An exploration of the features and methods of Imāmī exegesis. Principally, it offers a description and analysis of the major tenets of Imāmī doctrine, as reflected in the earliest Imāmī works of exegesis and related sources, up to the Major Occultation of the twelfth Imam in 329/941.

I will assess earlier approaches to the morphology of the G-stem imperative in Semitic and mount a reconstruction that supports a specific set of disyllabic patterns for the imperative of the basic stem in Proto-Semitic, i.e., qutul, qitil, and qital. The most common process envisioned for the formation of the imperative is clipping from the prefix conjugation, but the most recent full treatment of the topic is Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal’s revision and expansion of a century-old proposal that qatul, qatil, (...) and qital are the patterns of the imperative in Proto-Semitic. I refute both the clipping approach and Bar-Asher’s patterns in favor of qutul, qitil, and qital, which are the most economical and precise reconstruction in accounting for the realizations of the imperative in the various branches of Semitic. (shrink)

In the first part of this article, we show that, contrary to the Gricean tradition, inter-clausal and is not semantically equivalent to logical conjunction and, contrary to temporal approaches such as Bar-Levand Palacas 1980, it is not temporallyloaded. We then explore a commonsenseidea – namely that while sentence juxtaposition might be interpreted either as discourse coordination or subordination, and indicates coordination. SDRT already includes notions of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations (cf. Lascarides and Asher 1993, Asher 1993), and (...) the meaning of and is related to this distinction. Similar distinctions that play a crucial role in anaphora resolution have also appeared in AI – cf. Scha and Polanyi 1988, or Webber 1991. However, this discourse-structure-based distinction has not been well defined yet, and our approach provides independent motivation for it. This paper argues that the semantics of and includes a notion of coordination expressed as the requirement of a Coordinated Discourse Topic (CDT).CDT characterizes aclass of discourse relations, among which are Narration and Result.Once the basic semanticcontribution of and is isolated, effects related to its presence such as changes in temporal structure, blocking of a Discourse Relation, or conditional meanings are shown to follow from the defeasiblearchitecture set up by SDRT. (shrink)

Consistent with numerous electrophysiological studies, we recently reported that conscious perception is associated with a widely distributed modulation of the P3 component . We also showed that correct objective performance in the absence of subjective awareness is associated with a spatially more restricted modulation of the P3. The relatively late occurrence of the P3 along with lack of control for post-perceptual processes suggests that this component might reflect processes related to stimulus evaluation or confidence rather than to visual awareness or (...) objective performance. The main aim of the current study was to test this hypothesis. While EEG was recorded, participants performed a forced-choice localization task and reported their subjective perception of the target on a 3-level scale that also indexed their confidence. The results showed that our previous findings are replicated when confidence is controlled for. (shrink)

ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Elimelekh mi-Lizensḳ -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Mosheh Leyb mi-Sasov -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Menaḥem mi-Ḳasov -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Yitsḥaḳ Ayziḳ mi-Ḳalov -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Uri mi-Sṭrelisḳ -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Naftali Tsevi me-Ropshits -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Asher me-Ropshits -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Tsevi Elimelekh mi-Dinov -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Ḥ. Halbershṭam mi-Tsanz -- ha-R. ha-ḳ. R. Avraham mi-Sṭreṭin.

ABSTRACTAfter co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus with an affective unconditioned stimulus, the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when infor...

How much should the present generations sacrifice to reduce emissions today, in order to reduce the future harms of climate change? Within climate economics, debate on this question has been focused on so-called “ethical parameters” of social time preference and inequality aversion. We show that optimal climate policy similarly importantly depends on the future of the developing world. In particular, although global poverty is falling and the economic lives of the poor are improving worldwide, leading models of climate economics may (...) be too optimistic about two central predictions: future population growth in poor countries, and future convergence in total factor productivity (TFP). We report results of small modifications to a standard model: under plausible scenarios for high future population growth (especially in sub-Saharan Africa) and for low future TFP convergence, we find that optimal near-term carbon taxes could be substantially larger. (shrink)

Visual objects can be represented by their similarities to a small number of reference shapes or prototypes. This method yields low-dimensional (and therefore computationally tractable) representations, which support both the recognition of familiar shapes and the categorization of novel ones. In this note, we show how such representations can be used in a variety of tasks involving novel objects: viewpoint-invariant recognition, recovery of a canonical view, estimation of pose, and prediction of an arbitrary view. The unifying principle in all these (...) cases is the representation of the view space of the novel object as an interpolation of the view spaces of the reference shapes. (shrink)

Lesbian Ethics seems to address a need for an alternative to heteropatriarchal ethics. That need appears to have two suspect sources: a concept of agency which requires that agents know what is right; and a notion women may have that by being "good" we can escape the degraded status of females and achieve a status of citizeness, or honorary male. Instead of providing such an ethic, the book may show us how to live without it.

We show, for each computable ordinal α and degree $\alpha > {0^{\left( \alpha \right)}}$, the existence of a torsion-free abelian group with proper α th jump degree α.

Volume 34, Issue 8, December 2020, Page 1690-1703.

The main goal of our study was to investigate the role of insight into one’s own biases in the process of hypothesis validation in accordance to the two fundamental social perception domains on the example of confirmation bias. The study was conducted on a group of 593 participants with the use of a confirmation bias procedure, a free recall procedure and the Metacognitive Self scale. We manipulated with the domain and the value of information given to the respondents. We suspected (...) that individuals with a high metacognitive self, in opposition to low metacognitive self ones, would not process the given information according to the two fundamental social perception domains. The results verified the existence of an interaction effect of the metacognitive self and the domain of the information given about a perceived person on the susceptibility to follow the confirmation bias. Contrary to the low metacognitive self individuals, who show a higher tendency for the confirmation bias within the competence than the community domain, persons with a high insight into their own biases express the same level of confirmation bias in no respect to the domain of the information. The value of the information has no significant influence. (shrink)

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects (...) the commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...