8,319 research outputs found
Non-Holistic Meaning Anatomism and the No-Principled-Basis Consideration
Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore (1999/2002) frame the debate over meaning holism in terms of a distinction between meaning atomism and meaning anatomism. The former holds that the meaning of an expression E is determined by some relation between E and some extra-linguistic entity. The latter holds that the meaning of E is at least partly determined by some of E’s “inward” relations (IRs) with other expressions in the very language. They (1992) argue that meaning anatomism inevitably collapses into meaning holism, which is the view that the meaning of E is determined by E’s IRs with every other expression in the very language because there is no principled distinction for the anatomist to divide the meaning-determining IRs from the non-meaning-determining ones. In response, the non-holistic anatomist urges that Fodor and Lepore’s no-principled-basis consideration is groundless because the lack of a generally accepted criterion for such a distinction does not undermine the viability of the distinction itself. While this point is well taken, I think that Fodor and Lepore are onto an important question here. That is, what does it make non-holistic anatomism distinctive from its holistic counterpart if without a principled basis for the distinction among IRs? I look into this question and give an alternative argument from Fodor and Lepore’s to suggest that non-holistic anatomism cannot bypass the no-principled-basis consideration. The non-holistic anatomist will need a principled distinction in kind between IRs to back her point
Ricci Curvature on Alexandrov spaces and Rigidity Theorems
In this paper, we introduce a new notion for lower bounds of Ricci curvature
on Alexandrov spaces, and extend Cheeger-Gromoll splitting theorem and Cheng's
maximal diameter theorem to Alexandrov spaces under this Ricci curvature
condition.Comment: final versio
Lipschitz continuity of harmonic maps between Alexandrov spaces
In 1997, J. Jost [27] and F. H. Lin [39], independently proved that every
energy minimizing harmonic map from an Alexandrov space with curvature bounded
from below to an Alexandrov space with non-positive curvature is locally
H\"older continuous. In [39], F. H. Lin proposed a challenge problem: Can the
H\"older continuity be improved to Lipschitz continuity? J. Jost also asked a
similar problem about Lipschitz regularity of harmonic maps between singular
spaces (see Page 38 in [28]). The main theorem of this paper gives a complete
resolution to it.Comment: We remove the assumption in the previous version that the domain
space has nonnegative generalized Ricci curvature. This solves Lin's
conjecture completely. To appear in Invent. Mat
An Energetic Variational Approach for ion transport
The transport and distribution of charged particles are crucial in the study
of many physical and biological problems. In this paper, we employ an Energy
Variational Approach to derive the coupled Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes
system. All physics is included in the choices of corresponding energy law and
kinematic transport of particles. The variational derivations give the coupled
force balance equations in a unique and deterministic fashion. We also discuss
the situations with different types of boundary conditions. Finally, we show
that the Onsager's relation holds for the electrokinetics, near the initial
time of a step function applied field
Mean reversion of inflation rates in 19 OECD countries: Evidence from panel Lm unit root tests with structural breaks
The paper applies the recently developed panel LM unit root tests with heterogeneous structural breaks by Im et al., [The Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 2005] in order to re-examine the validity of mean reversion in the inflation rates of 19 OECD countries for the time period 1960-2004. Our empirical findings are favorable to the stationarity of the inflation ratesand therefore point to the absence of hyperinflation in the majority of the countries. The results indicate that most shocks to inflation rates are temporary and soon converge when we control for breaks, with the inflation rates showing mean reversion. Overall, some policy implications are obtained in this paper.Inflation
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