The use of theories of Sanskrit syntax by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta to explain the action of monistic Śaiva myth and ritual is examined. These thinkers develop a distinctive approach to syntax that reductionistically emphasizes the role of the true Self/Śiva as omnipotent agent, in opposition to the denigration of agency by the majority of Hindu as well as Buddhist philosophies. An analogy to the Indian discussions is seen in the typological effort of Kenneth Burke's "Grammar of Motives," and it (...) is suggested that indigenous theories of action syntax would be a useful focus for comparative research. (shrink)

This study investigates the interaction between linear and dialogic syntax in Hebrew conversation. Analyzing resonance in divergently aligned contexts, we examine a particular dialogic modification of complex syntactic constructions: the embedding of one construction within the scope of another. Specifically, we examine a family of constructions which, in the terms of linear syntax, are analyzed as forms of complementation (via the complementizer še- ‘that’, via a question word, or via the conditional conjunction 'im ‘if ’). However, the dialogic alignment of (...) these forms with their preceding utterances reflects a complex picture, in which some patterns are still definable by linear syntax, but others are not accounted for by these traditional terms. Rather, the application of the Dialogic Syntax framework calls into question defining such constructions from a purely structural perspective and supports a more fluid, Emergent Grammar approach. Moreover, we illustrate how dialogic actions in fact motivate the interaction-based grammaticization of new constructions, culminating, in the case of the constructions examined here, in the emergence of discourse markers. (shrink)

This volume contains twelve chapters on the derivation of and the correlates to verb initial word order. The studies in this volume cover such widely divergent languages as Irish, Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, Jakaltek, Mam, Lummi (Straits Salish), Niuean, Malagasy, Palauan, K'echi', and Zapotec, from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives, including Minimalism, information structure, and sentence processing. The first book to take a crosslinguistic comparative approach to verb initial syntax, this volume provides new data to some (...) old problems anddebates and explores some innovative approaches to the derivation of verb initial order. (shrink)

Feedback such as backchannels and clarification requests often occurs subsententially, demonstrating the incremental nature of grounding in dialogue. However, although such feedback can occur at any point within an utterance, it typically does not do so, tending to occur at Feedback Relevance Spaces. We present a corpus study of acknowledgements and clarification requests in British English, and describe how our low-level, semantic processing model in Dynamic Syntax accounts for this feedback. The model trivially accounts for the 85% of cases where (...) feedback occurs at FRSs, but we also describe how it can be integrated or interpreted at non-FRSs using the predictive, incremental and interactive nature of the formalism. This model shows how feedback serves to continually realign processing contexts and thus manage the characteristic divergence and convergence that is key to moving dialogue forward. (shrink)

Cet article a pour objet l’analyse de trois types de théorisations de la signification basées sur un modèle binaire du signe. Celles de Frege, Husserl et Saussure. Relevant d’un même paradigme, les deux premières sont confrontées en tant que s’y développent deux conceptions opposées de la signification – extensionnelle chez Frege, intensionnelle chez Husserl – contribuant à la mise en place, selon des perspectives opposées, de la dualisation de la syntaxe et de la sémantique. Relativement à cette conséquence, leur paradigme (...) est ensuite opposé à celui de la sémiologie structurale de Saussure dans laquelle l’interaction de la syntaxe et de la sémantique est internalisée au niveau du système qu’intègrent les signes comme éléments. De sorte que ce que l’on vise au terme de cet article, c’est à mettre au jour une explication possible de la raison de la divergence entre deux types de conceptions de la sémantique qui organiseront le développement de courants concurrents tout au long de l’histoire de la linguistique du 20e siècle, l’une formelle et mathématisée, l’autre structurale. (shrink)

The evolution of human language, and the kind of thought the communication of which requires it, raises considerable explanatory challenges. These systems of representation constitute a radical discontinuity in the natural world. Even species closely related to our own appear incapable of either thought or talk with the recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality that characterize human talk and the thought it expresses. W. Tecumseh Fitch’s proposal (2004, in press) that human language is descended from a sexually selected, prosodic (...) proto-language that approximated its syntactic complexity, and later acquired semantics thanks to kin selection for its use as a means of pedagogical transmission, has the promise of meeting these explanatory challenges. However, Fitch’s theory raises two problems of its own: (1) according to Boyd and Richerson (1996, Proc. Br. Acad. 88: 77–93), circumstances in which pedagogy is adaptive are inevitably rare in nature, and (2) it is unlikely that our non-discursive precursors had generally systematic, task-domain neutral thoughts to communicate to their offspring. I propose solutions to these problems. Pedagogy would be favored in a population where complex rituals dominated diverse aspects of life. Prosodic proto-language could emerge as the medium of pedagogic transmission. As this medium was used to teach a greater variety of tasks, it would become increasingly general and domain neutral. The presence and importance of such a system of communication in hominid populations could then drive, via Baldwinian mechanisms, the evolution of a kind of ‘thinking for speaking’ (Slobin 1991, Pragmatics 1: 7–25) characterized by recursive structure, generalized systematicity, and task-domain neutrality. (shrink)

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this (...) film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema. (shrink)

One important achievement Rudolf Carnap claimed for his book, The Logical Syntax of Language, was that it effected a synthesis of two seemingly antithetical philosophies of mathematics, logicism and formalism. Reconciling these widely divergent conceptions had been a goal of Carnap’s for several years. But in the years in which Carnap’s synthesis evolved, important intellectual developments influenced the direction of his efforts and, ultimately, the final outcome. These developments were, first of all, the epoch-making theorems proved by Kurt Gödel, which (...) required the abandonment of several theses central to the aims of logicism and formalism. Of far greater significance, in the present context, are the changes in Carnap’s own philosophical outlook, brought about not only by Gödel’s theorems but concurrent discussions within the Vienna Circle as well as his own researches. Consequently, the exact sense in which Carnap attempted the synthesis of logicism and formalism in the Logical Syntax requires careful examination. In what follows below, the evolution of Carnap’s synthesis will be traced, from the first reconciliation he proposed , through the synthesis that appeared with the publication of The Logical Syntax of Language. The aim is to determine which modifications of Carnap’s synthesis were required by Gödel’s theorems, and which were motivated by changes in his own thinking. Although the characteristic theses of both logicism and formalism required profound modifications because of Gödel’s theorems, the philosophical impulses that originally fueled their programs retained much of their former virulence. But the changes in Carnap’s thought that ocurred in the years he was developing his synthesis especially affected his appreciation of the philosophical motivations underwriting the logicist approach, so that much of the philosophical insight that inspired it is lost, and Carnap’s combination of logicism and formalism is a putative synthesis at best. (shrink)

We address the puzzle of “unity in diversity” in human languages by advocating the (minimal) common denominator for the diverse expressions of transitivity across human languages, consistent with the view that early in language evolution there was a modest beginning for syntax and that this beginning provided the foundation for the further elaboration of syntactic complexity. This study reports the results of a functional MRI experiment investigating differential patterns of brain activation during processing of sentences with minimal versus fuller syntactic (...) structures. These structural layers have been postulated to represent different stages in the evolution of syntax, potentially engaging different brain networks. We focused on the Serbian “middles,” analyzed as lacking the transitivity (vP) layer, contrasted with matched transitives, containing the transitivity layer. Our main hypothesis was that transitives will produce more activation in the syntactic (Broca's–Basal Ganglia) brain network, in comparison to more rudimentary middles. The participants ( n = 14) were healthy adults (Mean age = 33.36; SD = 12.23), native speakers of Serbo-Croatian. The task consisted of reading a series of sentences (middles and transitives; n = 64) presented in blocks of 8, while being engaged in a detection of repetition task. We found that the processing of transitives, compared to middles, was associated with an increase in activation in the basal ganglia bilaterally. Although we did not find an effect in Broca's area, transitives, compared to middles, evoked greater activation in the precentral gyrus (BA 6), proposed to be part of the “Broca's complex.” Our results add to the previous findings that Broca's area is not the sole center for syntactic processing, but rather is part of a larger circuit that involves subcortical structures. We discuss our results in the context of the recent findings concerning the gene-brain-language pathway involving mutations in FOXP2 that likely contributed to the enhancement of the frontal-striatal brain network, facilitating human capacity for complex syntax. (shrink)

