Online research in philosophy

This paper presents a phenomenon of colloquial English that we call Contrastive Reduplication (CR), involving the copying of words and sometimes phrases as in It’s tuna salad, not SALAD-salad, or Do you LIKE-HIM-like him? Drawing on a corpus of examples gathered from natural speech, written texts, and television scripts, we show that CR restricts the interpretation of the copied element to a ‘real’ or prototypical reading. Turning to the structural properties of the construction, we show that CR is unusual (...) among reduplication phenomena in that whole idioms can be copied, object pronouns are often copied (as in the second example above), and inflectional morphology need not be copied. Thus the ‘scope’ of CR cannot be defined in purely phonological terms; rather, a combination of phonological, morphosyntactic, syntactic, and lexical factors is involved. We develop an analysis within the parallel architecture framework of Jackendoff (1997, 2002), whereby CR is treated as a lexical item with syntactic and semantic content and reduplicative phonology. We then sketch an alternative analysis, based on current assumptions within the Minimalist Program, which involves movement into a focus-like position with both the head and the tail of the resulting chain spelled out. (shrink)

this with seared tuna best). Cook over high heat in wok until 2/3 to 3/4 cooked but not done. Set aside.

Diagonalization is a proof technique that formal learning theorists use to show that inductive problems are unsolvable. The technique intuitively requires the construction of the mathematical equivalent of a Cartesian demon that fools the scientist no matter how he proceeds. A natural question that arises is whether diagonalization iscomplete. That is, given an arbitrary unsolvable inductive problem, does an invincible demon exist?The answer to that question tunas out to depend upon what axioms of set theory we adopt. The two main (...) results of the paper show that if we assume Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory plus AC and CH, there exist undetermined inductive games. The existence of such games entails that diagonalization is incomplete. On the other hand, if we assume the Axiom of Determinacy, or even a weaker axiom known as Wadge Determinacy, then diagonalization is complete. (shrink)