bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Intuitive mechanics, psychological reality and the idea of a material object
Authors: Peacocke Christopher
Published: November 2023

There are interrelations between all three of these issues, or so I shall argue. I approach the subject as a philosopher, primarily concerned with what are in a broad sense conceptual aspects of the issues. In saying that, I do not mean in the least to endorse any controversial doctrine alleging the irrelevance of psychology to philosophy, or of philosophy to psychology. I mean only that questions of what has to be the case for a principle of an intuitive theory to be psychologically real, or questions about the appropriate goals of a psychological theory, cannot themselves be settled just by the discovery of additional empirical truths. Even more so does this apply to such a constitutive question as ‘What is necessarily involved in having a conception of a material world?’ All these are essentially philosophical questions; though, of course, it is certainly not only philosophers who are qualified to address them.
Introduction: Spatial representation in the sensory modalities
Authors: Eilan Naomi
Published: November 2023

The following chapters cover a wide range of questions. They are less closely related to each other than are chapters in others parts, in that each is concerned with one or more of the very many different problems raised by the issue of spatial representation in the modalities. Nevertheless, there is one meta-question that they can all be said to be either directly concerned with or to have bearings on, and this is whether there is any sense at all in which the perception of, and thought about, objects, space and spatial properties is modality specific. Thus, botl1 chapters seven and eight suggest that there are ways in which touch and body sense respectively do exhibit some modality-specific features. For chapters nine and ten, concerned w1th questions of cross-modal integration and matching, a central issue is whether perceptions are modality-specific and, if so, in what way. Finally, chapter eleven is concerned with the kinds of errors it argues are prevalent in contemporary writing on perceptual contents,
Introduction: What and where
Authors: McCarthy Rosaleen
Published: November 2023

The question of the interrelationship between spatial representations and our conception and perception of objects in space is a core concern of many of the chapters in this volume: those in Part V deal with the question of ‘what and where’ as it bears on some very specific problems. A unifying theme for each of these accounts is their common reference to the distinctions between what and where that have been proposed on the basis of neurobiological studies of the visual system. Work based on the recording of activity from single cells in the brain, together with studies of the behavioural effects of brain injuries, has challenged the conventional and intuitive view that the perception of objects is closely tied to the perception of space. Rather than being closely intertwined and mutually dependent, what and where are thought to be processed independently from the earliest levels of perception onwards. If this challenge to conventional and intuitive views is valid and useful at the level of cognition (as well as biology) then there are many profound implications.
Things about Things
Authors: Dennett Daniel C
Published: November 2023

Perhaps we can all agree that in order for intelligent activity to be produced by embodied nervous systems, those nervous systems have to have things in them that are about other things in the following minimal sense: there is information about these other things not just present but usable by the nervous system in its modulation of behavior. (There is information about the climatic history of a tree in its growth rings-the information is present, but not usable by the tree.) The disagreements set in when we start trying to characterize what these things-about-things are-are they “just” competences or dispositions embodied somehow (e.g. in connectionist networks) in the brain, or are they more properly mental representations, such as sentences in a language of thought, images, icons, maps, or other data structures? And if they are “symbols”, how are they “grounded,,? What, more specifically, is the analysis of the aboutness that these things must have? Is it genuine intention ality or mere as if intentionality? These oft-debated questions are, I think, the wrong questions to be concentrating on at this time, even if, “in the end”, they make sense and deserve answers. These questions have thrived in the distort ing context provided by two ubiquitous idealizing assumptions that we should try setting aside: an assumption about how to capture content and an assumption about how to isolate the vehicles of content from the “outside” world.
On Referential Semantics and Cognitive Science
Authors: Higginbotham James T
Published: November 2023

Cognitive science is predicated on the view that mental states and processes (or many of them, and not only cognitive but also emotional states) are computational; that is, (a) that they are classified in part according to what they represent, and (b) that causal transactions between them have a purely formal basis. The states and processes of abstract machines, for instance in the sense of Eilenberg (1974), illustrate both features. What the machine is computing is determined by coding the inputs and decoding outputs, through codes that normally lend themselves to a .coding of the internal configurations as well. But the states and configurations within the machine have what effects they do in virtue of their formal characteristics, indifferent to the coding, or what interpretation they may have. I am interested here in the role of referential semantics within cognitive science, so conceived.
Theories of Concepts: A Wider Task
Authors: Peacocke Christopher
Published: November 2023

