bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Language Mixing and Language Input: Parental Discourse Strategies
Authors: Lanza Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

The notion of input has already been drawn into the discussion of language mixing in the preceding chapters. A more careful examination of language input as a context for language mixing in infant bilingualism will be the aim in this chapter. How do the parents respond to their child’s language mixing in conversation? What signals do they give the child regarding the appropriateness of mixing languages in conversation? How do parent and child negotiate language choice in discourse? In this chapter, we will build upon the findings from Chapters 4 and 5, and incorporate them within an interactional context.
Conclusion
Authors: Lanza Elizabeth
Published: November 2023

Whether or not the child acquiring two languages simultaneously initially has one system or two systems has been an area of controversy in studies of infant bilingualism. This controversy has focused on language mixing and explanations for it. The bilingual child’s morphological and lexical mixing have been by far the types of mixing most often invoked as evidence for a single system and for the claim that the child is not aware of operating with two languages. My case study investigation of language mixing in infant bilingualism traced the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two 2-year-old children in Norway from families in which the fathers were Norwegian and the mothers American.
Syntax in Cognitive Grammar
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In this chapter I address some aspects of the treatment of syntax and syntactic categories in cognitive grammar, especially as these bear on the possessive construction. I begin by devoting a few pages to a distinction, fundamental to cognitive grammar, between two kinds of linguistic unit: those that designate things, and those that designate relations. All linguistic units belong to one of these two categories. Nouns and nominal expressions designate things, whilst expressions of other syntactic categories (clausal, prepositional, adjectival, adverbial, etc.) designate relations. The distinction is fundamental, not only to a characterization of syntactic categories, but also to the mechanism by which symbolic units combine to form units of increasing internal complexity.
The Constituent Structure of Prenominal Possessives
Authors: Taylor John R
Published: November 2023

In approaching any linguistic expression, one of the first questions that a linguist is trained to ask concerns the constituent structure of the expression.
Subcognition and the Limits of the Turing Test
Authors: French Robert M
Published: November 2023

Alan Turing, in his original article about an imitation-game definition of intelligence, seems to be making two separate claims. The first, the philosophical claim, is that if a machine could pass the Turing Test, it would necessarily be intelligent. This claim I believe to be correct. His second point, the pragmatic claim, is that in the not-too-distant future it would in fact be possible actually to build such a machine. Turing clearly felt that it was important to establish both claims. He realized, in particular, that if one could rigorously show that no machine could ever pass his test, his philosophical point, while still true, would lose a great deal of significance. He thus devoted considerable effort to establishing not only the philosophical claim but also the pragmatic claim.
The Normativity of Instrumental Reason
Authors: Korsgaard Christine M
Published: November 2023

Most philosophers think it is both uncontroversial and unproblematic that practical reason requires us to take the means to our ends. If doing a certain action is necessary for or even just promotes a person’s aims, the person obviously has at least a prima-facie reason to do it. Just as obviously, this reason is what we nowadays call an ‘internal’ reason, one which is capable of motivating the person to whom it applies. So those who hold that practical reasons must be internal point to the instrumental principle as a clear case of a source of reasons which pass that test.1 But philosophers have, for the most part, been silent on the question of the normative foundation of this requirement. The interesting question, almost everyone agrees, is whether practical reason requires anything more of us than this.
Constructive Existence Claims
Authors: Detlefsen Michael
Published: November 2023

It is a commonplace of constructivist thought that a claim that an object of a certain kind exists is to be backed by an explicit display or exhibition of an object that is manifestly of that kind. Let us refer to this requirement as the exhibition condition.
Zermelo’s Conception of Set Theory and Reflection Principles
Authors: Tait W W
Published: November 2023

Zermelo (1930) is concerned with impredicative second-order set theory. He treats the general case of set theory with urelements, but it will be enough to consider only the case of pure set theory, i.e. without urelements. In this context, Zermelo’s theory is the axiomatic second-order theory T2in the language of pure set theory whose axioms are Extensionality, Regularity, Null Set, Unordered Pairs, Union, Power Set, Second-order Separation, Second-order Replacement, and Choice.
Semiotic Grammar
Authors: McGregor William B
Published: November 2023

