Several writers have assumed that when in “Outline of a Theory of Truth” I wrote that “the orthodox approach” – that is, Tarski’s account of the truth definition – admits descending chains, I was relying on a simple compactness theorem argument, and that non-standard models must result. However, I was actually relying on a paper on ‘pseudo-well-orderings’ by Harrison. The descending hierarchy of languages I define is a standard model. Yablo’s Paradox later emerged as a key (...) to interpreting the result. (shrink)

First published in 1992, this book evokes Pandora and Occam as metaphoric corner posts in an argument about language as discourse and in doing so, brings analytic philosophy to bear on issues of Continental philosophy, with attention to linguistic, semiological, and semiotic concerns. Instead of regarding meanings as guaranteed by definitions, the author argues that linguistic expressions are schemata directing us more or less loosely toward the activation of nonlinguistic sign systems. Ruthrof draws up a heuristic hierarchy of discourses, (...) with literary expression at the top, descending through communication-reduced reference and speech acts to formal logic and digital communication at the bottom. The book offers multiple perspectives from which to review traditional theories of meaning, working from a wide variety of theorists, including Peirce, Frege, Husserl, Derrida, Lyotard, Davidson, and Searle. In Ruthrof's analysis, Pandora and Occam illustrate the opposition between the suppressed rich materiality of culturally saturated discourse and the stark ideality of formal sign systems. This book will be of interest to those studying linguistics, literature and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper examines the logical and metaphysical consequences of denying Leibniz's Law, the principle that if t1= t2, then φ(t1) if and only if φ(t2). Recently, Caie, Goodman, and Lederman (2020) and Bacon and Russell (2019) have proposed sophisticated logical systems permitting violations of Leibniz's Law. We show that their systems conflict with widely held, attractive principles concerning the metaphysics of individuals. Only by adopting a highly revisionary picture, on which there is no finest-grained equivalence relation, can a well-motivated metaphysics (...) for rejecting Leibniz's Law be developed. We sketch one such picture—a metaphysics of stuff. Stuff ontologies can be initially motivated through ordinary language: stuff stands to mass nouns as objects stand to count nouns. The stuff ontology we propose takes stuff to be fundamental and views the world as composed of an infinite descending hierarchy of kinds and portions of stuff. We defend the coherence of this picture and offer a model theory demonstrating that it can be consistently formalized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AN ITALIAN VIEW OF THE DEBATE ON VIRTUE TERENCE KENNEDY, C.Ss.R. Accademia Alfonsiana Rome, Italy FATHER GIUSEPPE ABBA, S.B.D., professor of moral philosophy at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome, has written two volumes of prime importance for the theory of the moral virtues. Although writing in Italian, he has entered into the thick of debate in other languages, especially English. The first, Lex et Virtus: Studi sull'evoluzione (...) delta dottrina morale di san Tommaso d'Aquino (Las-Roma, 1983, 293 pp.) is every bit as wide ranging as its title suggests. His thesis is that St. Thomas's moral thought underwent a long and radical evolution that issued in "a new science" in the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae totally centered in the virtues. His book is neatly divided in two parts: humanity under the regime of law and humanity under the regime of virtue. He argues that the Scriptum super Sententiis presents virtue as the capacity to put law into practice in life. Here law has priority because it is conceived as participation in the divine rectitude, and virtue is derivative in as far as it facilitates compliance with God's law, making our response easy, pleasurable and spontaneous by restraining the disorderly influence of passion on our moral response. The De V eritate, he maintains, follows the same descending schema. Truth is communicated downwards through the hierarchy of intellectual beings so that the human virtues are seen mainly in terms of how they reflect the divine truth, especially in the moral knowledge involved in free choice or liberum arbitrium. The Summa Contra Gentiles III classifies morality under the rubric of the law as rational submission to divine government through 123 124 TERENCE KENNEDY, c.ss.R. Providence. In this vision, our return to God as final end is given focal emphasis before being considered the fruit of our effort. Abba makes a strong case that in the Secunda Pars St. Thomas passes from a conception of morality based in law to one founded in the virtues. Morality assumes deeper significance in its own right because the human person is no longer viewed mainly as a direct reflection of divine truth but truly as imago Dei having dominion over his acts in freedom and deliberation. God, the subjectum of theology, is known through his effects in creation and the motus hominis in Deum provides matter for the speculative discipline of theology as the study of God. Morality unveils the mystery of God through how He works in our free activity drawing us to Himself. St. Thomas thus has very little in common with those contemporary moralists who are wholly taken up with the rightness of actions in normative ethics. Abba maintains that in the Summa St. Thomas was the first to afford morality its rightful place as an integral part in his theological synthesis. This involved a reworking of the idea of virtue beginning, with a fresh approach to habitus in the Ia!Jae. The determination of a habit ad unum is necessary because of the way a specifically human form is received in particular matter. This determination means not just a further specification of the matter, but the coming into being of new abilities, a creative enablement. of our nature with original energies so that it can reach its enc(' efficaciously. Virtue now has priority over law, because facility, pleasure and spontaneity are only the effects of this new interior transformation of our nature. Thus the originality of virtue arises not from our mode of acting firmiter, faciliter, delectabiliter, but from the new interior capacities by which we can realize our moral selves, naturally and supernaturally. Law is thereafter thought of in relation to its service of virtue as an external command promulgated for the government of a collectivity. It is given precisely so as to educate the collectivity to virtue. In the community governed by God's divine law it is not possible to follow His law without being enlivened by the infused virtues. The eternal law is not exhausted by our understanding of the precepts of divine law THE DEBATE ON VIRTUE 125 but it embraces God's complete idea... (shrink)

