The present study investigates the collocation-induced semiosis of the linguistic sign AFRICA as being used in the academic section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (known as COCA) (Davies, Mark. 2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): one billion words, 1990-present. Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/coca/). Drawing on a hybrid theoretical framework, the study utilizes Charles Peirce’s (1931–58) semiotic model of the sign and Roman Jakobson’s theory of “markedness” (Jakobson, Roman. 1972. Verbal communication. Scientific American (Special Issue, September 1). (...) 73–80) as well as Stuart Hall’s treatment of “code” (Hall, Stuart. 1980. Encoding/decoding. In Stuart Hall, Doothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, & Paul Willis (eds.), Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–79, 117–127. New York: Routledge) and John Swales’ notion of “discourse community” (Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The study empirically tests the hypothesis that, in a given discourse domain, the relevant interpretant can decode a linguistic sign (representamen) in the co-text of its marked collocates in a way that is collocationally used via the two modes of iconic and indexical signification. The concordance-based analysis conducted in the present study offers two findings, theoretical and practical. First, the study proposes the theoretical concept of collocational semiosis as one way of methodologically integrating the study of collocation into a structural-linguistic analytic framework that richly intersects with the genre-based notion of “discourse community.” Second, in the academic discourse community of the COCA, to the expert interpretant, the representamen AFRICA has been decoded due to its marked collocates which have been technically used in two modes of signification, viz. iconic and indexical. (shrink)

The 25th of January, 2011 witnessed a wave of political unrest all over Egypt, with repercussions that have re-shaped the future of contemporary Egypt. For the first time in the modern history of Egypt since the 1952 Nasserite revolution, grass-root protestors went to streets chanting slogans against the military regime headed by the (since then ex-) President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. This placed the then regime, as well as its mainstay, the National Democratic Party (NDP), in a political crisis on (...) both local and international scales. It is this critical moment that led Mubarak to give his unprecedented speech on February 1st, 2011. The speech has brought about epoch-making political changes in the history of contemporary Egypt. Under public pressure, two seminal declarations were made in this speech: (1) Mubarak’s intention not to nominate himself for a new presidential term; (2) a call on the Houses of Parliament to amend articles 76 and 77 of the constitution concerning the conditions on running for presidency and the period for the presidential term in Egypt. The present paper seeks to answer the following overarching question: what are the discursive strategies used for saving the political face of Mubarak in his speech on February 1st, 2011? I follow a text-analytic framework based on the socio-semantic theory of social actors and the pragmatic models of speech acts and face-threatening acts. The analysis reveals Mubarak’s attempt to save his positive political face as a legitimate President who regarded himself as the official ruler invested with absolute power over Egypt. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Este artículo estudia una corta narración en árabe muy conocida a través de diversas versions populares documentadas en manuscritos de diferentes orígenes (Siria, Egipto y Norte de África), comenzando en el siglo XVII. La narración describe cómo un peque.o gorrión queda atrapado en la trampa de un cazador y cómo, mediante todo tipo de estratagemas y usando su ingenio, logra escapar de su terrible destino. Si bien esta narración aparece frecuentemente en los círculos tardíos más populares, muchos de sus elementos (...) esenciales, se pueden rastrear en los escritos árabes medievales clásicos de los orígenes islámicos de Oriente y Occidente, en la mayoría de los casos como dos fábulas distintas. La historia de esta narración se mueve así entre la literatura clásica medieval y la popular premoderna. Incluso toca los márgenes de la historia de las Mil y una noches. En un artículo reciente se ha examinado un manuscrito datado en el siglo XVII que presenta toda la narración tal y como se encuentra con el ritmo y metro del dialect egipcio en el mawwāl. El presente estudio, basado en un manuscrito, analiza en cambio la adaptación de la narrative popular a la prosa. (shrink)

En 2021 est sorti le film By the throat, du duo d’artistes Effi & Amir. Ils y explorent la manière dont les dispositifs scientifiques de compréhension de la langue tracent des frontières langagières et fonctionnent main dans la main avec des politiques d’assignations identitaires. Dans le cadre de ce numéro de Multitudes, nous avons décidé de les faire dialoguer avec Amalini Simon, psychologue clinicienne et directrice du centre Babel, dont le travail clinique et de recherche gravite autour de la (...) question du plurilinguisme et de la médiation transculturelle. (shrink)

