Results for 'Maria Giuseppina Pacilli'

822 found
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  1. Cross-linguistic semantics.Maria Bittner - 1994 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (1):53 - 108.
    Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...)
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  2. Cross-linguistic semantics for questions.Maria Bittner - 1998 - Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (1):1-82.
    : The Hamblin-Karttunen approach has led to many insights about questions in English. In this article the results of this rule-by-rule tradition are reconsidered from a crosslinguistic perspective. Starting from the type-driven XLS theory developed in Bittner (1994a, b), it is argued that evidence from simple questions (in English, Polish, Lakhota and Warlpiri) leads to certain revisions. The revised XLS theory then immediately generalizes to complex questions — including scope marking (Hindi), questions with quantifiers (English) and multiple wh-questions (English, Hindi, (...)
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  3. Darwinian 'blind' hypothesis formation revisited.Maria E. Kronfeldner - 2010 - Synthese 175 (2):193--218.
    Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothesis formation. The paper then introduces and develops the standard critique that creative hypothesis formation is guided (...)
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  4. In defence of a humanistically oriented historiography: the nature/culture distinction at the time of the Anthropocene.Giuseppina D'Oro - 2020 - In Jouni Matt-Kuukkanen (ed.), Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives. Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury. pp. 216-236.
    “Do Anthropocene narratives confuse an important distinction between the natural and the historical past?” asks Giuseppina D’Oro. D’Oro defends the view that the concept of the historical past is sui generis and distinct from that of the geological past against a new, Anthropocene-inspired challenge to the possibility of a humanistically oriented historiography. She argues that the historical past is not a short segment of geological time, the time of the human species on Earth, but the past investigated from the (...)
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  5. The touch of King Midas: Collingwood on why actions are not events.Giuseppina D’Oro - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (1):160-169.
    It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not (...)
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  6. Imagination and Revision.Giuseppina D'Oro & Jonas Ahlskog - 2021 - In C. M. van den Akker (ed.), The Routledge Companion to History and Theory. Routledge. pp. 215-232.
    In this contribution we explore revisionists and anti-revisionists conceptions of the historical imagination. The focus will be on how these conceptions of the historical imagination determine how one ought to answer the question of whether or not it is in principle possible to know the past in its own terms rather than from the perspective of the present. The contrast that we are seeking to draw is that between a conception of the historical imagination which is revisionist in the sense (...)
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  7. Tense, mood, and centering.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Natural languages exhibit a great variety of grammatical paradigms. For instance, in English verbs are grammatically marked for tense, whereas in the tenseless Eskimo-Aleut language Kalaallisut they are marked for illocutionary mood. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience and speaking is part of that experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology, or reference to speech acts without any illocutionary mood morphology. Nevertheless, different grammatical systems are semantically parallel in certain respects. Specifically, (...)
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  8. Ontology for human talk and thought (not robotics).Maria Bittner - 2006 - Theoretical Linguistics 32 (1):47-56.
    Hamm, Kamp, and van Lambalgen 2006 (hereafter HLK) propose to relate NL discourse to cognitive representations that also deal with world knowledge, planning, belief revision, etc. Surprisingly, to represent human cognition they use an event calculus "which has found applications in robotics". This comment argues that the robotics-based theory of HLK attributes too much to world knowledge and not enough to the ontology, centering, and other universals of NL semantics. It is also too Anglo-centric to generalize to languages of other (...)
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  9. María G. Navarro: Interpretar argumentando.José María García Gómez-Heras - 2011 - Isegoría 44:366-372.
    Escribir hoy en día un libro sobre hermenéutica, que tal hermenéutica se refiera a la desarrollada por G. Gadamer en su conocido Verdad y método y que se pretenda añadir algo nuevo a lo mucho escrito sobre el tema parecería, a primera vista, empresa irrealizable. Que ambas pretensiones inspiren la sólida monografía de María G. Navarro —titulada Interpretar y argumentar— constituye empresa audaz y arriesgada, plena de coraje innovador, que provoca admiración, curiosidad e interés. Contra lo que pudiera parecer a (...)