The label `semiotic grammar' captures a fundamental property of the grammars of human languages: not only is language a semiotic system in the familiar Saussurean sense, but its organizing system, its grammar, is also a semiotic system. This proposition, explicated in detail by William McGregor in this book, constitutes a new theory of grammar. Semiotic Grammar is `functional' rather than `formal' in its intellectual origins, approaches, and methods. It demonstrates, however, that neither a purely functional nor a purely formal account of language is adequate, given the centrality of the sign as the fundamental unit of grammatical analysis. The author distinguishes four types of grammatical signs: experiential, logical, interpersonal, and textural. The signifiers of these signs are syntagmatic relationships of the following types, respectively: constituency, dependency, conjugational (scopal) and linking (indexical, connective). McGregor illustrates and exemplifies the theory with data from a variety of languages including English, Acehnese, Polish, Finnish, Japanese, Chinese, and Mohawk; and from his pioneering research on Gooniyandi and Nyulnyul, two languages of the Kimberleys region of Western Australia.
Constituency: The Experiential Semiotic
Authors: McGregor William B
Published: November 2023

This chapter begins the detailed elaboration and explication of the SG model with an investigation of constituency relationships, the syntagmatic relationships which define and are defined by, the experiential semiotic. We begin, in section 4.1, by identifying the building blocks of experiential grammar, the units and syntagmatic relationships among them, which go together in the construction of human beings’ representations of their worlds of experience. In the process of doing this, we attempt to provide a clearer notion of which linguistic phenomena fall within the experiential semiotic and are analysable in terms of constituency.
A Sensible Subjectivism?
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

1. Usually—if only for the purpose of having the position summarily dismissed as soon as possible—the doctrine of subjectivism is reported as claiming that ‘x is good’ or ‘x is right’ or ‘x is beautiful’, as uttered by speaker S, says that S approves of x, or that x induces in S a certain sentiment of approbation. The first and perhaps most obvious objection, that ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘beautiful’ do not themselves mean the same, might be countered by distinguishing different species of approbative sentiment. But there is a more familiar and more considerable second objection: at least when it is given in this form, subjectivism makes a difficulty for itself about disagreement.
The Concern to Survive*
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

Under the influence of well known thought experiments modern inheritors of John Locke’s conception of personhood have recently been led to draw a distinction between questions of the identity of a person and questions about survival. ‘Certain important questions [about such matters as survival, memory, and responsibility] do presuppose a question about personal identity.But they can be freed of this presupposition. And when they are, the question about identity has no importance’.
Rights and Reproductive Choice
Authors: Harris John
Published: November 2023

Reproductive choice is an idea that is respected more in the breach than in the observance. It is when people, particularly women, actually want to exercise choice that the trouble starts. The trouble is well under way, particularly because technology is rapidly increasing the range and the nature of available choices. Recently a number of new possibilities have entered the market place of ideas, and some are already being offered in the bazaar, raising issues of market regulation, personal freedom, and fundamental ethics.
Ethical Issues in Pre-implantation Diagnosis
Authors: Holm Søren
Published: November 2023

Pre-implantation diagnosis is a new technique which makes it possible to investigate the genetic make-up of an embryo produced by in vitro fertilization (IVF) prior to its implantation into a woman’s uterus.
Letter from a Post-menopausal Mother
Authors: Beaufort Inez De
Published: November 2023

For your eighteenth birthday, this milestone of adulthood, I’m writing you this letter. A plea for the accused? An explanation for more under standing, if need be posthumously? A justification? A testament for later, for when you are in more reflective mood? I think that mothers always look back at the birth on the occasion of the birthdays of their children; it is such an overwhelming event that you want, maybe have to relive it.
Words and Word-Formation: Morphology in OED
Authors: Kastovsky Dieter
Published: November 2023

abstract

The Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary by the Philological Society of 1859 not only formally inaugurated this project, it also laid down the basic principles which should govern the work on the NED (later OED) itself. Of these, the following two are regarded as the most important ones by Craigie and Onions in their ‘Historical Introduction’ to the Supplement volume of the OED (Craigie and Onions 1933: p. viii):

Principle I: The first requirement of every lexicon is that it should contain every word occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate. Principle IV: In the treatment of individual words the historical principle will be uniformly adopted. Both principles do not seem to be unreasonable, especially if one takes into account the historical context in which they were formulated. Previous dictionaries had always been relatively restricted in their coverage, and it should therefore come as no surprise that the compilers of the New English Dictionary wanted it to be more comprehensive than its predecessors, ideally even all-comprehensive. After all, the number of words listed has always been a major factor in advertising a lexicon until today (Stein 1978a: 103 f.).
‘This Unique and Peerless Specimen’: The Reputation of the OED
Authors: Bailey Richard w.
Published: November 2023

