Rating scale questionnaires were administered to 600 students in three age groups, 12?13, 15?16 and 20?21 from Japan, the UK, Greece and the USA. The questionnaires explored the extent of playing music while studying, the kinds of tasks when music was played, the perceived effects of music on studying, the characteristics and types of music played while studying and the factors that influenced the decision to play music while studying. Statistical analysis revealed both commonality and differences in playing music while (...) studying related to both age and culture. Some tasks were more frequently accompanied by music than others. Students reported being able to make decisions about the impact of background music on their performance. The results are discussed in relation to their educational implications. (shrink)

Limited distribution phenomena related to negation and negative polarity are usually thought of in terms of affectivity where affective is understood as negative or downward entailing. In this paper I propose an analysis of affective contexts as nonveridical and treat negative polarity as a manifestation of the more general phenomenon of sensitivity to (non)veridicality (which is, I argue, what affective dependencies boil down to). Empirical support for this analysis will be provided by a detailed examination of affective dependencies in Greek, (...) but the distribution of any will also be shown to follow from (non)veridicality. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the distribution and interpretation of free choice items (FCIs) in Greek, a language exhibiting a lexical paradigm of such items distinct from that of negative polarity items. Greek differs in this respect from English, which uniformly employs any. FCIs are grammatical only in certain contexts that can be characterized as nonveridical (Giannakidou 1998, 1999), and although they yield universal-like interpretations in certain structures, they are not, I argue, universal quantifiers. Evidence will be provided that FCIsare (...) indefinites; the quasi-universal effect is shown to be the result of binding by an operator with universal force. Additionally, the limited distribution of FCIs in non veridical contexts can be accounted for by analyzing them as indefinites which must always be interpreted in an intensional type. The difference between ``regular'' indefinites and FCIs, therefore, is reduced to a type difference which captures the fact that only the latter exhibit limited distribution: because of their intensional type, FCIs will be grammatical only in contexts providing alternatives (worlds or situations), and nonveridical contexts do exactly this. By contrast, FCIs are excluded from veridical and episodic contexts because these provide no alternatives and hence do not satisfy the lexical semantic requirement ofFCIs. The proposed analysis is supported by data from other languages as well (Spanish, Catalan,French) and has important consequences regarding the analysis of English any. If FCIs are not universal quantifiers but indefinites, then the usual ambiguity thesis (free choice any being universal, negative polarity any an existential) can no longer be maintained, at least not as one in terms of quantificational force. (shrink)

Some ideas expressed in the collective monograph Universality in Morality (2020), edited by Ruben Apressyan, are here critically examined. The book is based on the results of a large-scale study by professional ethical philosophers devoted to the question of the nature of universality in morality and the mechanisms of universalisation of individual maxims and norms from antiquity to modern ethical theories, represented above all by the analytical tradition in philosophy. Of great interest is the analysis of related phenomena in morality, (...) which makes it possible to determine the causes and nature of the transformation of morality in different eras and the accompanying change in the terminological apparatus of absolute ethical universalism, considered to be the starting point in the analysis of key modern concepts of moral universality. The article also suggests possible avenues for continued research in this area which could prompt modifications not only to the history of the concept of universality in morality, but also to our assessment of the contribution of individual authors and entire eras to the progress of human civilisation. This concerns above all the moral theory of contractarianism and the Enlightenment. Focus on their ideas goes a long way to determining the direction of current historical-philosophical research that reconstructs the history of ethical teachings and individual concepts. The importance attached today to a new view of the theory of the social contract, considered not only from socio-political but also from moral positions, forces us to approach in a new way the question concerning the universality of the key philosophical categories developed within this theory throughout its history. Elaborating the ideas set forth in the monograph, the author also stresses the relevance of the problem of justifying the thesis about the moral law as an analogue of the universal law of nature in the modern context. (shrink)

