If definitive evidence concerning treatment effectiveness becomes available from an ongoing randomized clinical trial, then the trial could be stopped early, with the public release of results benefiting current and future patients. However, stopping an ongoing trial based on accruing outcome data requires methodological rigor to preserve validity of the trial conclusions. This has led to the use of formal interim monitoring procedures, which include inefficacy monitoring that will stop a trial early when the experimental treatment appears not to be (...) working. For participants, inefficacy monitoring is especially important as it ensures that they are not being treated worse than if they had not enrolled on the trial. We discuss the importance of reporting with trial results the formal interim inefficacy monitoring guidelines that were utilized, and, if none were used, the reasons for their absence. A survey of two leading medical journals suggests that this is not current practice. (shrink)

Papers addressing the role which human motivation plays in a wide range of specialties including clinical psychology, internal medicine, sports psychology, ...

In sentences like Every teacher laughed we think of every teacher as a unary (=type (1)) quantifier - it expresses a property of one place predicate denotations. In variable binding terms, unary quantifiers bind one variable. Two applications of unary quantifiers, as in the interpretation of No student likes every teacher, determine a binary (= type (2)) quantifier; they express properties of two place predicate denotations. In variable binding terms they bind two variables. We call a binary quantifier Fregean (or (...) reducible) if it can in principle be expressed by the iterated application of unary quantifiers. In this paper we present two mathematical properties which distinguish non-Fregean quantifiers from Fregean ones. Our results extend those of van Benthem (1989) and Keenan (1987a). We use them to show that English presents a large variety of non-Fregean quantifi ers. Some are new here, others are familiar (though the proofs that they are non-Fregean are not). The main point of our empirical work is to inform us regarding the types of quantification natural language presents - in particular (van Benthem, 1989) that it goes beyond the usual (Fregean) analysis which treats it as mere iterated application of unary quantifiers. Secondarily, our results challenge linguistic approaches to "Logical Form" which constrain variable binding operators to "locally" bind just one occurrence of a variable, e.g., the Bijection Principle (BP) of Koopman and Sportiche (1983). The BP (correctly) blocks analyses like For which x, x's mother kissed x? for Who did his mother kiss? since For which x would locally bind two occurrences of x. But some of our irreducible binary quantifiers are naturally represented by operators which do locally bind two variables. This paper is organized as follows: Section 1 provides an explicit formulation of our questions of concern. Section 2 classifies the English constructions which we show to be non-Fregean. Section 3 presents the mathematical properties which test for non-Fregean quantification and applies these tests to the constructions in Section 2. Proofs of the mathema tical properties are given in the Appendix. (shrink)

Business ethics is once again a hot topic as examples of improper business practices that violate commonly accepted ethical norms are brought to our attention. With the increasing number of scandals business schools find themselves on the defensive in explaining what they are doing to help respond to the call to teach ‘‘more’’ business ethics. This paper focuses on two issues germane to business ethics teaching efforts: the ‘‘targeted output’’ goals of teaching business ethics and when in the curriculum business (...) ethics should be taught. (shrink)

Recent work in natural language semantics leads to some new observations on generalized quantifiers. In § 1 we show that English quantifiers of type $ $ are booleanly generated by their generalized universal and generalized existential members. These two classes also constitute the sortally reducible members of this type. Section 2 presents our main result--the Generalized Prefix Theorem (GPT). This theorem characterizes the conditions under which formulas of the form Q1x 1⋯ Qnx nRx 1⋯ xn and q1x 1⋯ qnx nRx (...) 1⋯ xn are logically equivalent for arbitrary generalized quantifiers Qi, qi. GPT generalizes, perhaps in an unexpectedly strong form, the Linear Prefix Theorem (appropriately modified) of Keisler & Walkoe (1973). (shrink)

We consider the logical form of a natural language sentence to be a formal object which determines both the logical properties of the sentence and, more generally, the ways the sentence is logically related to other sentences. Thus if some NL sentence logically entails another, this fact must follow, given the logical forms of the two sentences. The power of a theory of logical forms of natural language then lies first in what logical properties and relations it can define, and (...) second, in which NL sentences it can show to be logically related to which others. (shrink)

