In Epictetus‘ chapter on Providence, the eighteenth section contains an evident corruption: ταντα επ’ εκαοτον επνειν εδει και και νον μεγιστον υμνονεπνμνειν… The duplication of cannot be genuine. It is not an iteration of the kind which heightens the effect of a passage: it just falls flat. Wilamowitz, in his Lesebuch, printed in the first place. This is an improvement, but I doubt whether this conjecture really settles the point. The duplication is stressed, and not eased, by the noun and (...) Epictetus is hardly likely to have followed the verb by the homophonous synonym At one of the two places, then, the scribe missed the original verb by duplicating the other. I believe that consideration of the context can show what the original was and from which place it was ousted. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

The most prominent recent model of how concepts can have gradient applicability—that is, apply more fully to some items than to others—is that supplied by the prototype theory. Such a model, however, assumes concepts to be internally individuated and structured, and it might thus be challenged by both concept externalism and conceptual atomism. This paper argues that neither of these challenges presents an obstacle to viewing some concepts as having gradient application, and develops a different model of the conditions for (...) such application. I call the notion of gradient applicability I discuss a feature-based one, and distinguish it from both the prototype theory’s typicality-based notion and a vagueness-based notion. On the model I develop, what determines whether a concept has gradient applicability is just the nature of the property it expresses, not facts about its stereotype. Focusing in particular on Fodor’s Informational Atomism, I argue on this basis that externalism is compatible with gradient applicability for all concepts, and that conceptual atomism is compatible with gradient applicability in the case of natural kind concepts, but not in the case of response-dependent concepts. This does not, however, present an obstacle to viewing some response-dependent concepts as having gradient applicability, for I also argue that in fact atomism cannot be true of response-dependent concepts. (shrink)

We used multiple methods to examine two questions about emotion and culture: (1) Which facial expressions are recognised cross-culturally; and (2) does the “forced-choice” method lead to spurious findings of universality? Forty participants in the US and 40 in India were shown 14 facial expressions and asked to say what had happened to cause the person to make the face. Analyses of the social situations given and of the affect words spontaneously used showed high levels of recognition for most of (...) the expressions. A subsequent forced-choice task using the same faces confirmed these findings. Analysis of the pattern of magnitude, discreteness, and similarity of responses across cultures and expressions led to the conclusion that there is no neat distinction between cross-culturally recognisable and nonrecognisable expressions. Results are better described as a gradient of recognition. (shrink)

Extensive empirical work has shown that species richness decreases roughly exponentially or quadratically with latitude. What appears to be a latitudinal gradient in fact may simply be a negative correlation of latitude with area at that latitude, due to convergence of lines of meridian at the poles. There is simply less area at high latitudes, which means fewer niches and fewer opportunities for speciation, hence diminished biodiversity at high latitudes. Similarly, analytic geometry of a cone shows that species number should (...) decrease linearly with altitude on a conical mountain. Here, I provide an explicit mathematical model of the area hypothesis of species richness along latitude and altitude gradients. I re-analyze a previously published latitudinal gradient dataset and show that species number is a linear function of the predicted area and that species number is more fully explained by predicted area than by a quadratic function of latitude. However, analytic geometry is not needed if precise measures of area are known. (shrink)

The 14th century Συναξάριον τοῦ τιμημένου Γαδάρου (in English: the Tale of the heroic donkey) could be described as an aitiological story. In medieval Greek there was a synonymous word, νικóν (nikón), which alternatively to the more common word γάδαρος (ghádharos) meant donkey. The word νικóν recalls the verb (nikó) and even reminds us of the homophonous participe derived from the same verb. The tale explains how the word νικóν came into being. Due to a fatal error in the editio (...) princeps by W. Wagner (Carmina Graeca medii aevi, 1874) the pointe of the Tale is not intellegible in the printed text. K. Tsantsanoglu in 1971 realised the problems of Wagner's edition, but his article did not lead to a re-evaluation of this fine piece of late-Byzantine literature. The present article offers: a new edition of the Tale of the heroic donkey, based on a completely new reading of the single manuscripts that preserves it; a new reading of the texts, focussing on questions of rhetorics and literary genre; a full glossary, based on the new edition. (shrink)

