It is routinely observed in NLP that sentences seem to “evoke” situations (where I use this term comprehensively to cover events, episodes, eventualities, processes, etc.). Much like discourse entities evoked by explicit noun phrases, these evoked situations can be referred to anaphorically, as for instance in (1) and (3) below, and can be modified in various ways, for instance by supplying their duration and location, as in (2) and (4).

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

previous theories and the relevance of those criticisms to the new accounts. Additionally, we have included a new section at the end, which gives some directions to literature outside of formal semantics in which the notion of mass has been employed. We looked at work on mass expressions in psycholinguistics and computational linguistics here, and we discussed some research in the history of philosophy and in metaphysics that makes use of the notion of mass.

Mimesis as Make-Believe is important reading for everyone interested in the workings of representational art.

There exist a variety of biological variations known as intersex conditions or disorders of sex development, which cause a per­son’s sex as male or female to be uncertain at birth. In the past several decades, cosmetic surgery aimed at “normalizing” the infant’s body has become an increasingly controversial treatment for an infant with an IC or DSD. While ICs and DSDs are not addressed directly by Catholic moral teaching, the Catholic Tradition has a number of tools that can undergird a (...) Catholic response to the suffering of people with ICs and DSDs and support improved medical, pastoral, and spiritual care for them and their families. (shrink)

First published in 1962, contains the William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. It sets out Austin's conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts for at least the last ten years of his life. Starting from an exhaustive examination of his already well- known distinction of performative utterances from statements, Austin here finally abandons that distinction, replacing it by a more general theory of 'illocutionary forces' of utterances which has important bearings on a wide (...) variety of philosophical problems. (shrink)

It was proposed that the data from Monte Carlo statistical investigations be subjected to analysis of variance methods rather than the conventional techniques of tabling, graphing, and inspecting the data. Two examples in which analysis of variance methods were applied to published Monte Carlo studies were presented. It was suggested that balanced factorial designs should be used whenever possible in Monte Carlo studies so that analysis of variance methods would be directly applicable. Finally, three advantages of analysis of variance methods (...) over conventional techniques were described and analysis of variance methods were contrasted with a possible alternative analytical method, multiple regression analysis. (shrink)

This chapter defends the property dualism argument. The term “semantic premise” mentioned is used to refers to an assumption identified by Brian Loar that antiphysicalist arguments, such as the property dualism argument, tacitly assume that a statement of property identity that links conceptually independent concepts is true only if at least one concept picks out the property it refers to by connoting a contingent property of that property. It is argued that, the property that does the work in explaining the (...) possibility of a posteriori identities need not be a first-order property of the referent in question. On his view, the property dualism argument requires only a weaker semantic premise, which allows that the property in question be a higher order property. A refined version of the property dualism argument is formulated, which uses the weaker premise, and defends the argument against various objections. (shrink)

A new comprehensive framework for narrative understanding has been developed. Its centerpiece is a new situational logic calledEpisodic Logic, a knowledge and semantic representation well-adapted to the interpretive and inferential needs of general NLU. The most distinctive features of EL is its natural language-like expressiveness. It allows for generalized quantifiers, lambda abstraction, sentence and predicate modifiers, sentence and predicate reification, intensional predicates, unreliable generalizations, and perhaps most importantly, explicit situational variables linked to arbitrary formulas that describe them. These allow episodes (...) to be explicitly related in terms of part-whole, temporal and causal relations. Episodic logical form is easily computed from surface syntax and lends itself to effective inference. (shrink)

Current sociological theories appear to have lost their general persuasiveness in part because, unlike the theories of the ‘classical era’, they fail to maintain an integrated stance toward society, and the practical role that sociology plays in society. The authors explore various facets of this failure and possibilities for reconstructing sociological theories as integrated wholes capable of conveying a moral and political immediacy. They discuss the evolution of several concepts (for example, the social, structure, and self) and address the significant (...) disputes (for example, structuralism versus humanism, and individual versus society) that have dominated twentieth-century sociological thought. Their ideas and analyses are directed towards an audience of students and theorists who are coming to terms with the project of sociological theory, and its relationship with moral discourses and political practice. The authors of these essays are sociological theorists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. They are all established, but not ‘establishment’ authors. The book contains no orthodoxies, and no answers. However, the essays do contribute to identifying the range of issues that will constitute the agenda for the next generation of sociological theorists. (shrink)