avant propos This paper is basically Keenan (1992) augmented by some new types of properly polyadic quantification in natural language drawn from Moltmann (1992), Nam (1991) and Srivastav (1990). In addition I would draw the reader's attention to recent mathematical studies of polyadic quantiicationz Ben-Shalom (1992), Spaan (1992) and Westerstahl (1992). The first and third of these extend and generalize (in some cases considerably) the techniques and results in Keenan (1992). Finally I would like to acknowledge the stimulating and constructive (...) discussions ofthe earlier paper with many scholars, notably Dorit Ben-Shalom, Jaap van der Does, Hans Kamp, Uwe Mormich, Arnim von Stechow, Mats Rooth, and Ede Zimmermann. And I repeat here the acknowledgment in the earlier paper to Jim Lambek, Ed Stabler and two anonymous referees for Linguistics and Philosophy (the latter responsible for substantial improvements in the proofs - see footnote 10). (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Three of the most venerable objections to anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are traceable to Xenophanes and his critique of the early Greek gods. Though suitably revised, these ancient criticisms have persisted over the centuries, plaguing various religious communities, particularly those of classical Christian commitment. Xenophanes complained that anthropomorphism leads to unseemly characterizations, noting that both over the ages, the list of unseemly characteristics has expanded somewhat.

In this chapter we shall examine the characteristic properties of a construction wide-spread in the world’s languages, the passive. In section 1 below we discuss defining characteristics of passives, contrasting them with other foregrounding and backgrounding constructions. In section 2 we present the common syntactic and semantic properties of the most wide-spread types of passives, and in section 3 we consider passives which differ in one or more ways from these. In section 4, we survey a variety of constructions that (...) resemble passive constructions in one way or another. In section 5, we briefly consider differences between languages with regard to the roles passives play in their grammars. Specifically, we show that passives are a more essential part of the grammars of some languages than of others. (shrink)

This special issue presents developments in research on the cognitive mechanisms and consequences of surprise. Amidst much progress, surprise research has often been siloed, so, as editors, we have sought to juxtapose insights, theories, and findings, to support cross‐fertilization in future research. The present paper sets the stage by presenting a historical summary, highlighting contrasts in definitions, and tracing major threads running through this issue and the larger surprise literature.

In 1992, James Keenan put forward a renewed interpretation of the development of Aquinas’s thought to the effect that he shifted from an intellectual determinism in his early works, to an understanding of the autonomy of the will in the Prima Secundae of the Summa theologiae; this autonomy is the ground for Keenan’s (and others’) distinction between moral goodness and moral rightness. The present essay analyzes Keenan’s interpretation in terms of the body of criticism that it has generated over the (...) past ten years. In particular, it highlights five important implications that Keenan draws from his theory of the will’s autonomy: the separation of volition from knowledge in the dynamic of freedom, the virtue of charity as formal and non-specific, the moral neutrality of the acquired virtues, the two measures of moral action, and sin as moral “badness.”. (shrink)

In a footnote to ‘Of Miracles’, David Hume defined the miraculous as ‘… a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent .’ In the opening pages of the essay itself, however, Hume dropped the reference to agency in favour of the simpler declaration that any ‘ … miracle is a violation of the laws of nature …’ This preference for the simpler formulation was deliberate. According to (...) Hume, it was their violation of natural law that provided the genuinely intimidating obstacle against miracles. As the course of his argument makes clear, Hume believed that the massive accumulation of evidence supporting the regularity of nature invariably would overwhelm any meagre reports to the contrary. For this reason alone, questions of divine agency could be ignored as purely academic. (shrink)

This book details the discovery and significance of the Shanghai Museum Zhou Yi, the Wangjiatai Gui cang, and the Fuyang Zhou Yi, including full translations of the texts and additional evidence that constructs a new narrative of the Yi ...

Contrary to Hume’s contention, there is no essential connection between miracles and violations of natural laws. Not only may violations of natural law be utterly nonmiraculous, miracles may occur in complete conformity with such laws. Furthermore, a proper understanding of miracles in terms of divine agency places them into an epistemic context where the growth of science does not directly threaten their possibility.

We illustrate a novel conception of linguistic invariant which applies to grammars of different natural languages even though they may use different categories and have difl'erent rules. We illustrate formally how semantically defined notions, such as "is an anaphor" may be invariant in all linguistically motivated grammars, and we show that individual morphemes, such as case markers, may be invariant in grammars that have them in exactly the same sense in which properties, such as "is a Verb Phrase" or relations (...) such as "is a constituent of". (shrink)

roots In the Lexicon of Malagasy we include an entry whose string part is vidy ('buy'). Its category is 'RT [AG, TH) ', indicating that it is a root and is associated with a two element set of theta roles, AGFNT and THEME. Semantically this entry is interpreted as a binary relation (= a two participant event), noted VIDY'.

a transitive verb, Lt b) is its minimal correspondent built with a reciprocal verb.* (I) a. m+aN+enjika (Manenjika) an-dRabe Rakoto. pREs+AcT+cltase Acc-Rabe Rakoto..