OPEN Introduction: Address as Social Action Across Cultures and Contexts

This is the introductory chapter of Address Practice as Social Action: European Perspectives. It is open access under a CC BY license.How we address one another says a great deal about our social relationships and which groups in society we belong to. This edited volume examines address choices in a range of everyday interactions taking place in Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Italian and the two national varieties of Swedish, Finland Swedish and Sweden Swedish

Introduction : Address as Social Action Across Cultures and Contexts

The introduction provides a brief overview of address research, particularly focusing on address practices in Europe. It also serves to contextualize the six chapters of the volume, all of which present up-to-date empirical research of address and social relations in a variety of contexts and languages including Dutch, French, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish.Interaction and variation in pluricentric languages (IVIP

Knowledge of objective modality

The epistemology of modality has focused on metaphysical modality and, more recently, counterfactual conditionals. Knowledge of kinds of modality that are not metaphysical has so far gone largely unexplored. Yet other theoretically interesting kinds of modality, such as nomic, practical, and 'easy' possibility, are no less puzzling epistemologically. Could Clinton easily have won the 2016 presidential election—was it an easy possibility? Given that she didn't in fact win the election, how, if at all, can we know whether she easily could have? This paper investigates the epistemology of the broad category of 'objective' modality, of which metaphysical modality is a special, limiting case. It argues that the same cognitive mechanisms that are capable of producing knowledge of metaphysical modality are also capable of producing knowledge of all other objective modalities. This conclusion can be used to explain the roles of counterfactual reasoning and the imagination in the epistemology of objective modality