One of the most basic functions of human language is to convey who did what to whom. In the world's languages, the order of these three constituents (subject [S], verb [V], and object [O]) is uneven, with SOV and SVO being most common. Recent experiments using experimentally elicited pantomime provide a possible explanation of the prevalence of SOV, but extant explanations for the prevalence of SVO could benefit from further empirical support. Here, we test whether SVO might emerge because (...) (a) SOV is not well suited for describing reversible events (a woman pushing a boy) and (b) pressures to be efficient and mention subjects before objects conspire to rule out many other alternatives. We tested this by asking participants to describe reversible and non‐reversible events in pantomime, and we instructed some participants to be consistent in the form of their gestures and to teach them to the experimenter. These manipulations led to the emergence of SVO in speakers of both English (SVO) and Turkish (SOV). (shrink)

In Optimality Theory, recent work has been exploring the idea that the order of constituents in syntax is determined by alignment constraints, developed within the theory of Generalized Alignment ). Costa and Samek-Lodovici present general overviews, and both have specifically argued that OT analyses are superior to proposals expressed in terms of the parameterized “directionality” of movement or ordering. In Korean, the ordering options for major clausal constituents have been explored in Choi and Lee, who discussed the ordering of (...) a verb’s arguments as an interaction between constraints on canonical ordering and constraints on information structure. In this paper, I will discuss extending the ideas of ordering as alignment into the core clausal syntax, concentrating on the non-phrasal clausal elements.. (shrink)

This article argues that, far from being a merely defensive act of individual protest, civil disobedience is a much more radical political practice. It is transformative in that it aims at the politicization of questions that are excluded from the political domain and at reconfiguring public space and existing institutions, often in comprehensive ways. Focusing on the reconstitution of the political community also allows us to reconceptualize constituent power. Rather than portraying it as a quasi-mythical force erupting only in (...) extraordinary moments, constituent power can be conceptualized as a dynamic situated within established orders, transgressing their logic and reconfiguring them from within. Civil disobedience as a transformative and potentially comprehensive practice aimed at reconstituting the political order can then be seen as an internal driving force keeping this dialectic in play. A concrete example can be found in protests and border struggles by irregularized migrants. They show how unexp... (shrink)

In this dissertation I consider the merits of certain nominalist accounts of phenomena related to the character of ordinary objects. What these accounts have in common is the fact that none of them is an error theory about standard cases of predication and none of them deploys God or uniquely theistic resources in its explanatory framework. -/- The aim of the dissertation is to answer the following questions: -/- • What is the best nominalist account on offer? • How might (...) it be improved? • Does it ultimately succeed? -/- I will argue that while so-called trope theory is the best account on offer, it can be significantly improved—or replaced—by a novel version of nominalism that is modeled after trope theory. Ultimately, however, I will argue that even the novel version fails. -/- The dissertation unfolds as follows. In Chapter 1, I introduce Austere Nominalism (AN), which is perhaps the most extreme version of nominalism that falls within the scope of the dissertation. AN is often described as the view that there exist only concrete particulars. According to AN, it is unnecessary to posit any entities other than ordinary objects—turkeys, tables, and the like—in order to account for explananda related to the character of those objects. (Such explananda include the phenomenon of attribute agreement, of attribute possession, of true subject-predicate sentences, etc.) In this chapter I argue that AN fails to provide an adequate account of these explananda. In addition, introducing and criticizing AN serves an important heuristic role for the rest of the dissertation. To understand this role, we must distinguish between the basic explanatory strategy deployed by the austere nominalist and the type of explananda for which she deploys that strategy. The austere nominalist deploys the strategy to account for the character of ordinary objects. As I argue in Chapter 1, this deployment is a failure. As I go on to show in Chapter 2, the widespread rejection AN has led to a variety of rival accounts of the character of ordinary objects. In rejecting AN, however, these accounts also tacitly reject its basic explanatory strategy. Thus goes the baby with the bathwater, since, arguably, there are some attractive features of AN’s basic explanatory strategy. Indeed, those who defend the most prominent version of nominalism—trope theory—seem to overlook the advantages of AN’s basic strategy, and by so doing, make an unnecessary concession to the realist. Or so I argue in Chapter 3. And, as I will argue in Chapter 4, the strongest version of nominalism is a novel account, modeled after trope theory, that deploys AN’s basic strategy at a more fundamental level than that of ordinary objects. This novel account—troper theory—is closer in spirit to AN than is traditional trope theory. (Thus, AN serves as a foil for the discussion of other nominalist views.) Finally, in the Afterword I indicate how troper theory is equally vulnerable to some of the traditional objections that plague trope theory. Thus, if you are not convinced that traditional objections to trope theory are conclusive and you want to be a nominalist, then you should abandon trope theory and adopt troper theory. If you take traditional objections against trope theory to have significant force, then you should reject both theories. (shrink)