The paper provides a new argument against the classical invariance criterion for logical terms: if all terms with a permutation invariant extension qualify as logical, then for any arbitrary true contingent sentence K of the meta-language, there would be a logically true object-language sentence 'φ' such that K follows from the sentence 'φ is true'. Thus, many logically true sentences would be a posteriori. To prevent this fatal consequence, we propose to alter the invariance criterion: not only the term's extension, (...) but also its semantic clause must satisfy certain invariance conditions. The paper ends with the observation that the new criterion makes explicit the dependency of the classification of terms into logical and non-logical ones at the different levels of the Tarskian hierarchy of languages. (shrink)

We introduce and study hierarchies of extensions of the propositional modal and temporal languages with pairs of new syntactic devices: point of reference-reference pointer which enable semantic references to be made within a formula. We propose three different but equivalent semantics for the extended languages, discuss and compare their expressiveness. The languages with reference pointers are shown to have great expressive power (especially when their frugal syntax is taken into account), perspicuous semantics, and simple deductive systems. For (...) instance, Kamp's and Stavi's temporal operators, as well as nominals (names, clock variables), are definable in them. Universal validity in these languages is proved undecidable. The basic modal and temporal logics with reference pointers are uniformly axiomatized and a strong completeness theorem is proved for them and extended to some classes of their extensions. (shrink)

This book begins with the question 'Who am I?' and immediately sets off in an astonishingly original direction. Why didn't anyone before Harding think of responding to this question like this? It's so obvious, once you see it. Harding presents a new vision of our place in the universe that uses the scientific method of looking to see what is true. It turns out that the truth about ourselves is not only true but also very good, and breathtakingly beautiful. We (...) live in a sacred, many-layered, living universe - or rather it lives in us. Though it was completed in 1950, this book is still ahead of its time. One day it will surely be widely recognised for its greatness: its all-encompassing vision, its originality and freshness, its depth of insight, its wide-ranging knowledge, the clarity and poetry of its language, its humanity. It is a world-view not dependent on local culture or religion, but on universally verifiable facts. It is also a world-view that respects our manifest differences whilst celebrating our underlying unity - the unity not just of oneself with other people but with all of life, indeed with the whole universe. Harding died in 2007 aged 97, leaving behind him an impressive body of work. He was a highly creative person who was passionate about - he was in love with - this living universe and the immortal treasure that abides at its centre - at our centre. "A work of the highest genius." C. S. Lewis. (shrink)

I reconsider and enhance a somewhat neglected argument within the domains of reparations for slavery and black reparations. That argument is for compensating present-day descendants of enslaved per...

To understand – intuitively and analytically both – that man is a „being of light” created as a perfect „face and alikeness” and, implicitly, as a becoming measure of the cosmic „wave patterns”, is the main purpose of the present paper. To recuperate the language of the religion by the privilege of a new „living fields” science (biophotonics) means to realize rationally the millenary expectancy of the ESSENTIAL UNITY: man, cosmos, and divinity, harmoniously together.

