Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a (...) new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

This paper examines Aristotle’s vocabulary of pain, that is the differences and relations of the concepts of pain expressed by synonyms in the same semantic field. It investigates what is particularly Aristotelian in the selection of the pain-words in comparison with earlier authors and specifies the special semantic scope of each word-cluster. The result not only aims to pin down the exact way these terms converge with and diverge from each other, but also serves as a basis for further (...) understanding Aristotle’s philosophical conception of pain. (shrink)

We discuss a research project that develops and applies algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We try to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and secondlanguage acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms: We use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students’ abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of science (...) texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques feeds back into further development of our computational theory. Keywords: artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, reading, reasoning, science education, vocabulary acquisition. (shrink)

The automatic integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging goals facing biomedical informatics today. Controlled vocabularies have played an important role in realizing this goal, by making it possible to draw together information from heterogeneous sources secure in the knowledge that the same terms will also represent the same entities on all occasions of use. One of the most impressive achievements in this regard is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is rapidly acquiring the (...) status of a de facto standard in the field of gene and gene product annotations, and whose methodology has been much intimated in attempts to develop controlled vocabularies for shared use in different domains of biology. The GO Consortium has recognized, however, that its controlled vocabulary as currently constituted is marked by several problematic features - features which are characteristic of much recent work in bioinformatics and which are destined to raise increasingly serious obstacles to the automatic integration of biomedical information in the future. Here, we survey some of these problematic features, focusing especially on issues of compositionality and syntactic regimentation. (shrink)

The English language is immensely rich in terms of vocabulary. When learning vocabulary, successful students employ specific strategies. Several studies have been conducted to explore the vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) English language learners employ. However, there is a lack of empirical research on the topic in Afghanistan. Therefore, the aims of this study were to 1) explore the VLS undergraduate English learners employ; 2) examine the correlation between VLS and gender; 3) examine the correlation between VLS and (...) students’ year of studies; and 4) examine the correlation between VLS and students’ English proficiency level. The study used a descriptive-quantitative research design. The study discovered that metacognitive and memory strategies were the most frequently used, while social strategies were the least frequently used. Moreover, the correlation results revealed that metacognitive strategies were more prevalent among males, while memory strategies were more popular among females. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, realize (...) that you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

In the English literary world, a similar concept to the title of this short reflection piece has appeared before. However, it seems not obvious that such a succinct expression—which fully captures its intended meaning—exists in other cultures. At the very least, such formulations are rarely encountered. At least, this holds in my mother tongue, Vietnamese. Therefore, I have chosen this concise title for a brief reflection to convey a valuable message in today’s chaotic information landscape.

Eighteenth-century German writers with broad interests in natural history, and in particular, in the kind of ethnographic reports typically included in travel and expedition narratives, had to be able to access and read the original reports or they had to work with translations. The translators of these reports were, moreover, typically forced more than usual into the role of interpreter. This was especially the case when it came to accounts wherein vocabulary did not exist or was at least not (...) settled, and more importantly where scientific understanding was uncertain or altogether lacking, a situation that could only make the creation of semantic categories all the more significant. With this state of affairs in mind, this essay concentrates on Immanuel Kant’s work to develop a specialised racial vocabulary, and does so in a manner that reveals the importance of Buffon’s account of variation as a resource for Kant, even as Kant sought to position the new vocabulary as an improved template for transforming taxonomy or Naturbeschreibung into a genuine historical science or Naturgeschichte. (shrink)

Movement-building involves, crucially, an attempt to build bridges that mediate between the transformative aims of radicals and broad publics that are normally indifferent to projects of far-reaching social change. The vocabularies that activists deploy, in order to understand themselves and to make themselves understood by others, can serve to construct such bridges. But they can also serve to erect barriers to the constructive work already done, notably by previous generations. It is worth paying attention, therefore, to the potential pitfalls of (...) ill-considered elements of whatever political vocabulary one adopts. Here, I examine in detail some important differences between the political vocabulary of the New Left (associated with radicalization of the late 60s and early 70s) and the political vocabulary of the “post-New Left,” that is, the activist Left of the first two decades of the 21st century. (shrink)

At or near the beginning of many textbooks and syllabi in applied or professional ethics is a unit on philosophical moral theories (such as utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics). However, teaching such theories is of questionable value in this context. This article introduces the moral vocabulary approach. Instead of burdening students with complex ethical theories, they are introduced to the logic of elementary moral concepts. This avoids many of the drawbacks of teaching ethical theories, while preserving the benefit of (...) equipping students with the conceptual tools they need to critically analyse ethical issues. (shrink)

A discussion of the role of metaphor and reinterpretation in extending architectural vocabularies.

