Although various theories of conceptual combination have been proposed in the past, these models have addressed interpretation issues rather than addressing the circumstances in which combinations are used. As a result, existing theories make no explicit predictions about what kind of nouns will be used more often in combination and why this might be the case. In this study we address the issue...

In (1991), Meinwald initiated a major change of direction in the study of Plato’s Parmenides and the Third Man Argument. On her conception of the Parmenides , Plato’s language systematically distinguishes two types or kinds of predication, namely, predications of the kind ‘x is F pros ta alla’ and ‘x is F pros heauto’. Intuitively speaking, the former is the common, everyday variety of predicat...

Science progresses by finding and correcting problems in theories. Good theories are those that help facilitate this process being hard to vary: They explain what they supposed explain, consistent with other good theories, not easily adaptable anything. Here we argue that, rather than a lack of distinction between exploratory confirmatory research, an abundance flexible is better explanation fo...

In this contribution, we present a computational stylistic study of the French classic literature texts based on a data-driven approach where discovering interesting linguistic patterns is done without any prior knowledge. We propose an objective interestingness measure to extract meaningful stylistic syntactic patterns from a given author’s work. Our hypothesis is based on the fact that the mo...

This paper argues that the most famous objection to backward time travel can carry no weight. In its classic form, the objection is that backward time travel entails the occurrence of impossible things, such as auto-infanticide—and hence is itself impossible. David Lewis has rebutted the classic version of the objection: auto-infanticide is prevented by coincidences, such as time travellers sli...

In most real life situations we are not only confronted with one single source of risk or one single risk, but with several sources of risk or combinations of risks. An important question is whether individual risks influence each other or not. This may concern the time of their occurrence and/or their severity. In other words, we need to understand how to model and describe the dependence stru...

Rejecting the temptation to make up a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for diagrammatic and sentential systems, we present an important distinction which arises from sentential and diagrammatic features of systems. Importantly, the distinction we will explore in the paper lies at a meta-level. That is, we argue for a major difference in metatheory between diagrammatic and sentential ...

This is an edited and translated transcript of a lecture by Niklas Luhmann in which he outlined the foundation of his systems theory based on the notion of difference and distinction. After a brief introduction to early theories of distinction, the central ideas of SpencerBrown’s Laws of Form as the most radical form of differential thinking are presented. For Luhmann’s systems theory, this has...

The product/process distinction with regards to “argument” has a longstanding history and foundational role in argumentation theory. I shall argue that, regardless of one’s chosen ontology of arguments, arguments are not the product of some process of arguing. Hence, appeal to the distinction is distorting the very organizational foundations of argumentation theory and should be abandoned.