This essay goes beyond the dominant conception of constituent power developed by Emmanuel Sieyès and Carl Schmitt by excavating an alternative through the practices of twentieth-century workers’ councils and the interpretations of council democracy by Cornelius Castoriadis and Hannah Arendt. Interpreters of the constituent power often agree on its fundamentally antagonistic relation to constituted power, hereby making constituent politics a momentary experience, which cannot be sustained in constituted politics. Council democracy, instead, discloses a modality of politics, which (...) bridges the gap between constituent power and political form in order to provide institutional means through which the spirit of revolution can survive the founding moment. With this alternative concept of council democratic constituent power, this essay contributes to radical democratic theory by stipulating ways in which institutions can be rethought radically democratic as a way in which constituent power can be institutionally approximated and continually reexperienced. (shrink)

This paper considers Niccolò Machiavelli’s contribution to a theory of constituent power. Modern authors who have analysed the concept of constituent power generally agree on its ambiguous, paradoxical and apparently contradictory essence. With few exceptions, Machiavelli is absent from both the historical reconstructions of and the theoretical debates on the origin of constituent power. My argument is built around two main theses: reintroducing Machiavelli to the debate on constituent power offers an original response to the theoretical (...) fallacies and inconsistencies identified by modern scholars. In particular, Machiavelli’s philosophy contributes to the comprehension of constituent power as a living force within social order. My second thesis is that by tracing the source of constituent power back to Machiavelli, we can overcome the main theoretical problem implied by this concept, namely the problem of the priority of the factual or the juridical, by providing a vision that emphasises their immanent coexistence. (shrink)

Rousseau has always had an uncertain relationship with the theory of constituent power. On the one hand, his distrust of political representation and support for popular sovereignty seem consistent with the idea of the people as a legally unlimited constitution-maker. On the other hand, if, from those views about representation and sovereignty, it follows that Rousseau is a proponent of direct democracy, then there seems to be no place in his thought for a theory that presupposes, above all, a (...) separation between those who exercise a delegated authority and those who possess an original constitution-making power. In a legal order in which all laws must be directly made by the people, such a separation is absent: the constituent and the legislative body are one and the same. It is therefore not surprising that Rousseau’s name is largely absent from contemporary literature on constituent power. In this article, however, I will show that once Rousseau’s particular conception of law, as well as his distinction between sovereignty and government, are properly understood, one finds in his work not only the first major formulation of the theory of constituent power, but also a careful exploration of its implications for actual constitutional practice. (shrink)

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment (...) were concealed from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution. (shrink)

This paper is part of a general programme of developing and investigating particular first- order modal theories. In the paper, a modal theory of propositions is constructed under the assumption that there are genuinely singular propositions, ie. ones that contain individuals as constituents. Various results on decidability, axiomatizability and definability are established.

The objectives of the present paper are, firstly, to question the conception according to which propositional constituents are exhausted by the assignment of referential contents. Secondly, to argue that introducing the notion of mediational content is useful to provide a theory of meaning for expressions of a natural language. In order to achieve those objectives, I address the following issue: in what sense are mediational contents relevant to the determination of truth-conditions and to compose assertions?

This chapter explores the metaphysical views about higher-order logic held by two individuals responsible for introducing it to philosophy: Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Frege understood a function at first as the remainder of the content of a proposition when one component was taken out or seen as replaceable by others, and later as a mapping between objects. His logic employed second-order quantifiers ranging over such functions, and he saw a deep division in nature between objects (...) and functions. Russell understood propositional functions as what is obtained when constituents of propositions are replaced by variables, but eventually denied that they were entities in their own right. Both encountered contradictions when supposing there to exist as many objects as functions, and both adopted views about the meaningfulness of higher-order discourse that were difficult to state from within their own strictures. (shrink)

In this paper I want to explore the arguments for so-called ‘unarticulated constituents’ (UCs). Unarticulated constituents are supposed to be propositional elements, not presented in the surface form of a sentence, nor explicitly represented at the level of its logical form, yet which must be interpreted in order to grasp the (proper) meaning of that sentence or expression. Thus, for example, we might think that a sentence like ‘It is raining’ must contain a UC picking out the place at (...) which the speaker of the sentence asserts it to be raining. In §1 I will explore the nature of UCs a little further, and, in §2, suggest that we can recognise two different forms of argument for them.. (shrink)

Depuis la nuit des temps, les relations homme-animal ont reposé sur un principe d'inégalité et de domination. Pourtant, la place et le statut des animaux ont récemment connu de grandes évolutions. L'animalisme, à l'instar de l'antispécisme ou de l'abolitionnisme est progressivement entré dans le débat public, poussé par une actualité brûlante (scandales des abattoirs, vidéos L214, émergence d'un véganisme de masse, etc.). A l'origine, ce courant d'éthique proposant de défendre les droits des animaux était considéré comme une mouvance violente et (...) radicale. Comment cette doctrine a-t-elle séduit un public de plus en plus large? Que nous raconte cet engouement quant à nos valeurs, aux croyances de notre société? Cet ouvrage constitue la première analyse sociologique de ce phénomène émergent. En embrassant les points de vues politiques, écologiques, religieux ou encore celui des contre-cultures, Marianne Celka jette un regard neuf et, pour la première fois, neutre et objectif sur cette question aussi profonde que troublante du rapport entre l'homme et l'animal. (shrink)