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” (...) of the text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision. (shrink)

This study focused on determining the attitudes and academic performance of engineering students in Technological University of the Philippines-Manila. A total of 139 male engineering and 47 female engineering students were the respondents of the study. This only dwell on the attitude in learning English Language Vocabulary in terms of their behavioral aspects, cognitive aspects, and emotional aspects. This is a quantitative study utilized by descriptive and inferential method as the research design. Based on the findings, academic grades strongly (...) correlate with their attitude in learning English vocabulary which is a negative correlation coefficient in all its components with r value of -0.3695 in behavioral, -0.5261 in Cognitive, and -0.4332 in emotional aspect. Their P values is less than .00001 which is significant at p<0.05. Thus, the null hypothesis where there is no significant relationship between their ALEV and academic performance is rejected. The researcher recommends that teachers should enhance creativity in teaching vocabulary which inculcate the positive attitudes and motivation towards learning process. Teachers and parents should encourage the learners to read and watch educational related materials. (shrink)

In this chapter, the frameworks of enactive cognitive science (e.g., Baran- diaran 2008, 2017; Di Paolo et al. 2018) and ontological design, particu- larly the work of Tony Fry (e.g., 2009), are synthesized to give a general account of how humans act toward change at multiple scales. According to this synthesis, design is understood as a spatiotemporally extended form of adaptive self-regulation, or adaptivity in the enactive vocabulary (Di Paolo 2005). When we design, we regulate ourselves in the local-present (...) to resource our future selves in ways that make certain regulations either possible or easier, and thus, desired outcomes more probable. Adaptivity, here, entails an ongoing redirection of the individuating tendencies of person-world systems either for maintaining some existing trajectories or for stabilizing new ones. This happens predominantly through modify- ing constraints at what Secchi and Cowley (2018, 2021) term the meso- scale of social organizing. This chapter considers diferent types of design (maintenance, habit, identity) operative across scales, from organisms to organizations. It concludes with some indications for how this perspective might be valuable in facing current ecological and environmental chal- lenges and the obvious demands they put on the need for change across all scales of human living. (shrink)

This article is an introduction to moral concepts. Its purpose is to introduce and explain vocabulary that can be used both in examining ethical theories, and in talking about the ethically significant aspects of concrete situations. We begin by distinguishing descriptive and normative claims, and explaining how moral claims are a special type of normative claims. We then introduce terms for the moral evaluation of actions, states of affairs, and motives. Focusing on the question ‘what should be done?’, we (...) talk at some length about factors that influence the moral evaluation of actions, such as rights, duties, and consequences. We also cover related concepts such as justifications, excuses, praise, and blame. Finally, we discuss ethical reasoning and the roles played therein by principles, values, and theories. (shrink)

In fragment B 1 Heraclitus claims to have achieved a profound insight into the nature of things: ‘distinguishing each thing in accordance with its nature and explaining how it is.’ In a number of similarly cryptic remarks, he offers a series of clues to the nature of that insight. It is properly spoken of as noos or wisdom rather than as learning from experience (B 17, 28a, 40, 45, 54, 104, 107, 123). It consists of xunesis or understanding what is (...) common (B 2, 80, 89, 103) and requires paying attention (B 86, 118, 112) to how things opposed to one another are actually in agreement (B 8, 10, 12, 80, 88). In making these cryptic remarks Heraclitus was seeking to make his audience aware of the possibility that they might achieve a deep insight into the nature of the cosmos and their place within the larger scheme of things. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, we examine some basic linguistic abilities in a small sample of adults with minimal receptive vocabulary, whose receptive mental verbal age ranges from 1;2 to 3;10. In particular, we examine whether the participants in our study understand noun phrases consisting of a noun modified by an adjective. We use stimuli that they can recognise by name. Except for one participant, we find that, while all of them understand the noun and adjective in isolation, none seems to (...) understand these noun phrases, which means that they seem to not do linguistic composition. In order to test whether the difficulty is linguistic or conceptual, we ran two other studies, one on concept composition, and the other on iconic symbolic composition (composition of pictograms). Results suggest that linguistic composition is particularly difficult in this population, and that vocabulary breadth may not predict compositional abilities. (shrink)

