Most meanings we express belong to large families of variant meanings, among which it would be implausible to suppose that some are much more apt for being expressed than others. This abundance of candidate meanings creates pressure to think that the proposition attributing any particular meaning to an expression is modally plastic: its truth depends very sensitively on the exact microphysical state of the world. However, such plasticity seems to threaten ordinary counterfactuals whose consequents contain speech reports, since it (...) is hard to see how we could reasonably be confident in a counterfactual whose consequent can be true only if a certain very finely tuned microphysical configuration obtains. This essay develops the foregoing puzzle and explores several possible solutions. (shrink)

This paper considers the connections between semantic shiftiness (plasticity), epistemic safety and an epistemic theory of vagueness as presented and defended by Williamson (1996a, b, 1997a, b). Williamson explains ignorance of the precise intension of vague words as rooted in insensitivity to semantic shifts: one’s inability to detect small shifts in intension for a vague word results in a lack of knowledge of the word’s intension. Williamson’s explanation, however, falls short of accounting for ignorance of intension.

Are moral terms semantically plastic—that is, would very slight changes in our patterns of use have shifted their meanings? This is a delicate question for moral realists. A 'yes' answer seems to conflict with the sorts of intuitions that support realism; but a 'no' answer seems to require a semantics that involves hefty metaphysical commitments. This tension can be illustrated by thinking about how standard accounts of vagueness can be applied to the case of moral terms, and also by considering (...) how realists should respond to the Moral Twin Earth problem. After presenting the puzzle, I will argue that moral realists can accept the semantic plasticity of moral expressions while accounting for contrary intuitions in a way that is nearly cost-free. (shrink)

Meaning seems to shift from context to context; how do we know when someone says "grab a chair" that an ottoman or orange crate will do, but when someone says "let's buy a chair," they won't? In Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers, Kronenfeld offers a theory that explains both the usefulness of language's variability of reference and the mechanisms which enable us to understand each other in spite of the variability. Kronenfeld's theory, rooted in the tradition of ethnoscience (or cognitive (...) anthropology), accomplishes three things. First, it distinguishes prototypic referents from extended referents. Second, it describes the various bases of semantic extensions. Finally it details how we use the situational context of usage, the linguistic context of opposition and inclusion, and the conceptual context of knowledge about the world to interpret communicative events. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to present plastic semiotics, one of the most recent branches of the Greimassian School. In his Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method (1966) Algirdas Julius Greimas stated that sensorial perception was the dimension in which the grasping of meaning takes place, but explicit principles of the analysis of this nonlinguistic dimension were published only years later, in his article “Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics” (1984). Since then, plastic semiotics has been leading independent existence, focused on (...) the eff ects of sense generated by the form and the substance of expression. Plastic analysis has turned out to be a fruitful approach not only in the field of visual studies, but also in the research into other sensorial expressions.Статья знакомит с одной из наиболее молодых ветвей греймасовской семиотики – пластической. В книге Греймаса ≪Структурная семантика: поиск метода≫ (1966) чувственное восприятие было определено как измерение, в котором осуществляется схватывание смысла/значения. Основы анализа этого неязыкового измерения были изложены им позднее в статье ≪Фигуративная семиотика и пластическая семиотика≫ (1984). С тех пор пластическая семиотика превратилась в самостоятельную дисциплину, которая фокусируется на сенсорных эффектах смысла, произведенных формой и сущностью выражения. Пластический анализ оказался плодотворным подходом не только в области визуальных исследований, но и в исследованиях других сенсорных выражений.Artikli eesmargiks on tutvustada plastilist semiootikat, uht Greimase koolkonna uuemat haru. Greimase teoses “Strukturaalne semantika: meetodi otsingul” (1966) nimetati meeletaju selleks mootmeks, milles leiab aset tahenduse tabamine. Selle mittekeelelise mootme analuusi sonaselged pohimotted ilmusid aga aastaid hiljem Greimase artiklis “Figuratiivne semiootika ja plastiline semiootika”. Sestsaadik on plastiline semiootika muutunud iseseisvaks distsipliiniks, keskendudes meelelistele tagajargedele, mida tekitavad valjenduse vorm ja sisu. Plastiline analuus on osutunud viljakandvaks lahenemiseks mitte uksnes visuaaluuringute vallas, vaid ka teiste meeleliste valjenduste uurimisel. (shrink)

Churchland's paper "Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality" offers empirical, semantical and epistemological arguments intended to show that the cognitive impenetrability of perception "does not establish a theory-neutral foundation for knowledge" and that the psychological account of perceptual encapsulation that I set forth in The Modularity of Mind "[is] almost certainly false". The present paper considers these arguments in detail and dismisses them.

