Many authors writing on slurs think that they are lexically rich, in the sense that their lexical meaning comprises both a descriptive dimension and an expressive/evaluative one, the latter accounting for their derogatory character. However, more fine-grained theories of slurs have recently been proposed, drawing on frameworks from lexical semantics. My main aim in this paper is to compare three such fine-grained rich-lexicon theories – the one put forward by myself in previous work with two similar ones, Croom’s (...) (2011, 2013) and Neufeld’s (2019, 2022). While my primary aim is to underlie the commonalities and differences between the three views, I also aim at showing that the latter views have some issues that are easily avoided in the framework I propose. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to show that there are many phenomena that pertain to the construction of truth-conditional compounds that follow characteristic patterns, and whose explanation requires appealing to knowledge structures organized in specific ways. We review a number of phenomena, ranging from non-homogenous modification and privative modification to polysemy and co-predication that indicate that knowledge structures do play a role in obtaining truth-conditions. After that, we show that several extant accounts that invoke rich lexical meanings (...) to explain such phenomena face problems related to inflexibility and lack of predictive power. We review different ways in which one might react to such problems as regards lexical meanings: go richer, go moderately richer, go thinner, and go moderately thinner. On the face of it, it looks like moderate positions are unstable, given the apparent lack of a clear cutoff point between the semantic and the conceptual, but also that a very thin view and a very rich view may turn out to be indistinguishable in the long run. As far as we can see, the most pressing open questions concern this last issue: can there be a principled semantic/world knowledge distinction? Where could it be drawn: at some upper level (e.g. enriched qualia structures) or at some basic level (e.g. constraints)? How do parsimony considerations affect these two different approaches? A thin meanings approach postulates intermediate representations whose role is not clear in the interpretive process, while a rich meanings approach to lexical meaning seems to duplicate representations: the same representations that are stored in the lexicon would form part of conceptual representations. Both types of parsimony problems would be solved by assuming a direct relation between word forms and (parts of) conceptual or world knowledge, leading to a view that has been attributed to Chomsky (e.g. by Katz 1980) in which there is just syntax and encyclopedic knowledge. (shrink)

We outline a novel theory of natural language meaning, Rich Situated Semantics [RSS], on which the content of sentential utterances is semantically rich and informationally situated. In virtue of its situatedness, an utterance’s rich situated content varies with the informational situation of the cognitive agent interpreting the utterance. In virtue of its richness, this content contains information beyond the utterance’s lexically encoded information. The agent-dependence of rich situated content solves a number of problems in semantics and the philosophy of (...) language (cf. [14, 20, 25]). In particular, since RSS varies the granularity of utterance contents with the interpreting agent’s informational situation, it solves the problem of finding suitably fine- or coarse-grained objects for the content of propositional attitudes. In virtue of this variation, a layman will reason with more propositions than an expert. (shrink)

For many years, it has been common-ground in semantics and in philosophy of language that semantics is in the business of providing a full explanation about how propositional meanings are obtained. This orthodox picture seems to be in trouble these days, as an increasing number of authors now hold that semantics does not deal with thought-contents. Some of these authors have embraced a “thin meanings” view, according to which lexical meanings are too schematic to enter propositional contents. I will (...) suggest that it is plausible to adopt thin semantics for a class of words. However, I’ll also hold that some classes of words, like kind terms, plausibly have richer lexical meanings, and so that an adequate theory of word meaning may have to combine thin and rich semantics. (shrink)

يُعالج هذا المقال آلية التطور اللُغوي بصفة عامة، وملامح هذا التطور في أوقات الأزمات النوعية التي تكتنف البشر من حين إلى آخر، سواء أكانت أزمات مجتمعية أو سياسية أو اقتصادية أو علمية، مع التركيز على أبرز الابتكارات والإضافات اللغوية المُعجمية في دول العالم الناطق بالإنجليزية خلال جائحة كورونا، وذلك انطلاقًا من فرضٍ رئيس مؤداه ضرورة مشاركة علماء اللغة في مواجهة الأزمة ابتغاءً للوضوح والشفافية.