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language, and instead condition the structure on (...) the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed. Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event. In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon. (shrink)

The concept of spontaneous order is an important framework in many fields of research in the natural and social sciences today, and it bears heavily on methodological problems related to economics in particular. In fact, all domains of scientific and philosophical research where it can be maintained intelligibly that an undesigned but nevertheless effective order has emerged solely through the interaction of the constituent parts of a given system and also through the interaction of this system as (...) a whole with its environment fall under what is now often preferably called the "paradigm of auto-organization". This paradigm can be traced back to Leibniz (Dobuzinkis 1989, p. 245) or even to the Spanish Jesuits of the Salamanca School of the XVIth century (Lepage 1983, p. 347), and a lot of scientific work has now been done from within its conceptual framework, for instance Varela & Maturana's theory of "autopoiesis", Heinz von Foerster's second generation cybernetic models, Ilya Prigogine's thermodynamics of open systems and dissipative structures, and chaos theory. In economics, the concept of social spontaneous order is intimately linked with Friedrich Hayek's work, and Hayek has himself insisted on the effective kinship of such approaches (Hayek 1979, p. 158). One can say that there is today in economics a full-fledged Theory of Spontaneous Order (TSO) which articulates four distinct arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.3 (2002) 425-446 [Access article in PDF] Giving Orders: Theory and Practice in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina Vicki Hsueh Indians. Of Edisto Ashapo and Combohe to the South our friends. Of Wando Ituan Sewee and Sehey to the north came to our assistance and were zealous and resolute in it 1000 bowmen In our want supplied us. Q. Spaniards. What we shall (...) doe to the Spaniards if we invade them we brake the peace, if we sit still we loose our reputation with the Indians our friends. Westoes. Inland man eaters. Country. To the northward more sickly, about Ashley River fertile and of a wonderful growth. Tatchequea. A very fruitfull Country 8. days jorney by the North west the Emperor our friend and enemy to the Westoes and to hard for them. Q. Settlem't. 500 people will secure the settlement 1000 perfect it. desires supplys of necessarys till that time Excerpt from Carolina Memoranda in the handwriting of John Locke, Esq., 15 September 1670 Within the last decade, scholars such as James Tully, Barbara Arneil, and Bhikhu Parekh have performed a crucial intervention on modern constitu-tionalism's behalf. 1 Not only has constitutionalism in the modern age been [End Page 425] plagued by assumptions of cultural uniformity and an on-going inability to adjudicate between competing cultural claims, but it has been unable effectively to diagnose those limitations and dilemmas. The root of the problem, James Tully suggests, is ultimately a matter of historical perspective. "[T]he tendency," he writes, "is not to notice the philosophical and ideological debates over the last three hundred years... only the result of these debates is seen—the victorious modern language of constitutional uniformity—and claims for recognition are viewed through its framework as if it were impartial and universal." 2 In response Tully and others have sought to tackle this predicament at its historical root. Identifying modern constitutionalism's colonial origins as a significant part of the problem, their studies address the development of constitutionalism and colonialism as an entwined phenomenon in the early modern period, focusing particularly on the British-American context. In this sense, Locke's Two Treatises of Government stands as an exemplary illustration of the period's entangled colonial and constitutional temperaments. Well-known for its influential articulation of compact and resistance, the Two Treatises, Barbara Arneil argues "were written as a defence of England's colonial policy in the new world against the sceptics in England and the counter-claims of both the aboriginal nations and other European powers in America." 3 Accordingly, present-day constitutionalism continues to bear the weighty legacy of those colonial rationales. "[T]he language of modern constitutionalism," Tully further explains, "which has come to be authoritative was designed to exclude or assimilate cultural diversity and justify uniformity. The design is difficult to see because this 'modern' language has become the customary way of thinking about, reflecting on and envisioning a just constitutional order." Ultimately, Tully submits, citing Wittgenstein, "A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably." 4This much-needed thickening of constitutionalism's historical context has enriched our awareness of constitutionalism's vexed origins, as it has proffered potent tools for interrogating current cultural adjudication. Yet, a troubling predicament persists. As if caught within the tenacious grip of the language of modern constitutionalism, Tully, Arneil, and Parekh insistently portray seventeenth-century British-American colonialism solely as a straightforward process of appropriation and assimilation without addressing or incorporating the [End Page 426] complex and contingent elements of that history in its emergence. Lacking the various negotiations and accommodations between settler and indigene in ambition and actualization, their portrayals crucially underplay the dynamic relationship between theories of constitutionalism and practices of colonialism—an approach that ultimately serves to reinscribe the narrative of triumphalist progress within their critiques. 5This problematic is the context for my reading of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,1669... (shrink)