This book begins with the question 'Who am I?' and immediately sets off in an astonishingly original direction. Why didn't anyone before Harding think of responding to this question like this? It's so obvious, once you see it. Harding presents a new vision of our place in the universe that uses the scientific method of looking to see what is true. It turns out that the truth about ourselves is not only true but also very good, and breathtakingly beautiful. We (...) live in a sacred, many-layered, living universe - or rather it lives in us. Though it was completed in 1950, this book is still ahead of its time. One day it will surely be widely recognised for its greatness: its all-encompassing vision, its originality and freshness, its depth of insight, its wide-ranging knowledge, the clarity and poetry of its language, its humanity. It is a world-view not dependent on local culture or religion, but on universally verifiable facts. It is also a world-view that respects our manifest differences whilst celebrating our underlying unity - the unity not just of oneself with other people but with all of life, indeed with the whole universe. Harding died in 2007 aged 97, leaving behind him an impressive body of work. He was a highly creative person who was passionate about - he was in love with - this living universe and the immortal treasure that abides at its centre - at our centre. "A work of the highest genius." C. S. Lewis. (shrink)

Optogenetics and DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) are important research tools in recent neurobiology. These tools allow unprecedented control over activity in specifically targeted neurons in behaving animals. Two approaches in philosophy of neuroscience, mechanism and ruthless reductionism, provide explicit accounts of experiments and results using tools like these, but each offers a different picture about how levels of mechanisms relate. I argue here that the ruthless reductionist’s direct mind‐to‐cellular/molecular activities linkages “in a single bound” better fits (...) with both the experimental designs using these tools and some of the scientists’ own judgments about their results than does the mechanist’s “nested hierarchies of mechanisms‐within‐mechanisms.” So at least some important work in current neuroscience appears to be ruthlessly reductive. Mechanism may not correctly characterize all current work in neuroscience, despite its recent popularity. (shrink)

Due to its structure, language is open to change with the differentiation of time and events. The importance of language, which has a great importance in interpersonal communication, is much more privileged for Muslims who shape their civilizations according to the Qur’ān. Because the language in question in this medium is not only an element that completes human relations, but also the language of religion with divine characteristics, which communicates with people through revelation and belongs to the supreme creator. It (...) is normal for a language, which is considered to be a social phenomenon, to be constantly open to change due to meaning expansion, meaning narrowing or meaning distortions. It is possible to change the language in proportion to the development of the human mind. However, if the “language of religion” is in question, it is extremely important in terms of the universal messages it carries that the concepts it contains should not be expanded or distorted in order to preserve the purity of that religion. It is certain that the change that will occur in the words of the Qur’ān will affect its interpretation and thus religious life. In a realm where revelation is fixed and unchangeable, time and understanding are variable, what matters to us is how much we are in harmony with the first and essential meaning given to the concepts in our effort to understand the Qur’ān. In this article, with the revelation of the revelation, the expansion of the concept of mustad‘af to gain new political meanings, a case which almost all commentators have agreed on until today, has been analyzed, especially in the last century. The concept of mustad‘af, which is mentioned in four verses in the Qur’ān and is rarely included in the hadiths, basically represents the people who have not had the opportunity to migrate to live their faith, who were persecuted by deniers and oppressors and whose right to worship was taken away. The concept of mustad‘af, which basically means “weak, belittled and oppressed”, gained a religious content with Islam and preserved it. While the concept has been used in a narrow sense in the Sunni world until today and did not develop any meaning, it found a wide place in the Shiite world and underwent new meaning expansions. After the period of Hulefa-i Raşidîn, the Shiites accepted themselves as victims of the treatment they received by the political powers and named themselves as mustad‘af, and they produced a literature of victimization from there. This concept, which is used by Shiite scholars for people who sometimes do not fall into blasphemy and shirk, and sometimes believe in Allah and His Messenger, although they are not subject to the sect of shia, has been made available for new meanings with the change of world politics after the modern period. In the 19th century, the “social justice” and “equality” discourses of communism affected the Islamic world as well as the whole world. In addition to the establishment of many “left”-centered political parties in the Islamic world, contemporary Muslim thinkers were also influenced by this, and after a while many Islamic values started to be considered as left-wing. Especially before the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, the proletariat and bourgeois conflict was evaluated as an affiliate and mustad‘af, and it was hoped that the neglected masses would be converted to Islam with this new discourse. Those who have an imperialist and capitalist character, covet the wealth of third world countries and do all kinds of evil against them. Those who were left weak, exploited and stripped of their resources were regarded as mustad‘af. Again, the dictators who came to power against the will of the Muslims were evaluated as mustaqbir and the masses of the people as mustad‘af. It is possible to read a historical or religious text through any ideology. However, the fact that should not be ignored here is that if every word and concept in the Qur’ān loses its meaning in the medium and culture in which it descended, the language of religion and therefore all values belonging to religion will evaporate over time. (shrink)

Computational models of memory are often expressed as hierarchic sequence models, but the hierarchies in these models are typically fairly shallow, reflecting the tendency for memories of superordinate sequence states to become increasingly conflated. This article describes a broad-coverage probabilistic sentence processing model that uses a variant of a left-corner parsing strategy to flatten sentence processing operations in parsing into a similarly shallow hierarchy of learned sequences. The main result of this article is that a broad-coverage model with constraints (...) on hierarchy depth can process large newspaper corpora with the same accuracy as a state-of-the-art parser not defined in terms of sequential working memory operations. (shrink)

