reformulate the OQA. But the bulk of the paper is devoted to Durrant's objection. I argue that the post-Moorean programme of looking for synthetic identities between moral and naturalistic properties is either redundant or impossible. For it can be carried through only if 'good' expresses an empirical concept, in which case it is redundant since naturalism is true. But 'good' does not express an empirical concept (a point proved by the reformulated OQA). Hence synthetic naturalism is impossible. I discuss direct reference as a possible way out for the synthetic naturalist and conclude that it will not work. The OQA may be a bit battered but it works after a fashion. (shrink)

The paper highlights proof-theoretic semantics as providing natural resources for capturing semantic variation in natural language. The semantic variations include:Distinction between extensional predication and attribution to intensional transitive verbs a non-specific object.Omission of a verbal argument in a transitive verb.Obtaining sameness of meaning of sentences with transitive verbs with omitted object and existentially quantified object.Blocking unwarranted entailments in adjective–noun combinations.Capturing quantifier scope ambiguity.Obtaining context dependent quantifier domain restriction. The proof-theoretic resources employed to capture the above semantic variations include:The use (...) of different kinds of formal parameters and different ways of binding them to predicates.Omission of a premise from a proof-rule.Basing meanings on derivations in meaning-conferring proof-systems.Appealing to substructurality of I/E-rules.Controlling the order of rule applications in derivations.Controlling the open formulas participating in a context within a sequent. (shrink)

The Kiki-Bouba effect comprises a relation between two abstract figures and two non-words: the star-shaped figure is called 'Kiki' and the rounded figure 'Bouba'. The effect is explained by a sound-vision synaesthesia: certain sounds are associated with certain shapes in a non-arbitrary manner.When we asked the participants to decide which of the two figures, the star-shaped or the rounded one, to call yin and which yang, some 85% choose the star-shaped figure as yin. There are previous cases of synaesthesia where (...) personality is attributed to numbers or letters. In our results, the word Kiki is overall happy, clever, small, thin, young, unpleasant, and nervous. The starshaped figure is overall clever, tall, small, slim, nervous, unpleasant, and upper-class. That is, the correspondence above all concerns the qualifying adjectives clever, unpleasant, and nervous, as well as the physical appearance small and thin. This brings us to the fat-thin effect. Cinema, literature, comics, and children's programmes are full of contrasting figures: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Laurel and Hardy , Asterix and Obelix, Tintin and Captain Haddock, Bert and Ernie , or the Spanish comic about very naughty twin boys called Zipi and Zape . Our main conclusion is that first names and last names are not entirely arbitrary. There is a correspondence between names and physical characteristics and concepts . The Kiki-Bouba effect is a semantic one. (shrink)

Let’s define epistemological direct realism as the view that we have noninferentially justified beliefs in at least some contingent propositions describing the external physical world. I add the adjective “external” here so as to leave open the question of whether sensations and other mental phenomena are themselves physical. I take it that an indirect realist can consistently maintain both that all knowledge of external physical reality must be inferred from knowledge of subjective sensations and also conclude that subjective sensations (...) are, for example, brain states. It’s a bit awkward, however, to use the cumbersome expression “external physical reality” and so for ease of exposition I shall often omit the adjective “external.” I shall say that a proposition describes the physical world only if its truth entails a proposition which attributes to some object those properties in virtue of which the thing is physical. So, for example, I might be able to know that the F exists, where the F is, in fact, a physical object. But if the proposition that the F exists does not entail that the F is physical, the proposition that the F exists is not, in this sense, a proposition describing the physical world. Berkeley, for example, sometimes posed as an epistemological direct realist when he claimed both that we can know unproblematically that certain ideas exist and that a physical object is nothing but a bundle of ideas. But when he was being careful he made clear that the ideas we know directly are never by themselves constitutive of a physical object—at best they are logical “parts” of objects. On his more sophisticated view, knowledge that a given physical object exists would always require inference—complex inference at that. Berkeley was no epistemological direct realist. (shrink)

