It is customary to identify three broad classes of grading particles: additive particles like also, exclusive particles like only, and scalar particles like even (cf. König (1991); in the examples, grave accent stands for the main, falling accent).

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction A Brief History of Developmental Explanations of Phenotypic Evolution Research Questions of Evo‐Devo Unifying Themes of the Conceptual Basis of Evo‐Devo Conclusion: A Mechanistic Theory of Evo‐Devo Challenges the Modern Synthesis Postscript: Counterpoint References.

The paper explains response particles like yes and no as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences. It is argued that negated antecedent clauses introduce two propositional discourse referents, which results in ambiguities of answers that are partly resolved by pragmatic optimization. The paper also discusses response particles like okay, right, uh-huh, uh-uh, and German ja, nein and doch.

In this paper we argue that an operational organism concept can help to overcome the structural deficiency of mathematical models in biology. In our opinion, the structural deficiency of mathematical models lies mainly in our inability to identify functionally relevant biological characters in biological systems, and not so much in a lack of adequate mathematical representations of biological processes. We argue that the problem of character identification in biological systems is linked to the question of a properly formulated organism concept. (...) Lastly, we demonstrate how a decomposition of an organism into independent characters in the context of a specific biological process--such as adaptation by means of natural selection--depends on the dynamical properties and invariance conditions of the equations that describe this process. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that there are two types of genericity, called characterizing statements and kind reference in Krifka et al. (1995). Characterizing statements express generalizations about sets of entities or situations, cf. (1); kind reference involves reference to an entity that is related to specimens, cf. (2).

In the development of modern philosophy self-consciousness was not generally or unanimously given important consideration. This was because philosophers such as Descartes, Kant and Fichte thought it served as the highest principle from which we can 'deduce' all propositions that rightly claimed validity. However, the Romantics thought that the consideration of self-consciousness was of the highest importance even when any claim to foundationalism was abandoned. In this respect, Hölderlin and his circle, as well as Novalis and Schleiermacher, thought that self-consciousness, (...) itself, was not a principle but must be ranked on a minor or dependent level, and presupposed the Absolute as a superior but inaccessible condition or ground. This reservation did not hinder them from recognising that the foundationalist Fichte was the first to have shown conclusively that from Descartes, via German Rationalism and British Empiricism, up to Kant, self-consciousness was misconceived of as the result of an act of reflection by which a second-order act bent back upon a first-order act that is identical to itself. This conception entailed circular entanglements and infinite regresses, and was too high a price to pay. Whereas Fichte thought pre-reflexive self-awareness was a philosophical principle, the Romantics and their vehement critic Kierkegaard, abandoned the idea of self-consciousness as a foundational starting point of philosophy. Instead, they founded self-consciousness on transcendent Being, a prior non-conceptual consciousness ('feeling') and reproached Fichte for having fallen back into the repudiated reflection model of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 2 Seiten: 286-325.

Joseph Schumpeter's work has been all too selectively appropriated by public choice theorists. Schumpeter criticized the high level of rationality the classical model of democracy imputes to citizens, and he provided an alternative theory, inspiring rational choice theory and allowing for diverse forms of irrationality. Following in Schumpeter's footsteps I will discuss four problems: the deficient rationality of voters, politicians as ?political entrepreneurs,? leadership in democracy and the rise of the ?political class,? and the affinity between democracy and capitalism.

