: In the 1980s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials. We argue that this move was misguided, and we offer an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics and a new pragmatic principle, which we call Be Articulate. This principle requires that a meaning pp’ conceptualized as involving (...) a pre-condition p should be articulated as … … rather than as … pp’ …, unless the full conjunction is ruled out because the first or the second conjunct is semantically idle. In particular, … … is infelicitous - and hence … pp’ … is acceptable - if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. An equivalence theorem guarantees that this condition suffices to derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Extensions of the condition lead to several new predictions, in particular concerning some ‘symmetric readings’, as well as presupposition projection in quantified structures, which displays a complex interaction between the nature of the trigger and the monotonicity of the quantifier. (shrink)

As part of a recent attempt to extend the methods of formal semantics beyond language, it has been claimed that music has an abstract truth-conditional semantics, albeit one that has more in common with iconic semantics than with standard compositional semantics. After summarizing this approach and addressing a common objection, we argue that music semantics should be enriched in three directions by incorporating insights of other areas of Super Semantics. First, it has been claimed by Abusch 2013 that visual narratives (...) make use of discourse referents akin to those we find in language. We argue that a similar conclusion extends to music, and we highlight it by investigating ways in which orchestration and dance may make cross-referential dependencies more explicit. Second, we show that by bringing music semantics closer to the semantics of visual narratives, we can give an account of the semantics of mixed visual and musical sequences. Third, it has been claimed that co-speech gestures trigger characteristic conditionalized presuppositions, called ‘cosuppositions’, and that their semantic status derives from their parasitic character relative to words. We argue that the same conclusion extends to some instances of film and cartoon music: it may trigger cosuppositions that can be revealed by embedding film excerpts or gifs in sentences so as to test presupposition projection. We further argue that under special discourse conditions, pro-speech gestures and pro-speech music alike can trigger cosuppositions as well. These results suggest that new insights can be gained not just by extending the methods of semantics to new objects, but also by drawing new connections among them. (shrink)

We argue that a formal semantics for music can be developed, although it will be based on very different principles from linguistic semantics and will yield less precise inferences. Our framework has the following tenets: Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. In both cases, the semantic content derived from an auditory percept can be identified with the set of inferences it licenses on its causal sources, analyzed in appropriately abstract ways. What is special about music semantics is that (...) it aggregates inferences based on normal auditory cognition with further inferences drawn on the basis of the behavior of voices in tonal pitch space. This makes it possible to define an inferential semantics but also a truth-conditional semantics for music. In particular, a voice undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. Aspects of musical syntax might be derivable on semantic grounds from an event mereology, which also explains some cases in which tree structures are inadequate for music. Intentions and emotions may be attributed at several levels, and we speculate on possible explanations of the special relation between music and emotions. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...) addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise when the two contexts are distinct, and (...) exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated. (shrink)

This paper argues that in some explanations mathematics are playing an explanatory rather than a representational role, and that this feature unifies many types of non-causal or non-mechanistic explanations that some philosophers of science have been recently exploring under various names. After showing how mathematics can play either a representational or an explanatory role by considering two alternative explanations of a same biological pattern—“Bergmann’s rule”—I offer an example of an explanation where the bulk of the explanatory job is done by (...) a mathematical theorem, and where mechanisms involved in the target systems are not explanatorily relevant. Then I account for the way mathematical properties may function in an explanatory way within an explanation by arguing that some mathematical propositions involving variables non directly referring to the target system features constitute constraints to which a whole class of systems should comply, provided they are describable by a mathematical object concerned by those propositions. According to such “constraint account”, those mathematical facts are directly entailing the explanandum, as a consequence of such constraints. I call those explanations “structural”, because here properties of mathematical structures are accounting for the explanandum; various kinds of mathematical structures thereby define various types of structural explanations. (shrink)

