This review considers Semantic Syntax and Slavic Transformational Syntax particularly in the light of their contributions to the theory of grammar. Semantic Syntax is shown to have a polemical bias against the Aspects model and toward generative semantics. Its editor's position in the constellation of semantic logicians is defined; pro-Chomskian objections to the logical-cognitive semantic theory are advanced. Slavic Transformational Syntax is comprised of essays with a wide range of theoretical stances; the insights of the radical case grammar of James (...) Miller are compared with those of Semantic Syntax. Remarks on deixis by Richard Brecht are discussed in relationship to semantic-logic approaches. Certain similarities of Jakobsonian functionalism and generative semantics are discussed. (shrink)

The prime purpose of this paper is, first, to restore to discourse-bound occasion sentences their rightful central place in semantics and secondly, taking these as the basic propositional elements in the logical analysis of language, to contribute to the development of an adequate logic of occasion sentences and a mathematical (Boolean) foundation for such a logic, thus preparing the ground for more adequate semantic, logical and mathematical foundations of the study of natural language. Some of the insights elaborated in this (...) paper have appeared in the literature over the past thirty years, and a number of new developments have resulted from them. The present paper aims at providing an integrated conceptual basis for this new development in semantics. In Section 1 it is argued that the reduction by translation of occasion sentences to eternal sentences, as proposed by Russell and Quine, is semantically and thus logically inadequate. Natural language is a system of occasion sentences, eternal sentences being merely boundary cases. The logic has fewer tasks than is standardly assumed, as it excludes semantic calculi, which depend crucially on information supplied by cognition and context and thus belong to cognitive psychology rather than to logic. For sentences to express a proposition and thus be interpretable and informative, they must first be properly anchored in context. A proposition has a truth value when it is, moreover, properly keyed in the world, i.e. is about a situation in the world. Section 2 deals with the logical properties of natural language. It argues that presuppositional phenomena require trivalence and presents the trivalent logic ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ , with two kinds of falsity and two negations. It introduces the notion of Σ-space for a sentence A (or / A /, the set of situations in which A is true) as the basis of logical model theory, and the notion of / ${\bf P}^{A}$ / (the Σ-space of the presuppositions of A), functioning as a 'private' subuniverse for / A /. The trivalent Kleene calculus is reinterpreted as a logical account of vagueness, rather than of presupposition. ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ and the Kleene calculus are refinements of standard bivalent logic and can be combined into one logical system. In Section 3 the adequacy of ${\rm PPC}_{3}$ as a truth-functional model of presupposition is considered more closely and given a Boolean foundation. In a noncompositional extended Boolean algebra, three operators are defined: $1_{a}$ for the conjoined presuppositions of a, ã for the complement of a within $1_{a}$ , and â for the complement of $1_{a}$ within Boolean 1. The logical properties of this extended Boolean algebra are axiomatically defined and proved for all possible models. Proofs are provided of the consistency and the completeness of the system. Section 4 is a provisional exploration of the possibility of using the results obtained for a new discourse-dependent account of the logic of modalities in natural language. The overall result is a modified and refined logical and model-theoretic machinery, which takes into account both the discourse-dependency of natural language sentences and the necessity of selecting a key in the world before a truth value can be assigned. (shrink)

We construct various isometry groups of the Urysohn space , including abelian groups which act transitively, and free groups which are dense in the full isometry group.

The political independence of the United States of America was proclaimed in a Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, on July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson drafted the document, and the changes made in the text reflected the struggle among different factions in the revolutionary camp. Jefferson's initial version was fundamentally retained, however; and that is precisely what makes the Declaration of Independence not merely a legal document but a vivid example of a bourgeois revolutionary program expressing (...) in concentrated form the ideology of the radical wing of the American Enlightenment. The form of the Declaration was an address to world public opinion explaining the causes and bases for the decisive political break of the 13 British colonies with the home country. In fact it provided a general philosophical justification for the validity of revolutionary change in the social order by the people. The Declaration became the legal ground for the American system of government, sanctioning its independence and serving as the basis for the documents of a constitutional nature that followed. The treatment of the nature of man and his rights is the most important feature of the revolutionary conclusions of the Declaration. (shrink)

The contemporary philosophy of medicine may be characterized as a continuous struggle with the Cartesian heritage, in order to reach a more satisfying image of man. This paper outlines the influence of Cartesian dualism on the foundations of medicine.The notion of a real distinction between the mental and physical, particularly the mechanistic conception of the human body, made possible the development of the natural sciences as well as scientific medicine, not hampered any longer by the risk of colliding with religion (...) or Church. (shrink)

To address the complex challenge of global antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a pandemic treaty should include mechanisms that 1) equitably address the access gap for antimicrobials, diagnostic technologies, and alternative therapies; 2) equitably conserve antimicrobials to sustain effectiveness and access across time and space; 3) equitably finance the investment, discovery, development, and distribution of new technologies; and 4) equitably finance and establish greater upstream and midstream infection prevention measures globally. Biodiversity, climate, and nuclear governance offer lessons for addressing these challenges.