The main claim of this paper is that a general theory of negative concord (NC) should allow for the possibility of NC involving scoping of a universal quantifier above negation. I propose that Greek NC instantiates this option. Greek n-words will be analyzed as polarity sensitive universal quantifiers which need negation in order to be licensed, but must raise above negation in order to yield the scoping ∀¬. This gives the correct interpretation of NC structures as general negative statements. The (...) effect is achieved by application of QR, and the account is fully compositional, as only sentence negation is the vehicle of logical negation ¬. Greek n-words are also compared to nwords in Romance, Slavic, and Hungarian. This analysis, if correct, has two important.. (shrink)

The evidence on gender discrimination in lending remains controversial. To capture gender biases in banks’ loan allocations, we observe the impact on the applicants of a microfinance institution and exploit the natural experiment of a regulatory change imposing a strict EUR 10,000 loan ceiling on microcredit. Descriptive statistics indicate that the presence of the ceiling is associated both with bank-MFI co-financing and with harsher treatment of female borrowers. To investigate causal links, we develop an econometric approach that addresses the concerns (...) of selection biases, multicollinearity, and endogeneity. Our empirical findings suggest that the change in the MFI’s gender-related attitude was triggered by banks through co-financing. Hence, we speculate that co-financing pushes ceiling-constrained MFIs to import whatever biases in loan granting that the banks are prone to. Overall, this paper stresses that apparently benign regulations such as loan ceilings can significantly harm the women’s empowerment efforts made by MFIs. (shrink)

In the Linguistics Companion, Blackwell, Oxford. Available in on-line encyclopedia.

This paper explores the role that the scalar properties and presuppositions of even play in creating polarity sensitive even meanings crosslinguistically (henceforth EVEN). I discuss the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek counterparts of even in positive, negative, subjunctive sentences, and polar questions. These items are shown to be polarity sensitive, and a three-way distinction is posited between a positive polarity (akomi ke), a negative polarity (oute), and a ‘flexible scale’even(esto) which does not introduce likelihood, but is associated with scales (...) made salient by the context. The analysis is a refinement of Rooth’s original idea that negative polarity is involved in the interpretation of English even, and establishes further that the “negative” polarity domain of EVEN includes a sensitivity that is not strictly speaking negative (flexible scale esto). The distributional restrictions of EVEN items are shown to follow from distinct presuppositions (positive polarity and flexible scale EVEN), or from their lexical featural specification (negative polarity EVEN), a result that squares neatly with the fact that ill-formedness is systematic pragmatic deviance in the former case but robust ungrammaticality in the latter. This result supports the by now widely accepted view that polarity dependencies are not of uniform nature, and that we need to distinguish presupposition failures (which are weaker and possibly.. (shrink)

This article examines the critique of social contract theory in Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan through the lens of Georges Bataille's notion of sacrifice. Bataille and Hobbes share several key motifs, including death, violence and sovereignty. However, they interpret these motifs in different ways. Hobbes rationalises these concepts by introducing the concept of the social contract, whereby individuals relinquish their freedom in exchange for security. For him, the state is a means of protecting people’s lives through rational submission to the social contract. (...) In contrast, Bataille emphasises the role of the irrational and the sacred, viewing them as a means of liberation from the fear of death, the material world and domination. Sacrifice plays a pivotal role in Bataille's philosophy, serving as a conduit to the sacred and a unifying force within communities through shared experiences of loss and sacrifice. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that over time, the significance of sacrifice has increased in terms of utilitarian value, while its intrinsic value as an act of gratuitous giving for the sake of affirming the "fertility of life" has diminished. Hobbes's social contract can be presented in basic terms as the sacrifice of a good for the sake of exchanging it for another good. This is exemplified by the exchange of the right to liberty for protection from the sovereign. For both Hobbes and Bataille, the fear of death is the rationale behind the relinquishment of freedom and the introduction of prohibitions. But Bataille, unlike Hobbes, proposes to build society not on the fear of death, but on overcoming this fear and sovereign rejection - the rejection of both one's freedom and the transfer of it to someone else. Thus, reading Leviathan through Bataille's logic helps to debunk the image of the sovereign as a mortal god and omnipotent protector. (shrink)

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, (...) it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs. (shrink)

