Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This (...) characterization of meaning focuses on what function a sentence serves in discourse, rather than what that sentence refers to (e.g., a state of the world). By representing the meaning of imperatives, connectives and declaratives in a common dynamic format, the challenges posed for non-representationalism are met. (shrink)

Joann Starr, a Roman Catholic nun, and Bruce Zawacki, a burn surgeon, met 22 years ago in the Los Angeles County, University of Southern California Burn Center in the roles of a patient and her physician struggling over issues of autonomy and informed consent. After recovery, she remained a nun and has become a patient advocate and doctoral candidate in bioethics. He remained a burn surgeon and has become a bioethics teacher and author. Although they live in distant locations, (...) they maintain their friendship and frequently discuss their shared experience. Recently they met to reflect on the events, lessons, and meanings of their original encounter. (shrink)

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)

Paul Zanker has put together a fascinating comparative study of the history of the visual image of the intellectual in Greco-Roman Antiquity. His focus is on the image of intellectuals as a class within a particular society and the changes in those images that distinguish how the intellectual and his or her role is perceived and defined from one era to another.

This paper proposes a semantics for free choice permission that explains both the non-classical behavior of modals and disjunction in sentences used to grant permission, and their classical behavior under negation. It also explains why permissions can expire when new information comes in and why free choice arises even when modals scope under disjunction. On the proposed approach, deontic modals update preference orderings, and connectives operate on these updates rather than propositions. The success of this approach stems from its capacity (...) to capture the difference between expressing the preferences that give rise to permissions and conveying propositions about those preferences. (shrink)

No existing conditional semantics captures the dual role of 'if' in embedded interrogatives — 'X wonders if p' — and conditionals. This paper presses the importance and extent of this challenge, linking it to cross-linguistic patterns and other phenomena involving conditionals. Among these other phenomena are conditionals with multiple 'if'-clauses in the antecedent — 'if p and if q, then r' — and relevance conditionals — 'if you are hungry, there is food in the cupboard'. Both phenomena are shown to (...) be problematic for existing analyses. Surprisingly, the decomposition of conditionals needed to capture the link with interrogatives provides a new analysis that captures all three phenomena. The model-theoretic semantics offered here relies on a dynamic conception of meaning and compositionality, a feature discussed throughout. (shrink)

This paper aims to address the difficulties of high school students in bridging their computational understanding with their visualization skills in understanding the notion of the limits in their calculus class. This research used a pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design research on 62 grade 10 students enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Engineering Program (STEP) in one of the public high schools in Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines. A series of remedial sessions were given to help them understand the function values, one-sided (...) limits, limits of a function, and its discontinuities with the aid of the GeoGebra. Results revealed that there is a significant improvement in their mathematics performance before and after the remediation, t(61) = -19.99, p<.05. The real-time feedback provided by the drawing interface of GeoGebra has provided the students the insights into how objects behave in geometrical space, bridging their understanding in locating the values shown by the computational algebraic processes. Additionally, the significant difference in the achievement reveals a large effect size (Cohen’s =2.54) which could be accounted for by the remediation using interactive activities in the GeoGebra. (shrink)

A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry.

Research explored methods for “shortening the food links” or developing the “local foodshed” by connecting farmers with food service buyers (for restaurants and institutions) in Colorado. Telephone interviews were used to investigate marketing and purchasing practices. Findings include that price is not a significant factor in purchasing decisions; that food buyers prioritize quality as their top purchasing criterion but are not aware that local farmers can provide higher quality, that institutions are interested in buying locally; that small farms can offer (...) comparable or higher quality produce andservice; and that farmers need to show buyers what the quality of produce and service they can provide. (shrink)

When first confronted by the Historia Romana of Velleius Paterculus, it is easy for a reader to assume on the basis of the title and the surviving part of the text that it is a history of Rome, albeit a short one. In the following discussion I intend to demonstrate, first, why that initial assumption should be rejected and, secondly, how the work fits into the tradition of Roman historical writing.