There are many tasks for a theory of concepts which are suggested by the very nature of a concept. Those tasks include: elucidating a particular concept’s role in fixing reasons for making judgements; characterizing its normative role more generally; describing its relation to the level of reference and truth; explaining the relation of all of the preceding to understanding and knowledge; and of course much else. I would be the first to endorse the view that there is great illumination to be gained by carrying out such tasks. Here I am going to argue, as a substantive and no doubt controversial thesis, that there also exists a wider task, one whose execution is made possible by the construction of substantive theories of particular concepts. This wider task is one with epistemological, metaphysical, and psychological aspects. The task is that of addressing what I call the Integration Challenge.
Connecting Vision with the World: Tracking the Missing Link
Authors: Pylyshyn Zenon W
Published: November 2023

You might reasonably surmise from the title of this chapter that I will be discussing a theory of vision. After all, what is a theory of vision but a theory of how the world is connected to our visual representations? Theories of visual perception universally attempt to give an account of how a proximal stimulus (presumably a pattern impinging on the retina) can lead to a rich representation of a three-dimensional world and thence to either the recognition of known objects or to the coordination of actions with visual information. Such theories typically provide an effective (i.e. computable) mapping from a 2D pattern to a representation of a 3D scene, usually in the form of a symbol structure. But such a mapping, though undoubtedly the essential purpose of a theory of vision, leaves at least one serious problem that I intend to discuss here. It is this problem, rather than a theory of vision itself, that is the subject of this chapter.
The African Setting
Authors: Myers-Scotton Carol
Published: November 2023

THE main data sources of this volume are two African nations where English is the main official language, with one or more indigenous languages also sharing official status. In Kenya, Swahili is a co-ordinate official language, and in Zimbabwe, Shona and Ndebele also have official status. In both cases, English has more of the roles in domains of socio-economic consequence. For example, English is the medium of instruction of education at all levels, or at least beyond the first few years of primary school. It is also the language of written work, whether in government or business. The CS to be studied largely involves English; however, two examples come from francophone Africa (Wolof/French and Lingala/French).
The Rise of Codeswitching as a Research Topic
Authors: Myers-Scotton Carol
Published: November 2023

This chapter provides an overview of how study of the socio-psychological motivations for CS evolved to become a major research topic. This development can be attributed to a number of factors, but the stimulation offered by the work of John Gumperz on CS was crucial. Gumperz’s own work is discussed in some detail and that of others who have followed him in the attempt to interpret or explain CS is surveyed.
A Markedness Model of Codeswitching
Authors: Myers-Scotton Carol
Published: November 2023

The previous chapter discussed the theory to account for code choices in general and its antecedents. Here the markedness model in relation to CS is presented. The model consists of a set of general maxims applying to any code choice. This chapter discusses their application to CS, and provides examples illustrating their realization.
Conclusion
Authors: Myers-Scotton Carol
Published: November 2023

The goal of this volume has been to provide a general theoretical treatment of the socio-psychological motivations for codeswitching (CS) as a language-contact phenomenon. The arguments have been illustrated with many naturally occurring examples from African contexts; the volume is also, therefore, a description of the types of CS which involve African languages. As such, the result is, I hope, not only an explanation of the motivations of CS, but also a view of those aspects of African life glimpsed in everyday conversations involving CS. Descriptive emphasis has been on Kenya and especially its capital, Nairobi. A number of examples from Harare, Zimbabwe, are also included. Additional examples from other areas of Africa make the case that the phenomena discussed are not localized; they come from other areas of Africa, such as the capitals of Senegal (Dakar) and Nigeria (Lagos), as well as from Zaïre and Ghana. References to CS in other areas of the world are additional evidence of the generality of the phenomenon and its motivations.
The Sorites Slippery Slope Argument
Authors: Walton Douglas
Published: November 2023

Many logic textbooks do not mention the slippery slope argument at all. Of those that do, the majority cite the causal type of slippery slope argument and classify it a fallacy (or a tricky argument that can be fallacious). These texts identify the slippery slope fallacy with the causal type of slippery slope argument. A few texts treat the slippery slope fallacy as an argument essentially having to do with the use of vague terms in reasoning, and these texts generally bring in the ancient sorites or bald man argument as related to the problem. Two texts in particular, Scriven (1976) and Fogelin (1987), have taken some useful steps in indicating how the paradox of the sorites argument is related to the practical problem of dealing with slippery slope fallacies in contexts where reasoning with a key vague term is evidently the source of the problem.
The Precedent Slippery Slope Argument
Authors: Walton Douglas
Published: November 2023

Policies and rules admit of exceptions in exceptional cases. They have an inherent vagueness of application similar to the vagueness of words and phrases. Slippery slope argumentation can arise in disputes about exceptions to rules, where an arguer presses for consistency between his own case and one that has already been conceded as an exception to the rule. A man is clocked at fifty-six miles per hour by a radar detection unit of the highway patrol in a fifty-five mile per hour speed limit zone. He argues to the patrolman that he should not get a ticket because the difference in speed of one mile per hour is insignificant: ‘After all, it’s really arbitrary that the agreed-upon speed limit is fifty-five rather than fifty-six isn’t it? It’s just because fifty-five is a round number that it is chosen as the limit.
The Full Slippery Slope Argument
Authors: Walton Douglas
Published: November 2023