The provision of services by companies in specific domains requires continuous commitment and a constructive approach to meet customer requirements, however, it is often challenging to determine the level of customer satisfaction without their feedback. Therefore, this paper attempts to provide a solution to this problem by using comments from social networks and evaluating their sentiment using the VADER model. In order to accomplish the aim of our research, a lexicon has been built with more than 9500 adjectives and verbs (...) from the Albanian language based on VADER which is just in the initial form and the sentiments are evaluated as positive, neutral, or negative. The lexicon was constructed for the Albanian language and two companies of the Republic of Kosovo were researched as case studies. Furthermore, the sentiment estimation, using the VADER model, in case of our datasets, we obtained a high accuracy, approximately between 89% and 95%. This level of accuracy has been primarily attributed to the application of all preprocessing steps within the dataset, which significantly enhances the model’s performance. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to sketch out the conceptual possibility of what is given the name remuant existence. That is to say, a changeable, restless and fickle existence. The word remuant, no longer in common use in the English language, is an adjective. Its meaning offered here is used to designate what will be considered the qualifying attribute of existence, which is to make the point that existence is remuant existence. Existence is a common noun and thereby grammatically (...) a universal but if it cannot exist without being remuant its nominal universality is of no significance. The universality of existence does not mean anything; only remuant existence has meaning. The articulation of this concept, and those which are concomitant with it, is primarily an untangling of the remuant from the critique of presence and of the subject offered by Jacques Derrida, whose influence remains visitant throughout. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism (‘EC’), the view that the truth-values of knowledge attributions may vary with the context of ascription, has a variety of different linguistic implementations. On one of the implementations most popular in the early days of EC, the predicate ‘knows p’ functions semantically similarly to gradable adjectives such as ‘flat’, ‘tall’, or ‘empty’. In recent work Jason Stanley and John Hawthorne have presented powerful arguments against such implementations of EC. In this article I briefly systematize the contextualist analogy to (...) gradable adjectives, present Stanley’s argument against the analogy, and offer a contextualist response that abandons the analogy in favor of modeling the semantics of ‘knows p’ along the lines of quantifier expressions. I then present Hawthorne’s objection to the views presented, and finally conclude by outlining an argument to the effect that ‘knows p’ is an automatic indexical and as such to be expected to function differently from many other indexicals that the term has been compared to in the literature. I finally point out that no analogy should be expected to be perfect, and that no harm is done by postulating some unique behavior of ‘knows p’. (shrink)

Systematic studies of translation which follow the scientific profile of theories and seek to individuate the methodological features that should be attributed to practical activity, the multiplicity of directions and solutions of logical and philosophical theories of language, the many facets of semiotics, the plurality of anthropological approaches tied into the multiform horizons of hermeneutical reflection, combine to increase the speculative problem of translation, which takes shape in the nexus between identity and otherness. These issues are examined in relation to (...) B. Lonergan: not just regarding the experience of translating Insight but also through analysing the difficulty of translation which Longergan himself had to face in studying Aquinas. In particular, there is discussion of the meaning of the word 'insight' as it was used in Verbum. The contents of the word as used there help to explain its meaning in Insight, while at the same time we can recognise the renewed and stronger form of the word in the latter work. Translation of the adjective 'actual' leads to the need both to understand each word within many contexts and to interpret these contexts. (shrink)

