Philosophy Of Language

This is the text of a book aiming to reintegrate the main strands of the philosophy of meaning developed in the Twentieth Century by philosophers like Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and later by Strawson, Searle, and Dummett. As a counterpoint, the work of philosophers like Saul Kripke is considered. Even Donald Williams's trope ontology is considered.

Warum sollten wir moralisch sein? Diese Frage nach Begründung beschäftigt die Moralphilosophie seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Ihr gegenwärtiges Paradigma setzt auf ethischen Pluralismus, moralischen Fortschritt und Moralbegründung durch Widerspruchsfreiheit. Doch dabei verstrickt sie sich selbst in einen Widerspruch.
Diese Studie bringt die Sprachphilosophie Wittgensteins mit der Kritischen Theorie in Konstellation, um zu zeigen, dass die moderne Moralphilosophie an ihrem Anspruch scheitern muss. Dabei wird klar, dass weder Widerspruchsfreiheit noch Moralbegründung der gesellschaftlichen Praxis vorangehen. Im Gegenteil, in der vermeintlichen Rationalität der modernen Moralphilosophie spiegeln sich die Widersprüche unserer Gesellschaft. Die Aufgabe der Philosophie besteht daher nicht darin, diese Widersprüche zu lösen, sondern sie durch sprachkritische Analyse offenzulegen. Indem Wittgenstein mit Marx,
Adorno und Horkheimer in Dialog gebracht wird, entsteht ein neuer Zugang zur Moralphilosophie – eine Kritik, die sowohl sprachlich als auch gesellschaftlich ansetzt.

This year's Kirchberg Wittgenstein Symposium has feminist philosophy as its main topic. To celebrate the event, I am preparing an online paper. It will take me months to complete it, but I have now written these first 12 pages: the introduction, the discussion of the *Tractatus*, and a brief discussion of the 1930 Preface. My intention is to work out a new paradigm for interpreting Wittgenstein, based strictly on the texts he actually meant to publish, or regarded as his *publications*. ----- Postscript: To my mind the definitive paper on feminist philosophy is Susan Haack's https://reasonpapers.com/pdf/18/rp_18_3.pdf. See also her more recent https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3467041.

Soloviev y de las primeras investigaciones sobre su pensamiento en relación con el arte, este artículo pretende identificar los conceptos clave que constituyen esta estética, subrayando los presupuestos antropológicos y epistemológicos que comportan. Al mismo tiempo, se contrasta el pensamiento de Soloviev con algunos pensadores posteriores, singularmente con V. Kandinsky, cuya concepción de lo espiritual en el arte, a pesar de sus diferencias, puede dialogar con el pensamiento de Soloviev.

Postoji nekoliko načina da se tzv. književni kritičar, ili komentator ili egzeget, pozicionira između pisca, tj. književnika, s jedne, i čitatelja, s druge strane. Kod nas je najčešći slučaj taj da se, u uvjetima vrlo primitivne robnonovčane razmjene, kritičar shvati i locira kao neka vrsta piščeva promotora, ili piščeve isturene borbene jedinice, za mađijanje i zavođenje publike u svrhu plasiranja tog kulturnog dobra na za pisca financijski najpovoljniji način. Ove su refleksije pisane pod posve drukčijom perspektivom. Ovdje književni kri čar, ili komentator, ili naprosto tvorac ovih redova, zauzima prije svega prostor između pisca i čitatelja, nastojeći sebe shvatiti oblikova kao i jedno i drugo....

Rescher (1964) showed that “most” could not be reduced to the universal and existential quantifiers, effectively disproving the idea that semantics can be indirect truth-definition by paraphrase into first-order quantification theory. But a truth-definition, according to a footnote added in 1984 to “Truth and Meaning” must be a modal theory, supporting counterfactuals about the truth-conditions a speaker’s merely possible utterances would have. A subjunctive truth-definition, with predication supplemented by two complex predicate-formation primitives devices and a propositional function abstraction operator, both adapted from Stalnaker’s work, yields a theory of semantic form that is directly Tarskian. The truth-conditions of every expression in the object-language is given by an expression in the meta-language. The theory involves no paraphrase.
We apply that theory to comparative predicates, including the quantifiers “much” and “many,” their comparative “more,” and their superlative “most.” “More” is a dual quantifier of which “most” is the general case. “Most” is a most interesting adverbial predicate, with applications beyond modifying a propositional function to yield a quantifier phrase.