The full or combined slippery slope argument, introduced in Chapter 1. 2, is similar in many points of comparison to the three other kinds of slippery slope argument. Indeed, it combines all three. But in so doing, it is typically a much more complex kind of argumentation which requires a good deal of evidence to properly support. It has been used with notable frequency in recent ethical controversies, particularly on subjects in medical ethics like euthanasia, as indicated in cases 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5.
Some Content is Narrow
Authors: Jackson Frank , Pettit Philip
Published: November 2023

One way to defend narrow content is to produce a sentence of the form ‘S believes that P’, and show that this sentence is true of S if and only if it is true of any duplicate from the skin in, any doppelganger, of S. Notoriously, this is hard to do. Twin Earth examples are pervasive. Another way to defend narrow content is to show that only a narrow notion can play the causal explanatory role we require of content in a properly scientific psychology or cognitive science. Notoriously, this is hard to do. The considerations—methodological solipsism, the principle of autonomy, or whatever—invoked to show that a broad notion of content cannot play the required causal explanatory role are open to serious objection. Moreover, this approach is not an argument for the existence of narrow content as such. It is an argument that content had better be narrow.
Socrates’ Defense, Part II (24b3-30cl)
Authors: Brickhouse Thomas C , Smith Nicholas D
Published: November 2023

From 24b3 to 28a4 Socrates elects to reply to the ‘later’ accusers by interrogating one of them, Meletus, the officia1 author of the indictment against him. This interrogation has been the source of a good deal of puzzlement, for during the interrogation Meletus seems to be ill-prepared to defend his own charges coherently. To some, this is a decisive sign that the entire interlude is largely, if not wholly, invented by Plato to discredit Socrates’ prosecutors as inept and unprincipled. Other readers see the interrogation as showing that neither Socrates nor Meletus takes the formal charges as the real motive for the prosecution.
Bayle, locke, and the metaphysics of toleration
Authors: Lennon Thomas m.
Published: November 2023

An argument against the toleration of dissenting (and therefore presumptively false) beliefs is that they not only upset the common interest, but also run contrary to the individual interest of those holding them. The argument is found, in one form or other, in a long tradition beginning with Plato and extending through much of the history of religious strife to various totalitarian regimes of our own time. The most cogent version of the argument is based on a theory of human nature, of what it is essentially to be human. The familiar linkage goes as follows. To know the good is to do the good, because doing the good is always in one’s interest; because of what we are, doing the good satisfies our essential needs. Thus the importance of, and the justification for, constraining the individual’s beliefs about the good. An intuitive illustration of the argument can be extracted from Book I of The republic: it is wrong to return a borrowed knife to a crazed owner, because to do so would be contrary to his interest; but beliefs can be more harmful than knives, and no less care should be taken with them.
Character And Meaning In Plato’s Hippias Minor
Authors: Blundell Mary Whitlock
Published: November 2023

That Plato attached serious philosophical importance to literary character is well known. He returned time and again to the heroic figures of poetry, evincing a deep concern with the enormous cultural influence they exerted through education and other public institutions, such as festivals. He ardently resisted not only this influence, but the way it was inculcated through what seemed to him mindless emotional identification without real understanding (cf. Rep. 605 c- 6o6 o). An integral part ofhis ethical mission was to come to terms with this pervasive influence. To this end he employed various strategies, of which the censorship proposed in the Republic is only the most obvious.
Editor’S Afterword: Platonic Scholars And Other Wishful Thinkers
Authors: Smith Nicholas D
Published: November 2023

No doubt anyone reading this collection has, at some time or other and in some form or other, been asked the following question: How on earth could there be anything more to say about philosophers who have been studied ceaselessly for nearly two and a half millennia? (In what follows, I shall call this ‘The Inevitable Question’, for the sake of brevity.) The easiest answer to this question scholars can offer to nonscholars is to say that each generation of scholars must reinterpret the Greeks in terms that are accessible to their own generation, and hence, that our discoveries are often simply discoveries of ways to make yet another generation appreciate the wisdom of the ancients.
Musical Standards as Function of Musical Accomplishment
Authors: Ross James
Published: November 2023