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  10. Notes from greenland.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Tuesday evening, December 27, 1983 …I did go skiing today, though, which is what I want to write about. The temperature is down to –10°C again, on my thermometer, which probably means –12 to –13°C, in real terms. The visibility is still very poor though the wind has stopped. I set off at 2 pm and got home at about 4 pm, which meant skiing in the dark all the time. This wouldn’t have bothered me except that I had an (...)
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  11. Human History in the Age of the Anthropocene: A Defence of the Nature/Culture Distinction.Giuseppina D'Oro - 2021 - Iai News.
    A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as responsible for the devastating impact humans have had on the planet. But if we give up on the nature / culture distinction and see human activity as just another type of natural process, we risk losing our ability to attribute (...)
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  12.  82
    Democracy and Knowledge: Remarks on Brennan and Wikforss.Tero Tulenheimo & Giuseppina Ronzitti - 2024 - Filosofiska Notiser 11 (1):19-61.
    We take up Jason Brennan’s critique of democracy as formulated in his monograph _Against Democracy_ (2016) and discuss the arguments that Åsa Wikforss presents against Brennan’s views in her book _Därför demokrati_ (2021). Both authors grant the importance of knowledge for political decision-making, but they differ in their respective understandings of what counts as knowledge and they draw very different conclusions from the relevant knowledge requirement. Our general aim is to detect problems in democracy as well as in attempts to (...)
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  13. Austrian Aesthetics.Maria E. Reicher - 2006 - In Markus Textor (ed.), The Austrian contribution to analytic philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 293–323.
    Thinking of problems of aesthetics has a long and strong tradition in Austrian Philosophy. It starts with Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848); it is famously represented by the critic and musicologist Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904); and it is continued within the school of Alexius Meinong (1853-1920), in particular by Christian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) and Stephan Witasek (1870-1915). Nowadays the aesthetic writings of Bolzano, Ehrenfels, and Witasek are hardly known, particularly not in the Anglo-Saxon world. Austrian aesthetics is surely less known than Austrian contributions (...)
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  14. (1 other version)Reasons for action and practical reasoning.Maria Alvarez - 2010 - Ratio 23 (4):355-373.
    This paper seeks a better understanding of the elements of practical reasoning: premises and conclusion. It argues that the premises of practical reasoning do not normally include statements such as ‘I want to ϕ’; that the reasoning in practical reasoning is the same as in theoretical reasoning and that what makes it practical is, first, that the point of the relevant reasoning is given by the goal that the reasoner seeks to realize by means of that reasoning and the subsequent (...)
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  15. The Structural Determination of Case and Agreement.Maria Bittner & Ken Hale - 1996 - Linguistic Inquiry 27 (1):1–68.
    We analyze Case in terms of independent constraints on syntactic structures — namely, the Projection Principle (inherent Case), the ECP (marked structural Case), and the theory of extended projections (the nominative, a Caseless nominal projection). The resulting theory accounts for (1) the government constraint on Case assignment, (2) all major Case systems (accusative, ergative, active, three-way, and split), (3) Case alternations (passive, antipassive, and ECM), and (4) the Case of nominal possessors. Structural Case may correlate with pronominal agreement because the (...)
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  16.  45
    Picture a book—A philosophy performance exhibition visual essay on “What’s Left of Human Nature.”.Maria Kronfeldner, Patrik Nikovitz & Nastassia Stein - 2024 - Zenodo.
    This is a report on a philosophy performance that happened as part of the 2024 Long Night of Research in Austria. Maria Kronfeldner staged the content of her book “What’s left of Human Nature: A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept,” (2018, MIT Press) by filling the wall in the gallery of CEU’s Library Café with pictures and text, performatively communicating the process of philosophical inquiry – the ordering of the material that one has found, the (...)