In Gradient Acceptability and Linguistic Theory, Elaine J. Francis examines a challenging problem at the intersection of theoretical linguistics and the psychology of language: the problem of interpreting gradient judgments of sentence acceptability in relation to theories of grammatical knowledge. This problem is important because acceptability judgments constitute the primary source of data on which such theories have been built, despite being susceptible to various extra-grammatical factors. Through a review of experimental and corpus-based research on a variety of syntactic phenomena (...) and an in-depth examination of two case studies, Francis argues for two main positions. The first is that converging evidence from online comprehension tasks, elicited production tasks, and corpora of naturally-occurring discourse can help determine the sources of variation in acceptability judgments and narrow down the range of plausible theoretical interpretations. The second is that the interpretation of judgment data depends crucially on one's theoretical commitments and assumptions, especially with respect to the nature of the syntax-semantics interface and the choice of either a categorical or a gradient notion of grammaticality. The theoretical frameworks considered in this book include derivational theories (e.g. Minimalism, Principles and Parameters), constraint-based theories (e.g. Sign-based Construction Grammar, Simpler Syntax), competition-based theories (e.g. Stochastic Optimality Theory, Decathlon Model), and usage-based approaches. While showing that acceptability judgment data are typically compatible with the assumptions of various theoretical frameworks, Francis argues that some gradient phenomena are best captured within frameworks that permit soft constraints-non-categorical grammatical constraints that encode the conventional preferences of language users. (shrink)

Punning is an important means of creating humorous effects by intentionally exploiting semantic ambiguity. Previous psycholinguistic research on puns has mainly focused on the process of meaning retrieval in homograph puns, while it is still not entirely clear how readers dynamically utilize contextual information to understand homophone puns. In the current investigation, 68 native Chinese participants were recruited to read three types of experimental sentences while their eye movements were recorded: the homophone-pun sentences where the less salient (...) class='Hi'>homophone was visually presented, the homophone-salient sentences where the salient homophone was used, and the homophone-error sentences where the critical context noun in the homophone puns was replaced with an unrelated word. Humor rating results of the homophone puns and the homophone-salient sentences demonstrated that the less salient homophones rather than the salient ones elicited much larger humor responses when presented visually in the same potential pun context. In addition, the reverse fixation pattern in the homophone area and the spill-over region also suggested that meanings of the salient homophones were more recoverable even when not presented visually. Statistical analyses of the homophone puns and the homophone-error sentences showed that the semantic relatedness between the critical context noun and the less salient homophone could significantly predict the humor rating scores of Chinese readers. Taken together, less salient homophones need to receive more contextual support to balance out the advantages of salient homophones before generating a humorous pun interpretation. (shrink)

A model predictive control method based on recursive backpropagation neural network and genetic algorithm is proposed for a class of nonlinear systems with time delays and uncertainties. In the offline modeling stage, a multistep-ahead predictor with GA-RBP neural network is designed, where GA-BP neural network is used as a one-step prediction model and GA is employed to train the initial weights and bias of the BP neural network. The incorporation of GA into RBP can reduce the possibility of the BP (...) neural network falling into a local optimum instead of reaching global optimization. In the online optimizing stage, a multistep-ahead GA-RBP neural network predictor and an improved gradient descent method are proposed to efficiently solve the online optimization problem of nonlinear MPC by minimizing a modified quadratic criterion. The designed MPC strategy can avoid information loss while linearizing the controlled system and computing the Hessian matrix and its inverse matrix. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can reduce the computational burden and improve the performance of MPC for the solution of nonlinear controlled systems. (shrink)

