In the cocktail party situation, people with normal hearing usually follow a single speaker among multiple concurrent ones. However, there is no agreement in the literature as to whether the background is segregated into multiple streams/speakers. The current study varied the number of concurrent speech streams and investigated target detection and memory for the contents of a target stream as well as the processing of distractors. A male-voiced target stream was either presented alone (single-speech), together with one male-voiced distractor (one-distractor), (...) or a male- and a female-voiced distractor (two-distractor). Behavioral measures of target detection and content tracking performance as well as target- and distractor detection related event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were assessed. We found that the N2 amplitude decreased whereas the P3 amplitude increased from the single-speech to the concurrent speech streams conditions. Importantly, the behavioral effect of distractors differed between the conditions with one vs. two distractor speech streams and the non-zero voltages in the N2 time window for distractor numerals and in the P3 time window for syntactic violations appearing in the non-target speech stream significantly differed between the one- and two-distractor conditions for the same (male) speaker. These results support the notion that the two background speech streams are segregated, as they show that distractors and syntactic violations appearing in the non-target streams are processed even when two speech non-target speech streams are delivered together with the target stream. (shrink)

1 The notion of specicity has played a signicant role in linguistic theory both in the elds of semantics and, increasingly, in work on syntax/semantics interface., Abbott, Kripke, Fodor and Sag, Higginbotham and Enc among many others; see also Pesetsky, Szabolcsi and Zwarts, Diesing, Dobrovie- Sorin, E. Kiss, Mahajan, and Chung for work where specicity is discussed in connection with syntactic matters.) Specicity is interesting for the student of semantics because it is crucially relevant to establishing varieties of reference. (...) For the syntactician, the notion of specicity comes up when attempting to account for the use of various case markers on DOs in languages as diverse as Romanian, Turkish, and Hindi, or when attempting to account for the full spectrum of judgments concerning weak island violations and the interpretation of multiple wh-questions. The rst point I will argue for is that there are several distinct notions of specicity that should be kept apart. More specically, I will argue that there are at least three. The discussion inevitably leads to Fodor and Sag's ambiguity claim, which in turn leads to the issue of the possible scopes of indenite noun phrases versus the possible scope of quanticational noun phrases. Section 3 will establish the relevant empirical generalizations concerning simple indenites and distributives, and Section 4 captures them within a non-congurational theory of scope proposed in Farkas and Farkas. (shrink)

It has long been observed that the superlative construction, exemplified by John climbed the highest mountain, has two readings. On the absolute reading, the heights of the relevant mountains in a relevant context are compared; on the comparative reading, relevant climbers’ achievements of mountain climbing are compared (Szabolcsi, Comparative superlatives, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 1986). Two theories have been proposed regarding this ambiguity. One theory holds that it results from movement of the superlative morpheme -est (movement theory) (Heim, Association (...) with focus, Doctoral Dissertation, 1985, Notes on superlatives, 1999; Szabolcsi 1986).The other theory holds that the ambiguity is derived by assignment of different values to the context variable C, keeping a single LF structure where -est stays in situ (in-situ theory) (Farkas and Kiss, Nat Lang Linguist Theory 18:417–455, 2000; Sharvit and Stateva, Linguist Philos 25:453–504, 2002). As is pointed out by Heim (1999), a choice between these theories is hard to make based solely on English. Through an investigation of Japanese superlative constructions, this paper argues that, in Japanese at least, a movement theory is required. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that besides knowledge of facts or truths, there is also knowledge of things–for example, we say that we know people or know places. We could call this "objectual knowledge". In this paper, I raise doubts about the idea that there is a sui generis objectual knowledge that is distinct from knowledge of truths.

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

The aim of this series is to make exploratory work that employs new linguistic data, extending the scope or domain of current theoretical proposals, available to a wide audience. These monographs will provide an insightful generalization..

