Henry Laycock
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- May 2006
- ISBN:
- 9780199281718
- eISBN:
- 9780191603594
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/0199281718.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Language
The second application of the assumption that singular reference is ‘ultimately’ exhaustive also represents non-count reference as singular — as reference to individual ‘quantities’ or ‘parcels’ of ...
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The second application of the assumption that singular reference is ‘ultimately’ exhaustive also represents non-count reference as singular — as reference to individual ‘quantities’ or ‘parcels’ of stuff. Unsurprisingly, the idea is sometimes explicitly advanced on the model of plural reference as singular. However, any such view must attempt to circumvent the difficulties posed by Russell’s analysis of the conditions, whereby descriptions count as semantically singular. It is argued that such an attempt cannot succeed.Less
The second application of the assumption that singular reference is ‘ultimately’ exhaustive also represents non-count reference as singular — as reference to individual ‘quantities’ or ‘parcels’ of stuff. Unsurprisingly, the idea is sometimes explicitly advanced on the model of plural reference as singular. However, any such view must attempt to circumvent the difficulties posed by Russell’s analysis of the conditions, whereby descriptions count as semantically singular. It is argued that such an attempt cannot succeed.
Marja‐Liisa Kakkuri‐Knuuttila and Miira Tuominen
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199666164
- eISBN:
- 9780191751936
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199666164.003.0003
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy
In Topics I 8 Aristotle argues that all dialectical problems and premises involve the predicables: definition, peculiar property, genus, differentia, or accident. This claim of exhaustiveness is ...
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In Topics I 8 Aristotle argues that all dialectical problems and premises involve the predicables: definition, peculiar property, genus, differentia, or accident. This claim of exhaustiveness is important for understanding Aristotle’s dialectic but faces some objections. For example general notions of sameness, similarity, homonymy, and difference, introduced as dialectical tools in Topics I 13, are difficult to understand in terms of the predicables. Aristotle’s procedure suggests two interpretations of the claim. The first one restricts problems and premises to predications and offers formal criteria for classifying them. Second, Aristotle also offers extended definitions for definition and genus such that can accommodate freely formulated problems and premises if they occur in arguments leading up to arguments concerning the predicables. This paper argues that neither of the two interpretations is a satisfactory reading of the claim of exhaustiveness and that a tension remains between the formal criteria presented in the syllogism of I 8 and the variety of actual dialectical problems and premises.Less
In Topics I 8 Aristotle argues that all dialectical problems and premises involve the predicables: definition, peculiar property, genus, differentia, or accident. This claim of exhaustiveness is important for understanding Aristotle’s dialectic but faces some objections. For example general notions of sameness, similarity, homonymy, and difference, introduced as dialectical tools in Topics I 13, are difficult to understand in terms of the predicables. Aristotle’s procedure suggests two interpretations of the claim. The first one restricts problems and premises to predications and offers formal criteria for classifying them. Second, Aristotle also offers extended definitions for definition and genus such that can accommodate freely formulated problems and premises if they occur in arguments leading up to arguments concerning the predicables. This paper argues that neither of the two interpretations is a satisfactory reading of the claim of exhaustiveness and that a tension remains between the formal criteria presented in the syllogism of I 8 and the variety of actual dialectical problems and premises.
Veneeta Dayal
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199281268
- eISBN:
- 9780191757396
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281268.001.0001
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Theoretical Linguistics
The study of questions is one of the major success stories in modern semantics. This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with ...
