The existence of null arguments in Athabascan languages, and other polysynthetic languages, is a debated topic. We argue that, if the agreement on the verb is the argument, the so-called Pronominal Argument Hypothesis, languages such as Navajo do not have null arguments in the traditional sense. We then outline the diachrony of Athabascan object marking on the verb (by looking at the various co...

After determining one set of skills that we hoped our students were learning in the introductory philosophy class at Carnegie Mellon University, we designed an experiment to test whether they were actually learning these skills. In addition, there were four sections of this course in the Spring of 2004, and the students in Section 1 were taught the material using argument diagrams as a tool to ...

The slippery slope argument (SSA) is generally treated as a fallacy by both traditional and contemporary theories of argumentation, but is frequently used and widely accepted in applied reasoning domains. Experiment 1 tests the hypothesis that SSAs are not perceived as universally weak arguments. The results provide the first empirical demonstration that SSAs vary predictably in their subjectiv...

Entire matrix-valued functions of a complex argument (entire matrix pencils) are considered. Bounds for spectral variations of pencils are derived. In particular, approximations of entire pencils by polynomial pencils are investigated. Our results are new even for polynomial pencils. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusi...

Three experiments investigated the use of verb argument structure by tracking participants' eye movements across a set of related pictures as they listened to sentences. The assumption was that listeners would naturally look at relevant pictures as they were mentioned or implied. The primary hypothesis was that a verb would implicitly introduce relevant entities (linguistic arguments) that had ...