Search

I propose an account of possible worlds. According to the account, possible worlds are pluralities of sentences in an extremely large language. This account avoids a problem, relating to the total number of possible worlds, that other accounts face. And it has several additional benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and explores the importance of interreligious dialogue within the multireligious and multicultural communities. The dialogical tool to be used in this endeavor is Comparative Theology. Through the literature review, the scenario of religiously diverse communities, especially in South Africa, is painted both historically and sociologically. Comparative Theology is defined and historically identified. Theology of dialogue is brought forth as a method that Comparative Theology can use towards social harmony in pluralistic South Africa. Social harmony as a sociological anticipation is defined and related to theology. Social harmony is presented as the form of collective philosophy, which means working together for the greater good, and putting the societal or organisational needs above and ahead of the needs of an individual. The intention is not to convert but to understand and see how harmonious coexistence can be initiated and achieved. Interreligious dialogue is not an initiative of weighing error from truth. It is an engagement with the other, and as dialogical partners coming from different traditions, Comparative Theologians provide guidelines towards this dialogue. Reflective suggestions are highlighted, and these are networking and partnership development for human survival. Christ's example of crossing the cultural and religious barriers is elaborated as a model to follow. Contact without contamination is the driving force. Disengagement and personal insulation are not an ideal option. Christian theologians are encouraged to engage dialogically with people of different religions, as dialogue is the better option towards understanding of the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and explores the importance of interreligious dialogue within the multireligious and multicultural communities. The dialogical tool to be used in this endeavor is Comparative Theology. Through the literature review, the scenario of religiously diverse communities, especially in South Africa, is painted both historically and sociologically. Comparative Theology is defined and historically identified. Theology of dialogue is brought forth as a method that Comparative Theology can use towards social harmony in pluralistic South Africa. Social harmony as a sociological anticipation is defined and related to theology. Social harmony is presented as the form of collective philosophy, which means working together for the greater good, and putting the societal or organisational needs above and ahead of the needs of an individual. The intention is not to convert but to understand and see how harmonious coexistence can be initiated and achieved. Interreligious dialogue is not an initiative of weighing error from truth. It is an engagement with the other, and as dialogical partners coming from different traditions, Comparative Theologians provide guidelines towards this dialogue. Reflective suggestions are highlighted, and these are networking and partnership development for human survival. Christ’s example of crossing the cultural and religious barriers is elaborated as a model to follow. Contact without contamination is the driving force. Disengagement and personal insulation are not an ideal option. Christian theologians are encouraged to engage dialogically with people of different religions, as dialogue is the better option towards understanding of the other.

I formulate a theory of groups based on pluralities and counterparts: roughly put, a group is a plurality of entities at a time. This theory comes with counterpart-theoretic semantics for modal and temporal sentences about groups. So this theory of groups is akin to the stage theory of material objects: both take the items they analyze to exist at a single time, and both use counterparts to satisfy certain conditions relating to the modal properties, temporal properties, and coincidence properties of those items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Einar Bohn [AJP 2019] has proposed a version of panpsychism on which consciousness is fundamentally a property of pluralities of basic objects. I argue that this pluralized panpsychism is structurally similar to emergentism, and faces the problem of explaining how a plurality of basic objects could be a subject of experiences. Because of these issues, pluralized panpsychism is not a substantial improvement on orthodox panpsychism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural definite descriptions across many languages display two well-known properties. First, they can give rise to so-called non-maximal readings, in the sense that they 'allow for exceptions' (Mary read the books on the reading list, in some contexts, can be judged true even if Mary didn't read all the books on the reading list). Second, while they tend to have a quasi-universal quantificational force in affirmative sentences ('quasi-universal' rather than simply 'universal' due to the possibility of exceptions we have just mentioned), they tend to be interpreted existentially in the scope of negation (a property often referred to as homogeneity, cf. Löbner in Linguist Philos 23:213–308, 2000). Building on previous works (in particular Krifka in Proceedings of SALT VI, Cornell University, pp 136–153, 1996 and Malamud in Semant Pragmat, 5:1–28, 2012), we offer a theory in which sentences containing plural definite expressions trigger a family of possible interpretations, and where general principles of language use account for their interpretation in various contexts and syntactic environments. Our theory solves a number of problems that these previous works encounter, and has broader empirical coverage in that it offers a precise analysis for sentences that display complex interactions between plural definites, quantifiers and bound variables, as well as for cases involving non-distributive predicates. The resulting proposal is briefly compared with an alternative proposal by Križ (Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language, University of Vienna, 2015), which has similar coverage but is based on a very different architecture and sometimes makes subtly different predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentences with plural expressions can receive at least two interpretations. For example, the sentence The boys hold a balloon could mean that the boys as a group jointly hold one balloon (the collective reading) or that each boy holds one balloon, which would imply that as many balloons were held as there are boys (the distributive reading). Building on Frazier et al. (1999), we show that the human processor favors collective readings. Crucially, the preference for collective readings is only observed when the distributive reading has to be established through the means of phrasal distributivity (e.g., triggered by distributive quantifiers), and the preference disappears in case of lexical distributivity (e.g., the distributive interpretation of win). The findings provide evidence for different mental representations of the two types of distributivity and shed light on why the processor exhibits a default preference for collective interpretations.