In line with recent developments in leadership research which conceptualise leadership as a discursive and collaborative process rather than a set of static attributes and characteristics displayed by individuals, this paper explores some of the discursive processes through which leadership emerges in a sports team. Drawing on over ten hours of naturally occurring interactions among the players of a women’s netball team in the UK, and applying the concepts of deontic and epistemic status and stance, we identify and describe some (...) of the specific processes through which leadership is claimed and assigned, as well as rejected, passed on, and eventually accepted by different team members at different points throughout an interaction. While the processes outlined in our analysis contribute to theoretical discussions regarding the notion of emergent leadership, this paper also demonstrates the benefits of taking a discourse analytical approach to leadership, and outlines how such an approach enables researchers to empirically capture emergent leadership in situ. (shrink)

Contemporary debates on God’s emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God’s emotionality on the basis of God’s omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffers with us. Contemporary philosophy of emotion reflects this divide. Some philosophers argue that emotions are voluntary and intelligent mental events, making them potentially compatible with omniscience and omnipotence. Others claim that emotions are involuntary and basically physiological, rendering them inconsistent (...) with traditional divine attributes. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility creates a three-way conversation between the debate in theology, contemporary philosophy of emotion, and pre-modern (particularly Augustinian and Thomist) conceptions of human affective experience. It also provides an exploration of the intelligence and value of the emotions of compassion, anger and jealousy. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of corporate social responsibility disclosure on corporate reputation as perceived by non-professional stakeholders. Proponents of CSR disclosure argue that CSR disclosure can be considered as a tool for reputation management. We empirically investigate this claim using a reputation index which tracks the general public’s perceptions of corporate reputation over time. In our analysis, we focus on disclosure in stand-alone CSR reports and control for CSR performance. We find that, in contrast to the common belief, stand-alone (...) CSR reports do not influence corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. However, we are able to document that stand-alone CSR reports influence corporate reputation among professional stakeholders. We also provide some evidence that transparent CSR disclosure on corporate websites can influence corporate reputation among non-professional stakeholders. (shrink)

In this paper, we contrast English and Greek resultative secondary predication, showing that Greek lacks the productive syntactic strategy which English employs. We propose that the difference in productivity should be attributed to properties of the morphology in the two languages (namely, to the differing productivity of certain verbal affixes). Finally, we give a compositional semantics for the complex event formation in the morphology/syntax that accounts for the contrasts between resultatives in English and Greek.

Nudging is considered a promising approach for behavioural change. At the same time, nudging has raised ethical concerns, specifically in relation to the impact of nudges on autonomous choice. A complexity is that in this debate authors may appeal to different understandings or dimensions of autonomy. Clarifying the different conceptualisations of autonomy in ethical debates around nudging would help to advance our understanding of the ethics of nudging. A literature review of these considerations was conducted in order to identify and (...) differentiate between the conceptualisations of autonomy. In 33 articles on the ethics of nudging, we identified 280 autonomy considerations, which we labelled with 790 unique autonomy codes and grouped under 61 unique super-codes. Finally, we formulated three general conceptualisations of autonomy. Freedom of choice refers to the availability of options and the environment in which individuals have to make choices. Agency involves an individual's capacity to deliberate and determine what to choose. Self-constitution relates to someone's identity and self-chosen goals. In the debate about the ethics of nudging, authors refer to different senses of autonomy. Clarifying these conceptualisations contributes to a better understanding of how nudges can undermine or, on the other hand, strengthen autonomy. (shrink)