Ontologies describe reality in specific domains in ways that can bridge various disciplines and languages. They allow easier access and integration of information that is collected by different groups. Ontologies are currently used in the biomedical sciences, geography, and law. A Biomedical Ethics Ontology would benefit members of ethics committees who deal with protocols and consent forms spanning numerous fields of inquiry. There already exists the Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI); the proposed BMEO would interoperate with OBI, creating a powerful (...) information tool. We define a domain ontology and begin to construct a BMEO, focused on the process of evaluating human research protocols. Finally, we show how our BMEO can have practical applications for ethics committees. This paper describes ongoing research and a strategy for its broader continuation and cooperation. (shrink)

In book X, Plato's rejection of mimetic poetry can be read as a parallel to rejecting the conventions of the poetic style contemporary to his time. This rejection can, owing to the premises derived and the analyses made in this paper, further be read as to suggest that Plato presses for a reformation of the poetic vocabulary. That is, as to suggest that Plato proposes that the non-rational imagistic tradition, embodied in mimetic poetry, get replaced by a rational and (...) noetic-aspiring rhetoric that opts for knowledge and truth. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in (...) normative statuses affected by speech-acts—pragmatic norms. These structural discursive norms differentiate discursive practices and account for distinctive features such as objectivity and motivational import that some have and others lack. The structure exhibited by a practice is then explained in terms of its utility, making it possible to see how different discursive practices are answerable to the different needs and purposes of the discursive beings who use them. I call the resulting explanatory framework a pragmatic analysis of linguistic meaning (PALM). -/- Turning my attention to moral “ought,” I argue that the structural discursive norms of moral discourse differentiate it from other objective discourses, like empirical discourse, on the one hand, and from other normative discourses, like prudential discourse, on the other. Drawing on work in evolutionary psychology and anthropology, I complete the PALM with an account of moral discourse a meta-normative practice with a metacoordinative function. Its utility for the discursive beings who use it lies in its enabling them to remedy certain tensions and instabilities that arise in their other coordinative, normative practices in a way that minimizes the risk of domination by alpha-type freeriders, the fracturing of social groups, and individual defection from cooperative endeavors. -/- In the final two chapters, I leverage the account to defend a pragmatist-friendly notion of objectivity in terms of a structure of distributed epistemic authority according to which no claim within a practice is ultimately authoritative or immune from challenge and to reconcile this sense of objectivity with a persistent pressure toward a kind of relativism that restricts the standing to make moral claims to members of the relevant communities. (shrink)

The abstract Latinate vocabulary of modern English, in which philosophy and science are done, is inherited from medieval scholastic Latin. Words like "nature", "art", "abstract", "probable", "contingent", are not native to English but entered it from scholastic translations around the 15th century. The vocabulary retains much though not all of its medieval meanings.

In a development that has still been hardly noticed by philosophers, a conception of ontology has been advanced in recent years in a series of extra-philosophical disciplines as researchers in linguistics, psychology, geography and anthropology have sought to elicit the ontological commitments (‘ontologies’, in the plural) of different cultures or disciplines. Exploiting the terminology of Quine, researchers in psychology and anthropology have sought to establish what individual human subjects, or entire human cultures, are committed to, ontologically, in their everyday cognition, (...) in much the same way in which philosophers of science have attempted to elicit the ontological commitments of the natural sciences. Thus they have engaged in inquiries designed to establish how folk ontologies (or folk biologies, folk theories of physics, folk psychologies, and so on) develop through infancy and childhood, or to establish the degree to which given elements of folk ontologies reflect universal features of the human cognitive system. In a parallel development, researchers in biomedicine developed what they called 'ontologies' as controlled vocabularies to ensure interoperability of the way in which, for example, genomic data is described in different biological disciplines. We describe in what follows some of the relations between these efforts and the more traditional concerns of philosophers. (shrink)

Medical terminology collects and organizes the many different kinds of terms employed in the biomedical domain both by practitioners and also in the course of biomedical research. In addition to serving as labels for biomedical classes, these names reflect the organizational principles of biomedical vocabularies and ontologies. Some names represent invariant features (classes, universals) of biomedical reality (i.e., they are a matter for ontology). Other names, however, convey also how this reality is perceived, measured, and understood by health professionals (i.e., (...) they belong to the domain of epistemology). We analyze terms from several biomedical vocabularies in order to throw light on the interactions between ontological and epistemological components of these terminologies. We identify four cases: 1) terms containing classification criteria, 2) terms reflecting detectability, modality, uncertainty, and vagueness, 3) terms created in order to obtain a complete partition of a given domain, and 4) terms reflecting mere fiat boundaries. We show that epistemology-loaded terms are pervasive in biomedical vocabularies, that the “classes” they name often do not comply with sound classification principles, and that they are therefore likely to cause problems in the evolution and alignment of terminologies and associated ontologies. (shrink)