The authors notice that negation is more frequent in spoken language than in news and spoken English (dialogue), and that the number of verbal interaction users influences the number of negation used. Utterances characterized by a high level of spontaneity include more occurrences of negation than those prepared beforehand. The authors made an attempt to define if any qualitative and functional differences within the same utterance genre, namely television news, can be found between Polish and English, and if making negations can have ideological implications. The phenomenon of negation seems to constitute a perfect tool for polarizing a positively-marked description of “us”, and a negatively-organized description of “them”. The opinions are directly conveyed with the use of a given system of the receiver opinion who in order to accept the legitimacy of statements, their relevance and coherence, has to make an effort to imagine an alternative vision of the world, projected by the ne...

The mental models we use to reflect on hypothetical situations present enormous challenges when we consider
the impacts that certain decisions have on human ways of life in complex societies. Deontic logic and the
development of its normative systems lead to an expansion of epistemic degrees and control models over cognitive
processes based on axioms and inferential rules. Deontic theorems are rigorously constructed to address
conditional obligations and prohibitions. One of the most esteemed mental models today is counterfactual
reasoning, a propositional model of conditional statements that is highly relevant in contemporary discourse.
The goal of this paper is to investigate how deontic counterfactual reasoning establishes a special type of
semantics, where human acts are not taken as actual behaviours but as hypothetical models of action. The old
tension between facts and norms, present in legal philosophy under the heading of the naturalistic fallacy, has
posed many challenges for deontic logic and legal theory. Deontic counterfactuals emerge as mental models
employed to overcome this classic accusation, also referred to as illicit inference, by constructing undefeatable
semantic models, here considered as deontically consistent worlds.
KEYWORDS
Deontic logic; conditionals; counterfactual; norms; propositions.

This thesis argues that language in general, and proper names in particular, are surreptitious examples of narrative gaps. In this way, in the context of literature, the narrative gaps enclosed in proper names enable the audience to become an active participant in a type of writing that exceeds the limit of the specific literary text at hand. In deconstructing the way in which proper names and nicknames are used by Rosario Ferré and García Márquez, this exposition shows how names, as conveyors of different identities, systematically enable an exercise of différance: they distinguish subjects while postponing an actual description of their individuality. This emptiness of ultimate meaning, however, has been disguised through the means of further narrative gaps (such as "prostitute," "wife," or "husband") that transfer the responsibility of assigning meaning onto the shoulders of the readers. In order to understand the implications of this assertion, this work reflects on the nature of reading and writing, as well as the differences that, apparently, keep literature and reality apart. Finally, by engaging the ideas of John L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, this paper aims to contribute to an understanding of how literary works (such as the ones analyzed here) may challenge the notion of authorship altogether by forcing the reader to complete a textual reality that does more than map preexisting circumstances, it actively writes them.

Представлена критика прототеории Д. Катца. Опираясь на принципы семантического платонизма, он предлагает новое понимание отношений между смыслом и референцией. Однако такая позиция сталкивается с тремя сильными возражениями: против некаузальных способов доступа к абстрактным платоническим сущностям (Бенацерраф–Филд–Чейн), против интуиции как способности априорного знания грамматических фактов (Хорвич–Чейн–Оливер) и против медиального статуса конечных интенсионалов в вопросах фиксации референции языковых выражений (Крипке–Богосян–Куш). Без убедительных ответов на эти возражения прототеория Катца не может считаться достойным конкурентом для натуралистических теорий языка.The article presents criticism of Katz’s proto-theory. Based on the principles of semantic Platonism, he offers a new understanding of the relationship between sense and reference. However, his account faces three strong objections: against non-causal ways of accessing abstract Platonic entities (Benacerraf–Field–Chey...

