Predictive Sentencing addresses the role of risk assessment in contemporary sentencing practices. Predictive sentencing has become so deeply ingrained in Western criminal justice decision-making that despite early ethical discussions about selective incapacitation, it currently attracts little critique. Nor has it been subjected to a thorough normative and empirical scrutiny. This is problematic since much current policy and practice concerning risk predictions is inconsistent with mainstream theories of punishment. Moreover, predictive sentencing exacerbates discrimination and disparity in sentencing. Although structured risk (...) assessments may have replaced 'gut feelings', and have now been systematically implemented in Western justice systems, the fundamental issues and questions that surround the use of risk assessment instruments at sentencing remain unresolved. This volume critically evaluates these issues and will be of great interest to scholars of criminal justice and criminology. (shrink)

The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic/sentence-external and sentence-internal readings of singular different . The empirical motivation for such an account is provided by a cross-linguistic survey and an analysis of the differences in distribution and interpretation between singular different , plural different and same (singular or plural) in English. The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-internal (...) uses of singular different to be distinct, much as its deictic uses require the values of two discourse referents to be distinct. Thus, we take sentence-internal readings to be a form of ‘association with distributivity’ that is similar to association with focus. The contrast between singular different , plural different and same is explained in terms of several kinds of quantificational distributors that license their internal readings. The analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system couched in type logic, so we get compositionality in the usual Montagovian way. Quantificational subordination and dependent indefinites in various languages provide additional motivation for the account. Investigating the connections between items with sentence-internal readings and the quantificational licensors of these readings opens up a larger project of formally investigating (i) the typology of quantificational distributors and distributivity-dependent items and (ii) the fine-grained contexts of evaluation needed to capture this typological variation. (shrink)

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. (...) They are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated”. This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example : I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account : the structure of sentence does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account. (shrink)

According to non-cognitivism, moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. This paper presents an empirical argument against this view. We begin by showing that non-cognitivism entails the prediction that after some reflection competent ordinary speakers’ semantic intuitions favor that moral sentences and judgements do not aim to represent how things morally are. At first sight, this prediction may seem to have been confirmed by previous research on folk metaethics. However, a number of methodological (...) worries lead us to doubt this interpretation. We, therefore, conducted a psychological study that alleviates these worries as far as possible. It turned out that competent ordinary speakers’ reflective semantic intuitions dominantly fail to favor that moral sentences do not aim to represent how things morally are. This challenge to non-cognitivism is defended and supplemented by considering deflationary theories of moral truth and middle ground theories in the cognitivism/non-cognitivism debate. (shrink)

In this paper, I have proposed a compositional semantic analysis of exception NPs from which three core properties of exception constructions could be derived. I have shown that this analysis overcomes various empirical and conceptual shortcomings of prior proposals of the semantics of exception sentences. The analysis was first formulated for simple exception NPs, where the EP-complement was considered a set-denoting term and the EP-associate was a monadic quantifier. It was then generalized in two steps: first, in order to (...) account for quantified EP-complements, and second, in order to account for polyadic quantifiers as the EP-associates. An additional assumption that was made in several places was that EPs may operate at the level of implications. The consequences of this assumption, though, still have to be investigated. (shrink)

Un empire - la domination exercee par la Bible et les autorites - fit naitre en retour le reve d'exercer un pouvoir par l'activite intellectuelle, fondee sur une maitrise du Livre et materialisee par les productions de textes. Ainsi s'etablit le savoir scolastique. Le present ouvrage propose une etude du sens et des moyens de l'activite de pensee lors d'un des beaux matins de l'Occident medieval. Alain Boureau montre d'abord comment se forma une communaute intellectuelle, qui etait aussi une corporation (...) sociale, source de promotion et d'exclusion, d'exaltation libre et de dures contraintes. L'institution s'etablit autour d'un texte d'enseignement et de debat, les Sentences de Pierre Lombard. Un savoir nouveau en terre chretienne impliquait de maitriser les elements de l'heritage religieux et ancestral: la Bible, les principes de la foi et la patristique. Apres avoir analyse les techniques textuelles mises en pratique, que sont l'abstraction intellectuelle et son complement, la casuistique, l'analyse universelle et l'elaboration des distinctions, Alain Boureau oppose la formation d'un langage rationnel dans la communaute scolastique au discours institutionnel qui se solidifia, et a la grande singularite d'une parole individuelle issue de la langue commune. L'Empire du livre constitue, apres La Religion de l'Etat, le deuxieme volume de la serie La Raison scolastique. Alain Boureau, directeur d'etudes a l'EHESS, est medieviste. Parmi ses derniers ouvrages: La Papesse Jeanne, La Religion de l'Etat. La construction de la Republique etatique dans le discours theologique de l'Occident medieval,,, De vagues individus. La condition humaine dans la pensee scolastique,,. Theologie, science et censure au XIIIe siecle. Le cas de Jean Peckham. (shrink)