On the dust jacket of The Subject's Point of View there is a detail from Vilhelm Hammershoi's Interior with Sitting Woman. It is hard to think of a painter who better captures the inner in his work. From the monochrome colour, to the back that faces us, to the door swung open to reveal yet another doorway, we are led to interiority – to the inner. This is a perfect image for a book whose author wants to persuade us to (...) return to the interior – a Cartesian interior.The Cartesian interior has come in for quite a drubbing in philosophy for some considerable time. In the mid-to-late 1970s, a style of argument emerged, designed to challenge this conception of mind and establish in its place an externalist conception of language and of mind. One version of the argument was due to Hilary Putnam and emerged in the context of considerations concerning linguistic meaning; another was due to Tyler Burge and emerged first in the context of considerations concerning the individual in relation to his/her social environment. In his earliest paper, on this topic, Burge wrote of ‘the elderly Cartesian tradition’ where ‘the spotlight is on what exists or transpires “in” the individual – his secret cognition, his innate cognitive structures, his private perceptions and introspections, his grasping of ideas, concepts or forms’. Farkas wants to defend this ‘elderly tradition’, but she does add to it some interesting twists. First and foremost, she places to one side ideas of privacy, of incorrigibility and infallibility. She also wishes to place the issue of dualism to one side. What Farkas concentrates on is privileged access and argues that this is …. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis research examines how fake identities on social media create and sustain antagonistic and racist discourses. It does so by analysing 11 Danish Facebook pages, disguised as Muslim extremists living in Denmark, conspiring to kill and rape Danish citizens. It explores how anonymous content producers utilise Facebook’s socio-technical characteristics to construct, what we propose to term as, platformed antagonism. This term refers to socio-technical and discursive practices that produce new modes of antagonistic relations on social media platforms. Through a discourse-theoretical (...) analysis of posts, images, ‘about’ sections and user comments on the studied Facebook pages, the article highlights how antagonism between ethno-cultural identities is produced on social media through fictitious social media accounts, prompting thousands of user reactions. These findings enhance our current understanding of how antagonism and racism are constructed and amplified within social media environments. (shrink)

Recent work in social and cultural studies of science and technology has shown that the ‘epistemic dependence’ of laypeople on experts is not a relation of blind trust, but typically and necessarily involves critical assessment of expert testimonies. Normative epistemologists have suggested a number of criteria, mostly of contextual nature since expert knowledge means restricted cognitive access to some epistemic domain, according to which non-experts can reliably evaluate expert claims; while science studies scholars have concentrated on how laypeople can come (...) to warranted decisions about technical matters on non-technicalgrounds. Instead of addressing the problem transcendentally (how such decisions are possible) or normatively (how such decisions should be reached), this paper contrasts the recommendations available in the literature with the empirical findings of a rough case study concerning the public reaction to the H1N1 vaccine issue. Awareness of how lay people do come to such decisions may inform and refine normative philosophical investigations. (shrink)

Play is not only a kind of activity, but also a set of attitudes. We may join a card game in a casino without assuming a play attitude; conversely we may transform a seemingly tedious action, such as a walk to the store, into a pleasant experience of spontaneous movements by adopting an attitude of play. Attitudes of Play is a comprehensive study of the persistent human tendency to bring a cheerful and good-humoured outlook to any kind of situation, including (...) the serious and the mundane. Gabor Csepregi offers a phenomenological description of forms of playfulness, showing how, time and again, our attitudes of play redefine and shape diverse activities and experiences – from teaching, healing, or worshipping to political conflict or walking down the street. With play attitudes, we exercise our freedom to colour these scenes or give them an altogether new form, evoking in us more refined sentiments and more acute perceptions. This book seeks to distinguish play activities from attitudes of play, showing that the latter hold value not merely for their educational or other instrumental benefits but also, and perhaps most importantly, for the overall fulfillment and well-being they offer in all stages of human existence. (shrink)

The paper rst lays out a non-congurational approach to scope ambiguities in which scope dependencies are treated as dependencies between evaluation indices of variables. The notions of dependent and domain variables are dened naturally in this framework. These concepts are then used to account for the distribution and interpretation of determiner reduplication in Hungarian, a phenomenon that has not received much attention so far.1 1. Introduction This paper contributes to the study of the semantics of indenites in natural language by (...) introducing on the scene a new type of indenite, called dependent. We meet it in Hungarian, where one may reduplicate certain determiners, as illustrated in [1]-[3]. (shrink)

The main concern of this contribution is Focus in Hungarian. The first section reviews the arguments in Roberts (1998) that Hungarian Focus does not encode a discourse function that is independent from the discourse function of intonationally marked Focus in languages like English (contra ´.

This paper proposes an account of the distribution and role of a set of particles in Hungarian dubbed `polarity particles', which include igen `yes', nem `no', and de `but'. These particles occur at the leftmost edge of a class of assertions uttered as reactions to an immediately preceding assertion or polar question. It is argued that they express two sets of features typical of the class of reactive assertions they occur in, one set encoding the polarity of the asserted sentence, (...) and the other encoding the relation of the asserted sentence to the immediately preceding utterance. The discussion is set against an explicit approach to context structure and to assertive and polar questioning speech acts that draws on a number of pre-existing proposals in the literature. (shrink)

There is an increasing number of voices—both in the relatively new academic field of film scholarship and outside it—claiming that film could be or even should be studied within science as opposed to the humanities. Among them, one finds some of the most distinguished film scholars teaching in film, literature, art history, or visual arts departments; their core argument is that their specific field needs to become more scientific. A craving for disciplinary rigor in the humanities is as old as (...) Plato’s attack on rhetoric and poetics. In the era of constant academic assessment exercises, however, this craving for measurable results seems like a simple survival instinct. Still, what Plato had not dreamt of (and... (shrink)