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The study of questions is one of the major success stories in modern semantics. This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax. The topics covered are extensive and varied: direct–indirect questions, weak–strong exhaustiveness, maximality, mention-some answers, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, higher order questions, embedding predicates, selection, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, pied piping, focus, intervention, polar and alternative questions, bias, negative polarity, non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. The author, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Readers will find in this book a lucid exposition of the classics as well as discussion of the most recent, cutting edge research on questions. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues. Semantically sophisticated accounts are presented incrementally and major points summarized at the end of each section. Individual accounts of phenomena are placed in the relevant context. Issues that remain open are highlighted and promising lines of further inquiry sketched out. It constitutes at the same time a comprehensible guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language semantics and a compass for how this area of study is developing.Less
The study of questions is one of the major success stories in modern semantics. This book synthesizes and integrates 40 years of research on the semantics of questions, and its interface with pragmatics and syntax. The topics covered are extensive and varied: direct–indirect questions, weak–strong exhaustiveness, maximality, mention-some answers, functional answers, single-multiple-trapped list answers, higher order questions, embedding predicates, selection, quantificational variability, concealed questions, weak islands, pied piping, focus, intervention, polar and alternative questions, bias, negative polarity, non-canonical questions. The literature on this rich set of topics, theoretically diverse and scattered across multiple venues, is often hard to assimilate. The author, drawing on her own research, brings them together for the first time in a coherent, concise, and well-structured whole. Readers will find in this book a lucid exposition of the classics as well as discussion of the most recent, cutting edge research on questions. Each chapter begins with a non-technical introduction to the issues. Semantically sophisticated accounts are presented incrementally and major points summarized at the end of each section. Individual accounts of phenomena are placed in the relevant context. Issues that remain open are highlighted and promising lines of further inquiry sketched out. It constitutes at the same time a comprehensible guide to one of the most vibrant areas of research in natural language semantics and a compass for how this area of study is developing.
Robert Arp, Barry Smith, and Andrew D. Spear
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780262527811
- eISBN:
- 9780262329583
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262527811.003.0006
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
We here describe the occurrent side of BFO, including the BFO categories of process, process boundary, spatiotemporal region, and temporal region. As objects are located in spatial regions, so ...
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We here describe the occurrent side of BFO, including the BFO categories of process, process boundary, spatiotemporal region, and temporal region. As objects are located in spatial regions, so processes are located in spatiotemporal regions. Processes are related to objects through the relation of participation, as when one object participates with another object in the process of colliding. BFO is an ontology which rests on the open world assumption. Thus it does not make any claim to completeness. This chapter concludes with some considerations on the implications of this assumption for BFO’s treatment of the continuant and occurrent categories and for BFO’s perspectivalism.Less
We here describe the occurrent side of BFO, including the BFO categories of process, process boundary, spatiotemporal region, and temporal region. As objects are located in spatial regions, so processes are located in spatiotemporal regions. Processes are related to objects through the relation of participation, as when one object participates with another object in the process of colliding. BFO is an ontology which rests on the open world assumption. Thus it does not make any claim to completeness. This chapter concludes with some considerations on the implications of this assumption for BFO’s treatment of the continuant and occurrent categories and for BFO’s perspectivalism.
Veneeta Dayal
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780199281268
- eISBN:
- 9780191757396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199281268.003.0002
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Theoretical Linguistics
Chapter 2 introduces the three classic papers on the semantics of questions: Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, and Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982. Questions as denoting sets of (true) propositions and ...
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Chapter 2 introduces the three classic papers on the semantics of questions: Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, and Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982. Questions as denoting sets of (true) propositions and questions as partitions on possible worlds are discussed as well as the distinction between weak and strong exhaustiveness. Possibilities for bridging these different approaches are presented. Crucial to this is the possibility of separating the question denotation from an answerhood operation that takes questions as argument. The notion of maximality plays a crucial role in the interpretation of number morphology in wh phrases. It also plays a crucial role in the definition of an answerhood operator, which captures presuppositions about existence and informativity. The chapter concludes with a snapshot of a theory of questions and answers that can be taken as a baseline, against which suggestions for modification and refinement suggested in subsequent chapters can be evaluated.Less
Chapter 2 introduces the three classic papers on the semantics of questions: Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, and Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982. Questions as denoting sets of (true) propositions and questions as partitions on possible worlds are discussed as well as the distinction between weak and strong exhaustiveness. Possibilities for bridging these different approaches are presented. Crucial to this is the possibility of separating the question denotation from an answerhood operation that takes questions as argument. The notion of maximality plays a crucial role in the interpretation of number morphology in wh phrases. It also plays a crucial role in the definition of an answerhood operator, which captures presuppositions about existence and informativity. The chapter concludes with a snapshot of a theory of questions and answers that can be taken as a baseline, against which suggestions for modification and refinement suggested in subsequent chapters can be evaluated.
