Irony as Expression (of a Sense of the Absurd)

Situational irony is, first, explained as a severe violation of one or more established, non-moral norms; such violation constitutes that situation’s absurdity. The classical “inversion” theory of communicative irony associated with Cicero and Quintilian, as well as its refinement in terms of the notion of conversational implicature (Grice 1989), are then shown to be inadequate.The echoic (Sperber (1984), Wilson (2006), Wilson & Sperber (2012)) and pretence (Currie 2010) theories are also shown to fail to account for the broad range of communicative irony, although they each contain valuable insights. Further, both theories hold that ironic speakers express attitudes but do not explain how they do so. On the basis of prior work by Green conceptualizing the notion of expression as signaling and showing a psychological state, we defend a view of communicative irony as expressing a sense of a situation’s absurdity. The view generalizes beyond absurdity to encompass expression of a sense of situations’ silliness, wackiness, or goofiness, and accommodates milder forms of irony such as we find in meiosis

Language Understanding and Knowledge of Meaning

In recent years the view that understanding a language requires knowing what its words and expressions mean has come under attack. One line of attack attempts to show that while knowledge can be undermined by Gettier-style counterexamples, language understanding cannot be. I consider this line of attack, particularly in the work of Pettit (2002) and Longworth (2008), and show it to be unpersuasive. I stress, however, that maintaining a link between language understanding and knowledge does not itself vindicate a cognitivist view of the former

Leggere: la tua strada verso te stesso

Many readers of literature are convinced that engagement with it provides insight into the human condition, as well as helping them to become better people. This conviction turns out to be more controversial than it appears, and arguments as well as experimental studies have been marshalled supporting both sides of the debate. That debate has however focused on literature’s capacity to pro-vide knowledge of the world around us. Recent developments in Philosophy have instead highlighted distinctive features of understanding in contrast to knowledge, and in this essay I argue that a ne-glected aspect of literature’s epistemic power is its ability to provide understanding, and in particular self-understanding as we reflect on our reactions to the narratives that make up the core of our enga-gement with literature

Emission Spectrum of Fundamental Strings: An Algebraic Approach

We formulate a linear difference equation which yields averaged semi-inclusive decay rates for arbitrary, not necessarily large, values of the masses. We show that the rates for decays M \to m+\M' of typical heavy open strings are independent of the masses $M$ and $m$, and compute the ``mass deffect''$M-m-M'$. For closed strings we find decay rates proportional to $M m_{R}^{(1-D)/2}$, where $m_{R}$ is the reduced mass of the decy products. Our method yields exact interaction rates valid for all mass ranges and may provide a fully microscopic basis, not limited to the long string approximation, for the interactions in the Boltzmann equation approach to hot string gases.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figure

An Investigation of Language Acquisition as an Antecedent to Pro-Social Development for Secondary Students at Risk for Behavior Disorders

Moral development in youth is of importance to both researchers and to educational professionals seeking to shape the pro-social moral development of young people. This study investigated a new theory of moral development based on literature from neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive psychology. The purpose of this study was to research functional language acquisition’s potential as an antecedent to the development of pro-social moral development among a purposeful sample of alternative school students. This study answered four questions: What gaps, if any, exist between typical language development and the language development of the participants of the study as measured by a functional language sampling assessment? Given a picture of a social event with shared activities, will the participants make pro-social or antisocial connections among the agents? When cartooning to visually represent a participant’s understanding of possible moral transgressions, does the participant’s drawing and writing show a social, cognitive, and/or a language gap between what the participant draws and writes and what the participant tells about the concepts? Will participants show a difference in language function when the task requires higher and/or lower levels of cognition? To answer these questions, language samples were gathered from study participants using a verbal prompt, shared referent (pictures), and cartooning. Participants were ten alternative school students. Four students with significant behavior problems comprised the Core Group. Five of their higher achieving peers comprised the Comparison Group. An additional student with significant behavior and academic issues provided a Confirmation Case. All of the students in the study were found to have pre-language levels of language function across all tasks. Further, none of the students made consistently pro-social connections in their stories for agents depicted in APRICOT I and APRICOT II pictures. Students’ cartooned stories showed gaps between their cartooning and what they said orally. This study suggests alternative school students may have significant functional language deficits and that the behavioral programs at such schools fail to provide students the pro-social moral concepts needed for pro-social moral development. Additionally, they may benefit from the introduction of opportunities for functional language acquisition rarely offered by current curricula

The Political Economy of the Pacific Northwest: A Surplus Approach

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on September 4, 2015Dissertation advisor: James I. SturgeonVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 122-131)Thesis (Ph.D.)--Department of Economics and Social Sciences Consortium. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015The dissertation is comprised of three independent essays. Each essay examines the process of qualitative change in the provisioning process from a different vantage, while remaining fixed in relation to the Columbia River. Among the three essays the period 1866 to 1945 is covered. The first essay examines development of the region's railroad system, and the aspirations on the part of its financiers to realize speculative gains. The region is situated in the context of the post Civil War imperial stance of the state, and the rise of global finance. It is argued that while other colonial processes had operated in the region since the arrival of the fur trappers, construction of railroads embodied a watershed in the commitment for absentee owners to engage in transformational development. The second essay traces the emergence of the electric utility globally, and in reference to the Pacific Northwest. It is argued that the electric utility emerges directly from the railroad - finance nexus. Key social relationships are explored that explain the emergence of the electric utility as a going concern, with particular emphasis placed upon Henry Villard. Villard's financial connections were instrumental in establishing the markets in which Edison's patents would become successful in general. Villard's relationship with Edison, both social and pecuniary in nature, would shape the subsequent process of electrification for the region. The third essay argues that transformation of the Columbia River basin into a hydrological machine emerges as a response to the abuses of the electric utilities. Development of the basin for power, navigation, and irrigation were viewed as a means by which the inhabitants of the region might break the colonial yoke under which the utilities absentee owners had placed them. Private utilities had squandered the wealth embodied in the social technology, failing to provision inhabitants of the region with electricity uniformly at a fair rate. Utilities at the base of a holding company pyramid were used to extract surplus incomes from ratepayers, in part, by inflating their rate bases. Moreover, private utilities wielded political power and worked to undermine efforts to institute municipal or public power projects. Such tension was felt regionally and nationally, galvanzing a countervailing force capable of ushering in large-scale, public, hydroelectric projects. Notwithstanding the dreams of New Deal planners, the Organic Machine would be placed into the narrower service of powering the WWII aluminum plant.Introduction -- Of railroads and finance -- The emergence of the electric utility -- This dam machine kills fascists -- Conclusio

On computation of the first Baues--Wirsching cohomology of a freely-generated small category

The Baues--Wirsching cohomology is one of the cohomologies of a small category. Our aim is to describe the first Baues--Wirsching cohomology of the small category generated by a finite quiver freely. We consider the case where the coefficient is a natural system obtained by the composition of a functor and the target functor. We give an algorithm to obtain generators of the vector space of inner derivations. It is known that there exists a surjection from the vector space of derivations of the small category to the first Baues--Wirsching cohomology whose kernel is the vector space of inner derivations.Comment: 11 page

Energy balance and the sphingosine-1-phosphate/ceramide axis

Peer reviewedPublisher PD