Research in formal theoretical semantics has recently expanded its scope to include gestural communication, focusing in particular on gestures that contribute to the content of an accompanying utterance, e.g., size gestures (LARGE, WIDE), pointing gestures, and gestures that depict objects (TELESCOPE) or actions (SLAP). At the same time, fruitful inquiries at the intersection of primatology and linguistics have given rise to the hypothesis that human and non-human great apes share a common set of directive (=imperative) gestures. Directive gestures such as (...) STOP or COME-CLOSER, pose non-trivial issues for a semantic analysis: we inherit the challenges that pertain to the analysis of imperative utterances (Come closer!), while adding a further challenge that stems from the underspecified mapping between a directive body movement and its potential counterparts in human language. We begin by outlining the problem and surveying the nascent state-of-the-art with regards to a formal semantics of directive gestures. Particular attention is given to the multifunctionality of directive gestures, which typically have different effects in different contexts; for example, a non-human ape gesture may communicate "Stop that" in some contexts and "Move away" in others, with similar patterns found in humans. We show that this multifunctionality can be derived from a single, rich abstract lexical entry, "Not…!", a candidate for a universal building block of meaning, shared by human and non-human great apes. "Not…!", which incorporates negation/rejection, temporal reference and presuppositionality is more explanatory in comparison to a minimal alternative. This chapter lays out the hypothesis space, addressing the foundational question of how to explain attested gestural overlap between human and non-human great apes. We conclude the chapter by reviewing potential expansions of the analysis to the pragmatic gestures of humans, which are thus placed on the primate gestural meaning continuum and connected to the directive gestures we share with our non-human relatives in the great ape family. (shrink)

The renewed interest in concepts and their role in psychological theorizing is partially motivated by Machery’s claim that concepts are so heterogeneous that they have no explanatory role. Against this, pluralism argues that there is multiplicity of different concepts for any given category, while hybridism argues that a concept is constituted by a rich common representation. This article aims to advance the understanding of the hybrid view of concepts. First, we examine the main arguments against hybrid concepts and conclude that, (...) even if not successful, they challenge hybridism to find a robust criterion for concept individuation and to show an explanatory advantage for hybrid concepts. Then we propose such a criterion of individuation, which we will call ‘functional stable coactivation’. Finally, we examine the prospects of hybridism to understand what is involved in recent approaches to categorization and meaning extraction. 1 The Heterogeneity of Conceptual Representations2 Two Challenges for Hybrid Concepts: Individuation and Explanation2.1 The coordination criterion2.2 Concepts as constituents of thoughts3 Individuating Hybrids: Functional Stable Coactivation4 The Explanatory Power of Hybrid Concepts4.1 Categorization4.2 Meaning extraction4.2.1 Linguistic comprehension and rich lexical entries4.2.2 Polysemy and hybrid concepts5 Conclusion. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

Is the family subject to principles of justice? In "A Theory of Justice", John Rawls includes the (monogamous) family along with the market and the government as among the, "basic institutions of society", to which principles of justice apply. Justice, he famously insists, is primary in politics as truth is in science: the only excuse for tolerating injustice is that no lesser injustice is possible. The point of the present paper is that Rawls doesn't actually mean this. When it comes (...) to the family, and in particular its impact on fair equal opportunity, (the first part of the Difference Principle, Rawls' second principle of justice), he abandons the priority of justice. I also argue that he is right to do so. -/- The central argument is simple. As Rawls admits, what family one is raised by profoundly affects one's life chances: a child raised by a family has far greater life chances on every dimension than one raised in a poorer family that may lack books, education, and time to give the child attention. But the prevailing family arrangements in the industrialized West, assigning children to be raised by their biological parents, is guaranteed to perpetuate this injustice. While Rawls says an unjust institution in the basic structure of society, in which he includes the family, must be, "reformed or abolished," he refrains from calling for the reform or abolition of the family. We must simply work around it to compensate for the injustices he admits it involves. And this despite the fact that alternative arrangements involving communal child-rearing (Plato) or assigning children to those best qualified to raise them (Rousseau) are common in the philosophical literature. Moreover, the practice of having children raised by their biological parents is a relatively recent one, at least in the West, where, before the late 18th century, fostering-out or apprenticeship arrangements were normal and expected for both rich and poor for centuries. -/- Much of the paper is devoted to fine-grained textual analysis of Rawls' attempts to avoid the devastating implications of this argument for his theory of justice -- much of which are stated only in the original edition of "A Theory of Justice" and simply deleted, without substitution by anything better, in the second edition. In the end, Rawls has no way out. He cannot keep the priority of justice, fair equality of opportunity, and the monogamous family in which children are raised by their biological parents. As he admits, these are mutually inconsistent. -/- In the final part of the paper, I argue that Rawls should give up on the priority of justice. While child-rearing by the biological parents is a historical anomaly, in the real modern world it would be politically unfeasible to institute Platonic, Rousseauean, or similar legislation that purportedly assigned children to those best able to raise them, regardless of biological relationship. Since Rawls is committed to principles of political stability and feasibility, as he should be, and since ought implies can, such proposals are off the table. I concur with Rawls that we must work around this injustice, even those there are more just arrangements available in principle. But the cost of this -- less high than Rawls suggests -- is abandoning the principle of the priority of justice. Justice is one of a number of considerations that we must or may balance in deciding on the best attainable social relations. It is not a trump. However, this comes a great cost for Rawls: he must also abandon the lexical ordering of principles of justice or, in general, right or good principles of social order, in favor of the messy intuitionist balancing that his theory is designed to avoid. -/- One feature of the paper that is worth independent attention is a discussion of Marx's rejection of justice in the Critique of the Gotha Program, which I explicate, and urge, without adopting it, that it has a great deal more force than is widely understood. (shrink)