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  17. Quantification in Eskimo: A Challenge for Compositional Semantics.Maria Bittner - 1995 - In Emmon W. Bach, Eloise Jelinek, Angelika Kratzer & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Quantification in Natural Languages. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 59--80.
    This paper describes quantificational structures in Greenlandic Eskimo (Kalaallisut), a language where familiar quantificational meanings are expressed in ways that are quite different from English. Evidence from this language thus poses some formidable challenges for cross-linguistic theories of compositional semantics.
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  18. How to do 'Jazzy Philosophy': An Interview with Maria daVenza Tillmanns.Maria daVenza Tillmanns & Nathan Eckstrand - 2020 - Blog of the Apa.
    Interview with the author of "why We are in Need of Tails." Iguana Books, Toronto, Canada.
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  19. Building complex events: the case of Sicilian Doubly Inflected Construction.Fabio Del Prete & Giuseppina Todaro - 2020 - Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 38 (1):1-41.
    We examine the Doubly Inflected Construction of Sicilian (DIC; Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001, 2003, Cruschina 2013), in which a motion verb V1 from a restricted set is followed by an event verb V2 and both verbs are inflected for the same person and tense features. The interpretation of DIC involves a complex event which behaves as a single, integrated event by linguistic tests. Based on data drawn from different sources, we argue that DIC is an asymmetrical serial verb construction (Aikhenvald (...)
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  20. The leopard does not change its spots: naturalism and the argument against methodological pluralism in the sciences.Jonas Ahlskog & Giuseppina D'Oro - 2022 - In Adam Tamas Tuboly (ed.), The history of understanding in analytic philosophy: around logical empiricism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 185-208.
    This paper sets out to undermine the view that a commitment to the early modern conception of the mind as immortalized in Ryle’s metaphor of the (Cartesian) ghost in the machine and in Quine’s metaphor of the (Lockean) myth of the museum is required to articulate a defence of the sui generis character of humanistic explanations. These powerful metaphors have not only contributed to undermining the claim for methodological pluralism by caricaturizing the arguments for disunity in the sciences; they have (...)
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  21. To reply or not to reply, that is the question: descriptive metaphysics and the sceptical challenge.Giuseppina D'Oro - 2023 - In Benjamin De Mesel and Sybren Heyndels Audun Bengtson (ed.), P.F. Strawson and His Philosophical Legacy. Oxford University Press. pp. 192-211.
    How should one respond to scepticism? Should one seek to refute it? Or should scepticism be ignored? This paper argues that descriptive metaphysics occupies an intermediate logical space between truth-directed transcendental arguments aimed at refuting the sceptic and the quietist stance of the Humean naturalist who declines to take up the sceptical challenge. Descriptive metaphysics is neither quietist nor confrontational. It seeks to show, rather, that the sceptic is not a genuine partner in conversation.
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  22. What’s Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept.Maria E. Kronfeldner - 2018 - Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
    Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to (...)
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  23. On the Semantics of the Greenlandic Antipassive and Related Constructions.Maria Bittner - 1987 - International Journal of American Linguistics 53:194–231.
    : This study describes a new field method, suited for investigating scope relations — and other aspects of truth conditional meaning — with native speaker consultants who may speak no other language and have no background in linguistics or logic. This method revealed a surprising scope contrast between the antipassive and the ergative construction in Greenlandic Eskimo. The results of this field work are described in detail and a crosslinguistic scope generalization is proposed based on Greenlandic Eskimo, Basque, Polish, Russian, (...)
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  24. (1 other version)Notes on evidentiality and mood.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    In Kalaallisut (Eskimo-Aleut:Greenland) verbs inflect for illocutionary mood (declarative, interrogative, imperative, or optative). In addition, the language has an evidential (reportative) clitic which is compatible with all illocutionary moods and gives rise to a variety of readings. These<br>lecture notes exemplify the attested combinations and readings by means of a representative sample of mini-discourses and mini-dialogs.
