Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of _every_ is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like _every frog is green_ meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condition (e.g., being green). One important difference concerns (...) how the determiner treats its two grammatical arguments. On the relational view, the arguments are on a logical par as independent terms that specify the two relata. But on the restricted view, the arguments play distinct logical roles: specifying the limited domain versus supplying an additional condition on domain entities. We present psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that the restricted view better describes what speakers know when they know the meaning of a determiner. In particular, we find that when asked to evaluate sentences of the form _every F is G_, participants mentally group the Fs but not the Gs. Moreover, participants forego representing the group defined by the intersection of F and G. This tells against the idea that speakers understand _every F is G_ as implying that the Fs bear relation (e.g., inclusion) to a second group. (shrink)

The comprehension of anaphoric relations may be guided not only by discourse, but also syntactic information. In the literature on online processing, however, the focus has been on audible pronouns and descriptions whose reference is resolved mainly on the former. This paper examines one relation that both lacks overt exponence, and relies almost exclusively on syntax for its resolution: adjunct control, or the dependency between the null subject of a non-finite adjunct and its antecedent in sentences such as Mickey talked (...) to Minnie before ___ eating. Using visual world eyetracking, we compare the time course of interpreting this null subject and overt pronouns (Mickey talked to Minnie before he ate). We show that when control structures are highly frequent, listeners are just as quick to resolve reference in either case. When control structures are less frequent, reference resolution based on structural information still occurs upon hearing the non-finite verb, but more slowly, especially when unaided by structural and referential predictions. This may be due to increased difficulty in recognizing that a referential dependency is necessary. These results indicate that in at least some contexts, referential expressions whose resolution depends on very different sources of information can be resolved approximately equally rapidly, and that the speed of interpretation is largely independent of whether or not the dependency is cued by an overt referring expression. (shrink)

Journal of Applied Philosophy, EarlyView.

As we become more and more enhanced with cyborg technology, significant issues of law and policy are raised. For example, as cyborg devices implanted within the body create a class of people with enhanced motor and computational abilities, how should the law and policy respond when the abilities of such people surpass those of the general population? And what basic human and legal rights should be afforded to people equipped with cyborg technology as they become more machine and less biology? (...) As other issues of importance, if a neuroprosthetic device is accessed by a third party and done to edit one’s memory or to plant a new memory in one’s mind, or even to place an ad for a commercial product in one’s consciousness, should there be a law of cognitive liberty or of “neuro-advertising” that applies? This paper discusses laws and statutes enacted across several jurisdictions which apply to cyborg technologies with a particular emphasis on legal doctrine which relates to neuroprosthetic devices. (shrink)

Sentences such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance” exhibit an unusual form of anaphora, implicit control, where neither anaphor nor antecedent is audible. The non-finite reason clause has an understood subject, PRO, that is anaphoric; here it may be understood as naming the agent of the event of the host clause. Yet since the host is a short passive, this agent is realized by no audible dependent. The putative antecedent to PRO is therefore implicit, which it normally (...) cannot be. What sorts of representations subserve the comprehension of this dependency? Here we present four self-paced reading time studies directed at this question. Previous work showed no processing cost for implicit vs. explicit control, and took this to support the view that PRO is linked syntactically to a silent argument in the passive. We challenge this conclusion by reporting that we also find no processing cost for remote implicit control, as in: “The ship was sunk. The reason was to collect the insurance.” Here the dependency crosses two independent sentences, and so cannot, we argue, be mediated by syntax. Our Experiments 1–4 examined the processing of both implicit (short passive) and explicit (active or long passive) control in both local and remote configurations. Experiments 3 and 4 added either “3 days ago” or “just in order” to the local conditions, to control for the distance between the passive and infinitival verbs, and for the predictability of the reason clause, respectively. We replicate the finding that implicit control does not impose an additional processing cost. But critically we show that remote control does not impose a processing cost either. Reading times at the reason clause were never slower when control was remote. In fact they were always faster. Thus, efficient processing of local implicit control cannot show that implicit control is mediated by syntax; nor, in turn, that there is a silent but grammatically active argument in passives. (shrink)