In this paper I present an empirical solution to the puzzle of Macbeth's dagger. The puzzle of Macbeth's dagger is the question of whether, in having his fatal vision of a dagger, Macbeth sees a dagger. I answer this question by addressing a more general one: the question of whether perceptual verbs are intensional transitive verbs (ITVs). I present seven experiments, each of which tests a collection of perceptual verbs for one of the three features characteristic of ITVs. One (...) of these features is Nonexistence: the failure of sentences involving transitive verbs to entail the existence of their direct objects. The experiments reveal that with respect to all three of these features, "see" behaves much more like a paradigmatically extensional verb than an intensional one. But surprisingly, unlike "see", "perceive" behaves much more like a paradigmatically intensional verb. This shows that the category of perceptual verbs is not uniform with respect to the features of intensionality; while Macbeth does not see a dagger, he may still perceive one. (shrink)

Scott Soames has recently argued that traditional accounts of propositions as n-tuples or sets of objects and properties or functions from worlds to extensions cannot adequately explain how these abstract entities come to represent the world. Soames’ new cognitive theory solves this problem by taking propositions to be derived from agents representing the world to be a certain way. Agents represent the world to be a certain way, for example, when they engage in the cognitive act of predicating, or cognizing, (...) an act that takes place during cognitive events, such as perceiving, believing, judging and asserting. On the cognitive theory, propositions just are act types involving the act of predicating and certain other mental operations. This theory, Soames argues, solves not only the problem of how propositions come to represent but also a number of other difficulties for traditional theories, including the problem of de se propositions and the problems of accounting for how agents are capable of grasping propositions and how they come to stand in the relation of expression to sentences. I argue here that Soames’ particular version of the cognitive theory makes two problematic assumptions about cognitive operations and the contents of proper names. I then briefly examine what can count as evidence for the nature of the constituents of the cognitive operation types that produce propositions and argue that the common nature of cognitive operations and what they operate on ought to be determined empirically in cross-disciplinary work. I conclude by offering a semantics for cognitive act types that accommodates one type of empirical evidence. (shrink)

Structural realism has been proposed as an epistemological position interpolating between realism and sceptical anti-realism about scientific theories. The structural realist who accepts a scientific theory thinks that is empirically correct, and furthermore is a realist about the ‘structural content’ of . But what exactly is ‘structural content’? One proposal is that the ‘structural content’ of a scientific theory may be associated with its Ramsey sentence (). However, Demopoulos and Friedman have argued, using ideas drawn from Newman's earlier criticism (...) of Russell's structuralism, that this move fails to achieve an interesting intermediate position between realism and anti-realism. Rather, () adds little content beyond the instrumentalistically acceptable claim that the theory is empirically adequate. Here, I formulate carefully the crucial claim of Demopoulos and Friedman, and show that the Ramsey sentence () is true just in case possesses a full model which is empirically correct and satisfies a certain cardinality condition on its theoretical domain. This suggests that structural realism is not a position significantly different from the anti-realism it attempts to distinguish itself from. Introduction Technical framework Ramsification Empirical adequacy Ramsification empirical adequacy + cardinality constraint Conclusion. (shrink)

The opening sentence to Michael Hardt's and Antonio Negri's Empire1 is pregnant with promise and peril. Signifying a process deemed to be under way, it hearkens back to and beyond that famous Manifesto of 1848, even while looking forward to a time when what is now only imminent will have become reality. In part summoned into existence to fulfill the ancient prophecies of declining Rome and rising Christianity, Empire is said to be 'realizing' or 'manifesting' itself in time honoured (...) 19th-century, especially Marxist, fashion; but whereas the specter invoked by the Communist Manifesto haunted only a continent, the immaterial spirit of Empire, dripping crisis like ectoplasm, stalks the entire world. (shrink)

Carnap’s search for a criterion of empirical significance is usually considered a failure. I argue that the results from two out of his three different approaches are at the very least problematic, but that one approach led to success. Carnap’s criterion of translatability into logical syntax is too vague to allow for definite results. His criteria for terms—introducibility by chains of reduction sentences and his criterion from “The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts”—are almost trivial and have no clear relation (...) to the empirical significance of sentences. However, his criteria for sentences—translatability, verifiability, falsifiability, confirmability—are usable, and under the assumptions needed for the Carnap sentence approach, verifiability, falsifiability, and translatability become equivalent. As a result of the Carnap sentence approach, metaphysics is rendered analytic. (shrink)

Grodzinsky's theory of agrammatic sentence processing fails to account for crucial empirical facts. In contrast to his predictions, the data show that there are (1) degrees of severity and (2) problems with sentences that do not require movement, and that (3) under the right task circumstances, full-fledged syntactic trees are constructed.