The aim of this paper is to argue against the claim that the term “belief”, as it functions in philosophical psychology, has natural-kind term semantics; this thesis is central to the famous Lycan–Stich argument against eliminative materialism. I will argue that the current debate concerning the discrepancy between the professed opinions and actions, especially the debate concerning the idea of aliefs, shows that the concept of belief is plastic and amenable to conceptual engineering. The plasticity and amenability to conceptual (...) engineering of the concept of belief give us, in turn, a reason to doubt that “belief” functions in a way that is presupposed in the Lycan–Stich argument. Finally, I point to an alternative to both eliminativism and the natural kind view, namely the idea that we should treat belief as a human kind. (shrink)

Numerous studies have investigated the neuro-cognitive mechanism of learning words in isolation or in semantic contexts recently. However, emotion as an important influencing factor on novel word learning has not been fully considered in the previous studies and how emotion affect word learning and the underlying neural mechanism have not been systematically investigated. 16 participants were trained to learn novel concrete or abstract words under negative, neutral and positive contextual emotions in continuous three days, and fufilled the testing tasks (...) in day1 and day3 during fMRI scanning. We compared the brain activations in day1 and day3 aming to investigate the role of contextual emotions in learning different types of words and the corresponding neural plasticity changes. Behaviorally, the performance for the words learned in negative context was lower than the neutral and positive contexts, which indicated that the contextual emotions had significant impact on novel word learning. Correspondingly, the functional plasticity changes of the right angular (AG), bilateral insula and anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) induced by word learning were modulated by the contextual emotions. And the insula also was sensitive to the concreteness of the learned words. More importantly, the functional plasticity changes of left inferior frontal gyrus(L IFG) and left fusiform(L FG) were interactively influenced by the contextual emotions and words’ concreteness, suggesting that the contextual emotional information had a discriminable effect on different types of words in the neural mechanism level. These results demonstrate that the emotional information in contexts is inevitable for word learning, and the role of contextual emotions in brain plasticity for learning was discussed. (shrink)

The acquisition and evolution of speech production, discourse and communication can be negatively impacted by brain malformations. We describe, for the first time, a case of developmental dynamic dysphasia (DDD) in a right-handed adolescent boy (subject D) with cortical malformations involving language-eloquent regions (inferior frontal gyrus) in both the left and the right hemispheres. Language evaluation revealed a markedly reduced verbal output affecting phonemic and semantic fluency, phrase and sentence generation and verbal communication in everyday life. Auditory comprehension, repetition, (...) naming, reading and spelling were relatively preserved, but executive function was impaired. Multimodal neuroimaging showed a malformed cerebral cortex with atypical configuration and placement of white matter tracts bilaterally and abnormal callosal fibers. Dichotic listening showed right hemisphere dominance for language and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) additionally revealed dissociated hemispheric language representation with right frontal activation for phonology and bilateral dominance for semantic processing. Moreover, subject D also had congenital mirror movements (CMM), defined as involuntary movements of one side of the body that mirror intentional movements of the other side. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI during voluntary unimanual (left and right) hand movements showed bilateral motor cortex recruitment and tractography revealed a lack of decussation of bilateral corticospinal tracts. Genetic testing aimed to detect mutations that disrupt the development of commissural tracts correlating with CMM (e.g., Germline DCC mutations) was negative. Overall, our findings suggest that DDD in subject D resulted from the underdevelopment of the left inferior frontal gyrus with limited capacity for plastic reorganization by its homologous counterpart in the right hemisphere. Corpus callosum anomalies probably contributed to hinder interhemispheric connectivity necessary to compensate language and communication deficits after left frontal involvement. (shrink)

The use of metaphor and metonymy in social awareness campaigns has been shown as an effective strategy to evoke emotional reactions in the audience and influence behavior change. Using authentic campaign discourse, this study investigated how two multimodal, figurative representations of plastic pollution (plastic pollution is war on nature and plastic pollution is usurpation of marine life) influenced participants’ responses to solutions-oriented and emotions-oriented measures. The data were gathered from two online surveys: Experiment 1 used Likert-scales and free-text responses; these (...) were analyzed using statistical techniques and semantic frame analysis. Experiment 2 was a shorter follow-up study which used Likert-scales. The results suggest that the war frame inspired more negative emotional reactions overall, whereas the usurpation frame inspired more positive emotions. We also find that political orientation significantly moderates people’s sense of empowerment to tackle plastic pollution. The results have implications for future experimental studies seeking to explore the interaction of positive and negative affective states in the context of ecological issues, and for designers of campaigns who seek to use metaphor and metonymy to evoke the desired emotional and behavioral responses. (shrink)