According to one productive and influential approach to cognition, categorization, object recognition, and higher level cognitive processes operate on a set of fixed features, which are the output of lower level perceptual processes. In many situations, however, it is the higher level cognitive process being executed that influences the lower level features that are created. Rather than viewing the repertoire of features as being fixed by low-level processes, we present a theory in which people create features to subserve the representation (...) and categorization of objects. Two types of category learning should be distinguished. Fixed space category learning occurs when new categorizations are representable with the available feature set. Flexible space category learning occurs when new categorizations cannot be represented with the features available. Whether fixed or flexible, learning depends on the featural contrasts and similarities between the new category to be represented and the individual's existing concepts. Fixed feature approaches face one of two problems with tasks that call for new features: If the fixed features are fairly high level and directly useful for categorization, then they will not be flexible enough to represent all objects that might be relevant for a new task. If the fixed features are small, subsymbolic fragments (such as pixels), then regularities at the level of the functional features required to accomplish categorizations will not be captured by these primitives. We present evidence of flexible perceptual changes arising from category learning and theoretical arguments for the importance of this flexibility. We describe conditions that promote feature creation and argue against interpreting them in terms of fixed features. Finally, we discuss the implications of functional features for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction, and formal models of dimensionality reduction. Key Words: concept learning; conceptual development; features; perceptual learning; stimulus encoding. (shrink)

Besides mechanistic explanations of phenomena, which have been seriously investigated in the last decade, biology and ecology also include explanations that pinpoint specific mathematical properties as explanatory of the explanandum under focus. Among these structural explanations, one finds topological explanations, and recent science pervasively relies on them. This reliance is especially due to the necessity to model large sets of data with no practical possibility to track the proper activities of all the numerous entities. The paper first defines topological explanations (...) and then explains why topological explanations and mechanisms are different in principle. Then it shows that they are pervasive both in the study of networks—whose importance has been increasingly acknowledged at each level of the biological hierarchy—and in contexts where the notion of selective neutrality is crucial; this allows me to capture the difference between mechanisms and topological explanations in terms of practical modelling practices. The rest of the paper investigates how in practice mechanisms and topologies are combined. They may be articulated in theoretical structures and explanatory strategies, first through a relation of constraint, second in interlevel theories, or they may condition each other. Finally, I explore how a particular model can integrate mechanistic informations, by focusing on the recent practice of merging networks in ecology and its consequences upon multiscale modelling. (shrink)

There are two main approaches to the problem of donkey anaphora (e.g. If John owns a donkey , he beats it ). Proponents of dynamic approaches take the pronoun to be a logical variable, but they revise the semantics of quantifiers so as to allow them to bind variables that are not within their syntactic scope. Older dynamic approaches took this measure to apply solely to existential quantifiers; recent dynamic approaches have extended it to all quantifiers. By contrast, proponents of (...) E-type analyses take the pronoun to have the semantics of a definite description (with it ≈ the donkey, or the donkey that John owns ). While competing accounts make very different claims about the patterns of coindexation that are found in the syntax, these are not morphologically realized in spoken languages. But they are in sign language, namely through locus assignment and pointing. We make two main claims on the basis of ASL and LSF data. First, sign language data favor dynamic over E-type theories: in those cases in which the two approaches make conflicting predictions about possible patterns of coindexation, dynamic analyses are at an advantage. Second, among dynamic theories, sign language data favor recent ones because the very same formal mechanism is used irrespective of the indefinite or non-indefinite nature of the antecedent. Going beyond this debate, we argue that dynamic theories should allow pronouns to be bound across negative expressions, as long as the pronoun is presupposed to have a non-empty denotation. Finally, an appendix displays and explains subtle differences between overt sign language pronouns and all other pronouns in examples involving ‘disjunctive antecedents’, and suggests that counterparts of sign language loci might be found in spoken language. (shrink)

The informational content conveyed by utterances has two sources:meaning as it is encoded in words and rules of semantic composition (often called literal or semantic meaning) and further inferences that may be obtained by reasoning on the speaker's motives (the conjunction of these inferences with the literal meaning is often called the strengthened or pragmatic meaning of the sentence). While in simple cases the difference can seem obvious enough, in general this is not so, and the investigation of the semantics–pragmatics (...) interface has proven to be one of the most vibrant areas of research in contemporary studies of meaning. We will survey three domains – scalar implicatures, presuppositions, and conventional implicatures – in which there are considerable empirical benefits to be obtained from this enterprise. However, it is also of foundational and methodological interest: knowledge of semantic meaning is part of knowledge of language; by contrast, pragmatic inferences are derived in part from the assumption that the speaker obeys certain rules of behavior – typically ones dictated by rationality (which may, for instance, lead to the maximization of the utility of an utterance to the speaker or to others). Owing to foundational interest in the interaction between language and reasoning, the study of the semantics– pragmatics interface originated in philosophy; however, it quickly became a central topic within linguistics and psycholinguistics, and the convergence of results from these last two fields has resulted in rich cross-disciplinary exchanges. For reasons of space, we do not consider psycholinguistic results in this survey, but it should be said at the outset that they have changed the face of the field by providing new and more reliable data (for instance, on processing and language acquisition) and sometimes by challenging data that had too quickly become solidified on the basis of unsystematic introspection alone. -/- As we will see, the debates are more open than ever. Scalar implicatures, which were usually considered a staple of pragmatic reasoning, have recently been reassigned to the semantics or even to the syntax by proponents of locally computed implicatures (‘localists’ for short). (shrink)