The following contribution1 was inspired by Cleo Condoravdi’s article on NPI licensing in temporal clauses (Condoravdi, this volume). Condoravdi gives a coherent and comprehensive account of be- fore which crucially involves coercion of propositions to the earliest or maximal times at which the propositions are true, and a modal component for non-factual interpretations. I argue for a nonmodal, non-coercive analysis of clauses like [A before B] as ‘A is the case when B has not been the case’, triggering a conversational (...) implicature that B will be the case later. I will discuss temporal operators involving measure phrases, like three hours before, and I will show that so-called “expletive” negation in corresponding clauses in German is, in fact, interpreted as negation. (shrink)

One of the difficult areas for persons learning a foreign language is to grasp the range of usages of syntactic patterns that exist in the foreign language. It is not sufficient to learn how passive formation works, or how pre- or postpositional phrases are constructed, or how perfect tenses are expressed. One also has to learn which verbs can passivize at all, which verbs go with which pre- or postpositions, and, in case perfect tenses are expressed, as in a number (...) of European languages, with different auxiliaries like ‘have’ and ‘be’, which verb needs which auxiliary. For English, Levin (1993) distinguishes no less than 57 verb classes, most of them with a number of subclasses, that show distinct syntactic behavior. (shrink)

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Meta-ethical realism faces the serious epistemological problem of how to explain our epistemic access to moral reality. In the face of this challenge many are sceptical about non-naturalist realism. Nonetheless, there is good reason to acknowledge moral objectivity: morality shows all the signs of a truth-apt discourse but doesn’t exhibit the typical relativity inducing features. This suggests a middle-ground position, a theory that embraces the virtues of realism but does avoid its vices: objectivist antirealism. In this paper, I’ll discuss, mainly (...) following Crispin Wright’s account of moral truth as superassertibility, a promising version of objectivist antirealism and show how to cope with notorious problems, notably those arising from the thought that moral disagreement might be possible in which nobody is guilty of a cognitive shortcoming, which contradicts the antirealist claim that moral truth is not beyond our epistemic reach. The solution is to deny the possibility of cognitively faultless moral disagreement by arguing that cognitively blameless thinkers either agree or stay agnostic and, therefore, never disagree about any moral proposition. Since assuming an agnostic stance on the part of such thinkers contradicts the antirealist’s conception of truth—even within the limits of intuitionistic logic—I’ll propose an alternative logical revision for the moral discourse: a three-valued logic with epistemically construed truth-values. (shrink)

The paper first presents a short survey of ancient and modern logical, rhetorical and argumentative approaches (e.g. Aristotle, Quintilian, Quine, Anscombre and Ducrot) studying the properties of paradoxical utterances. This survey is followed by a tentative definition of paradoxes as seemingly contradictory utterances triggering conversational implicatures in the sense of Grice. A specific group of paradoxes, namely, persuasive paradoxes, is further characterized by the specific implicatures which they trigger: the implicatures of persuasive paradoxes serve the interest of the (political) speaker (...) because they either convey a sharp criticism of the political opponent(s) or praise the political activities of the speaker in a highly effective way.The second part of the paper takes a corpus of about 80 paradoxical utterances from Cicero's speeches to show how they are used 1. for a devastating criticism of Cicero's political enemies, 2. a milder form of criticism in the case of his friends, when their political activities have failed, 3. a praise of successful policies of Cicero and his political friends and 4. a defense of unsuccessful activities started by Cicero and his friends. (shrink)

Recent discussion of the meaning contribution of focus centered around the question of how focus information is integrated into semantic and pragmatic interpretation. One type of theory assumes that certain operators can make direct use of focus information. These theories stipulate that focus-sensitive operators like only or even, quantificational adverbials, and reason clauses have to be associated with a focus in their scope. Such “association with focus” theories have been proposed, for example, by Jackendoff (1972), Jacobs (1983), Rooth (1985), von (...) Stechow (1990) and Krifka (1992). More recently, Rooth (1992) has proposed that focus contributes in a more indirect way to the interpretation of these operators. Rooth argued that the quantificational domain of such operators is fixed by contextual factors, and that these contextual factors in turn are influenced by focus. More specifically, focus is seen as a device that introduces and regulates contextual variables that are then taken up by certain operators. One important argument for the contextual account of focus is that it does not have to stipulate focus in certain cases, namely socalled “second occurrence expressions”, in which there is little, if any, phonological evidence for it. (shrink)