This text analyzes the partial results of a survey carried out with seven womenmothers in the municipality of Vitória da Conquista-BA in 2017, in which they narrate their experiences in intra-family relationships, with their sons and daughters, but not only. The objective is to bring out the relational perceptions that these women have of themselves around maternal identities and conjugal roles exercised within the scope of social-family power relations, as well as to understand some conflicts arising from them - full of ambiguities - and the distinct ways of dealing found by them. The analysis is made from a look that intersects several places of belonging, problematizing various positions different class locations, race, generation, level of education, current spatial occupation and other emerging social markers in field research - structural or circumstantial - as the geographical origin and origin, and, thus, unveiling a certain plurality of experiences and perceptions about being a woman-mother. For the appreciation and systematization of the reports, I anchored myself on the qualitative analysis made possible through the categorization and content analysis inspired by Bardin (1977), in addition to the valuation of the subjectivity of the speeches through methodological strategies with the use of oral history (MAGALHÃES, 2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With psychoanalytic vision, traumatic patterns in individual or collective life, carved out by wounds of the past, become increasingly visible. One such pattern in the Indian socio-political narrative is woven out of the silenced voices of its minority community. This paper picks up on experiences of being a Christian in a predominantly Hindu State, in which Christians, as perceived descendants of the coloniser responsible for the nation's traumatic history, are unthinkingly relegated to the role of the 'outsider'. Although India is taking leaps in its economic development, the diminishing tolerance for ethnic diversity is emerging as a blot of shame on Indian society. In recent times, attacks on Christians have become rampant, worsened by the callousness of law enforcement agencies. These attacks, typically carried out by masked assailants, serve to magnify the paranoia this community experiences. The eminent Indian social psychologist Ashis Nandy (1988) notes that, behind such movements to homogenise a society, is the political use of 'religion-as-ideology' (p. 178). Nandy's countervailing concept of 'religion-as-faith' (p. 178) preserves space for plurality and makes everyday existence increasingly meaningful. However, religion-as-faith is dying a slow death. Fluidity in definitions of Indian selfhood is giving way to rigidification. The Christian response to these attacks typically remains 'We are blessed, for we are tortured in His name'. In leaning on psychoanalytic thinking, this paper is a reflection on the intermediary space where the majority's intolerance of and the minority's submission to a 'higher plan' meet to co-create a narrative of terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines diverse practices in the establishment of marriage partnerships in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, 1 parts of which were controlled by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Family law was an area in which the attempt to transform local practices was conspicuously present, but not fully achieved. Lawful marriage was linked to conversion to Dutch Protestantism and to inheritance of property. In the authoritative space of the provincial board that heard the matrimonial disputes examined in this article, the Company did not proactively attempt to reform family life, an area where it could not easily dictate terms. It made a significant dent as the requirement for marriage registration was recognised by natives. But the limited reach of the introduced law is evident in the Company’s reluctant recognition that its two-step process of reading the banns and subsequent marriage ceremony created confusion and that locals still followed customary practices for forging unions. The VOC faced a normative order in the villages that was characterised by ritual underpinnings. Such local features went unrecognised in official law rules, but their perseverance is testimony to the pluralities in practice in an early colonial encounter in the Indian Ocean world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentences such as "The girls read a book" can lead to multiple interpretations: They could be reading the same book (collective) or they could each be reading their own book (distributive). In ambiguous contexts, adults prefer the collective interpretation, and preschool children show a slight bias for a distributive interpretation. The current research investigated whether conceptual factors (number of actors) influences interpretations of these kinds of predicates. The data with children show a stronger collective bias when there are four actors compared to two actors. This may be because children are more likely to conceptualize groups of four (vs. two) as sets rather than collections of individuals. These data are discussed with reference to research on visual and conceptual integration abilities, showing that children lag behind in their ability to combine components into a whole in comparison to parsing objects into their component parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises the question under what circumstances a plurality forms a set. My main point is that not always all things form sets. A provocative way of presenting my position is that, as a result of my approach, there are more pluralities than sets. Another way of presenting the same thesis claims that there are ways of talking about objects that do not always collapse into sets. My argument is related to expressive powers of formal languages. Assuming classical logic, I show that if all plurality form a set and the quantifiers are absolutely general, then one gets a trivial theory. So, by reductio, one has to abandon one of the premiss. Then, I argue against the collapse of the pluralities into sets. What I am advocating is that the thesis of collapse limits important applications of the plural logic in model theory, when it is assumed that the quantifiers are absolutely general.

