Absolute Universals Research Articles

System of Semantic Universals in the Sound Space Lexicon

One of the central problems of typological linguistics is the identification and study of common features inherent in all or most languages. All natural languages have common and distinctive regularities. The common patterns established as a result of the intersection of linguistic features in different languages by means of the comparative method are called linguistic universals. The linguistic universals established in this way in different languages of different families belong to one of the central problems of typological linguistics, to universology or linguistics of universals. The paper is a continuation of the study of absolute universals that know no exceptions or are characteristic of almost all languages of the world. The aim of the study is the system of semantic universals. Using the comparative and descriptive methods, the material of the Indo-European and Ugro-Finnish languages, representing the lexicon of the sound space of 25 languages of different language groups and families, has been traced. The languages under comparison belong to different language systems, but they have absolute universal onomatopoeic semantic formations. The reason for this typology lies in the closeness of these universals to the natural sounds of the reality, which are imitated by different language systems. In all the languages of the world, the objective basis of the studied semantic universals is extra-linguistic sound, imitation of the phenomena of sound space, because they arise in the same sphere of semantics in all languages - noise, creaking, screaming, hitting - sound in general. The formation of semantic universals is determined by two factors: extra-linguistic, or universal, independent of a particular language, and linguistic, which manifests itself in different ways depending on a particular language. The reason for this typology lies in the closeness of such semantic universals to the natural sounds of the surrounding reality, which are imitated by different language systems. Consequently, their sound shells are related to the corresponding phenomena of objective reality through their semantics. The proposed study is a contribution to the development of the theory of universals or universology as a separate science, which at this stage of linguistics development is separated from typological linguistics.

Идея жизни у Гегеля и ее значение для понимания цивилизационного развития современной России

Hegel’s idea of life turned out to be productive in terms of understanding the present and the future of such a modern civilization as Russia. Turning to this idea allows us to answer some of the questions that concern us today, including what life is in its spiritual dimension and what may be the projection of the spirit on the development of a civilization. Firstly, we need to rethink Hegel’s teaching about life and its spiritual dimension to find out what we lack in the understanding of contemporary facts of life. Nature in the idea of life not only reaches its external manifestation, but also transcends its own limits. Hegel sees life in its unity with the spirit, which frees life from objectivity and subjectivity, raising it to “absolute universality”. All living things, including man, are a continuous ascent to the spirit, going beyond the boundaries of the bosom of nature. Only in man does life reach its spiritual development and go from nature to the kingdom of the spirit. Secondly, the present and the future of Russian civilization can be considered through the prism of Hegel’s understanding of the levels and contradictions of the spiritual organization of human life by conducting a certain thought experiment. Russia is at a civilizational crossroads today. It has not been able to reach the end of the stage of the development of the objective spirit as the actual embodiment of the moral idea and complete the construction of the civilization, including creating a civil society and the rule of law. The country is still in the grip of civilizational dilemmas, both in its present and in the anticipated future. It can be assumed that Russia’s living space is deformed and lies between two pairs of opposing trends: between traditionalization and modernization in the present and between informatization and ecologization in the possible future.

Revisiting Greenberg’s “Generalizations about Numeral Systems” (1978)*

This article examines seven of the 54 generalizations on numeral systems presented by Greenberg in 1978 either as absolute universals or as universal tendencies. Five of the generalizations deal with details of the arithmetic structure of numeral systems, with particular reference to the order of elements in the numeral expression and to the use of subtraction and related phenomena in numeral expressions. It is shown that the details of these generalizations need to be revised in light of new data, and argued that even the formulation of universal tendencies is problematic given the rarity of some of the phenomena at issue and the resulting difficulty of establishing statistically valid inferences. Two of the generalizations discuss fundamental properties of natural language numeral systems, namely whether they are necessarily finite, and whether they allow gaps. It is argued, contra Greenberg, that there are both natural number series that are infinite and those with gaps. Throughout, it is emphasized that only the careful formulation of the original generalizations by Greenberg has enabled us to progress in our understanding of these aspects of numeral systems in natural languages.