Two major episodes of farm protest have occurred in the past decade. In each case, protesting farmers have chosen to create new farm organizations rather than express their grievances through one of many existing farm interest groups. The result has been the development of a durable grassroots farm lobby, a hybrid mode of exercising political influence that combines features of interest group lobbying and social movement protest. The first episode saw the mobilization of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), a nation-wide (...) protest organization devoted to achieving a federal guarantee of parity prices. When AAM's attempt to change federal farm policy failed, it was unable to sustain a high level of member mobilization or organizational activity. This failure is attributed to the lack of a stable organizational structure, the lack of durable membership incentives, and the counterproductive effects of disruptive protest tactics. The second episode of protest occurred in reaction to the farm-debt crisis of the 1980s. Protesting farmers organized numerous crisis groups to provide emergency services to financially distressed farmers. The crisis groups coalesced into the National Save the Family Farm Coalition (NSFFC) in order to exert influence over federal farm policy. It is argued that this coalition structure, along with membership incentives provided by crisis groups through their constituent service programs, may allow this latest farm movement to exert more considerable and durable influence over federal farm policy than AAM was able to do in the late 1970s. The problems of maintaining a national coalition of grassroots groups are discussed and evaluated. (shrink)

This essay defends the view that “modern science,” as with modernity in general, is a polycentered phenomenon, something that appears in different forms at different times and places. It begins with two ideas about the nature of rational scientific inquiry: Karin Knorr Cetina's idea of “epistemic cultures,” and Philip Kitcher's idea of science as “a system of public knowledge,” such knowledge as would be deemed worthwhile by an ideal conversation among the whole public under conditions of mutual engagement. This account (...) of the nature of scientific practice provides us with a new perspective from which to understand key elements in the philosophical project of Jaina logicians in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries c.e. Jaina theory seems exceptionally well targeted onto two of the key constituents in the ideal conversation—the classification of all human points of view and the representation of end states of the deliberative process. The Buddhist theory of the Kathāvatthu contributes to Indian epistemic culture in a different way: by supplying a detailed theory of how human dialogical standpoints can be revised in the ideal conversation, an account of the phenomenon Kitcher labels “tutoring.” Thus science in India has its own history, one that should be studied in comparison and contrast with the history of science in Europe. In answer to Joseph Needham, it was not ‘modern science’ which failed to develop in India or China but rather non-well-ordered science, science as unconstrained by social value and democratic consent. What I argue is that this is not a deficit in the civilisational histories of these countries, but a virtue. (shrink)

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and (...) Japanese. Insofar as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory. (shrink)

Using concepts from abstract algebra and type theory, I analyze the structural presuppositions of any holistic ethical theory. This study is motivated by such recent holistic theories in environmental ethics as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Arne Naess’ deep ecology, and various aesthetic ethics of the sublime. I also discuss the holistic and type theoretic assumptions of suchstandard ethical theories as hedonism, natural rights theory, utilitarianism, Rawls’ difference principle, and fascism. I argue that although there are (...) several common senses of part-whole in ethical theory, the central sense of holism in ethics is that of a theory that defines its key moral idea as an emergent group property grounded in the relational properties of its individual constituents. Hedonism and Kantianism do not count as holistic in this sense. Natural rights theory does in adegenerate way. Utilitarianism and various environmental ethics are paradigm examples. I point out as a general structural weakness of environmental holistic theories that their first-order grounding in nonmoral vocabulary seems to preclude an explanation of many moral intuitions about human ethics. (shrink)

Using concepts from abstract algebra and type theory, I analyze the structural presuppositions of any holistic ethical theory. This study is motivated by such recent holistic theories in environmental ethics as Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Arne Naess’ deep ecology, and various aesthetic ethics of the sublime. I also discuss the holistic and type theoretic assumptions of suchstandard ethical theories as hedonism, natural rights theory, utilitarianism, Rawls’ difference principle, and fascism. I argue that although there are (...) several common senses of part-whole in ethical theory, the central sense of holism in ethics is that of a theory that defines its key moral idea as an emergent group property grounded in the relational properties of its individual constituents. Hedonism and Kantianism do not count as holistic in this sense. Natural rights theory does in adegenerate way. Utilitarianism and various environmental ethics are paradigm examples. I point out as a general structural weakness of environmental holistic theories that their first-order grounding in nonmoral vocabulary seems to preclude an explanation of many moral intuitions about human ethics. (shrink)