We provide a systematic recipe for eliminating self-reference from a simple language in which semantic paradoxes (whether purely logical or empirical) can be expressed. We start from a non-quantificational language L which contains a truth predicate and sentence names, and we associate to each sentence F of L an infinite series of translations h 0(F), h 1(F), ..., stated in a quantificational language L *. Under certain conditions, we show that none of the translations is self-referential, but that any one (...) of them perfectly mirrors the semantic behavior of the original. The result, which can be seen as a generalization of recent work by Yablo (1993, Analysis, 53, 251–252; 2004, Self-reference, CSLI) and Cook (2004, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 69(3), 767–774), shows that under certain conditions self-reference is not essential to any of the semantic phenomena that can be obtained in a simple language. (shrink)

Epistemic logics are essential to the design of logical systems that capture elements of reasoning about knowledge. In this paper, we study the computability of unifiability and the unification types in several epistemic logics.

Previous neural network models of concept learning were mainly implemented with supervised learning schemes. However, studies of human conceptual memory have shown that concepts may be learned without a teacher who provides the category name to associate with exemplars. A modular neural network architecture that realizes concept acquisition through two functionally distinct operations, categorizing and naming, is proposed as an alternative. An unsupervised algorithm realizes the categorizing module by constructing representations of categories compatible with prototype theory. The naming module associates (...) category names to the output of the categorizing module in a supervised mode. In such a modular architecture, the interface between the modules can be conceived of as an “information relay” that encodes, constrains, and propagates important information. Five experiments were conducted to analyze the relationships among internal conceptual codes and simple conceptual and lexical development. The first two experiments show a prototype effect and illustrate some basic characteristics of the system. The third experiment presents a bottom‐up model of the narrowing down of children's early lexical categories that honors mutual exclusivity. The fourth experiment introduces top‐down constraints on conceptual coding. The fifth experiment exhibits how hierarchical relationships between concepts are learned by the architecture, and also demonstrates how a spectrum of conceptual expertise may gradually emerge as a consequence of experiencing more with certain categories than with others. (shrink)

In several sign languages, plurals can be realized with unpunctuated or punctuated repetitions of a noun, with different semantic implications; similar repetition-based plurals have been described in some homesigns and silent gestures. Unpunctuated repetitions often get approximate ‘at least’ readings while punctuated repetitions typically correspond to ‘exactly’ readings. The prevalence of these mechanisms could be thought to be a case in which Universal Grammar does not just specify the abstract properties of grammatical elements, but also their phonological realization, at least (...) in the visual modality. We explore an alternative in which punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions arise from general properties of iconic representations. On an empirical level, we argue that in ASL, punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions are unlikely to be an exclusively grammatical mechanism, as they can be found with purely iconic representations. On a theoretical level, we argue for a modular account with three components. First, repetition-based plurals can create a simplified pictorial representation. Second, unpunctuated repetitions give rise to pictorial vagueness, resolved by way of quantification over precisifications. Third, a pragmatic process involving strategic reasoning maps these vague representations onto a set of candidate linguistic meanings, including some ‘at least’ plural readings that are best expressed by unpunctuated repetitions. (shrink)

An introduction to semantics for the general reader. How things mean, from animal communication to music.