Identification of reliable reference genes for quantitative real-time PCR normalization in pitaya

BackgroundA suitable reference gene is an important prerequisite for guarantying accurate and reliable results in quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analyses. However, there is no absolute universality in reference genes among different species. It’s hard to find an ideal reference gene to fit for different tissues and growth periods. Pitaya (Hylocereus) is commercially produced as a new fruit crop at a large scale in tropical and subtropical regions. To date, there is no report on the identification of the most reliable reference genes for qRT-PCR normalization in pitaya.ResultsIn this study, six candidate reference genes i.e. Actin(1), GAPDH, UBC(1), UBC(2) EF1-α(1) and histone(1) were selected from thirty-nine typical candidate reference genes to determine the most stable reference genes for qRT-PCR normalization in different tissues, temperature stresses and fruit developmental stages of pitaya. Among the six candidate reference genes, Actin(1) and EF1-α(1) were the most stable gene according to calculations of three statistical methods (GeNorm, NormFinder and BestKeeper) while UBC(1) and UBC(2) showed the lowest expression stability. The six candidate reference genes were further validated by comparing expression profiles of key genes related to betalain biosynthesis at flesh coloration stages of Guanhuahong (Hylocereus monacanthus) and Guanhuabai (H. undatus) pitayas. Actin(1) was recommended the best reference gene for accurate normalization of qRT-PCR data.ConclusionsIn this study, the stability of the selected reference genes for normalizing the qRT-PCR data were identified from pitaya. Actin(1) was the most stably expressed genes in different tissues and fruit developmental stages in pitaya. The present work provides the first data of reference gene identification for pitaya and will facilitate further studies in molecular biology and gene function on Hylocereus and other closely related species.

Game comparison through play

Absolute Universes of Combinatorial Games, as defined in a recent paper by the same authors, include many standard short Normal- Misère- and Scoring-play monoids. Given G and H in an Absolute Universe U, we define a dual Normal-play game, called the Left Provisonal Game [G,H], and show that G≽H if and only if Left wins [G,H] playing second. As an example of our construction, we show how to compare Dicot Misère-play games in Siegel's computer program CGSuite and illustrate by including the partial order of all games of rank 2. We also show that Joyal's Normal-play Category generalizes to every Absolute Universe U, and we define the associated categories LNP(U).

Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music

Music has been called "the universal language of mankind." Although contemporary theories of music evolution often invoke various musical universals, the existence of such universals has been disputed for decades and has never been empirically demonstrated. Here we combine a music-classification scheme with statistical analyses, including phylogenetic comparative methods, to examine a well-sampled global set of 304 music recordings. Our analyses reveal no absolute universals but strong support for many statistical universals that are consistent across all nine geographic regions sampled. These universals include 18 musical features that are common individually as well as a network of 10 features that are commonly associated with one another. They span not only features related to pitch and rhythm that are often cited as putative universals but also rarely cited domains including performance style and social context. These cross-cultural structural regularities of human music may relate to roles in facilitating group coordination and cohesion, as exemplified by the universal tendency to sing, play percussion instruments, and dance to simple, repetitive music in groups. Our findings highlight the need for scientists studying music evolution to expand the range of musical cultures and musical features under consideration. The statistical universals we identified represent important candidates for future investigation.

Duality of patterning: Absolute universal or statistical tendency?

AbstractAs more of the world's languages are described and compared, more absolute universals have joined the class of statistical tendencies. However, few have questioned the universality of the duality of patterning. Following Hockett, most linguists assume that in all human languages, discrete meaningless parts combine to form meaningful units that, themselves, recombine. However, an alternative interpretation, explored in this article, is that duality, like other proposed linguistic universals, is a statistical tendency reflecting a complex set of factors, and most centrally, the need for some minimal number of basic units that can recombine to yield a potentially infinite set of form-meaning correspondences. If this is the essence of duality, then we expect: languages where duality is not a central component of grammar; languages where most, but not all, utterances are decomposable into meaningless phonological units; and different types of phonological building blocks in different languages. These expectations appear to be confirmed by natural language data.

An Investigation into Setting Head Parameters in English as a Head-initial Language from the Minimalist Perspective

Opposing to the behaviorist approach, the alternative approach proposed by Chomsky believes that language acquisition cannot be accounted for without considering a linguistically specific system of Principles and Parameters which every healthy child is expected to have genetically in his or her mind. A set of absolute Universals, Notions and Principles exist in the UG which do not vary from one language to another, while certain grammatical principles and rules may be universal. It is also true that languages differ from one another in some important ways like being either head-initial or head-last. Regarding English head parameters, all heads (whether nouns, verbs, prepositions, or adjectives etc.) normally precede their complements. In this study we tried to investigate why this language is considered as a head initial one despite the occurrence of different options for every NP, VP, AP and PP.

Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology (review)

Reviewed by: Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology Jeffrey Heath The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology. Jae Jung Song, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. xxi + 704. $150.00 (cloth). There are eleven other linguistic volumes in the Oxford Handbook series. This one contains thirty chapters, from ten to forty-five pages each. It is especially useful for readers who are not themselves engaged in mainstream typology but who wish to follow or catch up on it. For this journal, instead of a technical review aimed at typologists, or complete coverage of the chapters, a selective appreciation with a linguistic anthropological flavor is appropriate. If by mainstream typology we mean the inheritors of Joseph Greenberg’s first-order worldwide codings of grammatical data points (e.g., constituent order, morphological agreement), and second-order correlations among them, the main recent news has been the intrusion of geography and history. This “epiphany” (as the editor calls it on p. 3) began around 1990 with work by, e.g., Matthew Dryer and Johanna Nichols. It had once seemed that worldwide typology would flourish as conclusions drawn from Greenberg’s thirty languages were refined by the addition of hundreds of new languages; Chomsky’s absolute universals would be supplemented or replaced by powerful probabilistic correlations. As it happens, worldwide typology has run into snags. Careful studies have found systematic macroregional biases, making even the ideal of a global typology with bias-purified results deeply problematic. This issue is covered in Dik Bakker’s chapter on “Language Sampling” (pp. 100–127), but it crops up in several others. And geography leads to history. If each macroregion has its own trait distributions and correlation patterns, this can only be explained by an unexpectedly profound conservatism of grammatical patterns, going back far beyond the brick wall of ten thousand years that has plagued comparative historical linguistics. Edward Sapir lives. And a number of seemingly robust correlations from the Greenberg era have imploded. For example, the correlation between noun-adjective and verb-object order has not held up (Song on “Word Order Typology,” pp. 253–79). In this instance, the problem can be solved by refining the theoretical analysis (an object is phrasal, while an adjective is not). But typology faces weekly crises as new reference grammars from the Amazon and New Guinea stream out, often revealing categories and constructions that resist labeling and coding (Patience Epps on “Documentary Linguistics,” pp. 634–49). Greenberg-style typology is bureaucratic; it needs cross-linguistically codable traits based on reliable etic grids, fed into large databases that output powerful correlations. But what if the codings are forced, or if the correlations are unimpressive (sixty to forty instead of eighty-five to fifteen)? One consequence of the bureaucratization of the subfield is a striking lack of interest in extreme languages. Pidgins, creoles, and sign languages are not listed in seventeen pages of language and subject indexes at the back, and I noticed only one or two passing references in the text. Perhaps there are good (bureaucratic) reasons for these omissions. The recent controversies about Pirahã played out in the pages of Language and The New Yorker are too recent to have been covered in a volume several years in the making. However, the neglect of configurationality is hard to excuse—it gets one brief footnote. Yet this is the most crucial dividing point among human languages, since the absence of multiword phrasing has consequences for the entire grammar and lexicon (think of quantification and negation, for example). It deserves to be prominently featured in a [End Page 287] subfield whose major aim is to document the range of human language structures. A chapter on configurationality would have made a nice complement to Walter Bisang’s chapter on “Word Classes” (pp. 280–302), which describes languages that lack a well-defined noun-verb distinction, essentially subordinating lexicon to syntax and discourse. But there are not enough fully nonconfigurational languages to make interesting statistics, and it is hard to code their features. John Haiman (“Competing Motivations,” pp. 148–65) does deal directly with another kind of extreme language, namely, Cambodian, which he provocatively calls an “everything-drop” language. The extensive ellipsis affecting all stem...

Does Gokana really have no syllables? Or: what's so great about being universal?