Imperialism, profit, and philology had, by the mid-nineteenth century, become important ingredients of British lexicography-often prioritized in that order. In his Imperial Lexicon of the English Language (1852), John Boag made the first of these explicit in describing his two-volume work: It is called ‘the Imperial Lexicon of the English language,’ because the Anglo-Saxon speech is not now, as formerly, the instrument of thought and medium of intercourse of the English nation only; it is spoken in every latitude of the globe; it is displacing every older tongue found prevailing in those countries where it has taken root; in a few years it will be the native tongue of more people than the whole of Europe will contain; and whilst, therefore, the complete collection and arrangement of its words becomes truly an English Lexicon, it does so in a sense of prospective usefulness so comprehensive as to be fitly expressed by the word ‘Imperial’. (1852: 3) Such sentiments had become commonplace. In 1846 an anonymous pamphleteer in Manchester had declared that ‘in the literary combat for supremacy, it is, there-fore, England against the world’. The following year John Bradshaw was even more convinced of the imperial mission of English: ‘it clearly shows the God of providence has a hand in doing it’ (quoted with other examples in Bailey 1991: 106-9).
Introduction
Authors: Fox Anthony
Published: November 2023

This book is concerned with the linguistic description of the so-called ‘prosodic’ features of speech, which are generally taken to include length, accent and stress, tone, intonation, and potentially a few others. The description and the definition of these features have always been something of a problem for linguists; for many years, and especially in the formative period of modern linguistic theory in the second quarter of the twentieth century, the study of these features suffered from relative neglect. With some exceptions, phonological descriptions were based primarily on ‘segments’-vowels and consonants-and prosodic features were either ignored or forced into an inappropriate segmental mould. In recent years this imbalance has been redressed, and several phonological theories are now available which are not merely more sympathetic to prosodic features but are even largely based upon them. However, it remains the case that there is no universal consensus among philologists about either the nature of prosodic features themselves or the general framework for their description, and it is difficult to obtain a clear picture of the field as a whole. The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of these features, and to consider some of the principles on which such a framework can be based.
Prosodic Structure
Authors: Fox Anthony
Published: November 2023

In the preceding chapters we have looked in some detail at individual prosodic features, principally length, accent, tone, and intonation, though others, such as rhythm, have also been considered, and we have examined the ways in which these features can be systematized phonologically. Each feature has been dis cussed largely in its own terms, as an independent prosodic system, taking account of its individual phonetic and phonological properties, and the means of specifying them.
Who Should Know about My HIV Positivity and Why?
Authors: Häyry Heta
Published: November 2023

Suppose that I am HIV positive, in other words, that my blood contains traceable antibodies to the human immunodeficiency virus, which in its turn is the causative agent of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome, AIDS. Suppose, further, that so far I am unaware of the fact, and so is everybody else. The questions that I propose to answer in this chapter are: ‘Who should know about my HIV positivity?’, and ‘Why?’
Deciding How to Decide
Authors: Velleman J David
Published: November 2023

By “deciding how to decide,” I mean using practical reasoning to regulate one’s principles of practical reasoning. David Gauthier has suggested that deciding how to decide is something that every rational agent does. Whether or not we agree with Gauthier about agents in general, we might think that his suggestion applies well enough to many of us moral philosophers. We assess rival principles of practical reasoning, which tell us how to choose among actions; and assessing how to choose among actions certainly sounds like deciding how to decide. One of my goals in this essay is to argue, in opposition to Gauthier, that assessing rival principles of practical reasoning is a job for theoretical rather than practical reasoning. How to decide is something that we discover rather than decide.
Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy
Authors: Matthews Gareth B
Published: November 2023

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews invites us to view this as a response to something inherently problematic in the basic notions that philosophy deals with. He examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that this development may be seen as an archetypal pattern that philosophers follow even today. So it is that one may be won over to philosophy in the first place by the example of a Socratic teacher who displays an uncanny gift at getting one perplexed about something one thought one understood perfectly well. Later, however, wanting like Plato to move beyond perplexity to produce philosophical 'results', one may be chagrined to discover that one's very best attempt to develop a philosophical theory induces its own perplexity. Then, like late Plato and like Aristotle, the philosopher may seek to 'normalize' perplexity in a way that both allows for progress and yet respects the peculiarly baffling character of philosophical questions.
Shared Perplexity: The Self-Stinging Stingray
Authors: Matthews Gareth B
Published: November 2023

Plato’S dialogue Meno opens with a question from Meno about whether virtue can be taught. Socrates replies that, far from knowing whether or not virtue can be taught, he doesn’t even know what virtue is (71a). There follows this characteristic avowal of what is called ‘Socratic ignorance’:
Perplexity and Methodology in Aristotle
Authors: Matthews Gareth B
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 2 we saw that Aristotle thinks philosophy begins in perplexity. More particularly, he thinks it begins in the astonished recognition that there is some basic perplexity we don’t know how to deal with. He seems to have thought that the perplexities that set off the first philosophers, that is, the first Western philosophers, were puzzles about the universe. What about perplexity in Aristotle’s own philosophy? What role does it play there? Does it play any continuing role at all?
Ethical Explorations
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