Este trabajo pretende explorar la dimensión ritual en los Textos de las Pirámides, el corpus de literatura religiosa extensa más antiguo de la humanidad. La naturaleza variada de sus componentes textuales ha impedido que los egiptólogos comprendan en profundidad las complejidades de la colección y los contextos originales en los que estos textos aparecieron. La aplicación de la teoría del ritual, principalmente la aproximación de la sintaxis ritual, ofrece a los investigadores un marco excelente de análisis e (...) interpretación del corpus, su estructura y función. Sujeto a las reglas de la sintaxis ritual es posible exponer los múltiples niveles de significado en el corpus para la resurrección y salvación del difunto. (shrink)

The term ‘humanism’ is Western in origin. It denotes the tradition that places special emphasis on cultivation of letters for education. In the West, this tradition was originated with sophists and Isocrates, established by Cicero, and was developed by Renaissance humanists. East Asia, however, also has its own humanistic traditions with equal educational relevance. One of these is a Japanese version of Confucian humanism established by Ogyu Sorai (1666–1728). This tradition is based on the interpretation of Confucius as a lover (...) of poetry and a teacher of rites. In this article, we discuss the main features of East Asian humanism represented by Sorai and Confucius. Then, after an overview of Western humanism, we aim to elucidate both the convergence and divergence of the two traditions. The investigation will help us (hopefully) to envision humanistic education of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article redefines as iconic action what has been conventionally described as ritual. Beginning with the primary definition of “ritual as repetition,” the article describes iconic action as social construct built in the combination of iconic significations and cosmology, and shows that this structure is similar to that of the word and syntax in language. Repeating the iconic action in this structure, values and meanings in cosmology become assimilated into the practitioner. The icon as a signifier consistently evokes (...) a specific emotion in the practitioner. In repetition, the consistent evocation of specific emotions stabilizes the pair relation between the icon-signifier and the emotion-referent, making their relation into a structure. In this structure, meaning and the values which icons carry become adopted into the platform of emotions by the practitioner. Cosmology is a condensed vision of the universe, in which icons stand out like keywords, representing in their images its major values and meanings. The performances become the embodiment of the cosmology and the expressions of these values and the meanings through action in the specific emotions. In repetition, the vision of the universe becomes held in the emotions and expressed through the actions of the body, the iconic action. A vision of the universe is lived in experience, “spoken” and expressed in, and by, the “language” of the iconic action of the individual performer. This structure becomes self-perpetuating, when the iconic action achieves spontaneity through repetition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 54-59 [Access article in PDF] Buddhist Views on Ritual Pactice Mahayana Buddhist Ritual and Ethical Activity in the World John MakranskyBoston College Society of Buddhist Christian Studies Meeting, Orlando, Florida, November 20, 1998 Contemporary attempts to derive a present-day social ethic from traditional Buddhism usually stem from doctrinal understandings and higher practices of meditation, often overlooking Buddhist ritual practice as a source (...) of ethical formation and expression.Philosophical study of Buddhism alone may leave one's capacity for ethical response untouched. Rigorous contemplative practices of Vipassana, Zen, or higher Tibetan meditation are out of the reach of many. Ritual forms have provided ways for Buddhists from all walks of life to become attuned to the same subtle dimensions of body, speech, and mind that higher Buddhist philosophy and meditation engage. Ritual also serves as means to empower and deepen philosophical inquiry and meditation. We do well not to forget the unique power of Buddhist ritual to include the many (not only the elite) in the most profound dimensions of Buddhist ethical understanding, formation, and expression.The relative obscurity of ritual practice in contemporary consideration of Buddhist social ethics may also obscure from view some of Buddhism's past social-ethical expressions, which have sometimes taken symbolic ritual forms, rather than organized social outreach of the sort we are accustomed to identify as social-ethical activity. Buddhist ritual-contemplative forms have been viewed as ways to perform social service within and through the mythico-magical cosmoses of Asian traditions: cosmoses of buddhas, bodhisattvas, and myriad powerful, sacred beings. Since Asian Buddhists understand these cosmoses to interpenetrate our world, many of their ritual-contemplative practices are intended to perform needed social functions, within a broad context of universal salvation: healing, treating pain, treating mental illness, promoting economic well-being, preventing and assisting in disasters, protecting the helpless, easing the transition of death....Contemporary Buddhist ethics tend to de-emphasize the ritualistic and devotional aspects of Buddhism to newly emphasize material resources and strategies for social transformation which can be related to higher Buddhist philosophy. While this is important, there is a danger that contemporary Buddhists, by reinterpreting practice as social service too exclusively in modern, material terms, may dilute rather than reinforce the ontological and epistemological intuitions of Buddhism, losing touch with time-tested means for persons to actually learn to embody an ultimate source of ethical response that transcends ontological assumptions of modern, secular thought. [End Page 54] By experiencing social service as a natural extension of ritual activity, each element of such service symbolically expresses an ultimate source of ethical response within a path of ultimate transformation, reinforcing rather than diluting the deepest intuitions of Buddhism even as Buddhist practice takes new social-ethical expression in our world.As an example, I will focus on one of the earliest and most popular continually practiced Buddhist rituals of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: the Bhadracaryapranidhana ("resolution of excellent practice") which appears within the Avatamsaka sutra. This practice, further delineated in treatises ascribed to Nagarjuna, Asan(dot)ga, Vasubandhu, S´antideva and many others, consists of seven ritual activities: bowing, offering, confession, ritual rejoicing, requesting teaching, entreating the buddhas to continually manifest, and dedication of karmic merit.The ritual appears at the end of the Avatamsaka sutra, a scripture thousands of folios long in Tibetan translation. What follows is my own condensed commentary on the first portion of the ritual, which aims to correlate its elements with the fuller context of practice and visionary experience described in the sutra as a whole.The ritual takes place set within the nirvanic realms of infinite buddhas, bodhisattvas, and holy beings whose salvific power and activity penetrate all realms of living beings who remain caught in the sufferings of sam.sara. To enter into the ritual is not merely to visualize these intersecting dimensions of nirvanic and samsaric existence, but to have one's body, speech, and mind symbolically entered into the stream of practice of all buddhas and bodhisattvas past, present, and future, to participate through all senses and movements of thought... (shrink)

Sacrifice haunts the Phaedo. In this article, I argue that the mise-en-scène of the death scene of the Phaedo, as well as other sacrificial elements in the background of the dialogue, creates a nexus that positively integrates the birth, philosophical practice, and death of Socrates into the ritualized rhythm of the life of the city of Athens. A close reading of the death scene presented as a synopsis with Walter Burkert’s well-known analysis of Greek sacrifice reveals convergences and divergences between (...) the Phaedo and Greek sacrificial practice. Socrates appears as a willing victim who accepts the city’s sacrificial practice while remaining on his own terms. (shrink)