The structural and magnetic properties of Y(Fe1-xMnx)12 compounds and their nitrides (x = 0.2 and 0.4) have been studied by using X-ray diffraction and magnetic measurements. It is found that the lattice parameters increase, while the saturation magnetization and Curie temperature decrease with Mn content increment in Y(Fe1-xMnx12 compounds. Y(Fe0.8Mn0.2)12 compound shows a weak easy-c axis magnetization direction, but Y(Fe0.6Mn0.4)12 compound is in a paramagnetic state at room temperature. Upon nitrogenation, the lattice parameters, Curie temperature are notably increased and the (...) saturation magnetization is greatly increased by about 50%. The easy magnetization direction for both compound nitrides all lies in the basal plane at room temperature. (shrink)

For a function $f$ with domain $[X]^{n}$, where $X\subseteq\mathbb{N}$, we say that $H\subseteq X$ is canonical for $f$ if there is a $\upsilon\subseteq n$ such that for any $x_{0},\ldots,x_{n-1}$ and $y_{0},\ldots,y_{n-1}$ in $H$, $f=f$ iff $x_{i}=y_{i}$ for all $i\in\upsilon$. The canonical Ramsey theorem is the statement that for any $n\in\mathbb{N}$, if $f:[\mathbb{N}]^{n}\rightarrow\mathbb{N}$, then there is an infinite $H\subseteq\mathbb{N}$ canonical for $f$. This paper is concerned with a model-theoretic study of a finite version of the canonical Ramsey theorem with a largeness (...) condition and also a version of the Kanamori–McAloon principle. As a consequence, we produce new indicators for cuts satisfying $\operatorname{PA}$. (shrink)

Este artículo aborda el proceso de proclamación como califa de Córdoba de Hišām, hijo y sucesor de al-Ḥakam II, cuando era todavía un niño de apenas once años. En relación con este aspecto, se analizan dos problemas. Desde el punto de vista jurídico, la cuestión de la legalidad del gobierno de un menor de edad en las sociedades islámicas clásicas. Por otro lado, la crisis política que la proclamación de Hišām desencadenó, debido a las resistencias que generaba en ciertos medios (...) palatinos y jurídicos su minoría. En este contexto, Ibn Abī ‘Āmir, futuro Almanzor, logró usurpar el ejercicio del poder, marginando por completo al califa y provocando con ello el descrédito de la institución califal. Por todo ello, la proclamación de Hišām constituye la primera fase en la crisis del califato de Córdoba, que acabó desembocando en su abolición. (shrink)

Los soberanos de la dinastía Naṣrí de Granada se intitulan sultanes o Amīr al-Muslimīn en su abundante correspondencia exterior con otros príncipes musulmanes o cristianos. Sin embargo, a partir de la segunda dinastía, comienzan a utilizar también el título califal aunque parece que de forma privada, dentro del entorno familiar o el cortesano, tal como prueban determinados documentos emanados del Dīwān al-Inšā’ naṣrí. El califato ostentado por los Naṣríes no es el mismo que el de los Omeyas o los Almohades (...) que llevaba emparejado el título de Amīr al-Mu’minīn y Jalīfat Rasūl Allāh, sino que lo acompañan del título de Jalīfat al-Raḥmān o Jalīfat Allāh, como otros soberanos musulmanes de la baja Edad Media. Su legitimidad está basada en una genealogía que les hace entroncar con los Jazārŷ, es decir con los Anṣār de Sa‘d b. ‘Ubāda, que pretendió proclamarse Califa a la muerte de Muḥammad. (shrink)

