scholarly journals ISOMORPHISM INVARIANCE AND OVERGENERATION

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 482-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
OWEN GRIFFITHS ◽  
A.C. PASEAU
Keyword(s):  
Logical Constant ◽  
Logical Nature ◽  
Clear Cases

AbstractThe isomorphism invariance criterion of logical nature has much to commend it. It can be philosophically motivated by the thought that logic is distinctively general or topic neutral. It is capable of precise set-theoretic formulation. And it delivers an extension of ‘logical constant’ which respects the intuitively clear cases. Despite its attractions, the criterion has recently come under attack. Critics such as Feferman, MacFarlane and Bonnay argue that the criterion overgenerates by incorrectly judging mathematical notions as logical. We consider five possible precisifications of the overgeneration argument and find them all unconvincing.

A Dual Act Analysis of Slurs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Camp
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Content ◽  
The Other ◽  
Conventional Implicature ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
Perlocutionary Effect ◽  
Communicative Role

Slurs are incendiary terms—many deny that sentences containing them can ever be true. And utterances where they occur embedded within normally “quarantining” contexts, like conditionals and indirect reports, can still seem offensive. At the same time, others find that sentences containing slurs can be true; and there are clear cases where embedding does inoculate a speaker from the slur’s offensiveness. This chapter argues that four standard accounts of the “other” element that differentiates slurs from their more neutral counterparts—semantic content, perlocutionary effect, presupposition, and conventional implicature—all fail to account for this puzzling mixture of intuitions. Instead, it proposes that slurs make two distinct, coordinated contributions to a sentence’s conventional communicative role.

The Idea of a Logical Constant

1981 ◽  
Vol 78 (9) ◽  
pp. 499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Logical Constant

COVID-19 may hit less resilient EU eastern areas more

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Significant Development ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Standards Of Living ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
Economic Slowdown ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
The Impact

Significance At least in the EU’s eleven eastern member states (EU-11), there has been significant if slow progress in lifting standards of living across the board in the past decade. However, progress is uneven and the impact of the economic slowdown due to lockdowns in the past year may well have affected disproportionately already poorer regions. Impacts Some governments, notably Hungary’s, will put political loyalty above need in directing recovery funds to the localities. People in ‘left-behind’ regions may seek a better life in relatively prosperous capital cities or abroad. There is scope for countries and regions to learn from each other given clear cases of significant development in the past decade.

The Person Model Theory and the Question of Situatedness of Social Understanding

2018 ◽  
pp. 468-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Newen
Keyword(s):  
Model Theory ◽  
Simulation Theory ◽  
Early Infancy ◽  
Theory Theory ◽  
Social Understanding ◽  
Interaction Theory ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
Person Model ◽  
Intense Debate

Humans are hyper-social beings, highly dependent on others and on successfully interacting with them. Which theory can adequately describe our ability to understand others? In the literature we have an intense debate among proponents of theory-theory, simulation theory, and interaction theory. I argue first that none of these accounts is adequate but that we need to go in the direction of what I call the “person model theory.” The second important question is which types of embodiment (or further aspects of 4E) are systematically relevant for social understanding according to the person model theory? I argue that there are clear cases of embodiment of social understanding, while extendedness and/or enactment seem to be only clearly implemented in early infancy. Furthermore, 4E features of being embodied, enacted, extended, or embedded can only be ascribed to an implementation, a token of a specific type which makes the 4E features intensely context-dependent.

Predicates, parts, and impermanence: a contemporary version of some central Buddhist tenets

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-488
Author(s):  
MATTHEW McKEEVER
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Buddhist Philosophy ◽  
Logical Constant ◽  
Good Sense ◽  
Buddhist Doctrine ◽  
Spatially Extended ◽  
Temporal Parts ◽  
Spatial Locations

AbstractIn this article, I argue that recent work in analytic philosophy on the semantics of names and the metaphysics of persistence supports two theses in Buddhist philosophy, namely the impermanence of objects and a corollary about how referential language works. According to this latter package of views, the various parts of what we call one object (say, King Milinda) possess no unity in and of themselves. Unity comes rather from language, in that we have terms (say, ‘King Milinda’) which stand for all the parts taken together. Objects are mind- (or rather language-)generated fictions. I think this package can be cashed out in terms of two central contemporary views. The first is that there are temporal parts: just as an object is spatially extended by having spatial parts at different spatial locations, so it is temporally extended by having temporal parts at different temporal locations. The second is that names are predicates: rather than standing for any one thing, a name stands for a range of things. The natural language term ‘Milinda’ is not akin to a logical constant, but akin to a predicate.Putting this together, I'll argue that names are predicates with temporal parts in their extension, which parts have no unity apart from falling under the same predicate. ‘Milinda’ is a predicate which has in its extension all Milinda's parts. The result is an interesting and original synthesis of plausible positions in semantics and metaphysics, which makes good sense of a central Buddhist doctrine.