The epistemicist theory aims to explain ignorance due to vagueness by semantic plasticity: the shiftiness of intensions across close possible worlds resulting from shiftiness in usage. This explanation is challenged by the Omniscient Speaker Puzzle (Sennet in Philos Stud 161(2):273–285, 2012). Suppose that an omniscient speaker, Barney, who knows all the facts about usage and how these facts determine the intensions of expressions, cooks up a scheme to stabilise the intension of a normally semantically plastic term like ‘rich’. (...) It seems that ‘rich’ would display all the phenomena associated with vagueness without being semantically plastic, thus making the epistemicist explanation of ignorance due to vagueness insufficient. In this paper, I present a few choice points for epistemicism that arise as a result of the puzzle. (shrink)

Epistemicism associates vagueness with ignorance produced by semantic plasticity: the shiftiness of intensions in our language resulting from small changes in usage. The recent literature (Caie 2012; Magidor 2018; Yli-Vakkuri 2016) points to a missing piece in the epistemicist theory of vagueness, namely a clear account of the semantics of the definiteness operator Δ. The fundamentals of the epistemicist theory are well understood. However, the technical work of defining the definiteness operator has proven difficult. There are several desiderata (...) that we would like Δ to satisfy. For instance, we would like the epistemicist notion of ‘definiteness’ to interact well with modal operators and validate intuitive principles like ‘necessarily, if φ is definitely true, then φ is true’. Providing an account that would meet all such desiderata has eluded the epistemicists so far. In this paper, I present a novel version of a multidimensional model inspired by the work of Robert Stalnaker and David Kaplan. Using this model, I provide an account of epistemicist definiteness that meets our desiderata. (shrink)

Theorical lines,iconic lines, poetic and political lines. Theorists write right even when they think crooked, despite the zigzags of the search. Artists and poets are tempted by passing and moving lines, for they experience plasticity more than others, even when these lines are straight. The plastic and semantic richness of lines becomes the breeding ground for artistic and political actions.

Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction PART I Intentionality Chapter 1 Fodor’ Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum Chapter 2 Semantics, Wisconsin Style Chapter 3 A Theory of Content, I: The Problem Chapter 4 A Theory of Content, II: The Theory Chapter 5 Making Mind Matter More Chapter 6 Substitution Arguments and the Individuation of Beliefs Chapter 7 Stephen Schiffer’s Dark Night of The Soul: A Review of Remnants of Meaning PART II Modularity Chapter 8 Précis of The Modularity of (...) Mind Chapter 9 Why Should the Mind Be Modular? Chapter 10 Observation Reconsidered Appendix: A Reply to Churchland’s ‘Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality" References Index of Names. (shrink)

In this study we present a self-organizing connectionist model of early lexical development. We call this model DevLex-II, based on the earlier DevLex model. DevLex-II can simulate a variety of empirical patterns in children's acquisition of words. These include a clear vocabulary spurt, effects of word frequency and length on age of acquisition, and individual differences as a function of phonological short-term memory and associative capacity. Further results from lesioned models indicate developmental plasticity in the network's recovery from damage, (...) in a non-monotonic fashion. We attribute the network's abilities in accounting for lexical development to interactive dynamics in the learning process. In particular, variations displayed by the model in the rate and size of early vocabulary development are modulated by (a) input characteristics, such as word frequency and word length, (b) consolidation of lexical-semantic representation, meaning-form association, and phonological short-term memory, and (c) delayed processes due to interactions among timing, severity, and recoverability of lesion. Together, DevLex and DevLex-II provide an accurate computational account of early lexical development. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The nature and the role of sensation sit at the heart of classic enlightenment debates about the nature of knowledge. While these debates, in their modern form, came into being several hundred years ago, many key words from them remain with us today. As a result, a number of culturally particular assumptions also remain as part of the semantic composition of these words. In the following, we examine such assumptions, particularly (...) in relation to sensoriality. We contrast the classic empiricist and rationalist views on sensation, including their broader epistemological stakes, and bring forth a third account through Peircean semiotics. We suggest that the classic debate between rationalists and empiricists can be re-examined by asking how repetition exists in the world. By thinking about the ontology of repetition, and by highlighting some of the basic semiotic principles of this, we suggest that sensoriality needs to be recognized as a dynamical system rather than a system that exists for the documenting of "what there is". In this account, neither sensoriality nor the nature of existence, including the physical world, are anchored toward absolutes on any level. This point, however, does not lead us toward rationalist claims about the non-importance of senses or the body, but toward recognition that while patterns and stability play a significant role in living systems, there is always room for plasticity and open-endedness. It is in this space between stability and change, where meaning is brought into being. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