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  25. Won't you please unite? Darwinism, cultural evolution and kinds of synthesis.Maria Kronfeldner - 2010 - In A. Barahona, H.-J. Rheinberger & E. Suarez-Diaz (eds.), The Hereditary Hourglass: Genetics and Epigenetics, 1868-2000. Max Planck Insititute for the History of Science. pp. 111-125.
    The synthetic theory of evolution has gone stale and an expanding or (re-)widening of it towards a new synthesis has been announced. This time, development and culture are supposed to join the synthesis bandwagon. In this article, I distinguish between four kinds of synthesis that are involved when we extend the evolutionary synthesis towards culture: the integration of fields, the heuristic generation of interfields, the expansion of validity, and the creation of a common frame of discourse or ‘big-picture’. These kinds (...)
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  26. Actions, thought-experiments and the 'principle of alternate possibilities'.Maria Alvarez - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (1):61 – 81.
    In 1969 Harry Frankfurt published his hugely influential paper 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility' in which he claimed to present a counterexample to the so-called 'Principle of Alternate Possibilities' ('a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise'). The success of Frankfurt-style cases as counterexamples to the Principle has been much debated since. I present an objection to these cases that, in questioning their conceptual cogency, undercuts many of those debates. Such cases (...)
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  27. (3 other versions)Maria daVenza Tillmanns, Why We Are in Need of Tales (Part III). [REVIEW]Maria daVenza Tillmanns - 2022 - Социум И Власть 94:92-98.
    Readers are awaiting a new encounter with stories united under the common title Why We Are in Need of Tales. Let me remind you that these deep philosophical books were written by Maria daVenza Tillmanns, a professional philosopher dedicated to the study of philosophizing with children, who has gained valuable experience in this field. Maria’s books are inspired by her work with her students at El Toyon Elementary School in National City (California), with whom Maria held philosophy (...)
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  28.  74
    Relevance without existence.Maria Buyko, Vincenzo Moscati & Salvatore Pistoia-Reda - 2024 - Glossa 9 (1):1-13.
    The present paper presents experimental evidence confirming that contextually mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when quantifiers range over empty domains. In the literature, this possibility has been interpreted as providing further evidence for a grammatical approach to scalar implicatures. The main result presented here is that scalar sentences with empty domains are judged as more infelicitous when associated with a mismatching implicature than variants with the same empty domains but associated with a non-mismatching implicature. We interpret this result (...)
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  29. Agency and Two‐Way Powers.Maria Alvarez - 2013 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 113 (1pt1):101-121.
    In this paper I propose a way of characterizing human agency in terms of the concept of a two‐way power. I outline this conception of agency, defend it against some objections, and briefly indicate how it relates to free agency and to moral praise‐ and blameworthiness.
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  30. (2 other versions)Debilissimae Entitates?Maria Rosa Antognazza - 2001 - The Leibniz Review 11:1-22.
    Over the past decades a number of scholars have identified Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld as one of the most decisive early influences on Leibniz. In particular, the impressive similarity between their conceptions of universal harmony has been stressed. Since the issue of relations is at the heart of both Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s doctrines of universal harmony, the extent of the similarity between their doctrines will depend, however, on Bisterfeld and Leibniz’s respective theories of relations, and especially on their ontologies of relations. (...)
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  31. The tragedy of the digital commons.Gian Maria Greco & Luciano Floridi - 2004 - Ethics and Information Technology 6 (2):73-81.
    In the paper it is argued that bridging the digital divide may cause a new ethical and social dilemma. Using Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, we show that an improper opening and enlargement of the digital environment (Infosphere) is likely to produce a Tragedy of the Digital Commons (TDC). In the course of the analysis, we explain why Adar and Huberman's previous use of Hardin's Tragedy to interpret certain recent phenomena in the Infosphere (especially peer-to-peer communication) may not be entirely (...)
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  32. Why Collingwood Matters: A Defence of Humanistic Understanding.Giuseppina D'Oro - 2023 - New York: Bloomsbury.