Até o final dos anos setenta, a crítica literária esteve profundamente influenciada pelo estruturalismo e pela primazia, atribuída por esse movimento, ao texto em si. A partir dos anos 80, no entanto, o quadro teórico inverteu-se e os estudos no campo da teoria literária passaram a priorizar os problemas da recepção dos textos. Os representantes desta guinada no campo da crítica literária, são vagamente chamados de "pós-estruturalistas". Contudo, é bom lembrar que esses autores, apesar de certa reciprocidade temática, estão longe de constituir uma unidade de pensamento. Aliás, um dos principais pontos de discordância no âmbito destas teorias pósestruturalistas concerne exatamente à maneira como se deve entender o processo de leitura de um texto. Afinal, se estamos diante de um impulso cooperativo por meio do qual a leitura realizaria o sentido da obra, como devemos entender essa "interferência autoral" do leitor? Qual é, finalmente, o campo da interpretação? Um bom exemplo desta controvérsia aparece no debate travado entre o semiólogo italiano Umberto Eco e o filósofo francês Jacques Derrida acerca dos limites do processo interpretativo. Podemos dizer que, de certa maneira, tal controvérsia já é um exercício de interpretação acerca de uma célebre frase de Paul Valéry: "Il n'y a pas de vrai sens d'un texte" (não há verdadeiro sentido de um texto). Com efeito, há pelo menos duas interpretações possíveis para a fala de Valéry: a primeira diria que o significado de um texto é sempre -e interminavelmente -posposto; a segunda,

O artigo pretende, em primeiro lugar, caracterizar o programa de superação da metafísica proposto por Rudolf Carnap no artigo “Superação da metafísica pela análise lógica da linguagem” e apresentar um paralelo entre suas conclusões e aquelas apresentadas por Moritz Schlick em textos anteriores. Em segundo lugar, pretende-se mostrar que a filiação de Carnap ao Tractatus logico-philosophicus de Wittgenstein está baseada em uma compreensão sui generis da noção mesma de contrassenso e da tese de que as supostas proposições da metafísica são destituídas de sentido. Essa compreensão, porém, se baseia na apropriação do verificacionismo que o próprio Wittgenstein propôs no início da década de 1930.The article aims, first, to characterize the program of eliminating metaphysics proposed by Rudolf Carnap in the article “The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language” and to stress the parallel between the author’s conclusions and those presented by Moritz Schlick in earlie...

Peirce describes himself as a 'contrite fallibilist' (see 1.14, c. 1897)1; he stresses that any of our beliefs may be mistaken, that our beliefs can never be absolutely certain, perfectly precise, or completely universal, and he urges that we always be prepared to revise our beliefs, to 'dump the whole cartload', as he picturesquely puts it, 'the moment experience is against them ' (1.55, c. 1896). When it comes, however, to the question of whether we are fallible, not only with respect to our ordinary, empirical beliefs, but also with respect to our mathematical beliefs, Peirce's confident anti-dogmatism seems to falter. Peirce believes that the truths of mathematics are necessary. And he seems to suspect that the necessity of mathematical truths somehow precludes the possibility of our being mistaken in our mathematical beliefs; for when (e.g. 7.108, 1892, 1.248, 1902) he claims that fallibilism does extend even to mathematics he is tempted to compromise his commitment to the necessity of mathematical truths, and to hint that mathematical inference is, after all, only probable, and when, elsewhere (e.g. 1.149, c. 1897) he stresses the necessary character of mathematical truths, he also hints that we are fallible only with respect to our factual beliefs. 2 What is puzzling about this, to my mind, is why Peirce should think that there is a difficulty about reconciling fallibilism with the necessity of mathematical truths. Why should one not allow that we may hold false mathematical beliefs, and at the same time grant that mathematical truths are necessarily true?-of course, if mathematical truths are necessarily true, then, if we hold false mathematical beliefs, those beliefs are necessarily false; but there is still no obvious difficulty in that. (If I add up a long column of figures incorrectly, then, if the correct answer is necessarily true, my answer is necessarily false. But why should it be supposed that that precludes my adding up the column incorrectly?)