Punctured languages are languages whose words are partial words in the sense that the letters at some positions are unknown. We investigate to which extent restoration of punctured languages is possible if the number of unknown positions or the proportion of unknown positions per word, respectively, is bounded, and we study their relationships for different boundings. The considered restoration classes coincide with similarity classes according to some kind of similarity for languages. Thus all results we can (...) also formulate in the language of similarity. We show some hierarchies of similarity classes for each class from the Chomsky hierarchy and prove the existence of linear languages which are not δ -similar to any regular language for any δ < ½. For δ ≥ ½ this is unknown but it could only be possible in the case of non-slender linear languages. (shrink)

We present a modal logic for the class of subset spaces based on discretely descending chains of sets. Apart from the usual modalities for knowledge and effort the standard temporal connectives are included in the underlying language. Our main objective is to prove completeness of a corresponding axiomatization. Furthermore, we show that the system satisfies a certain finite model property and is decidable thus.

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful “just so stories” about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about (...) language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the “descended larynx” of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language. (shrink)

Universal Darwinism provides a methodology to study the evolution of anatomical form and sociocultural behavior that centers on defining the units and levels of selection, and it identifies the conditions whereby natural selection operates. In previous work, I have examined how this selection-focused evolutionary epistemology may be universalized to include theories that associate with an extended synthesis. Applied evolutionary epistemology is a metatheoretical framework that understands any and all kinds of evolution as phenomena where units evolve by mechanisms at levels (...) of an ontological hierarchy; and it provides three heuristics to search for these units, levels and mechanisms. The heuristics are applicable to language and sociocultural evolution, and here, we give an in-depth analysis of how the unit-heuristic can be implemented into language origin and evolution studies. The importance of developing hierarchy theories is also more fully explained. (shrink)

In this paper we propose a pragmatic approach to the evolution of language based on analysis of a particular element of human communication: discourse coherence. We show that coherence is essential for effective communication. Through analysis of a collection of neuropsychological and neurolinguistic studies, we maintain that the proper functioning of executive processes responsible for planning and executing actions plays a key role in the construction of coherent discourses. Studies that tested the discursive and conversational abilities of bonobos have showed (...) that apes are unable to construct a flow of discourse governed by coherence, and therefore, apes’ conversational interactions are quite different from those of humans. We then propose that the emergence of coherence in communication occurred after the split between great apes’ and humans’ lines of descendants and that this emergence might have been the result of a specific gradual development in the course of hominin evolution of the executive functions. (shrink)

In this article, I develop the concept and practice of ‘listening to difference,’ examining J.G. Herder’s aural theory of cultural diversity as primarily worked out in the ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772). I examine the sources Herder critiqued to outline his aural theory of linguistic and cultural difference, which have thus far only been summarily mentioned if at all in scholarship despite the prominence of the ‘Treatise’ in intellectual history and philosophy. These sources comprise the travelogues of seventeenth- (...) and early eighteenth-century French scientists, mathematicians, diplomats, and Jesuit missionaries who described the inadequacy of Romanized orthography to accurately transcribe the sounds and pronunciations of the indigenous peoples they encountered throughout the Americas, Thailand, and China. Herder’s critical readings of travelogues showcased the unintended failures and interruptions in European colonial practices of listening. I argue that it was the French travellers’ failure to erase difference, to transform it into identity or, in other words, into a universalist monolingualism, which produced a consciousness of cultural and linguistic difference, even if repressed. The sounds of the spoken indigenous languages exposed the limits of the paradigms of Catholic and European linguistic classification. Instead, the exemplary technologies for preserving difference in scriptural and listening practices were for Herder the Hebrew alphabet and the oral transmission of poetry in ancient and Indigenous cultures. Listening to difference, as I define it, involves an openness to listening to the voices and sounds of the othered by listeners who recognize their distinct situated, embodied positionalities. It offers alternate possibilities to conceive of human diversity as continually in formation and not as a static or progressive hierarchy. (shrink)

Aristotle's endeavor, at least insofar as we can judge from the way it has been transmitted to us and from the titles of the lost works, is often presented as the first work of an encyclopedic nature, as it seems to embrace and order all of the elements of knowledge. Does Aristotle not advance a classification of sciences, in Metaphysics, E, 1, as well as a systematic outline of the “sciences of nature” in his Meteorologica, I, 1? And again, although (...) logic is often presented as not belonging to the system of sciences since it is not counted as a science in Metaphysics, E, 1, is Aristotle not generally considered the inventor of this discipline? The impression is all the stronger in that Andronicus of Rhodes, in the first century b.c., edited Aristotle's works by roughly adopting the threefold division of philosophy into Logic-Physics-Ethics, a division that had become common during the Hellenistic period though more particularly proper to the Stoic system. Since then, all the editions of Aristotle, in every language, have been made to serve the order in which Aristotle's treatises were thus edited. (shrink)