    R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was an English philosopher, historian and practicing archaeologist. His work, particularly in the philosophy of action and history, has been profoundly influential in the 20th and 21st century. Although the importance of his work is indisputable, this is the first book to consider how and why it actually matters. Giussepina D'oro considers the importance of Collingwood as a thinker who thinks kaleidoscopically and, unlike lots of contemporary philosophers, refuses to focus on narrow, technical interests but instead, observes (...)
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  33. Nominal quantification as top-level anaphora.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    So far, we have focused on discourse reference to atomic individuals and specific times, events, and states. The basic point of the argument was that all types of discourse reference involve attention-guided anaphora (in the sense of Bittner 2012: Ch. 2). We now turn to discourses involving anaphora to and by quantificational expressions. Today, we focus on quantification over individuals but the analysis we develop will directly generalize to other semantic types. The basic idea is that quantification is one more (...)
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  34. Time and modality without tenses or modals.Maria Bittner - 2011 - In Renate Musan & Monika Rathert (eds.), Tense across Languages. Niemeyer. pp. 147--188.
    In English, discourse reference to time involves grammatical tenses interpreted as temporal anaphors. Recently, it has been argued that conditionals involve modal discourse anaphora expressed by a parallel grammatical system of anaphoric modals. Based on evidence from Kalaallisut, this paper argues that temporal and modal anaphora can be just as precise in a language that does not have either grammatical category. Instead, temporal anaphora directly targets eventualities of verbs, without mediating tenses, while modal anaphora involves anaphoric moods and/or attitudinal verbs.
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  35. How many kinds of reasons?Maria Alvarez - 2007 - Philosophical Explorations 12 (2):181 – 193.
    Reasons can play a variety of roles in a variety of contexts. For instance, reasons can motivate and guide us in our actions (and omissions), in the sense that we often act in the light of reasons. And reasons can be grounds for beliefs, desires and emotions and can be used to evaluate, and sometimes to justify, all these. In addition, reasons are used in explanations: both in explanations of human actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc., and in explanations of a (...)
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  36. Mood as illocutionary centering.Maria Bittner - unknown
    By this point, we have developed some articulated analyses of top-level temporal anaphora, including temporal quantification, in languages with grammatical tense and/or aspect systems, represented by English, Polish, and Mandarin. But it is still not clear how this approach might extend to temporal anaphora in a language such as Kalaallisut, which has neither grammatical tense nor grammatical aspect, but instead marks only grammatical mood and person. Most theories of mood and modal reference either ignore temporal reference or analyze modal and (...)
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  37. Psychological Essentialism and Dehumanization.Maria Kronfeldner - 2020 - In Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization. London, New York: Routledge.
    In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner (...)
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  38. The Standing to Blame and Meddling.Maria Seim - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (2):7-26.
    It is generally agreed that for blame to be appropriate the wrongdoer must be blameworthy. However, blameworthiness is not sufficient for appropriate blame. It has been argued that for blame to be appropriate the blamer must have standing to blame. Philosophers writing on the topic have distinguished several considerations that might defeat someone’s standing to blame. This paper examines the underexplored consideration of how personal relationships can influence who has the standing to express blame. We seem to assume that if (...)
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  39. Mood-based temporal reference.Maria Bittner - unknown
    Last time we introduced the notion of an illocutionary perspective . The basic idea is that the very act of speaking up introduces several discourse referents. The speech act itself (e ) is introduced as the central perspective point ( ε ). In addition, all the speech spheres (p ) where this speech act is realized, as well as the worlds of each sphere (w ∈p ) are introduced as modal topics ( Ω and  ω ).
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  40. Individuals and possibilities (3): Notes on issues raised by stone & Hardt (1997).Maria Bittner - manuscript
    This is the last of three lectures on anaphoric parallels between individuals and possibilities across languages (IMS, Stuttgart, 2000).