My title, "Belief in Naturalism," signals, not that I adopt naturalism as an article of faith, but that my purpose in this paper is to shed some light on what belief is, on why the concept of belief is needed in epistemology, and how all this relates to debates about epistemological naturalism. After clarifying the many varieties of naturalism, philosophical and other (section 1), and then the various forms of epistemological naturalism specifically (section 2), I offer a theory of belief in which three elements -the behavioral, the neurophysiological, and the socio-historical -interlock (section 3), and apply this theory to resolve some contested questions: about whether animals and pre-linguistic infants have beliefs, about the fallibility of introspection, and about self-deception (section 4).

A natural language is an organic living thing; and meanings change as words take on new, and shed old, connotations. Recent (post-Fregean) philosophy of language has paid little attention to the growth of meaning; radical philosophers like Feyerabend and Rorty have suggested that meaning-change undermines the pretensions of science to be a rational enterprise. Thinkers in the classical pragmatist tradition, however -Peirce in philosophy of science and, more implicitly, Holmes in legal theory-both recognized the significance of growth of meaning, and understood how it can contribute to the progress of science and to the adaptation of a legal system to changing circumstances. This paper develops these insights, and illustrates them by reference to (1) the growth of meaning of "DNA" from the identification of "nuclein" to the discovery of mtDNA almost a century later, and (2) the growth of meaning of "the establishment of religion" in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from its ratification in 1791 to the present day. Arguing that the growth of meaning can indeed contribute to rationality, it also shows why narrowly formal models are inadequate both to science and to law.

I. The classical pragmatist tradition; contemporary distortions of pragmatism. II. Peirce's thesis of the "growth of meaning"; its relevance to the vocabulary of the sciences and the rationality of the scientific enterprise. III. Peirce's "ethics of terminology"; its connection with his aspiration to make philosophy "scientific." IV. Why, in the language of philosophy today, we see impoverishment of meaning and violations of the ethics of terminology.

本稿では、天理教の「つとめ」の地歌である「みかぐらうた」の翻訳について、タラル・アサドの儀礼や翻訳に関わる知見に基づいて考察する。「みかぐらうた」のテキストの翻訳は古くから様々な試みが見られるが、「つとめ」で唱えられる際は、韓国語を除き、元々の日本語で書かれた地歌のみが正式なテキストとして用いられる。外国語で歌える「みかぐらうた」の翻訳が可能であるのか、またそれが教理上許されるのかという問いはこれまでも問われてきたが、天理教の異文化伝道研究の中での蓄積は決して多くない。そこで本稿では、それらの問いを探求するのに求められる視角を浮き彫りにするために、テキスト解釈や音韻論ではなく、「身体」に着目して議論の展開を試みる。

その議論を展開するにあたり、初めに「みかぐらうた」に内包される身体性に目を向け、「みかぐらうた」を唱えながら「つとめ」を実践することで行為主体にどのような変化をもたらすのかという問いにつながる教理言説を確認する。次に、そのような言説の理解を深めるための補助線として、アサドの儀礼論や翻訳論を参照し、信仰者が儀礼の実践を通して聖典の言語を身体に翻訳するという視点を紹介する。そして最後に、アサドの知見を援用することで、「みかぐらうた」の翻訳の意味する射程を、そのテキストの使われる儀礼を通しての主体形成にまで広げて理解することが可能になるという点、また、「みかぐらうた」を日本語以外の言語に翻訳して「つとめ」の地歌として唱えることについて考察するには、それが「感覚ある人間の身体」に翻訳され得るのかという視点を踏まえておく必要があるという点について論じる。
【キーワード】みかぐらうた、翻訳、身体、涵養、タラル・アサド

Unlike other modern sciences that have dramatically transformed our way of life over a historically short period of time, linguistics cannot boast of any serious achievements that affect our daily life. This raises the issue of practicality of linguistic theories and their applicability in our praxis of living. Confined to the methodologically erroneous and theoretically untenable framework based on the code model of language and communication, linguistics of the mainstream persists in viewing language as a cultural tool in the service of the mind rather than a biologically and ecologically functional feature of humans as a species. Reification of language precludes any productive theorizing about its nature and function, and the biological function of language and its role in the evolution of our species is ignored.