The study aimed to analyze lexical items underpinned in the textbooks used in the current teaching of ESP and GE. Using content analysis, a systematic evaluation of texts to examine nuances to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative data. This was such of importance, however, difficult to study due to issues of interest like in the study, frequency of lexical items in ESP, and GE textbooks. Results found 13,713 lexical items in Hospitality Management, 17,561 in Criminology, 4576 in Tourism, (...) 7167 in Marine Engineering, and 512 in Information Technology. Furthermore, the overall percentage of ESP lexical items fell in Tier 2 (with multiple-meaning while the least was in Tier 3, specifically on context-specific vocabulary. It is the core of vocabulary learning to ensure English language teaching. It is its goal to help learners better understand language, allowing them to understand others as they want to express themselves as well. This applies not only in speaking but also in writing and reading. Wilkins (1972, p. 111-112) stated that without grammar very little understanding can be acquired and without vocabulary there can be no learning at all. Thus, even without good grammar, so long as you equipped with useful words and expression, one can still manage to communicate. Lewis (1993) argued that “lexis is the heart of language” and that it develops a better fluency and expression in English. He also added the significance to the learners of acquiring a more productive vocabulary knowledge, also, their eagerness to develop their own personal vocabulary strategies. Thus, a proposed bridge model program was recommended to highlight the study findings using the lexicons found from the different respective courses. (shrink)

The essay aims at demonstrating that it is dangerous to try to reconstruct a philosophical doctrine taking into account solely or predominantly the analysis of vocabulary. This is particularly true of the philosophical doctrines of the ancients, who generally did not feel obliged to adopt a coherent and unambiguous technical terminology. Starting from the essay of F. Camera, Sui molteplici significati di hermeneia in Platone, which was published in 2004 and then re-edited in 2011 with few modifications but with (...) a different title, the author shows that the method of facing Plato’s hermeneutics through the ἑρμηνεύειν-words is a source of distortions and over-interpretations; that is, it causes excessive density and conceptual significance to be attributed to words used instead in their current meaning. One must remember, even if it should be well known to anyone who devotes himself to these themes, that not all words, expressions and concepts become philosophical entities only because they appear in the works of an author tagged “philosophy.”. (shrink)

My main purpose in this article is to present an argument for the idea that necessity qua truth in all possible worlds, without other qualifications, leads us to contradiction. If we do not want to accept the contradiction, we will face a dilemma: or accepting that everything we take as contingent is in fact necessary, or accepting that we cannot translate some sentences – at least the indexed to worlds sentences – to the possible worlds vocabulary. We have an (...) intuition – and we develop an argument for it – that if “P”, evaluated in w*, is a contingent truth, so it cannot be the case that “P in w*” is a necessary truth. Generally, the argument tries to show that “P”, evaluated in w*, and “P in w*” are made true by the same contingent fact. If we suppose that “P in w*” is necessary, we would have to suppose that the fact that makes it true is also necessary, which would be contradictory with the fact that makes “P” true in w*, if we accept that what makes “P” in w* and “P in w*” true is the same fact. I attain such an aim by presenting an argument that is divided in two parts, one to imply the contradiction and the other to show that there is no relevant difference between the indicated sentences, by showing how the dilemma arises, and by answering some possible objections. This is an important objective because the possible worlds vocabulary is the default vocabulary to treat the modalities of necessity and possibility. And if it is flawed, it is important that we identify the flaw and fix it – which is exactly what we intend to do at the end of this article, by suggesting some qualification at the necessity notion, that the necessity is the native truth in all possible worlds. And this would save the possible worlds vocabulary from the presented objection. (shrink)

Many existing biomedical vocabulary standards rest on incomplete, inconsistent or confused accounts of basic terms pertaining to diseases, diagnoses, and clinical phenotypes. Here we outline what we believe to be a logically and biologically coherent framework for the representation of such entities and of the relations between them. We defend a view of disease as involving in every case some physical basis within the organism that bears a disposition toward the execution of pathological processes. We present our view in (...) the form of a list of terms and definitions designed to provide a consistent starting point for the representation of both disease and diagnosis in information systems in the future. (shrink)

Since 2016, there has been an explosion of academic work and journalism that fixes its subject matter using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. In this paper, I argue that this terminology is not up to scratch, and that academics and journalists ought to completely stop using the terms ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’. I set out three arguments for abandonment. First, that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ do not have stable public meanings, entailing that they are either nonsense, context-sensitive, or contested. (...) Secondly, that these terms are unnecessary, because we already have a rich vocabulary for thinking about epistemic dysfunction. Thirdly, I observe that ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ have propagandistic uses, meaning that using them legitimates anti-democratic propaganda, and runs the risk of smuggling bad ideology into conversations. (shrink)