There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to complex expressions on the basis (...) of their structure and the semantic values of their constituents, and a finite number of production schemata. The theory enables the derivation of truth-conditions for each sentence of the language: something of roughly the form ‘S is true iff P’.1 The claim that speakers stand in a cognitive relation to such theories is advanced, not as a conceptual analysis of semantic competence or understanding, but rather as an empirical hypothesis about human speakers in particular, one part of a broader empirical account of our linguistic competence and cognition generally. It therefore must mesh with the rest of our theorizing in these areas and whatever relevant data from neighboring inquiries there may be. The precise nature of the cognitive relation a speaker is supposed to bear to a truththeory is a matter of some dispute. I speak of ‘‘cognizing’’ (following. (shrink)

Legal theorists have characterized physical evidence of brain dysfunction as a double-edged sword, wherein the very quality that reduces the defendant’s responsibility for his transgression could simultaneously increase motivations to punish him by virtue of his apparently increased dangerousness. However, empirical evidence of this pattern has been elusive, perhaps owing to a heavy reliance on singular measures that fail to distinguish between plural, often competing internal motivations for punishment. The present study employed a test of the theorized double-edge pattern (...) using a novel approach designed to separate such motivations. We asked a large sample of participants (N = 330) to render criminal sentencing judgments under varying conditions of the defendant’s mental health status (Healthy, Neurobiological Disorder, Psychological Disorder) and the disorder’s treatability (Treatable, Untreatable). As predicted, neurobiological evidence simultaneously elicited shorter prison sentences (i.e., mitigating) and longer terms of involuntary hospitalization (i.e., aggravating) than equivalent psychological evidence. However, these effects were not well explained by motivations to restore treatable defendants to health or to protect society from dangerous persons but instead by deontological motivations pertaining to the defendant’s level of deservingness and possible obligation to provide medical care. This is the first study of its kind to quantitatively demonstrate the paradoxical effect of neuroscientific trial evidence and raises implications for how such evidence is presented and evaluated. (shrink)

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real‐world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real‐world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal (...) states of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality. (shrink)

In what is known as the “received view” analysis, logical positivism construed scientific theories TC as being axiomatized in first‐order predicate calculus using proper axioms T (the theoretical laws) and having distinct observational and theoretical vocabularies VO and VT which are related to each other via a dictionary of correspondence rules C (see theories). Prior to 1936 the correspondence rules were required to be equivalences between VT terms and simple or complex observational conditions expressible using just VO terms that provided (...) noncreative explicit definitions of the terms (see craig's theorem). The empirical content of the theory TC was identified with the set O of theorems which contained VO but not VT terms. (shrink)

Despite intensive debates regarding action imitation and sentence imitation, few studies have examined their relationship. In this paper, we argue that the mechanism of action imitation is necessary and in some cases sufficient to describe sentence imitation. We first develop a framework for action imitation in which key ideas of Hurley’s shared circuits model are integrated with Wolpert et al.’s motor selection mechanism and its extensions. We then explain how this action-based framework clarifies sentence imitation without a (...) language-specific faculty. Finally, we discuss the empirical support for and philosophical significance of this perspective. (shrink)

1. The practice of morality raises the following two closely related questions in semantics and philosophical psychology: What do moral sentences mean? And what does it mean to make a moral judgeme...

Repeat offenders receive longer sentences than first offenders in virtually every modern jurisdiction. Such prior-record enhancements are politically popular. Scholars are more divided, especially regarding severe enhancements. Retributivists have long disagreed about which enhancements, if any, are morally justifiable and on what basis. This article advances the debate, offering lessons for retributivists on all sides. I address an intuitive argument that justifies enhancements in terms of character. This argument has been caricatured and dismissed, with defenders of enhancements preferring character-independent arguments. (...) I reconstruct an argument for enhancements that assumes recidivism constitutes evidence of culpability-aggravating character traits. The argument seems at least coherent, inferentially valid, and intuitively plausible. I then raise what I see as the real threats to the argument, which are neither conceptual nor normative, but empirical. I identify some formal features that the character argument requires of culpability-aggravating traits. To support enhancements, such traits must also correlate properly with criminal records. One place to look for characterizations of such traits, and evidence of correlation, is criminology, in theories of criminogenesis and criminality. I conclude that character arguments for prior-record enhancements cannot be dismissed, although their thorough evaluation awaits answers to complex empirical questions. (shrink)

The starting point of this paper is the empirically determined ability to reason in natural language by employing probable sentences. A sentence is understood to be logically probable if its schema, expressed as a formula in the language of classical propositional calculus, takes the logical value of truth for the majority of Boolean valuations, i.e., as a logically probable formula. Then, the formal system P is developed to encode the set of these logically probable formulas. Based on natural semantics, (...) a strong completeness theorem for P is proved. Alternative notions of consequence for logically probable sentences are also considered. (shrink)

It is often thought that questions of reference are crucial in assessing scientific realism, construed as the view that successful theories are at least approximately true descriptions of the unobservable; realism is justified only if terms in empirically successful theories generally refer to genuinely existing entities or properties. In this paper this view is questioned. First, it is argued that there are good reasons to think that questions of realism are largely decided by convention and carry no epistemic significance. An (...) alternative conception of realism is then proposed, which focuses on the Ramsey sentences of scientific theories, constructed in the manner of David Lewis's 'How to define theoretical terms'. It is argued that because the Ramsey sentence of a theory preserves the epistemically significant part of the theory's content without generating commitments to any particular conclusions about reference, the realism issue is better addressed by asking whether Ramsey sentences of theories, rather than the theories themselves, are approximately true. (shrink)