The early period Ismaili jurist Al-Qādî al-Nu'mān appears as an important figure in the formation of Ismaili jurisprudence. There is very little information about Kadı Nu'mân's family, childhood, education and intellectual environment. His full name is Abû Hanîfah Nu'man b. Muhammad b. Mansûr al-Qādî at-Tamîmî Al Qayrawānî. He was born around 290/903 (late 3rd (9th) century) into an educated family in Qayravan in North Africa. There are different opinions about the sect he belonged to when he was growing up. On (...) the other hand, it is difficult to say for certain whether Nu’mān received education in the Ismaili sect due to the understanding of taqiyya in the madhhab. However, it is understood from the basic jurisprudence texts Nu’mān wrote that he most likely did not receive a Sunni education. Historians refer to him as 'Qadi Nu’mān or Abu Hanifah al-Shi'i' in order not to confuse him with the imam of the Hanafi school. Qādî Nu’mān served at different levels of the Fatimid State. Around 313/925, he entered the service of the first Fatimid caliph, Mahdi (r. 909-934 CE/297-322 AH), as a copyist and secretary. During the reigns of the third caliph Mansur and the fourth Fatimid caliph Mu’izz (d. 365/975), Qādî Nu’mān first served as a judge in Tripoli and then in Mansouriya, the Fatimid capital. After the Fatimids conquered Egypt and the center of government was moved to Cairo, Qādî Nu’mān was appointed by the fourth caliph Mu’izz as the head of the appellate courts (maẓālim). Qadi Numans career was at the peak in the period of Caliph Muiz. Qādî Nu’mān worked as a judge in the Fatimid State for about twenty-six years and continued this duty until his death in 363 (973). After the fall of the Fatimid caliphate, there haven’t been any other Fatimid or Ismaili jurists. Qādî Nu’mān is considered by contemporary Ismaili writers as a figure who systematically transformed Ismaili fiqh into an independent sect of fiqh. It can be said that Ismaili fiqh was developed through his works in the Fatimid period. His works continued as the main references in the fiqh studies and after the Fatimid period. With the death of Qādî Nu’mān, the period of ijtihad in Ismaili fiqh and its the establishment phase of Ismaili fiqh came to an end; The sect, in which esoteric interpretations were at the forefront, emerged as a distinctive school of fiqh by discarding ambiguity. Qādî Nu’mān was a very productive writer. He wrote important works related to the field of furu al-fiqh and usûl al-fiqh. Among his works, Ikhtilāf uṣūl al-madhāhib is undoubtedly one of the most important works in the early history of fiqh methodology. The work in question, which was originally written with the aim of rejecting the Sunni fiqh method, discusses the approaches of the Sunni schools of fiqh on ikhtilāf, taqlid, ijma, nazar, qiyas, istihsan, ijtihad and ra’y in a polemical manner. It reveals the differences of the Ismaili method from the Sunni method in terms of the sources on which the fiqh is based, the authority to make ijtihad and the theory of interpretation of the texts. Qādî Nu’mān examined the relationship between reason and revelation in general and the role of religious authority in comprehending and interpreting the texts while criticizing Sunni methods. Ikhtilāf uṣūl al-madhāhib has the characteristics of the works of development period as a form. It is possible to observe the question-answer and dialectic form which can be seen in the works of the development period throughout the work in question. Qādî Nu’mān endeavoured to persuade his opponents with a dialectical and argumentative style. Again, he replied to the Sunnis, who were his interlocutors, with their own proofs. In addition to these, Ikhtilāf uṣūl al-madhāhib has a unique feature in the matter of content. Because it is not very familiar to any Sunni handbook of usûl al-fiqh. It does not mention the hâss, âmm, ijma, qiyas, amir, nahy, alfaz bets, etc. The text is very similar to the Ahbari movement of the Jafari sect for it rejects all forms of ijtihad. It was written at a time when fiqh was not yet stable. Ikhtilāf uṣūl al-madhāhib gives us crucial information about the development of different usûl and fiqh sources in the middle of the fourth century. However, what is interesting here is that the information he gives about Ismaili method and fiqh is very little compared to the one about Sunni method and fiqh. Much of it centered on Sunni thought and its rejection. However, his ultimate goal was to defend the Ismaili doctrine. (shrink)

Que dire à des jeunes de vingt ans pour leur conduite dans ce monde qui part à la dérive? La civilisation s'effondre, les valeurs s'inversent, la culture se rétrécit comme une peau de chagrin, les livres comptent moins que les écrans, l'école n'apprend plus à penser mais à obéir au politiquement correct, la famille explosée, décomposée, recomposée se retrouve souvent composée d'ayants droit égotistes et narcissiques. De nouveaux repères surgissent, qui contredisent les anciens : le racisme revient sous forme de (...) racialisme, la phallocratie sous prétexte de néo-féminisme, l'antisémitisme sous couvert d'antisionisme, le fascisme sous des allures de progressisme, le nihilisme sous les atours de la modernité, l'antispécisme et le transhumanisme passent pour des humanismes alors que l'un et l'autre travaillent à la mort de l'homme, l'écologisme se pare des plumes anticapitalistes bien qu'il soit le navire amiral du capital--il y a de quoi perdre pied. J'ai rédigé une série de lettres à cette jeune génération pour lui raconter les racines culturelles de notre époque : elles ont pour sujet la moraline, le néo-féminisme, le décolonialisme, l'islamo-gauchisme, l'antifascisme, la déresponsabilisation, la créolisation, l'antisémitisme, l'écologisme, l'art contemporain, le transhumanisme, l'antispécisme. L'une d'elles explique en quoi consiste l'art d'être français : d'abord ne pas être dupe, ensuite porter haut l'héritage du libre examen de Montaigne, du rationalisme de Descartes, de l'hédonisme de Rabelais, de l'ironie de Voltaire, de l'esprit de finesse de Marivaux, de la politique de Hugo."--Back cover. (shrink)