In contemporary bioethics, two vocabularies can be distinguished:person-speak andnature-speak. The first is built around the claim that a person's moral decisions are to be respected, while the other stands on the claim that moral decisions should comply with standards for human behaviour conveyed by nature. While most bioethicists have obtained a thorough mastery ofperson-speak, they are considerably less well-versed innature-speak. Apparently, the latter has lost much of its former ability to capture important aspects of moral existence. In this paper I (...) attempt to rehabilitatenature-speak from a hermeneutical perspective. I believe that the task of ethics is to enlarge our range of moral description and to rediscover neglected ways of speaking about human experience. The ethicist should enable individuals in health care settings to become more articulate about their moral experience. He should not content himself with applying those moral vocabularies which happen to be readily available, but should rather proceed by recovering forgotten vocabularies from within the philosophical tradition. Finally, one particular effort at restoringnature-speak is critically reviewed. (shrink)

We present an inferentialist account of the epistemic modal operator might. Our starting point is the bilateralist programme. A bilateralist explains the operator not in terms of the speech act of rejection ; we explain the operator might in terms of weak assertion, a speech act whose existence we argue for on the basis of linguistic evidence. We show that our account of might provides a solution to certain well-known puzzles about the semantics of modal vocabulary whilst retaining classical (...) logic. This demonstrates that an inferentialist approach to meaning can be successfully extended beyond the core logical constants. (shrink)

We develop a novel solution to the negation version of the Frege-Geach problem by taking up recent insights from the bilateral programme in logic. Bilateralists derive the meaning of negation from a primitive *B-type* inconsistency involving the attitudes of assent and dissent. Some may demand an explanation of this inconsistency in simpler terms, but we argue that bilateralism’s assumptions are no less explanatory than those of *A-type* semantics that only require a single primitive attitude, but must stipulate inconsistency elsewhere. Based (...) on these insights, we develop a version of B-type expressivism called *inferential expressivism*. This is a novel semantic framework that characterises meanings by inferential roles that define which *attitudes* one can *infer* from the use of terms. We apply this framework to normative vocabulary, thereby solving the Frege-Geach problem generally and comprehensively. Our account moreover includes a semantics for epistemic modals, thereby also explaining normative terms under epistemic modals. (shrink)

This paper presents and motivates a new philosophical and logical approach to truth and semantic paradox. It begins from an inferentialist, and particularly bilateralist, theory of meaning---one which takes meaning to be constituted by assertibility and deniability conditions---and shows how the usual multiple-conclusion sequent calculus for classical logic can be given an inferentialist motivation, leaving classical model theory as of only derivative importance. The paper then uses this theory of meaning to present and motivate a logical system---ST---that conservatively extends classical (...) logic with a fully transparent truth predicate. This system is shown to allow for classical reasoning over the full (truth-involving) vocabulary, but to be non-transitive. Some special cases where transitivity does hold are outlined. ST is also shown to give rise to a familiar sort of model for non-classical logics: Kripke fixed points on the Strong Kleene valuation scheme. Finally, to give a theory of paradoxical sentences, a distinction is drawn between two varieties of assertion and two varieties of denial. On one variety, paradoxical sentences cannot be either asserted or denied; on the other, they must be both asserted and denied. The target theory is compared favourably to more familiar related systems, and some objections are considered. (shrink)

This chapter provides an introduction to higher-order metaphysics as well as to the contributions to this volume. We discuss five topics, corresponding to the five parts of this volume, and summarize the contributions to each part. First, we motivate the usefulness of higher-order quantification in metaphysics using a number of examples, and discuss the question of how such quantifiers should be interpreted. We provide a brief introduction to the most common forms of higher-order logics used in metaphysics, and indicate a (...) number of questions which can be raised in such systems using logical vocabulary alone. Using a further example, we return to applications of higher-order logics in metaphysics. We also mention key developments in the history of higher-order logic as it pertains to metaphysics. Finally, we mention certain arguments which have been raised against the use of higher-order logic, and some ways of responding to them. (shrink)

This paper shows how to conservatively extend classical logic with a transparent truth predicate, in the face of the paradoxes that arise as a consequence. All classical inferences are preserved, and indeed extended to the full (truth—involving) vocabulary. However, not all classical metainferences are preserved; in particular, the resulting logical system is nontransitive. Some limits on this nontransitivity are adumbrated, and two proof systems are presented and shown to be sound and complete. (One proof system allows for Cut—elimination, but (...) the other does not.). (shrink)