John Skorupski develops in these essays a distinctive and systematic moral philosophy, examining fundamental questions in ethics, and then applying the results to issues of culture and politics. The first three parts of the book focus on central ethical concepts: reasons, the good, and morality. Skorupski examines normative claims about what we have reason to think, feel, or do. He then presents a conception of the good which differs significantly from the utilitarianism of Mill while maintaining its important insights. Drawing on Kant and Hegel, his account of morality relates it to autonomy and the emotions involved in blame and recognition. The final part of the book is a liberal critique of the forms of liberalism which dominate contemporary culture. Ethical Explorations firmly links liberal politics to its ethical ideal, and links that ideal to modern morality and modern ideas of the good.
Neutral versus Relative: Philosophical Utilitarianism and Practical Reason
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

The first part of this essay (Sections 2-5) examines the distinction between ‘neutral’ and ‘relative’ reasons, a distinction which plays a role in a number of the essays in this book. A special case of it, which has been much discussed, is the distinction between agent-neutral and agent-relative reasons. It is quite common at the moment to make ‘agent neutrality’ a necessary condition of an ethical position called ‘consequentialism’ and to contrast that with ‘deontology’, which is held to be ‘agent relative’.1 Both these tendencies, I shall argue, regrettably obscure useful distinctions. This will prompt us to consider the contrast between deontological and teleological ethics more widely, and also to consider that much abused term, ‘utilitarianism’.
The Post-Modern Hume: Ernest Gellner’s ‘Enlightenment Fundamentalism’
Authors: Skorupski John
Published: November 2023

Sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cur’d, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it. ‘Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them; and take it for granted, whatever may be the reader’s opinion at this present moment, that an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and internal world.
Body, Soul, and Nerves: Epicurus, Herophilus, Erasistratus, the Stoics, and Galen
Authors: Staden Heinrich Von
Published: November 2023

It is striking that polarities such as corporeal-incorporeal, mortal immortal, matter-form, transient-eternal, and generated-ungenerated—all of which are deployed to draw lines of demarcation between body and soul from the classical period to later antiquity—are not central to the more influential early Hellenistic theories of body and soul. Despite their radically divergent versions of the world and of human beings, Epicurus, many Stoics, and the more significant early Hellenistic physicians share a constellation of convictions concerning soul and body which is not receptive to boundary lines of such a kind (even if some features of their beliefs continue to resonate with those of their precursors).
Loan Phonology: Perception, Salience, the Lexicon and OT
Authors: Jacobs Haike , Gussenhoven Carlos
Published: November 2023

Unless they are treated as exceptions, loanwords whose phonological stucture does not fit into the phonology of the borrowing language need to be adapted to it. Rule-based accounts of the adaptation (or ‘nativisation’) of loanwords are typically confronted with the duplication problem (Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1977: 136). This situation arises when a rule needs to be added to the grammar which duplicates a morpheme structure constraint, of which the sole function is to adapt loanwords to the native phonological system. As has been argued by Yip (1993), a constraint-based theory like Optimality Theory (OT) does not have to add extra rules to account for the nativisation of loan words. Rather, the adaptation ought to follow from the constraint ranking of the borrowing language.
Optimal Syntax
Authors: Bresnan Joan
Published: November 2023

Most OT syntax work to date has taken the OUTPUT to consist of representational simulations of transformational derivations using chains and traces (e.g. Grimshaw 1997; Legendre, Smolensky, and Wilson 1998; Grimshaw and Samek-Lodovici 1998).2 The purpose of these notes is to show that there may be advantages, both conceptual and empirical, to adopting a more radically nonderivational theory of GEN, based on a parallel correspondence theory of syntactic structures.
The Universal Constraint Set: Convention, not Fact
Authors: Ellison T Mark
Published: November 2023