Ten years of employment policies have demonstrated two fundamental discrepancies: a job is not a guarantee of a satisfactory income and growth does not guarantee the creation of jobs. In proposing a necessary displacement of the angle of approach to the dynamics of liberal globalization, and of the relation of capital/labor to the antagonism of capital/life, the article supports the demand for a guaranteed income: guaranteed income as a constituent process, that is, in order to open a (...) class='Hi'>constituent phase at the level of social and economic institutions. (shrink)

Dutch allows for variation as to whether the first position in the sentence is occupied by the subject or by some other constituent, such as the direct object. In particular situations, however, this commonly observed variation in word order is ‘frozen’ and only the subject appears in first position. We hypothesize that this partial freezing of word order in Dutch can be explained from the dependence of the speaker’s choice of word order on the hearer’s interpretation (...) of this word order. A formal model of this interaction between the speaker’s perspective and the hearer’s perspective is presented in terms of bidirectional Optimality Theory. Empirical predictions of this model regarding the interaction between word order and definiteness are confirmed by a quantitative corpus study. (shrink)

Word order alternation has been described as one of the most productive information structure markers and discourse organizers across languages. Psycholinguistic evidence has shown that word order is a crucial cue for argument interpretation. Previous studies about Spanish sentence comprehension have shown greater difficulty to parse sentences that present a word order that does not respect the order of participants of the verb's lexico-semantic structure, irrespective to whether the sentences follow the canonical word order of (...) the language or not. This difficulty has been accounted as the cognitive cost related to the miscomputation of prominence status of the argument that precedes the verb. Nonetheless, the authors only analyzed the use of alternative word orders in isolated sentences, leaving aside the pragmatic motivation of word order alternation. By means of an eye-tracking task, the current study provides further evidence about the role of information structure for the comprehension of sentences with alternative word order and verb type, and sheds light on the interaction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. We analyzed both “early” and “late” eye-movement measures as well as accuracy and response times to comprehension questions. Results showed an overall influence of information structure reflected in a modulation of late eye-movement measures as well as offline measures like total reading time and questions response time. However, effects related to the miscomputation of prominence status did not fade away when sentences were preceded by a context that led to non-canonical word order of constituents, showing that prominence computation is a core mechanism for argument interpretation, even in sentences preceded by context. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature (...) artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial (...) languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

No social life is possible without order. Order being the most constituent element of society, it is not surprising that so many theories have been developed to explain what social order is and how it is possible, as well as to explore the features that social order acquires in its different dimensions. The book leads these many theories of social order back to a few main matrices for the use of theoretical and practical reason, (...) which are defined as 'paradigms of order'. The plurality of conceptual constructs regarding social order is therefore reduced to a manageable number of theoretical patterns and an intellectual map is produced in which the most significant differences between paradigms are clearly outlined. Furthermore, the 'paradigmatic revolutions' are addressed that marked the most relevant turning points in the way in which a 'well-ordered society' should be understood. Against this background, the question is discussed on the theoretical and practical perspectives for a cosmopolitan society as the only suitable possibility to meet the global challenges with which we are all presently confronted. (shrink)

The EU is often considered to be a unique entity. This assertion rests on assessments of its institutional character more than on assessments of its social constituency, i.e., the structure of demands and expectations that citizens and groups place on the EU. Establishing the character of the latter is important both to understand the EU as polity and to understand its democratic deficit. It is also of theoretical interest given the increased focus on recognition politics, not only within nation-states but (...) also within the transnational realm. This article develops a conceptual-methodological framework with a set of structured tests so as to permit us to establish the character of the EU’s social constituency. This framework combines a philosophical approach to recognition with a sociological approach to contentious politics. A central element is the notion of ‘recognition order’, and the article briefly examines whether the EU might be said to make up a unique recognition order. (shrink)

A community, for ecologists, is a unit for discussing collections of organisms. It refers to collections of populations, which consist (by definition) of individuals of a single species. This is straightforward. But communities are unusual kinds of objects, if they are objects at all. They are collections consisting of other diverse, scattered, partly-autonomous, dynamic entities (that is, animals, plants, and other organisms). They often lack obvious boundaries or stable memberships, as their constituent populations not only change but also move (...) in and out of areas, and in and out of relationships with other populations. Familiar objects have identifiable boundaries, for example, and if communities do not, maybe they are not objects. Maybe they do not exist at all. The question this possibility suggests, of what criteria there might be for identifying communities, and for determining whether such communities exist at all, has long been discussed by ecologists. This essay addresses this question as it has recently been taken up by philosophers of science, by examining answers to it which appeared a century ago and which have framed the continuing discussion. (shrink)

