McCawley supplements his earlier book—which covers such topics as presuppositional logic, the logic of mass terms and nonstandard quantifiers, and fuzzy ...

In his Farewell to Reason, Paul Feyerabend advocates radical pluralism in all intellectual endeavors and disputes the widely held belief that all issues can and should be resolved rationally. For Feyerabend, it is desirable that mutually incompatible approaches to scientific and scholarly research proliferate. Even an approach that one's favored school of thought dismisses as loony is likely to yield ideas and factual observations that its derogators will find of value and would otherwise have missed. To derive intellectual benefit from (...) an alternative tradition, one need not accept its premises and values; likewise, to ignore uncongenial ideas, one is not obliged to construct a refutation of than, which is just as well, since such a refutation usually can be constructed only by stacking the cards against adversaries about whom one is grossly ignorant. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Jerry A. Fodor’s critique of the logical structures proposed in Donald Davidson’s “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.” I will have nothing to say below about the parts of Fodor’s paper which deal with the proposals of Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning.” I am inclined to agree with Fodor’s conclusion that, a truth definition for a natural language need not reveal the logical structure of the sentences of the language, though my reasons are quite different from (...) those which Fodor gives. Fodor mentions only the fact that trivial truth definitions are possible; however, even disregarding trivial definitions, I would maintain that a wide range of putative ‘logical forms’ can be consistent with the same assignment of truth values and that the choice among alternative systems of ‘logical form’ must be made on the basis of whether they allow rules of inference and rules of grammar to be stated in full generality. (shrink)

It is unfortunate that Francis Y. Lin, in ‘Chomsky on the “ordinary language” view of language’ pays little attention to his own remark, ‘Chomsky’s criticisms make us realize that we should not be content with general and vague formulations of convention, ability, and so on. We must make such notions precise and provide details’ Lin speaks so imprecisely and provides so few details of notions on which he relies heavily, such as ‘general learning mechanism’ and ‘sentence frame’, that readers must (...) employ large amounts of guesswork to place even a halfway specific interpretation on his proposals and claims. (shrink)

Dr. Stewart identifies nausea as the central metaphor of Zarathustra, a nausea that accompanies a contempt for mediocrity, for democratic systems, indeed for bourgeois existence in general; but it is a nausea that more centrally accompanies Nietzsche's perspectivism. Thus, it is the nausea that occurs in the face of the chaotic and indeterminate character of the universe and of human existence.

Geography and Ethics examines the place of geography in ethics and of ethics in geography by drawing together specially commissioned contributors from distinguished scholars from around the world.

Record of papers given at a symposium held at the University of Texas at Austin, April 1967; includes; C.J. Fillmore - The case for case; E. Bach - Nouns and noun phrases; J.D. McCawley - The role of semantics in a grammar; P. Kiparsky Linguistic universals and linguistic change.

"Cornell Paperback." Includes index. Bibliography: p. 163-165.

The process of antigenic variation in parasitic African trypanosomes is a remarkable mechanism for outwitting the immune system of the mammalian host, but it requires a delicate balancing act for the monoallelic expression, folding and transport of a single variant surface glycoprotein (VSG). Only one of hundreds of VSG genes is expressed at time, and this from just one of ≈15 dedicated expression sites. By switching expression of VSGs the parasite presents a continuously shifting antigenic facade leading to prolonged chronic (...) infections lasting months to years. The basics of VSG structure and switching have been known for several decades, but recent studies have brought higher resolution to many aspects this process. New VSG structures, in silico modeling of infections, studies of VSG codon usage, and experimental ablation of VSG expression provide insights that inform how this remarkable system may have evolved. (shrink)

Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault's investigation of ethics, James Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault's specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault's framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with (...) two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception. (shrink)