This paper investigates the performance of 16 Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating LoRaWAN-related engineering tasks involving optimal placement of drones and received power calculation under progressively complex zero-shot, natural language prompts. The primary research question is whether lightweight, locally executed LLMs can generate correct Python code for these tasks. To assess this, we compared locally run models against state-of-the-art alternatives, such as GPT-4 and DeepSeek-V3, which served as reference points. By extracting and executing the Python functions generated by each model, we evaluated their outputs on a zero-to-five scale. Results show that while DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4 consistently provided accurate solutions, certain smaller models—particularly Phi-4 and LLaMA-3.3—also demonstrated strong performance, underscoring the viability of lightweight alternatives. Other models exhibited errors stemming from incomplete understanding or syntactic issues. These findings illustrate the potential of LLM-based approaches for specialized engineering applications while highlighting the need for careful model selection, rigorous prompt design, and targeted domain fine-tuning to achieve reliable outcomes.

Profesor UNA n estos países nuestros, inmersos en una técnica y en una política económica brutal y antihumana, es de vital importancia buscar en todos aquellos pensadores que, cerca o lejanamente se refieran a este problema con el propósito de ir aclarando más nuestra conciencia y nuestra acción frente a la negación de la vida en la naturaleza y en la existencia social del individuo humano. Y si, además, el autor es considerado, como en el caso de Heidegger, una de las cumbres filosóficas del Occidente contemporáneo, indudablemente su análisis sobre el problema técnico antihumanista no es solo una cuestión interesante para hacer ejercicios filosóficos de la Inteligencia sino que es necesario para saber en qué escollo del devenir histórico se encuentran aferrados nuestros pueblos. Y todo esto con el fin de buscar un camino para salir de esta miseria ontológica que padecen la naturaleza y los seres humanos en América Latina.

Reflections on language and metalanguage highlight the systemic power of language to generate self-referentiality and meta-referentiality, even to the point where language can be used to negotiate the different contexts and codes within which language can function. These "indexial" and autopoietic capacities are often carried by unobtrusive (e.g., "phatic") linguistic functions and can frequently express themselves in fleetingly subtle verbal interactions. Hence the reduction of language to its referential function -as habitually happens when comparing human language to other information-processing organisms and systems -ignores what is probably its most powerful systemic characteristic. This insight -the power of language and its users to become self-reflexively metacontextual -should not be overlooked in contemporary posthumanist discussions problematizing the distinction between humans and other animals, or humans and artificially intelligent machines.

In this work, we propose a definition of logical consequence based on the relation between the quantity of information present in a particular set of formulae and a particular formula. As a starting point, we use Shannon"s quantitative notion of information, founded on the concepts of logarithmic function and probability value. We first consider some of the basic elements of an axiomatic probability theory, and then construct a probabilistic semantics for languages of classical propositional logic. We define the quantity of information for the formulae of these languages and introduce the concept of informational logical consequence, identifying some important results, among them: certain arguments that have traditionally been considered valid, such as modus ponens, are not valid from the informational perspective; the logic underlying informational logical consequence is not classical, and is at the least paraconsistent sensu lato; informational logical consequence is not a Tarskian logical consequence.