This paper reviews a series of experimental studies that address what we call ‘interface judgement’, which is the complex judgment involving integration from multiple levels of grammatical representation such as the syntax-semantics and prosody-semantics interface. We first discuss the results from the ERP literature connected to NPI licensing in different languages, paying particular attention to the N400 and the P600 as neural correlates of this specific phenomenon and focusing on the study by Xiang et al. (2016). The results of this (...) study show evidence that there are two distinct NPI licensing mechanisms, i.e., licensing and rescuing, in line with Giannakidou (1998, 2006). Then we discuss an acceptability judgement task on Greek NPIs which supports the negativity as a scale hypothesis (Zwarts 1995, 1996, Giannakidou 1998). For the semantics-prosody interface judgment, we discuss two types of findings on two different phenomena and languages: (i) the study by Giannakidou & Yoon (2016) on scalar and non-scalar NPIs in Greek and Korean, which serves as the foundation for Chatzikontantinou (2016)’s study of production data showing distinct prosodic properties in emphatic (scalar) and non-emphatic (non-scalar) Greek NPIs; (ii) a (production and perception) study by Etxeberria & Irurtzun (2015) on the prosodic disambiguation of the scalar/non-scalar readings of sentences containing the focus particle ‘ere’ in Basque. The main conclusion of the paper is that experimental methods of the kind discussed in the paper are useful in establishing physical, quantitative correlates of interface judgement. (shrink)

Philosophy for children is an educational movement that includes diverse goals that are not always clearly articulated by theorists and practitioners. In order to navigate the multitude of aims found in the philosophy for children literature I propose distinguishing between the following categories of goals: aims of education; educational goals of philosophy for children ; goals of a community of philosophical inquiry ; goals of the facilitator; and goals of the children. The definitions of these various types are given along (...) with some examples of how the distinctions between them can be of aid in understanding the approaches, criticisms, and practice of philosophy for children. (shrink)

The puzzle of English until is well-known. Karttunen 1974 argues that until is ambiguous between a durative and a punctual negative polarity (NPI) meaning. Mittwoch 1977 claims that there is no ambiguity and that the two meanings are due to scope differences: NPI-until is in fact until above negation. Mittwoch’s account relies crucially on the assumption that negation is an aspectual operator that ‘stativizes’ verb meanings (a position recently argued for in de Swart 1996, and de Swart and Molendijk 1999; (...) see also Klima 1964, Seuren 1974, Verkuyl 1993). Thus far, the correct analysis of until remains an open issue. (shrink)

There are two main approaches in the phenomenological understanding of the unconscious. The first explores the intentional theory of the unconscious, while the second develops a non-representational way of understanding consciousness and the unconscious. This paper aims to outline a general theoretical framework for the non-representational approach to the unconscious within the phenomenological tradition. In order to do so, I focus on three relevant theories: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenology of body memory, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of (...) affectivity. Both Merleau-Ponty and Fuchs understand the unconscious as a “sedimented practical schema” of subjective being in the world. This sedimented unconscious contributes to the way we implicitly interpret reality, fill in the gaps of uncertainty, and invest our social interactions with meaning. Husserl, however, approaches the unconscious in terms of affective non-vivacity, as a sphere of sedimentation and the horizon of the distant past which stays affectively connected to the living present. Drawing on these ideas, I argue that these two accounts can reinforce one another and provide the ground for a phenomenological understanding of the unconscious in terms of the horizontal dimension of subjective experience and a non-representational relation to the past. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of uncertainty, scientific attention has focused primarily on probabilistic approaches, which predominantly rely on the assumption that uncertainty can be measured and expressed numerically. At the same time, the increasing amount of research from a range of areas including psychology, economics, and sociology testify that in the real world, people’s understanding of risky and uncertain situations cannot be satisfactorily explained in probabilistic and decision-theoretical terms. In this article, we offer a theoretical overview of an alternative approach to (...) uncertainty developed in the framework of the ecological rationality research program. We first trace the origins of the ecological approach to uncertainty in Simon’s bounded rationality and Brunswik’s lens model framework and then proceed by outlining a theoretical view of uncertainty that ensues from the ecological rationality approach. We argue that the ecological concept of uncertainty relies on a systemic view of uncertainty that features it as a property of the organism–environment system. We also show how simple heuristics can deal with unmeasurable uncertainty and in what cases ignoring probabilities emerges as a proper response to uncertainty. (shrink)

