Realism, Metasemantics, and Risk

It is often claimed that realism about normativity entails that it is difficult for us to know anything about it. I refine this thought by characterizing realism as a thesis which is committed to explaining a semantic thesis about possible uses of normative language: that normative terms like ‘ought’ are semantically stable, in the sense that the term refers to the same property even if it is used differently. There are independent arguments which show that a realist view, if it is plausible, should entail semantic stability for ‘ought’. In this paper I argue that, if the realist succeeds in explaining semantic stability, the realist view implies that normative beliefs will be at risk of being false, and hence not knowledge. Central to this argument is a phenomenon I call meta-semantic risk. I argue that the phenomenon of meta-semantic risk gives rise to a significant dose of normative skepticism for the realist, but it does not entail wholesale skepticism, since the epistemic threats are only contingent, and threatens only precise normative beliefs. I close by sketching two arguments that may show that even this limited form of skepticism counts significantly against the realist view.

LINGUISTATICAL STUDY OF CHINESE INTERNET LEXICOLOGY

Different changes occur in each language under the influence of scientific and technical processes. Significant changes are observed in the lexical structure of the language: constant renewal and enrichment, the reflection of major changes in the life of society, the emergence of large-scale new language units. As a result of the emergence of a new object in human life, the problem of defining it in speech arises, translating it from one language to another in order to support and develop mutual cultural communication. With the advent of the Internet, there have been many changes in Chinese society, including the Chinese language. Under the influence of the Internet, an Internet language different from the literary normative language was formed.

Is Relaxed Realism a Genuinely Novel View?

In this paper I argue that relaxed realism can answer questions about normative language and thought without collapsing into one of the familiar views in the literature or becoming implausible. More specifically, contrary to Michael Ridge, I argue that relaxed realists can use an inferentialist approach to metasemantics without their view collapsing into naturalism or quasi-realism. The inferentialist account that I propose is that the role of normative expressions involves language-entry transitions construed as rational intuitions and language-exit transitions explained in terms of rational agency. I argue that this account fits with relaxed realism and keeps the view distinct from naturalism, quasi-realism, and other familiar views in the literature.

Cognitive Phraseological Variations in Terminology of Public International Law and Its Application in Translation into Farsi

For the past twenty years, “phraseology” has been considered a very important topic of study for various specialized languages. The linguistic view that used to see phraseology such as “idiom researches and lexicography classifying various kinds of idiomatic expressions” has changed meaningfully. Nowadays, thanks to these changes, the new view is focused on identifying and classifying phraseology as well as applying them to research in theory. That is why we would do well to try to define new horizons of phraseology in different specialized languages. The language of interest here is the prescriptive and descriptive language of international law instruments. We should consider this language as the normative language of judges, legislators, courts and international lawyers. These practitioners – who use specific types of phraseology and stable linguistic structures –should perhaps adhere to the use of a professional language that conforms to recognized standards of normative rules. This paper, therefore, tries to define the main relations between phraseology studies and IL Latin expressions and their systematic-semantic equivalences in languages with different roots like Farsi.

Advanced Introduction to Legal Research Methods

Written by Ernst Hirsch Ballin, this original Advanced Introduction uncovers the foundations of legal research methods, an area of legal scholarship distinctly lacking in standardisation. The author shows how such methods differ along critical, empirical, and fundamental lines, and how our understanding of these is crucial to overcoming crises and restoring trust in the law. Key topics include a consideration of law as a normative language and an examination of the common objects of legal research.

Adverbialized individual words and adverbs without suffixes in Lithuanian slang and non-normative language and their adaptative features

here are a number of adverbialized individual words and adverbs without suffixes in Lithuanian slang and non-normative language. Most of them are assimilated borrowings adapted to the language system. Adaptive adverbialization of borrowed adverbs is determined by certain systemic features which are related to the territorial dialects of the Lithuanian language and the standart language. When the Slavic formants of the borrowed individual words are phonetically adapted, analogous hybrid derivatives with that formant are already available in Lithuanian slang. There are few adverbs derived from the singular nominative case. There are also few adverbs derived from the conjugation forms of the verb, mostly the forms are borrowed from informal Russian language. There are a number of borrowed adverbs without formants: there are mostly phonetically, graphically adapted borrowings from Russian language; borrowings of this type are rare from English and German languages. The analysis found that the adaptive features of the slang adverbs are determined by systemic regularities. Slang adverbs are adapted phonetically and graphically according to the principle of substitution of foreign phonemes as close as possible to their own. Slang lexicon tends to copy standart language models and integrate into Lithuanian language derivative and flexic paradigms.

If I told you everyone picked that (inefficient) tool, would you? Children attend to normative language when imitating and transmitting tool use

In this study, we extended research on children’s imitation by examining the impact of normativity on children’s decision about whether to imitate inefficient actions in the context of tool use. In particular, this study explored how conventional language (highlighting norms) versus instrumental language (highlighting a desired end-goal) influenced children’s imitation and transmission of the use of an inefficient tool to achieve a particular end-goal. Rather than examining children’s imitation of unnecessary actions that do not impede goal-completion, we examined children’s conformity with a modeled behavior that may result in sacrificing goal completion. Thus, the stakes of conforming with the stated norm were higher than when children are asked to imitate a series of unnecessary actions that may not impede achieving a designated goal. Children (N = 96 4- to 6-year-olds) were presented with either a conventional or instrumental description of a model’s actions before watching the model choose an inefficient tool. Results indicated that children who heard conventional language imitated the model’s inefficient tool choice and chose to teach a third party to use the inefficient tool at significantly higher rates than when they heard instrumental language. The use of a within-subjects design allowed us to confirm that descriptions that included conventional language impacted children’s imitation and transmission of inefficient tool use above and beyond individual differences in children’s baseline imitation rate. The results have implications for the extent to which children will conform with what “we” are “supposed” to do.

Indeterminacy as Indecision, Lecture III: Indeterminacy as Indecision

This lecture presents my own solution to the problem posed in Lecture I. Instead of a new theory of speech acts, it offers a new theory of the contents expressed by vague assertions, along the lines of the plan expressivism Allan Gibbard has advocated for normative language. On this view, the mental states we express in uttering vague sentences have a dual direction of fit: they jointly constrain the doxastic possibilities we recognize and our practical plans about how to draw boundaries. With this story in hand, I reconsider some of the traditional topics connected with vagueness: bivalence, the sorites paradox, higher-order vagueness, and the nature of vague thought. I conclude by arguing that the expressivist account can explain, as its rivals cannot, what makes vague language useful.