The firm of Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in Göttingen has recently published a number of fine books on the history of modern mathematics in Germany, with particular emphasis on Göttingen. Their works on David Hilbert are Der Briefwechsel David Hubert -Felix Klein (1886 -1918) (1985) edited by Günther Frei; Über die Entstehung von David Hubert's "Grundlagen der Geometrie" (1986) by M.-M. Toepell; and now Hilbertprogramm und kritische Philosophie (1990) by Volker Peckhaus. The first of these has very little for the logician: a pair of letters (numbers 55 and 56) and an accompanying excerpt from a letter from Paul Gordan to Klein will satisfy those claiming a psychological background to Hubert's programme. The book by Toepell should serve to dispel the myth that Hubert's Grundlagen der Geometrie arose in a vacuum: Hilbert concerned himself with geometry throughout the 1890s, lecturing on it a number of times. However, except as background to the development of Hilbert's foundational views, Toepell's book is not essential reading for the historian of logic. This historian cannot, however, ignore the book of Peckhaus, which is the first booklength study of Hilbert's foundational activity in the period between Hilbert's Grundlagen and the end of the First World War. A la Toepell Peckhaus dispels the myth of Hilbert's 1904 -1917 foundational vacuum; he offers the clearest perspective on the rôle of the paradoxes in Hilbert's programme I've ever seen; and he offers a very powerful challenge to those of us who stubbornly cling to the belief that there wasn't a philosophical bone in Hilbert's body. All but the most perfunctory reader will notice a shift in Hilbert's attitude toward the paradoxes. When, in 1900, he originally called for consistency proofs for his axiomatisation of arithmetic and, eventually, for an axiomatisation of set theory, the paradoxes were not a major concern to him. Indeed, of his two publications on the matter, only the one-his famous address on problems-even hinted at the existence of the paradoxes when he mentioned that some collections-like that of all alephs-are inconsistent. Hilbert had already known of the set-theoretic paradoxes for several years. In his 1904 lecture at Heidelberg, he actually used the word "paradox" and declared that "the avoidance of such contradictions and the clarification of those paradoxes is rather to be kept in the eyes as a principal goal from the start in the investigation of the numberconcept". Noting that logic depends on arithmetic and arithmetic on logic, he added that "for the avoidance of paradoxes a piecewise simultaneous development of the laws of logic and arithmetic is therefore necessary". It is not at all clear from these remarks whether the paradoxes are now an impetus or merely a constraint. In his later popular accounts of his foundational views, the paradoxes would become not merely an impetus, but the prime mover. Indeed, in his 1917 lecture on axiomatic thinking Hilbert was so taken with the paradoxes that he considered them to be the reason Kronecker and Poincaré rejected Cantor's set theory. Dropping the chronologically absurd reference to Kronecker, Hilbert would again wax poetic over the paradoxes in his other great popular account-his 1925

Vice epistemology studies the qualities of individuals and collectives that undermine the creation, sharing, and storing of knowledge. There is no settled understanding of which epistemic vices exist at the collective level. Yet understanding which collective epistemic vices exist is important, both to facilitate research on the antecedents and effects of collective epistemic vice, and to advance philosophical discussions such as whether some collective epistemic vices are genuinely collective. I propose an empirical approach to identifying epistemic vices in corporations, analyzing a large dataset of online employee reviews. The approach has parallels to the methodology for identifying the big-five personality traits. It surfaces epistemic vices that are attributed to corporations by its own members and reduces the number of vices to the minimum required to describe differences between corporations. This approach yields a new taxonomy of epistemic vices for corporations. While two ...

Appel à contributions pour le numéro 56 Théorie du langage et philosophie analytique en Afrique Numéro coordonné par Auguste Nsonsissa, Gilbert Babena et Yannick Essengue Revue à comité de lecture, trimestrielle et trilingue, Al-Mukhatabat publie des articles de logique, d'épistémologie, d'arts, de technologie et de sciences sociales. Les articles sont soumis de façon anonyme à deux membres du comité scientifique de la revue pour leur évaluation. L'envoi d'un document à la revue signifie que l'auteur autorise sa publication. L'article, qui reste la propriété pleine de son auteur, doit être envoyé sous format docx et PDF, ne dépassant pas 30 pages (notes et bibliographie incluses), accompagné d'un résumé en anglais, en arabe et en français. L'auteur sera notifié de la décision du comité de lecture dans un délai de 3 mois. La Revue vise à familiariser davantage les lecteurs aux subtilités de la pensée scientifique et à favoriser les approches et les méthodes logiques, argumentatives et épistémologiques dans le traitement des divers problèmes qui touchent la connaissance de façon générale, comme base pour instaurer un dialogue authentique et fructueux entre les cultures du monde.