Confucianism has attracted some attention in business ethics, in particular as a form of virtue ethics. This paper develops ideas about Confucianism in business ethics by extending discussion about Confucian ideas of ritual. Ritual has figured in literature about organisational culture, but Confucian accounts can offer additional ideas about developing ethically desirable organisational cultures. Confucian ritual practice has diverged from doctrine and from the classical emphasis on requirements for concern and respect as parts of ritual. Despite (...) some differences of emphasis amongst early writers, classical texts like the Analects and Mencius allow for the importance of ritual as opportunity for interpersonal encounter. These are texts that bring out the flexibility and context-sensitivity of ritual, with associated implications about the need for care and attention to other individuals. They eschew ritual as unthinking repetition, in favour of ritual as meaningful expression. The mutual awareness such ritual can engender is an important part of human existence. Such ritual is a means to solving coordination problems through common knowledge, as opposed to unthinking routine. Undue routinisation can be one problem with organisational ritual, while another can be use of ritual as a means of oppressive control. In organisations, ritual should satisfy general requirements of concern and respect, and should maintain opportunities for mutual encounter. The difference between arrangements which do or do not offer such opportunities may suggest lines of development for virtue ethics in business. (shrink)

Explores the parallels and divergences between music and language, dismisses certain fashionable semiotic approaches, and tries to show that recent attempts to give a generative theory of musical syntax are fundamentally mistaken. Explores the suggestions that music has syntax and a rule‐guided structure, and argues that these suggestions are based on metaphors. The meaning of a piece of music is given by perception, not by convention.

This collection of articles provides an overview of current generative theorizing and empirical work on the nature, origin and scope of parameters of linguistic variation. Often taking diverging views, the papers in the volume address some or all of the main debated topics in parametric syntax.

This paper reassesses Searle’s Chinese Room argument in light of Large Language Models (LLMs). While Searle criticized computational systems for being mere “syntax manipulators,” transformer models of the kind exemplified by LLMs complicate this characterization. Earlier computational systems relied on a more rigid logical foundation, based largely on pattern recognition and mechanical substitution. By tracking patterns of use, maintaining rich contextual dependencies, and exploiting implicit regularities in large datasets, LLMs show an unprecedented capacity for semantic modelling. And yet, LLMs remain (...) limited in several respects. For instance, even the most advanced AI model suffers from impaired referential grounding and a good model of the external world. I argue that this is because they fail to successfully reproduce the spontaneous, nonsymbolic, biologically entrenched forms of semiosis that characterize the simplest biological organizations. After examining two plausible strategies to cope with these deficits, I conclude that the algorithmic implementation of formal symbol systems diverges in fundamental ways from experience-based intentional representations. This, in turn, warrants skepticism toward bald attributions of intentionality to LLMs and substantiates the core of Searle’s original argument against strong AI. (shrink)

Research on the evolution of language is often framed in terms of sharp discontinuities in syntax and semantics between animal communication systems and human language as we know them. According to the so-called “pragmatics-first” approach to the evolution of language, when trying to understand the origins of human language in animal communication, we should be focusing on potential pragmatic continuities. However, some proponents of this approach (e.g. Seyfarth and Cheney Animal Behavior 124: 339–346, 2017) find important pragmatic continuities, whereas others (...) (e.g. Origgi and Sperber 2000) find sharp discontinuities. I begin (in Section 1) by arguing that this divergence is due to the fact that the proponents implicitly rely, respectively, on two different views of pragmatics, corresponding to different conceptions of what is involved in context-dependence – one “Carnapian”, the other “Gricean”. I argue that neither conception is fit to serve the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the evolution of language. In Section 2, I examine a recent formal “semantic-pragmatic” analysis of monkey calls, due to Philippe Schlenker et al. (in, e.g., Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (6): 439–501, 2014, Trends in Cognitive Science 20 (12): 894–904, 2016a, Theoretical Linguistics 42 (1–2): 1–90, 2016b), which appears to improve on the Carnapian and Gricean conceptions. However, I argue that the appearances are misleading and that the S-P analysis is no better suited than Carnapian analyses for the purposes of those seeking to establish human-nonhuman pragmatic continuities. Understanding why this is so will point the way toward my preferred, genuinely intermediate conception of pragmatics (as defended in Bar-On Biology & Philosophy 36 (6): 1–25, 2021), which – I argue in Section 3 – is better fit for these purposes. Drawing on recent discussions of chimpanzee communication, I briefly indicate which aspects of extant primate call communication – both gestural and vocal – could potentially count as pragmatic according to this conception. (shrink)

This article mainly aims to make an examination over the holy. It has been inquired into how something being ascribed holy can have a meaning in philosophy. As the article's research area, the differences in both opinion and execution which have later divided Christianity into two as Catholic and Orthodox Churches have been selected. The separation of these two churches under the subject titles such as Filioque controversy, the idea of First Among Equals (primas inter pares), and ritual of (...) Transubstantiation have also shaped how they perceived and thought the holy. With these divergences being investigated, it has been tried to present how much of a share these had in giving meaning for the holy. It has been labored to manifest the role of these two Churches' -which belong to and come from the same celestial tradition- divergences in the metamorphosis and paradigm shift that the holy underwent. For the last, through the Church Fathers' opinions and views which have been seen related to subject matter, with moving beyond the divergences, it has been searched whether there is a possibility of meeting on the common ground or not . (shrink)

Many papers have been devoted to the semantic turn Carnap took in the late 1930s after Tarski had explained to him his method for defining truth and his work on the establishment of scientific semantics. Commentators have often argued that the major turn in Carnap’s approach to languages had already been taken in the Logical Syntax of Language, but they have usually assumed that Carnap was happy to subsequently follow Tarski and adopt Tarskian semantics. In this paper, it is argued (...) that this assumption needs to be qualified and that Carnap was actually far from following Tarski when he decided to complement his syntactic method with a semantic one. Carnap and Tarski had different goals, divergent programs, and dissenting views on truth and semantics. After exploring several possible methods for the explication of logical concepts such as L-truth and L-implication, Carnap opted for definitions based on concepts he had found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Waismann’s work on a logical interpretation of probability. Carnap’s reasons for taking a semantic turn are to be understood in the context of his principle of tolerance. He first hoped he could use Tarski’s technique to recover in the semantic setting the completeness result he had tried to establish in the Logical Syntax. His eventual adoption of non-Tarskian semantics can be accounted for by his program of a logical analysis of science—including empirical science—and his ambition to elaborate a unified logical framework for deductive, inductive, and modal logic, and for explicating analyticity. (shrink)

Is what is said determined by syntax, conventional meaning, and select aspects of context? This thesis—semanticity—seems plausible because what is said can diverge from both what the speaker means and what the addressee understands, and because ordinary speakers know what is said when presented with a novel sentence‐context pair. I argue that semanticity is actually not the best explanation of these properties, because what is implied shares them. I then explain this commonality: What is said and what is implied are (...) similarly determined by the interpretation of an addressee defined in terms of the context. (shrink)

