We use large collections of online product reviews, in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, to study the use conditions of expressives (swears, antihonorifics, intensives). The distributional evidence provides quantitative support for a pragmatic theory of these items that is based in speaker and hearer expectations.

The collection focuses on meaning change as a topic of interdisciplinary research.

Since the spectrum of possibilities in linguistic theory construction is much broader and more variegated than students of linguistics have perhaps been led to believe, the Current Issues in Linguistic Theory series has been established in order to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of linguistic opinions of scholars who do not necessarily accept the prevailing mode of thought in linguistic science. CILT is a theory-oriented series which welcomes contributions from scholars who have significant proposals to make towards (...) the advancement of our understanding of language, its structure, functioning, and development. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory is especially designed, by offering an alternative outlet for meaningful contributions to the current linguistic debate, to furnish the community of linguists the diversity of opinion which a healthy discipline must have. (shrink)

Wunsch und Versuch, die Philosophie Meister Eckharts und Johann Gottlieb Fichtes zu vergleichen, gehören zu den problematischen Anstrengungen des vergangenen 20. Jahrhunderts. Einerseits ist nämlich unumstritten: Es gibt keinen Hinweis dafür, daß Fichte Schriften oder Zitate oder auch den Namen Meister Eckharts gekannt hätte. Was immer Fichte auch gedacht und geschrieben haben mag, es ist nicht auf eine Kenntnis oder Lektüre Eckharts zurückzuführen: Eine historische Arbeit findet hier keinen Anknüpfungspunkt oder nur einen ganz allgemeinen: die weitere Geschichte des Neuplatonismus. Andererseits (...) ist das Thema systematisch verstellt: Geschärft durch den Klang einer Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie, die alles, was deutsch war oder zu sein vorgab, in das Konstrukt eines,!deutschen Wesens’ zwanghaft zu vereinen suchte, wird sich jede Hinwendung zu diesem Thema daran messen lassen müssen, ob und inwieweit es ihr gelingt, ihre Methode philosophisch und philosophiehistorisch zu rechtfertigen. Erinnert sei an die Schriften von Hermann Schwarz, Alfred Rosenberg und Heinz Finke, die als Vergleichsgrundlage an,!rassegebunde Volksseelen‘ oder etwa an ein spezielles,!germanisches Lebensgefühl‘ appellierten. (shrink)

Wunsch und Versuch, die Philosophie Meister Eckharts und Johann Gottlieb Fichtes zu vergleichen, gehören zu den problematischen Anstrengungen des vergangenen 20. Jahrhunderts. Einerseits ist nämlich unumstritten: Es gibt keinen Hinweis dafür, daß Fichte Schriften oder Zitate oder auch den Namen Meister Eckharts gekannt hätte. Was immer Fichte auch gedacht und geschrieben haben mag, es ist nicht auf eine Kenntnis oder Lektüre Eckharts zurückzuführen: Eine historische Arbeit findet hier keinen Anknüpfungspunkt oder nur einen ganz allgemeinen: die weitere Geschichte des Neuplatonismus. Andererseits (...) ist das Thema systematisch verstellt: Geschärft durch den Klang einer Blut-und-Boden-Ideologie, die alles, was deutsch war oder zu sein vorgab, in das Konstrukt eines,!deutschen Wesens’ zwanghaft zu vereinen suchte, wird sich jede Hinwendung zu diesem Thema daran messen lassen müssen, ob und inwieweit es ihr gelingt, ihre Methode philosophisch und philosophiehistorisch zu rechtfertigen. Erinnert sei an die Schriften von Hermann Schwarz, Alfred Rosenberg und Heinz Finke, die als Vergleichsgrundlage an,!rassegebunde Volksseelen‘ oder etwa an ein spezielles,!germanisches Lebensgefühl‘ appellierten. (shrink)

