Introduction Someone comes and says something. Without really needing to think, I understand what is said, refer it without difficulty to familiar codes, ...

If faraway peoples have different ideas from our own, is this because they have different mentalities? Did our remote ancestors lack logic? The notion of distinct mentalities has been used extensively by historians to describe and explain cultural diversity. Professor Lloyd rejects this psychologising talk of mentalities and proposes an alternative approach, which takes as its starting point the social contexts of communication. Discussing apparently irrational beliefs and behaviour, he shows how different forms of thought coexist in a single culture (...) but within conventionally defined contexts. (shrink)

Two kinds of theoretical framework for syntax are encountered in current linguistics. One emerged from the mathematization of proof theory, and is referred to here as generative-enumerative syntax (GES). A less explored alternative stems from the semantic side of logic, and is here called model-theoretic syntax (MTS). I sketch the outlines of each, and give a capsule summary of some mathematical results pertaining to the latter. I then briefly survey some diverse types of evidence suggesting that in some ways MTS (...) seems better suited to theorizing about the relevant linguistic phenomena. (shrink)

Notice that this paper has not claimed that all natural languages are CFL's. What it has shown is that every published argument purporting to demonstrate the non-context-freeness of some natural language is invalid, either formally or empirically or both.18 Whether non-context-free characteristics can be found in the stringset of some natural language remains an open question, just as it was a quarter century ago.Whether the question is ultimately answered in the negative or the affirmative, there will be interesting further questions (...) to ask. If it turns out that natural languages are indeed always CFL's, it will be reasonable to ask whether this helps to explain why speakers apparently recognize so quickly whether a presented utterance corresponds to a grammatical sentence or not, and to associate structural and semantic details with it. It might also be reasonable to speculate about the explanation for the universally context-free character of the languages used by humans, and to wonder whether evolutionary biological factors are implicated in some way (Sampson (1979) could be read in this light). And naturally, it will be reasonable to pursue the program put forward by Gazdar (1981, in press) to see to what extent CFL-inducing grammatical devices can be exploited to yield insightful descriptions of natural languages that capture generalizations in revealing ways.If a human language that is not a CFL is proved to exist, on the other hand, a different question will be raised: give the non-context-free character of human languages in general, why has this property been so hard to demonstrate that it has taken over twenty-five years to bring it to light since the issue was first explicitly posed? If human languages do not have to be CFL's, why do so many (most?) of them come so close to having the property of context-freeness? And, since the CFL's certainly constitute a very broad class of mathematically natural and computationally tractable languages, what property of human beings or their communicative or cognitive needs is it that has caused some linguistic communities to reach beyond the boundaries of this class in the course of evolving a linguistic system?Either way, we shall be interested to see our initial question resolved, and further questions raised. One cautionary word should be said, however, about the implications (or lack of them) that the answer will have for grammatical studies. Chomsky has repeatedly stated that he does not see weak generative capacity as a theme of central importance in the theory of grammar, and we agree. It is very far from being the case that the recent resurgence of interest in exploring the potential of CF-PSG or equivalent systems will, or should, be halted dead in its tracks by the discovery (if it is ever forthcoming) that some natural language is not a CFL. In the area of parsing, for instance, it seems possible that natural languages are not only parsed on the basis of constituent structure such as a CF-PSG would assign, but are parsed as if they were finite state languages (see Langendoen (1975) and Church (1980) for discussion along these lines). That is, precisely those construction-types that figure in the various proofs that English is not an FSL appear to cause massive difficulty in the human processing system; the sentences crucial to the proofs are for the most part unprocessable unless they are extremely short (yet the arguments for English not being and FSL only go through if length is not an issue). This means that in practice properties of finite state grammars are still of great potential importance to linguistic theory despite the fact that they do not provide the framework for defining the total class of grammatical sentences. The same would almost certannly be true of CF-PSG's if they were shown to be inadequate in a similar sense. It is highly unlikely that the advances made so far in far in phrase structure description could be nullified by a discovery about weak generative capacity. Moreover, there are known to be numerous ways in which the power of CF-PSG's can be marginally enhanced to permit, for example, xx languages to be generated without allowing anything like the full class of recursively enumerable or even context-sensitive languages (see Hopcroft and Ullmann (1979), Chapter 14) for an introduction to this topic, noting especially Figure 14.7 on p. 393. The obvious thing to do if natural languages were ever shown not to be CFL's in the general case would be to start exploring such minimal enhancements of expressive power to determine exactly what natural languages call for in this regard and how it could be effectively but parsimoniously provided in a way that closely modelled human linguistic capacities.In the meantime, it seems reasonable to assume that the natural languages are a proper subset of the infinite-cardinality CFL's until such time as they are validly shown not to be. (shrink)

From one of the most influential scientists of our time, a dazzling exploration of the hidden laws that govern the life cycle of everything from plants and animals to the cities we live in. The former head of the Sante Fe Institute, visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term "complexity" can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has (...) found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities and our businesses. Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other. If you know the size of a mammal, you can use scaling laws to learn everything from how much food it eats per day, what its heart-rate is, how long it will take to mature, its lifespan, and so on. Furthermore, the efficiency of the mammal's circulatory systems scales up precisely based on weight: if you compare a mouse, a human and an elephant on a logarithmic graph, you find with every doubling of average weight, a species gets 25% more efficient--and lives 25% longer. This speaks to everything from how long we can expect to live to how many hours of sleep we need. Fundamentally, he has proven, the issue has to do with the fractal geometry of the networks that supply energy and remove waste from the organism's body. (shrink)

