No detailed description available for "Semantics and Comprehension".

In everyday joint activities, people coordinate with each other by means not only of linguistic signals, but also of material signals – signals in which they indicate things by deploying material objects, locations, or actions around them. Material signals fall into two main classes: directing-to and placing-for. In directing-to, people request addressees to direct their attention to objects, events, or themselves. In placing-for, people place objects, actions, or themselves in special sites for addressees to interpret. Both classes have many subtypes. (...) Features of material signals were examined in pairs of people who were videotaped as they assembled TV stands, built Lego models, planned furnishings for a house, played piano duets, or bought coffee at Starbucks. In these activities, the pointing and placements were often sustained, creating three phases of signals – initiation, maintenance, and termination – each with its own interpretation. (shrink)

In Physics 2.8 Aristotle argues for his natural teleology by arguing for the goal-directed character of nature. The argument that he develops with the most care is directed against those natural philosophers, like Empedocles, who maintain that the results of natural processes which benefit organisms, such as teeth, come to be through chance. Aristotle counters by arguing that because the beneficial results of natural processes occur regularly, ‘always or for the most part’, they cannot be the outcome of chance, which (...) would yield beneficial results only irregularly. Thus such results must come to be only for the sake of some end. This argument against chance has received the most attention from scholars, but Physics 2.8 contains another argument for the goal-directed character of nature, which has received relatively little attention because it does not seem to offer much argument for natural teleology. The argument depends upon an analogy between action and nature, and it simply maintains that since human action and nature are analogous, and since action is goal-directed, so too is nature. The argument is of interest, despite its neglect, because it seems to prove nothing to us and yet Aristotle puts it forward confidently as advancing his view about the goal-directed character of nature. The argument from analogy should claim our attention because it provides important evidence for the basic spring behind Aristotle 's natural teleology. The fact that Aristotle takes for granted the strength of the analogy with human action in his argument for the goal-directedness of nature suggests that he holds human-like goal-directedness to be a condition of intelligibility that must be met by any intelligible process of coming to be, whether human or natural. (shrink)

Concept of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism.

In China, the transformation from a centrally planned economy to one dominated by market forces has been characterized by the devolution of authority from the center to localities. This is as true of the enormous state bureaucracy associated with the control of fertility as it is with the economic bureaucracies more often studied in transitional societies. Using observations from several field sites, the authors document how county-, township-and village-level family planning cadres have gone from being agents of the state to (...) autonomous actors who must negotiate between the ongoing demands of the central bureaucracy and the new opportunities available in the locales in which they work and dwell. They suggest that any serious change in the draconian restrictions on fertility that have obtained in China for almost thirty years is likely to derive from initiatives at the local level. Local actors have already begun to adjust to the tensions between responsibilities and available resources that have tended to induce paralysis in the upper levels of this long-standing state bureaucracy. (shrink)

This text attempts to list philosophical bibliographies published in all countries since about 1450, when printing was invented, through the year 1974. Nonspecialists and undergraduates will find references to the standard bibliographical aids appropriate to their interests and courses. Advanced scholars are directed to the more specialized and abstruse bibliographies.