In his book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Paul Churchland suggests that the singular terms for prepositional attitude predicates serve an adverbial function as elements of complex predicates. This view, called monadic adverbialism, has three problems. First the monadic predicates cannot be semantic primitives because this would compromise the learnability of the language containing them. Second, the account has no way to analyze general de dicto beliefs that does not compromise the language being learnable. Third, the (...) account requires that de re behefs be treated as instances of general de dicto beliefs, which leads back to the second problem. The conclusion is that monadic adverbialism ought to be rejected. (shrink)

In synesthesia, a certain stimulus (eg grapheme) is associated automatically and consistently with a stable perceptual-like experience (eg color). These associations are acquired in early childhood and remain robust throughout the lifetime. Synesthetic associations can transfer to novel inducers in adulthood as one learns a second language that uses another writing system. However, it is not known how long this transfer takes. We found that grapheme-color associations can transfer to novel graphemes after only a 10-minute writing exercise. Most subjects experienced (...) synesthetic associations immediately after learning a new Glagolitic grapheme. Using a Stroop task, we provide objective evidence for the creation of novel associations between the newly learned graphemes and synesthetic colors. Also, these associations generalized to graphemes handwritten by another person. The fast learning process and the generalization suggest that synesthesia begins at the semantic level of representation with the activation of a certain concept (the inducer), which then, uniquely for the synesthetes, activates representations at the perceptual level (the concurrent). Thus, the results imply that synesthesia is a much more flexible and plastic phenomenon than has been believed until now. (shrink)

Processing of emotional speech in the absence of visual information relies on two auditory channels: semantics and prosody. No study to date has investigated how blindness impacts this process. Two theories, Perceptual Deficit, and Sensory Compensation, yiled different expectations about the role of visual experience (or its lack thereof) in processing emotional speech. To test the effect of vision and early visual experience on processing of emotional speech, we compared individuals with congenital blindness (CB, n = 17), individuals with late (...) blindness (LB, n = 15), and sighted controls (SC, n = 21) on identification and selective-attention of semantic and prosodic spoken-emotions. Results showed that individuals with blindness performed at least as well as SC, supporting Sensory Compensation and the role of cortical reorganisation. Individuals with LB outperformed individuals with CB, in accordance with Perceptual Deficit, supporting the role of early visual experience. The LB advantage was moderated by executive functions (working-memory). Namely, the advantage was erased for individuals with CB who showed higher levels of executive functions. Results suggest that vision is not necessary for processing of emotional speech, but early visual experience could improve it. The findings support a combination of the two aforementioned theories and reject a dichotomous view of deficiencies/enhancements of blindness. (shrink)

In his book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Paul Churchland suggests that the singular terms for prepositional attitude predicates serve an adverbial function as elements of complex predicates. This view, called monadic adverbialism, has three problems. First the monadic predicates cannot be semantic primitives because this would compromise the learnability of the language containing them. Second, the account has no way to analyze general de dicto beliefs that does not compromise the language being learnable. Third, the (...) account requires that de re behefs be treated as instances of general de dicto beliefs, which leads back to the second problem. The conclusion is that monadic adverbialism ought to be rejected. (shrink)

