Aspect construal in Mandarin: a usage-based constructionist perspective on LE

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le, confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspect. We argue that le participates in two distinct family resemblance constructions of aspect construal associated with two distinct sentential positions. The clause-internal le construction construes the closing or final boundary of an event and the clause-final le construction construes the opening or initial boundary of an event. Corpus analysis showed that the two aspect constructions have distinct patterns in natural language uses that are consistent with the proposed construals. Results from elicited response data showed that native speakers paid attention to construction-level formal and semantic cues in making family resemblance judgments about tokens of the two constructions. This study has both theoretical and methodological implications for crosslinguistic research on grammatical aspect in relation to lexical aspect and for usage-based constructionist approaches to grammatical categories beyond aspect.

Investigating Scientists’ Views of the Family Resemblance Approach to Nature of Science in Science Education

In this paper, we use the “Family Resemblance Approach” (FRA) as a framework to characterize how scientists view the nature of science (NOS). FRA presents NOS as a “system” that includes clusters or categories of ideas about the cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects of science. For example, the cognitive-epistemic aspects include aims and values such as objectivity and scientific methods such as hypothesis testing. Social-institutional aspects refer to a range of components including social values such as honesty about evidence and institutional contexts of science such as research institutions. Characterized as such, NOS is thus a system of interacting components. The initial account of FRA was proposed by philosophers of science and subsequently adapted and extended for science education including through empirical studies. Yet, there is little understanding of the extent to which FRA coheres with scientists’ own depictions about NOS. Hence, an empirical study was conducted with scientists to investigate their views about FRA as well as their views of NOS using the FRA framework. In so doing, the research sought to explore the utility of FRA from scientists’ point of view. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of 17 Taiwanese scientists’ responses to a set of written questions indicates that scientists are in agreement with the FRA account of NOS, and they detail all aspects in their reference to NOS, although the social-institutional aspects are underrepresented in their depiction. Implications for further studies and science education are discussed.

Rorty and Royce

Despite the evident lack of pragmatist family resemblance between the “absolute pragmatism” of Josiah Royce and Rorty’s antifoundationalism, historicism, and contingentism, this chapter identifies a shared project of, in Rorty’s parlance, intervening in cultural politics. Three claims are advanced: first, that Royce’s later work can be productively viewed as a series of philosophical interventions in cultural politics; second, that while evidence of Rorty’s engagement with Royce’s thought is scant, drawing on archival material establishes that it exists and was more influential on Rorty than currently appreciated; and, third, that reading Rorty and Royce within the same frame generates insights about the transformative moral resources available to pragmatists—namely, the power of affective ties and ethical commitments exemplified in the notion of loyalty. What results is an approach to questions of justice through the lens of community particularly attuned to those who have been marginalized or excluded.

Purifying applied mathematics and applying pure mathematics: how a late Wittgensteinian perspective sheds light onto the dichotomy

In this work we argue that there is no strong demarcation between pure and applied mathematics. We show this first by stressing non-deductive components within pure mathematics, like axiomatization and theory-building in general. We also stress the “purer” components of applied mathematics, like the theory of the models that are concerned with practical purposes. We further show that some mathematical theories can be viewed through either a pure or applied lens. These different lenses are tied to different communities, which endorse different evaluative standards for theories. We evaluate the distinction between pure and applied mathematics from a late Wittgensteinian perspective. We note that the classical exegesis of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, due to Maddy, leads to a clear-cut but misguided demarcation. We then turn our attention to a more niche interpretation of Wittgenstein by Dawson, which captures aspects of the aforementioned distinction more accurately. Building on this newer, maverick interpretation of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics, and endorsing an extended notion of meaning as use which includes social, mundane uses, we elaborate a fuzzy, but more realistic, demarcation. This demarcation, relying on family resemblance, is based on how direct and intended technical applications are, the kind of evaluative standards featured, and the range of rhetorical purposes at stake.

