Online research in philosophy

Sentences containing pronouns and indefinite noun phrases can be said toexpress open propositions, propositions which display gaps to be filled.This paper addresses the question what is the linguistic content ofthese expressions, what information they can be said to provide to ahearer, and in what sense the information of a speaker can be said tosupport their utterance. We present and motivate first order notions ofcontent, update and support. The three notions are each defined in acompositional fashion and brought together within a single and coherentframework.

The genetic code has been regarded as arbitrary in the sense that the codon-amino acid assignments could be different than they actually are. This general idea has been spelled out differently by previous, often rather implicit accounts of arbitrariness. They have drawn on the frozen accident theory, on evolutionary contingency, on alternative causal pathways, and on the absence of direct stereochemical interactions between codons and amino acids. It has also been suggested that the arbitrariness of the genetic code justifies attributing semantic information to macromolecules, notably to DNA. I argue that these accounts of arbitrariness are unsatisfactory. I propose that the code is arbitrary in the sense of Jacques Monod's concept of chemical arbitrariness: the genetic code is arbitrary in that any codon requires certain chemical and structural properties to specify a particular amino acid, but these properties are not required in virtue of a principle of chemistry. This notion of arbitrariness is compatible with several recent hypotheses about code evolution. I maintain that the code's chemical arbitrariness is neither sufficient nor necessary for attributing semantic information to nucleic acids.

This paper arose from an attempt to determine how the very late medieval1 supposition theorists treated anaphoric pronouns, pronouns whose significance is derivative from their antecedents. Modern researches into pronouns were stimulated in part by the problem of "donkey sentences" discussed by Geach 1962 in a section explaining what is wrong with medieval supposition theory. So there is some interest in seeing exactly what the medieval account comes to, especially if it turns out, as I suspect, to work as well as contemporary ones. Besides, finding a good analysis of pronouns has proved to be very difficult, and so we might possibly find some insight in a historically different kind of approach. I discuss a version of supposition theory that aims at producing analyses of sentences containing quantified terms,2 as articulated around 1400 by Paul of Venice, and as further developed by certain logicians such as de Soto and Celaya in the 1400's and early 1500's.3 Much of what I will say also applies indirectly to earlier versions of supposition theory (before 1400).

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey , he beats it ). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantifiers so as to allow them to bind variables that are not within their syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to existential quantifiers; recent dynamic approaches have extended it to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of E-type analyses take the pronoun to have the semantics of a definite description (with it ≈ the donkey, or the donkey that John owns ). While competing accounts make very different claims about the patterns of coindexation that are found in the syntax, these are not morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are in sign language, namely through locus assignment and pointing. We make two main claims on the basis of ASL and LSF data. First, sign language data favor dynamic over E-type theories: in those cases in which the two approaches make conflicting predictions about possible patterns of coindexation, dynamic analyses are at an advantage. Second, among dynamic theories, sign language data favor recent ones because the very same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent. Going beyond this debate, we argue that dynamic theories should allow pronouns to be bound across negative expressions, as long as the pronoun is presupposed to have a non-empty denotation. Finally, an appendix displays and explains subtle differences between overt sign language pronouns and all other pronouns in examples involving ‘disjunctive antecedents’, and suggests that counterparts of sign language loci might be found in spoken language.

The problem discussed here is to find a basis for a uniform treatment of the relation between pronouns and their antecedents, taking into account both linguists' and philosophers' approaches. The two main candidates would appear to be the linguists' notion of coreference and the philosophers' notion of pronouns as variables. The notion of coreference can be extended to many but not all cases where the antecedent is non-referential. The pronouns-as-variables approach appears to come closer to full generality, but there are some examples of pronouns of laziness which appear to resist either of the two approaches.

Carminati (2002) shows that the existence of both phonetically full and phonetically null pronouns (pro) in Italian reflects a division of labor with respect to anaphora resolution. Pro prefers to link to prominent antecedents more than its phonetically overt counterpart does (where prominence is determined by syntactic position in intrasentential anaphora cases).

For most people, pronouns are just a matter for linguists. In linguistics, pronouns are classified according to the various linguistic functions they perform: for instance, deictic or anaphoric, definite or indefinite, personal or demonstrative, etc. But a closer look at the issue reveals that pronouns have a great deal to do with philosophy as well. This paper presents a brief sketch of some classical philosophical problems to show how dealing with pronouns has played a part in the formulation and advancement of important philosophical issues including spatial orientation, dialectics, cognition, existential experiences, social relationships, the philosophy of rights, and so forth. For Elmar Holenstein on his Seventieth Birthday.

Montalbetti (1984) points out certain semantic differences between phonetically full and phonetically empty pronouns (henceforth full and n u l l pronouns) that challenge the traditional interpretive parallelism between empty and full categories (see Chomsky 1981, 1982). He shows that both in subject (1) and object position (2), while null pronouns can be interpreted as bound variables (as in (1a) and (2a) ), full pronouns cannot (as in (1c) and (2c)).

Much syntactic research on Romance, and, specifically, on Spanish, has been devoted within the GB framework to examining the properties of a class of pronominal elements involving the so-called ‘arbitrary reference’.1 Here is a sample of such constructions.