Typically, human practices that are aimed at excellence have regulations, principles, procedures, customs, rules, and other routines for ‘how to do it’—some with very great force and others that belong to beginners or intermediate stages but give way in maturity—that, with other factors, make a framework against which competence and excellence can be discerned. Thus, fingering, bowing, intonation, metre, rhythm, accent, breathing, phrasing, drive, intensity, stance, and indeterminately many other physical conditions with which musicians deliberately, or with practised elections, make perceptually discriminable features of the sound, are elements of objective competence and of measurable objective excellence. Excellence is understood here as competence developed to certainty, ease, sensitivity, and musicality.
Consciousness and Knowledge
Authors: Mohanty Jitendra Nath
Published: November 2023

Philosophical reflection has to begin with the data of experience. A major part of these data is constituted by the way we ordinarily talk about ourselves and about our world. Such common linguistic usage (lokavyavahāra), though not the final court of appeal for philosophical theories, is certainly a sure starting-point, if supplemented by the reports of introspection of ordinary men about their own experiences (loka-pratīti)).
Indian Theories of Truth: Their Common Framework
Authors: Mohanty Jitendra Nath
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I want to begin by reflecting not on some one or other amongst the theories of truth (prāmānya) in Indian philosophy, but rather on that common framework which encompasses them all, or perhaps the most important amongst them, or on that common horizon within which these theories and their mutual dialogues have moved. Taken separately, there are, in the large spectrum of the Indian philosophies, theories that exhibit remarkable affinities to the major Western theories of truth. Thus the Nyaya theory of truth is a sort of correspondence theory, the Mimǡmsǡ a sort of self-evidence theory, and the Buddhist a sort of pragmatic theory. There are theories, such as the Nyaya, which combine a correspondence theory of the nature of truth with a sort of coherence theory and a sort of ]Pragmatic theory of the test of truth. Some others, like the Mimamsa, question the very distinction between the nature and the test of truth. Comparative philosophy, bent on tagging theories on to theories, promises to be a rewarding enterprise.
Historical Development of Tok Pisin
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I set the scene for the emergence of Tok Pisin, which has its roots in European economic interests in the Pacific. The features accompanying the spread of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca, and later that of English, are similar to those which Fishman, Cooper, and Conrad (1977) have identified as associated with the spread of languages of wider communication elsewhere, e.g. imposition of military rule and extended period of military authority, linguistic diversity among the indigenous population, missionization, and material incentives associated with the learning of the language (see also Mazrui and Zirimu 1978 on the interaction of Church and State interests in the spread of Swahili). Here I will show how the labour trade and the plantation setting, in particular, were conducive to the spread of Melanesian Pidgin, as was the establishment of missions, where Tok Pisin was used as a lingua franca in teaching literacy. I deal also with its stabilization, expansion, standardization as a written language, and its role in Papua New Guinea today.
Language, Education, and Development: from Pre-Colonial days to Post-Colonial Society
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

Colonial rule transformed traditional communities from their small-scale agricultural subsistence base into a society which today has most of the hallmarks of the social and political inequalities associated with stratification in modern developed countries. A crucial shift in the balance of linguistic power among the indigenous languages was occasioned by the introduction of Tok Pisin and English and was part of this process of transformation. Many people who had never previously co-operated among themselves obtained a new unifying factor after the Europeans’ arrival, namely, the desire for their material culture, or Kago. (Kago is a term used in Tok Pisin to refer to European goods.) Tok Pisin was needed in contacts with Europeans in order to gain access to their goods and technology. Then later, with the dramatic introduction of English, increased access to schooling, and the availability of better jobs requiring knowledge of English, Tok Pisin became less useful and the linguistic ecology was again disrupted. This occurred in the context of a change-over from a hierarchically structured colonial society to a more socially mobile post-colonial one in which English-medium schooling became more widely accessible.
Tok Pisin i go we? (Where is Tok Pisin going?)
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: November 2023

I have taken the title of this chapter from a collection of papers (McElhanon 1975b) given at the conference at which linguists debated the status of Tok Pisin. I noted in Chapter 1 that the question of where Tok Pisin is going cannot be addressed without also asking where Papua New Guinea is going. Given the complex of social, cultural, and political variables which transformed the linguistic ecology of pre-contact Papua New Guinea to its modern state, it is unrealistic to expect that a change in language policy alone can undo the effects of colonial strategics of development. Due to the late introduction of European imperialism in the south-west Pacific, the end of the colonial era has been correspondingly late by comparison with other parts of the world. In that respect it is instructive to look for parallels between what is happening in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere, such as Africa and the Caribbean, where decolonization has a longer history. In this chapter I will look at the debate on language policy with specific reference to attempts to increase the status of Tok Pisin.
Politeness: Cross-cultural Perspectives
Authors: Sifianou Maria
Published: November 2023