David Gil
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199668441
- eISBN:
- 9780191748707
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668441.003.0004
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Syntax and Morphology, Language Families
Gil’s chapter argues that there is no distinction between nouns and verbs in Riau Indonesian. Ideally, the absence of a categorial distinction should be considered as the default case, with the ...
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Gil’s chapter argues that there is no distinction between nouns and verbs in Riau Indonesian. Ideally, the absence of a categorial distinction should be considered as the default case, with the burden of proof on the shoulders of anybody who wishes to demonstrate its presence in a particular language. However, with regard to the noun/verb distinction, its universality is so commonly assumed that instead, one is expected to provide explicit arguments if one wishes to deny its applicability to a particular language. This paper examines a series of grammatical environments, which in many other languages provide diagnostics for a noun/verb distinction, and shows, based on naturalistic data, that none of these distinguish between nouns and verbs in Riau Indonesian. It then argues that Riau Indonesian meets Evans and Osada’s three criteria for lacking a noun/verb distinction, namely bidirectionality, compositionality, and exhaustiveness.Less
Gil’s chapter argues that there is no distinction between nouns and verbs in Riau Indonesian. Ideally, the absence of a categorial distinction should be considered as the default case, with the burden of proof on the shoulders of anybody who wishes to demonstrate its presence in a particular language. However, with regard to the noun/verb distinction, its universality is so commonly assumed that instead, one is expected to provide explicit arguments if one wishes to deny its applicability to a particular language. This paper examines a series of grammatical environments, which in many other languages provide diagnostics for a noun/verb distinction, and shows, based on naturalistic data, that none of these distinguish between nouns and verbs in Riau Indonesian. It then argues that Riau Indonesian meets Evans and Osada’s three criteria for lacking a noun/verb distinction, namely bidirectionality, compositionality, and exhaustiveness.
Bert Timmermans and Axel Cleeremans
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- June 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199688890
- eISBN:
- 9780191801785
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199688890.003.0003
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology
The study of consciousness requires a solution to the following fundamental problem: How can we measure consciousness? While there has been substantial progress in measuring the level of awareness, ...
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The study of consciousness requires a solution to the following fundamental problem: How can we measure consciousness? While there has been substantial progress in measuring the level of awareness, and researchers have made steady progress delineating the neural correlates of consciousness, it remains impossible to measure the contents of awareness directly and link a person’s subjective experience to an objective state of the world or the person. In a historical overview this chapter highlights how research has moved from a strict dissociation logic and the search for subjective and objective thresholds for awareness to more graded approaches in which conscious and unconscious processes are recognized to contribute to all measurements. Subsequently, it delineates the most important challenges to behavioral methods such as exhaustiveness, exclusiveness, and sensitivity. In particular it focuses on the risk of confounding awareness and metacognition, and the tension between exclusiveness of a measure and the information criterion.Less
The study of consciousness requires a solution to the following fundamental problem: How can we measure consciousness? While there has been substantial progress in measuring the level of awareness, and researchers have made steady progress delineating the neural correlates of consciousness, it remains impossible to measure the contents of awareness directly and link a person’s subjective experience to an objective state of the world or the person. In a historical overview this chapter highlights how research has moved from a strict dissociation logic and the search for subjective and objective thresholds for awareness to more graded approaches in which conscious and unconscious processes are recognized to contribute to all measurements. Subsequently, it delineates the most important challenges to behavioral methods such as exhaustiveness, exclusiveness, and sensitivity. In particular it focuses on the risk of confounding awareness and metacognition, and the tension between exclusiveness of a measure and the information criterion.
