Social theory remains puzzled by the relation between practices and structures, or the link between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’. Grand theorists including Giddens and Bourdieu have gained distinction for their writings on these questions, trying to marry insights and concerns of a ‘micro’ sociological nature with traditional ‘macro’ structural questions including inequality, power relations, and social reproduction. These theorists arguably fail, however, in their attempts to move social theory beyond traditional dualisms. Relevant but neglected contributions from ethnomethodology are introduced and compared (...) to the work of Giddens and Bourdieu in an attempt to identify and outline an approach to practices and structures that more reliably avoids problems of dualism and reification, and at the same time offers an understanding of structures and their relations to practices that can be much more closely grounded in empirical studies. Key Words: micro-macro link • reification • ethnomethodology • Pierre Bourdieu • Jeff Coulter. (shrink)

What are words? What makes two token words tokens of the same word-type? Are words abstract entities, or are they (merely) collections of tokens? The ontology of words tries to provide answers to these, and related questions. This article provides an overview of some of the most prominent views proposed in the literature, with a particular focus on the debate between type-realist, nominalist, and eliminativist ontologies of words.

It has been widely argued that words are analogous to species such that words, like species, are natural kinds. In this paper, I consider the metaphysics of word-kinds. After arguing against an essentialist approach, I argue that word-kinds are homeostatic property clusters, in line with the dominant approach to other biological and psychological kinds.

ABSTRACT The idea that two words can be instances of the same word is a central intuition in our conception of language. This fact underlies many of the claims that we make about how we communicate, and how we understand each other. Given this, irrespective of what we think words are, it is common to think that any putative ontology of words, must be able to explain this feature of language. That is, we need to provide criteria of identity for (...) word-types which allow us to individuate words such that it can be the case that two particular word-instances are instances of the same word-type. One solution, recently further developed by Irmak, holds that words are individuated by their history. In this paper, I argue that this view either fails to account for our intuitions about word identity, or is too vague to be a plausible answer to the problem of word individuation. (shrink)

The "Dutch Book" argument, tracing back to Ramsey and to deFinetti, offers prudential grounds for action in conformity with personal probability. Under several structural assumptions about combinations of stakes, your betting policy is coherent only if your fair odds are probabilities. The central question posed here is the following one: Besides providing an operational test of coherent betting, does the "Book" argument also provide for adequate measurement of the agents degrees of beliefs? That is, are an agent's fair odds also (...) his/her personal probabilities for those events? We argue the answer is "No!" The problem is caused by the possibility of state dependent utilities. (shrink)

We characterize, in syntactic terms, the ranges of epimorphisms in an arbitrary class of similar first-order structures. This allows us to strengthen a result of Bacsich, as follows: in any prevariety having at most \ non-logical symbols and an axiomatization requiring at most \ variables, if the epimorphisms into structures with at most \ elements are surjective, then so are all of the epimorphisms. Using these facts, we formulate and prove manageable ‘bridge theorems’, matching the surjectivity of all epimorphisms in (...) the algebraic counterpart of a logic \ with suitable infinitary definability properties of \, while not making the standard but awkward assumption that \ comes furnished with a proper class of variables. (shrink)

The late Colin Macleod's commentary on Iliad 24 has rightly received praise for its sensitivity to the nuances of Homeric language and its appreciation of the entire poem as a carefully constructed work of art. Although reluctant to accept the more radical solutions proposed by the ‘oral’ school, Macleod showed himself fully aware of the contribution made by the oral theory towards elucidating the history of the epic. Nevertheless, his commentary is concerned principally with the Iliad as we have it: (...) a poem which is at one level a masterly re-telling of saga but at another a sublime tragedy, commiserating the sorrows inseparable from human existence and holding up for our admiration the heroes who nobly confront pain and death. I believe that much, and probably most, of the Iliad can and should be viewed in this light. The last book of all, as Macleod himself has shown, offers especially rich rewards to an interpreter who keeps in the front of his mind the overriding aims of the great poet. Yet Macleod's method, like any other single method, will never yield a fully satisfactory answer on all occasions. However the ‘definitive’ or ‘monumental’ composition of the Iliad was brought about, it formed only one stage in the development of the Greek epic. Our Iliad cannot have been the first or the only treatment, on a large scale, of the matter of Troy. (shrink)

It has been a common assumption that words are substances that instantiate or have properties. In this paper, I question the assumption that our ontology of words requires posting substances by outlining a bundle theory of words, wherein words are bundles of various sorts of properties (such as semantic, phonetic, orthographic, and grammatical properties). I argue that this view can better account for certain phenomena than substance theories, is ontologically more parsimonious, and coheres with claims in linguistics.