Mandarin focus particles systematically have heterogeneous uses. By examining details of two focus particles jiu 'only' and dou 'even', this paper explores the hypothesis that varieties of alternatives give rise to systematic 'ambiguities'. Specifically, by positing sum-based alternative sets and atom-based ones, it maintains unambiguous semantics of jiu as only and dou as even, while deriving their variability through interaction with alternatives. Independently motivated analyses of distributive/collective readings and contrastive topics, combined with varieties of alternatives, deliver the full range of facts concerning jiu and dou. Theoretically, the paper illustrates an integration of Link, Landman's theory of pluralites into Rooth's alternative semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are different views of the logic of plurals that are now in circulation, two of which we will compare in this paper. One of these is based on a two-place relation of being among, as in 'Peter is among the juveniles arrested'. This approach seems to be the one that is discussed the most in philosophical journals today. The other is based on Bertrand Russell's early notion of a class as many, by which is meant not a class as one, i.e., as a single entity, but merely a plurality of things. It was this notion that Russell used to explain plurals in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics; and it was this notion that I was able to develop as a consistent system that contains not only a logic of plurals but also a logic of mass nouns as well. We compare these two logics here and then show that the logic of the Among relation is reducible to the logic of classes as many. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some initial thoughts on shared electronic spaces, analysed as unavoidable sources of plurality. Seen from a didactic perspective, these spaces, which serve frequently as a point of departure for plural approaches in education, call irremediably into question standard classroom practices.

Statements about the behavior of biochemical entities (e.g., about the interaction between two proteins) abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that have to be taken into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering: such statements can not only be understood as event reporting statements, but also as ascriptions of dispositions or tendencies that may or may not refer to collectives of interacting molecules or even to collectives of interaction events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on the nouns that denote pluralities of units has isolated a category of nouns that denote heterogeneous aggregates (such as jewellery or furniture). The present paper seeks to establish whether the category of “aggregates” should be extended to nouns such as foliage, which are not mentioned in studies. Like jewellery or furniture, they only have non-count uses; but they do not apply to heterogeneous units, and are therefore not hyperonymic (at least in their central sense). The study concludes that hetereogeneity is not a defining feature of aggregate nouns, and that nouns of the foliage type should be included. Like the other non-count nouns studied here, they construe the units as parts of a whole (unlike the “groupings” denoted by N + ‑s, in which reduplicated units can be compared and differentiated within the set, and allow access to their parts). They also differ from collective nouns, which are count nouns, in that a distributive property cannot be ascribed to the set (heart-shaped foliage / jewellery, for instance, has to describe the shape of the individual leaves or jewels). Like the nouns that denote aggregates of heterogeneous units, nouns of the foliage type exist because they foreground the common function of the units, to the detriment of their individuality.Foliage type nouns differ from nouns that denote heterogeneous aggregates in one major respect, beyond the lack of heterogeneity: the units are construed as being fixed on a support (typically a branch, or branches, for foliage). This explains why a piece of foliage may not denote a leaf, where a piece of jewellery typically refers to a jewel. But the study concludes that this feature does not exclude foliage nouns from the category of aggregate nouns; similarly, collective nouns exhibit a broad range of variations in their behaviour and conceptualisation.