Two Conceptions of Omissions

Conceptions of omissions standardly come in two flavours: omissions are construed either as mere absences of actions or are closely related to paradigmatic ‘positive’ actions. This paper shows how the semantics of the verb ‘to omit’ constitutes strong evidence against the view of omissions as involving actions. Specifically, by drawing from an influential fourfold typology of verbal predicates popularised by Zeno Vendler, I argue that declarative statements involving reference to omissions are semantically stative, which is a finding that makes serious trouble for the conception of omissions as being closely related to paradigmatic actions. But references to omissions, in certain linguistic contexts, undergo a shift of meaning to describe processes or activities engaged in by the agent. Still, despite the semantic flexibility of the verb ‘to omit’, its processive reading does not straightforwardly support the second conception of omissions. A subsidiary aim of this paper is to offer a sketch of the metaphysics of processive action in order to show what those who claim that omissions are closely related to actions might be committed to.

Mental Time-Travel, Semantic Flexibility, and A.I. Ethics

This article argues that existing approaches to programming ethical AI fail to resolve a serious moral-semantic trilemma, generating interpretations of ethical requirements that are either too semantically strict, too semantically flexible, or overly unpredictable. This paper then illustrates the trilemma utilizing a recently proposed 'general ethical dilemma analyzer', GenEth. Finally, it uses empirical evidence to argue that human beings resolve the semantic trilemma using general cognitive and motivational processes involving ‘mental time-travel’, whereby we simulate different possible pasts and futures. I demonstrate how mental time-travel psychology leads us to resolve the semantic trilemma through a six-step process of interpersonal negotiation and renegotiation, and then conclude by showing how comparative advantages in processing power would plausibly cause AI to use similar processes to solve the semantic trilemma more reliably than we do, leading AI to make better moral semantic choices than humans do by our very own lights.

Contemporary International/World Novels’ Transmissibility from Partial Connections to Hermeneutics of Situation (With References to Glissant, Volpi, Murakami, and Rushdie)

Due to its formal and semantic flexibility, the novel is often viewed as exemplarily associated with globalization. Most interpretations of this view lead to a paradox – presentations that the genre of the novel offers can be specific, and yet, widely circulated – and refer it to transnationalism, to the worlding of many cultural identities, or to some kind of literary space. These interpretations leave open the questioning of the cultural denotations or literary features that empower novels to be widely circulated and universalized. This article identifies and analyzes this explicit questioning in Glissant’s Tout-monde, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor, and suggests a quadruple answer. 1. Contemporary novels, that are read as world novels, reflect the paradox that qualifies their world circulation: they designate and deconstruct the signs of the universal by offering totalizing and detotalizing perspective and by questioning their universalization potential. 2. This formal and semantic paradox is presented by means of “partial connec tions”, i.e. objective or imagined references to distant or non-identical cultural references that can be viewed as partially overlapping. Partial connections impose a metonymic view of all chains of cultural mentions, and, between the latter, delineate special kinds of union – differences coexist and unite, and their discontinuities invite to view them as equally real. Partial connections found world novels’ rhetoric and transmissibility. 3. Due to these partial connections, some kind of specific herme neutics is developed or implied – hermeneutics of situation. No overall inter pretation of their own universalizability is offered by world novels – they generate symptomatic readings. 4. Remarkably, these literary and cultural montages apply to canonical kinds of novel – investigation novel (In Search of Klingsor), historical novel (The Moor’s Last Sigh), Bildungsroman (Tout-monde, Kafka on the Shore), that are most often recognized as universal because of their canonicity and the readability they show. On the one hand, these montages alter the canonicity and readability of these kinds of novels, on the other, they trigger their wide circulation because they negate any rule of reading and any overall interpretation, and however suggest some kind of universal hermeneutics – the use of partial connections is of utmost importance.

Cooperation and coercion

Coercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literature, we identify three mechanisms – selection, enrichment, and override – that have alternatively been proposed to account for coercion effects. We then present an approach that combines all three mechanisms, arguing that they can be unified along a single axis: the degree of top-down influence of complex structures on lexical semantics.