Origin of Geometry and Origin of the Work of Art: Reduction, Truth, and History in Husserl and Heidegger Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry and Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art were surprisingly developed in parallel and deal with the same subject, the question of the origin: of a science, in one case, and of the artwork, in the other. From their comparison, the different conception that Husserl and Heidegger have of origin and truth clearly emerge. It concerns what (...) Heidegger identified as the real point of his divergence from Husserl, when they tried to write the entry “Phenomenology” for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, namely the method of reduction. For Husserl, the reduction opens up a material content, an essence, which ensures the persistence of truth in historical transmission, beyond linguistic variability, as happens in geometry; for Heidegger, reduction brings to light the ontological and, we might say, grammatical condition of truth, that is, its being an event and giving rise to an original syntax, to a world. This is the function of the work of art, whose essence consists in its mere being-made, in its being, that is, a work: the actualization of a possibility. (shrink)

This article contributes to Construction Grammar, historical linguistics, and Russian linguistics through an in-depth corpus study of predicate agreement in constructions with quantified subjects. Statistical analysis of approximately 39,000 corpus examples indicates that these constructions constitute a network of constructions (“allostructions”) with various preferences for singular or plural agreement. Factors pull in different directions, and we observe a relatively stable situation in the face of variation. We present an analysis of a multidimensional network of allostructions in Russian, thus contributing to (...) our understanding of allostructional relationships in Construction Grammar. With regard to historical linguistics, language stability is an understudied field. We illustrate an interplay of divergent factors that apparently resists language change. The syntax of numerals and other quantifiers represents a notoriously complex phenomenon of the Russian language. Our study sheds new light on the contributions of factors that favor singular or plural agreement in sentences with quantified subjects. (shrink)

An intensional semantic system for languages containing, in their logical syntax, sortal quantifiers, sortal identities, (second-order) quantifiers over sortals and the necessity operator is constructed. This semantics provides non-standard assignments to predicate expressions, which diverge in kind from the entities assigned to sortal terms by the same semantic system. The nature of the entities assigned to predicate expressions shows, at the same time, that there is an internal semantic connection between those expressions and sortal terms. A formal logical system is (...) formulated that is proved to be absolutely consistent, sound and complete with respect to the intensional semantic system. (shrink)

This study explores the genre of Instagram communication in a cross-cultural educational context: the USA, Germany, and Ukraine. It aims to analyze the multimodal textual structure and identify linguistic and visual patterns in posts from leading universities in the USA. The findings highlight commonalities and divergences in how universities construct their identity, engage with audiences, and manage their image through Instagram. American and German universities demonstrate highly institutionalized, research-driven communication with heavy use of hashtags, emojis, and pronouns (“we”, “you”), promoting (...) inclusivity and academic prestige. Ukrainian posts emphasize national identity, cultural resilience, and community belonging, often with fewer imperative or rhetorical structures. All three demonstrate strategic use of multimodal tools for branding and outreach.Instagram posts by universities serve as curated, multimodal texts that reflect institutional values, sociocultural narratives, and educational strategies. The differences in syntax, color use, pronoun choice, and emoji frequency illustrate cultural distinctions in communication style and institutional priorities. The study confirms Instagram’s role as a platform for institutional self-presentation and global academic engagement. (shrink)

In A Parting of the Ways, Friedman narrates the Davos debate as a catalysator in the genesis of two diverging trajectories within twentieth-century philosophy. In this paper, I introduce a participant of the Davos debate, Jean Cavaillès, who does not adhere to Friedman’s bifurcation and who was able to zigzag between the developments in phenomenology and logical positivism. To show how this French epistemologist was able to connect these two traditions, I detail Cavaillès’ encounter with the Vienna Circle, explicate (...) his Kantianism, and chronicle the place of Bolzano in his account of the (historical) development of philosophy of science. After that, I examine Cavaillès’ critique of Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache and argue that Cavaillès’ theory of science is much closer to Carnap’s logical analysis than either he himself or the secondary literature suggests. Both philosophers, in fact, argue for the importance of constructing the unity of science, affirm the autonomous development of science, and conceptualize a dynamic notion of the a priori. In the conclusion, I disclose the similarities between Cavaillès’ conceptualization of the dynamic a priori and Friedman’s relativized a priori, and argue for the importance of extending Friedman’s account of the interwar developments in philosophy of science. (shrink)

This paper examines Carnap’s concept of semantic analyticity, as presented in Logical Foundations of Probability, and extends it to Languages I and II in Logical Syntax of Language. The primary objective is to assess whether the semantic and syntactic explications of analyticity are equivalent for these two languages. The results demonstrate that, for the contracted version of Language I—obtained by removing functors—the semantic and syntactic explicata are indeed equivalent. However, for the contracted version of Language II, which is derived by (...) removing functor-expressions, the two explicata diverge and lack logical equivalence. Notably, for the first-order fragment of the extracted II, which excludes unlimited quantifiers, a formula that is semantically analytic in II is also syntactically analytic in II, though the reverse does not necessarily hold. Furthermore, all theorems in II that are syntactically analytic are also semantically analytic in II. (shrink)