One of the ways in which a poet may show his quality is by discrimination and originality in his choice of adjectives. Poetry likes to adorn the bare noun; a noun such as ‘the sky’ calls out for an attribute. But in practice the poet has to take care to avoid the cliche. He can seldom write ‘the blue sky’; even ‘the azure sky’ has become trite. He has to search for the epithet which will be both apt and original.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 417-418 [Access article in PDF] Heidi M. Ravven and Lenn E. Goodman, editors. Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy. Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 290. Cloth, $78.50. Paper, $26.95.The current anthology presents an important contribution to the study of Spinoza's relation to Jewish philosophy as well as to contemporary scholarship of Spinoza's metaphysics and political (...) theory.In the opening essay, Lenn Goodman takes upon himself the ambitious task of evaluating Spinoza's positions as to several central disputes throughout the history of philosophy. In this rich and extensive essay Goodman argues that Spinoza's radical rationalism makes him pursue syntheses between traditionally opposed poles. Lee Rice's article, "Love of God in Spinoza," carefully analyzes Spinoza's concept of love and suggests the existence of three kinds of love parallel to the three kinds of knowledge. Warren Montag addresses the unresolved issue of Spinoza's relation to the Kabbalah. Montag sides with Deleuze against the association of Spinozism with the Neo-Platonic theory of emanation, arguing that unlike the Neo-Platonists and Kabbalists, Spinoza's view of God rules out any hierarchy, and does not assume a descent from primal simplicity into complexity. Edwin Curley contributes a beautiful reading of the story of Job and of Maimonides' interpretation of the story. Curley follows Maimonides' discussion of the various positions regarding the question of divine providence and his attempt to identify the speeches of the characters of the book of Job with each of these positions. Following a sensitive consideration of various attempts to [End Page 417] recover Maimonides' own rather concealed view about providence, Curley concludes that "[W]hatever you think Maimonides' final word on Job is, our examination of him certainly supports [Spinoza's] claim that [Maimonides] reads Scripture in terms of Platonic or Aristotelian speculations" (170).Warren Zev Harvey's essay addresses Spinoza's most neglected work, the Compendium of the Grammar of the Hebrew Language. Apart from providing an outline of Spinoza's work as a Hebrew grammarian ("a noun-intoxicated grammarian") and pointing out some of Spinoza's more eccentric views about the nature of the Hebrew language, Harvey makes a compelling case for the importance of the book for the study of Spinoza's metaphysics. He points out a fascinating analogy which Spinoza draws between the parts of speech: (proper) noun, adjectives, and participles, and Spinoza's key metaphysical terms: substance, attributes, and modes. (Think about the weighty implications of this analogy for Curley's interpretation of the substance-mode relation.) According to Harvey, Spinoza's claim that all Hebrew words are derived from nouns is a linguistic parallel to Spinoza's pivotal metaphysical doctrine which makes all things be in the substance (or God). Kenneth Seeskin's article discusses the views of Maimonides and Spinoza on the question of creation and God's relation to the world. Seeskin reconstructs an interesting critical dialogue between these two philosophers. According to Seeskin, both philosophers held that an effect must be similar to its cause. Maimonides' commitment to Negative Theology and to the denial of any common measure between God and finite things forced him to deny causal or explanatory relation between God and the world. What Maimonides can suggest instead is rather to prove that the emergence of the world ex nihilo and according to the divine will, is possible, and even likely given certain astronomical facts of medieval science. Thus, Maimonides would hold that "although we have grounds for believing that creation occurred, we will never be in a position to say how" (120). For Spinoza, such a view constitutes nothing but a "sanctuary of ignorance." Thus, according to Seeskin, Spinoza affirms a clear causal relation between God and the world of finite things insofar as God is said to explain the world. While I tend to agree with most aspects of this analysis, it is important to note that Spinoza also claims that "between the finite and infinite there is no relation" (Letter 54). This... (shrink)

A proposition containing an adjectival predicate has customarily been described as one which predicates some quality of its subject; thus "William is white" is said to attribute whiteness to William. The concrete adjectival form in such a situation was sometimes said (e. g. by Boethius) to be derived from the corresponding abstract (as "white" from whiteness, "just" from justice, and so on), thus enabling the subject in question to be "denominated" from the abstract by means of the concrete. The quality (...) is then said to be predicated of its subject in a denominative or paronymous fashion. Involved here also is the shaky assumption that adjectives may indeed be distinguished from substantives on the basis of the former's correlation with available abstract forms which the latter lack, but this need not concern us here. (shrink)