This article continues the author's research devoted to the study of the problem of choreographic interpretations of literary works, in particular, John Neumeier's ballet "Anna Karenina". In this work, the identification of expressive staging means and choreographic elements used by Neumeier in the production of duets by Anna Karenina and Alexei Vronsky is carried out in order to determine the place of these choreographic fragments in the performance, as well as their significance for the author's interpretation of the images of (...) the main characters of the novel by Leo Tolstoy. In the course of the research, the author applied comparative-historical, ideological-artistic and analytical methods, as well as the method of included observation. In the course of the source analysis, video materials from the archives of the Hamburg Ballettzentrum and the Moscow Bolshoi Theater were used, as well as lectures conducted by Neumeier before the Moscow premiere of Anna Karenina. A detailed analysis of the dance score of three duets by Anna and Vronsky revealed traditional and innovative author's solutions related to the new research results. So, Neumeier uses such staging means as the compilation of Tchaikovsky and Schnittke's music; the inclusion of symbolic images in the choreographic canvas; the appearance of other characters; the use of stage lighting to accentuate the transition from reality to the sphere of the subconscious; active choreographic development based on a technically saturated duet dance, replete with high supports in the neoclassical style, as well as acrobatic elements; semantic use of plastic quotations. It can be concluded that in order to develop the images and relationships of Anna Karenina and Alexey Vronsky, the choreographer chooses a duet as the dominant musical and choreographic form. Moreover, in his version of Anna Karenina, Neumeier makes three duets of the main characters a key component of the performance and the author's interpretation of the images of the main characters. (shrink)

In developmental lexical–gustatory synesthesia, specific words can trigger taste perceptions and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical–gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some evoked tastes occurred during childhood (...) suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes . Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed. (shrink)

Poetry is an important challenge for semiotics, and a special area of study for the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school, since the first volume of Sign Systems Studies was Juri Lotman’s monograph Lectures on Structural Poetics (1964). From then on the concept of poetry as one of the secondary modelling systems has evolved, since in relation to poetry, the primary modelling system is natural language. In this paper, the concept of semiotic system has been re-examined and the treatment of primary and secondary (...) semiotic systems has been significantly revised. A semiotic system can be characterized not only by its internal structure and other systems to which it is related, but also by the field upon what it is realized. The latter aspect has gained almost no attention in any treatment of semiotics; the execution of a sign is understood in the spirit of Saussure and Hjelmslev as a material realization of an abstract element (for instance, a chess piece knight can be realized with wood or plastic, but it can also remain purely virtual). At first, distinction is made between language and sign system. Every sign system consists of language and field. There are three different kinds of fields: 1) just a background – footprints on sand are a sign on the background of sand; 2) a material structured field (a football ground or a chess board in the game called Chapayev) and 3) an abstract structured field, which in its turn consists of other fields (for instance, the chess board which consists of 64 fields). Differently from a football ground, a chess board can be a purely virtual one on which virtual pieces are moved (for instance, in case of blindfold or correspondence chess). The field in its turn can be language and one language can use another language as its field. In this case we speak of primary and secondary sign systems. For instance, the prosodic system of language is a field for a verse metre, while the semantic system of language is a field for a narrative. (shrink)

This paper addresses a potentially major shift in environmental and landscape aesthetics, which reassesses the traditional view on landscape in light of the idea of global environment. Landscaping is thus rethought as a mode of creatively being on Earth. For this purpose, the paper begins by providing a definition of Earth as a completely semiotized and therefore “plastic” space which is continuously re-shaped by traces, semantic processes and human practices. Earth-shaping practices are then investigated as gestures of poetic overwriting, (...) capable of inhabiting interconnected non-equilibrium landscapes. The paper concludes by examining the case-study of DOM-, an artistic collective that performs ways of dwelling in damaged territories and exploited environments. (shrink)

Variations in life history define key comparative and evolutionary biological questions, important for understanding the mechanisms of mammalian evolutionary divergence, developmental adaptability and plasticity. In this regard, the differences among predominantly altricial and precocial species represent a particularly significant, if still poorly understood and contested case. Here, it will be shown how the classical analysis of such ontogenetic variations, going back to the semantic biology of A. Portmann, can be expanded and synthesized with comparative physiological approaches, based on (...) the negentropic theory of ontogeny by I. A. Arshavsky and his school. In this little received but pioneering tradition, extensive comparative and experimental investigations were carried out on the role of musculoskeletal systems and stressors in driving life history variations, particularly in the altricial-precocial spectrum. As shown by Arshavsky and co-workers, by focusing on general allometric regularities, the approximations based on the classical energy rules of surface and mass offer valuable benchmarks, but also predictions that are frequently violated by the variability of physiological and metabolic scaling relationships among altricials and precocials, and thus, a complex and historical approach is needed to describe their local physiological mechanisms and systemic regularities. This paper shows how Arshavsky’s findings and framework can play an integrative role in this context, potentially helping to bridge the mainly descriptive approach of semantic morphology, as developed by Portmann’s school, with the more functional explanations predominating current ecology and life history theory. These problems can be important for biosemiotics by highlighting the contingent, activity-dependent, and surplus anabolic stress mechanisms underlying diversification in eutherian developmental systems and possibly, the epigenetic evolution of pace-of-life syndromes. (shrink)