Gadamer’s hermeneutic philosophy avoids the problem of literary objectiveness altogether. His approach witnesses the general fact that an indifference towards literary objectiveness in particular, leads to a peculiar neglect of par excellence literariness as such. It seems obvious, however, that the constitutive aspects of the crisis of literary objectiveness cannot be shown to contain the underlying intention of bringing about this situation. At this point, one can identify what could probably be the most important element in a definition of literary (...) objectiveness. In contrast to ‘natural’ objectiveness and objectiveness based on various societal conventions, the legitimacy of a literary work is solely guaranteed by its elements being organized in accordance with the rules of literary objectiveness. Thus when the crisis of literary objectiveness intensifies, literariness will also find itself in a crisis. This crisis detaches new, quasi-literary formations from various definitions of literariness. When literary objectiveness ceases, however, to be understood as a system constituted by various objective formations aiming to correspond in one way or another to the ‘world’, scientific analysis of literary objectiveness will be rendered impossible. The crisis of literary objectiveness thus brings about the crisis of the theory of literature and the philosophy of art. Gadamer explicitly argues that the scientific approach proves to be inadequate in the analysis of artistic experience. This attitude results in the categorical rejection of a scientific orientation, but he seems to overemphasize an otherwise correct thesis on the non-reflexive character of artistic experience. It is the anti-mimetic and Platonic character of Gadamer’s aesthetic hermeneutics that determines the status of literary objectiveness in his system of thought. What is of crucial importance, however, is to point out that this aesthetics entails a fundamental reduction of the significance of literary objectiveness. As soon as the essence of aesthetic object-constitution is taken to be re-cognition, the absolutely natural interest in the original object represented by a work of art.Undoubtedly, Gadamer’s conception answers a number of questions that tend to be ignored by other theories. It is just as obvious, however, that Gadamer completes here the aesthetic devaluation of the objective domain. It is not the characteristics of the ‘original’ that constitute the image, but in effect the image turns the original into an original. Paraphrasing this claim one arrives at a near paradox: not objectiveness makes a work of art possible, but a work of art lends objects their objectiveness. (shrink)

Here we investigate the classes RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ of representable directed cylindric algebras of dimension α introduced by Nemeti[12]. RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ can be seen in two different ways: first, as an algebraic counterpart of higher order logics and second, as a cylindric algebraic analogue of Quasi-Projective Relation Algebras. We will give a new, "purely cylindric algebraic" proof for the following theorems of Nemeti: (i) RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ is a finitely axiomatizable variety whenever α ≥ 3 is finite and (ii) one can obtain (...) a strong representation theorem for RCA $^\uparrow_\alpha$ if one chooses an appropriate (non-well-founded) set theory as foundation of mathematics. These results provide a purely cylindric algebraic solution for the Finitization Problem (in the sense of [11]) in some non-well-founded set theories. (shrink)

In vivo explore des questions fondamentales et des moments cruciaux de l’existence humaine – l’entrée en interaction avec une culture étrangère, la décision de se sortir d’une condition de vie routinière ou malheureuse, une action généreuse posée dans un contexte quotidien ordinaire – en fonction de leur potentiel de transformation de l’existence. En recourant à des illustrations tirées de la vie réelle et d’œuvres de fiction, Gabor Csepregi révèle le rôle primordial des sentiments personnels dans le façonnement de la vie (...) humaine et démontre le pouvoir formateur de la spontanéité en dehors du contexte traditionnel de l’éducation formelle. Ces moments, et notamment la façon dont ils perturbent l’ordre temporel ordinaire constituent des expériences vécues de notre vitalité. « Recourant à un langage clair et précis, In vivo captivera les philosophes et les intellectuels. Csepregi engage un dialogue entre diverses traditions, faisant appel aux meilleurs courants de plusieurs philosophies pour développer un point de vue unique ». - Gaëlle Fiasse, Université McGill. (shrink)

The subject of mental processes or mental states is usually assumed to be an individual, and hence the boundaries of mental features – in a strict or metaphorical sense – are naturally regarded as reaching no further than the boundaries of the individual. This chapter addresses various philosophical developments in the 20th and 21st century that questioned this natural assumption. I will frame this discussion by fi rst presenting a historically infl uential commitment to the individualistic nature of the mental (...) in Descartes’ theory. I identify various elements in the Cartesian conception of the mind that were subsequently criticized and rejected by various externalist theories, advocates of the extended mind hypothesis and defenders of embodied cognition. Then I will indicate the main trends in these critiques. (shrink)

The short treatise known as Περὶ κόσμου is a learned piece of protreptic addressed to Alexander, ‘the best of princes’, usually identified with Alexander the Great. The treatise is traditionally attributed to Aristotle, and although it does espouse recognizably Aristotelian views, it contains various doctrinal and linguistic elements which have led the large majority of scholars to regard it as inauthentic. The dating of the treatise is a more controversial matter, though most scholars would put it somewhere in the Hellenistic (...) period. (shrink)