It is argued thatde dicto andde re beliefs are attitudes towards syntactically structured entities (sentences) in the head. In order to identify the content of ade dicto orde re belief, we must be able to match causal relations of belief states to natural language inferences. Such match-ups provide sufficient empirical justification for regarding those causal relations as syntactic transformations, that is, inferences. But only syntactically structured entities are capable of enjoying such inferential relations. Hence,de dicto andde re beliefs must (...) be syntactically structured. Given that beliefs are also brain states, it follows that they are sentences in the brain. The argument presented here is shown to be an improvement over similar arguments advanced by Harman and Fodor. (shrink)

Abstract Meeting the eliminativist challenge to folk psychology requires showing that beliefs have explanatory virtues unlikely to be duplicated by non?cognitive accounts of behavior. The explanatory power of beliefs is rooted in their intentionality. That beliefs have a distinctive kind of intentionality is shown by the distinctive intensionality of the sentences which report them. Contrary to Fodor, the fundamental explanatory virtues of beliefs are not to be found in their capacity to make causally inactive properties relevant to the explanation of (...) behavior. Rather, the distinctive intentionality of beliefs provides the best explanation of the fact that fully intelligent behavior displays a selectivity of response to properties of the perceptual environment. (shrink)

Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive languages like higher-order logic are ideally suited for representing and reasoning about structured knowledge. Uncertain knowledge can be modeled by using graded probabilities rather than binary truth-values. The main technical problem studied in this paper is the following: Given a set of sentences, each having some probability of being (...) true, what probability should be ascribed to other (query) sentences? A natural wish-list, among others, is that the probability distribution (i) is consistent with the knowledge base, (ii) allows for a consistent inference procedure and in particular (iii) reduces to deductive logic in the limit of probabilities being 0 and 1, (iv) allows (Bayesian) inductive reasoning and (v) learning in the limit and in particular (vi) allows confirmation of universally quantified hypotheses/sentences. We translate this wish-list into technical requirements for a prior probability and show that probabilities satisfying all our criteria exist. We also give explicit constructions and several general characterizations of probabilities that satisfy some or all of the criteria and various (counter) examples. We also derive necessary and sufficient conditions for extending beliefs about finitely many sentences to suitable probabilities over all sentences, and in particular least dogmatic or least biased ones. We conclude with a brief outlook on how the developed theory might be used and approximated in autonomous reasoning agents. Our theory is a step towards a globally consistent and empirically satisfactory unification of probability and logic. (shrink)

It is still an open question how senses of inherent polysemous words are represented and interpreted. Empirical results are not conclusive about the representation of polysemy. Therefore, different representation models try to give an answer about the puzzle of representation of polysemous words in general and of inherent polysemous words in particular. Inherent polysemous words are those that have several related senses that allow copredication, which occurs when one polysemous word is used to express simultaneously two related senses in (...) a sentence. Ortega-Andrés and Vicente, 2019) propose a rich semantic approach that explains the interpretation of copredicative sentences. This chapter has three goals: I discuss and classify underspecification approaches about the representation of polysemous words; I analyze some empirical results and their contributions to the debate about the representation of polysemy and inherent polysemy; and I argue that the rich account that Ortega-Andrés and Vicente give a plausible explanation about the representation of inherent polysemous words. (shrink)

Se afirma que los enunciados necesarios a posteriori, propuestos por S. Kripke, exigen una comprensión débil de la necesidad; esto quiere decir: a) existencia contingente del designatum y b) dependencia racionalista en principios lógicos a priori, particularmente los de diferencia y de identidad. La principal consecuencia es que los enunciados necesarios a posteriori corresponden a instancias de dichos principios lógicos. Contrario al racionalismo, esto no exige que dichos enunciados sean a priori, pues su justificación requiere información empírica. Finalmente, se defiende (...) que la distinción entre denotación y designación permite sostener que la necesidad débil se aplica a las instancias de la clase, y no a esta, con lo que se evita el indeterminismo referencial. The article states that a posteriori necessary sentences as proposed by S. Kripke require a weak understanding of necessity. This means: a) contingent existence of designatum, and b) rationalist dependence on a priori logical principles, particularly those of difference and identity. The main consequence is that a posteriori necessary sentences correspond to instances of these logical principles. Contrary to rationalism, this does not require that these be a priori sentences, given that their justification requires empirical information. Finally, the article argues that the distinction between denotation and designation supports the idea that weak necessity applies to instances of the class, and cannot be applied to the class itself, thus avoiding referential indeterminism. (shrink)

According to Thomasson’s Easy Ontology, all existential questions have straightforward answers and are solvable by conceptual and empirical work. So there is no need for traditional metaphysics to solve them. First, I give some counterexamples to this thesis from incomplete and undecidable theories. Then I discuss some possible responses, I consider a wider sense of conceptual analysis and argue that even in this sense Easy ontology is not able to resolve the problem and must sacrifice either easiness or answerability. (...) Finally, I will argue that although traditional metaphysics does not make the undecidable sentences answerable, it can still make sense of them and helps us to understand why there are unanswerable questions at all. (shrink)