Advocates of an ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ have claimed that standard evolutionary theory fails to accommodate epigenetic inheritance. The opponents of the extended synthesis argue that the evidence for epigenetic inheritance causing adaptive evolution in nature is insufficient. We suggest that the ambiguity surrounding the conception of the gene represents a background semantic issue in the debate. Starting from Haig’s gene-selectionist framework and Griffiths and Neumann-Held’s notion of the evolutionary gene, we define senses of ‘gene’, ‘environment’, and ‘phenotype’ in a (...) way that makes them consistent with gene-centric evolutionary theory. We argue that the evolutionary gene, when being materialized, need not be restricted to nucleic acids but can encompass other heritable units such as epialleles. If the evolutionary gene is understood more broadly, and the notions of environment and phenotype are defined accordingly, current evolutionary theory does not require a major conceptual change in order to incorporate the mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance. _1_ Introduction _2_ The Gene-centric Evolutionary Theory and the ‘Evolutionary Gene’ _2.1_ The evolutionary gene _2.2_ Genes, phenotypes, and environments _3_ Epigenetic Inheritance and the Gene-Centred Framework _3.1_ Treating the gene as the sole heritable material? _3.2_ Epigenetics and phenotypic plasticity _4_ Conclusion. (shrink)

I have both a smaller and a larger aim. The smaller aim is polemical. Kit Fine believes that a material thing—a Romanesque statue, for example, or an open door—can be distinguished from its constituent matter—a piece of alloy, say, or a hunk of plastic—without recourse to modal or temporal considerations. The statue is Romanesque; the piece of alloy is not Romanesque. The door is open; the hunk of plastic is not open. I argue that these considerations, when combined with a (...) proper understanding of how the use of ‘not’ is functioning, entail that the statue is the piece of alloy, and that the door is the hunk of plastic. Far from challenging the doctrine that a material thing is its matter, Fine’s observations confirm the view. My larger aim is methodological. I will show that natural language semantics can guide inquiry in certain areas of metaphysics by helping us to advance lingering debates. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic put forth a new kind of affective exhaustion. Being forced to stay at home, diminish social interactions and reduce the scale of their everyday mobility, many people experienced boredom, sluggishness, and existential immobility. While state-imposed pandemic policies changed rapidly, everyday life remained strangely unmoving. A sense of being stuck unfurled―as if not only social life, but time itself had come to a halt. At the same time, there was a latent sense of tension and increased aggressiveness which (...) became manifest not only in protests and riots, but also in the texture of everyday life. In this contribution, we argue that both of these states―the feeling of being stuck, and the feeling that this putative tranquility is nothing but the calm before a storm―can be conceptualized as affective stasis. Through a rearticulation of the ancient concept of stasis, we show that these two at first glance incongruous affective conditions are intricately entangled. In Ancient Greek, the term stasis meant “stand, standing, stance”. Being used in a wide variety of contexts―politics, navigation, sports, rhetoric, medicine, and others―stasis took on different meanings which can be semantically organized around two opposite poles: one is the total absence of motion, and the other is an event of radical and often violent social and political change. Drawing on affect theory, phenomenology, and ancient Greek semantics, we propose affective stasis as a novel conceptual framework for political phenomenology. (shrink)

You have hands, but does it follow that there’s an external material world? Moore thought so. However, we argue that this is a mistake. We defend the Ecumenical View, on which ordinary object terms like “hands” are metaphysically ecumenical, akin to the way that terms like “table” are physically ecumenical: just as there are wooden, metal, or plastic tables, so too there can be material, virtual, or immaterial hands. Moore’s position, however, is metaphysically sectarian: the semantics of “hands” requires a (...) materialist metaphysics. Moore’s proof fails not because it displays bad epistemology but because of its problematic commitment to sectarian metaphysics. We conclude with some explorative thoughts on how the Ecumenical View bears on common sense epistemology and a possible equivocation in our understanding of the premises of Moore’s argument. (shrink)