In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact apervasive symmetrybetween the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate (...) the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program ofontological symmetrycould be developed, and we offer in theAppendixa symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has repeatedly been described as an “essentially contested concept,” which means that its signification is subject to continuous struggle. We argue that the “CSR institution” (CSRI; i.e., the set of standards and rules regulating corporate conduct under the banner of CSR) is legitimized by narratives which “decontest” the underlying concept of CSR in a manner that safeguards the CSRI from calls for alternative institutional arrangements. Examining several such narratives from a structuralist perspective, we find them to (...) be permeated with six recurrent ambiguities that we show to be reflective of three deep-set taboos: the taboo of the noncongruency between corporate profit objectives and societal needs, the taboo of multinational firms’ continued contribution to the emergence of global socioenvironmental issues, and the taboo of the CSRI’s moderate results in solving these problems. We contend that the perpetuation of these taboos contributes to inhibiting substantial change in the way of doing business, and we sketch out possibilities for initiating a “recontestation” of CSR’s meaning. (shrink)

In dynamic theories of presupposition, a trigger pp′ with presupposition p and at-issue component p′ comes with a requirement that p should be entailed by the local context of pp′. We argue that some co-speech gestures should be analyzed within a presuppositional framework, but with a twist: an expression p co-occurring with a co-speech gesture G with content g comes with the requirement that the local context of p should guarantee that p entails g; we call such assertion-dependent presuppositions ‘cosuppositions’. (...) We show that this analysis can be combined with earlier theories of local contexts to account for complex patterns of gesture projection in quantified and in attitudinal contexts, and we compare our account to two potential alternatives: one based on supervaluations, and one, due to Cornelia Ebert, that treats co-speech gestures as supplements. We argue that the latter is correct, but for ‘post-speech’ gestures, rather than for co-speech gestures. (shrink)

Claude Levi-Strauss mentioned several times in his work that the notion of transformation is the keystone of the structural analysis he pratices. By his own admission, this notion stems from his reading of D’Arcy Thomson’s book On Growth and Form during World War II in the United States. But Levi-Strauss makes use of two very different meanings of transformation, relating to two distinct morpho-genetic traditions. On the one hand, he is inspired by Goethe’s Morphology. All forms can be seen as (...) transformation of a Urform, an original form, from which they grow out like a tree. But on the other hand, D’Arcy Thomson’s emphasis lies on the geometric simplicity of a transformation grid that allows the transition from one biological form to the other without considering any original from which other forms would be derivable. Levi-Strauss’ epistemological choice to study myths and masks can be better understood when his concept of transformation is clearly defined in relation to Goethe and D’Arcy Thomson. Thus, the originality of his own interpretation will become clear. (shrink)

Ce livre ne présente pas la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze, ni encore moins il ne la résume. Il s'en sert en l'appliquant à des problèmes spécifiques politiques et esthétiques, pour en montrer concrètement, sur des exemples précis, des cas, la pertinence et la fécondité. Ainsi à travers le masochisme de la Vénus à la fourrure, la peinture du Lorrain, l'espace public démocratique du contrat social, et l'étrange athéisme de Sade, on peut voir la force de révélation que détiennent les concepts (...) deleuziens d'espace lisse et de lignes de fuite. Mais en même temps qu'on verra jouer concrètement ces concepts, leur parenté très grande avec ceux de Lacan apparaîtra clairement. Le travail d'analyse, la clinique, quand il est concret et précis, dissout les gros concepts et, au-delà des oppositions d'opinion massives, ouvre et trace des lignes de sens et des perspectives de lecture radicalement nouvelles, où les vieux antagonismes deviennent désuets. D'où la richesse atypique de la philosophie deleuzienne."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to propose a precise characterization of the collective practice behind at least an important part of the phenomena named “decision by consensus”. First, I provide descriptions of the use of this rule, and give a definition of the non-opposition rule, both as a specific sequence of acts and as a stopping rule. Second, I challenge the usual way of understanding the non-opposition rule by contrast with voting, stating that the contrast between logic of approval (...) and logic of consent also has to be taken into account. Third, I examine the conditions of its use. The non-opposition rule satisfies groups whose concern is to decide without dividing. Finally, from the analytic benefit of opening up decision by consensus as the use of the non-opposition rule, I will examine, in a fourth part, whether consensus in decision-making is as democratic a procedure as is sometimes thought. (shrink)