Quantification, Negation, and Focus: Challenges at the Conceptual-Intentional Semantic Interface Tista Bagchi National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS) and the University of Delhi Since the proposal of Logical Form (LF) was put forward by Robert May in his 1977 MIT doctoral dissertation and was subsequently adopted into the overall architecture of language as conceived under Government-Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), there has been a steady research effort to determine the nature of LF in language in light of structurally (...) diverse languages around the world, which has ultimately contributed to the reinterpretation of LF as a Conceptual-Intentional (C-I) interface level between the computational syntactic component of the faculty of language and one or more interpretive faculties of the human mind. While this has opened up further possibilities of research in phenomena such as quantifier scope and scope interactions between negation, quantification, and focus, it has also given rise to a few real challenges to linguistic theory as well. Some of these are: (i) the split between lexical meaning – a matter supposedly belonging to the phase-wise selection of lexical arrays – and issues of semantic interpretation that arise purely from binding and scope phenomena (Mukherji 2010); (ii) partially relatedly, the level at which theta role assignment can be argued to take place, an issue that is taken up by me in Bagchi (2007); and (iii) how supposedly “pure” scopal phenomena relating to quantifiers, negation, and emphasizing expressions such as only and even (comparable to, e.g., Urdu/Hindi hii and bhii, Bangla –i and –o) also have dimensions of both focus and discourse reference. While recognizing all of these challenges, this talk aims to highlight particularly challenge (iii), both in terms of scholarship in the past and for the rich prospects for research on languages of south Asia with the semantics of quantification, negation, and focus in view. The scholarship of the past that I seek to relate this issue to is where, parallel to (and largely independently of) the research on LF that had been happening, Barwise and Cooper were developing their influential view of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers, culminating in their key 1981 article “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural Language” while, independently, McCawley, in his 1981 book Everything that Linguists have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, established through argumentation that all noun phrases semantically behave like generalized quantified expressions (further elaborated by him in the second – 1994 – revised edition of his book). I seek to demonstrate, based on limited data analysis from selected languages of south Asia, that our current understanding of quantification, negation, and focus under the Minimalist view owes something significant to the two major, but now largely marginalized, works of scholarship, and that for the way forward it is essential to adopt a more formal-semantic approach as adopted by them and also by later works such as Denis Bouchard’s (1995) The Semantics of Syntax, Mats Rooth’s work on focus (e.g., Rooth 1996, “Focus” in Shalom Lappin’s Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory), Heim and Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar (1998), and Yoad Winter’s (2002) Linguistic Inquiry article on semantic number, to cite just a few instances. (shrink)