The representational epistemic approach to the design of visual displays and notation systems advocates encoding the fundamental conceptual structure of a knowledge domain directly in the structure of a representational system. It is claimed that representations so designed will benefit from greater semantic transparency, which enhances comprehension and ease of learning, and plastic generativity, which makes the meaningful manipulation of the representation easier and less error prone. Epistemic principles for encoding fundamental conceptual structures directly in representational schemes are described. (...) The diagrammatic recodification of probability theory is undertaken to demonstrate how the fundamental conceptual structure of a knowledge domain can be analyzed, how the identified conceptual structure may be encoded in a representational system, and the cognitive benefits that follow. An experiment shows the new probability space diagrams are superior to the conventional approach for learning this conceptually challenging topic. (shrink)

The historical avant-gardes showed that it is in the syntactic space where the mutations of art occur, where the creative potentialities in contemporary art are played. Hence the need to accentuate the syntactic creation registers in the works of the Estridentistas. There is no creation of images, rhythms, words, atmospheres, sound orientations, planes or political-literary postures that are valid apart from the syntax effects in which the poems of Manuel Maples Arce, Germán List, Salvador Gallardo and Kyn-Taniya take place, the (...) paintings, engravings and sculptures by Fermín Revueltas, Ramón Alva de la Canal, Germán Cueto and Leopoldo Méndez, the novels and essays by Arqueles Vela, the pieces from the Estridentista period by Silvestre Revueltas, the plays by Salvador Gallardo and Germán Cueto. The syntax is the tracing of indirect paths created in each poem, installation, plastic or musical work, to show life in things; those forces, paths and paths that, when going from life to language, create a work. It is, therefore, a speed. I don't use "speed" as a metaphor. It is the speeds that interdigitate events, images, objects; those that relate and stress semantic, sound, semiotic and social forces, paths and trajectories. Velocity is the gradient of the syntax, the relationship between phenomena, the variation of the elements according to a certain direction, the trajectory medium, the semantic loads and the systems of signs: it is not necessary to think that the syntactic effects are something like general mechanisms that precede poems, plastic and musical works. A new syntactic speed detaches itself as much as it can from what is constituted and seeks to bring poetic, pictorial, musical language to its threshold of meaning, informational or communication, to its referential, rhythmic, constructive threshold. Therefore, it should not be confused with acceleration. Slowness is a speed, as in Handke's writing or in some sections of Tarr's films. (shrink)

In the late 19th century, a comprehensive semantics of crowds emerged in European social theory, dominated in particular by Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde. This article extracts two essential, but widely neglected, sociological arguments from this semantics. First, the idea that irrationality is intrinsic to society and, second, the claim that individuality is plastic rather than constitutive. By following the destiny of this semantics in its American reception, the article demonstrates how American scholars soon transformed the conception of crowds. (...) Most importantly, the theoretical cornerstone of the European semantics, the notion of suggestion, was severely challenged in the USA. It is argued that this rejection of the suggestion doctrine paved the way for a distinctive American approach to crowds and collective behaviour in which the early European emphasis on irrationality was ignored and crowds were analysed as rational entities. This may have relieved the discomfort of irrationality but it is also entirely disposed of what were in fact crucial sociological insights. The article recalls the semantics of crowds in order to evoke an early branch of social theory that still contains a provocative gesture. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that there is a large class of expressions, typified by ‘plastic flower’, ‘stuffed animal’ and ‘kosher bacon’, that have a unique semantics combining compositional, idiomatic and decompositional interpretation. These expressions are compositional because their constituents contribute their meanings to the meanings of the wholes; they are idiomatic because their interpretation involves assigning dictionary entries to non-terminal elements in their syntactic structure; and they are decompositional because their meanings have proper parts that are not the meanings (...) of any of their syntactic constituents. We argue that extensionalist semantics, on which the meaning of an expression is a function from domains to extensions in those domains, cannot provide an adequate account of the semantics of these expressions, and that supplementation with a theory of pragmatic interpretation does not improve the situation. We show how our account explains the intensionality and the productivity of these expressions. (shrink)

This article discusses Hilary Putnam's views on the mind-body problem, by locating them in the general context of a satisfying pluralistic naturalism that he tried to articulate throughout his entire philosophical career. The first attempt in this direction was computational functionalism, his version of psychological functionalism centered on the analogy between mind/body and software/hardware, which (differently from David Lewis and others) he came to think of as an empirical hypothesis. That was a very successful proposal; however, later Putnam abandoned it (...) and embraced what he called 'liberal functionalism'. The reason for this change of mind was twofold: on the one hand, Putnam reached the conclusion that computational functionalism was incompatible with his views on semantic externalism; on the other hand, he began to think that mental states, besides being compositionally plastic (i.e., two entities can be in the same psychological state without being in the same physical state), are also computationally plastic (i.e., two entities can be in the same psychological state without being in the same functional state).In conclusion, I will argue that 'liberal functionalism' opened an interesting perspective for a successful non-reductive version of naturalism. (shrink)