What is the relationship between the world and logic, between intuition and language, between objects and their quantitative determinations? Rationalists, on the one hand, hold that the world is structured in a rational way. Representationalists, on the other hand, assume that language, logic, and mathematics are only the means to order and describe the intuitively given world. In World and Logic, Jens Lemanski takes up three surprising arguments from Arthur Schopenhauer’s hitherto undiscovered Berlin Lectures, which concern the philosophy of language, (...) logic, and mathematics. Based on these arguments, Lemanski develops a new position entitled ‘rational representationalism’: the world is always structured by human beings according to linguistic, logical, and mathematical principles, but the basic vocabulary of these structural descriptions already contains metaphors taken from the world around us. (shrink)

What does it mean to intentionally not perform an action? Is it possible to not perform an action out of resistant intention? Is there sufficient language for talking about this kind of behavior in the social sciences? In this article, a nonnormative vocabulary of not doings including resistant intentional omissions is developed. Unlike concepts that describe official, overt, and public resistance, James Scott’s everyday resistance and Albert Hirschman’s exit have made it possible to talk about the resistant inactions of (...) agents in the social sciences. But in order to grasp the ordinariness of this kind of oppositional behavior, philosophy of intentional omissions is used. (shrink)

Reasons, it is often said, are king in contemporary normative theory. Some philosophers say not only that the vocabulary of reasons is useful, but that reasons play a fundamental explanatory role in normative theory—that many, most, or even all, other normative facts are grounded in facts about reasons. Even if reasons fundamentalism, the strongest version of this view, has only been wholeheartedly endorsed by a few philosophers, it has a kind of prominence in contemporary normative theory that suits it (...) to be described as orthodoxy by its critics. It is the purpose of this paper to make progress toward understanding what appeal Reasons Fundamentalism should have, and whether that appeal is deserved. I will do so by exploring and comparing two central motivations for Reasons Fundamentalism. (shrink)

This book presents a critical analysis of the semantic incommensurability thesis of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. In putting forward the thesis of incommensurability, Kuhn and Feyerabend drew attention to complex issues concerning the phenomenon of conceptual change in science. They raised serious problems about the semantic and logical relations between the content of theories which deploy unlike systems of concepts. Yet few of the more extreme claims associated with incommensurability stand scrutiny. The argument of this book is as follows. (...) The terms of theories with different concepts diverge semantically and the vocabularies of such theories may not be fully intertranslatable. Given the possibility of referential overlap between the terms of conceptually divergent theories, it does not follow that the content of such theories is incomparable. Nor, given the distinction between understanding a language and translation from one language into another, does it follow that the proponents of mutually untranslatable theories are unable to communicate. Neither is it the case that the shift between conceptually divergent theories involves a discontinuous transition between theories which have no common reference or that refer to distinct worlds of their own making. The semantic differences resulting from conceptual variance may be embraced within a thoroughly realist framework on which they are construed as diverse linguistic relations to a fixed and independent reality. -/- The book, which was originally published in 1994, has now been re-issued in the Routledge Revivals series. -/- . (shrink)

It is often thought that judgments about what we ought to do are limited by judgments about what we can do, or that “ought implies can.” We conducted eight experiments to test the link between a range of moral requirements and abilities in ordinary moral evaluations. Moral obligations were repeatedly attributed in tandem with inability, regardless of the type (Experiments 1–3), temporal duration (Experiment 5), or scope (Experiment 6) of inability. This pattern was consistently observed using a variety of moral (...) vocabulary to probe moral judgments and was insensitive to different levels of seriousness for the consequences of inaction (Experiment 4). Judgments about moral obligation were no different for individuals who can or cannot perform physical actions, and these judgments differed from evaluations of a non-moral obligation (Experiment 7). Together these results demonstrate that commonsense morality rejects the “ought implies can” principle for moral requirements, and that judgments about moral obligation are made independently of considerations about ability. By contrast, judgments of blame were highly sensitive to considerations about ability (Experiment 8), which suggests that commonsense morality might accept a “blame implies can” principle. (shrink)

We develop and defend a new approach to counterlogicals. Non-vacuous counterlogicals, we argue, fall within a broader class of counterfactuals known as counterconventionals. Existing semantics for counterconventionals, 459–482 ) and, 1–27 ) allow counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of predicates and relations. We extend these theories to counterlogicals by allowing counterfactuals to shift the interpretation of logical vocabulary. This yields an elegant semantics for counterlogicals that avoids problems with the usual impossible worlds semantics. We conclude by showing how this (...) approach can be extended to counterpossibles more generally. (shrink)