In his writings between 1941 and 1951, Michael Polanyi developed a distinctive view of liberal social and political life. Planned organizations are a part of all modern societies, according to Polanyi, but in liberal modernity he highlighted dynamic social orders whose agents freely adjust their efforts in light of the initiatives and accomplishments of their peers. Liberal society itself is the most extensive of dynamic orders, with the market economy, and cultural orders of scientific research, Protestant religious inquiry, and common (...) law among its constituents. Liberal society and its dynamic orders of culture are, Polanyi explained, directed at transcendent ideals (truth, beauty, and justice). He saw knowledge, rules of practice, and standards of value in these orders as being preserved in traditions that inform and constrain the initiatives of their members. Investing faith in a cultural enterprise, Polanyi's agents choose to act responsibly, dedicating their freedom to an ideal end. They are custodians and cultivators of the heritage of their dynamic order. ☆ The authors express their appreciation to two reviewers for History of European Ideas for having provided helpful comments on the penultimate version of this text. (shrink)

Abraham ibn Ezra's scientific corpus represented an exceptional case: instead of the common Latin model embodied by the scholar coming from the Christian North to the Iberian Peninsula to initiate a translation enterprise, we have in Ibn Ezra the contrary case of an intellectual imbued with the Arabic culture, who abandons al-Andalus, roams around the Christian countries and delivers in his wandering through Italy, France and England, the scientific and cultural cargo that he amassed during his youth in al-Andalus. The (...) main purpose of this article is to provide a picture of Ibn Ezra's scientific corpus as comprehensive and detailed as possible given the present state of research. The paper will fall into two main parts: Ibn Ezra's scientific work will be broken up into three main genres: Mathematics, Astronomy, Scientific Instruments and Tools; The astrological encyclopaedia; Translations from Arabic into Hebrew. In the second part, Ibn Ezra's scientific corpus will be reassembled as a whole in order to provide a global characterization, trying to point out its general organization and shape, and to indicate its main aims and special traits revealing Ibn Ezra personal contribution. (shrink)

(1) This is Part 2 of the semantic theory I call TM. In Part 1, I developed TM as a theory in the analytic philosophy of language, in lexical semantics, and in the sociology of relating occasions of statement production and comprehension to formal and informal lexicographic conclusions about statements and lexical items – roughly, as showing how synchronic semantics is a sociological derivative of diachronic, person-relative acts of linguistic behavior. I included descriptions of new cognitive psychology experimental paradigms which (...) would allow us to precisely measure the two constituents of semantics – meaning and reference – both at the level of individual speech acts and at the level of societal convergences, i.e. at both the token and type levels. -/- (2) In the Introduction, I recapitulate the arguments of Part 1. The Introduction also develops some analytic philosophical and lexical semantics themes not discussed in Part 1. -/- (3) After the Introduction, I present neural TM (nTM) as a theory of the neural mechanisms and processes which give rise to these person/occasion-relative acts of linguistic behavior. I develop nTM at three levels, the first two of which describe linguistic/semantic functions independently of their cortical locations. At the first level, I describe individual word-to-word and word-to-object connections. At the second level, I describe the corresponding structuralist networks of which they are the individual components. At this level, I introduce some key linguistic concepts of TM – its graded meaning, reference, and generalization sets, and the types of statements which express various levels of word-to-word and word-to-object relationships among lexical items which, because of the constraints they impose on the use of those lexical items in statements we produce and comprehend, are concepts. This constitutes the second structural level of nTM. -/- (4) At the third level, I associate the non-localized structures of the previous levels with cortically located neural structures and with the fasciculi that connect them. I distinguish neural areas in which primary (phonetic) and secondary (orthographic) lexicons are stored in long-term memory. I also describe the embodied concepts which co-exist in the anterior temporal lobes with the images they lexicalize. These concepts are often said to name physical objects and their features, although what they in fact name are kinds of physical objects and features. I describe how conceptual constraints and referential constraints interact to channel our intentions to say how things are into statements which are semantically well-formed, and which consequently successfully communicate information. -/- (5) Following this presentation of nTM, I examine five prominent neural semantic theories. I point out what is wrong with each of them as far as their explanations of semantics are concerned, and I also indicate how nTM can replace the “semantic cores” of those theories. -/- (6) The two basic mistakes made by neuroscience semantic theories, as I will explain, are (i) that all but one of them regard semantics as a matter of the association of words with perceptual images, and of generalizations from those associations; and (ii) that they all rely on an unspecified set of neural structures which purportedly encode the meaning of concepts in abstraction from their phonological and orthographic forms. nTM maintains, in contrast, that there are no abstract neural representations of semantic content. Neural constraints on our linguistic behavior, especially on our ascriptive and co-ascriptive use of words, express the semantic constraints on those words which make them concepts. That is the semantic content of words. -/- (7) I next consider several results from neuroscience experimental data which have been given one interpretation by one or another of the standard neurosemantic theories, but to which nTM gives a different interpretation. I include several predictions which I have found neither confirmed nor disconfirmed in the experimental neuroscience literature. -/- (8) After a concluding section in which I summarize the major changes to neurosemantic theory introduced by TM, and the analytic philosophy of language and lexical semantics contexts within which TM is situated, there follows an appendix in which I discuss neural net AI, and make some recommendations for implementing nTM in silicon. (shrink)