The essay considers three classic definitions of philosophy, namely those offered by Socrates, Boethius, as semantically enriched by Montaigne, and Kant, in order to reflected on individual and collective death. Kant’s philosophical tool of the antinomies of reason is deployed to think through the antinomies of our pandemic in order to make clear that in a pandemic there is only collective, and not individual or even national, inoculation. The false dichotomies of physical versus social, embodiment versus virtuality, nationalism versus planetarization, (...) and propaganda versus science, are discussed. Lady philosophy appears wearing blue plastic gloves. (shrink)

The term “aesthetics” is misleading when applied in the classical Indian philosophical context. Before the modern period, there is substantially no body of speculation on the pleasurable responses to created objects, as such, or on their formal capacities to induce such responses. What we do have, on the other hand, are: (1) several partly distinct traditions having to do with the elements out of which are constructed such objects – including literary “objects” – according to prevailing canons of symbology and (...) use that have a ritual or religious basis; and (2) an intensely developed set of speculations on the narrower question of the observed power (often judged in emotive terms) of the dramatic work to transform us, its spectators. This second problematic, in time, comes to be seen as paradigmatic for all “art,” including poetry, music, and the plastic arts. The first set of traditions focuses on what we might call the semantics of the work, contrasting it, in the case of the written work, with “ordinary” symbolical and ritual uses of language “how does it mean what it means?”; the second set deals with the restorative or transformative capacity of dramatic and other “fictive” works, vis‐à‐vis those that immediately and practically provide, or presume to provide, a transcendent solution on human problems – most importantly, of course, the essentially religious problem of human suffering caused by the bondage of cyclic existence “how does the work of art also accomplish human ends?”. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that the plasticity of sense, the fact that tokens of the same type frequently express different Sinne, does not constitute a threat to human linguistic communication. The first part presents the phenomenon. I try to make clear that the appropriate notion of meaning for natural languages is not the one developed in logical semantics; meanings in natural languages are not fixed once and for all, stable. Consequently, What Is Said by an (...) utterance is not something determined exclusively by literal meaning. The second part shows that the plasticity of sense was known in the ideational theories of language, especially that of Arnauld & Nicole. The third part introduces the notions of Plan and Mindreading and show how they contribute to the success of communication.O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar que a plasticidade do sentido, o fato de que os exemplares de um tipo, freqüentemente, não expressam o mesmo Sinn, não constitui uma ameaça para a comunicação lingüística humana. A primeira parte apresenta o fenômeno da plasticidade do sentido. Tentarei mostrar que a noção de significado apropriada para as línguas naturais não é aquela desenvolvida na semântica lógica; o significado, nas línguas naturais, não é estável, fixado de uma vez por todas. Conseqüentemente, o que é dito em uma enunciação não é algo determinado exclusivamente pelo significado literal. A segunda parte mostra que a plasticidade do sentido era conhecida nas teorias ideacionais da linguagem, particularmente a de Arnauld & Nicole. A terceira parte introduz as noções de Plano e Leitura de mente e mostra como elas contribuem a explicar o sucesso da comunicação. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued recently that relatively abstract beliefs or cognitive categories like those regarding race can influence the perceptual experience of relatively low-level visual features like color or lightness. Some of the proposed best empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of experiments in which White faces were consistently judged as lighter than equiluminant Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were labeled ‘White’ as opposed to ‘Black’ (Levin and Banaji 2006). The latter result (...) is considered especially indicative of cognitive penetration, based on the reasoning that the relevant distortions were a function of lexical labeling, and hence the effect must have been mediated by categorization at the cognitive level. I argue that this reasoning is flawed, and that the assumptions on which it relies are questionable on both empirical and theoretical grounds. I propose an alternative, low-level explanation of the phenomena, which I argue is empirically more plausible and abductively preferable to the cognitive-penetration account. The upshot is that cognitively impenetrable perceptual systems may be psychologically more plastic and hence philosophically more significant than is nowadays commonly assumed. (shrink)