The thesis focuses on a quite recent research field lying in between Descriptive Set Theory and Automata Theory (for infinite objects). In both areas, one is often concerned with subsets of the Cantor space or of its homeomorphic copies. In Descriptive Set Theory, such subsets are usually stratified in topological hierarchies, like the Borel hierarchy, the Wadge hierarchy and the difference hierarchy; in Automata Theory, such sets are studied in terms of regularity, that is, the property of (...) being recognised by an automaton or, equivalently, of being expressible in Monadic Second-Order Logic. This double point of view leads to many interesting questions about the interplay and relationship between topological complexity and regularity. While we have a complete picture of what happens in the case of automata on words, the case of automata on trees is still a terra incognita. Some results have already been obtained for particular classes of languages, like Buchi languages, deterministic languages, ¨ and unambiguous languages. In this thesis we instead drop any restriction and prove some new results concerning arbitrary regular tree languages which belong to low levels of the Borel hierarchy and of the Wadge hierarchy. (shrink)

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist account (...) of language – by which language is viewed only in terms of its communicative uses and reach and not in relation to its symbolic and identity functions. Second is his simplistic advocacy of English as a global lingua franca, which ignores issues of power and inequality, along with related delimited access to high-status English language varieties. Third are the inherent limitations associated with his advocacy of linguistic territoriality, which recognizes state-sanctioned languages but little else, thus failing to mitigate existing linguistic hierarchies. Finally, the wider argument for English as a global lingua franca is inevitably underpinned by a monolithic/hegemonic view of English itself. This monolithic conception of English stands in contradistinction, not only to the actual plethora of Englishes in the world today, but also, more importantly, to their widely varying status and use in furthering cross-communication and related notions of social and economic mobility. The latter thus fatally undermines Van Parijs’s central argument linking social and economic mobility ineluctably to access to English. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. The settling of a language -- 2. The Whorf hypothesis -- 3. Relativism or a universal theory? -- 4. What does language have to do with logic and mathematics? -- 5. A test bed for grammatical theories -- 6. The Chomsky hierarchy in perpsective -- 7. Reflexivity and identity in language and cognition -- 8. The generalized logic hierarchy and its cognitive implications -- 9. The intensionalization of extensions.

There are many different views on what role language plays in ethnic identification. This article is focused on the given issue based on the sample of the Cuban minority living in Slovakia. The topic is analyzed on a sample of Cubans living in the territory of Slovakia in a time frame ranging from 1 to 37 years as well as their descendants who come from mixed Slovak-Cuban families. In this article I am dealing with the impact of the Spanish, Slovak, (...) Hungarian, and English language. (shrink)

Michael Friedman has recently argued that Carnap'sLogical Syntax of Language is fundamentally flawed in a way that reveals the ultimate failure of logical positivism. Friedman's argument depends crucially on two claims: (1) that Carnap was committed to the view that there is a universal metalanguage and (2) that given what Carnap wanted from a metalanguage, in particular given that he wanted a definition of analytic for an object language, he was in fact committed to a hierarchy of stronger and (...) stronger metalanguages. We argue that neither of these claims need be accepted. We show that there is no textual evidence for (1) and that if metalanguages are to be used for merely descriptive and not also justificatory purposes, Carnap does not need to define analyticity sufficiently for proving consistency, and so could have given a definition that does not entail a hierarchy of metalanguages. (shrink)

We examine some assumptions about the nature of 'levels of reality' in the light of examples drawn from physics. Three central assumptions of the standard view of such levels (for instance, Oppenheim and Putnam 1958) are (i) that levels are populated by entities of varying complexity, (ii) that there is a unique hierarchy of levels, ranging from the very small to the very large, and (iii) that the inhabitants of adjacent levels are related by the parthood relation. Using examples (...) from physics, we argue that it is more natural to view the inhabitants of levels as the behaviors of entities, rather than entities themselves. This suggests an account of reduction between levels, according to which one behavior reduces to another if the two are related by an appropriate limit relation. By considering cases where such inter-level reduction fails, we show that the hierarchy of behaviors differs in several respects from the standard hierarchy of entities. In particular, while on the standard view, lower-level entities are 'micro' parts of higher-level entities, on our view, a system's macro-level behavior can be seen as a ('non-spatial') part of its micro-level behavior. We argue that this second hierarchy is not really in conflict with the standard view and that it better suits examples of explanation in science. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Kant’s philosophy of grammar in order to argue that: (a) the formal analysis of language implies that there is a structural correspondence between logical and grammatical form; (b) there is a distinction between the sense in which logic is formal and the sense in which grammar is formal; (c) universal grammar descends from the system of categorial functions that are investigated in the transcendental analytic; (d) transcendental grammar implies that the universal form of human language (...) has its ground in the universal structure of thought; (e) the concept of a grammatical norm is clarified once we combine the theory of universal grammar with how linguistic experience takes place. (shrink)