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  41. (1 other version)Aspect as eventuality centering: Mandarin.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Unlike English and Polish, Mandarin has no grammatical tense (TNS). Therefore, reference times are only introduced by temporal modifiers (contra Smith 1991/7, Wu 2003, Lin 2005, etc). In Mandarin discourse, the frequency of such modifiers (‘today’, ‘last night’, etc) is about the same (low) as in tensed languages (e.g. English, Polish) and plays a similarly marginal role in temporal discourse reference. This, however, does NOT mean that in tenseless Mandarin temporal relations between eventualities in discourse are in any way less (...)
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  42. Sample derivations in Update with Centering.Maria Bittner - manuscript
    Appendix to lecture notes on "Nominal (re)centering: From Kalaallisut to UC1". Day 2 of advanced course on "Cross-linguistic compositional semantics" at LSA Summer Institute 2009 at UC Berkeley.
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  43. Individuals and possibilities (1): Notes on stone (1999) 'reference to possible worlds'.Maria Bittner - unknown
    The first of three lectures on nominal and modal discourse reference across languages (IMS, Stuttgart, 2000).
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  44. Future discourse in a tenseless language.Maria Bittner - 2005 - Journal of Semantics 22 (4):339-87.
    The Eskimo language Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless.
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  45. Topical Referents for Individuals and Possibilities.Maria Bittner - 2001 - In Rachel Hastings, Brendan Jackson & Zsófia Zvolensky (eds.), Proceedings from SALT XI. CLC.
    Partee (1973) noted anaphoric parallels between English tenses and pronouns. Since then these parallels have been analyzed in terms of type-neutral principles of discourse anaphora. Recently, Stone (1997) extended the anaphoric parallel to English modals. In this paper I extend the story to languages of other types. This evidence also shows that centering parallels are even more detailed than previously recognized. Based on this evidence, I propose a semantic representation language (Logic of Change with Centered Worlds), in which the observed (...)
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  46. Explaining Creativity.Maria Kronfeldner - 2018 - In Berys Gaut & Matthew Kieran (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 213-29.
    Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of creativity, because it confuses conceptual issues with (...)
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  47. Online update: Temporal, modal, and de se anaphora in polysynthetic discourse.Maria Bittner - 2007 - In Chris Barker & Pauline I. Jacobson (eds.), Direct compositionality. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 11--363.
    This paper introduces a framework for direct surface composition by online update. The surface string is interpreted as is, with each morpheme in turn updating the input state of information and attention. A formal representation language, Logic of Centering, is defined and some crosslinguistic constraints on lexical meanings and compositional operations are formulated.
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  48. (1 other version)When Ignorance is No Excuse.Maria Alvarez & Clayton Littlejohn - 2017 - In Philip Robichaud & Jan Wieland (eds.), Responsibility - The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 64-81.
    Ignorance is often a perfectly good excuse. There are interesting debates about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake subvert obligation, but little disagreement about whether non-culpable factual ignorance and mistake exculpate. What about agents who have all the relevant facts in view but fail to meet their obligations because they do not have the right moral beliefs? If their ignorance of their obligations derives from mistaken moral beliefs or from ignorance of the moral significance of the facts they have in (...)
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  49. Aspectual universals of temporal anaphora.Maria Bittner - 2008 - In Susan Deborah Rothstein (ed.), Theoretical and Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Semantics of Aspect. John Benjamins. pp. 11--349.
    It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...)
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  50. Perspectival discourse referents for indexicals.Maria Bittner - 2014 - In Proceedings of SULA 7. UMass at Amherst. pp. 1–22.
    This paper argues that indexical reference is a species of discourse reference, just like anaphora. Both varieties of discourse reference involve not only context dependence, but also context change. The act of speaking up focuses attention and thereby makes this very speech event available for discourse reference by indexicals. Mentioning something likewise focuses attention, making the mentioned entity available for subsequent discourse reference by anaphors. Empirical evidence is presented from grammatical centering in Kalaallisut and "shifty indexicals" in Slave attitude reports.
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