The volume starts with the paper of Lynn Maurice Ferguson Arnold, former Premier of South Australia and former Minister of Education of Australia, concerning the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) that was held from 25 May to 25 November 1937 in Paris, France. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the Nazi German and the Soviet pavilions directly across from each other. Many papers are devoted (...) to the interpretation of this opposition. Arnold’s paper considers the differences in the two totalitarian states’ architectural and design discourse styles. Although each of them communicated a totalitarian language of purposes, permissions, and boundaries, they essentially differed in the styles of discourse represented by the architecture and design of their respective pavilions. They were opposites of each other and the liberal ideals they contested. The internationalist viewpoint reflecting the multi-ethnic mix of the USSR is contrasted to the ein Volk homogeneity represented in the German pavilion. The Soviet pavilion opted for a utopian future to be arrived at by “benign” leadership, whereas the German pavilion anchored itself in the myth of Teutonic history with the nostalgic pride protected by the swastika-bearing eagle. Jean-Yves Béziau is best known as a logician and founder of Universal Logic. However, in this paper, he poses a new philosophical question: why philosophical discourse does not use images? The paper begins with a general analysis of different types of philosophical discourses. Then, he focuses on why images have been and are still rejected in philosophical discourse. He explains various ways to use images in a fruitful way to develop philosophical thinking and discourse and illustrates his view by providing several examples. He concludes with a promising programmatic declaration about founding a new journal entitled World Journal of Pictorial Philosophy to stimulate the usage of images for developing philosophical thinking. Although complaints about the obscurity of many philosophers’ discourse are widespread, Tatiana Denisova, ex-professor of the Surgut University and a research associate of the University of the Aegean undertakes a positive attitude to this problem. She explains that the reasons for the obscurity of philosophical texts, the subsequent complexity in communicating philosophers’ meanings and their eventual incomplete understanding is not a sign of their inferiority. On the contrary, it is a sign of the fruitfulness of philosophical discourse, which can generate new meanings. Thus, the darkness of philosophical discourse is like the life-giving chaos, and the obscurity that it inevitably contains can be the keeper of implicit meanings and even their generator. Katarzyna Gan-Krzywoszyńska and Piotr Leśniewski, authors of a monograph on Polish philosopher Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890 – 1963), make a comparative analysis of his educational style with that of Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (1921 – 1997). The authors highlight that these scholars have distinctly different backgrounds. The former was an educator, philosopher and a leading advocate of critical pedagogy connected with the dialogical Latin-American tradition. The latter was a philosopher and logician, a notable representative of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic with significant contributions to semantics, model theory and the philosophy of science. Despite their apparent difference, the authors identify some striking similarities regarding their attitudes towards education; notably, their approaches are essentially dialogical. Gilah Yelin Hirsch is a multidisciplinary artist who works as a painter, writer, curator, educator, and filmmaker. In her experiential paper, he explains how and why she uses four channels of communication in her creative expression: writing, painting, filmmaking, and teaching, as dialogic inquiry. She considers that these channels compose a continuum of discourse styles, each reaching a different facet of kaleidoscopic consciousness. She claims that her choice of medium is prompted by a need to communicate her insights profoundly. Thus, for instance, she created painted allegories to express narratives based on dreams and visions emerging from her subconscious. Art and healing is another Tibetan-rooted type of discourse practised by the author. Creating and observing a healing image produces a positive psychophysiological change in both the artist and the viewer. The discourse here is tripartite between creator, image, and viewer. Filmmaking is another type of discourse she practices between the filmmaker/artist as shaman or healer and the viewer as respondent or participant. These films are meant to be experienced frame by frame, physically and emotionally in both the body and mind. Jocelyn Ireson-Paine is a cartoonist and programmer. His paper offers an original attempt to use category theory in cartooning. Category theory is a branch of mathematics that provides concepts and methods to describe general abstract structures in terms of a labelled directed graph called category, whose nodes are called objects, and whose labelled directed edges are called arrows (or morphisms or transformations or mappings). The author explores different ways to define “style” in art using category theory and a relational view of art. Moreover, he examines how “translation” (transformation) between styles could be defined and reveals the difficulties of how it could be implemented in a computer using special software. Jens Lemanski is a philosopher who has revived research in Arthur Schopenhauer’s legacy by exploring his work on mathematical evidence, logic diagrams, and problems of semantics. In this paper, he advances a new approach to eristic as an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to win an argument. The author attributes the origins of this view to Schopenhauer, suggesting a new reading of his work. According to the author, eristic is a prohibitive technique that takes effect when the norms of discourse ethics are transgressed and violated. Thus, eristic is viewed as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Roshdi Rashed is an authority on the history of Arabic mathematical sciences. Proceeding from Gilles-Gaston Granger’s definition of mathematical style, he studies the question of whether a mathematical work can be characterized by a single style or by a multitude of styles. This question is explored within the style of a single work, namely Menelaus’s Sphaerica, and through the study of the development of a single problem over time, namely the isoperimetric problem. He indicates Menelaus’s divergence from the Euclidean style of (plane and stereometric) geometry caused by the drop of the Parallel Postulate, which associated it with hyperbolic geometry. Hence, the author concludes that Menelaus’s Sphaerica incorporates the well-known Euclidean style with a variation of the non-Euclidean one. On the other hand, examining the isoperimetric problem reveals another interesting historical picture. A succession of different styles (cosmological, geometric, infinitesimalistic, style of the calculus of variations, of synthetic geometry) can be observed due to the transformation of the research object over time. Boris Shalyutin, a Russian social philosopher, and Ombudsman for Human Rights in the Kurgan Region, explores the origins of discourse in combination with the birth of society and law. He claims that legal discourse marks the historical emergence of discourse in general. Homo Juridicus generated Homo Sapiens, which have created new spheres of discourse, notably moral discourse and further philosophical, political, and scientific discourse. Petros Stefaneas, a logician, computer scientist and novelist, suggests an alternative to the traditional narratology approach for studying (interactive) social media discourse. He claims that style describes how the parts of a narrative are blended into a whole. The author relies upon Goguen’s and Harrel’s concept of style as a choice of blending principles and transfers to the study of the social media narratives elements from the methodology of studying Web-based collaborative search for mathematical proofs like those implemented within the Polymath project. The last paper belongs to Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, a linguist, language revivalist, and proponent of a model of the emergence of Israeli Hebrew, according to which Hebrew and Yiddish were the primary sources of Modern Hebrew. This paper explores the fascinating and multifaceted Yiddish language and its survival in Israeli. Yiddish is characterized by a unique style that embeds psycho-ostensive expressions throughout its discourse. The author highlights the cross-fertilization between Hebrew and Yiddish as it manifests itself in any aspect of the Israeli language. He claims that Yiddish survives beneath Israeli phonetics, phonology, discourse, syntax, semantics, lexis, and even morphology, although traditional and institutional linguists have been most reluctant to admit it. (shrink)

This paper summarizes the debate on human uniqueness launched by Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. In the progress of this debate, Noam Chomsky’s introduction of the Language-Acquisition Device (LAD) in the mid-1960s marked a turn to the machine model of mind that seeks human uniqueness in uniquely human components of neural circuitry. A subsequent divergence from the machine model can be traced in the short history of ape language research (ALR). In the past fifty years, (...) the focus of ALR has shifted from the search for behavioral evidence of syntax in the minds of individual apes to participant-observation of coregulated interactions between humans and nonhuman apes. Rejecting the computational machine model of mind, the laboratory methodologies of ALR scientists Tetsuro Matsuzawa and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh represent a worldview coherent with Darwin’s continuity hypothesis. (shrink)

A range of positions persist in the proper interpretation of generative linguistics. The paper responds to recent work in this area that either weakly or strongly diverges from the non-contentful, internalist model presented in Collins (2008a). Against the sympathetic criticisms of Matthews (2008) and Smith (2008), it is argued that a crucial role for content in our understanding of linguistic theories remains obscure, although the discussion here will hopefully clarify the divergence between the parties as merely perspectival. Rey (2008) more (...) strongly argues that the non-contentful model is prey to some classic complaints. The charges are rebutted. Finally, the position of Devitt (2008a, b) is considered. It is argued that his most recent presentation of his brand of realism fails to speak to the fundamental complaints levelled against it, especially as regards the putative role of conventions in the explanation of unvoiced syntax. (shrink)

The main purpose of the study was to determine the place of the Greek revisions of the Scripture in Antiochian exegetical practice, on the example of the work of Adrian of Antioch “Εἰσαγωγή εἰς τὰς θείας γραφάς” (“Introduction to the Divine Scriptures”). The detailed analysis of the work envisaged the highlighting of hermeneutic and linguistic issues, as well as the fixation of linguistic features of the text: phonetics, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. An analysis of all levels of the author’s language (...) was necessary for an adequate understanding of the text and the comparison of biblical quotations with existing revisions of the Scriptures. Therefore, the method of textual and contextual analysis, comparative and statistical methods allowed to determine the specificity of Hadrian’s approach to the sacred text, the conceptual apparatus of his work and the source (divergences of the biblical text).The hypothesis of the presence in Adrian’s citations of clear matches with the Hebrew text and the Syriac translation is proved in this article, which emphasizes the absence of a universal standard LXX that would exist as a codified textological tradition among representatives of the Antioch school. Adrian’s quotation from the memory of the biblical text was also confirmed, in the same way as the assumption about the possibility of Adrian’s translation of the Holy Scriptures and the option of having an existing revision of the text before him, but unknown to us today. The thesis of the broad context of the coexistence of textual traditions, in particular in the 5th century, among the representatives of the Antioch school, found its comprehensive justification. (shrink)

In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky offered a new vision for linguistic research and syntacticians. This chapter explores some ways in which Chomsky's linguistic work has influenced research on one domain of linguistic performance, sentence processing, over the last half century. It shows that Chomsky's claim in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax is largely borne out: "the study of performance will proceed only as far as the study of the underlying competence permits". The chapter briefly addresses a question about the (...) scope of modern sentence processing research and its relationship to specific grammatical formalisms. It reviews the literature on incremental ambiguity resolution, moves to the processing of long‐distance filler‐gap dependency processing, and provides information on the processing of anaphoric relations. In order to illustrate how the phenomenon has contributed to psycholinguistic theorizing, the chapter outlines a well‐known model and then considers how other models diverge. (shrink)