All languages make the same phonological generalizations. This is the remarkable claim of Optimality Theory (OT). In early generative phonology (Chomsky and Halle 1968), phonological generalizations were expressed by ordered rewrite rules. Each language, however, required its own set of rules as well as its own ordering. Later, under specification phonology (Archangeli and Pulleyblank 1989, 1994) emphasized default rules. Universal tendencies in the rules were apparent, but characterizing all languages with a single set of rules remained an unreachable dream.
Learning Phonology: Genetic Algorithms and Yoruba Tongue—Root Harmony
Authors: Pulleyblank Douglas , Turkel William J
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents an implementation of a genetic algorithm which acquires the constraint rankings of an Optimality-theoretic grammar. The chapter begins by sketching the structure of a grammar within Optimality Theory, goes on to outline the nature of an acquisition model employing genetic algorithms, and finally, applies genetic algorithms to Optimality Theory, using as a case study the acquisition of tongue-root harmony systems. The basic structure of a phonological grammar in Optimality Theory is established by the appropriate ranking of a universally determined set of violable constraints. This structure is well suited for an acquisition model based on genetic algorithms, a form of evolution that occurs on a computer. In a genetic algorithm, a problem of some sort is encoded in the form of strings of symbols. In the case of an Optimality-theoretic grammar, each such string of symbols directly corresponds to a ranked set of constraints. A population of these strings (ranked constraint sets) is randomly generated, each corresponding to a possible grammar. The goodness (or ‘fitness’) of each of the strings is then assessed for how well it describes the sort of data encountered. The fitness of most of the randomly generated strings will be very poor—especially if the search space is large—but some strings are better than others.
The Latin Background
Authors: Sampson Rodney
Published: November 2023

Our starting point for tracing the history of vowel nasalization lies in the ancestor of the various Romance languages and dialects, Latin. Clearly, knowledge of the pronunciation of a language form which is no longer used by native speakers can never be complete, so that any conclusions drawn on the characteristics of Latin speech must be somewhat tentative. As regards more delicate features of pronunciation, such as vowel nasality, for which no special written symbolization existed, the tentativeness must be even greater. However, from the information which is available there are some indications to suggest that vowels may well have been significantly affected by nasality at various stages of the history of Latin.
Sardinian and Corsican
Authors: Sampson Rodney
Published: November 2023

The islands of Sardinia and Corsica have undergone rather special linguistic evolution. Sardinia fell under Roman control comparatively early, from 238 BC, but after a lengthy period of romanization lasting two centuries which established the use of Latin, the island remained socially and linguistically somewhat isolated. The result has been that a distinctive and often archaic form of Romance has developed. As far as vowel evolution is concerned, the long/short vowel-length contrast in Latin has been lost but without the qualitative adaptations of short vowels which are commonly found elsewhere in Romance.
Romanian (Balkan Romance)
Authors: Sampson Rodney
Published: November 2023

In the Balkans, two forms of Romance survived up to modern times. These are Romanian and Dalmatian. Romanian is spoken by about 25 million people and is conventionally divided up into four main sub-groups: (a) Daco-romanian (DR), which is spoken in the state of Romania by over 20 million people and divided regionally into a number of sub-types, notably Transylvanian (north and west), Moldavian (north-east and east), and Wallachian (south), the standard language being a cultivated variety of Wallachian based on the usage of Bucharest; (b) Istro-romanian (IR) which is closely linked to western types of DR and only split off at some stage before the end of the thirteenth century as a result of the westward migration of its speakers to what used to be north western Yugoslavia; (c) Aromanian (AR) which is spoken by up to half a million people living mainly in migrant pastoral communities in northern Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, and former Yugoslavia; (d) Megleno-romanian (MR) which is a variant of AR used by a small community living north of the Gulf of Salonica.
Conclusion: Retrospect and Prospects
Authors: Sampson Rodney
Published: November 2023

The picture which has emerged from our review of Romance nasal vowel evolution has been a varied one. That there should be variation is of course predictable given that the developments which have been considered extend over a span of two thousand years and relate to a vast geographical area encompassing a host of separate communities. Yet it is possible to detect certain common characteristics for vowel nasalization in Romance in a similar way to what Chen (1972a, 1975) has sought to do for Chinese dialects. A number of shared characteristics have in fact presented themselves fairly clearly in the course of our coverage. Some of these may be directly compared with patterns of nasalization identified by linguists working on data from outside Romance also. In this way, our findings will serve to confirm or qualify claims that these patterns may have general validity in language. Others, however, are less readily reconciled with general assumptions which have been made about vowel nasalization and signal areas where further investigation is needed. In this final chapter these broader issues are considered as we briefly evaluate the data which have emerged from our review.
Prescriptivism
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

ETHICAL theories (in the sense of theories about the meaning and logical properties of moral terms) fall into two main classes: descriptivist and non-descriptivist (SOE 3. 4). According to the former. moral words like ‘good’ and ‘wrong’ resemble ordinary descriptive words like ‘red’ and ‘rectangular’ in this respect, that their meaning and their application conditions are firmly linked. so that to change either is to change the other. Victims of the ‘descriptive fallacy’ (Austin 1961: 234; 1962: 3) think that the same has to be true of all words; but this has been shown not to he the case. Imperatives are the obvious counterexample. Prescriptivists took their cue from an observation about these. The application conditions of imperatives clearly vary independently of their meaning. If I tell someone to shut the door and you tell him not to, we may still he meaning the same by the imperative ‘Shut the door’, which I affirm and you negate.
Internalism And Externalism In Ethics
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