This study discusses and compares three explicit definitions of kalima by al-Zamakhsharī (d. 538/1144), Ibn al-Ḥājib (d. 646/1249), and Ibn Hishām al-Anṣārī (d. 761/1360), in light ofʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī’s (d. 898/1492) analysis and evaluation of the definitions of al-Zamakhsharī and Ibn al-Ḥājib in his commentary on the latter’s al-Kāfiya. The article also studies the different criteria Muslim grammarians and logicians have used in their conceptualization of the best definition in the context of Ibn Hishām’s attempt to fully use the criteria of logic in his grammatical definition of kalima.

The following paper investigates the crucial notion of a "canonical ascription statement" in Bruno Molder's Mind Ascribed , and argues that the reasons given for preferring the book's approach of canonicallity to a more common understanding of canonicallity in terms of the ascriptions we would "ideally" make are not only unpersuasive, but also leave the interpretivist position more open to skeptical worries than it should be. The paper further argues that the resources for a more compelling justification of Molder's conception of canonicality are already in Molder's book itself.

thank Professor Burt Neuborne for sparking my interest in this topic during his class and for his guidance and advice. 1. "This Court consistently has given voice to, and has reaffirmed, the central judgment of the Framers of the constitution that, within our political scheme, the separation of governmental powers into three coordinate Branches is essential to the preservation of liberty." Mistretta v.

This paper discusses the interaction between voices in the so-called Appraisal satellite, a section in the generic structure of hard news concerned with evaluation (White, 1998). The discussion focuses primarily on the interplay between external voices brought into the discourse by various forms of presentation, i.e. forms of reporting the language of others (Semino and Short, 2004); in addition, the paper touches upon the interplay between external voices and the internal authorial voice of the journalist. External voices are considered in terms of the function they fulfil in hard news Appraisal. Prototypically, external voices serve as the main source of evaluation but also fulfil various subsidiary roles; for instance, voices serve as the target of evaluation, express attitude, and provide a summary, background information and justification. Correspondences are found between voice functions and forms of presentation. Voice functions are interpreted from a dialogic perspective, mo...

Resumo. O artigo propõe um estudo das demonstrações diagramáticas euclidianas, sob um ponto de vista retórico, questionando a visão tradicional de que os diagramas são meros recursos psicotécnicos no processo de descoberta matemática. Argumenta-se que os diagramas são usados para justificar afirmações específicas nas demonstrações, as quais não comprometem a correção dos resultados alcançados por Euclides. Para explicar isso, mostra-se a possibilidade de o método inferencial euclidiano ser interpretado à luz dos entimemas, ou seja, dos argumentos retóricos dependentes da audiência. Por fim, o texto discute o conceito de demonstração canônica, i.e., de demonstração completa segundo os princípios de uma teoria, como forma de antecipar algumas objeções. São consideradas também as limitações da análise lógica, ao estabelecer a definição standard como única espécie de demonstração canônica.

English translation of my french short survey paper of Putnam's philosophy of truth entitled "Putnam : le réel, le rationel et le naturel" published in Archives de Philosophie in 2024.
Putnam's philosophy of truth has notoriously undergone a number of inflections over the course of his career. Here, I propose to revisit this trajectory, taking as a starting point Putnam's claim to fidelity to three commitments of reason in scientific practice: recognition of the interpersonal and diachronic character of inquiry; recognition of "equivalent descriptions"; and commitment to the scientific study of the mind. Each of these commitments is at first sight bound up with a particular philosophical tropism. To put it briefly, the first is realist, insofar as in order to investigate the same things we must be able to investigate the things themselves. The second is rationalist, insofar as it demands that rational indiscernibility implies real indiscernibility. The third is naturalistic in its invitation to study in the third-person language and thought. Now, the theory of truth, insofar as it has to pronounce on what it is to think the world - to be able to say what it is to think it correctly - is a territory on which each of these principles of intelligibility can make claims. What I would like to show in this essay is the way in which a certain tectonics of these principles determines Putnam's philosophy of truth in its successive evolutions. In describing this tectonics, I shall elicit the role of Putnam’s indecision between what I shall call “truth-first” and “reference-first” grounding in the theory of knowledge.