Three experimental tasks—spontaneous telling of a story, reading, and parsing the story—were used to determine whether empirical data reflect the narrative structure of stories and can be predicted by a plot unit analysis of the stories (Lehnert, 1981). It was found that spontaneous pause durations at sentence breaks were highly correlated with the importance of these breaks as predicted theoretically. Only low correlations were obtained, however, when reading pause durations were correlated with the model. As for parsing values, (...) the value of the correlation coefficients depended on whether stories had sufficient superficial linguistic cues to help the subjects in parsing. It was concluded that spontaneous pausing not only reflects the narrative structure of stories, but can be used as a guide to constructing theories of narrative structure as well as for deciding between competing theories. (shrink)

The practice of sending parolees back to prison for violations of their parole conditions, which has grown seven-fold over the past 25 years and now contributes significantly to rising prison populations, has escaped rigorous empirical or theoretical analysis. This article suggests that this practice be understood as a form of sentencing , as a deprivation of liberty for violation of state-imposed rules. Seen through this lens, the practice of parole revocations is particularly vulnerable to critique as failing to meet (...) the standards of sentencing jurisprudence. The article calls for a reexamination of parole revocation policy using a sentencing framework. (shrink)

The current study aims to examine the hope levels of theology students in the context of their education level. The correlational (relational) screening method was used in this study. The sample of the study consists of a total of 429 students (328 girls, 101 boys) studying at the Faculty of Theology at Erzincan Binali Yildirim University. Hope levels of the students were determined by Karaca-Kandemir Hope Scale developed by Karaca and Kandemir. The scale consists of three sub-dimensions: goal-oriented, hope and (...) significance, and stability. One-way analysis of variance (ANO-VA) was used for data analysis. According to the findings obtained as a result of the analysis, it is seen that the education levels of the Theology Faculty students cause differentiation in terms of goal-oriented and stability which are sub-dimensions of hope; however, it was found that the scale did not cause any difference in terms of hope and meaningfulness subscale and total hope levels. This finding did not corroborate the research hypothesis that the higher the education level of theology faculty students, the higher their hope level. The results, however, give an idea that theology education can have a positive effect on students' hope levels.Summary: Hope, which is a fundamental feature of human existence, has many functions, both individually and socially. Hope, which is one of the main characteristics that distinguish human beings from other beings, is one of the most powerful tools that help create and implement future designs of individuals and societies. It is possible to see this powerful effect of hope in the object of all human works and actions such as art, literature, and architecture. However, despite the expressed impact of hope, religion, which accompanies it in the existential journey of humanity and is one of its most influential sources of motivation, has the potential to produce a highly useful function on hope. Because religion demands the individual to be future-oriented rather than the past. This demand of religion does not mean that the past actions of the individual and society have no importance. While building the future of the individual and society on lessons learned from the past, religion orders that he should not be a prisoner of his past and that he hopes for the energy he has produced by taking shelter in the attributes of Allah, Most Gracious and Merciful. For this reason, the Qur'an equates despair of Allah's mercy with coming out of religion (Yusuf 12 / / 87).Despite the strong relations between religion and hope, empirical studies on the issue are not yet adequate. However, in recent times, especially with the effect of Positive Psychology, it is a fact that empirical studies have been carried out to determine the relationship of these emotions with religiosity about positive emotions such as patience, optimism, empathy, and self-regulation. One of the positive emotions expressed is hope. However, it is seen that some empirical studies have been conducted on the relationship between hope and religiosity. However, apart from these studies, empirical studies on higher education levels are needed in order to reveal the relationship between hope and religiosity in a healthier way. Because of the strong relationship between religion and hope, it is expected that there will be an increase in parallel with the religious education taken in higher education. From this point of view, this study primarily aims to reveal the strong connection between religion and hope. The main problem of this study, which is based on the primary hypothesis that learning religion at a higher education level, will increase the level of hope of students, is the relationship between theology education and hope. In this study, which was conducted to determine the hope levels of the students of the Faculty of Theology, the method of collecting information related to the questionnaire technique used in the screening model was used.The population of the study consists of 744 students enrolled in Erzincan Binali Yıldırım University Theology Faculty in the fall semester of 2018-2019 academic year. The sample group of the research is 429 students in the faculty during the application period. Accordingly, 144 (33.6%) of the total students in the sample group were in the “preparatory class,” 79 (18.4%) were in the “first grade”, and 78 (18.2%) were in the “second grade,” while 60 (14.0%) were in the “third grade,” 68 (15.9%) were in the “fourth grade.”“Personal Data Questionnaire” and “Karaca-Kandemir’s Hope Scale” were used as data collection instruments. In the “Personal Data Questionnaire,” there are questions about the learning levels of the working group.Karaca-Kandemir’s Hope Scale, which is used in the study, is a scale developed by Karaca and Kandemir based on their cultural codes to determine the hope levels of individuals.The scale is a 5-point Likert type and consists of three sub-dimensions: “goal-oriented,” “hope and meaningfulness,” and “stability.” Of the 13 items in the scale, 8 (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10 and 12) had a positive sentence structure such as “Dreaming about the future excites me,” 5 of them (3, 6, 8, 11 and 13) it has a negative sentence structure such as “I cannot bring the end of a job easily after starting a job.” In the scoring phase of the hope scale, negative sentences were reversed. While the lowest score that can be obtained from the “goal-oriented” dimension of the scale is 5, the highest score is 25; the lowest score that can be obtained from the dimension of “hope and meaningfulness” is 4, the highest score is 20; the lowest score that can be obtained from the “stability” sub-dimension is 4, while the highest score is 20. As a result, the lowest score that can be obtained from the total of the scale is 13, and the highest score is 65. Low scores from the scale indicate that the individual's level of hope is low, and high scores indicate high levels of hope.In order to determine the differentiation between class levels, Single Factor Analysis of Variance-ANOVA was applied to the data set. As a result of the analysis, multiple comparisons were made between the means with statistically significant differences. For this purpose, Post Hoc LSD and Tukey HSD tests were used to determine the source of the difference. The significance level of “.05 “ was taken as a criterion for all these operations. In the research, it was seen that the education they received from the Faculty of Theology students caused a differentiation in the “goal-oriented and stability” sub-dimension of hope; however, “hope and meaningfulness” subscale and “total hope” did not cause any differentiation. This result did not confirm the research hypothesis that “the level of hope differs according to class (education) level and the level of hope increases as the level of education (education) increases hope. However, in the “goal-oriented” dimension of hope, the second and third-grade students of fourth-grade students; In terms of “stability” dimension, the fact that the first-grade students scored significantly higher than the preparatory class students gives an important idea that the education received in the Faculty of Theology can have an effect on hope. However, it is thought that similar studies that will be conducted with a large sample group and centering on all dimensions and hopes of religiosity will produce remarkable results. (shrink)