One of Brown and Levinson’s concerns has been the :,earch for universals in language usage. Extensive parallels across unrelated languages have convinced them that, in spite of cultural peculiarities, there are universal linguistic properties. The issue of universality in language is quite controversial and seems to be related to earlier considerations concerning the relationship of language, thought, and culture. Sapir and Whorf strongly advocated this interrelationship and the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each language on which the ‘real world’ or culture is built. This thesis c.:ime to be widely known as the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, or ‘linguistic relativity’.1 Hymes (1966: u6) presents a different version of ‘linguistic relativity’ when he says that ‘cultural values and beliefs are in part constitutive of linguistic relativity,’ whereas for Whorf it was the structure of language which in part determined thought and culture.
Perceptions of Politeness
Authors: Sifianou Maria
Published: November 2023

‘We speak with our vocal organs, but we converse with our entire bodies’ (Hudson, 1980: 134, quoting Abercrombie). Thus, politeness cannot be limited to form and is not restricted to the linguistic medium. There are linguistic/verbal as well as non-linguistic/nonverbal norms of politeness. Informative communication is mainly verbal, whereas rapport communication involves much non-verbal behaviour as well. Emotive communication, as Arndt and Janney (1985: 282) call it, ‘involves complexly interrelated verbal, vocal and kinesic activities’. These non-vocal manifestations complement the verbal manifestations in order to satisfy emotional nee-ds which appear to be basic in communication. Politeness, in a broad sense, is what is behind this concern for our emotional needs and those of the other person.
Lëtzebuergesch And Its Competitors: Language Contact In Luxembourg Today
Authors: Hoffmann Jean-Paul
Published: November 2023

It is not difficult to argue that Luxembourg is ‘a linguistic melting pot’. Multilingualism in the present-day grand duchy is virtually a matter of inheritance. In the ‘Old’ Luxembourg which existed until 1839 (see Map 1.2), German and French language communities had been taken into separate account by the administration since at least the time of John the Blind’s decree of 1340 formally recognizing a quartier allemand and a quartier wallon. ‘New’ Luxembourg (see Map 1.3) differs only in that the French which is used as one of the official administrative languages and which exists in harmony with standard German and the Lëtzebuergesch substratum, no longer has any group of indigenous speakers left among the native population (see Section 2.r.2). Indeed, with regard to both French and standard German, natives of the grand duchy then as now use only one form of speech in communication with their fellow citizens, namely their own mother tongue, Lëtzebuergesch, and while both French and standard German continue as languages of school and government administration, in many spheres of private and public life the use of Lëtzebuergesch, particularly in written form, has expanded over the course of the last twenty years. It is therefore no longer a rarity to find Lëtzebuergesch being used for obituaries, commercial advertisements, shop signs, street furniture, or on the sides of commercial vehicles.
Textual Varieties Of Lëtzebuergesch
Authors: Hoffmann Fernand
Published: November 2023

The passage below is taken from a speech given in the House of Deputies on 18 April 1992 by Edouard Juncker (Christian Social Democrats). It features a highly elaborated code, difficult both in spoken and written form, and to the average Luxembourger perhaps even unintelligible. The hypotactic ordering is totally alien to Lëtzebuergesch and has been borrowed from standard German.
Language Contact and Contact Languages in Native North America
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

As a distinctive culture area of native North America, the Southeast extended from the Atlantic Coast into the Prairies (including the lower Mississippi River valley) and from the Potomac and Ohio Rivers to the. Gulf Coast (including Florida), and was distinguished by a linguistic diversity surpassed only by the Northwest Coast and native California (see Crawford 1975a: 74 and Haas 1971: 44; 1973: 1,210). For this area, linguistic research has documented five separate language families plus several language isolates, both unrelated and distantly related:
History
Authors: Drechsel Emanuel J
Published: November 2023

A prime concern of historical research has been how to identify Mobilian Jargon in historical records or ethnographies other than by linguistic and specifically morphosyntactic characteristics. The basic means would appear to be names used in designating the pidgin; but this conclusion has proven unreliable due to the diversity and non-exclusivity of names for Mobilian Jargon, some of which could refer at the same time to the native language of a people or the people themselves or might yet have some other reference.
Introduction
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

There is an ample supply of books, new and old, on the history of the French language, in all the major languages of the world. The basic facts are common currency, and introductory textbooks, detailed manuals, and research monographs abound. Along with English, which shares with French a good part of its history, French is probably one of the best documented languages in the world. Its history seems to hold few secrets: modern theorists seeking examples of phenomena to illustrate their theories usually turn to works that are fifty, a hundred, years old for their data. Usually they are not disappointed in the accuracy and exhaustiveness of older research, even though they seek to supplement the data in the public domain with new examination.
Sociolinguistic History of French
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