It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the “Opacity Thesis,” the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus (...) threatens to render acting from duty unintelligible. To diffuse the threat, I argue, first, that we need not attribute the Opacity Thesis to Kant. Kant's concern with the ubiquity of moral self-opacity does not imply the strong skeptical conclusion that knowledge of the grounds of one's action is impossible. Second, I show how moral self-opacity in cases of morally bad action emerges from the intrinsic inability of representing oneself, insofar as one is pursuing the indeterminate end of “happiness.” Thus, moral self-opacity does not undermine the will's self-consciousness but is born of it. (shrink)

The aim of the present study is to articulate a comparative study of Zeno of Citium and Immanuel Kant. The main reason for the comparative form of the study is that the full extent of the selective affiliations, continuities and discontinuities in the philosophers’ thought with regard to democracy under a cosmopolitan condition, as they define it, has not yet been explored. Studying their political arguments does not entail, in the present study, a historical examination of their ideas. Historical research (...) has, to date, been the norm in the examination of the thought of these thinkers. However, although both thinkers focus both on citizenship as an indispensable condition for democratic governance, a systematic comparison of what citizenship and democracy are as major political concerns in Zeno and Kant remains unquestioned by researchers. The originality of the present research derives, first, from the comparison of both thinkers that has not been critically presented so far. Second, it derives from the critique of the political views of Zeno according to the research conducted in the Gregory Vlastos Archive (that has never been conducted and presented so far) and is followed by tracing symmetries and asymmetries in the works of Kant that extend their arguments on cosmopolitanism to the solidification of democracy and the avoidance of war. As for the focus of the study on Kant, the novelty that is being argued for is the priority attributed to the cosmopolitan agenda as a precondition of a sovereign democratic state instead of the opposite being presented and claimed so far. (shrink)

Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a (...) mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity. (shrink)

While the impassibility debate has traditionally been construed in terms of whether God suffers, recent philosophy of religion has interpreted it in terms of whether God has emotions more generally. This article surveys the philosophical literature on divine im/passibility over the last 25 years, outlining major arguments for and against the idea that God has emotions. It argues that questions about the nature and value of emotions are at the heart of the im/passibility debate. More specifically, it suggests that presuppositions (...) about the dichotomy between emotions and reason (or the ‘heart and the head’) have negatively impacted the debate. It contends that the debate can only move forward in response to serious reflection on our affects as we experience them, aided by historical and anthropological as well as contemporary philosophical perspectives. (shrink)

This paper critically examines our relationship with justice in contemporary western liberal settings, with a particular focus on why our pursuit of justice is intimately entangled with punitive logics. It does so by defining this approach to justice as predominantly pathological, in the sense that it follows a logic that is akin to that displayed in our contemporary sensibilities regarding bodily pain. We deploy the concept of ‘dys-appearance’ used by Drew Leder in the context of his theory of embodiment to (...) discuss how, in western liberal societies, justice is primarily experienced and paid attention to when it appears negatively as a phenomenon; that is, we only become conscious of justice in our lived experiences through the painful and episodic experience of injustice. This phenomenological quality of justice, we argue, is intrinsically linked to how the pursuit of justice in these settings predominantly takes a hostile, punitive aspect. (shrink)

Modern formal logic, which is based on Kant’s logical project, interprets logical consequence as formal, which leads to substantive paradoxes that combine any thoughts at all and so to the loss of consequence as such. Beginning with A. Tarski, modern history of logic brings the problem of logical consequence into the realmof search for the relation of consequence, or grounding. In his doctoral dissertation on the nature of logical formality J. MacFarlane claims that the paradoxes of formal theories of logical (...) consequence stem from the loss of grounding by the transcendental system of logic in the post­Kantian logical tradition. Arguably, analysis of logical terminology of consequence in Kant’s seminal works — Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of the Power of Judgment — in comparison with the terminology of earlier works, Prolegomena and lectures on logic attributed to him will clarify the question of the relation oflogical consequence in the formal and non­formal sense. The key concept of consequence in Kant’s terminology is Folgerung, which denotes ‘following’ in logical and non­logical contexts. I have also analysed related concepts: Folge, Abfolge, folglich etc., established dif- ferences between logical terms with similar meaning ‘inference’ (Schluss) and ‘conclusion’ (Konklusion). Finally, I make an attempt to formulate the problem of logical consequence in formal logic through the logical terms Schlussfolge, Folgerung and Konsequenz. On the strength of my analysis I propose to consider Kant’s consequence (Folgerung) to be a concept of transcendental logic that reflects the relation of consequence and grounds formal consequence. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

