Specifics

In all these examples there appears to be mismatch between the position at which an indefinite appears and its preferred interpretation. Following many of the more recent contributions to the literature, I will assume that this is the hallmark of specificity (e.g. Ahusch 1994, Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, van Geenhoven 1998). Such mismatches are not the norm: indefinites are often interpreted in situ, and there is some reason for taking this to be the default option. The reason is that comparatively 'neutral', i.e. semantically attenuate, indefinites have a preference for in situ readings [...]

Not every pseudoalgebra is equivalent to a strict one

We describe a finitary 2-monad on a locally finitely presentable 2-category for which not every pseudoalgebra is equivalent to a strict one. This shows that having rank is not a sufficient condition on a 2-monad for every pseudoalgebra to be strictifiable. Our counterexample comes from higher category theory: the strict algebras are strict 3-categories, and the pseudoalgebras are a type of semi-strict 3-category lying in between Gray-categories and tricategories. Thus, the result follows from the fact that not every Gray-category is equivalent to a strict 3-category, connecting 2-categorical and higher-categorical coherence theory. In particular, any nontrivially braided monoidal category gives an example of a pseudoalgebra that is not equivalent to a strict one.Comment: 17 pages; added more explanation; final version, to appear in Adv. Mat

The storage capacity of underground gas storages in the Czech republic

Sources of natural gas are in most cases located in remote areas far from the places where the gas is utilized, i.e. especially developed industrial countries to which it is transported via pipeline. However, transit gas pipelines, which are transporting extracted gas to the consumers, have a relatively limited peak capacity, the transit supplies essentially have a stable character and are not able to cover increased seasonal or peak demands for gas in gas distribution networks. The solution of this problem is the main task for underground gas storages (UGS) that through the operative regulation maintain stability and reliability of the entire gas system. This article provides a general list of options that can increase the storage capacity of natural gas in underground gas storages and focuses on factors that influence the options of an individual UGS

Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature

Bare plurals (dogs) behave in ways that quantified plurals (some dogs) do not. For instance, while the sentence John owns dogs implies that John owns more than one dog, its negation John does not own dogs does not mean "John does not own more than one dog", but rather "John does not own a dog". A second puzzling behavior is known as the dependent plural reading; when in the scope of another plural, the 'more than one' meaning of the plural is not distributed over, but the existential force of the plural is. For example, My friends attend good schools requires that each of my friends attend one good school, not more, while at the same time being inappropriate if all my friends attend the same school. This paper shows that both these phenomena, and others, arise from the same cause. Namely, the plural noun itself does not assert 'more than one', but rather the plural denotes a predicate that is number neutral (unspecified for cardinality). The 'more than one' meaning arises as an scalar implicature, relying on the scalar relationship between the bare plural and its singular alternative, and calculated in a sub-sentential domain; namely, before existential closure of the event variable. Finally, implications of this analysis will be discussed for the analysis of the quantified noun phrases that interact with bare plurals, such as indefinite numeral DPs (three boys), and singular universals (every boy)

Political membership in the contractarian defense of cosmopolitanism

This article assesses the recent use of contractarian strategies for the justification of cosmopolitan distributive principles. It deals in particular with the cosmopolitan critique of political membership and tries to reject the claim that political communities are arbitrary for the scope of global justice. By focusing on the circumstances of justice, the nature of the parties, the veil of ignorance, and the sense of justice, the article tries to show that the cosmopolitan critique of political membership modifies the contractarian premises in a way that is both unwarranted and unnecessary. While failing to establish principles of global distributive justice, existing cosmopolitan adaptations of the social contract device simply weaken the method’s justificatory potential

Humanity’s Collective Ownership of the Earth and Immigration

In my 2012 book On Global Justice, I argued that humanity’s collective ownership of the earth should be central to reflection on the permissibility of immigration. Other philosophers have recently offered accounts of immigration that do without the kind of global standpoint provided by collective ownership. I argue here that all these attempts fail. But once we see how humanity’s collective ownership of the earth can deliver a genuinely global standpoint on immigration, we must also consider two alternative ways of offering such a standpoint. First, some have argued that any given generation should be regarded as inheriting both the natural and the societal wealth of humanity. The second alternative invokes ethno-geographic communities characterized by particular land-use patterns. This approach would deliver a global standpoint on immigration by determining which community gets to select the land-use pattern for a given location. I argue that thinking about immigration from the standpoint of collective ownership of the earth is superior to both of those alternatives. While advancing a standpoint from which to think about questions of immigration/migration, this article also offers explanations to situate its themes in the current philosophical debate and cover quite a range of topics in the debate about immigration. No prior acquaintance with On Global Justice is presupposed here

Topic-neutral expressions

The point of this thesis is to try to make some sense of the fact that a list formed with "or" has different distributive properties in different contexts. The sentence(a) Mary is betrothed to Tom or Dick or Harry is equivalent to the disjunction of the results of attaching "Mary is betrothed to" to "Tom", "Dick" and "Harry". The sentence(b) Mary is more anxious to marry than Tom or Dick or Harry is equivalent to the conjunction of the results of attaching "Mary is more anxious to marry than" to "Tom", "Dick" and "Harry". The sentence(c) Mary wants to marry Tom or Dick or Harry does not imply either the conjunction or the disjunction of the results of attaching "Mary wants to marry" to "Tom", "Dick" and "Harry". In chapter two, in which conjunctively distributive "or" lists are discussed, I make the specific claim that the fact that in some contexts "or" lists are conjunctively distributive is related to the fact that3in some of these contexts, "and" lists are undistributive. The topic-neutral words "and" and "or, I claim, enable us to make more than one distinction. Implicit in this is the general claim that in order to understand the distinction between any pair of topic-neutral words, we must understand the distinctions that they enable us to make. When we examine the distinction between "any" and ''every", we find that the difference between the logical roles of these words parallels the difference between the logical roles of "or" and "and" - It follows that "any" and "every" enable us to make more than one distinction. Involved in the acceptance of the view that the distinction between "or" and "and" and the difference between "any" and "every" is different in different contexts is the rejection of the view implicit in Professor Geach's account of the "any/every" distinction according to which the 'meaning1 of a topic-neutral word can be given by a simple correlation between sentences containing that word and a single pro-positional form. The sentence in which "or" lists are undistributive are sentences in which the distinction made by "and" and "or" is a distinction between satisfiability-conditions. This fact enables us to understand why certain forms of practical inference are valid.<p