The life of a teacher is not as smooth as many may assume, as reports underscore the myriad challenges faced by educators both locally and internationally. This study aims to delve into the coping strategies employed by teachers within their profession. Utilizing a qualitative case study approach, this research engaged ten (10) junior high school teachers from the Department of Education (DepEd) as participants. Thematic analysis revealed eight (8) key themes encapsulating teachers' coping mechanisms within DepEd, including active coping, positive (...) coping, flexible coping, support group systems, acceptance, avoidant coping, commitment to personal growth, and emotional drivers and motivators. These themes shed light on the diverse array of coping strategies utilized by teachers over time. Categorized into two overarching meta-themes, constructive and non-constructive coping strategies emerged, with the former, encompassing active coping, positive coping, flexible coping, support group systems, acceptance, commitment to personal growth, and emotional drivers and motivators, being the predominant coping mechanisms fostering long-term improvement. Conversely, the latter, represented by avoidant coping, offers short-term relief but may lead to counterproductive outcomes. This study advocates for the development and implementation of a psychosocial training program aimed at enhancing teachers' well-being and resilience within their profession. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is, for what appear to be good reasons, uniformly hostile to sui generis final causes. And motivated to develop philosophically and scientifically plausible interpretations, scholars have increasingly offered reductivist and eliminitivist accounts of Aristotle's teleological commitment. This trend in contemporary scholarship is misguided. We have strong grounds to believe Aristotle accepted unreduced sui generis teleology, and reductivist and eliminitivist accounts face insurmountable textual and philosophical difficulties. We offer Aristotelians cold comfort by replacing his apparent view with failed accounts. (...) And so we ought to admit Aristotle’s prima facie commitments and deal with — if not accept — the consequences. (shrink)

If AI can write an excellent philosophy paper, we argue that philosophy journals should strongly consider publishing that paper. After all, AI stands to make significant contributions to ongoing projects in some subfields, and it benefits the world of philosophy for those contributions to be published in journals, the primary purpose of which is to disseminate significant contributions to philosophy. We also propose the Sponsorship Model of AI journal refereeing to mitigate any costs associated with our view. This model requires (...) at least one human to sponsor any AI manuscript submitted to a journal. After making this case, we evaluate a variety of objections—that our proposal will crash the academic job market, disincentivize humans from doing philosophy, and violate a variety of justified publishing norms—and conclude that they are all wanting. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner (...) than an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve (...) the conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up (...) on lexicality, problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her (...) audience. I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

A moral requirement R1 is said to be lexically prior to a moral requirement R2 just in case we are morally obliged to uphold R1 at the expense of R2 – no matter how many times R2 must be violated thereby. While lexical priority is a feature of many ethical theories, and arguably a part of common sense morality, attempts to model it within the framework of decision theory have led to a series of problems – a fact which (...) is sometimes spun as a ‘decision theoretic critique’ of lexical priority. In this paper, I develop an enriched decision theoretic framework that is capable of modelling lexical priority while avoiding all extant problems. This will involve introducing several new ingredients into the standard decision theoretic framework, including multidimensional utilities, de minimis risks, and the means to represent two different conceptions of risk. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I present data involving the use of the Romanian slur ‘țigan’, consideration of which leads to the postulation of a sui-generis, irreducible type of use of slurs. This type of use is potentially problematic for extant theories of slurs. In addition, together with other well-established uses, it shows that there is more variation in the use of slurs than previously acknowledged. I explain this variation by construing slurs as polysemous. To implement this idea, I appeal to (...) a rich-lexicon account of polysemy. I show how such a theory can be applied to slurs and discuss several important issues that arise. (shrink)

A one-boxer, Erica, and a two-boxer, Chloe, engage in a familiar debate. The debate begins with Erica asking Chloe: ‘If you’re so smart, then why ain’cha rich?’. As the debate progresses, Chloe is led to endorse a novel causalist theory of rational choice. This new theory allows Chloe to forge a connection between rational choice and long-run riches. In brief: Chloe concludes that it is not long-run wealth but rather long-run wealth creation which is symptomatic of rationality.

The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic change should be aware of those conditions.