I explain a mechanism I call “incorporation,” that I think is at work in a wide range of cases often put under the heading of “scare-quoting.” Incorporation is flagging some words in one’s own utterance to indicate that they are to be interpreted as if uttered by some other speaker in some other context, while supplying evidence to one’s interpreter enabling them to identify that other speaker and context. This mechanism gives us a way to use others’ vocabularies and contexts, (...) thereby extending our expressive capacities on the fly. -/- Explaining incorporation involves explaining intra-sentential shifts in lexicon and in context. Shifts of the former sort are familiar to linguists under the heading of “code-switching.” Shifts of the latter sort have been less explored; accordingly I explain how to modify Kaplan’s logic of demonstratives to allow for such shifts. -/- I compare the incorporation account of scare-quoting with accounts offered by Brandom, Recanati, Geurts and Maier, Benbaji, Predelli, and Shan. Finally I note a possible implication concerning the speech act of assertion: that you can properly assert a content you do not believe, let alone know, because part of it is expressed with words you do not understand. (shrink)

In explaining the notion of a fundamental property or relation, metaphysicians will often draw an analogy with languages. The fundamental properties and relations stand to reality as the primitive predicates and relations stand to a language: the smallest set of vocabulary God would need in order to write the “book of the world.” This paper attempts to make good on this metaphor. To that end, a modality is introduced that, put informally, stands to propositions as logical truth stands to (...) sentences. The resulting theory, formulated in higher-order logic, also vindicates the Humean idea that fundamental properties and relations are freely recombinable and a variant of the structural idea that propositions can be decomposed into their fundamental constituents via logical operations. Indeed, it is seen that, although these ideas are seemingly distinct, they are not independent, and fall out of a natural and general theory about the granularity of reality. (shrink)

Fictionalist approaches to ontology have been an accepted part of philosophical methodology for some time now. On a fictionalist view, engaging in discourse that involves apparent reference to a realm of problematic entities is best viewed as engaging in a pretense. Although in reality, the problematic entities do not exist, according to the pretense we engage in when using the discourse, they do exist. In the vocabulary of Burgess and Rosen (1997, p. 6), a nominalist construal of a given (...) discourse is revolutionary just in case it involves a “reconstruction or revision” of the original discourse. Revolutionary approaches are therefore prescriptive. In contrast, a nominalist construal of a given discourse is hermeneutic just in case it is a nominalist construal of a discourse that is put forth as a hypothesis about how the discourse is in fact used; that is, hermeneutic approaches are descriptive. I will adopt Burgess and Rosen’s terminology to describe the two different spirits in which a fictionalist hypothesis in ontology might be advanced. Revolutionary fictionalism would involve admitting that while the problematic discourse does in fact involve literal reference to nonexistent entities, we ought to use the discourse in such a way that the reference is simply within the pretense. The hermeneutic fictionalist, in contrast, reads fictionalism into our actual use of the problematic discourse. According to her, normal use of the problematic discourse involves a pretense. According to the pretense, and only according to the pretense, there exist the objects to which the discourse would commit its users, were no pretense involved. My purpose in this paper is to argue that hermeneutic fictionalism is not a viable strategy in ontology. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I discuss in detail several problematic consequences of any interesting application of hermeneutic fictionalism. Of course, if there is good evidence that hermeneutic fictionalism is correct in some cases, then some of these drastic consequences would have to be accepted.. (shrink)