On the face of it (though I am not an expert in the theory of meaning) this dispute does not look too dillkult to resolve. if we distinguish between speaker’s meaning and meaning in a language. The speaker’s meaning may be what would be more correctly expressed by saying ‘I have a pain in my thigh similar to what one has when one has arthritis in a joint’, or possibly ‘I have arthritis in one end of my thigh, namely in my hip’: the meaning in the language is such that what he says, taken literally, is a self-contradiction. But I shall not be concerned with this dispute. In ethics, the dispute between internalizes and externalists has been formulated in different ways, and some of the differences are very important. I shall myself use the terms in the following way.
Methods Of Bioethics: Some Defective Proposals
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

As to being true, that is not so difficult. Most philosophical truths are fairly obvious, though people obscure them by their inability or unwil1ingness to express themselves clearly. The difficult thing is to grasp the whole truth. If you take a bunch of supposedly divergent theories on almost any philosophical question, you will find in each of them some points which are right, and some which are wrong. Those who criticize these theories often rightly attack the points that are wrong, but do not see that not everything in a theory is wrong: it also, usually, has hold of important truths. So, in putting forward their own opposing theories, these philosophers discard the good with the bad, denying truths that their victims had grasped. So they too land themselves in a mixture of truth and error. The difficult thing. as I said, is to grasp the whole truth. This entails carefully disentangling the truths from the errors in all the theories one studies. It is the mark of the good philosopher to be able to do this.
A Utilitarian Approach To Ethics
Authors: Hare R M
Published: November 2023

A consequentialist is somebody who thinks that what determine the moral quality of an action (that is, determine whether it is right or wrong) are its consequences. An action is the making of some difference to what happens-to the history of the world. If I make no difference to what happens. I have done no action. In the widest sense, even if I do nothing (do not move a finger), I have done an action (what is sometimes called an act of omission). It made a difference to the history of the world that I did nothing. We are, in other words, responsible for what we fail to do as well as for what we actively do. I can of course he blamed for doing nothing: someone might say ‘You were to blame for not saving the life of the patient when you could have’.Suppose. then, that my gun is pointing at somebody and I pull the trigger, and he dies. We say ‘I have killed him’. Killing him was what I did-my act. If I did wrong. what made it wrong was the consequence of my pulling the trigger, namely that I killed him. In the light of this example. it is hard to see how people can deny that consequences. in this sense, are relevant to moral judgements about actions.
Socrates (470–399 Bc)
Authors: Taylor C C W
Published: November 2023

Assuming the truth of the generally (though not universally) accepted view that all Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death, the only evidence from Socrates’ own lifetime is Aristophanes’ Clouds, first produced in 423, in which Socrates is a central character.
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
Authors: Wood Allen
Published: November 2023

Radical social theorist and organizer of the working class, whose .thought is widely regarded as the chief inspiration for all forms of modern social radicalism. Born 5 May 1818 in the Rhenish city of Trier, Karl Heinrich Marx was son of a successful Jewish lawyer of conservative political views who converted to Christianity in 1824. He studied law at the University of Bonn in 1835 and at the University of Berlin in 1836, changing his course of study in that year to philosophy, under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, and the Young Hegelian movement. Marx completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1841.
William James (1842–1910)
Authors: Sprigge T L S
Published: November 2023

A Meric An philosopher and psychologist, son of Henry James, Swedenborgian religious thinker, brother of Henry James, the novelist, and Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at Harvard. Only some of his many concerns are considered here.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
Authors: Inwood M J
Published: November 2023

German philosopher who was the founder, and a skilful practitioner, of phenomenology. His early works, On the Concept of Number (1887) and Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), were marked by psychologism, the attempt to base logic and arithmetic on psychology. The concept of plurality, for example, was explained in terms of our mental act of combining different contents of consciousness into one representation, of, for example, seeing distinct people as a single group. Influenced in part by Frege’s criticism, Husserl abandoned this view, and in his Logical Investigations (1900-1; tr. London, 1970) argued that logic is not reducible to psychology. For example, the statement:
Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad
Authors: Hooker Brad
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I focus on the view I think is most often meant by the title ‘moral particularism’. This view is held by some of the most morally admirable people I know. Yet, as I shall explain here, the view seems wrong. I shall also argue that, whether or not it is wrong, the view would be a bad one for society to accept.
Why Practice needs Ethical Theory: Particularism, Principle, and Bad Behaviour
Authors: Nussbaum Martha
Published: November 2023