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

Recently, Derek Parfit has offered a novel solution to the “Repugnant Conclusion” that compared with the existence of many people whose quality of life would be very high, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better but whose lives would be barely worth living. On this solution, qualitative differences between two populations will often entail that the populations are merely “imprecisely” comparable. According to Parfit, this fact allows us to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating (...) the transitivity of better than. In this paper, I argue that Parfit’s view nevertheless implies two objectionable conclusions. The first is an alternative version of the Repugnant Conclusion that, Parfit suggests, may not be all that repugnant. The second is a revised version of the first that is nearly identical to the Repugnant Conclusion. I conclude that Parfit’s view offers no escape from repugnance. (shrink)

Siegel and Byrne debate whether perceptual experiences present rich properties or exclusively thin properties.

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. I offer (...) a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

Predicativists hold that proper names have predicate-type semantic values. They face an obvious challenge: in many languages names normally occur as, what appear to be, grammatical arguments. The standard version of predicativism answers this challenge by positing an unpronounced determiner in bare occurrences. I argue that this is a mistake. Predicativists should draw a distinction between two kinds of semantic type—underived semantic type and derived semantic type. The predicativist thesis concerns the underived semantic type of proper names and underdetermines a (...) view about the semantic type of bare occurrences. I’ll argue that predicativists should hold that bare names are derived individual-denoting expressions. I end by considering what this result means for the relationship between predicativism and other metalinguistic theories of names. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames (...) is developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

The literature on algorithmic fairness has examined exogenous sources of biases such as shortcomings in the data and structural injustices in society. It has also examined internal sources of bias as evidenced by a number of impossibility theorems showing that no algorithm can concurrently satisfy multiple criteria of fairness. This paper contributes to the literature stemming from the impossibility theorems by examining how informational richness affects the accuracy and fairness of predictive algorithms. With the aid of a computer simulation, (...) we show that informational richness is the engine that drives improvements in the performance of a predictive algorithm, in terms of both accuracy and fairness. The centrality of informational richness suggests that classification parity, a popular criterion of algorithmic fairness, should be given relatively little weight. But we caution that the centrality of informational richness should be taken with a grain of salt in light of practical limitations, in particular, the so-called bias-variance trade off. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that public linguistic norms are implicated in the epistemology of testimony by way of underwriting the reliability of language comprehension. This paper argues that linguistic normativity, as such, makes no explanatory contribution to the epistemology of testimony, but instead emerges naturally out of a collective effort to maintain language as a reliable medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, the epistemologies of testimony and language comprehension are deeply intertwined from the start, and there is no (...) room for grounding the one in terms of the other. (shrink)

Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199(3–4):8701–8740, 2021) and Steel and Bartha (Risk Analysis 43(2):260–268, 2023) argue that we should understand the precautionary principle as the injunction to maximise lexical utilities. They show that the lexical utility model has important pragmatic advantages. Moreover, the model has the theoretical advantage of satisfying all axioms of expected utility theory except continuity. In this paper I raise a trilemma for any attempt at modelling the precautionary principle with lexical utilities: it permits choice (...) cycles or leads to paralysis or implies that the smallest value difference that is possible in a context has extreme axiological implications. (shrink)

Richness theory offers a promising axiology. In this paper, I discuss how to translate it into a deontology. To do so, I recruit the concept of moral distance from a recently developed epistemology, and construe it in terms of causal power. Finally, I apply the resulting decision-theoretic framework to the question of how best to avert ecological disaster over the next 36 years and achieve ecological harmony over the next 986.

The Realist that investigates questions of ontology by appeal to the quantificational structure of language assumes that the semantics for the privileged language of ontology is externalist. I argue that such a language cannot be (some variant of) a natural language, as some Realists propose. The flexibility exhibited by natural language expressions noted by Chomsky and others cannot obviously be characterized by the rigid models available to the externalist. If natural languages are hostile to externalist treatments, then the meanings of (...) natural language expressions serve as poor guides for ontological investigation, insofar as their meanings will fail to determine the referents of their constituents. This undermines the Realist’s use of natural languages to settle disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

Illusionists claim that phenomenal consciousness does not exist, but merely seems to exist. Most debates concerning illusionism focus on whether or not it is true—whether phenomenal consciousness really is an illusion. Here I want to tackle a different question: assuming illusionism is true, what kind of illusion is the illusion of phenomenality? Is it a “rich” illusion—the cognitively impenetrable activation of an incorrect representation—or a “sparse” illusion—the cognitively impenetrable activation of an incomplete representation, which leads to drawing incorrect judgments? I (...) present this distinction and I classify the most influential illusionist theories along this line of divide. I then offer an argument against the accounts of the illusion of phenomenality in terms of sparse illusion. (shrink)

Can we consciously see more items at once than can be held in visual working memory? This question has elud- ed resolution because the ultimate evidence is subjects’ reports in which phenomenal consciousness is filtered through working memory. However, a new technique makes use of the fact that unattended ‘ensemble prop- erties’ can be detected ‘for free’ without decreasing working memory capacity.

