Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy (...) of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

Aquinas thinks that practical reason is distinct but not entirely insulated from speculative reason. Although his description of practical reasoning applies to a variety of human activities, his greatest focus is on that practical reasoning which is involved in human action. Although practical reasoning resembles the speculative in its use of a kind of syllogism, its connection with particular affairs precisely as contingent gives it a special character.

: The economic system of innovative dynamism is often accused of harming the environment. The opposite is true. As economies flourish through innovative dynamism, birth rates decline, new ways to extract old resources are invented, and previously useless materials are turned into useful new resources. Human and nonhuman animals are often adaptable and resilient in the […].

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of 'Frege's Theorem', which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume's Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. 'Finite Hume's Principle' also suffices (...) for the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege's definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é recolher passagens das Enéadas que contêm informação relevante para a investigação dos conceitos de espaço/lugar em Plotino. Espero poder indicar, depois disso, que pelo menos três noções de espaço/lugar coexistem na filosofia de Plotino: i) Plotino distingue espaço e matéria, mas dessa distinção não fica claro a) se o espaço subsiste à parte dos corpos, ou b) se ele é apenas um relativo, ou c) se ele é uma das propriedades dos corpos e, neste caso, (...) se ele tem algum tipo de modelo inteligível; iii) e, em várias passagens, Plotino formula uma versão platônica e imaterial do conceito estoico de espaço, afirmando que entes imateriais não estão num lugar, de modo que o corpo não é o lugar da alma, mas antes é a alma o lugar do corpo. (shrink)

Although Kant introduced the analytic/synthetic distinction, and although this distinction has been immensely influential, very few philosophers find Kant’s formulation of the distinction acceptable. Quine, for example, rejects Kant’s characterization of analyticity on the grounds that “it appeals to a notion of containment which is left at a metaphorical level.” This criticism is, I believe, unwarranted, for, although Kant is not as clear about the notion of conceptual containment as one would like, in both the Critique of Pure Reason and (...) the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics he offers intentional characterizations of this notion which, I hope to show, can be given a clear and precise formulation. Moreover, I shall argue that the notion of conceptual containment can be used to provide both an adequate characterization of analyticity and a nonlinguistic solution to the paradox of analysis. (shrink)

What were seen widely in Hume's time as "the obvious dictates of reason" are rarely if ever seen as such today. One reads now that the table does not seem to diminish as one removes oneself from it; instead it appears roughly the same in size all the while. And, what if it did seem to diminish? This would not prove that the existent of which one is visually aware is diminishing, and is therefore but the image of the table (...) rather than the table itself. The appearance of an object is not another object; it is just the original object appearing. Quite simply, things may seem otherwise than they are. (shrink)

Induction is the inference from a sample to a population, regardless of the possible existence of exceptions. Induction is used in the practice of science and engineering based on knowledge that can be accepted as evidence. There are two bodies of knowledge: evidential corpus, a set of propositions acceptable as evidence in a certain context; and practical corpus, a set of propositions counting as “practically certain” in that context. There are five kinds of induction described: statistical, universal, nomic, theoretical, and (...) instantial. (shrink)

The validity of an argument depends on the soundness of its premises. In the recent paper by Steele et al., conclusions are based on the initial construction of definitions relating to ‘desire’ and...

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

Two kinds of causal inference rules which are widely used by social scientists are investigated. Two conceptions of causation also widely used are explicated -- the INUS and probabilistic conceptions of causation. It is shown that the causal inference rules which link correlation, a kind of partial correlation, and a conception of causation are invalid. It is concluded a new methodology is required for causal inference.

Skeptics try to persuade us of our ignorance with arguments like the following: 1. I don't know that I am not a handless brain-in-a-vat [BIV]. 2. If I don't know that I am not a handless BIV, then I don't know that I have hands. Therefore, 3. I don't know that I have hands. The BIV argument is valid, its premises are intuitively compelling, and yet, its conclusion strikes us as a absurd. Something has to go, but what? Contextualists contend (...) that an adequate solution to the skeptical problem must: (i) retain epistemic closure, (ii) explain the intuitive force of skeptical arguments by explaining why their premises initially seem so compelling, and (iii) account for the truth of our commonsense judgment that we do possess lots of ordinary knowledge. Contextualists maintain that the key to such a solution is recognizing that the semantic standards for 'knows' vary from context to context such that in skeptical contexts the skeptic's premises are true and so is her conclusion; but in ordinary contexts, her conclusion is false and so is her first premise. Despite its initial attractiveness, the contextualist solution comes at a significant cost, for contextualism has many counterintuitive results. After presenting the contextualist solution, I identify a number of these costs. I then offer a noncontextualist solution that meets the adequacy constraint identified above, while avoiding the costs associated with contextualism. Hence, one of the principal reasons offered for adopting a contextualist theory of knowledge -- its supposedly unique ability to adequately resolve the skeptical problem -- is undermined. (shrink)

The high technology and the costs involved in critical care disclose the implausibility of applying the American standard version of bioethics in the developing world. The American standard version of bioethics was framed during the rapid secularization of the American culture, the emergence of a new image for the medical profession, the development of high technology medicine, an ever greater demand in resources, and a shift of focus from families and communities to individuals. This all brought with it a particular (...) ideology of health care which promised Americans (1) the best of care, (2) equal care, and (3) physician/patient choice, without (4) runaway costs. This essay argues that this moral project is impossible in practice. This impossibility is especially salient in developing countries. In addition to the fact that it is financially impossible to provide all in the developing world with the standard of care accepted by law, policy, and convention in developed countries, different moral perspectives with different orderings of values will seem more or less plausible in different cultures. Indeed, such an approach would be harmful. A concrete bioethics applicable across the world does not appear possible. (shrink)