Chomsky’s highly influential Syntactic Structures ( SS ) has been much praised its originality, explicitness, and relevance for subsequent cognitive science. Such claims are greatly overstated. SS contains no proof that English is beyond the power of finite state description (it is not clear that Chomsky ever gave a sound mathematical argument for that claim). The approach advocated by SS springs directly out of the work of the mathematical logician Emil Post on formalizing proof, but few linguists are aware of (...) this, because Post’s papers are not cited. Chomsky’s extensions to Post’s systems are not clearly defined, and the arguments for their necessity are weak. Linguists have also overlooked Post’s proofs of the first two theorems about effects of rule format restrictions on generative capacity, published more than ten years before SS was published. (shrink)

Why has gender equality progressed so much more slowly in philosophy than in other academic disciplines? Here, I address both factual and theoretical matters relating to the causes, effects, and potential redress of the lack of women in philosophy. First, I debunk extant claims that women are more likely than men to disagree with their philosophy professors and male peers; that women are more sensitive to disagreements in the philosophy classroom than men are; and that the gender imbalance in philosophy (...) is no worse than in many cognate disciplines. Second, I discuss ways in which the nature of philosophical inquiry and debate may provide uniquely strong opportunities for person-perception to hinder progress toward egalitarian treatment of interlocutors. And third, I argue that a diversity of perspectives in philosophy is essential not only for reasons of social justice, but also for philosophical progress. Efforts to improve philosophy should therefore countenance the role of person-perception in the practice of philosophical debate. For philosophy to become more diverse, the steps the profession takes to achieve that goal will have to go beyond—and not merely match—the steps taken to increase the numbers of women and otherwise underrepresented individuals in other fields. (shrink)

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion was decisively challenged by John Hedley Brooke in his classic Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Almost two decades on, Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives revisits this argument and asks how historians can now impose order on the complex and contingent histories of religious engagements with science. Bringing together leading scholars, this volume explores the history and changing meanings of the categories 'science' and 'religion'; the role of publishing and (...) education in forging and spreading ideas; the connection between knowledge, power and intellectual imperialism; and the reasons for the confrontation between evolution and creationism among American Christians and in the Islamic world. A major contribution to the historiography of science and religion, this book makes the most recent scholarship on this much misunderstood debate widely accessible. (shrink)

There was a famous discussion between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer in Davos which revealed the lostness and emptiness of this remarkable representative of established academic philosophy to everyone who had eyes. Cassirer had been a pupil of Hermann Cohen, the founder of the neo-Kantian school. Cohen had elaborated a system of philosophy whose center was ethics. Cassirer had transformed Cohen's system into a new system of philosophy in which ethics had completely disappeared. It had been silently dropped: he had not (...) faced the problem. Heidegger had faced the problem. He declared that ethics is impossible, and his whole being was permeated by the awareness that this fact opens up an abyss.... Only a great thinker could help us in our plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger. The only question of importance, of course, is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not. But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence—of who is competent to judge. StraussHeidegger conceals nothing. He does not lie. He says what he really thinks.JanicaudIt is important for us to understand, above all, the true intentions of our author, to illuminate what he thinks really needs to be said, and to surmise what is most critical for him. LevinasOnly once or twice in my thirty to thirty-five years of teaching have I ever spoken about what really matters to me.HeideggerFor a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do I ever believe what I say, and if indeed I do happen to tell the truth I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find. MachiavelliThe `doctrine' of a thinker is what is unsaid in his saying, to which man is exposed so that he might expend himself for it. HeideggerBut for those on the outside everything is in parables; so that they may see but not perceive, and hearing, they may hear but not understand; lest they should turn, and their sins be forgiven them. Mark 4:12“Now do you recognize that I am a philosopher?”... “I would have, had you remained silent.”BoethiusThe same goes for Heidegger: It is necessary to know how to listen to the silences of philosophers. These are always eloquent.Althusser. (shrink)

To what extent can constructive mathematics based on intuitionistc logic recover the mathematics needed for spacetime physics? Certain aspects of this important question are examined, both technical and philosophical. On the technical side, order, connectivity, and extremization properties of the continuum are reviewed, and attention is called to certain striking results concerning causal structure in General Relativity Theory, in particular the singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose. As they stand, these results appear to elude constructivization. On the philosophical side, it (...) is argued that any mentalist-based radical constructivism suffers from a kind of neo-Kantian apriorism. It would be at best a lucky accident if objective spacetime structure mirrored mentalist mathematics. the latter would seem implicitly committed to a Leibnizian relationist view of spacetime, but is it doubtful if implementation of such a view would overcome the objection. As a result, an anti-realist view of physics seems forced on the radical constructivist. (shrink)