In this chapter, I revisit the issue of the explanatory gap that is supposed to open when considering identity statements between physical and mental phenomena. I show that the question asked in the original formulation of the explanatory gap was this: ʻwhy this phenomenal character, rather than any other, is attached to this physiological process?ʼ I argue that this question can be answered, because there is a natural fit between the phenomenal character of experiences and their functional roles. For example, (...) pains feel inherently unpleasant, and that explains why they cause avoidance behaviour, and the felt location and intensity of pain indicates the location and extent of damage to the body. I discuss some other possible gaps in our understanding the relationship between the mental and the physical, and conclude that the fit between functional role and phenomenal character goes a long way, though probably not the whole way, to closing the explanatory gap. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive study of the Derveni Papyrus. The papyrus, found in 1962 near Thessaloniki, is not only one of the oldest surviving Greek papyri but is also considered by scholars as a document of primary importance for a better understanding of the religious and philosophical developments in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Gábor Betegh aims to reconstruct and systematically analyse the different strata of the text and their interrelation by exploring the archaeological context; the interpretation of (...) rituals in the first columns of the text; the Orphic poem commented on by the author of the papyrus; and the cosmological and theological doctrines which emerge from the Derveni author's exegesis of the poem. Betegh discusses the place of the text in the context of late Presocratic philosophy and offers an important preliminary edition of the text of the papyrus with critical apparatus and English translation. (shrink)

and Data The essence of scope in natural language semantics can be characterized as follows: an expression e1 takes scope over an expression e2 iff the interpretation of the former affects the interpretation of the latter. Consider, for example, the sentence in (1) below, which is typical of the cases discussed in this paper in that it involves an indefinite and a universal (or, more generally, a non-existential) quantifier. (1) Everyx student in my class read ay paper about scope. How (...) can we tell whether the indefinite in (1) is in the scope of the universal or not? We can answer this question in two ways. From a dependence-based perspective, Q y is in the scope of Qx if the values of the variable y (possibly) covary with the values of x. From an independence-based perspective, Q y is outside the scope of Qx if y’s value is fixed relative to the values of x. This brings us to the first of our two central questions: should the scopal properties of ordinary, ‘unmarked’ indefinites be characterized in terms of dependence or in terms of independence? The difference between these two conceptualizations is that a dependence-based approach establishes which quantifier(s) Q y is dependent on, while an independence-based approach establishes which quantifier(s) Q y is independent of. Logical semantics has taken both paths to the notion of scope: compare the standard, dependence-based semantics of first-order logic (FOL) – or the dependence-driven Skolemization procedure – with the independence-based semantics of Independence-Friendly Logic (IFL, Hintikka 1973, Sandu 1993, Hodges 1997, Väänänen 2007 among others). Natural language semantics has only taken the dependence-based path. (shrink)

"In this book, Gabor Csepregi describes in detail the nature and scope of the body's innate abilities and reflects on their significance in human life."--BOOK JACKET.

Based on the existence of polysemy (e.g., lunch can refer to both food and events), it is argued that central tenets of externalist semantics and Fodorian concept atomism, an externalist theory on which words lack semantic structure, are unsound. We evaluate the premise that these arguments rely on—that polysemous words have separate, finer‐grained senses. We survey the evidence across psychology and linguistics and argue that it shows that polysemy does not exist, at least not in this “sense”. The upshot is (...) that if polysemy does not exist, it cannot pose a problem for atomism or externalism. (shrink)

The immediate aim of this paper is to account for the use and interpretation of polarity particles in general, and of the Romanian polarity particles da/nu/ba in particular. We exemplify the uses of da and nu in (1) and (3) respectively.

Since the onset of the digital revolution, humankind has experienced an unprecedented acceleration of changes triggered by technological advancements. Frequently used digital media have unquestionably penetrated our everyday life, shaping human cognition in multiple ways. The rise of artificial intelligence, which coevolved with a new, interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, has amplified these effects, contributing new ways of affecting human society, in terms of efficient human-machine interaction and knowledge generation and accumulation, at an exponential rate. Simultaneously, cultural shifts driven by (...) globalization and social media have fostered new modes of communication, identity formation, and knowledge dissemination on a global scale. Understanding the intricate dynamics of techno-cultural evolution and its influence on cognition is essential for comprehending the contemporary society and preparing it for the future challenges. We need to adapt for the current and future information environments and digital landscapes, improving human resilience to new technologies and addressing core human vulnerabilities. Thanks to human flexibility, enabled by neural plasticity, that may be feasible, ideally combined with alleviation of known negative effects of digital technologies. (shrink)