Modelling data in applied areas particularly in reliability engineering is a prominent research topic. Statistical models play a vital role in modelling reliability data and are useful for further decision-making policies. In this paper, we study a new class of distributions with one additional shape parameter, called a new generalized exponential-X family. Some of its properties are taken into account. The maximum likelihood approach is adopted to obtain the estimates of the model parameters. For assessing the performance of these estimators, (...) a comprehensive Monte Carlo simulation study is carried out. The usefulness of the proposed family is demonstrated by means of a real-life application representing the failure times of electronic components. The fitted results show that the new generalized exponential-X family provides a close fit to data. Finally, considering the failure times data, the Bayesian analysis and performance of Gibbs sampling are discussed. The diagnostics measures such as the Raftery–Lewis, Geweke, and Gelman–Rubin are applied to check the convergence of the algorithm. (shrink)

The House of Lords in F v West Berkshire Health Authority [1989] considered the lawfulness of providing care and treatment for a mentally incapacitated adult. They did not, however, directly consider the use of restraint to enable the provision of care in the face of resistance from the patient. The law has since had good cause to give consideration to this important issue. This paper establishes the present law in the context of using restraint to deliver care. Although the legal (...) principles established have derived from what might be considered to be “hard cases”, life-and-death cases, they apply to all aspects of routine medical, dental and nursing care. Further, the paper considers the recent government proposals and the effect those proposals may have on the routine care of such patients. (shrink)

This is an extremely readable and interesting contribution. The author takes the reader through the Patient Self-Determination Act in some depth, but doesn't make any attempt to look at its provisions in real detail. This cannot be taken as an omission, as the purpose of the book is to explore the principles underpinning the legislation and to explore its ethical content. In that respect, this is a very interesting exercise. On one ….

The Lord of the Fourteen worlds is manifest here. Questioner: For whom is the title 'Dada Bhagwan' used? Dadashri: For 'Dada Bhagwan.' Not for me. I am a 'Gnani Purush A. M. Patel.' 'Dada Bhagwan' is the Lord of the fourteen worlds. He dwells within you also, but He has not awakened yet, he remains unmanifested. Here within me, He is fully awakened and manifest. He is capable of awakening the Lord within you.

The first problem which Gochet takes up in this important book is whether the proposition is necessary to logical syntax. Gochet is intent upon following out the nominalistic enterprise of desolving [[sic]] the ontological status of the proposition as much as possible. He notes that Quine’s schematic letters can replace the propositional variables, and thus the first transference is made from semantics to syntax, the first important loosening of ontological commitments. Tarski’s thesis that sentences are true or false, and not (...) propositions, is the leading idea in the analysis and in the nominalistic criterion, in general. Throughout, the specific problem is to determine when the use of the notion of proposition is ontologically compromising. Here Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment is the analytic tool. Gochet distinguishes a syntactic version and a semantic version. Gochet refines this criterion by means of several objections of Ayer and Church and making some technical innovations proposed by Prior and Marcus-Barcan. Thus, along with the law of parsimony, he now has a powerful means for detecting the ontological commitments of certain modes of speech. (shrink)

In this book Carnois analyzes the notion of freedom as the central concept which gives internal coherence to the Kantian enterprise. The book is divided into two parts: Freedom and Nature, and Freedom and Morality. Carnois begins his analysis with the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason which questions whether a cause, of its own account, can initiate a series of effects. The double causality pointed to here is taken as a fact. The author shows that Kant distinguishes (...) the practical freedom "inserted" in nature from the transcendental freedom heterogeneous with the sensible world. The distinction indicates the speculative interest of reason in freedom, but since its real possibility cannot be shown by theoretical reason, freedom remains problematic: a rational hypothesis and a regulative principle. Carnois explores the double causality through the concept of character which is both empirical and intelligible. He shows that the relation between characters is one of causality or that of sign to signified; and that it is this relation which defines the human being. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors have detected a new effect in the area of geomagnetism, related to the behavior of a magnetic dipole freely floating on water surface. An experiment is described in the present paper in which a magnetic dipole fixed upon a float placed on non- magnetized water surface undergoes displacement along with reorientation caused by fine structure of the earth's magnetic field. This fact can probably be explained by secular decrease of the earth's major dipole moment. Further, (...) a detailed study of the phenomenon may create interesting premises for its practical use, particularly for the analysis of fine structure of geomagnetic field and its time-dependent anomalies. A strange behavior of some sea fish species prior to strong earthquakes may be explained if the fish are assumed as 'live magnetic dipoles'. (shrink)

A. M. Ritchie; XII—Can Animals See? A Cartesian Query, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 June 1964, Pages 221–242, https://doi.org/.

Objectives: Evidence based patient choice seems based on a strong liberal individualist interpretation of patient autonomy; however, not all patients are in favour of such an interpretation. The authors wished to assess whether ideals of autonomy in clinical practice are more in accordance with alternative concepts of autonomy from the ethics literature. This paper describes the development of a questionnaire to assess such concepts of autonomy.Methods: A questionnaire, based on six moral concepts from the ethics literature, was sent to aneurysm (...) patients and their surgeons. The structure of the questionnaire was assessed by factor analysis, and item reduction was based on reliability.Results: Ninety six patients and 58 surgeons participated. The questionnaire consisted of four scales. Two of the scales reflected the paternalistic and consumerist poles of the liberal individualist model, one scale reflected concepts of Socratic autonomy and of procedural independence, and the fourth scale reflected ideals of risk disclosure.Discussion: The Ideal Patient Autonomy Scale is a 14 item normative instrument. It is clearly distinct from the generally used psychological preference questionnaires that assess preferences for physician-patient roles. (shrink)