Innocence is indeed a glorious thing; but, unfortunately, it does not keep very well and is easily led astray. Consequently, even wisdom which consists more in doing and not doing than in knowing-needs science, not in order to learn from it, but in order that wisdom’s precepts may gain acceptance and permanence … Thus is ordinary human reason forced to go outside its sphere and take a step into the field of practical philosophy, not by any need for speculation (which never befalls such reason so long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical grounds themselves … Thus when ordinary practical reason cultivates itself, there imperceptibly arises in it a dialectic which compels it to seek help in philosophy.
Molyneux’s babies: Cross-modal perception, imitation and the mind of the preverbal infant
Authors: Meltzoff Andrew N
Published: November 2023

Gareth Evans (1985) contemplated novel variants of the Molyneux problem to illuminate certain questions in epistemology. I and others have used variants of the Molyneux problem to address questions about the nature of the infant mind. When we study infants instead of blind adults, the questions cannot be verbal; we must infer infant perception and thought through their actions. Imagine that the blind man is presented with a sphere to explore by touch. A sphere and cube are placed before him and sight is bestowed. In this modified example we do not ask the man to use a verbal label to designate which object he has just touched; we simply ask that he point towards or even to look longer at that object. The subject’s response in this instance is nonverbal., but it raises most of the critical issues of the original case.
Computing ‘where’ and ‘what’ in the visual system
Authors: Braddick Oliver
Published: November 2023

The ability to extract spatial relations seems to be a skill that is deeply embedded in our visual system: we need little in the way of deliberation or special strategy to judge, say, that points A B C lie in a straight line; that D is not vertically above E but slightly to the right; that X is above the centre of circle 0, and so on. This chapter looks at some evidence that may help us to understand how such tasks are performed - or at least to pose the question het ter. It outlines the possible roles of two kinds of neural encoding: first in terms of receptive fields responding to specific spatial configurations, and second in terms of the ‘local sign’ of neurons responding to features at particular locations. Broadly these might be thought of as signalling ‘what’ and ‘where’ respectively, although the encoding of spatial relations, by either mechanism, is potentially relevant both for identifying an object and for locating it. Insofar as location and identity are distinguishable kinds of information,
Image indeterminacy: The picture theory of images and the bifurcation of ‘what’ and ‘where’ information in higher-level vision
Authors: Tye Michael
Published: November 2023

A long and impressive philosophical history attaches to the view that visual images represent the world in something like the manner of pictures. This century, however, the pictorial view of images has <ome under heavy philosophical attack. Three basic sorts of objections have been raised. First, there have been challenges to the sense of the view: mental images are not seen with real eyes; they cannot be hung on real walls; they have no objective weight or colour. What, then, can it mean to say that images are pictorial? Secondly, there have been arguments that purport to show that the view is false. Perhaps the best known of these is founded on the charge that the pictorial conception of images cannot satisfactorily explain the indeterminacy of many mental images. Finally, there have been attacks on the evidential underpinnings of the view. ..
Introduction
Authors: Myers-Scotton Carol
Published: November 2023

EVERYDAY conversations in two languages are the subject-matter of this volume. All over the world bilinguals carry on such conversations, from Hispanics in Texas, who may alternate between Spanish and English in informal in-group conversations, to West Africans, who may use both Wolof and French in the same conversation on the streets of Dakar, Senegal, to residents in the Swiss capital of Berne, who may change back and forth between Swiss German and French in a service exchange. Contrary to some popular beliefs, such conversations are not mainly a transitional stage in a language shift from dominance in one language to another. It is true that many immigrants who are in the process of language shift do engage in codeswitching, but this form of conversation is also part of the daily lives of many ‘stable’ bilingual populations as well. Neither is codeswitching only the vehicle of social groups on the socio-economic ‘margins’ of society; for example, in every nation, successful business people and professionals who happen to have a different home language from the language dominant in the society where they live frequently engage in codeswitching (between these two languages) with friends and business associates who share their linguistic repertoires. Consider Punjabi-origin physicians in Birmingham, England, Lebanese-origin businessmen in Dearborn, Michigan, or Chineseorigin corporate executives in Singapore.
Hobbes’s Social Contract*
Authors: Gauthier David
Published: November 2023

In justirying the sovereign, does Hobbes appeal to a social contract? In her new and important book, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, Jean Hampton says ‘No’ ( (2), cf. pp. 4, 186-8, 279). Hobbes’s ‘social contract’ argument is unfortunately, although no doubt irretrievably, mislabelled. He appeals, not lo a contract, but to a self-interested agreement or convention. And this appeal is typical of contractarian strategy; ‘there is no literal contract in any successful social contract theory’ ( (2), p. 4).
Hobbes and the Problem of God
Authors: Pacchi Arrigo
Published: November 2023