The grammar of later medieval French : an initial exploration of the Anglo Norman Dictionary textbaseThis article considers whether the syntax of later Anglo-Norman (AN) and of continental French (CF) diverged in the 14th century, as expected under the ‘essential difference’ hypothesis of Kibbee (1991), or whether, in keeping with the ‘dialect continuum’ hypothesis of Trotter (2003), AN syntax continued to show the same distinctions as in CF. Since later AN is extant mainly in non-literary prose in the period studied, (...) a related issue was how well this type of text revealed the timing of changes in later medieval Old French syntax already studied in literary genres. Analysis of partitive de under negationand of adverb syntax in the AN Hub textbase shows that insular French syntax until 1350 patterned with CF in the respects studied, continuing to confine partitive de under negation to use with the negator point, and distinguishing inverting from non-inverting initial adverbs. In keeping with trends in Middle French, this distinction broke down from 1350 onwards. These findings receive a better explanation under the dialect continuum hypothesis than under the fundamental difference hypothesis. It is further suggested that the ANHT offers a basis on which to study the timing of syntactic change in medieval French, though it should be augmented by corresponding CF material. (shrink)

Event semantics is concerned with the formal structure of sentences which appear to describe an event of some kind, e.g. ‘Brutus kills Caesar,’ or ‘My tooth fell out.’ Phenomenologists should be interested in work in this field, if they hope to rescue Husserl’s phenomenology of judgment from its narrow focus on copular judgments of the form ‘S is p.’ An adequate phenomenology of judgment must ultimately develop an account of judgments whose intentional correlates seem to be events, rather than states (...) of affairs, since such judgments are ubiquitous. For this endeavor, existing work on the formal structure of event sentences provides a crucial foothold. However, phenomenologists cannot simply import semantic theories for their own use, without first evaluating them for phenomenological plausibility. This concern is particularly acute in the case of the widely-adopted “Davidsonian” approach, according to which the logical structure of event sentences diverges radically from natural language syntax. The Davidsonian form introduces a “covert” variable, which stands in for an event. Thus, the sentence ‘Brutus kills Caesar’ becomes, ‘There is an event e that is a killing of Caesar by Brutus.’ Such a theory, if correct, would have decisive consequences for the phenomenology of event sentences, and even of events themselves. Yet the introduction of covert variables in turn introduces—I argue—a covert intentional object, without assessing this idea for phenomenological plausibility. Building on Husserl’s phenomenology of predication, I develop a criterion for evaluating this hypothesis, and argue that the Davidsonian approach, as it stands, is phenomenologically untenable. (shrink)

Linguistic creativity is the ability to understand indefinitely many previously unencountered sentences. In this paper, I compare Chomsky’s and Ricœur’s contrasting conceptions of this ability, in particular, their divergent views of nonsense. With nonsense, it seems as if syntax is outrunning semantics. Chomsky took this to show that syntax is autonomous of semantics. I propose a reading of Ricœur’s work on metaphor whereby Chomsky’s thesis is modified so that syntax and semantics are declared to be ultimately co-extensive notions.

Questions of evidence—including the idea, still central to what could be called informal epistemology, that our beliefs and claims are duly corrected by our encounters with autonomously resistant objects —are inevitably caught up in views of how beliefs, generally, are produced, maintained, and transformed. In recent years, substantially new accounts of these cognitive dynamics—and, with them, more or less novel conceptions of what we might mean by “beliefs”—have been emerging from various nonphilosophical fields as well as from within disciplinary epistemology. (...) Because of the distinctly reflexive nature of these developments—that is, new conceptions of concepts, revised beliefs about belief, invocations of evidence said to challenge the operation of evidence, quasi-logical refutations of the authority of logic, and so on—the deployment of positions and arguments becomes extremely difficult here, as does even the description of the relevant events in intellectual history. Indeed, since we are dealing here not merely with shifts of, as it is sometimes put, “vocabulary,” but, often enough, with clashes of profoundly divergent conceptual idiom and syntax, every major term and discursive move is potentially implicated in the problematic itself, and, thereby, open to radical questioning and liable to charges of question-begging.The aim of the present essay is twofold: first, to suggest the more general interest and significance, beyond the fields in which they are being developed, of these emerging reconceptions of belief; and, second, to frame that suggestion in an account which, since it cannot escape the rhetorical difficulties just mentioned, foregrounds them. A number of related themes—notably, symmetry, circularity, reciprocality, and ambivalence—recur throughout and, at various points, are drawn together in accord with the account itself. Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Duke University, and director of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultural Theory. Her current work examines contemporary models of cognition and communication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sally Is a Block of IceRevis(it)ing the Figure of Woman in PhilosophyRobyn FerrellThere is a metaphor made famous in the analytic philosophical literature by John Searle et al.: “Sally is a block of ice.” I met this metaphor first as an undergraduate student in philosophy of language classes. I remember, then, feeling a wordless anxiety for Sally, for the “tone” of this example interrupting, but not interrogated by, the (...) discussion it was recruited to illustrate. Later, I met Sally again, in papers given at philosophy conferences on metaphor in which, each time, this mention of Sally struck me as pointed but not observed.John Searle claims that to say “Sally is a block of ice” is to mean “Sally is an extremely unemotional and unresponsive person,” But this seems disingenuous, since the color in the metaphor comes from innuendo of a sexual character, the echoes of the Ice Queen, etc. And no doubt this is one reason why Searle would have adopted it, because it introduces the rhetorical color of sexual intrigue into an apparently technical discourse in the philosophy of language.But in his paper, this metaphor, “Sally is a block of ice,” features along with other metaphors only as an example of the trope. She is there in the text to illustrate Searle’s thesis that metaphor has meaning only because what he calls “speaker’s meaning” and “sentence meaning” are two very different things. On this view, “words have only the meanings they have,” and it is speakers uttering them “in a way that departs from what they actually mean” that allows the metaphor to operate. [End Page 194]Why would the speaker say anything other than what he meant? Why doesn’t he say, “Sally is an extremely unemotional and unresponsive person”? Since the “actual meaning” of language remains unchanged by the use of metaphor in an example of it, the interesting effect of this theory of metaphor is that the speaker can still say that, while he may have said, “Sally is a block of ice,” he didn’t mean it.Sally Is a Metaphor“Sally is a block of ice”: this evocative metaphor, this provocative figure, conjures for me the dilemma that women in philosophy have found, seeking a philosophical account of identity for an identity politics while also trying to find a place for themselves in the academy. Sally is a figure haunting the practice of English-speaking philosophy, where women are grudgingly admitted but, as Genevieve Lloyd has pointed out, disadvantaged by “inclusion without recognition of our difference.”Unless she is frozen on the slab at the morgue, Sally is not obviously a block of ice. But if Sally were a block of ice, if her identity were as a block of ice, and if the copulative form accurately described her in her essence, as “a block of ice,” why would she appear to us in physical form to be a woman?Between “This is Sally” and “Sally is a block of ice” lies a metaphysics of identity, stemming from the way that certain European languages tolerate the copula form to represent divergent senses, the “to be” of identity and the “to be” of attribution. I’ve written about the impact of this copula form for sexual difference elsewhere (Ferrell 2006). While the copula assigns objects to subjects, it does so in an ambiguous manner. Sometimes we say things such as: “Meg Ryan is Sally in the movie When Harry Met Sally on Channel 7 Sunday night.” Meg Ryan is Sally in the sense that she performs Sally. So, is Sally playing a part, then, when “Sally is a block of ice”?Judith Butler would likely say she was, her femininity a masquerade (Butler 1990). Is Sally playing a part when “Sally is Sally”? Nietzsche would say so: “[A]round every profound spirit a mask is continually growing” (Nietzsche 1968). Nietzsche incriminated grammar or syntax in the reproduction of metaphysics, claiming philosophers are particularly gullible in this regard: “[T]hey always believe in reason as in a piece of the metaphysical world itself, this backward belief always reappears in them as an all-powerful regression” (ibid., cited... (shrink)