The sheer multitude of criteria of empirical significance has been taken as evidence that the pre-analytic notion being explicated is too vague to be useful. I show instead that a significant number of these criteria—by Ayer, Popper, Przełęcki, Suppes, and David Lewis, among others—not only form a coherent whole, but also connect directly to the theory of definition, the notion of empirical content as explicated by Ramsey sentences, and the theory of measurement; two criteria by Carnap and Sober (...) are trivial, but can be saved and connected to the other criteria by slight modifications. A corollary is that the ordinary language defense of Lewis, the conceptual arguments by Ayer and Popper, the theoretical considerations by Przełęcki, and the practical considerations by Suppes all apply to the same criterion or closely related criteria. Furthermore, the equivalence of some criteria allows for their individual justifications to be taken cumulatively and, together with the entailment relations between nonequivalent criteria, suggest criteria for general auxiliary assumptions, comparative criteria, and more liberal conceptions of observation. (shrink)

It is argued thatde dicto andde re beliefs are attitudes towards syntactically structured entities (sentences) in the head. In order to identify the content of ade dicto orde re belief, we must be able to match causal relations of belief states to natural language inferences. Such match-ups provide sufficient empirical justification for regarding those causal relations as syntactic transformations, that is, inferences. But only syntactically structured entities are capable of enjoying such inferential relations. Hence,de dicto andde re beliefs must (...) be syntactically structured. Given that beliefs are also brain states, it follows that they are sentences in the brain. The argument presented here is shown to be an improvement over similar arguments advanced by Harman and Fodor. (shrink)

Bishop sentences such as “If a bishop meets a bishop, he blesses him” have long been considered problematic for the descriptivist (or E-type) approach of donkey anaphora (e.g. Evans, 1977; Heim, 1990; and Neale, 1990). Elbourne (2005) offers a situational descriptivist analysis that allegedly solves the problem, and furthermore extends its explanatory coverage to bishop sentence with coordinate subjects. However, I throw serious doubts on Elbourne’s analysis. Specifically, I argue that the purported solution is committed to the use of (...) unbound anaphora, and it cannot sustain the claimed empirical adequacy. (shrink)

The relation between theory and reality is an important problem for phüosophy of science. Positivists or logical empkicists of the Vienna Circle have tried to solve it by postulating several types of so-called basic statements induced by immediate experience or observation. According to Neurath protocol sentences are distinguished from other synthetic sentences only m virtue of their syntactical form. Since consistency is a relation concerning sentences only, not a sentence and any immediate experience,he contends that there remains an unbridgeable (...) gap between observationstatements and observation itself and consequently he adopts a coherentist strategy of corroboration, which Schlick, as a thorough empiricist, wants to avoid. For that purpose he introduces the notion of "Konstatierung". Such ascertainments play a decisive role as endpoints in the corroboration of theories insofar as they serve to verify predictions which express expected ascertainments. In spite of the fact that they are synthetic wc recognize their truth when grasping their meaning and, therefore, error is precluded in their case, while protocol sentences remain mere hypotheses. Quine attempts to overcome the weaknesses of all prior positions by proposing a purely behavioristic definition of 'observation sentence' which avoids the pitfalls of former sense-data theories as well as the ones of cultural relativism or irrationalism. Considering science to be a bridge linking together our sensory stimuli he comes to the view that empirical support of a theory is a consequence of the logical relation between the theory formulation and the observation categoricals derivable from it. He considers the ideological and epistemological neutrality of his conception as one of its main merits. Its feasibility depends, however, on the question whether, by his behavioristic method, he effectively can explain how linguistic expressions acquire their meanings. (shrink)