It has become a fact that fluency and competency in utilizing the advancement of technology, specifically the computer and the internet is one way that could help in facilitating learning in mathematics. This study investigated the effects of Dynamic Geometry Software (DGS) and Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in teaching Mathematics. This was conducted in Zamboanga del Sur National High School (ZSNHS) during the third grading period of the school year 2015-2016. The study compared the achievement and attitude towards Mathematics between (...) those students taught with DGS and CAS and those students who were taught without DGS and CAS. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest control group design was used with two groups which was matched according to their mathematical level. An achievement test was developed and administered to assess the students’ achievement in Mathematics. Aiken’s attitude scale was also used to assess the students’ attitude towards Mathematics. The data were treated with One-Way Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and t-test at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed a significant difference between the mathematics achievement between students taught with DGS and CAS and those who were taught without it. The integration of DGS and CAS in Mathematics lessons leads to better academic achievement result compared with that of the conventional method of teaching. Moreover, there was no significant difference on the attitude level of the students between the two groups. (shrink)

There is a big difference between saying Maya is singing, Is Maya singing? and Sing Maya! This paper examines and criticizes two attempts to rigorously explain this difference: Searle’s speech act theory and the truth-conditional reductionism advocated by Davidson and Lewis. On the speech act analysis, each utterance contains a marker which says what kind of speech act the utterance counts as performing. The truth-conditional reductionists try to reanalyze the non-declaratives (Is Maya singing? and Sing Maya!) as complex declarative forms. (...) The former analysis fails to recognize the indirect relationship between sentence (or clause) type and utterance force. The latter analysis fails to recognize the distinctive and thoroughly compositional contribution that the imperative, interrogative and declarative mood make to sentences containing them. (shrink)

The objective of the study was to develop a structural model that explores the relationship between Mathematics Performance and students’ self-regulated learning skills, grit, and expectancy-value towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The research collected survey data from 664 senior high school students from 17 STEM high schools, and conducted a covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis. The results of the SEM analysis indicate that the Re-specified Self-Regulated Learning Skill – Expectancy-Value towards STEM – Grit – Mathematics Performance (Re-specified (...) SRL-EV-GR-MP) model is the most parsimonious fit, offering the best empirical support for the theoretical model of the study. The research findings suggest that the mathematics performance of senior high school students in STEM curriculum is attributed to their high expectancies for success and perceived values of the STEM tasks, high grit, and high self-regulated learning skills. Moreover, the research also observed evidence of mediating and moderating grit effects in the concurrent effects of expectancy-values towards STEM and self-regulated learning skills towards students’ mathematics performance. (shrink)

The Philippines is one of the fast-growing economies in the South-East Asian and the Pacific region. This study considered eight factors: HEI PRC rate, crime rate, education, employment, health, poverty, income, and basic family amenities of the 17 regions of the country, all taken from the year 2012 databases of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) and Open Data Philippines. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) generated the indices of the six factors and Cluster Analysis (CA) (...) to group regional similarities. Clustering revealed that ARMM and MIMAROPA Regions have clustered independently, in two individual clusters, while the rest of the 15 regions have clustered in two groups of five and 10. The study revealed that crime, poverty and health mortality rates have generally inverse relationships with HEI PRC percentage performance, employment, education, income and basic housing amenities. (shrink)

A groundbreaking approach to martial arts combining Self-Image Psychology and Qigong. Martial arts teacher Phillip Starr draws on more than sixty years of experience to introduce the Mirror Image Technique--a method that recognizes the reinforcing nature of body and mind. Our self-image expresses in how we stand, move, and hold ourselves in the world; and in martial arts, the way we move reflects the way we think on the mat, in practice, and when sparring. Here, Starr pulls from (...) Self-Image Psychology and Qigong to offer readers a unique set of physical exercises that can be applied to any martial art tradition--as well as our personal lives. Like two mirrors facing each other, the physical body both reflects and changes the mind, and vice versa: our physical movements become more than just the consequence of our intentions or thoughts. As we adjust the way we move, we adjust the way we think: about ourselves, our lives, and our environments. Unlike other self-help books that consider the mind as the sole gateway to change, the Mirror Image Technique shows that cognitive transformation starts with the body. Starr takes readers through: • Demonstrating key principles of Qigong with exercises like The Unbreakable Arm and The Unliftable Body • Improving your stance • Increasing your strike force • Insights into the mindset for breaking boards (tameshiwari). Intended to enhance growth and personal development, the techniques in Martial Arts and the Mirror Image lead to a renewal of confidence and enthusiasm for one’s particular practice. (shrink)