Our study examines the expression and position of subjects in L2 acquisition, two phenomena that are studied within the framework of the Interface Hypothesis. The first version of the IH predicts that interface properties involving syntax and another cognitive domain may not be fully acquirable in a second language. The second version of the IH predicts that formal properties involving the syntax-semantics interface are unproblematic to acquire in L2 grammars compared to the vulnerable properties integrating syntax with the higher level (...) of pragmatics. We test these IH versions in L2 Spanish as acquired by L1 Greek speakers, a language combination understudied in the literature. Both languages share the null subject parameter, but still the IHs predict incomplete command at the syntax-pragmatics interface. Two acceptability judgment tasks were designed for Spanish: the first task tested null/overt subjects in referential contexts and the second task tested preverbal/postverbal subjects in informational contexts. Participants were L1 Greek intermediate and advanced learners of Spanish and native speakers of Spanish. In the first task, both experimental groups showed target-like distribution of null/overt subjects in most non-contrastive and contrastive contexts, except for the advanced group in unambiguous referential contexts. In the second task, the respective groups accepted felicitous preverbal subjects with unergative verbs, but diverged from native-like distribution of postverbal subjects with unaccusative verbs in neutral contexts. The L2 groups showed a high preference for unfelicitous preverbal subjects with both intransitive verbs in informational contexts, contrary to the subject inversion patterns of the control group. The results obtained were not consistent with the IH predictions, and other factors such as the type of subject, verb class and context played a role in L2 performance. (shrink)

This paper presents a contrastive analysis of noun phrases in English and Albanian. It focuses on their syntactic structures and key distinctions. Employing a qualitative approach, the research uses descriptive and comparative methods to analyse data from grammar and syntax books in both languages. The study examines simple and complex noun phrases, particularly the use of definiteness, premodifiers, and postmodifiers. The findings reveal that while both languages share similarities in using indefinite noun phrases, they diverge in marking definiteness: English uses (...) definite articles, whereas Albanian incorporates definiteness through morphological changes. These differences reflect broader grammatical tendencies and offer insights for improving language learning and translation practices. The findings provide practical implications for educators, translators, and linguists by enhancing understanding of syntactic differences for effective cross-linguistic communication. (shrink)

Within AI and the cognitively related disciplines, there exist a multiplicity of uses of belief. On the face of it, these differing uses reflect differing views about the nature of an objective phenomenon called belief. In this paper I distinguish six distinct ways in which belief is used in AI. I shall argue that not all these uses reflect a difference of opinion about an objective feature of reality. Rather, in some cases, the differing uses reflect differing concerns with special (...) AI applications. In other cases, however, genuine differences exist about the nature of what we pre-theoretically call belief. To an extent the multiplicity of opinions about, and uses of belief, echoes the discrepant motivations of AI researchers. The relevance of this discussion for cognitive scientists and philosophers arises from the fact that (a) many regard theoretical research within AI as a branch of cognitive science, and (b) even if theoretical AI is not cognitive science, trends within AI influence theories developed within cognitive science. It should be beneficial, therefore, to unravel the distinct uses and motivations surrounding belief, in order to discover which usages merely reflect differing pragmatic concerns, and which usages genuinely reflect divergent views about reality. (shrink)

The relationship between nature and culture in biocultural landscapes runs deep, where everyday practices and rituals have coevolved with the environment over millennia. Such tightly intertwined social–ecological systems are, however, often in the world’s poorest regions and commonly subject to development interventions which effect biocultural diversity. This paper investigates the social and ecological implications of an introduced wheat seed in the Pamir Mountains. We examine contrasting responses to the intervention through participatory observation of food practices around a New Year (...) class='Hi'>ritual, and interviews in two communities. Our results show how one community fostered biocultural diversity, while the other did not, resulting in divergent processes of social and cultural change. In the former, ritual is practiced with traditional seed varieties, involving reciprocal exchange and is characterised by little outmigration of youth. In contrast, the second community celebrates the ritual with replaced store-bought ingredients, no longer cultivates any grain crops and where circular migration to Russia is the main livelihood strategy. Coevolution as an analytical lens enables us to understand these divergent pathways as processes of dynamically changing social–ecological relations. The paper suggests that a deeper understanding of social–ecological relationships in landscapes offers a dynamic and process-oriented understanding of development interventions and can help identify endogenous responses to local, regional and global change—thereby empowering more appropriate and effective development pathways. (shrink)

Tractatus Arboris de Philosophia Analyticae is a systematic reconstruction of analytic philosophy in the tradition of Wittgenstein's Tractatus-but one that succeeds where the Tractatus failed. Organized as thirty interconnected treatises with hierarchically numbered propositions, this work begins with Frege's insight that logical form diverges from grammatical form and builds outward to address every major philosophical domain: properties and Platonism, propositions and truth, language and thought, the limits of empiricism, Cartesian skepticism, inductive inference, causation, modality, personal identity, determinism, free will, ethics, (...) religion, and law. Kuczynski dismantles eight major arguments against Platonism, exposes the self-refuting nature of empiricism, and demonstrates why nominalism collapses under its own weight. The result is a rigorous, integrated philosophical system constructed from first principles-philosophy done the way it should be done, with no hand-waving, no appeal to intuitions that dissolve under scrutiny, and no retreat into linguistic therapy. (shrink)