The relation between theory and reality is an important problem for phüosophy of science. Positivists or logical empkicists of the Vienna Circle have tried to solve it by postulating several types of so-called basic statements induced by immediate experience or observation. According to Neurath protocol sentences are distinguished from other synthetic sentences only m virtue of their syntactical form. Since consistency is a relation concerning sentences only, not a sentence and any immediate experience,he contends that there remains an unbridgeable (...) gap between observationstatements and observation itself and consequently he adopts a coherentist strategy of corroboration, which Schlick, as a thorough empiricist, wants to avoid. For that purpose he introduces the notion of "Konstatierung". Such ascertainments play a decisive role as endpoints in the corroboration of theories insofar as they serve to verify predictions which express expected ascertainments. In spite of the fact that they are synthetic wc recognize their truth when grasping their meaning and, therefore, error is precluded in their case, while protocol sentences remain mere hypotheses. Quine attempts to overcome the weaknesses of all prior positions by proposing a purely behavioristic definition of 'observation sentence' which avoids the pitfalls of former sense-data theories as well as the ones of cultural relativism or irrationalism. Considering science to be a bridge linking together our sensory stimuli he comes to the view that empirical support of a theory is a consequence of the logical relation between the theory formulation and the observation categoricals derivable from it. He considers the ideological and epistemological neutrality of his conception as one of its main merits. Its feasibility depends, however, on the question whether, by his behavioristic method, he effectively can explain how linguistic expressions acquire their meanings. (shrink)

The relation between theory and reality is an important problem for phüosophy of science. Positivists or logical empkicists of the Vienna Circle have tried to solve it by postulating several types of so-called basic statements induced by immediate experience or observation. According to Neurath protocol sentences are distinguished from other synthetic sentences only m virtue of their syntactical form. Since consistency is a relation concerning sentences only, not a sentence and any immediate experience,he contends that there remains an unbridgeable (...) gap between observationstatements and observation itself and consequently he adopts a coherentist strategy of corroboration, which Schlick, as a thorough empiricist, wants to avoid. For that purpose he introduces the notion of "Konstatierung". Such ascertainments play a decisive role as endpoints in the corroboration of theories insofar as they serve to verify predictions which express expected ascertainments. In spite of the fact that they are synthetic wc recognize their truth when grasping their meaning and, therefore, error is precluded in their case, while protocol sentences remain mere hypotheses. Quine attempts to overcome the weaknesses of all prior positions by proposing a purely behavioristic definition of 'observation sentence' which avoids the pitfalls of former sense-data theories as well as the ones of cultural relativism or irrationalism. Considering science to be a bridge linking together our sensory stimuli he comes to the view that empirical support of a theory is a consequence of the logical relation between the theory formulation and the observation categoricals derivable from it. He considers the ideological and epistemological neutrality of his conception as one of its main merits. Its feasibility depends, however, on the question whether, by his behavioristic method, he effectively can explain how linguistic expressions acquire their meanings. (shrink)

Buzaglo (as well as Manders (J Philos LXXXVI(10):553–562, 1989)) shows the way in which it is rational even for a realist to consider ‘development of concepts’, and documents the theory by numerous examples from the area of mathematics. A natural question arises: in which way can the phenomenon of expanding mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? But at the same time a more general question can be formulated: in which way do the mathematical concepts influence empirical concepts? What I (...) want to show in the present paper can be described as follows. The problem articulated by Buzaglo deserves some semantic refinements. Following explications are needed: What is meaning? (In particular: What are concepts?) What are questions? (Or, equivalently: Semantics of interrogative sentences.) -/- Further, a useful notion will be the notion of problem. Taking over the notion of conceptual system from Materna (Conceptual Systems. Logos, Berlin, 2004) and using Tichý’s Transparent intensional logic (TIL) I can try to solve the problem of the relation between mathematical and empirical concepts (not only for the case of expanding some mathematical concepts). (shrink)

This paper presents empirical studies and closely corresponding theoretical models of the performance of a chart parser exhaustively parsing the Penn Treebank with the Treebank’s own CFG grammar. We show how performance is dramatically affected by rule representation and tree transformations, but little by top-down vs. bottom-up strategies. We discuss grammatical saturation, including analysis of the strongly connected components of the phrasal nonterminals in the Treebank, and model how, as sentence length increases, the effective grammar rule size increases (...) as regions of the grammar are unlocked, yielding super-cubic observed time behavior in some configurations. (shrink)

The present paper is an attempt at the investigation of the nature of polarity contrast in natural languages. Truth conditions for natural language sentences are incomplete unless they include a proper definition of the conditions under which they are false. It is argued that the tertium non datur principle of classical bivalent logical systems is empirically invalid for natural languages: falsity cannot be equated with non-truth. Lacking a direct intuition about the conditions under which a sentence is false, we (...) need an independent foundation of the concept of falsity. The solution I offer is a definition of falsity in terms of the truth of a syntactic negation of the sentence. A definition of syntactic negation is proposed for English. (shrink)

CONTENTS: 1 Introductory Remark; 2 Formalism of Empirical Theories; 3 Semantics of Formalized Languages; 4 Interpretation of Empirical Theories; 5 Interpretation of Observational Terms; 6 Interpretation of Theoretical Terms; 7 Main Types of Meaning Postulates for Theoretical Terms; 8 Some Other Kinds of Meaning Postulates for Theoretical Terms; 9 Main Types of Statements in an Empirical Theory; 10 Towards a More Realistic Account; 11 Concluding Remarks; 12 Bibliographical Note.