How does the body influence the way we see the world? _Imagination, Illness and Injury_ examines the psychological factors behind perceptual limitations and distortions and links a broad range of somatic manifestations with their resolution. Melanie Starr Costello applies Jungian theory to a variety of cases, attributing psychosomatic phenomena to cognitive processes that are common to us all. She analyses the role of illness in several life narratives, and interprets the appearance of somatic phenomena during important phases of analytic (...) treatment. Together these case narratives present a significant challenge to established views of psychosomatics. Subjects covered include: archetypal constrictions of identity somatic elements of perception the psyche-soma split. _Imagination, Illness and Injury _brings a fresh perspective to the understanding and treatment of the psychotherapy client as a psycho-somatic unity. Jungian analysts, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists will greatly benefit from the clinical applications of archetypal theory presented here. (shrink)

A photographer and a geographer explore where the pavement ends. Nevada's enigmatic Black Rock country, despite its apparent silence and isolation, is actually an area where natural forces are ceaselessly restless and life in many forms has endured for millennia. Its haunting landscape has been the focus of study and contemplation by scientists, explorers, outdoors aficionados, and artists. In ""Black Rock,"" photographer Peter Goin and geographer Paul F. Starrs explore this fascinating place from the viewpoints of their respective disciplines. The (...) Black Rock, a desert realm almost the size of Delaware but scarcely a hundred miles north of Reno, embraces mile-high vertical mountains and one of the earth's flattest, most barren salt pans, boiling hot springs and freezing winter cold, plants that have evolved to survive the severest drought and lush pockets of rich grasses. Its bewildering environments startle our senses with a raw physical intensity that comes through in Goin's eloquent photographs and Starrs's richly informed text. We observe the region from numerous perspectives - the Black Rock at ground level, from the skies above, in the geology below; witness the shaping roles of water, wind, and geothermal action in shaping it; and view the effects of human hands, from ancient Native Americans to nineteenth-century explorers, ranchers, and miners, up through the congregants at today's Burning Man festivals. The result is a brilliant duet of visual and literary commentary on a region of stunning paradoxes and constant change and activity, where need and curiosity encounter the daunting, implacable forces of nature. (shrink)

This work explores the hypothesis that natural language is a tool for changing a language user's state of mind and, more specifically, the hypothesis that a sentence's meaning is constituted by its characteristic role in fulfilling this purpose. This view contrasts with the dominant approach to semantics due to Frege, Tarski and others' work on artificial languages: language is first and foremost a tool for representing the world. Adapted to natural language by Davidson, Lewis, Montague, et. al. this dominant approach (...) has crystalized as truth-conditional semantics: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know the conditions under which that sentence is true. Chapter 1 details the animating ideas of my alternative approach and shows that the representational function of language can be understood in terms of the more general function of changing representational mental states. Chapters 2-4 argue that the additional resources of this more general conception of meaning allow us to explain certain phenomena involving conditionals and grammatical mood that truth-conditional semantics does not. In the analysis of these specific phenomena and the articulation of the general approach on offer, it emerges that this approach combines insights and benefits from both use-theoretic and truth-theoretic work on meaning. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a conceptual underpinning for codes of ethics in business and the professions. Rule-utilitarianism is a theory of ethics which I believe can successfully do this. Business persons and professionals, hopefully, will be able to develop codes of ethics in a manner consistent with a well-formulated general ethical theory. This will help enable codes of ethics to be a bridge between general ethical theory and specific ethical decisions made in business and the professions.

A leading figure in neuroaesthetics makes the case that aesthetic experience can be meaningfully measured by the tools of neuroscience.