Pragmatic modulation makes contextual information necessary for interpretation. This poses a problem for homophonic reports and inter-contextual communication in general: of co-situated interlocutors, we can expect some common ground, but non-co-situated interpreters lack access to the context of utterance. Here I argue that we can nonetheless share modulated contents via homophonic reports. First, occasion-unspecific information is often sufficient for the recovery of modulated content. Second, interpreters can recover what is said with different degrees of accuracy. Homophonic reports and inter-contextual communication (...) are often successful because the reporting context does not demand full accuracy. (shrink)

Mental representations have continuous as well as discrete, combinatorial properties. For example, while predominantly discrete, phonological representations also vary continuously; this is reflected by gradient effects in instrumental studies of speech production. Can an integrated theoretical framework address both aspects of structure? The framework we introduce here, Gradient Symbol Processing, characterizes the emergence of grammatical macrostructure from the Parallel Distributed Processing microstructure (McClelland, Rumelhart, & The PDP Research Group, 1986) of language processing. The mental representations that emerge, Distributed Symbol Systems, (...) have both combinatorial and gradient structure. They are processed through Subsymbolic Optimization–Quantization, in which an optimization process favoring representations that satisfy well-formedness constraints operates in parallel with a distributed quantization process favoring discrete symbolic structures. We apply a particular instantiation of this framework, λ-Diffusion Theory, to phonological production. Simulations of the resulting model suggest that Gradient Symbol Processing offers a way to unify accounts of grammatical competence with both discrete and continuous patterns in language performance. (shrink)

Accumulation of neurotransmitters in the lumen of synaptic vesicles (SVs) relies on the activity of the vacuolar‐type H+‐ATPase. This pump drives protons into the lumen, generating a proton electrochemical gradient (ΔμH+) across the membrane. Recent work has demonstrated that the balance between the chemical (ΔpH) and electrical (ΔΨ) components of ΔμH+ is regulated differently by some distinct vesicle types. As different neurotransmitter transporters use ΔpH and ΔΨ with different relative efficiencies, regulation of this gradient balance has the potential to influence (...) neurotransmitter uptake. Nevertheless, the underlying mechanisms responsible for this regulation remain poorly understood. In this review, we provide an overview of current neurotransmitter uptake models, with a particular emphasis on the distinct roles of the electrical and chemical gradients and current hypotheses for regulatory mechanisms. -/- . (shrink)