This important book proposes a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein. The authors deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Rather, the link between language and world is a two-stage one, in which meaning is used and in which a natural language should be understood as fundamentally a collection of socially devised and maintained practices. Arguing against the philosophical mainstream descending from Frege and Russell to Quine, (...) Davidson, Dummett, McDowell, Evans, Putnam, Kripke and others, the authors demonstrate that discarding the notion of reference does not entail relativism or semantic nihilism. A provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice, this book will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists, students of communication and all those concerned with the nature and acquisition of human linguistic capacities. (shrink)

: This paper deals with the subject of mushākala, ta'rīz, kināya and ijāz in terms of language andthe using of Qur’ān's verb and noun forms, human genre and adjective nouns in terms of style and someother related problems. The punishment or retribution from Allāh (Makr) as mushākala form, whichsometimes occurs at the level of a gradual diminution or collapse, is a punishment that gradually destroysthe sinner without his realizing it. However, it is possible to say that there is another dimension (...) inMüshākala, destiny, and the formula of the working mechanism of destiny. According to this formula, it isunderstood that whatever behavior a person exhibits, Allah responds with a similar behavior. Based onthis dimension of destiny, it is understood that in one aspect (with the exception of Allah's will), mandetermines his own destiny relatively, and that his destiny is shaped as a result of his own actions. Some(Ta’rīd) verses and expressions with indirect narrative content were misinterpreted by some peoplebecause they implied something too deep to understand by human beings and had a profundity ofmeanings as well as secret wisdom. The fact is that about the 6th verse of the chapter of al-Mâida: "O youwho have believed, when you rise to (perform) prayer, wash your faces and your fore arms to the elbowsand your heads too." Shiites misunderstand Ibn Abbas's statement pointed out as "I can find nothing butwiping the feet in Allah's book, but they did not accept anything but washing", and their anointing of theirfeet is due to such a misunderstanding. In the Qur’ān, indirect expression is used in places that mentionabout the adab of maram (private) affairs in marital relationships; and that which should not be saidopenly. With such a form of expression, the Qur’ān is descended upon human beings from Allah to beexpressed in indirect expressions in situations where it is not welcome to express clearly. In the same way,it can be said that when the Qur’ān mentions a negative situation, it refers to it with closed expressions,and It can also be said that it uses Kinâya as a politeness and courtesy style. However, in any case, thecustomary usage should not be ignored while giving meaning to the verse expressions with allusions. Inexpressions of the Qur’ān, ijāz is used extensively; It is possible to say that a large part of the ijāz is theeliminate of words in expressions. For this reason it should not be overlooked that in some verses thatare not understood, some part of it may be deleted for ijāz. In terms of the style of the Qur’ān in thearticle, there are important points in terms of rhetoric in the use of verb and noun form, which is one ofthe topics discussed. (shrink)

Introduction Language Norms "Norms" From "Facts" The Constitutive A Posteriori "Facts" From "Norms" Mutability of Norms Self-Stabilization Amendment Through Violation Preposterous Norms Reflexive and Irreflexive Hierarchies Noticed and Unnoticed Changes Grounds of Phonetic Change The Logic of Normative Change Bibliography Notes Second Thoughts..