Language must play an important role in social history: many historical works introduce linguistic evidence, especially concerning lexicon, to illustrate le changes in social attitudes and institutions. The other side of the coin is that cultural changes can be more or less directly reflected in language change. Indeed it can be claimed that all language change, as distinct perhaps from linguistic change, must be triggered by changes in the community in which the language is spoken.
Processes of Linguistic Change
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

I have distinguished between language change and linguistic change, as between the history of a language and historical linguistics. In Part I, I have concentrated on language change .‘when a community changes its language. This I would maintain is virtually always a type of language shift. That is, the community has shifted its norm, so that a previously unprestigious, or even foreign, set of variants becomes accepted by the tone-setting section of the community. At the extreme, other variants, that were previously acceptable, fall into disuse. Such loss would constitute complete change: in fact, total loss of a variant is quite rare when the community retains a consciousness of its past, either through folk-memory or in the shape of texts. In order for such loss to occur, we must assume some social upheaval, which leads to a break with tradition.
Semantic Change
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

All human language has meaning, in the simple sense that its speakers mean something by what they say. It is usually recognized that whatever language they use they can, if they wish, mean the same thing. The semantic potentialities of language are common to all human beings, though they may be expressed differently in different languages. So how can we talk of ‘change of meaning’ or semantic change? In using this term are we saying that the same linguistic expression means one thing at one time, and another at a different time? Or is it, rather, that different speakers, either contemporaneously or successively, employ the same expression to mean different things? This latter dilemma is something most of us are very familiar with: indeed, in everyday conversational exchanges. we often have the feeling that we are talking at cross purposes, not getting our meaning across to our interlocutors, nor grasping what they are getting at. How, we wonder, can we understand what others mean when they speak? Perhaps we never do completely. But in general, for practical purposes, we get the message accurately enough, making use, as we do, of reference to shared beliefs, to common culture, to context, and to non-linguistic signals of various sorts.
Syntactic Change
Authors: Posner Rebecca
Published: November 2023

Linguists differ about what phenomena should be treated under the heading of syntax. Traditionally, in Romance studies, it is preferred to link morphology and syntax closely together, as morphosyntax, which covers the categorial status, syntactic use, and semantic value of morphological forms. For some, syntax is virtually synonymous with the ordering of elements within a sentence, the syntactic unit: in the Saussurean tradition, this is largely a matter for parole, the surface realization of the underlying system, langue, which 1s seen as the object of linguistics. So much depends on individual choice and on pragmatic factors that some deny the validity of the sentence as a unit of linguistic organization, preferring instead to study the utterance, a fleeting and spontaneous expression of discourse. From a diachronic point of view, it has also been maintained that syntax is frozen discourse, a product of literacy or planned speech parallel to the view of morphology as fossilized syntax.
Imagination and the Schematism
Authors: Gibbons Sarah L
Published: November 2023

Kant considers the Schematism part of the ‘transcendental doctrine of judgment’ in which he ‘will treat of the sensible condition under which alone pure concepts of understanding can be employed’ (A 136 / B 175). Although the Schematism is billed as an element of a doctrine of judgement, its primary debt seems to be to the analysis of imagination in the Transcendental Deduction rather than to any of the earlier descriptions of judgement. In articulating a doctrine of judgement, Kant intends to consider aspects of judgement other than its logical forms, or even the role of the categories in making possible the judgement of an object in general described in the Transcendental Deduction. The Schematism turns our focus away from the nature and role of the categories as forms of unity in judgement to the problem of how it is possible to apply them to material that is sensibly intuited.
Mystical Perception: St Teresa, William Alston, and the Broadminded Atheist
Authors: Kretzmann Norman
Published: November 2023

According to Richard Swinburne’s well-known Principle of Credulity, ‘How things seem to be is good grounds for a belief about how things are. From this it would follow that, in the absence of special considerations, all religious experiences ought to be taken by their subjects as genuine, and hence as substantial grounds for belief in the existence of their apparent object.’1 Naturally, Swinburne subjects his principle to several refinements in the course of carefully considering objections against it, but its fundamental simplicity is a very important aspect of its appeal. A more recent, fundamentally more complex attempt to establish a result very much like Swinburne’s application of his principle to religious experience is what I want to consider here.
Language in Society
Authors: Ben-Rafael Eliezer
Published: November 2023

As early as 1704, Vico asserted that objects of culture do not exist independently of what we think they are (Vico 1948). Similarly, Pateman (1989: 10–14) claims that the study of objects of culture, like language, is concept-dependent and requires a hermeneutic approach. As representation, contends Wittgenstein, language is both social and accessible to a person’s introspection, that is, both normative and subjective. It is the attribute of individuals, but there cannot be a one-person language (Wittgenstein 1958, quoted by Pateman 1989: 13). Pateman (1989: 22-42) takes this line of thought further: language is an open system but partially determined by socio-causal mechanisms. However, Wittgenstein vigorously states the primarily social nature of language, which consists of conventions between people and not of traits of people. Language is made up of rules pertaining to common knowledge, and language is basically an intentional object of mutual belief.
Social Divisions and Language
Authors: Ben-Rafael Eliezer
Published: November 2023