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysemes and homophones either as direct competitors to pictures, or as indirect-competitors to pictures. Polysemes elicited equal numbers of intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions whether (...) primed as direct competitors or as indirect-competitors. This contrasted with the finding that homophones elicited more intrusions to picture names compared to in control conditions when primed as direct competitors than when primed as indirect-competitors. These results suggest that polysemes, unlike homophones, are stored and retrieved as unified lexical representations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 40-62 [Access article in PDF] Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture Charles Stewart * The subject matter of anthropology has gradually changed over the last twenty years. Nowadays ethnographers rarely search for a stable or original form of cultures; they are usually more concerned with revealing how local communities respond to historical change and global influences. The burgeoning literature on transnational flows of ideas, (...) global institutions, and cultural mixture reflects this shift of attention. This increased awareness of cultural interpenetration has, furthermore, been instrumental in the critique of earlier conceptions of "culture" that cast it as too stable, bounded, and homogeneous to be useful in a world characterized by migrations (voluntary or forced), cheap travel, international marketing, and telecommunications. 1 Contemporary social theory has accordingly turned to focus on phenomena such as globalization, transnational nationalism, and the situation of diaspora communities. In this body of literature the word syncretism has begun to reappear alongside such related concepts as hybridization and creolization as a means of portraying the dynamics of global social developments.In what follows I consider some current attempts to theorize mixture before turning to examine the suitability, or not, of the terms listed above. Anthropologists and other social scientists have expressed ambivalence about all three terms--syncretism, hybridity, and creolization. I discuss these reservations before presenting a genealogical consideration of the single term syncretism. My purpose in considering the history of syncretism up to the present is not to enforce a standard usage confined to the domain of religion; nor is it my goal to promote syncretism to a position of primus inter pares in the company of all other terms for mixture. I see my approach instead as an attempt to illustrate historically that syncretism has an objectionable but nevertheless instructive past. If this past can be understood, then we are in a position to consciously reappropriate syncretism [Shaw and Stewart 2] and set the ethnographic study of cultural mixture on new tracks.This might seem too minimalist to readers who currently have no reservations about the term, but many anthropologists, on both sides of the Atlantic, have personally expressed to me strong reservations about ever employing the word syncretism. If asked why they hold this view, they are often unable to articulate a specific reason. Some, however, did express one or both of the following objections: (1) syncretism is a pejorative term, one that derides mixture, and/or (2) syncretism presupposes "purity" in the [End Page 40] traditions that combine. Both of these reservations will be considered below, but it is the broad disagreement within the anthropological community on the appropriateness of the very term syncretism that has stimulated this inquiry. Such ambivalence reflects basic uncertainties about how to conceptualize cultural mixture. Current Discussions of Mixture Cultures, if we still wish to retain this term (and I do), are porous; they are open to intermixture with other, different cultures and they are subject to historical change precisely on account of these influences. 2 This has no doubt always been the case. Certainly decolonization and the entry into a postmodernity where master narratives of purity and homogeneity are vulnerable to doubt have contributed to valorizing recognitions of mixture where formerly they had been stigmatized as inauthentic and hence uninteresting for anthropological study. Research in the Caribbean, in Sidney Mintz's view, started relatively late precisely because this region "was considered theoretically unfruitful... its peoples supposedly lacked culture, or were culturally bastardized" [303].Cultural borrowing and interpenetration are today seen as part of the very nature of cultures [Glissant 140-41; Rosaldo, Foreword xv]. To phrase it more accurately, syncretism describes the process by which cultures constitute themselves at any given point in time. Today's hybridization will simply give way to tomorrow's hybridization, the form of which will be dictated by historico-political events and contingencies. In examining cultural hybridity, writers such as Edward Said and James Clifford [Predicament 14-15] have lifted syncretism out of the framework of acculturation. Syncretism is no longer a transient "stage" which will disappear when, with time, assimilation occurs. As Said... (shrink)

Major contributions emanating from Sagvolden et al.'s theory include elucidation of the role in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) of temporal information processing, social learning, and response extinction learning. Key issues include a need for clearer explanation of the relative role of impulsivity versus response suppression/inhibition in the dual process model, and delineation of genotype-environment correlations versus interactions in the social and experiential mechanisms posited.

Many social gradients in health appear steeper for men than for women. I refer to this as the “Steepness Puzzle.” This paper explores the ethical implications of this Puzzle. First, it identifies potential explanations for the Steepness Puzzle, including methodological problems. Second, it highlights two harms associated with the methodological explanation: the consequences of biased epistemic practices and the marginalization of women. It also demonstrates how attempts to flatten the gradients in health could disproportionately favor men or reinforce (...) troubling gendered norms. Finally, I suggest ways to address the methodological problems underlying the Puzzle. (shrink)

Andrew Simester’s new book, Fundamentals of Criminal Law: Responsibility, Culpability, and Wrongdoing, is a masterful analysis of the doctrines of the general part of the criminal law and the multiple, overlapping functions that those doctrines serve. Along the way, Simester makes explicit what criminal law theorists routinely presuppose—that the ordinary words “blameworthiness” and “culpability” pick out the same moral concept. This essay argues that this assumed equivalence is mistaken: two concepts are in play, not one. Roughly, to be blameworthy is (...) to be justly liable to blaming practices in virtue of being at fault, and to be culpable is to act in a fashion that manifests or issues from insufficient concern for morally weighty interests. Culpability is not identical to blameworthiness, but rather a ground of blameworthiness: to be culpable is one way to be at fault, thus one way to be blameworthy. More importantly, culpability is not the exclusive ground of blameworthiness; an agent can be at fault, hence blameworthy, without being culpable. This essay defends these conceptual claims and draws forth some implications for two theses that Simester advances: that it is morally permissible to punish persons for criminal negligence and that it is unjust to punish persons who don’t deserve it. (shrink)