We should not admit categorial restrictions on the significance of syntactically well formed strings. Syntactically well formed but semantically absurd strings, such as ‘Life’s but a walking shadow’ and ‘Caesar is a prime number’, can express thoughts; and competent thinkers both are able to grasp these and ought to be able to. Gareth Evans’ generality constraint, though Evans himself restricte...

This paper presents and compares FG and Eu, two recent formalizations of Euclid’s diagrammatic arguments in the Elements. The analysis of FG, developed by the mathematician Nathaniel Miller, and that of Eu, developed by the author, both exploit the fact that Euclid’s diagrammatic inferences depend only on the topology of the diagram. In both systems, the symbols playing the role of Euclid’s dia...

From an evolutionary point of view, what is most overwhelmingly in need of explanation is the generality of human cognition, as compared to that of our immediate ancestors. Humans sing operas, build diesel engines and agonise about domain dependence. Above all they can sustain the kinds of societies required for each of these activities. What part a domain specialist apparatus plays in this new...

Recent evidence suggests that massive amounts of practice of the basketball free throw (a "set shot") results in the development of a specific memory representation that is unique to this one shot distance and angle, and that is distinct from set shots taken at locations other than the free throw line. We termed this unique capability an especial skill. In this article, we review the evidence a...

We prove game-theoretic generalizations of some well-known zero-one laws. Our proofs make the martingales behind the laws explicit, and our results illustrate how martingale arguments can have implications going beyond measure-theoretic probability.

We exploit the visual properties of concepts for lexical entailment detection by examining a concept’s generality. We introduce three unsupervised methods for determining a concept’s generality, based on its related images, and obtain state-ofthe-art performance on two standard semantic evaluation datasets. We also introduce a novel task that combines hypernym detection and directionality, sign...

I present a local, deterministic model of the EPR-Bohm experiment, inspired by recent work by Joy Christian, that appears at first blush to be in tension with Bell-type theorems. I argue that the model ultimately fails to do what a hidden variable theory needs to do, but that it is interesting nonetheless because the way it fails helps clarify the scope and generality of Bell-type theorems. I f...

Ignoring the generality in the design of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications limits their benefits. Furthermore, the possibilities of future extension and adaptation are also restricted. In this paper, several methods to enhance the generality in WSNs are explained. We have further evaluated the suitability of these methods in centralized and de-centralized management scenarios.

How does Wittgenstein understand quantification in the Tractatus? In particular, what becomes of higher-order quantification? Higher-order quantification is central to Frege’s and Russell’s universalist conception of logic, the conception that Russell vividly encapsulates in Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy: ‘logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with it...

The increased variety of information makes it critical to retrieve documents which are not only relevant but also broad enough to cover as many different aspects of a certain topic as possible. The increased variety of users also makes it critical to retrieve documents that are jargon free and easy-to-understand rather than the specific technical materials. In this paper, we propose a new conce...