European structuralism

European structuralism is a paradigm for the study of language developed by prominent European linguists during the inter-war period and the first decades after World War II that radically rejected the prevailing atomism of 19th century (particularly neo-grammarian) linguistics and language psychology

Modal Structuralism and Theism

Drawing an analogy between modal structuralism about mathematics and theism, I oer a structuralist account that implicitly denes theism in terms of three basic relations: logical and metaphysical priority, and epis- temic superiority. On this view, statements like `God is omniscient' have a hypothetical and a categorical component. The hypothetical component provides a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. The categorical component asserts the logical possibility of the theism struc- ture on the basis of uncontroversial facts about the physical world. This structuralist reading of theism preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology. Thus, it oers a way of understanding theism to which a naturalist cannot object, and it accommodates the fact that religious belief, for many theists, is an essentially relational matter

How to Defeat W\"{u}thrich’s Abysmal Embarrassment Argument against Space-Time Structuralism

In his 2009 PSA Recent Ph.D. Award winning contribution to the bi-annual PSA Conference at Pittsburgh in 2008, C. Wu ̈thrich mounted an argument against struc- turalism about space-time in the context of the General Theory of Relativity (GTR), to the effect that structuralists cannot discern space-time points. An “abysmal embarrass- ment” for the structuralist, Wu ̈thrich judged. Wu ̈thrich’s characterisation of space-time structuralism is however incorrect. We demonstrate how, on the basis of a correct char- acterisation of space-time structuralism, it is possible to discern space-time points in the GTR-structures under consideration. Thus Wu ̈thrich’s argument crumbles

Syntactic features in morphology : general problems of so-called pronominal inflection in german

Morphological analysis of inflectional categories has been for a long time a favored field of classical structuralism. American scholars, in this respect, concentrated on the representation of inflected forms in terms of concatenated morphemes

Structuralism as a Response to Skepticism

Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been motivated using verificationism, externalism, and coherentism. I argue that a more powerful veridicalist response to global skepticism can be motivated by structuralism, on which physical entities are understood as those that play a certain structural role. I develop the structuralist response and address objections

Structuralist Legal Histories

This is a contribution to a symposium titled Theorizing Contemporary Legal Thought. The central theme of the piece is the relation between legal structuralism and legal historiography

Структуралізм як лінгвістична течія (Structuralism as a linguistic movement)

Структуралізм як мовознавчий напрям з’явився відносно нещодавно, він потребує докладного та глибокого вивчення. У тезах досліджено основні положення структуралізму, Празька та Копенгагенська школа структуралізму, як осно- вних засновників структуралізму та генеративна граматика Хомського. (According to the fact, that such a direction as linguistic structuralism appeared relatively recently, it requires a detailed and thorough investigation. The subject of our study is the basic provisions of structuralism, Copenhagen and Prague schools of structuralism as the main founders of structuralism and generative grammar of Chomsky.

Algebraic structuralism

This essay is about how the notion of “structure” in ontic structuralism might be made precise. More specifically, my aim is to make precise the idea that the structure of the world is (somehow) given by the relations inhering in the world, in such a way that the relations are ontologically prior to their relata. The central claim is the following: one can do so by giving due attention to the relationships that hold between those relations, by making use of certain notions from algebraic logic

The advent of heroic anthropology in the history of ideas

In this article the advent of Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology is described as a reaction against the predominantly phenomenological bias of French philosophy in the post-war years as well as against the old humanism of existentialism which seemed parochial both in its confinement to a specific tradition of western philosophy and in its lack of interest in scientific approach. Nevertheless, the paradigm of structural anthropology cannot be equated with the field of structuralism, which became a very contestable form of intellectual fashion. The reception of Lévi-Strauss’s theory in the English-speaking world carried on both the same enthusiasm and the same distortions and simplifications, to the extent that in the course of anti-structural criticism, the main thrust of the epistemological approach of Lévi-Strauss seems to have been lost, to the collective detriment of social sciences and anthropology

Bunge’s Mathematical Structuralism Is Not a Fiction

In this paper, I explore Bunge’s fictionism in philosophy of mathematics. After an overview of Bunge’s views, in particular his mathematical structuralism, I argue that the comparison between mathematical objects and fictions ultimately fails. I then sketch a different ontology for mathematics, based on Thomasson’s metaphysical work. I conclude that mathematics deserves its own ontology, and that, in the end, much work remains to be done to clarify the various forms of dependence that are involved in mathematical knowledge, in particular its dependence on mental/brain states and material objects