Researchers widely associate linguistic variation with social identities, using the notion of marker to refer to the linguistic peculiarities bound to cleavages (Garmadi 1981; Myers Scotton 1983; Laver and Trudgill 1979; Helfrich 1979; Halliday 1979). These markers may be of all sorts of limit (see Goffman 1972; 1973)—territories, boundaries, sites, and so on—but the linguistic variants of particular groups do not generally enjoy the support granted to the legitimate language by institutional standardization such as school-teaching, language academies, official publications, or written literature. By differentiating between the standard language used for high cultural needs and the less formalized codes used in more prosaic circumstances, Ferguson’s (1959) notion of diglossia does not require, as Howard (1984: 21) puts it, seeing an informal variant like slang ‘as a disgusting excrescence on the face of the Queen’s English’. Slang, Howard argues, ‘enriches the public stock of harmless pleasure’.
The Shift to Hebrew
Authors: Ben-Rafael Eliezer
Published: November 2023

Research Study 1 (see Table 1.1) investigated the emergence of Hebrew as a dominant language in hundreds of three-generation family clusters. This research started at Tel Aviv University, among students of the Sociology Department, and proceeded by investigating their brothers and sisters, parents, and grandparents. The goal was to study the linguistic history of these families, the making of the linguistic transformation that has been experienced by Israeli Jews.
Imposing without Coercing
Authors: Ben-Rafael Eliezer
Published: November 2023

The Hebrew language was adopted by the early waves of Zionist immigrants, who as a rule were solidly organized in the political movements that inaugurated the Zionist enterprise. These immigrants came from Russia, Poland, and other Eastern or Central European countries. For them, Hebraization was a conversion. For the ‘later-comers’, who came from different countries and continents, Hebrew was a reality of the setting, imposed on them by the necessity of civil, social, and economic absorption.
Subjacency Forever
Authors: Richards Norvin
Published: November 2023

Baker (1970) noted that sentences of the following form are ambiguous in English: (1) [Who asked [who bought what]]? Here what can have scope either with the who in the embedded clause or with the who in the matrix clause. The availability of the latter reading is somewhat surprising in light of the ill-formedness of (2): That is, the process whereby what gets its scope in (1) is apparently immune to the constraint which rules out (2). One can imagine a number of ways in which the contrast between (2) and the wide-scope reading of (1) might be explained; I will concentrate here on two.
Phonology and Phonetics in Psycholinguistic Models of Speech Perception
Authors: Fitzpatrick Jennifer , Wheeldon Linda R
Published: November 2023

The relationship between psychological and linguistic theory has never been clear-cut. Indeed, following the unsuccessful attempts to demonstrate the psychological reality of transformational grammar, developments in these disciplines have been more parallel than interactive. However, in recent years, increasing use has been made of many ideas from generative phonology by psycholinguists interested in the processes underlying our comprehension of spoken language. In this chapter we will examine and evaluate the developing relationship between linguistic and psychological approaches to the representations and processes underlying the comprehension of spoken words.
Conceptual Foundations of Phonology as a Laboratory Science
Authors: Pierrehumbert Janet , Beckman Mary E , Ladd D R
Published: November 2023

The term ‘laboratory phonology’ was invented more than a decade ago as the name of an interdisciplinary conference series, and all three of us have co-organized laboratory phonology conferences. Since then, the term has come into use not only for the conference series itself, but for the research activities exemplified by work presented there. In this chapter we give our own perspective on how research in laboratory phonology has shaped our understanding of phonological theory and of the relationship of phonological theory to empirical data.