Abstract“Freedom” is a fundamental political concept: contestations or endorsements of freedom-conceptions concern the fundamental normative orientation of sociopolitical orders. Focusing on “freedom,” this article argues that the project of bringing about emancipatory sociopolitical orders is both aided by efforts at engineering fundamental political concepts as well as required by such ameliorative ambitions. I first argue that since the absence of ideology is a constituent feature of emancipatory orders, any attempt at bringing about emancipation should leverage genealogical approaches in (...) class='Hi'>order to debunk existing ideological freedom-concepts, which can occur only by exposing the discursive functions these have come to serve for the (re-)production of dominant power relations. I then suggest that establishing and sustaining an alternative, ideology-free conception of “freedom” is a steeper task. Ensuring widespread uptake of any ameliorated concept is contingent on effective change in the relevant social environment. Where fundamental political concepts such as “freedom” are concerned, effective intervention in the relevant social environment requires radical sociopolitical change. But if such change can be brought about and enables the widespread uptake of an “improved” freedom-concept, the concept's content comes to reflect changed social facts, thereby stabilizing the particular emancipatory sociopolitical order which has newly arisen. (shrink)

Here is an account of logical consequence inspired by Bolzano and Tarski. Logical validity is a property of arguments. An argument is a pair of a set of interpreted sentences (the premises) and an interpreted sentence (the conclusion). Whether an argument is logically valid depends only on its logical form. The logical form of an argument is fixed by the syntax of its constituent sentences, the meanings of their logical constituents and the syntactic differences between their non-logical constituents, treated (...) as variables. A constituent of a sentence is logical just if it is formal in meaning, in the sense roughly that its application is invariant under permutations of individuals.1 Thus ‘=’ is a logical constant because no permutation maps two individuals to one or one to two; ‘∈’ is not a logical constant because some permutations interchange the null set and its singleton. Truth functions, the usual quantifiers and bound variables also count as logical constants. An argument is logically valid if and only if the conclusion is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables (including all non-logical expressions) under which all its premises are true. A sentence is logically true if and only if the argument with no premises of which it is the conclusion is logically valid, that is, if and only if the sentence is true under every assignment of semantic values to variables. An interpretation assigns values to all variables. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz presents the idea of monads, as non-communicative, self-actuating system of beings that are windowless, closed, eternal, deterministic and individualistic. For him, the whole universe and its constituents are monads and that includes humans. In fact, any ‘body’, such as the ‘body’ of an animal or man has, according to Leibniz, one dominant monad which controls the others within it. This dominant monad, he often refers to as the soul. If Leibniz’s conception of monads is accepted, it merely (...) establishes human subjectivity, idiosyncrasies, biases, prejudices and individual points of view as the norm. How then do we ensure inter-subjectivity and the kind of social interaction requisite for the achievement of social order, since Leibniz’s system forecloses the possibility of interaction and communication among monads? In this essay, we argue that just as Leibniz’s monads synchronize only through the Supreme Monad (Monas Monadum), humans as social monads should also interact through a matrix of ideals like truth, honesty, sincerity, integrity, altruism, impartiality, compassion and trust. Since social order is actualised only within the context of linked social structures, relations and values, these utopian ideals would form the fulcrum through which humans relate and the very foundation that would anchor a viable social order. Our aim here is to establish a relationship between Leibniz’s metaphysics and the physical domains of life by showing that metaphysical constructs can impinge on human social relations and wellbeing. The study employed the qualitative method of research through critical analysis of texts, library and archival materials. (shrink)

We introduce _Interleave-Disjunction-Lock parallel multiple context-free grammars_ (IDL-PMCFG), a novel grammar formalism designed to describe the syntax of free word order languages that allow for extensive interleaving of grammatical constituents. Though interleaved constituents, and especially the so-called hyperbaton, are common in several ancient (Classical Latin and Greek, Sanskrit...) and modern (Hungarian, Finnish...) languages, these syntactic structures are often difficult to express in existing formalisms. The IDL-PMCFG formalism combines Seki et al.’s parallel multiple context-free grammars (PMCFG) with Nederhof and Satta’s (...) IDL expressions. We define the semantics of IDL-PMCFGs and study their expressivity, proving that IDL-PMCFG extends both PMCFG and IDL-CFG (context-free grammars equipped with IDL expressions) and that IDL-PMCFG parsing is \(\mathrm {NP}\) -hard. We then introduce COMPĀ, a programming language extending Ranta’s Grammatical Framework (GF) and built as a high-level front-end formalism to IDL-PMCFG for practical grammar development. We present a parsing algorithm for IDL-PMCFG inspired by earlier Earley-style PMCFG parsing algorithms and Nederhof and Satta’s IDL graphs and give a worst-case estimate of its complexity as a function of several metrics on IDL expressions, the size of the input and a new notion of the _G_-density of a language. (shrink)

