This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, as (...) well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

This note is a postscript to Ramsey's 'Truth and Probability'. It replaces that article's psychological reading of subjective probability with a reading of it as a consistency condition on the theory that we act to maximise expected utility.

This article provides excerpts and highlights from the insights of twenty global leaders, business executives, and sustainability experts who gathered at the Esalen Institute in California for four days in March 2002 to discuss how to best leverage change toward an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable global economy. The conference topic was sparked by the path-breaking book Natural Capitalism, which outlines an expanded vision of capitalism suitable for the environmental era. The natural capitalism model is qualitatively different from industrial era (...) capitalism in that it counts both humanity and ecosystem services as valid sources of capital in addition to the traditionally recognized sources, financial and manufactured. One early adopter of natural capitalism, CEO of the Atlanta -based carpet tiling company, Interface, shared how increased efficiency and greater employee and customer satisfaction have resulted. Although some of the conference participants forecasted that globalization is likely to bring humanity face-to-face with a planetary-wide environmental, financial, and social crisis, the overall message of this gathering was positive. Through the imaginative implementation of evolutionary and biomimicry design models in the cultural, financial, and economic spheres, novel solutions to global problems already are being discovered, and, if such innovative and solutions-oriented design thinking can spread rapidly enough, humanity may be able to ameliorate-or even obviate-the deleterious effects of globalization. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 12 Heft: 1 Seiten: 41-74.

This unusually accessible account of recent Anglo-American philosophy focuses on how that philosophy has challenged deeply held notions of subjectivity, mind, and language. The book is designed on a broad canvas in which recent arguments are placed in a historical context (in particular they are related to medieval philosophy and German idealism). The author then explores such topics as mental content, moral realism, realism and antirealism, and the character of subjectivity. Much of the book is devoted to an investigation of (...) Donald Davidson's philosophy, and there is also a sustained critique of the position of Richard Rorty. A final chapter defends the realist position against objections from postmodern thought. As a rigorous and historically sensitive account of recent philosophy, this book should enjoy a wide readership among philosophers of many different persuasions, literary theorists, and social scientists who have been influenced by postmodern thought. (shrink)

The author asks, "Can Christianity still be the moral guide to our fast-changing western society, in its moral confusion and spiritual bankruptcy?" "What is Christian mority and what has it to offer to to the twentieth century man?" In answering these questions, he considers such topics as "Charity and Chastity", "The Family and Society", Crime and Punishment", "The Sanctity of Human Life", and "Peace and War". He has intended the book for the general reader, but hopes that it will be (...) used by students as back-ground reading. (shrink)

The notion of world government is anathema to most political theorists. This is the case due to the arguments that a world government is infeasible, undesirable and unnecessary. This threef...

In the famous opening sentence of The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx notes that somewhere Hegel had written that great world-historical phenomena occur twice, neglecting to add, however, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Given what we now know of the heretofore hidden side of Bruno Rizzi, still another revision seems in order: sometimes such phenomena make yet a third appearance, this time as embarrassment, rank embarrassment. Indeed, Rizzi's name surfaced in three such sequential contexts. The first was in (...) the late 1930s when non-stalinist Marxists, primarily Trotskyists, were debating whether or not a “new class” had emerged in the Soviet Union. (shrink)

: For quite some time now there has been an ongoing debate whether authoritative self-knowledge is compatible with anti-individualism.1 One influential line of argument against compatibilism is due to Paul Boghossian (1998). I argue that Boghossian misconstrues what the anti-individualist really is committed to. This defence of compatibilism is elaborated by showing how the Twin Earth thought experiment is meant to speak in favour of anti-individualism. Partly this will show that Boghossian is wrong in his denial that empirical background knowledge (...) is imported into the Twin Earth experiment. The main points argued are that Boghossian fails to realize, both, (1) that anti-individualism does not involve concept-individuation in terms of reference, and (2) that anti-individualism assumes a core of representational success. In effect, these two points constitute an entirely new way to defend compatibilism, a way that seems to have gone unnoticed in the literature. (shrink)

