Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the lexicon. The demand for a fuller and more adequate understanding of lexical meaning required by developments in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has stimulated a refocused interest in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. Different disciplines have studied lexical structure from their own vantage points, and because scholars have only intermittently communicated across disciplines, there has been little recognition that there is a common subject matter. The conference on which this (...) volume is based brought together interested thinkers across the disciplines of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science to exchange ideas, discuss a range of questions and approaches to the topic, consider alternative research strategies and methodologies, and formulate interdisciplinary hypotheses concerning lexical organization. The essay subjects discussed include: * alternative and complementary conceptions of the structure of the lexicon, * the nature of semantic relations and of polysemy, * the relation between meanings, concepts, and lexical organization, * critiques of truth-semantics and referential theories of meaning, * computational accounts of lexical information and structure, and * the advantages of thinking of the lexicon as ordered. (shrink)

Cet article poursuit un objectif méthodologique, la présentation comparée de trois modes de représentation de la polysémie d’un item : grille, carte et arbre sémasioogique et son illustration autour d’un phylum étymologique, celui du verbe latin tornare qui est à la source, entre autres des verbes français tourner, italien tornare et anglais to turn et de leurs dérivés et composés. Dans l’éventail des sens et des constructions des trois verbes, tourner occupe une position intermédiaire, mais se révèle plus proche de (...) to turn que de l’italien tornare. A partir du sens unique du verbe latin (« fabriquer sur un tour de pottier ») chacun des trois verbes à configuré son espace sémantique en fonction de l’ensemble de ses concurrents, y compris les verbes morphologiquement apparentés. (shrink)

"Yang Xiong is the most useless of all. He was truly a rotten Confucian."Zhu Xi (11301200 A.D.)With this comment from Song Dynasty Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, the work of Han Dynasty philosopher Yang Xiong (53 B.C.18 A.D.) was effectively relegated to the dustbin of Chinese intellectual history. While influential in the Later Han as the clearest expression of the Old Text Confucian school, Yang's Fa yan has received little attention from Western scholars and appears here in a rare annotated English translation.Written (...) during the transition between the Former and Later Han Dynasties, the Fa yan is a notoriously elusive text that was stylistically modeled on the Analects of Confucius. Denigrated by later Neo-Confucians for his association with Han usurper Wang Mang, Yang Xiong served both the Former Han and Xin imperial courts as a court poet and scholar, and was well known for being a reclusive personality, earning him a reputation as a "hermit at court." Most famous for his position that human nature is a mixture of good and evil, Yang Xiong's philosophy stands in clear contrast to the syncretic Confucianism of his day as a reformer's vision of proper self-cultivation and statecraft.This volume presents an annotated translation of the entire text, focusing on the passages that elucidate Yang's discussion of the core concepts of the Confucian school. The translator's commentary traces the text's major philosophical concepts to their roots in Warring States era philosophy, noting stylistic and conceptual allusions to the Analects and Mencius, among other texts. Also included are a discussion of Yang's biography and the influence of the eremitic ideal on his life and thought. (shrink)

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, (...) years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

Le présent article revient sur la polémique qui anime les sphères politiques européenne et française depuis les années 1990 autour de la suppression du mot « race » des textes normatifs. Au-delà des enjeux idéologiques que ce débat cristallise, il propose d’élargir la perspective d’analyse à un phénomène plus englobant : la confrontation d’ordres juridiques hétérogènes engagés dans des processus intégratifs : « le droit français et le droit communautaire diffèrent dans leur démarche en matière de lutte contre les discriminations (...) ». Si le droit français « dit » la race, il lui nie une existence normative. A l’inverse, le droit de l’Union en fait un critère distinctif susceptible d’activer des dispositions juridiques liées au principe de non-discrimination. Ce changement de paradigme conduit le juge interne à modifier son approche traditionnelle des droits de l’Homme fondée sur le principe d’égalité. Les décisions du juge et du rapporteur public portent les traces d’aménagements dénominatifs lorsqu’il raisonne dans le cadre d’une approche plus relativiste, légitimant la différence de traitement. (shrink)

We describe a way of modeling high‐dimensional data vectors by using an unsupervised, nonlinear, multilayer neural network in which the activity of each neuron‐like unit makes an additive contribution to a global energy score that indicates how surprised the network is by the data vector. The connection weights that determine how the activity of each unit depends on the activities in earlier layers are learned by minimizing the energy assigned to data vectors that are actually observed and maximizing the energy (...) assigned to “confabulations” that are generated by perturbing an observed data vector in a direction that decreases its energy under the current model. (shrink)