A pervasive thought in contemporary philosophy of mathematics is that in order to justify reflection principles, one must hold universism: the view that there is a single universe of pure sets. I challenge this kind of reasoning by contrasting universism with a Zermelian form of multiversism. I argue that if extant justifications of reflection principles using notions of richness are acceptable for the universist, then the Zermelian can use similar justifications. However, I note that for some forms of (...) class='Hi'>richness argument, the status of reflection principles as axioms is left open for the Zermelian. (shrink)

This paper introduces the notion of a “psychologically rich life”: a life characterized by complexity, in which people experience a variety of interesting things, and feel and appreciate a variety of deep emotions via firsthand experiences or vicarious experiences. A psychologically rich life can be contrasted with a boring and monotonous life, in which one feels a singular emotion or feels that their lives are defined by routines that just aren’t that interesting. Our discussion considers how it is that the (...) psychologically rich life compares to other leading theories of the good life discussed within both philosophy and psychology, and it argues that a psychologically rich life ought to be recognized as a distinct and compelling form of the good life. (shrink)

Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious (...) experience corresponds to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing. We describe how attractor dynamics in working memory would induce impoverished recollections of our original experiences, how the discrete symbolic nature of language is insufficient for describing the rich and high-dimensional structure of experiences, and how similarity in the cognitive function of two individuals relates to improved communicability of their experiences to each other. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience—two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling. (shrink)

Gaetano commented on the problems that exist in diagnosing schizophrenia and argues that more effort should be devoted to understanding relevant subjective experiences. I am not convinced that this is necessarily so. I have argued previously that diagnosis of clinical disorders is unlikely to work well in the absence of a theory on which the diagnostic system can be based. At present, there is very little theory concerning schizophrenic disorders, or at least very little theory that elicits wide agreement and (...) has definitive empirical support. (shrink)

One very important question about poverty is what rich people like us should do to fight it. In this article, I argue that we can, at little cost to ourselves, give tithes of our money and live within our so-called ‘ecological footprint’. At the end of the article, it is argued that we should, morally, do these things.

There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I (...) aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning. (shrink)

The biblical passage from Luke 16, 19-31 is one of the most cited and discussed in the New Testament. However, when analyzed based on the relationships engendered following the narrated facts, a series of presupposed narrative programs contributes to the elucidation of the meaning of this text. This research, therefore, will analyze the aforementioned passage from the perspective of Greimasian semiotics. The method aims to reveal the generative path of meaning and highlight the intratextual elements, which make up the path (...) of construction of the meaning of the passage. It allows you to analyze your superficial and deep structures: it goes from the simple to the complex, from the most abstract to the most concrete. It can thus highlight the semantic oppositions from which the meaning of the text and its fundamental semantic category are constituted. The method has the potential to represent the relational organization between the social conditions of the subjects of the narrative. Furthermore, it provides neutral methodological support that avoids a priori conclusions and bias. The analysis of intertextuality completes the process started with Greimasian semiotics. This is because a careful reading of Lc 16,19-31 will not ignore its immediate and broader context: Luke and Acts read sequentially. By placing the parable in this broader narrative, Luke's readers could perceive connective elements, linking the story told by Jesus to what was happening in the early church. Thus, in Jesus' mouth the story of the rich man and the beggar was told as a criticism of avarice, but in Luke's editorial plan it was used to challenge believers to get involved in caring for the poor. (shrink)