There is a relationship between time and technology which has been obvious since the classical philosophies of time. Even telling the time necessitates technologies relating to measuring and counting. Technological developments have changed the temporal state of our reality. Key terms such as deceleration, synchronisation, prevention and de-temporalisation point to relevant problem areas in this respect. This yearbook, whose thematic focus is 2021, endeavours to reveal new technological and philosophical perspectives on the temporal conditions in which we think, communicate, work (...) and live. With contributions by Cornelius Borck, Stefan Böschen, Christopher Coenen, Olivier Del Fabbro, Andreas Folkers, Yvonne Förster, Alexander Friedrich, Steve Fuller, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Thilo Hagendorff, Thomas Hilgers, Dirk Hommrich, Erich Hörl, Sebastian Lederle, Janne Mende, Jürgen Meutgens, Carl Mitcham, Oliver Müller, Alfred Nordmann, Tom Poljanšek, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludger Schwarte, Astrid Schwarz, René von Schomberg, René Umlauf, Sarine Waltenspül, Bastian Weiß, Langdon Winner and Yongmou Liu. (shrink)

Rational agents are supposed to maximize expected utility. But what are the options from which they choose? I outline some constraints on an adequate representation of an agent’s options. The options should, for example, contain no information of which the agent is unsure. But they should be sufficiently rich to distinguish all available acts from one another. These demands often come into conflict, so that there seems to be no adequate representation of the options at all. After reviewing existing proposals (...) for how to construe decision-theoretic options and finding them all wanting, I suggest that our model of rational agents should include a special domain of ‘virtual’ option propositions to serve as formal objects of deliberation and choice. (shrink)

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

Some cognitive processes appear to have “phenomenal” properties that are directly revealed to the subject and not determined by physical properties. I suggest that the source of this appearance is the method by which our brain processes sensory information. The appearance is an illusion. Nonetheless, we are not mistaken when we judge that people sometimes fee lpain.

Our senses provide us with information about the world, but what exactly do they tell us? I argue that in order to optimally respond to sensory stimulations, an agent’s doxastic space may have an extra, “imaginary” dimension of possibility; perceptual experiences confer certainty on propositions in this dimension. To some extent, the resulting picture vindicates the old-fashioned empiricist idea that all empirical knowledge is based on a solid foundation of sense-datum propositions, but it avoids most of the problems traditionally associated (...) with that idea. The proposal might also explain why experiences appear to have a non-physical phenomenal character, even if the world is entirely physical. (shrink)

In Listening Subjects, David Schwarz uses psychoanalytic techniques to probe the visceral experiences of music listeners.

Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media build on large aggregates of information analysed by algorithms that transform data into commodities. While the former technologies were built on socio-economic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, media preferences, Big Data technologies register consumer choice, geographical position, web movement, and behavioural information in (...) technologically complex ways that for most lay people are too abstract to appreciate the full consequences of. The data mined for pattern recognition privileges relational rather than demographic qualities. We argue that the agency of interpretation at the bottom of market decisions within media companies nevertheless introduces a ‘heuristics of the algorithm’, where the data inevitably becomes translated into social categories. In the paper we argue that although the promise of algorithmically generated data is often implemented in automated systems where human agency gets increasingly distanced from the data collected, one can observe a felt need among media users and among industry actors to ‘translate back’ the algorithmically produced relational statistics into ‘traditional’ social parameters. The tenacious social structures within the advertising industries work against the techno-economically driven tendencies within the Big Data economy. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

This paper starts out from the idea that semantics is a “special science” whose aim, like that of chemistry or ecology, is to identify systematic, high-level patterns in a fundamentally physical world. I defend an approach to this task on which sentences are associated with with sets of possible worlds (of some kind). These sets of worlds, however, are not postulated for the compositional treatment of intensional contexts; they are not meant to capture what is intuitively asserted or communicated by (...) an utterance; nor are they supposed to shed light on the cognitive processes that underlie out linguistic competence. Instead, their job description is to capture certain regularities in the interactions between subjects using the relevant language. I also raise some questions about how the relevant worlds might be construed. (shrink)

Modal accounts of knowledge, mind, and language, as prominently defended by Lewis, leave no room for enquiry into non-contingent matters. According to Lewis, there is only one necessarily true proposition, and it is vacuously known by everyone. What, then, are we doing when we do metaphysics, which often seems to deal with non-contingent questions? Lewis never gave a satisfactory answer, or even acknowledged the problem. I explore some options. Can we understand the relevant parts of metaphysics as dealing with contingent (...) questions about our concepts? Can we understand them in terms of a hyperintensional conception of “explicit” knowledge? Both options have some promise. Ultimately, however, I don’t think they succeed at squaring Lewis’s empiricist epistemology with his metaphysical realism. (shrink)