The Calm before the Storm: Selected Writings of Itamar Singer on the End of the Late Bronze Age in Anatolia and the Levant. By Itamar Singer. Writings from the Ancient World Supplements, vol. 1. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011. Pp. vii + 766, illus. $69.95. Pax Hethitica: Studies on the Hittites and Their Neighbours in Honour of Itamar Singer. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, vol. 51. Edited by Yoram Cohen, Amir Golan, and Jared L. Miller. Wies baden: Harrasowitz Verlag, (...) 2010. Pp. xiv + 439, illus., portrait. (shrink)

Humans can learn complex functional relationships between variables from small amounts of data. In doing so, they draw on prior expectations about the form of these relationships. In three experiments, we show that people learn to adjust these expectations through experience, learning about the likely forms of the functions they will encounter. Previous work has used Gaussian processes—a statistical framework that extends Bayesian nonparametric approaches to regression—to model human function learning. We build on this work, modeling the process of learning (...) to learn functions as a form of hierarchical Bayesian inference about the Gaussian process hyperparameters. (shrink)

_Purpose_ of the article is to find out the main content and ways of embodying freedom as a value of the volunteer movement in the context of analyzing the social motivation of human behavior in general. _Theoretical basis._ The theoretical basis of the research is the philosophical and anthropological understanding of freedom as a person’s creative overcoming of obstacles to establish his or her eccentric essence. Such a vision is embedded, in particular, in Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of existence, Helmuth Plessner’s (...) philosophy of positioning in the world, and Paul Ricœur’s philosophy of rational choice of life path. _Originality__._ The importance of freedom as a value, as well as other social values, is revealed and specified through the analysis of the values of the volunteer movement. In the desire of people engaged in volunteer work to achieve freedom through other values, the content of freedom as a basis for self-reproduction of the individual, community and society is revealed. _Conclusions._ Representatives of various humanities and social sciences have distinct research interests in analyzing the values inherent in volunteers. As members of a certain society and certain communities in this society, volunteers do not act outside the economy, politics and other spheres of public life, but reveal their freedom through creative and non-standard solutions to economic, political, and other problems. At the same time, research psychologists focus attention on the personal self-realization of a person, theorists and practitioners of social work study volunteers’ desire to gain recognition from peers and other small social groups, and representatives of sociology, political science and other social sciences focus their attention on such socially significant values of volunteering as patriotism, solidarity, etc. The task of social philosophy is to justify the desire to contribute to the public good, which is common to all volunteers. Representatives of philosophical anthropology look for the best social intentions inherent in a person as a member of society in volunteering. Analysis of the values of volunteering as a motivator of human behavior provides knowledge of socially significant values inherent in every member of society to a greater or lesser extent. (shrink)

Special issue: Pre ́cis and Commentaries on Veit’s ‘Animal Consciousness’ Abstract: Facing stress and producing stress responses are crucial aspects of an organism’s life and the evolution of both its species and of the other species in its environment, which are co-evolving with it. Philosophers and biologists emphasize the importance of environmental complexity and how organisms deal with it in evolution of cognitive processes. This article adds to these discussions by highlighting the importance of stress physiology in processes connected to (...) plant cognition. While this article supports the thesis that life means cognizing (i.e., sensing the environment, arranging internal processes according to that perception, and affecting the environment with its actions), it also emphasizes that there are various kinds of organisms. In this regard, plant cognition is not animal cognition. However, given both the variety and continuity in evolutionary processes and the similarities even between the distantly related organisms in the tree of life, I argue that it is usually useful to consider and compare physiological and molecular mechanisms in plants and animals as well as the concepts and research processes in animal and plant science. Although the “pathological complexity” thesis that Veit (2023) presents is fruitful in considering the evolution of consciousness and cognition, I argue that, when thinking of biological processes in relation to cognition, stress can be a helpful concept (maybe even as suitable as pathological complexity) in thinking of organisms’ responses to environmental complexity and their adaptation and acclimation processes. (shrink)

We have lost one of the giants of the twentieth century physics when Yoichiro Nambu passed away in July, 2015, at the age of 94. Today's Standard Model, though still incomplete in many respects, is the culmination of the most successful theory of the Universe to date, and it is built upon foundations provided by discoveries made by Nambu in the 1960s: the mechanism of spontaneously broken symmetry in Nature (with G Jona-Lasinio) and the hidden new SU(3) symmetry of quarks (...) and gluons (with M-Y Han). In this volume honoring Nambu's memory, World Scientific Publishing presents a unique collection of papers written by his former colleagues, collaborating researchers and former students and associates, not only citing Nambu's great contributions in physics but also many personal and private reminiscences, some never told before. This book is a volume for all who benefited not only from Nambu's contributions toward understanding the Universe but also his warm and kind persona. It is a great addition to the history of contemporary physics. (shrink)