It is a common view among philosophers of language that both propositions and sentences are structured objects. One obvious question to ask about such a view is whether there is any interesting connection between these two sorts of structure. The author identifies two theses about this relationship. Identity (ID) – the structure of a sentence and the proposition it expresses are identical. Determinism (DET) – the structure of a sentence determines the structure of the proposition it expresses. After (...) noting that ID entails DET, the author argues against DET (and therefore also against ID). This argument is based on considerations to do with unarticulated constituents, but it is not ultimately empirical. As well as answering a question suggested by contemporary theories of propositions, the conclusion is significant because some, but not all, of the theories of propositions currently popular entail ID and/or DET. Unless there is a response to the argument here, those theories are refuted. (shrink)

In the past the law relating to involuntary manslaughter has been the subject of much criticism and controversy, though surprisingly it has received comparatively little attention during the recent review of the homicide law by the Law Commission and the Ministry of Justice. As far as the authors are aware, there has hitherto been no objective empirical research into cases of involuntary manslaughter in England and Wales. Based on data collected from case files maintained by HM Court Service and (...) the Crown Prosecution Service, this article provides a brief analysis of a sample of 127 recent cases. As well as the usual criminological analysis (of offender and offence characteristics), the article focuses on the variations in offenders’ moral culpability for causing death; the relationship between murder and manslaughter (especially those manslaughters at the ‘upper end’ of the seriousness scale); the categorization of different species of involuntary manslaughter, and the sentencing of convicted manslayers. (shrink)

W. V. Quine calls some general methods of science maxims: general defeasible principles that call on us to approximate, maximize, or minimize a state and that are interpreted and weighed in context-sensitive ways. On my reading, his empiricism asks us to maximize accepting overall theories empirically equivalent to ours but to minimize accepting sentences that both do not affect the empirical content of our overall theory and do not simplify our overall theory. His naturalism asks us to maximize accepting (...) sentences that are solely supported by standards that support our best current scientific theory. Drawing on the Quine archive at Houghton Library at Harvard, I support and apply these interpretations by investigating his rapidly evolving later work on empirical content and empirical equivalence, including some of his views on translation in this later work and his vacillation between what he calls the ecumenical and sectarian attitudes. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, two arguments, one by Chomsky, and one by Bar-Hillel and Shamir, are examined in detail and rejected. Both arguments purport to show that the structure of English precludes its having a finite state grammar which correctly enumerates just the well formed sentences of English. In the latter part of the paper I consider the problem of supporting claims about the structure and properties of a natural language when no grammar for the language has (...) yet been accepted. (shrink)

Conditionals are sentences of the form 'If A, then B', and they play a central role in scientific, logical, and everyday reasoning. They have been in the philosophical limelight for centuries, and more recently, they have been receiving attention from psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists. In spite of this, many key questions concerning conditionals remain unanswered. While most of the work on conditionals has addressed semantical questions - questions about the truth conditions of conditionals - this book focuses on the (...) main epistemological questions that conditionals give rise to, such as: what are the probabilities of conditionals? When is a conditional acceptable or assertable? What do we learn when we receive new conditional information? In answering these questions, this book combines the formal tools of logic and probability theory with the experimental approach of cognitive psychology. It will be of interest to students and researchers in logic, epistemology, and psychology of reasoning. (shrink)

In recent decades, increased attention has been given to the place of the victim within criminal justice systems. Advocates have called for recognition and participation for victims of crime, and widespread political support throughout common law jurisdictions has resulted in a number of reforms. While some have proven uncontroversial, the question of victim input into sentencing decisions has emerged as a highly contentious issue within scholarship. Scholars have been concerned with the potentially corrupting influence of victims’ private preferences and dispositions (...) on otherwise principled public decision-making. Exacerbating these concerns has been conceptual and normative ambiguity regarding the relationship of victims to public sentencing processes. Such questions relate to the proper relationship between individuals and public decision-making, and are thus usefully dealt with through political theory and the lens of citizenship. The present article applies deliberative democratic theory and argues that it accounts for scholars’ concerns while also providing direction through conceptual and normative clarity, reconciling in theoretical terms victim input with a public sentencing process. Moreover, it also argues that the framework highlights ways in which victims can make active contributions to processes of public deliberation by introducing novel perspectives and information, thereby enhancing the quality of sentencing decisions. Lastly, the article anticipates potential objections regarding the capacity of victims to meet civic standards in practice, pointing to a growing body of empirical research which suggests victims’ potential and emphasizes the importance of being attentive to questions of procedural design to realize it. (shrink)