The papers in this volume are updated versions of talks that were presented at the workshop QP structure, Nominalizations, and the role of DP that we organized at Saarland University, Germany, in December 2005. Although the connection between QP structure and definiteness, on the one hand, and nominalizations and definiteness on the other, were long observed in the literature, there has never been an attempt to bring the three together, and our aim at the workshop was to do exactly this: (...) to address recent developments in the area of quantifier phrase structure, nominalizations, and the linking definite determiner D. We invited discussions among the central approaches in syntax, morphology, semantics, and typology, paving the way towards a more comprehensive understanding of how quantification, definiteness and nominalizations are encoded in the grammar. (shrink)

This is my response as key discussant to papers presented at the workshop on Polarity at this year’s LSA meeting in Anaheim, CA.

This paper discusses the behavior of three lexically distinct Greek expressions which appear to be the counterparts of English even: akomi ke, oute, and esto. The behavior of these three expressions is examined in positive and negative sentences, and it is demonstrated that they all are polarity sensitive. The distributional constraints of the three even-items, crucially, are shown to follow from their distinct scalar associations. In particular, the low-scalar likelihood of positive even (akomi ke) remains problematic with negation as well (...) as affirmation, a fact supporting the polarity approach to even and the lexical ambiguity that is associated with it. In further support of this conclusion, negative bias in questions is shown to arise not with negative polarity oute (which is ungrammatical in questions) or positive akomi ke (which is fine but creates no bias), but with esto— a low scalar item defined on a context-dependent scale. This finding strengthens Kay's 1990 and Horn's 1989 observation that likelihood alone is not sufficient for capturing the scalar properties of even. (shrink)

Religion and spirituality are increasingly associated with mental health, yet spirit-related practices, beliefs and experiences (SPBEs) are regarded with more suspicion. This suspicion is misplaced, and worryingly so, since, I argue, it shuts down a potentially therapeutic avenue in relation to anomalous experiences such as hearing voices and sensing the presence of the dead. A presupposition of this argument is that anomalous experiences are not inherently pathological but can become so as a result of the way they are interpreted and (...) reacted to. While this claim is not new in itself, I will provide a philosophical foundation for it by defending a ‘contextualist’ view of pathology in the context of anomalous experiences against ‘inherentist’ alternatives, according to which some or all instances of anomalous experiences are inherently pathological. Keywords: religion, spirituality, auditory hallucinations, psychosis, pathology, mediumship, schizophrenia, hearing voices, mediumship, spirit possession, healing rituals. (shrink)

Many thanks to Ian Kidd and John Swinton for their most interesting, and extremely different, commentaries on my paper. I agree with the thrust of Kidd’s argument and hope that these possibilities may be explored more fully elsewhere. Swinton’s commentary is far more critical, and raises issues in need of urgent clarification—I therefore focus on these.Swinton begins his critique by saying that, “One of the basic presumptions that underpins the study and its conclusions is that depression is a natural entity (...) that can be clearly identified and responded to.” This perception of my paper confuses and concerns me, because I am not sure what has given this impression. It has thus far proved impossible to... (shrink)

Diversion from the syntactic norm, as manifested in the absence of otherwise expected lexical and syntactic material, has been extensively studied in theoretical syntax. Such modifications are observed in headlines, telegrams, labels, and other specialized contexts, collectively referred to as “reduced” registers. Focusing on search queries, a type of reduced register, I propose that they are generated by a simpler grammar that lacks a full-fledged syntactic component. The analysis is couched in the Parallel Architecture framework, whose assumption of relative independence (...) of linguistic components—their parallelism—and the rejection of syntactocentrism are essential to explain properties of queries. (shrink)