Research activities within laboratory phonology involve the cooperation of people who may disagree about phonological theory, but who share a concern for strengthening the scientific foundations of phonology through improved methodology, explicit modelling, and cumulation of results. These goals, we would argue, all reflect the belief that phonology is one of the natural sciences, and that all of language, including language-specific characteristics and sociolinguistic variation, is part of the natural world. In what follows, we explore the ramifications of this position for the relationship of data and methods to phonological theory; for the denotations of entities in that theory; and for our understanding of Universal Grammar (UG) and linguistic competence.
Embedded Interrogatives and Plurality
Authors: Lahiri Utpal
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I observe certain phenomena that require some extension and modification to be made to the theory presented in Chapter 3. I observe that interrogative complements of a predicate like know show a certain kind of reading when the subject of the predicate know is a plural NP, that is similar to the readings of sentences which contain a transitive predicate or verb and both of whose arguments are plural NPs: this is the kind of reading that has been noted by Scha (1981) and called semidistributive by Schwarzschild (1996) (whose analysis of this phenomenon is inspired by Gillon 1987). I also show that such readings are sensitive to the presence of adverbs of quantity. I show how the notion of answerhood with the relevant part–whole relation argued for in the last chapter can be made to handle this phenomenon, and show that this provides us with further arguments for the aforementioned lattice-theoretic approach to answers (to wh-questions whose domain itself consists of a complete atomic Boolean Algebra with its bottom element removed). This allows us to preserve the main outline of the analysis of QVE presented earlier (namely, IR of the interrogative complements of predicates like know followed by type-shifting to a formula consisting of the Ans predicate, and measure-quantification; contrasted with the absence of IR for complements of predicates like wonder). I outline a solution to this problem that will at the same time preserve the basic insights of the analysis of QVE presented earlier. The basic solution is inspired by the work of Scha (1981) and Schwarzschild (1996). I also note certain problems related to QVE when one considers plurality seriously and outline solutions to them.
The Syntax of Embedded Interrogatives and the Lexical Semantics of Interrogative- Embedding Predicates
Authors: Lahiri Utpal
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 3, we observed that among predicates that embed interrogatives, there are some differences between predicates like know and predicates like wonder, in that whereas a sentence like (1a) is paraphrasable by (16), there is no corresponding paraphrase for (2): (I) a. John knows what Bill bought.
The Doctrines of the Sophists: A Tabula Rasa
Authors: Romilly Jacqueline De
Published: November 2023

THE Sophists’ written works, quoted extracts and summaries of which were circulating in the city, more than confirmed the fears of the Athenians. The doctrines that they reflected were by no means confined to the subject of teaching rhetoric: they boldly rejected the existing traditions, and their potential power to shock was considerable. At this point, we enter upon new ground. These were truly philosophical doctrines, closely and confidently argued and every bit as audacious as the Sophists’ activities in the sphere of teaching. It is important to make this absolutely clear, for the Sophists’ doctrines should not be underestimated as a result of being associated with their teaching activities. Conscious of the practical aspect of the lessons that the Sophists gave and the arbitrary methods that, as masters of rhetoric, they used to show off their ability to defend an antithesis to every thesis, some critics have been led to minimize the importance of the Sophists’ thought, despite the fact that it could hardly be more rigorous. Others have also been influenced by Plato and much affected by the contrast between his philosophical rigour and the more practical character of the Sophists’ thinking. Hence the idea that has arisen that these teachers had no personal doctrines but just adopted those which suited their own professional interests.
Experience and Expression
Authors: Schulte Joachim
Published: November 2023

The writings preserved in Wittgenstein's manuscripts from 1945 to 1949, after he had completed the first part of Philosophical Investigations, chiefly concern the nature of certain psychological concepts. In this book Joachim Schulte uses these manuscripts - not the selections from them published so far - as a basis for reconstructing the central arguments and conceptual elucidations developed by Wittgenstein during that period. One of the principal subjects is the connection between instinctive reactions, linguistic and non-linguistic context, and mastery of a technique. This connection is explored through clarification of the concepts experience, sensation, and understanding - a clarification which provides illuminating contributions to the philosophy of psychology, aesthetics, and the theory of meaning. Wittgenstein's thoughts on the logic of language and his reflections on psychological concepts are closely knit. This is shown by his discussion of Moore's paradox, which sheds new light both on the limits of logical analysis and on certain curious features of the concepts believe, assume, and assert. The original German edition of this book was widely applauded as an outstanding work of scholarship offering unique and valuable insights. By translating it into fluent and limpid English, and at the same time enriching it with various amendments and additions, Dr Schulte has brought an important work to a wider scholarly community.
Physicalism and Mathematics
Authors: Hale Bob
Published: November 2023

It is no straightforward matter to give a satisfactory detailed characterization of physicalism and it may well be that for some purposes it is best to distinguish different interpretations of the position—some, no doubt, more plausible than others—for separate critical evaluation. But on any understanding of it that does not break faith with the broad, if somewhat vague, conception that informs and motivates it, physicalism is usually taken to be, at least in part, an ontological thesis: there are in reality no entities—objects, properties, relations, events, or states of affairs—but physical ones. Just what being physical amounts to is again far from straightforward, but we can safely take it, I think, that it requires at least locatability in space and time. And that is enough for it to be clear that the physicalist confronts a serious-looking problem over mathematics which, taking its syntax at face value, is replete with reference to and quantification over abstract entities—numbers of various sorts, sets, and functions. The natural philosophy of mathematics for the physicalist is, it would seem, some version of nominalism.