Science in the Department of Government, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, G1 1XQ, UK, email: G.stokerK strathclyde.ac.uk His main research interests are in local government, urban politics, and cross-national policy transfer. Between 1992 and 1997 he was Director of the ESRC Local Governance Research Programme. He has authored or edited over a dozen books. His two most recent publications ar...

The word proposition is used in physics with different meanings, which must be distinguished to avoid interpretational problems. We construct two languages L∗(x) and L(x) with classical set-theoretical semantics which allow us to illustrate those meanings and to show that the nonBoolean lattice of propositions of quantum logic (QL) can be obtained by selecting a subset of p-testable proposition...

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Languages that distinguish between types and structures use explicit components for the carrier type(s) in structures. Examples are the functional language Standard ML and most algebraic speciication systems. Hence, they have to use general sum types or signatures to give types to structures and to be able to build, for instance, the algebraic hierarchy. Furthermore, in most languages the model...

Every fifteen years or so Stephen Schiffer writes a state of the art book on the philosophy of language, with special emphasis on belief ascriptions, meaning, and propositions. The latest is his terrific new book The Things we Mean. It is again full of ideas, insights, arguments, expositions, and theories. For us, however, who believe that that-clauses are first and foremost clauses, not referr...

We formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decisionmaker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we show how the existence of unconsidered propositions can be represented by a coarsening of the state space. Furthe...

The traditional interpretation of Frege has him endorsing propositions that are not object dependent, i.e., propositions that can exist even though the proper names that occur in the sentences that express them do not refer. But John McDowell and Gareth Evans have challenged this with an influential interpretation of Frege. McDowell first introduced a Fregean reading that included object depend...

We offer an account of beliefs as patterns of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour. Such an account of beliefs is implicit in Ramsey’s treatment of probability, but is extended here to a much wider domain. Various puzzles then appear to dissolve. What is it that we know or believe? Is it sentences? Or is it propositions? In other words, in “Jack believes that X”, what kind of object takes ...

Aspects have been successfully promoted as a means to improve the modularization of software in the presence of crosscutting concerns. The so-called aspect interference problem is considered to be one of the remaining challenges of aspect-oriented software development: aspects may interfere with the behavior of the base code or other aspects. Especially interference between aspects is difficult...