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Possible-worlds accounts of mental or linguistic content are often criticized for being too coarse-grained. To make room for more fine-grained distinctions among contents, several authors have recently proposed extending the space of possible worlds by "impossible worlds". We argue that this strategy comes with serious costs: we would effectively have to abandon most of the features that make the possible-worlds framework attractive. More generally, we argue that while there are intuitive and theoretical considerations against overly coarse-grained notions of content, the (...) same kinds of considerations also prohibit an overly fine-grained individuation of content. An adequate notion of content, it seems, should have intermediate granularity. However, it is hard to construe a notion of content that meets these demands. Any notion of content, we suggest, must be either implausibly coarse-grained or implausibly fine-grained (or both). (shrink)

A tribute to vision boards evaluates their creative, motivational, and inspirational role in providing visual life and career maps for famous and everyday ...

Christopher Hookway presents a series of studies of themes from the work of the great American philosopher and pragmatist, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1913). These themes center on the question of how we are to investigate the world rationally. Hookway shows how Peirce's ideas about this continue to play an important role in contemporary philosophy.

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

Als Charles Darwin im Jahr 1859 seine Theorie einer Evolution der Arten durch natürliche Auslese veröffentlichte, sah er bereits eine grosse Debatte voraus, jedoch nicht deren Ausstrahlungskraft und Langlebigkeit. Zu Beginn standen die Folgen für die Wissenschaften, den Glauben an Gott und die Moralvorstellungen im Vordergrund. Bald kamen Überlegungen über Gesellschaft, Politik, internationale Beziehungen und über Eingriffe bis hinunter auf die Ebene des Individuums und seines Erbmaterials, seiner Gene hinzu. Sozialdarwinismus, Eugenik, Rassismus galten zeitweise als wissenschaftlich legitime Diskussions- und Politikfelder. (...) Befürchtungen vor einem vermeintlichen Niedergang lassen sich bis heute angesichts der Biologisierung des Denkens scheinbar wissenschaftlich-objektiv untermauern. Gegenwärtig sind die Kontroversen noch vielfältiger, beziehen weit mehr Menschen ein als im späten 19. Jahrhundert, haben weit gravierendere Auswirkungen. Die aus elf Ländern stammenden Autorinnen und Autoren zeichnen aus unterschiedlichen disziplinären Perspektiven die Facetten einer spannenden und bis in die Gegenwart hochaktuellen Debatte nach und fragen nach der Zukunft des "Streitfalls Evolution". (shrink)

Dichotomous categories, such as the West and the rest, primitive and modern, are discussed within a phenomenological theory that suggests humans create structures through which we perceive objects. The perception of culture as an object and its construction through the epistemological practices of fieldwork and interpretation within the metaphor of West and non-Western reveals the structure of sociocultural anthropological inquiry and expresses embodiment of the cosmology of nations. Experiences of, and shared understandings regarding, the body, soul, knowledge, thoughts, emotions, memories, (...) spirits, voice, and speech are compared from descriptions, participant observation, and embodiment as a multi-site ethnographic performance artist expressing new genres of ethnography. Harmony is defined as social location. (shrink)

The paper provides a systematic overview of recent debates in epistemology and philosophy of science on the nature of understanding. We explain why philosophers have turned their attention to understanding and discuss conditions for “explanatory” understanding of why something is the case and for “objectual” understanding of a whole subject matter. The most debated conditions for these types of understanding roughly resemble the three traditional conditions for knowledge: truth, justification and belief. We discuss prominent views about how to construe these (...) conditions for understanding, whether understanding indeed requires conditions of all three types and whether additional conditions are needed. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker's important study of epistemic injustice is focussed primarily on testimonial injustice and hermeneutic injustice. It explores how agents' capacities to make assertions and provide testimony can be impaired in ways that can involve forms of distinctively epistemic injustice. My paper identifies a wider range of forms of epistemic injustice that do not all involve the ability to make assertions or offer testimony. The paper considers some examples of some other ways in which injustice can prevent someone from participating (...) in inquiry. (shrink)