Stalnaker ( 1978 ) made two seminal claims about presuppositions. The most influential one was that presupposition projection is computed by a pragmatic mechanism based on a notion of ‘local context’ . Due to conceptual and technical difficulties, however, the latter notion was reinterpreted in purely semantic terms within ‘dynamic semantics’ (Heim 1983 ). The second claim was that some instances of presupposition generation should also be explained in pragmatic terms . But despite various attempts, the definition of a precise (...) ‘triggering algorithm’ has remained somewhat elusive. We discuss possible extensions of both claims. First, we offer a reconstruction of ‘local contexts’ which circumvents some of the difficulties faced by Stalnaker’s original analysis. We preserve the idea that local contexts are computed by a pragmatic mechanism that aggregates the information that follows from an incomplete sentence given the global context; but we crucially rely on a modified notion of entailment (‘R-entailment’), whose plausibility should be assessed on independent grounds. Second, we speculate that local contexts might prove necessary (though by no means sufficient) to understand how some presuppositions are triggered. In a nutshell, we suggest that a presupposition is triggered when the semantic contribution of an expression to its local context is in some sense ‘heterogeneous’. Without giving an analysis of the latter notion, we note that this architecture implies that presuppositions should be triggered on the basis of the meaning that an expression has relative to its local context (what we call its ‘local meaning’); we sketch some possible consequences of this analysis. (shrink)

The folk picture of agency suggests that human beings have basic agency over some of their omissions. For example, someone may follow through on a decision never to support a political party without doing anything in order to make themselves omit. A number of features appear to signal their agency: the omission is not just called intentional, it is also seen as an achievement and explained in terms of the reasons for the decision. Some philosophers have tried to debunk the (...) appearance and argue that agency over omissions always proceeds from agency over actions (on the model of Ulysses ordering his crew to tie him to the mast). Others have tried to uphold the appearance by understanding basic agency over omissions on the model of their theories of action (and most often on the model of causal theories). Against both groups, I argue for a vindication of the appearance in terms of a theory of sui generis basic agency over omissions. Basic intentional omissions are the behavioral outcomes of fluent control by their agents’ intentions. When an intention to omit fluently controls for the right omission, the omission is an intentional achievement performed because of the intention. The intention appropriately regulates the agent’s behavior so as to ensure the intended omission. We can therefore see basic agency over omissions as regulative and distinct from the agency exercised over actions. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy discusses his life's work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. As Nancy looks back on his philosophical texts, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts.

In this note, we reconstruct some results of the DRT analysis of presupposition projection within the theory of local contexts of Schlenker (2009). The latter offered a way to annotate every sentence with variables that denote the various local context sets that play a crucial role in Heim’s satisfaction theory (Heim 1983). In standard satisfaction theories, a presupposition must be entailed by its local context. Here we allow a presupposition to be indexed with other local contexts, and we propose, following (...) van der Sandt (1992) and Zeevat (1992), that presuppositions are preferably anaphoric to the highest possible context. The resulting analysis emulates some desirable results of DRT—notably its solution to the ‘Proviso Problem’ (Geurts 1999). But it arguably improves on DRT in some respects: it can generate genuine conditional presuppositions; and it yields more adequate results for some quantified examples. Several limitations of the theory—some of them quite severe—are also discussed. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- PART I: WHAT HAPPENED? -- Inheriting from Seattle -- What Are We Dealing With? -- Daring to be Pragmatic -- Infernal Alternatives -- Minions -- PART II: LEARNING TO PROTECT ONESELF -- Do You Believe in Sorcery? -- Leaving Safe Ground -- Marx Again... -- To Believe in Progress No Longer? -- Learning Fright -- PART III: HOW TO GET A HOLD? -- Thanks to Seattle? -- The Trajectory of an Apprenticeship -- Fostering (...) New Connections -- Sorry, but we have to -- Reactivating History -- PART IV: NEEDING PEOPLE TO THINK -- A Cry -- Interstices -- Ecosophy -- Political Creation -- Empowerment -- Reclaim -- Above All, Not to Conclude -- Index. (shrink)

Nous nous proposons de revenir dans cet article sur le partage explicité par Michel Foucault en 1978 entre une « philosophie de l’expérience, du sens et du sujet » et une «philosophie du savoir, de la rationalité et du concept » dans la tradition de laquelle s’inscrirait plutôt son propre travail archéologique. Nous montrons qu’appliqué aux premiers écrits de Foucault, un tel partage se trouve singulièrement brouillé, en particulier du fait des usages variables que ces écrits font de la notion (...) d’expérience, d’abord ramenée du côté de l’expérience vécue, avant d’être dédoublée en expérience historique et expérience-limite. (shrink)

