My purpose is to analyze lawyers creating meaning in three well-known cases in Anglo-American legal history: Commonwealth v. Woodward (1997) the famous Boston ‘nanny’ case, the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial (1995), and the John Peter Zenger Libel Case in Colonial New York (1734). In each case, creative lawyers were able to shift the question before the jury from the formal legal question—did Woodward and Simpson commit murder? Did Zenger publish libelous material?—to issues of vengeance and catharsis, and of the ability (...) of the legal system to represent the community’s sense of justice. (shrink)

I advocate a theory of syntactic semantics as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax – a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) – and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of understanding one domain (by modeling (...) it) in terms of another, can be viewed recursively: The base case of semantic understanding –understanding a domain in terms of itself – is syntactic understanding. (3) An internal (or narrow ), first-person point of view makes an external (or wide ), third-person point of view otiose for purposes of understanding cognition. (shrink)

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans (...) underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realization of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as "the world" – as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness. (shrink)

This essay is an effort to describe the foundational problems in international education and study abroad that constrain our efforts, as well as an attempt to sketch out what we need todo to foster engagement with the monumental problems that humanity faces. In addition, the essay also endeavours to suggest that international educators embed their work in a broad and compelling discourse that might provide a vision that is not exclusively focused on the state and/or the market, but is instead (...) global and human centric in its orientation. It should be a requirement at higher education institutions that all students engage in a significant periodof study abroad in order to help them see the globe as the context, and fundamental referent, for their lives. This should be the primary task of study abroad programs.Este artículo trata de describir los problemas fundamentales que atañen a la educación internacional y al estudio en el extranjero, unas preocupaciones que requieren de nuestrosesfuerzos. Es además un intento por abordar aquello que necesitamos para la búsqueda de compromisos con los monumentales problemas que acechan a la humanidad. Este artículo sugiriere, además, que los educadores internacionales deben implantar su trabajo en un amplio y convincente discurso que pueda aportar una visión que no esté exclusivamente centrada en el estado y/o el mercado, sino que contrariamente sea global y principalmente humano en su orientación. Debería ser un requisito en las instituciones de educación superior que todos los estudiantes desarrollen un periodo significativo de su formación en el extranjero, con el propósito de ayudarles a ver el globo como un contexto, y un referente fundamental, de sus vidas. Esta debería ser la primera tarea de los programas de estudio en el extranjero. (shrink)

The question of origins continues to captivate human thought and sentiment, despite the postmodern insistence that knowledge of origins is impossible since it must lie beyond the boundaries of the origin of knowledge. Knowledge cannot seek causes that precede its own existence, it is said. Still, theoretical narratives continue to arise accounting for such things as the origin of the universe, of our star and solar system, of Earth, of life on the planet, of the human species, of self-aware human (...) cultures, and so on down into the origins of the local and particular. This should not be surprising; we sense that knowing our origins will tell us who we are. With this in mind, this particular originary analysis of the origin of language will critically compare some of the foundational tenets of generative anthropology with the objective findings of palaeoanthropology and linguistics. Furthermore, an originary proposal of my own will be tendered. (shrink)