The restructuration of municipalities which has been decided by the Belgian government, is not only a purely technical operatzon but rather, and in the first place, a social problem. The shape and duty-profile of a local authority should not, indeed, be attuned only to fast changing expectations as far as services are concerned, but to consultation and participation as well.Public administration research cannot keep aloof from this debate, but is considerably hampered by the institutional confusion and the insufficient explicitation of (...) the aims of the present reform. A starting-pointcan, however, be found in the mergers of municipalities that were realized in 1964 and in 1970/1971. In 67 of these municipalities an inquiry was held concerning the consequences of the merger, and moreover, in twotest-cases this inquiry grew to a full-scale systematic policy analysis.This research shows that, as a rule, the former municipalities are reasonably represented in the new entity's council, but it also reveals that few efforts are made to give this representation a broader impact along formal or informal participation-channels. Integration of employees has not caused insurmountable problems. However, in large sized municipalities, resulting from mergers, one could notice a drastic increase in municipal personnel, not only with regard to new duties and objectives but to traditional administrative and police duties as well. Such a phenomenon points to the far-reaching changes which a substantial scale-increase provokes in a municipality's structure and policy profile. A large municipality resulting from mergers is no langer a simple sum of component parts, but a completely new entity, wishing to catch up as fast as possible with comparable municipalities that passed through a progressive growth process. Therefore, scale-increase is not only a means of economizing or an intra-administrative matter, but rather a way of creating chances for further development or wealth and well-being. (shrink)

Desenvolvo um método de prova por refutação para a Lógica Proposicional Clássica, que resgata ideias dos tablôs semânticos de Evert Beth. Primeiro apresento o método em forma conjuntista, depois o utilizo em forma tabular simplificada.

Formulações da validade dedutiva clássica costumam recorrer explicitamente a modalidades: por exemplo, um argumento é classicamente dedutivamente válido se, e somente se, necessariamente se as premissas forem verdadeiras, a conclusão também é verdadeira. Não é possível abolir completamente esse apelo ao discurso modal, porque a lógica clássica é o domínio das possibilidades. Não obstante, pode-se, por intermédio de uma semântica informacional, evitar que o usuário da lógica clássica tenha de manipular modalidades, ainda que elas estejam, de algum modo, imbricadas nos (...) infons – unidades mínimas de informação. A partir do trabalho pioneiro de Carnap e de Bar-Hillel, apresentarei duas semânticas informacionais: uma delas diretamente relacionada a mundos possíveis, e a outra relacionada aos duais de mundos possíveis. (shrink)

This article addresses the extent and ways in which gender inequality in the newspaper coverage of arts and culture has changed in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, 1955-2005. Through a quantitative content analysis, we mapped all articles that appeared in two elite newspapers in each country in four sample years 1955, 1975, 1995, and 2005. First, despite increasing women’s employment in arts and culture and a quantitative feminization of journalism, elite newspaper coverage of women in arts and (...) culture has hardly changed, making up about 20-25 percent consistently over the last 50 years. Second, our results show surprisingly few cross-national differences in the amount of the newspaper coverage devoted to women in arts and culture. Third, although women are underrepresented in the coverage of all artistic genres, there is some evidence of horizontal sex segregation—particularly in architecture and modern dance and fashion —as well as vertical sex segregation—in that attention to women has increased in “highbrow” genres that have declined in status. Finally, as the status of an actor type increases from laymen to artistic directors, the proportion of women decreases in newspaper attention to arts and culture. (shrink)

It is proved that all bimodal tense logics which contain the logic of the weak orderings and have unbounded depth do not have the interpolation property.

We introduce a discrete probabilistic model of motion in special and general relativity that is shown to be compatible with the standard model in the statistical limit.

Schubert squarely addresses the question of whether there is a single standard of certainty that can be applied to such disparate areas as logic, mathematics, politics, religion, familial/tribal commitments, and science. The result is a new “philosophy in a grand manner” and a powerful ethical proposal for our time.

The empirical and theoretical resources of different disciplines are often combined to shed light on questions that concern the deep history of humanity, such as the geographic origin of people groups, patterns of migration, and the diffusion of culture. In this article, I discuss three ways in which other disciplines, such as biology and archaeology, are integrated with historical linguistics to enhance our understanding of the past. First, other disciplines provide background knowledge that helps to constrain and assess competing historical (...) explanations of the data. I examine this issue in the context of the Principle of the Common Cause and Inference to the Best Explanation. Second, the synthesis of data from multiple disciplines provides a diverse and varied set of evidence, which is epistemically superior, other things being equal, to a homogeneous set of evidence. I consider several justifications for the confirmational value of diverse evidence. Finally, methods and procedures from other disciplines can often be fruitfully applied to forge new pathways to knowledge. Here, I survey the recent application of phylogenetic methods from biology, used for inferring evolutionary trees, within historical linguistics. (shrink)