A cross-linguistic/cultural study of verbal metaphor compares responses to terrorism in the UK (N = 96) and to urban violence in Brazil (N = 11). Focus groups discussed how violence changes perceptions of risk, decisions of daily life, and attitudes to others. Metaphor vehicles were identified in transcribed data, then grouped together semantically; 15 vehicle groupings were used with similar frequencies, 16 groupings more in UK data, 14 more in Brazil data. Systematic and framing metaphors were found inside vehicle groupings. (...) A small set of frequent verbal metaphors work as predicted by conceptual metaphor theory. Other verbal metaphor vehicles work much more specifically, as posited by discourse dynamics theory, metaphorizing contextually distinct aspects of living with violence. Major differences were found in responses to violence: UK participants demonstrate feelings of powerlessness and lack of agency through metaphor vehicles relating to Games of Chance, the Concealed nature of terrorist activity, and Body Postures negatively evaluating response from the authorities; Brazilian participants use metaphor vehicles of Violence to emphasize how the threat of urban violence itself becomes a powerful social force that constrains daily activities. (shrink)

To study the different mechanisms of understanding figurative language in a speaker’s native language and their second language, this study investigated how scientific metaphors in Chinese and English are electrophysiologically processed via event-related potential experimentation. Compared with the metaphors from daily life or in literary works, scientific metaphors tend to involve both a more complicated context structure and a distinct knowledge-inferencing process. During the N400 time window, English scientific metaphors elicited more negative N400s than Chinese ones at the parietal region. (...) In the late positive component time window, English scientific metaphors elicited less positive LPCs than Chinese ones at the parietal region, and larger late negativities encompassing smaller areas of the brain. The findings might indicate that for late unbalanced bilingual speakers, L2 scientific metaphor comprehension requires more effort in information retrieval or access to the non-literal route. Altogether, the possible findings are that non-native and non-dominant language processing involves decreased automaticity of cognitive mechanisms, and decreased sensitivity to the levels of conventionality of metaphoric meanings. (shrink)

When a term is used in science, we tend to integrate its origins, functions, and history to see if the term is a scientific one or comes from other fields. The term «empathy» is an example to such a case. This article challenges the widespread view that empathy is the capability of a person to understand emotions and thoughts of others. We will deconstruct the concept of empathy as an academic one by focusing on its limits. We will discuss the (...) possibility of empathy for humans in critically reconstructing the meaning of the word and its meanings from its ancient origins to contemporary research. Our question is centered on cognitive actions that enable empathy as an emotional way of understanding others. Based on our findings, we argue that the concept of empathy is a recently established academic term. As a concept, it matches with some alternative concepts such as apathy and sympathy. In rhetoric, it is the pathos of the speech that affects the speaker by emotions since no specific receptive ability of the speaker is needed. Similarly, when we use the term empathy, we should use it as a category of the sender, not that of the receiver. This concept of logical empathy opposes to the classical view of empathy studies emphasizing that empathy is a receptive category of the receiver. So, empathy is nothing else but the ability to send emotional or intellectual content suitable to a capable receiver. Also, the comparative study in the concept of empathy in Buddhism gives us evidence that empathy is a spiritual or mental concept whose applications are in the area of pre-linguistic states and esoteric contexts. In rhetorical terms we could define it as a persuasive mood of pathos-driven speech. (shrink)

In the final decades of the 20th century, the majority of modern Sinophone scholars believed that Confucianism was an outdated and obsolete ideology that was not only unsuitable for the development...

The phenomenon of systematic polysemy offers a fruitful domain for examining the theoretical differences between lexicological and lexicographic approaches to description. We consider here the process that provides for systematic conversion of count to mass nouns in English (a chicken Æ chicken, an oak Æ oak etc.). From the point of view of lexicology, we argue, standard syntactic and pragmatic tests suggest the phenomenon should be described by means of a single unindividuated transfer function that does not distinguish between (...) interpretations (rabbit = "meat" vs. "fur"). From the point of view of lexicography, however, these pragmatically determined"sense precisions" are made part of explicit description via the inclusion of semantic "licenses," a mechanism distinct from lexical rules. (shrink)