Standpoint Logic: Multi-Perspective Knowledge Representation

Ontologies and knowledge bases encode, to a certain extent, the standpoints or perspectives of their creators. As differences and conflicts between standpoints should be expected in multi-agent scenarios, this will pose challenges for shared creation and usage of knowledge sources. Our work pursues the idea that, in some cases, a framework that can handle diverse and possibly conflicting standpoints is more useful and versatile than forcing their unification, and avoids common compromises required for their merge. Moreover, in analogy to the notion of family resemblance concepts, we propose that a collection of standpoints can provide a simpler yet more faithful and nuanced representation of some domains. To this end, we present standpoint logic, a multi-modal framework that is suitable for expressing information with semantically heterogeneous vocabularies, where a standpoint is a partial and acceptable interpretation of the domain. Standpoints can be organised hierarchically and combined, and complex correspondences can be established between them. We provide a formal syntax and semantics, outline the complexity for the propositional case, and explore the representational capacities of the framework in relation to standard techniques in ontology integration, with some examples in the Bio-Ontology domain.

Modelling concrete and abstract concepts using brain-constrained deep neural networks

A neurobiologically constrained deep neural network mimicking cortical areas relevant for sensorimotor, linguistic and conceptual processing was used to investigate the putative biological mechanisms underlying conceptual category formation and semantic feature extraction. Networks were trained to learn neural patterns representing specific objects and actions relevant to semantically ‘ground’ concrete and abstract concepts. Grounding sets consisted of three grounding patterns with neurons representing specific perceptual or action-related features; neurons were either unique to one pattern or shared between patterns of the same set. Concrete categories were modelled as pattern triplets overlapping in their ‘shared neurons’, thus implementing semantic feature sharing of all instances of a category. In contrast, abstract concepts had partially shared feature neurons common to only pairs of category instances, thus, exhibiting family resemblance, but lacking full feature overlap. Stimulation with concrete and abstract conceptual patterns and biologically realistic unsupervised learning caused formation of strongly connected cell assemblies (CAs) specific to individual grounding patterns, whose neurons were spread out across all areas of the deep network. After learning, the shared neurons of the instances of concrete concepts were more prominent in central areas when compared with peripheral sensorimotor ones, whereas for abstract concepts the converse pattern of results was observed, with central areas exhibiting relatively fewer neurons shared between pairs of category members. We interpret these results in light of the current knowledge about the relative difficulty children show when learning abstract words. Implications for future neurocomputational modelling experiments as well as neurobiological theories of semantic representation are discussed.

The Nordic Countries

This chapter discusses the descriptive premises of the notion of a distinctive Nordic welfare model. It asks in what sense the Nordic welfare states constitute a distinctive type, and whether its core features have remained stable in recent decades. The global interest in the Nordic model is best explained by Nordic countries’ long record of good economic and social performance, as well as its anticipated ideological foundations of egalitarianism and universalism. Despite the continuous challenges of past decades, and in part differing welfare policy responses to those, the Nordic countries still bear some ‘family resemblance’, especially when viewed in a broader comparative framework. The empirical assessment provided in this chapter shows that the strong emphasis on public services and social investment still distinguishes the Nordic welfare states from others. The inbuilt emphasis on labour market participation of the Nordic countries lays the foundation and continuity for the tax-based welfare state.

Introduction

This chapter presents an overview of the popular music literature that has addressed the music of Queen. It is argued that authors have previously been limited in their analysis of Queen’s style because of lacking methodological frameworks. Having introduced and established the concept of idiolect, a specific distinction is drawn between compositional strategies and sonic patterns, which account for the different types of shared characteristics across the band’s output. These ideas are supported through the application of Wittgenstein’s model of ‘family resemblance’, suggesting that some tracks share more resemblances with others, yet they remain part of, and contribute to the overall ‘family’ of Queen’s output. This approach to idiolect is extended to consider how individual tracks are also connected to wider styles, thereby establishing the wider dual framework for subsequent analyses.

Grand Strategy Beyond the West

This chapter examines two of the most famous grand strategies with origins in Asia, identified with Sun Tzu and Gandhi. On the surface they would appear to be unfit for comparison. While Sun Tzu belongs to a tradition of military strategy, and is now part of the classical canon, Gandhi is identified with the nonviolent strategy of nonstate actors. The intention in examining the two together is to explore a family resemblance in their respective conceptions of grand strategy, even while recognizing that they are very distinct. After setting out some broad contrasts regarding cosmology, ontology, and epistemology, the chapter zooms in on the relevance of these points more specifically for understanding Sun Tzu or Gandhi. It concludes with some reflections on why the contrasts are important in a globalizing world. Both cases highlight the importance, if possible, of achieving objectives without recourse to military force, which, it argues, arises from a relational cosmology, where harmony and diversity coexist, and in which truth is not uniform but multiperspectival.