This article understands codes of ethics as written documents that represent social actors in specific ways through the use of language. It presents an empirical study that investigated the codes of ethics of the German Dax30 companies. The study adopted a critical discourse analysis-approach in order to reveal how the code-texts produce a particular understanding of the various internal social groups for the readers. Language is regarded as social practice that functions at creating particular understandings of individuals and groups, how (...) they are interrelated, and how they should behave. Findings show that codes of ethics do not represent employees as a group that is empowered or morally enlightened; instead they are positioned as passive receivers of rules and regulations. Furthermore, codes of ethics classify employees as having a need to be monitored and controlled by the higher levels of the corporate hierarchy. Overall, code language enforces compliance through maintaining existing and building new asymmetries between the different groups within a company. As a consequence, the article discusses a somewhat different understanding of code effectiveness. Reproducing and reemphasizing hierarchical relations could also lead to code compliance, perhaps without any need for developing the moral employee that is committed to ethical values. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that the brain functional connectome constitutes a unique fingerprint that allows the identification of individuals from a group. However, what information encoded in the brain that makes us unique remains elusive. Here, we addressed this issue by examining how individual identifiability changed along the language hierarchy. Subjects underwent fMRI scanning during rest and when listening to short stories played backward, scrambled at the sentence level, and played forward. Identification for individuals was performed between two scan (...) sessions for each task as well as between the rest and task sessions. We found that individual identifiability tends to increase along the language hierarchy: the more complex the task is, the better subjects can be distinguished from each other based on their whole-brain functional connectivity profiles. A similar principle is found at the functional network level: compared to the low-order network (the auditory network), the high-order network is more individualized (the frontoparietal network). Moreover, in both cases, the increase in individual identifiability is accompanied by the increase in inter-subject variability of functional connectivities. These findings advance the understanding of the source of brain individualization and have potential implications for developing robust connectivity-based biomarkers. (shrink)

In this work we investigate the Weihrauch degree of the problem Decreasing Sequence of finding an infinite descending sequence through a given ill-founded linear order, which is shared by the problem Bad Sequence of finding a bad sequence through a given non-well quasi-order. We show that $\mathsf {DS}$, despite being hard to solve, is rather weak in terms of uniform computational strength. To make the latter precise, we introduce the notion of the deterministic part of a Weihrauch degree. We (...) then generalize $\mathsf {DS}$ and $\mathsf {BS}$ by considering $\boldsymbol {\Gamma }$ -presented orders, where $\boldsymbol {\Gamma }$ is a Borel pointclass or $\boldsymbol {\Delta }^1_1$, $\boldsymbol {\Sigma }^1_1$, $\boldsymbol {\Pi }^1_1$. We study the obtained $\mathsf {DS}$ -hierarchy and $\mathsf {BS}$ -hierarchy of problems in comparison with the Baire hierarchy and show that they do not collapse at any finite level. (shrink)

This article discusses the work of George Seddon as a significant Australian intellectual whose writing on postcolonial settler-descendant relations with land and nature is a major contribution to academic and public life. Seddon’s originality lies partly in his bridging knowledge and expertise in both the humanities and sciences. However, while there is a reliance upon factual data drawn from geology, botany and zoology, Seddon’s analyses of language and culture can appear idiosyncratic and unsystematic in terms of social science methods. Based (...) on introspection, the work might be considered ‘autoethnography’, though Seddon seeks to do more than tell stories about himself. In acknowledging both the brilliance and shortcomings of Seddon’s work, I present some examples of how it has stimulated my own research on the cultural implications of naming species and places in Australia. (shrink)

The aim of Language for those who have Nothing is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of Dialogism and Polyphony, the Carnival and the Chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed. Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book corresponds with carnival (...) practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity. (shrink)

Why do we have a moral duty to fulfill promises? Hume offers what today is called a practice theory of the obligation of promises: he explains it by appeal to a social convention. His view has inspired more recent practice theories. All practice theories, including Hume’s, are assumed by contemporary philosophers to have a certain normative structure, in which the obligation to fulfill a promise is warranted or justified by a more fundamental moral purpose that is served by the social (...) practice of promising or adherence to it. Recent practice theories do have this structure, but, I argue, Hume’s own does not. Hume’s account, while it does trace the origin of promises to convention, is instead a causal explanation of the moral sentiments we have toward fulfillment and violation of promises, sentiments he regards as normative in themselves and not susceptible of further warrant. He explains how a collectively-invented social practice becomes morally obligatory for us to conform to, without deriving its moral authority from a more basic principle. I discuss one objection often made to practice theories that, in its application to Hume, presupposes the incorrect interpretation, and show that while it is telling for Hume’s descendants, for Hume it misses the mark. Instead I make a different challenge to Hume, and suggest how he might meet it. (shrink)

The general notions of object- and metalanguage are discussed and as a special case of this relation an arbitrary first order language with an infinite model is expanded by a predicate symbol T0 which is interpreted as truth predicate for . Then the expanded language is again augmented by a new truth predicate T1 for the whole language plus T0. This process is iterated into the transfinite to obtain the Tarskian hierarchy of languages. It is shown that there (...) are natural points for stopping this process. The sets which become definable in suitable hierarchies are investigated, so that the relevance of the Tarskian hierarchy to some subjects of philosophy of mathematics are clarified. (shrink)

