Emergence! (The Ontological Conjecture)

Ours is a vacuumless universe - Character and Potential pervade The spatio-temporal manifold! The manifold is discretely divided As the ancients foretold By atomicity, by discreteness amid continuity! Atomicity embedded within atomic occasions Events emerging as a confluence of Antecedent events! The character and relations within that nexus Constituent of an occasion’s causal past Determine the characteristics and relations Which ingress within the atomic event! As character ingresses into an atomic occasion, Bounded by spatial magnitude and temporal duration, The character and potentiality Within the event’s causal future Emerge, Begat as an occasion’s progeny. Co-Director, International Center for Process Philosophy, Science and Education

Lexical Distributivity and Implicit Arguments

Popular assumptions about distributive predicates and implicit arguments interact to predict incorrect truth conditions for sentences in which a predi­cate takes both an implicit argument and an overt distributive argument. This paper argues that the conflict provides evidence for a particular approach to argument structure and in particular to the semantics of implicit arguments: namely, a "neo-Davidsonian" approach, in which thematic roles are analyzed as relations between events and individuals, and existentially interpreted implicit arguments do not appear in the syntax or in logical representation at all. The effect of implicit arguments is produced through the use of meaning postulates guaranteeing that any atomic event of a given type must bear the appropriate thematic relation to some individual.

The Lessons of the First Atomic Year

The first year of the Atomic Age has drawn to a close. What were its achievements? What are the lessons we have to learn?The Bikini tests were undoubtedly the single outstanding atomic event of the past year. These tests underscored the potency of the new weapon, although they fell far short of the catastrophic results freely predicted by some members of the League of Frightened Men. At the same time, they showed that, at least for navies, the problem of atomic defense is not entirely beyond solution, even though direct hits, as is the case with most other bombs, are lethal. Atomic hits are mortal over far wider area than conventional heavy bombs, but they are still weapons which can be used only against one, two, three or perhaps half a dozen ships in comparatively close formation, rather than against entire fleets. Th effectiveness of atomic attack, therefore, depends upon the number of bombs employed—a fact which also holds true for attacks against industrial or urban targets and which has found too little attention in the current discussion.