In this essay, I address a novel criticism recently levelled at the Strong Programme by Nick Tosh and Tim Lewens. Tosh and Lewens paint Strong Programme theorists as trading on a contrastive form of explanation. With this, they throw valuable new light on the explanatory methods employed by the Strong Programme. However, as I shall argue, Tosh and Lewens run into trouble when they accuse Strong Programme theorists of unduly restricting the contrast space in which legitimate historical and sociological (...) explanations of scientific knowledge might be given. Their attack founders as a result of their failure to properly understand the overall methodological concerns of Strong Programme theorists. After introducing readers to the technique of contrastive explanation and correcting the errors in Tosh and Lewens’ interpretation of the Strong Programme, I argue that it is, in fact, Tosh and Lewens’ own commitment to scientific realism which places an unacceptable restriction on the explanatory space open to historians and sociologists of science. The happy ending is that the Strong Programme provides more freedom for analysis than does scientific realism, and that careful attention to the methodological benefits of contrastive explanation can help lighten the burden on historians and sociologists of science as they go about their explanatory business. (shrink)

We present a unified treatment of contrast and denial as slightly different instantiations of the same discourse schema. Both denial and contrast are analysed as involving a revision operation, what sets them apart is merely the type of information being retracted. The formal analysis requires a representational framework that separates different types of information and is therefore implemented in Layered DRT. One of our selling points is the account of the uses of rectification vs. contrastive particles (like German sondern/aber) (...) we get for free with our unification. (shrink)

Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop.

In his first research project, Greimas developed and applied new methods in the historical lexicology of modern French. His theoretical articles formulate a sociological approach that analyses vocabulary as a history of culture, illustrated in his two dissertations on fashion in 1830. In the 1980s, from the perspective of his semiotics, Greimas dismissed his early scholarship as failed experiments that taught him what not to do. In the changed epistemological context of the 21st century, the work appears as pioneering (...) research in cultural studies which possesses clear scholarly value. Greimas’ philological and lexicological training bore fruit directly and indirectly throughout his career. Two decades before he launched his semiotics, his project for lexicology proposes a semantic methodology, envisions the construction of an organon for the human sciences, and explicitly calls for a multi-generational collaborative enterprise. Like his structural semantics and semiotics, this lexicology entails three inseparable components: epistemological foundations, concrete methodologies, and robust applications. Moreover, a focus on the lexeme characterizes Greimas’ structural semantics and persists in his semiotics.В своей первой научно-исследовательской работе Греймас разработал и применил новые методы в исторической лексикологии современного французского языка. В его теоретических статьях сформулирован социологический подход, который анализирует лексику как историю культуры. Это иллюстрируют две диссертации Греймаса о моде в 1830 году. В 1980-х годах он отошел от своих ранних работ, считая их неудачными. Но в изменившемся эпистемологическом контексте 21-го века эти работы выглядят в культурных исследованиях новаторскими, обладающими несомненными академическими достоинствами. Филологическое и лексикологическое образование Греймаса давало прямые и косвенные результаты в течение всей его карьеры. За два десятилетия до начала семиотических исследований Греймас предлагает в своем лексикологическом проекте семантическую методологию, строительство органона для гуманитарных наук, а также призывает к междисциплинарному сотрудничеству. Как и структурная семантика и семиотика Греймаса, эта лексикология включает в себя три неразделимых компонента: эпистемологические основы, конкретные методологии и возможности применения. Кроме того, внимание к лексеме характеризует всю структурную семантику Греймаса и сохраняется в его семиотике. Oma esimeses teadusprojektis tootas Greimas valja nuudisprantsuse keele ajaloolise leksikoloogia uued meetodid ning rakendas neid. Tema teoreetilistes artiklites sonastatakse sotsioloogiline lahenemine, mis analuusib sonavara kui kultuuriajalugu ja mida illustreerivad tema kaks vaitekirja 1830ndate aastate moe kohta. 1980ndatel aastatel taandus Greimas oma varajastest uurimustest kui ebaonnestunud katsetustest. 21. sajandi muutunud epistemolooglises kontekstis osutub tema looming teedrajavaks uurimistooks kultuuriuuringute vallas. Greimase fi loloogiline ja leksikoloogiline ettevalmistus kandis kogu tema karjaari valtel vilja nii otseselt kui kaudselt. Kaks aastakummet enne seda, kui ta tuli valja oma semiootikaga, pakkus tema leksikoloogiaprojekt valja semantilise metoodika, nagi ette humanitaarteaduste organoni loomist ning kutsus otsesonu ules multidistsiplinaarsele koostoole. Nagu tema strukturaalne semantika ja semiootika sisaldab ka see leksikoloogia kolme uksteisest lahutamatut komponenti: epistemoloogilisi aluseid, konkreetseid meetodeid ja julgeid rakendusi. Lisaks iseloomustab lekseemile keskendumine Greimase strukturaalset semantikat ning jaab pusima tema semiootikas. (shrink)