O espaço ritual constitui-se num locus sagrado de festa. No palco religioso, o sentimento de reconhecer-se cheio do Esp í rito Santo ou incorporado pelas Entidades reescreve, no pr ó prio corpo do sujeito, a autenticidade de sua tradiçã o mitol ó gica. Simultaneamente, a experi ê ncia religiosa reatualiza o poder dessa tradiçã o. E s ã o v á rias as formas em que a narrativa m í tica emerge, vindo à tona e tornando-se tang ível à (...) percep çã o e à emo ção. E, neste sentido, a cultura desempenha um papel fundamental: ela é o elo a promover o encontro entre as verdades da crença e as experi ê ncias religiosas. Michel Meslin assinala que a religiã o só alcan ça o homem atrav é s das mediações culturais de seu tempo. Entre essas tamb é m variadas “ media ções culturais ” está a mú sica, com seus g ê neros, ritmos e uma forç a simb ó lica capaz de funcionar como chave, abrindo as portas das sensibilidades. Para al é m dos c â nticos – mas a eles conexos –, a experi ê ncia do transe ritual é um dispositivo de mediação cultural ainda mais poderoso: um d í namo de emoções liturgicamente sacralizadas. Este sentimento religioso de alegria tem suas bases na estrutura do sistema de crenças, e, assim, at é a cantiga que coadjuva e complementa os ritos, consubstancia seu status sagrado. Musicalizando o Sagrado, essa arte expressiva de f é e també m de cultura potencializa ainda mais o sentimento social de pertenç a à comunidade religiosa do indiv íduo, que também v ê alimentada sua esperança de vida. Este trabalho se envereda na trilha da experi ê ncia religiosa, em seus percalços sinuosos. Nesse caminho, a intençã o é compreender um pouco o funcionamento das engrenagens simb ó licas que conferem sentido à s manifesta çõ es performá ticas vividas por pentecostais e umbandistas, em dois grupos religiosos espec í ficos. E, ao analisar a relação entre a din â mica ritual desses cultos e a produção de sentidos operada nas linguagens gestuais dos sujeitos da crença, refletimos sobre os di á logos sem â nticos rituais que, construindo experi ê ncias de espiritualidade, reconstroem tamb é m experi ê ncias de vida. É quando a diverg ê ncia das cosmovisõ es sucumbe à convergê ncia dos significados religiosos. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, Zwicky demonstrated the slur‐neutral counterpart vocative divergence thesis (SNCVD):Slurs occur freely as vocatives. Neutral counterparts do not. In this article, I craft a novel problem for theories of slurs. The Vocatives Problem is the challenge to explain the SNCVD. I argue that there are two strong solutions. One construes slurs as encoding non‐expressive pejorative evaluation. Another construes them as expressives, as tools for expressing speaker‐contempt. I advance further rationales for treating slurs as expressives as a best solution. (...) I argue that four alternative accounts, none of which place restrictions on slurs’ semantics, fail to explain SNCVD. Finally, I show how the Vocatives Problem presents a formidable challenge to leading analyses of slurs that explain slurs’ derogatory force exclusively via appeal to pragmatics, socio‐linguistic rules like prohibitions, or articulations. (shrink)

Throughout Islamic history, the Qur’an has been transmitted through various recitational traditions (qirāʾāt). Numerous readings have been narrated over time—some broadly accepted by the Muslim community, while others were classified as shādhdh (irregular) and excluded from canonical recognition. The transmission of these shādhdh readings, espe-cially those diverging from the official orthography of the Muṣḥaf, sparked extensive debate not only among scholars of recitation but also among grammarians, lexicographers, and rhetoricians. These debates often transcended technical boundaries, influencing disciplines such as (...) langua-ge, exegesis, semantic interpretation, and religious practice. Consequently, certain sūrahs containing notable qirāʾāt variations became the focus of linguistic and exegetical inquiry—one prominent example being Sūrat Yūsuf. In particular, verses 8 and 14 of Sūrat Yūsuf, which include the expression wa-naḥnu ʿuṣbah (وَنَحْنُ عُصْبَةٌ), drew significant attention from classical scholars. The noun ʿuṣbah (عُصْبَةٌ), meaning a group or band, be-came central to grammatical and semantic discussions. Among the main questions raised was whether the word could be read in the accusative case (manṣūb), functioning either as a circumstantial noun (ḥāl) or as an expression of specification (ikhtiṣāṣ). While some narrations suggested this possibility, such a reading conflicted with the established iʿrāb system and the canonical rasm of the Muṣḥaf. Scholars observed that adopting the accusative form would create semantic inconsistencies, potentially alte-ring the contextual meaning of the verse and disrupting coherence. Thus, preserving the Qur’an’s orthographic form was regarded not only as a grammatical necessity but also as essential for maintaining semantic unity and doctrinal consistency. Within these scholarly discussions, one of the most prominent figures was the twelfth-century grammarian Abū Manṣūr al-Jawālīqī (d. 540/1145). In his treatise Jawābu Masʾalah, he examined this variant reading in detail, analyzing both its grammatical and structural aspects. His approach extended beyond linguistic analysis, seeking to uncover how iʿrāb influences the interpretive and semantic dimensions of Qur’anic recitation. Al-Jawālīqī began by presenting the variant narration and conducted a systematic investigation, concluding that reading ʿuṣbah as manṣūb is impermissible—neither as ḥāl nor as ikhtiṣāṣ. His treatment of the issue reflects a comprehensive engagement with linguistic precision and theological caution, demonstrating the link between Arabic grammar and Qur’anic interpretation. In his reasoning, al-Jawālīqī combined grammatical rigor with a commitment to preserving the Qur’anic text. He rejected interpretations that contradicted the canoni-cal orthography or led to semantic distortion, emphasizing that linguistic deviation endangers both grammatical correctness and interpretive stabi-lity. His analysis employed a dialectical, question-and-answer structure, engaging opinions of earlier linguists such as Ibn Miktham (d. 354/965), demonstrating a balanced evaluation of differing perspectives and rein-forcing the methodological sophistication of medieval Arabic scholarship. Jawābu Masʾalah thus stands not merely as a linguistic exposition but as a methodological model for safeguarding the Qur’an’s textual and semantic coherence. Al-Jawālīqī’s synthesis of grammatical reasoning and exegeti-cal awareness reflects the intellectual rigor of classical Arabic philology. The present study, drawing upon Jawābu Masʾalah, examines the variant reading attributed to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 40/661) in verses 8 and 14 of Sūrat Yūsuf within a linguistic framework. By analyzing the grammatical structure of this reading, it highlights al-Jawālīqī’s contribution to the study of Arabic grammar and his enduring commitment to protecting both the linguistic form and semantic integrity of the Qur’anic revelation. This analysis demonstrates how linguistic inquiry and theological reflection intersect to preserve the sacred text’s authenticity and interpretive har-mony. (shrink)

Language is perhaps the most complex and sophisticated of cognitive faculties in humans. The neurobiological basis of language in the healthy, aging brain remains a relatively neglected topic, in particular with respect to basic aspects of grammar and meaning. In the face of major changes to the physiological infrastructure underpinning perception and higher cognition, core language functions are frequently retained in the elderly. Meanwhile, neurolinguistic models of language are often tested and refined with reference to system abnormalities (as in cases (...) of language deficits or aphasias), but rarely with reference to the aging brain. This article outlines some major developmental stages in the neural architecture of language, and reviews the current state-of-the-art in research concerning how aging can result in distinct neural signatures of language. Certain differences in basic phrase and sentence processing strategies between children, young adults, and older adults can partly be explained by neurophysiological differences, and also divergences in core components of brain rhythms. Particular focus is placed here on spatiotemporal dynamics and neural oscillations, inter-brain coupling, 1/f neural noise, and neural entrainment. Exploring how language function changes with age can ultimately provide insights into the maturation and decay of basic properties of cortical computation. (shrink)

Confucianism, as a core component of Eastern traditional civilization, has exerted profound influence on social order, education, and governance. However, it contains significant internal contradictions, practical paradoxes, and sectarian divergences. The root of these contradictions lies in its heavy reliance on human-made norms (Ren, Yi, Li, Zhi, Xin, and ritual systems) rather than natural laws. This paper systematically analyzes the manifestations, types, and historical evolution of Confucian internal contradictions and philosophically proposes the proposition that “human-made is false.” By contrasting (...) these human-made norms with natural laws and systemic principles, the study further explores the implications of Confucian experience for modern social governance, educational systems, and civilization development. Drawing on the Lao-Yang Genesis Cosmology’s concept of “Dao follows Nature,” the paper suggests that modern civilization should prioritize holistic, scientific, and feedback-based approaches to achieve theoretical consistency and practical stability. This research provides a novel perspective integrating philosophy and science for understanding the limitations of traditional ethics and constructing sustainable civilization. (shrink)