A formal theory of objects, space and time

1990 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wayne D. Blizard
Keyword(s):  
Formal Theory ◽  
Order Theory ◽  
First Order ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
First Order Theory ◽  
Logical Nature

The two statements “Two different objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time” and “An object cannot be in two different places at the same time” are axioms of our everyday understanding of objects, space and time. We develop a first-order theory OST (Objects, Space and Time) in which formal equivalents of these two statements are taken as axioms. Using the theory OST, we uncover other fundamental principles of objects, space and time. We attempt to understand the logical nature of these principles, to investigate their formal consequences, and to identify logical alternatives to them. For easy reference, all of the nonlogical axioms of OST are listed together at the end of §2. In §3, we introduce two possible extensions of OST.

scholarly journals Linguistic Mistakes

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrek Reiland
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Common View ◽  
Philos Stud ◽  
The Common ◽  
Semantic Correctness ◽  
Clear Cases

AbstractEver since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say that it doesn’t result in a factual mistake, that is, in saying or thinking something false. On an alternative construal it is instead to say that it doesn’t result in a distinctively linguistic mistake, that is, in misusing the expression. It is natural to think that these two construals of semantic correctness are simply about different things and not necessarily in competition with each other. However, this is not the common view. Instead, several philosophers who subscribe to the orthodox construal have argued that the alternative construal of correctness as use in accordance with meaning doesn’t make any sense, partly because there are no clear cases of linguistic mistakes (Whiting in Inquiry, 59:219–238, 2016, Wikforss in Philos Stud 102:203–226, 2001). In this paper I develop and defend the idea that there’s a distinctively linguistic notion of correctness as use in accordance with meaning and argue that there are clear cases of linguistic mistakes.

scholarly journals The new big picture for linguistics: Complex systems

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
William A. Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Complex Systems ◽  
Distributional Pattern ◽  
Logical System ◽  
Human Speech ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Central Factor ◽  
History Of Linguistics ◽  
Big Picture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Logical Nature

Abstract In the history of linguistics there have been crucial moments when those of us interested in language have essentially changed the way we study our subject. We stand now at such a moment. In this presentation I will review the history of linguistics in order to highlight some past important changes in the field, and then turn to where we stand now. Some things that we thought we knew have turned out not to be true, like the systematic, logical nature of languages. Other things that we had not suspected, like a universal underlying emergent pattern for all the features of a language, are now evident. This emergent pattern is fractal, that is, we can observe the same distributional pattern in frequency profiles for linguistic variants at every level of scale in our analysis. We also have hints that time, as the persistence of a preference for particular variants of features, is a much more important part of our language than we had previously believed. We need to explore the new realities of language as we now understand them, chief among them the idea that patterned variation, not logical system, is the central factor in human speech. In order to account for what we now understand, we need to get used to new methods of study and presentation, and place new emphasis on different communities and groups of speakers. Because the underlying pattern of language is fractal, we need to examine the habits of every group of speakers at every location for themselves, as opposed to our previous emphasis on overall grammars. We need to make our studies much more local, as opposed to global. We do still want to make grammars and to understand language in global terms, but such generalizations need to follow from what we can now see as the pattern of language as it is actually used.

scholarly journals Combining visible and infrared radiometry and lidar data to test ice clouds optical properties

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 7215-7264
Author(s):  
A. Bozzo ◽  
T. Maestri ◽  
R. Rizzi
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Optical Depth ◽  
Near Infrared ◽  
Natural Variability ◽  
Ice Clouds ◽  
Cloud Optical Depth ◽  
Cloud Parameters ◽  
Modeling Methodology ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
Spectral Data Analysis

Abstract. Measurements taken during the 2003 Pacific THORPEX Observing System Test (P-TOST) by the MODIS Airborne Simulator (MAS), the Scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (S-HIS) and the Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) are compared to simulations performed with a line-by-line and multiple scattering modeling methodology (LBLMS). Formerly used for infrared hyper-spectral data analysis, LBLMS has been extended to the visible and near infrared with the inclusion of surface bi-directional reflectance properties. A number of scenes are evaluated: two clear scenes, one with nadir geometry and one cross-track encompassing sun glint, and three cloudy scenes, all with nadir geometry. CPL data is used to estimate the particulate optical depth at 532 nm for the clear and cloudy scenes. Cloud optical depth is also retrieved from S-HIS infrared window radiances, and it agrees with CPL values, to within natural variability. MAS data are simulated convolving high resolution radiances. The paper discusses the results of the comparisons for the clear cases and for the three cloudy cases. LBLMS clear simulations agree with MAS data to within 20% in the shortwave (SW) and near infrared (NIR) spectrum and within 2 K in the infrared (IR) range. It is shown that cloudy sky simulations using cloud parameters retrieved from IR radiances systematically underestimate the measured radiance in the SW and NIR by nearly 50%, although the IR retrieved optical thickness agree with same measured by CPL. MODIS radiances measured from Terra are also compared to LBLMS simulations in cloudy conditions using retrieved cloud optical depth and effective radius from MODIS, to understand the origin for the observed discrepancies. It is shown that the simulations agree, to within natural variability, with measurements in selected MODIS SW bands. The paper dwells on a possible explanation of these contraddictory results, involving the phase function of ice particles in the shortwave.

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