Dennett, a philosopher, and Griffin, an ethologist, have recently presented influential arguments promoting the extended use of intentional language by students of animal behavior. This essay seeks to elucidate and to contrast the claims made by each of these authors, and to evaluate their proposals primarily from the perspective of a practicing comparative psychologist or ethologist. While Griffin regards intentional terms as explanatory, Dennett assigns them a descriptive function; the issue of animal consciousness is central to Griffin's program and only (...) tangentially related to Dennett's. The philosopher's arguments are founded upon a more coherent metaphysics, but Dennett neglects to substantiate his claim that animal competences can be most readily modelled by artificial intelligence specialists when they are described in intentional terms. Both authors assume that some examples of animal behavior should not be given an intentional characterization, but neither provides adequate guidelines for the identification of cases belonging to this negative set. (shrink)

This is a collection of papers that resulted from the Third International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics that was held at Shanghai ...

Realism and empiricism have always been contradictory tendencies in the philosophy of science. The view I will sketch is a synthesis, which I call Contrastive Empiricism. Realism and empiricism are incompatible, so a synthesis that merely conjoined them would be a contradiction. Rather, I propose to isolate important elements in each and show that they combine harmoniously. I will leave behind what I regard as confusions and excesses. The result, I hope, will be neither contradiction nor mishmash.

We argue that contrastive statements have the same underlying semantics and affect the context in the same way as denials. We substantiate this claim by giving a unified account of the two phenomena that treats contrast as a subtype of denial. This analysis crucially requires a dynamic semantics view of context-dependence with a multi-dimensional representation of information.

What conception of causation is at work in the law? I argue that the law implicitly relies on a contrastive conception. In a liability case where the defendant's breach of duty must be shown to have caused the plaintiff's damages, it is not enough to consider what would have happened if the cause had not occurredthe law requires us to look to a specific replacement for the effect, which in this case is the hypothetical outcome in which the plaintiff (...) came off better. In place of I suggest the more explicit An explicitly contrastive approach can thus potentially help the lawyer phrase her causal question in a more explicit way, while shedding light on our conception of causation. (shrink)

According to proponents of irreducible cognitive phenomenology some cognitive states put one in phenomenal states for which no wholly sensory states suffice. One of the main approaches to defending the view that there is irreducible cognitive phenomenology is to give a phenomenal contrast argument. In this paper I distinguish three kinds of phenomenal contrast argument: what I call pure—represented by Strawson's Jack/Jacques argument—hypothetical—represented by Kriegel's Zoe argument—and glossed—first developed here. I argue that pure and hypothetical phenomenal contrast arguments face significant (...) difficulties, but that there is a sound glossed phenomenal contrast argument for irreducible cognitive phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper attempts to account for the contrastive discourse connective (tam) tersine (‘on the contrary’) in Turkish discourse. We suggest that this connective evokes a discourse structure which has at least three parts: the material in the prior linguistic context, its refutation, and then rectification in the clause where the connective is hosted. Since negation is obligatory in the discourse context for refutation, we include a discussion of negation and we conclude that the obligatory negative clauses are instances of (...) descriptive negation rather than metalinguistic negation. We show that linguistic and cognitive contexts interact in producing and interpreting the discourse adverbial connective under discussion and the discourse structure in which it is used. It is claimed that (tam) tersine serves to bring closer the cognitive context of the intended audience to that of the writer’s while minimizing any potential discrepancies in the audience’s and the writer’s cognitive context. We argue that this discourse connective and the discourse it evokes are used in the argumentative mode. (shrink)

Smart MR contrast agents exhibit modulation of their relaxivity by specific physiological or biochemical trigger-events, while targeted MR contrast agents are envisioned to deliver the large gadolinium chelates into the target tissue. In an effort to develop novel smart and targeted MR contrast agents, the series of the DO3A based multifunctional chelating agents with the variable length of the side chain has been synthesized. They serve as valuable multipurpose precursors for contrast agents based on gadolinium chelates in the design of (...) relaxometric MR probes. The presence of the amino group in the side chain of the macrocycle allows for conversion into various functional groups (aminophosponates, aminocarboxylates, etc.) or for conjugation with different biomolecules, dyes, and polymers. Choice of the functional groups depends on the.. (shrink)