A quantitative interpretation is given of the (in)coherence that moral agents experience as a tension between their ordered moral judgments over n physically incompatible actions, and the competitive ordering of motivating intensities (or, desires). Then a model describing one’s tendency to reduce the experienced in-coherence is constructed. In this model, moral sensitivity (S) and desire attachment (e) function as primitives that motivate from opposing perspectives the reduction of incoherence. Two distinct sub-processes of this reduction are therefore initiated by (S) and (...) (e) co-ordinated (more or less efficiently) by the agent’s degree of rationality (R) characteristic of her capacity to handle such internal tensions. This process ends when a new equilibrium between what motivates and what resists (further) reduction has been reached. A macro-equilibrium is described involving (R) constrained by weakness-of-will (W w ). A reinterpretation of the Aristotelian characters (enkratês, akratês, etc.) and an exegesis of Hume’s ‘Calm Passions’ follow as applications. (shrink)

This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a `bottom-up' process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order(s) in sentences. These results show that structural features of language (e.g. syntactic categories and word orders) could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general (...) learning mechanisms (e.g. pattern extraction and sequential learning) initially not language-specific. Keywords: Computer simulation; language origin; coevolution; compositionality; word order regularity. (shrink)

This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a ‘bottom-up’ process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order in sentences. These results show that structural features of language could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general learning mechanisms initially not language-specific. Keywords: (...) Computer simulation; language origin; coevolution; compositionality; word order regularity. (shrink)

The defeat of the Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters in 2005 and the following stalemate of the Lisbon Treaty have sparked a soul-searching process for European constitutional scholarship. Among the numerous academic efforts devoted to contemplating the future of European constitution, Michelle Everson and Julia Eisner's The Making of a European Constitution: Judges and Law Beyond Constitutive Power deserves a close look. Everson and Eisner argue for a postconstituent view of European constitutionalization, which they call ‘Rechtsverfassungsrecht’. Departing from (...) the myth of the constituent power, they interpret the development of a European constitution as a self-creating process by which the ordinary legal system gives itself a set of core values and thereby remakes itself into a constitutional order. Moreover, against the criticisms of juridification, they defend this lawyer-centred process of European constitutionalization as incorporating politics into the daily operation of the legal system. Engaging with Everson and Eisner's argumentation, I argue that their account of European constitutional development does not so much put out a realist theory of the EU constitutionalization as sets out a realist academic lawyering for the next round of European constitutional politics, which is shared among European constitutional scholars. Contrasting this community-based legal profession in Europe with the situation of epistemic pluralism in American jurisprudence, in this article I observe that a lawyer-centred European constitutional theory as Everson and Eisner's book illustrates is premised on an inherited consensus that has held a European legal profession together. However, this lawyer-centred account of European constitutionalization presumes either the projection of a professional community onto a Europe-wide civic culture or the self-appointment of legal professionals as the fiduciary of the citizenry. Each is a fiction, however. This fictional character of the legalist-constructivist strategy to European constitutional politics is the underlying cause of the dilemma facing European constitutional ordering. (shrink)

Whitehead’s cosmology centers on the self-creation of actual occasions that perish as they come to be, but somehow do combine to constitute societies that are persistent agents and/or patients. “Instance Ontology” developed by D.W. Mertz concerns unification of relata into facts of relatedness by specific intensions. These two conceptual systems are similar in that they both avoid the substance-property distinction: they differ in their understanding of how basic units combine to constitute complex unities. “Process Structural Realism” (PSR) draws from both (...) of these approaches in developing an account of how combinations of processes may produce ontologically significant coherences. When a group of processes achieves such closure that a set of states recurs continually, the effects of that coherence differ from what would occur in the absence of that closure. Such altered effectiveness is an attribute of the system as a whole, and would have consequences. This indicates that the network of processes, as a unit, has ontological significance. The closed network of processes, together with the conditions that prevail, constitute the form of definiteness of the coherence. That form continues to obtain as long as the coherence persists. Constituents contribute to, rather than share, that characteristic. Aspects of some recent research in systems biology, microeconomics, and social psychology illustrate the application of PSR. (shrink)

The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis has been called `the greatest of all medieval chronicles'. Written in Normandy between 1114 and 1141, it is a detailed history of the Norman people and their conquests, full of vivid, often penetrating portraits of the lives and characters of kings and queens, lords and bishops, simple knights, and humble villagers. The chronicle gives a unique, authentic picture of feudal society during a period of rapid change in church and state which saw the emergence (...) of the Anglo-Norman realm, the spread of new forms of monasticism, and the launching of the Crusades. Published in 1968, volume II of Marjorie Chibnall's six-volume edition of the Ecclesiastical History is now available for the first time in paperback. `a superbly edited Latin text and a unique English translation of the work of a major historian' American Historical Review `Mrs Chibnall is giving us... her edition of a classical medieval text which will itself become a classic of medieval scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)