Peter Kivy has a quarrel with “the task that [history] has bequeathed us” of searching for a single definition of art. Kivy’s book breaks down into two parts. In his first two chapters, Kivy traces the search for the definition of art from the Enlightenment until now, and argues the quest has been a failure. In the second half of his work, he analyzes five case studies of failed attempts to define one art in terms of a model appropriate to (...) another. These failures, stemming from inappropriate models, provide Kivy with ways to explore the differences between the arts, and thereby achieve more of a “philosophical understanding of the arts in all their particularity”. Kivy is not arguing the Wittgensteinian position that the search for sameness ought to be abandoned as impossible. His hope is to balance our search for commonality with a study of differences among the arts. For “in looking for differences, the search for sameness is forwarded rather than thwarted”. (shrink)

This is an excellent collection of fifteen essays on the state of analytic philosophy, past, present, and future, with contributions from such philosophers as Peter Hacker, Hilary Putnam, and Jaakko Hintikka. The editors have divided the collection into four parts. Part 1, “Introduction,” consists of an outstanding overview of analytic philosophy by Hacker, “Analytic philosophy: what, whence, and whither?” For the “what,” Hacker describes seven characteristic marks of analytic philosophy. As for “whence,” Hacker gives us a typical synoptic historical view, (...) from Moore and Russell to post-war Oxford and the later Wittgenstein. As for the “whither,” Hacker argues that as analytic philosophy has won most of its battles, it is now, due to Quine, characterized by scientism, but this need not mean the demise of philosophy. Two complementary tasks remain to analytic philosophy: the critical task of rectifying conceptual confusion; and the descriptive task of providing a “perspicuous representation of our conceptual schema”. (shrink)

_An investigation into the foundations of democratic societies and the ongoing struggle over the power of concentrated wealth_ Much of our politics today, Paul Starr writes, is a struggle over entrenchment—efforts to bring about change in ways that opponents will find difficult to undo. That is why the stakes of contemporary politics are so high. In this wide‑ranging book, Starr examines how changes at the foundations of society become hard to reverse—yet sometimes are overturned. Overcoming aristocratic power was (...) the formative problem for eighteenth‑century revolutions. Overcoming slavery was the central problem for early American democracy. Controlling the power of concentrated wealth has been an ongoing struggle in the world’s capitalist democracies. The battles continue today in the troubled democracies of our time, with the rise of both oligarchy and populist nationalism and the danger that illiberal forces will entrench themselves in power. _Entrenchment_ raises fundamental questions about the origins of our institutions and urgent questions about the future. (shrink)

Max Weber's distinction in "Politics as a Vocation" between the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility is best understood as a distinction between mutually exclusive ethical worldviews. Interpretations that correlate the two ethics with Weber's distinction between value-rational social action and instrumental-rational social action are misleading since Weber assumes that both types of rational social action are present in both ethics. The ethic of conviction recognizes a given hierarchy of values as the context for moral endeavor. The ethic (...) of responsibility acknowledges value obligations, but assumes the absence of any given hierarchy of values and the inevitability of value conflict as the context for moral endeavor. When interpreted in the context of his multilayered understanding of value conflict, Weber's ethic of responsibility emerges as a coherent ethical perspective. (shrink)

General Equilibrium Theory: An Introduction treats the classic Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium model in a form accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates in economics and mathematics. Topics covered include mathematical preliminaries, households and firms, existence of general equilibrium, Pareto efficiency of general equilibrium, the First and Second Fundamental Theorems of Welfare Economics, the core and core convergences, future markets over time and contingent commodity markets under uncertainty. Demand, supply, and excess demand appear first as functions, then optionally as correspondences. The (...) mathematics presented includes a real analysis, the Brouwer fixed point theorem, and separating and supporting hyperplane theorems. Optional chapters introduce the existence of equilibrium with set-valued supply and demand, the mathematics of upper and lower hemicontinuous correspondences, and the Kakutani fixed point theorem. The treatment emphasizes clarity and accessibility to the student through use of examples and intuition. (shrink)

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood. Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating (...) sentential force as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance force, and discuss its implications. (shrink)