Which and how much of our current drives –individually and as a global community– are driven by ancestral, inherited traits or imprinted on our animal condition? An attempt to approximate this intriguing query is explored here. It pertains to our identity, social constructions, and our ecological interaction. The origin of our species has its roots in ancestral habits, behaviors and a survival drive, transformed from changing environmental conditions. We were not born in a mother-of-pearl cradle nor were protected by magical (...) agents. We grew on the thread of time within the complex nature of bio-ecological interactions. They carved our identity, our genetic expression and the possible origin of our beliefs, resulting in an arch of various behaviors and cultural phenotypes. The biological nature of our construction dragged through millennia through species trials with variable rates of survival times provided traces of inconstant and multiple evolutive chains. Our modern cultural contexts –norms, priorities, values– appear as newly born. Yet, socio-cultural ecology upon which our brain organization and behavioral constructs derive include shared basic behavioral drives with non-human primates. The emergence of humans with a sophisticated language allowed the development of complex virtual constructs based on symbolism and the instruments of culture. This has enhanced cognitive capacity and emotional interaction supported by processes anchored in neural networks distributed within cortical and subcortical levels. Basic, essential neural connectivities were preserved during the evolutionary development of the species. The biological matrix and inheritance are usually segregated from the social and cultural construction. Sophistication of our cultural development tends to set up a divisive fault from primitive foundations of non-human animal behavior (survival, territory, reproduction, prevalence, access to nutrients). These are basic templates and underlie essential individual and group basic drives, and cultural constructs. Humans have not ceased from being territorial (whether applied to virtual or material dimensions). Various forms of social inequities have been expressed in our time and through human history. On evolutive terms, the notion of individual social status within the social structure of a gregarious community generated the probability of an individual ascending or descending that hierarchy. Thus, becoming a potential figure of leadership, or the subordinate or the marginalized. Is there an evolutive antecedent for human social inequities? How do we construct a different future? Post-industrial societies became increasingly dependent on material consumerism and technological cultures, to the point of embraining them; conceptually becoming technological hybrids. Are these a developmental must, or an uncontrolled spin-off of human inventiveness affecting our future? Construction of supernatural agents played a significant role in the socialization/domestication processes. Agents’ intentionality flourished through altered states of conscience, or under fear of natural phenomena attributed to supposed inhabitants of the Natural Kingdom or virtual beings. This imaginary universe, reinforced by ritual behaviors, contributed to control personal/collective distress of various possible origins and conditioned our degrees of emotional and cognitive freedom. (shrink)

In his pioneering work in the field of inductive inference, Gold (Inf Control 10:447–474, 1967) proved that a set containing all finite languages and at least one infinite language over the same fixed alphabet is not identifiable in the limit (learnable in the exact sense) from complete texts. Gold’s work paved the way for computational learning theories of language and has implications for two linguistically relevant classes in the Chomsky hierarchy (cf. Chomsky in Inf Control 2:137–167, 1959, Chomsky (...) in Knowledge of language: its nature, origin, and use, Praeger, 1986; Shieber in Linguist Philos 8:333–343, 1985; Heinz in Linguist Inq 41:623–661, 2010). Within that same framework, Angluin (Inf Control 45:117–135, 1980) provided a complete characterization for the learnability of language families. Mathematically, the concept of identification in the limit from that classical setting can be seen as the use of a particular type of metric for learning in the limit (Wharton in Inf Control 26:236–255, 1974). In this research note, I use Niyogi’s extended version of a theorem by Blum and Blum (Inf Control 28:125–155, 1975) on the existence of locking data sets to prove a necessary condition for learnability in the limit of any family of languages with the Gold property in any given metric. This recovers the most general version of Gold’s Theorem as a particular case. Moreover, when the language family is further assumed to contain all finite languages, the same condition also becomes sufficient for learnability in the limit. Finally, we discuss questions that are left open and outline a research program regarding language learnability in the limit from other input types and cognitive feasibility. (shrink)

Andrey Bely was an important member of the Russian symbolist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This essay presents a summary of the development of his ideas regarding the origins of image and symbol in poetic language. For Bely language organizes chaos. The poet finds images in the internal world of dreams. Music has an organizing power beyond that of language, which language attempts to imitate. Under the influence of Vladimir Solovyov he looked to the union of (...) Divine Wisdom or Sophia with the Eternal Logos as the principle behind symbolic images. Later, under the spell of Rudolf Steiner, he found the source of inspiration in the eternal dwelling of the Logos from which the human ego descends into flesh. The task of the poet is to recover the memory of the time before he left the realm of the Logos and to return to that realm by participating in Christ's ascent to the Cross. The autobiographical novel Kotik Letaev gives an account of recovering memory from before birth and the need to be joined with Christ crucified. (shrink)