I challenge the usual approach of defining emergence in terms of properties of wholes “emerging” upon properties of parts. This approach indeed fails to meet the requirement of nontriviality, since it renders a bunch of ordinary properties emergent; however, by defining emergence as the incompressibility of a simulation process, we have an objective meaning of emergence because the difference between the processes satisfying the incompressibility criterion and the other processes does not depend on our cognitive abilities. Finally, this definition fulfills (...) the nontriviality and the scientific‐adequacy requirements better than the combinatorial approach, emergence here being a predicate of processes rather than of properties. †To contact the author, please write to: Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Université Paris I Sorbonne), 13 rue du Four 75006, Paris; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

We argue that sign language requires a radical extension of formal semantics. It has long been accepted that sign language employs the same logical machinery as spoken language (occasionally making its abstract components overt), and simultaneously makes extensive use of iconicity. But the articulation between these two modules has only been discussed piecemeal. To capture it, we propose an ‘iconological semantics’ that combines standard logical semantics with a pictorial semantics in the Greenberg/Abusch tradition. We start by reanalyzing from this perspective (...) earlier data on iconic loci, which are simultaneously variables and simplified depictions of their denotations. We then analyze new data on ASL classifier predicates, constructions that are lexically specified as being iconic. Their behavior argues for a very expressive system, possibly one in which the object language contains viewpoint variables. These can be left free or they may depend on quantifiers, and distinct viewpoint variables can co-occur in a given sentence; this gives rise to an extraordinary interaction between depictions and logical operators. We then sketch an adaptation of pictorial semantics to the dynamic 3D representations used in sign language. Finally, we suggest that iconological semantics might also illuminate the interaction between logical operators and pro-speech gestures in spoken language. In the end, the standard view of language as a discrete compositional system must be revised: it also has a tightly integrated depictive component, and ‘textbook semantics’ should be revised to capture this fact. (shrink)

Elite sport is both worshipped disparaged. It is adored because athletes embody an ethical act of courage, self-sacrifice and fair play; it is criticized for too many scandals that plague and discredit it. Too often, athletes seem trapped in and crushed by a system much bigger than they are, a system that also compels them to do wrong, in a way that seems to instrumentalize them. But what is the real status of elite athletes? Does the system treat them with (...) dignity in a manner that allows them to accept freely and voluntarily the end purpose of the record to be beaten that demands enormous sacrifices? This article considers how an analysis of the concept of human dignity can help us better understand the place of the athlete in this complex reality of elite sport. (shrink)

This paper argues that one can advocate a moral imperative to pursue enhancement technologies while at the same time rejecting the historical reality of progress and holding a pessimistic view of the future. The first half of the paper puts forth several arguments for why progress is illusory and why one has good reason to be pessimistic about the future of humanity (and posthumanity). The second half then argues that this is entirely consistent with also championing the futurological vision of (...) transhumanism. The claim is that, relative to the alternatives proposed, this vision actually offers the safest route into the future, even if it also entails an increase in the probability of self-annihilation. (shrink)

Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to proximal stimulations. In light of the explosive brain growth that takes place inside and outside of the womb, first signs of feeling as opposed to sensing experience (...) are discussed. Feeling experience is considered as the necessary condition for having minimal self-awareness. Both would co-emerge in development. However, minimal self-awareness is rapidly supplemented with an awareness that is not just perceptual, but also conceptual and ethical, primarily defined in relation to and by others. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 31, Issue 1, pp 48 - 74 According to Hobbes, a commonwealth can only occur when the natural multitude of men are made one thanks to a covenantal device. The artificial unity of the political community can be seen as strengthened by the use of concepts that reflect some natural unity, such as “body” or “person”. Both notions can indeed be found in Hobbes’s political treatises, but the degree of importance attached to them varies greatly. The key (...) to this evolution is to be found in _De cive_, where Hobbes explicitly dismisses the notion of a body politic and substitutes the concept of person for it. This paper examines the significance of this conceptual change by following its trajectory from _Elements of Law_ to _Leviathan_ and discussing its implications for Hobbes’s understanding of civil unity. (shrink)