Darwin himself suggested the idea of generalizing the core Darwinian principles to cover the evolution of social entities. Also in the nineteenth century, influential social scientists proposed their extension to political society and economic institutions. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have hindered the realization of the powerful potential in this longstanding idea. Some critics confuse generalization with analogy. Others mistakenly presume that generalizing Darwinism necessarily involves biological reductionism. This essay outlines the types of phenomena to which a generalized Darwinism applies, and (...) upholds that there is no reason to exclude social or economic entities. (shrink)

Evans & Levinson's (E&L's) major point is that human languages are intriguingly diverse rather than (like animal communication systems) uniform within the species. This does not establish a about language universals, or advance the ill-framed pseudo-debate over universal grammar. The target article does, however, repeat a troublesome myth about Fitch and Hauser's (2004) work on pattern learning in cotton-top tamarins.

The application of evolutionary ideas to socioeconomic systems has been an increasingly prominent theme in the work of Friedrich Hayek, and the motif has become dominant in his recent book. In an earlier issue of this journal, Viktor Vanberg raises two substantive criticisms of Friedrich Hayek' theory of cultural evolution that invoke some important questions concerning use of the evolutionary analogy in social science.

In this article I attempt to transcend the mainstream conception of health care ethics, including nursing ethics, by bringing into the foreground a tension between a sense of life and an industrial-bureaucratic style of health care, with its emphasis on the systematic and procedural work culture necessary for mass production. I use the concept of ‘a sense of life’ to draw attention to the wisdom, sensitivity and responsibility that is necessary for the authentic care of others to be given a (...) chance in the development of modern health care. I emphasize the mindfulness that the professional requires for genuine care, and how the systematic organization of modern health care, on the whole, ignores, obstructs and even suppresses such mindfulness. (shrink)

Climate change is an anthropogenic existential threat that provokes extreme concern among climate scientists, but not, it seems, among all member of the public. Here, there is considerably more variability in level of concern and, it appears, in everyday sustainable behavior. But how does personality affect this variability in behavior? And how are underlying personality states like dispositional optimism linked to more sustainable everyday practices? Research in clinical psychology has suggested that dispositional optimism is a very positive personality characteristic associated (...) with higher levels of hope and resilience, but applied research from other domains has reported that optimists can, on occasion, bury their heads in the sand and avoid attending to external threats, like climate change, in order to maintain mood state. So are optimists more immune to climate change messaging than non-optimists? And do they make fewer sustainable choices? A series of experimental studies, manipulating signifiers of carbon footprint (Study 1) and eco labels on products (Study 2) found that optimists made more sustainable choices than non-optimists and that both groups were influenced equally by climate change film clips in terms of sustainable choices (Study 1). Optimists also displayed a false consensus effect, overestimating the proportion of people who would behave more sustainably like themselves (Study 3). Given that global problems like climate change need concerted, cooperative effort, these optimistic beliefs about how others behave could be adaptive in the long-run. Designing climate change messages to appeal to optimists might be a critical consideration for the future. (shrink)

First we review highlights of the ongoing debate about foundations of category theory, beginning with Fefermantop-down” approach, where particular categories and functors need not be explicitly defined. Possible reasons for resisting the proposal are offered and countered. The upshot is to sustain a pluralism of foundations along lines actually foreseen by Feferman (1977), something that should be welcomed as a way of resolving this long-standing debate.

When Michael Hunter first publicized the idea of ‘Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle’ I understood that his main aim was to test three competing psychoanalytical theories against the historical evidence provided by the life and work of Robert Boyle. Although this would have been a valuable exercise, and one that the British Society for the History of Science meeting partly engaged, the papers by Brett Kahr, John Clay and Karl Figlio published here raise some far more compelling issues which I shall explore (...) in the ensuing discussion. Before turning to this discussion I offer a few introductory remarks. (shrink)

Que veut dire « vivre de sa plume»? L'expression a souvent été invoquée par des historiens avançant le récit d'un progrès dans les pratiques littéraires marqué par le passage des écrivains du patronage au marché, afin de définir la « modernité » auctoriale par rapport à un modèle ancien de l'homme de lettres protégé par la noblesse. Or un examen plus attentif montrera que ce progrès vers une autonomie gagnée par la vente des écrits n'est guère aussi évident qu'on a (...) eu tendance à le croire. Cet article étudie donc les ambiguïtés du récit historique implicite dans la notion de « vivre de sa plume ». Il propose ensuite une approche différente qui considère cette représentation non pas comme le reflet d'une nouvelle réalité professionnelle, mais comme un élément dans une nouvelle rhétorique de la présentation de soi en tant qu 'intellectuel. Comme topos, l'image va désigner - et en fait, constituer - à la fois la libération sociale de l'auteur à l'égard de la noblesse et son autorité morale lorsque ses tentatives de vivre de ses écrits échouent et qu'il persiste tout de même à sacrifier son bonheur personnel à son art. (shrink)

The E-Z Reader 7 model is powerful but incomplete. When programming the saccade to the next word, we take into account the familiarity of the letter sequences at the beginning of that word. This landing position effect is well established, but is neglected in the model. A possible locus for the effect is suggested within the E-Z Reader framework.