This paper deals with the question or the relation between Hobbes’s philosophy and theology. There are some scholars who have tried to answer this question denying any link between Hobbesian thought and Christian, or even natural, religion, emphasizing the significance of the openly declared materialism and of lhe supposed atheism of Hobbes, and considering his theological slatemenls as merely opportunistic ones; others sift and peruse each Hobbesian writing, in search of every hint made by Hobbes at the existence of God, or at the coincidence of natural and divine law, in order lo show that he was in all respects a Christian thinker.
Has Dummett Oversalted his Frege? Remarks on the Conveyability of Thought
Authors: George Alexander
Published: November 2023

In the end we must always rely on other people’s understanding words, inflexions, and sentence-construction in essentially the same way as ourselves. I was relying upon a reader who would be ready to meet me half-way—who does not begrudge a pinch of salt.
Some Senses of Holism: An Anti-Realist’s Guide to Quine
Authors: Shieh Sanford
Published: November 2023

In ‘The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic’, perhaps the canonical text of Michael Dummett’s rehabilitation of L. E. J. Brouwer’s critique of classical mathematical reasoning, we read that
Introduction and Perspectives
Authors: Walton Douglas
Published: November 2023

A Slippery slope argument is a kind of argument that warns you if you take a first step, you will find yourself involved in a sticky sequence of consequences from which you will be unable to extricate yourself, and eventually you will wind up speeding faster and faster towards some disastrous outcome. A good example was the argument used to support the majority opinion in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision not to ban burning of the American flag as a criminal act. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. argued that any ruling to ban physical desecration of the flag would lead to further cases that would ‘enter territory having no discernible or defensible boundaries.’ Wouldn’t the court then have to consider prohibiting the burning of state flags, or the Constitution? Justice Brennan worried that in order to evaluate these choices, the court would end up imposing its own political preferences to suppress all kinds of unpopular protests. This kind of outcome is dangerous in a democratic country where freedom of speech is important.
Descartes On Innate Ideas, Sensation, And Scholasticism: The Response To Regius
Authors: Schmaltz Tad m.
Published: November 2023

Toward the end of his life, Descartes claimed, in response to the apostate Henricus Regius (Henri de Roy), that “there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind”. This claim in Notae in programma quoddam1 is followed by the assertion that even sensory ideas must be so innate. This nativist view of sensation is among the most baffling of Descartes’s doctrines, and it has not gone without scrutiny.2 Commentators have often attempted to assess the Notes simply by providing analyses of what Descartes could have meant by the terms we translate as ‘innate’ and ‘sensory idea’. While this has yielded some interesting results, it is not sufficient. Descartes offered his nativist account of sensation as part of a reaction to views proposed by his contemporaries, and this account is not considered properly when abstracted from the wider context of this reaction.
Silence And Imitation In The Platonic Dialogues
Authors: Kosman L A
Published: November 2023

First a bit of recusatio. There is an important paper waiting to be written about discursive gaps in the dialogues, about those parts of the dramatic space created by Plato of which the dialogues make us aware but say nothing, those parts of the histoire about which the discours is silent. Such a paper might well be entitled ‘Silence in the Platonic Dialogues’. There is another paper by the same title about the silent onlookers in the dialogues, those figures of whose presence we are made aware, but who say nothing in the course of the conversation.
Interpreting the Emotional Content of Music
Authors: Berenson F M
Published: November 2023

Interpretation, in the context of music, is almost invariably taken as referring to performers and critical writings are, therefore, primarily concerned with judgements of the quality of performances in terms of whose or which interpretation comes nearest to the spirit of the music, etc. Interpretation focuses on bringing out what there is in the music, on what is perceived, on what there is to be discovered, rendered audible and to offer what has been understood about the music to the audiences; all this is in keeping with the above definition. The audience, in turn, try to capture this understanding in some way. In this important sense the audience are also engaged in interpretation of what it is they are listening to (as opposed to merely hearing music passively). The activity of listening to music is inextricably bound up with interpreting what one is listening to and with experiencing the richness of the music in all its aspects. Yet, in most writings on this subject the emphasis is on the performer’s interpretation; very little is said about the listener’s interpretation.
Perceiving the Music Correctly
Authors: Kraut Robert
Published: November 2023

I am interested in a certain dispute. It concerns the metaphysics of musical meaning; more specifically, it involves a certain confrontation between a variety of pluralism and a variety of monism. At different times I have taken different sides in the dispute. More recently I have begun to worry about what kind of dispute it is, and about what sorts of considerations—psychological, music-theoretic, or philosophical—could possibly resolve it one way or the other.