Background: Ontologies and taxonomies are among the most important computational resources for molecular biology and bioinformatics. A series of recent papers has shown that the Gene Ontology (GO), the most prominent taxonomic resource in these fields, is marked by flaws of certain characteristic types, which flow from a failure to address basic ontological principles. As yet, no methods have been proposed which would allow ontology curators to pinpoint flawed terms or definitions in ontologies in a systematic way. Results: We present (...) computational methods that automatically identify terms and definitions which are defined in a circular or unintelligible way. We further demonstrate the potential of these methods by applying them to isolate a subset of 6001 problematic GO terms. By automatically aligning GO with other ontologies and taxonomies we were able to propose alternative synonyms and definitions for some of these problematic terms. This allows us to demonstrate that these other resources do not contain definitions superior to those supplied by GO. Conclusion: Our methods provide reliable indications of the quality of terms and definitions in ontologies and taxonomies. Further, they are well suited to assist ontology curators in drawing their attention to those terms that are ill-defined. We have further shown the limitations of ontology mapping and alignment in assisting ontology curators in rectifying problems, thus pointing to the need for manual curation. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a shift away from traditional truth-conditional accounts of meaning towards non-truth-conditional ones, e.g., expressivism, relativism and certain forms of dynamic semantics. Fueling this trend is some puzzling behavior of modal discourse. One particularly surprising manifestation of such behavior is the alleged failure of some of the most entrenched classical rules of inference; viz., modus ponens and modus tollens. These revisionary, non-truth-conditional accounts tout these failures, and the alleged tension between the behavior of modal vocabulary and (...) classical logic, as data in support of their departure from tradition, since the revisionary semantics invalidate some of these patterns. I, instead, offer a semantics for modality with the resources to accommodate the puzzling data while preserving classical logic, thus affirming the tradition that modals express ordinary truth-conditional content. My account shows that the real lesson of the apparent counterexamples is not the one the critics draw, but rather one they missed: namely, that there are linguistic mechanisms, reflected in the logical form, that affect the interpretation of modal language in a context in a systematic and precise way, which have to be captured by any adequate semantic account of the interaction between discourse context and modal vocabulary. The semantic theory I develop specifies these mechanisms and captures precisely how they affect the interpretation of modals in a context, and do so in a way that both explains the appearance of the putative counterexamples and preserves classical logic. (shrink)

In this paper I show that we have strong empirical and theoretical reasons to treat the verbs we use in our semantic theorizing—particularly ‘refers to ’, ‘applies to ’, and ‘is true of ’—as intensional transitive verbs. Stating our semantic theories with intensional vocabulary allows us to partially reconcile two competing approaches to the nature and subject-matter of semantics: the Chomskian approach, on which semantics is non-relational, internalistic, and concerns the psychology of language users, and the Lewisian approach, on (...) which semantics is fully relational, specifies truth-conditions, and has metaphysical implications. ITVs have two readings: an intensional, de dicto reading, and a relational, de re reading. A semantic theory stated with the de dicto readings of our semantic verbs captures the core insights of the Chomskian approach to semantics, in part because it allows us to assign extremely fine-grained semantic values to expressions, even when those expressions are empty. On the other hand, the de re reading yields a theory that is fully relational, and issues in truth-conditions. The resulting theories are related—and compatible—in that they are expressed by two different readings of the very same semantic vocabulary, and plausibly, the distinction between these two readings is one of scope. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and remedies for this injustice are widely debated. This article adds to the existing debate by arguing that theories of recog- nition can fruitfully contribute to Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and can provide a framework for structural remedy. By pairing Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice with theories of recognition, I bring forward a modest claim and a more radical claim. The first concerns a shift in our vocabulary; recognition theory can give a (...) name to the seriousness of the long-term effects of hermeneutical injustice. The second claim is more radical: thinking of hermeneutical injustice as preventing what I call “self-recogni- tion” provides a structural remedy to the phenomenon of hermeneutical injustice. Because hermeneutical injustice is first and foremost a structural injustice, I contend that every virtue theory of hermeneutical justice should be complemented by structural remedies in terms of recognition. Finally, what I argue sheds light on the seriousness of cases of exclusion of and discrimination against women in academia and helps to draw our attention to new ways to combat such problems. (shrink)

This paper consider Prior's connective Tonk from a particular bilateralist perspective. I show that there is a natural perspective from which we can see Tonk and its ilk as perfectly well-defined pieces of vocabulary; there is no need for restrictions to bar things like Tonk.

Moral discourse contains judgements of two prominent kinds. It contains deontic judgements about rightness and wrongness, obligation and duty, and what a person ought to do. As I understand them, these deontic judgements are normative: they express conclusions about the bearing of normative reasons on the actions and other responses that are available to us. And it contains evaluative judgements about goodness and badness. Prominent among these are the judgements that evaluate the quality of our responsiveness to morally relevant reasons. (...) We have a rich vocabulary for making such evaluations – our vocabulary of aretaic terms. Aretaic terms are those which can be used to attribute virtues: terms such as “kind”, “honest”, “fair”, “tolerant” and “reliable”. However, while they can be used to attribute virtues, they have other uses too; and they can be applied not only to persons but also to various states of persons, to actions and other responses, and to patterns of response. In this paper, I offer an account of the relationship between some of the principal uses of aretaic terms; and I show how a useful taxonomy of moral virtues can be generated from the thought that these are ways of being well oriented to morally relevant reasons. (shrink)