In philosophy of language, a distinction has been proposed between two aspects of lexical competence, i.e. referential and inferential competence (Marconi 1997). The former accounts for the relationship of words to the world, the latter for the relationship of words among themselves. The distinction may simply be a classification of patterns of behaviour involved in ordinary use of the lexicon. Recent research in neuropsychology and neuroscience, however, suggests that the distinction might be neurally implemented, i.e., that different cognitive architectures (...) with partly distinct neural realizations might be responsible for cognitive performances involving inferential and referential aspects of semantics. This hypothesis is strongly consistent with patient data supporting the notion of a functional double dissociation between inferential and referential abilities, and with a set of direct cortical mapping studies and neuroimaging experiments suggesting that inferential and referential abilities are underpinned by at least partly different regions of the human brain (e.g., Marconi et al. 2013; review in Calzavarini 2017). The initial hypotheses formulated in the setting of the philosophy of language, along with the neuropsychological experimental evidence (about how referential and inferential competences may be neurally instantiated) can be the input to computational modelling activities involving the inferential and the referential aspects of lexical competence. The aim of the talk is to offer a critical discussion of the kind of formalisms that can be used to model the two aspects of lexical competence, and of the main difficulties related to the use of these computational techniques. -/- Inferential (=symbolic) vs referential (=connectionist) formalisms. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has a problem. As Allesandro Lenci put it, the problem is that it cannot distinguish semantic from non-semantic relationships within its data. (2008, 2014). The data it relies on are patterns of co-occurrence of lexemes within linguistic corpora. But patterns of co-occurrence can reflect either our knowledge of what the world is like or our knowledge of what words mean -- matters of fact or matters of meaning. -/- In this essay, I develop a semantic theory which (...) draws this distinction in a way which makes it discernible in lexical semantics and cognitive science research. In doing so, this theory unifies truth-functional and structuralist approaches to semantics, and provides an integrated explanation of meaning and reference. -/- I base this semantic theory on linguistic dispositions to pair words with words, and to pair words with things, both based on learned patterns of association. These dispositions manifest themselves in verbal behavior, and (in Part 2) I propose a new neurophysical model to account for these dispositions which underlie both the intensional and extensional patterns in that behavior. (shrink)

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a (...) citizen of our polity. (shrink)

The intuitions at the core of environmental ethics and of other neglected value realms put pressure on traditional anthropocentric ethics based on monistic value theories. Such pressure is so severe that it has led many to give up on the idea of monistic value theories altogether. I argue that value monism is still preferable to value pluralism and that, indeed, these new challenges are opportunities to vastly improve impoverished traditional theories. I suggest an alternative monistic theory, Richness Theory, and (...) show how it provides an opportunity to capture the needs of both environmental ethics and of our traditional ethics. (shrink)

This paper introduces λ-grammar, a form of categorial grammar that has much in common with LFG. Like other forms of categorial grammar, λ-grammars are multi-dimensional and their components are combined in a strictly parallel fashion. Grammatical representations are combined with the help of linear combinators, closed pure λ-terms in which each abstractor binds exactly one variable. Mathematically this is equivalent to employing linear logic, in use in LFG for semantic composition, but the method seems more practicable.

My aim in this paper is to explicate the diversity of Indian Symbolism and to show the changing patterns of symbols. The first part is mostly descriptive and interpretative and tries to bring out the different forms of Indian Symbolism. The second part tries to bring out the different kinds of changes that are possible with regard to symbols.

Proprioception, a sense of bodily position and movement, is rarely the focus of conscious experience. If we are ordinarily conscious of proprioception, we seem only peripherally so. Thus, evidence that proprioception is present in the periphery of at least some conscious experiences seems to be good evidence that conscious experience is fairly rich. Anosognosia for paralysis is a denial of paralysis of one's limbs, usually in the wake of brain damage from stroke. Because anosognosic patients overlook their paralysis, anosognosia seems (...) be a counter-example to the claim that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience. However, careful consideration of the data shows that anosognosia makes a poor counterexample to a rich theory of consciousness. Thus, we retain reason to believe that proprioception exists in the periphery of conscious experience, and so to conclude that conscious experience is relatively rich. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is prudentially wise to defer to groups about how they are essentially constituted and defined. After a few words situating the paper in my greater research project (§1), I articulate the kind of deference I have in mind (§2). Then I offer two conditional arguments on why it is epistemically desirable to let other people tell you how they ought to be identified (§3). The first argument is that people are owed lexical sovereignty because (...) denying it is absurd; the second is that modest skeptics ought to agree with it on the basis of some relatively anodyne and plausible epistemic considerations. (shrink)