Opponents of the new mechanistic account of scientific explanation argue that the new mechanists are committed to a ‘More Details Are Better’ claim: adding details about the mechanism always improves an explanation. Due to this commitment, the mechanistic account cannot be descriptively adequate as actual scientific explanations usually leave out details about the mechanism. In reply to this objection, defenders of the new mechanistic account have highlighted that only adding relevant mechanistic details improves an explanation and that relevance is to (...) be determined relative to the phenomenon-to-be-explained. Craver and Kaplan (B J Philos Sci 71:287–319, 2020) provide a thorough reply along these lines specifying that the phenomena at issue are contrasts. In this paper, we will discuss Craver and Kaplan’s reply. We will argue that it needs to be modified in order to avoid three problems, i.e., what we will call the Odd Ontology Problem, the Multiplication of Mechanisms Problem, and the Ontic Completeness Problem. However, even this modification is confronted with two challenges: First, it remains unclear how explanatory relevance is to be determined for contrastive explananda within the mechanistic framework. Second, it remains to be shown as to how the new mechanistic account can avoid what we will call the ‘Vertical More Details are Better’ objection. We will provide answers to both challenges. (shrink)

I have argued that argumentation theorists should concern themselves with scientific argument as a source for images of epistemic virtue in argument. In this paper I will contrast the lessons learned from this endeavour with their counterpart in the evaluation of political arguments. Despite obvious differences, fundamental symmetries between the two argumentation cultures point to the need for a more serious engagement with rigorous disciplinary arguments in argument theory.

We describe the three place relation of contrastive knowledge, which holds between a person, a target proposition, and a contrasting proposition. The person knows that p rather than that q. We argue for three claims about this relation. (a) Many common sense and philosophical ascriptions of knowledge can be understood in terms of it. (b) Its application is subject to fewer complications than non-contrastive knowledge is. (c) It applies over a wide range of human and nonhuman cases.

Baumann (2008a) raises three main concerns for epistemic contrastivism. These lead him to a more complicated re-conception of knowledge, involving varying numbers of argument places for varying sorts of arguments. I will argue that these complications are unneeded. The more elegant and uniform contrastive treatment can resolve all of Baumann’s concerns, in a straightforward way.

Opponents of the new mechanistic account of scientific explanation argue that the new mechanists are committed to a ‘More Details Are Better’ claim: adding details about the mechanism always improves an explanation. Due to this commitment, the mechanistic account cannot be descriptively adequate as actual scientific explanations usually leave out details about the mechanism. In reply to this objection, defenders of the new mechanistic account have highlighted that only adding relevant mechanistic details improves an explanation and that relevance is to (...) be determined relative to the phenomenon-to-be-explained. Craver and Kaplan (B J Philos Sci 71:287–319, 2020) provide a thorough reply along these lines specifying that the phenomena at issue are contrasts. In this paper, we will discuss Craver and Kaplan’s reply. We will argue that it needs to be modified in order to avoid three problems, i.e., what we will call the Odd Ontology Problem, the Multiplication of Mechanisms Problem, and the Ontic Completeness Problem. However, even this modification is confronted with two challenges: First, it remains unclear how explanatory relevance is to be determined for contrastive explananda within the mechanistic framework. Second, it remains to be shown as to how the new mechanistic account can avoid what we will call the ‘Vertical More Details are Better’ objection. We will provide answers to both challenges. (shrink)

A promising but underexplored view about normative reasons is contrastivism, which holds that considerations are fundamentally reasons for things only relative to sets of alternatives. Contrastivism gains an advantage over non-contrastive theories by holding that reasons relative to different sets of alternatives can be independent of one another. But this feature also raises a serious problem: we need some way of constraining this independence. I develop a version of contrastivism that provides the needed constraints, and that is independently motivated (...) by the widespread idea that reasons involve the promotion of various kinds of objectives. (shrink)

Some apparent differences: (i) Denials are essentially a dialogue phenomenon as is obvious from the fact that (ii) denials taken out of their dialogue context are often plain contradictions (Horn, 1989), and for this reason (iii) their analysis necessarily involves nonmonotonic operations. Contrast on the other hand is (i’) a discourse relation frequently occuring in monologue, (ii’) never involving overt contradictions (*I am hungry but I am not hungry)1 and therefore (iii’) often treated as an essentially monotonic phenomenon: what licenses (...) a contrastive conjunction is not overt contradiction, but rather a conflict between what’s defeasibly implied by the first and second conjuncts. (shrink)

Can an act harm someone—a future someone, someone who does not exist yet but will—if that person would never exist but for that very action? This is one question raised by the non-identity problem. Many would argue that the answer is No: an action harms someone only insofar as it is worse for her, and an action cannot be worse for someone if she would not exist without it. The first part of this paper contends that the plausibility of the (...) ‘no harm’ argument stems from an equivocation. The second half argues for an account of harm that is both causal and contrastive. Finally, the paper contends that the contrastive account disarms the no harm argument and furthermore neutralizes a related argument that has been problematic for some previously proposed solutions to the non-identity problem. (shrink)