THIS THIRD AND FINAL LECTURE EXPLAINS THE SEMANTICS OF PROPHETIC LANGUAGE IN CONTEXT OF THE BOOK OF REVELATION. IT DEMONSTRATES THE PROPERTIES OF 'BABYLON' ARE THE SAME AS THE PROPERTIES OF C.1ST JERUSALEM. IT THEN APPLIES THE RULE; 'WHAT IS EQUAL TO EACH OTHER IS EQUAL TO THE SAME THING,' CONCLUDING ONLY JERUSALEM IS ASCRIBED THE TITLE 'BABYLON.'

A FIRST-CENTURY MODEL UNITES ALL THREE PROPHETIC SYSTEMS -TIME, LANGUAGE, CONTEXT- IN 70AD AT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MILLENNIAL TEMPLE.

IT IS OFFERED AS A WORKING HYPOTHESIS, THE SIMPLEST STATEMENT CONSISTENT WITH OBSERVATION.

PRAISE BE TO GOD.

This chapter explores the historical concept of performative language and how it has evolved within linguistic anthropological thought up to the modern day. The discussion begins with J. L. Austin's understanding of the performative utterance in the 1960s and traces its conceptual lineage into Judith Butler's understanding of performativity in the 1990s. It then examines how Butler's performativity theory has been taken up by linguistic anthropologists in thinking about performative language, especially scholars of gender, race, and class, largely in conjunction with Silverstein's work on indexicality and indexical performance.

L'articolo riprende il discorso letto il 2 settembre 2020 nel cortile dell\u2019Archiginnasio in occasione del funerale accademico. Ci si sofferma in particolare sull'etica di Andrea Battistini in quanto studioso, docente e uomo delle istituzioni. L'articolo appare in una delle riviste del cui comitato scientifico Andrea Battistini faceva parte, in un numero interamente dedicato alla sua memoria

This study investigates the relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge as measured by the Vocabulary Size Test (Nation and Beglar, 2007) and free productive vocabulary knowledge as demonstrated by the learners when writing a short story based on pictures. The focus is on three different areas of productive vocabulary use: lexical diversity (i.e. the proportion of different words in a text), lexical sophistication (i.e. the proportion of advanced words in a text) and lexical density (i.e. the proportion of content words in a text). The results of a bivariate correlation analysis indicate that there is a moderate relationship between learners’ receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical diversity of the texts they produce; there is a weak relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical sophistication in the texts; and there is no relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and lexical density.

This paper examines the convergence of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and Saussure's structural linguistics through the contemporary lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). It argues that meaning is neither a private referent nor a fixed semantic essence, but a function of public usage, shaped across time. Using the metaphor of the "beetle"-the private object in Wittgenstein's box-we explore how language attains clarity not through introspective certainty, but through shared and evolving linguistic games. LLMs, often criticized as mere syntactic machines, in fact instantiate this emergent clarity through usage. While they do not meet Searlean standards of intentionality, they do fulfill Wittgensteinian criteria of language mastery through behavior. In this, the paper maintains the distinction between use and awareness, but reframes understanding as a layered phenomenon, not a binary threshold.

This essay is based on one I published over three decades ago in a collection on trust (Gambetta 1988). It was an ethnographic analysis of 1960s fieldwork done in the slums of Accra, Ghana’s capital city. My original article had three sections. The first was empirical, which I have greatly reduced here. I address there how durable economic relations could be sustained in an urban environment that was marginal to both traditional and modern society. I illustrate with examples the tenor of commercial life and petty enterprise in Nima. I do not highlight trust at first. Only in the third section do I turn to what we may call the philosophy of trust. I focus there on migrants’ attempts to build viable enterprise. An intermediate section bridges the empirical and theoretical parts by exploring the semantics of trust and the set of terms to which it belongs. Anthropology is philosophy with real life examples. I offer here some reflections on what I have learned since, but first a few empirical observations.