This paper is concerned with syllable universals, especially the claim that all languages have syllables. Expanding beyond my earlier work, I take a new look at Gokana, the major counterexample to the universal syllable, and present overlooked (but ambiguous) evidence for a weight-insensitive bisyllabic trochee. After demonstrating the theory-dependent nature of absolute universals, and distinguishing between analyticvs. descriptive claims, I focus on the latter as a means of ‘normalising’ the discussion of what constitutes evidence for the syllable, both in Gokana and in general. A typological approach is argued for in which languages differ in the nature and extent of the ‘activation’ of phonological properties, with Gokana representing a language which only marginally activates the syllable, if at all. The paper ends by situating the issue within the context of recent discussions of universals and diversity (Evans & Levinson 2009), which have not dealt primarily with phonology.

Syntax is more diverse, and evolutionary linguistics is already here

AbstractEvans & Levinson (E&L) perform a major service for cognitive science. The assumption of Chomskyan generative linguistics – that there are absolute unrestricted universals of grammatical structure – is empirically untenable. However, E&L are too reluctant to abandon word classes and grammatical relations in syntax. Also, a cognitive scientist can already draw on a substantial linguistics literature on variationist, evolutionary models of language.

Universals in phonology

This article asks what is universal about phonological systems. Beginning with universals of segment inventories, a distinction is drawn between descriptive universals (where the effect of different theoretical frameworks is minimized) vs. analytic universals (which are specific-theory-dependent). Since there are few absolute universals such as “all languages have stops” and “all languages have at least two degrees of vowel height”, theory-driven or “architectural” universals concerning distinctive features and syllable structure are also considered. Although several near-universals are also mentioned, the existence of conflicting “universal tendencies” and contradictory resolutions naturally leads into questions concerning the status of markedness and synchronic explanation in phonology. While diachrony is best at accounting for typologically unusual and language-specific phonological properties, the absolute universals discussed in this study are clearly grounded in synchrony.

Christianity and Human Rights: Influences and Issues (review)

Reviewed by: Christianity and Human Rights: Influences and Issues John D’Arcy May Christianity and human rights: Influences and issues. Edited by Frances S. AdeneyArvind Sharma. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xi + 228 pp. The existence of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the World’s Religions” (UDHRWR) deserves to be more widely known, and this book not only reproduces the text, drawn up for a conference in Montreal to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UNUDHR, 1948), but offers a point-by-point comparison of the two documents by Frances Adeney and a series of papers that illuminate the issues raised by such declarations from very different points of view. The premise of the whole undertaking is that religious perspectives were not adequately represented in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, though even this is questioned by some of the contributors. The UDHRWR explicitly mentions the right to change one’s religion, asserting in article 18 (1): “There shall be no compulsion in religion. It is a matter of choice,” and it includes “the rights of nature and the earth” (art. 29 [1]; see also 24 [2]). Article 12 (4 and 5) also asserts the duty and the corresponding right of not denigrating the religions of others. Article 16 (5) mentions monasticism as an institution worthy of protection alongside marriage. [End Page 172] In an extremely detailed examination of the work of the Third Committee, which brought the original UN document to the floor of the General Assembly, Sumner B. Twiss finds abundant evidence that religious issues were debated at great length, with great respect, and from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds. The committee included representatives of Christian, Confucian, Marxist, Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions, and Twiss claims that it is a mistake to regard the document they produced as either Western or secular in intent. The question of the relationship between rights and duties was thoroughly debated, as were the social dimensions of both and the underlying theological and ideological issues. Although religious terminology was eventually omitted, this was agreed in an atmosphere of exemplary tolerance and mutual understanding. Twiss concludes: “The UDHRWR is redressing a nonexistent problem presumably posed by the UDHR” (p. 69). Nevertheless, in the present context of the desecularization or resacralization of the world, a more explicit treatment of religious aspects of human rights seems appropriate, and the papers collected here raise problems that are still with us. Frances Adeney introduces several of them: the distinction between public and private spheres, the relative weighting given to creation and sin, and the relationship between rights and duties. The specifically Christian contribution to the debate, in her view, is the insistence on the universality of human rights derived from the biblical conception of the human as the “image of God,” so that “Christians through the ages have assigned a transcendent worth to human beings” (p. 20). The dimension of community is signaled by the extension of the covenant from ethnic group to faith community, thus linking the covenant family of God to the unity of humankind. Whether this link is strong enough to secure the universality of human rights, however, remains an open question. The Christian ethicist Max Stackhouse counterposes to this the “profound individualism” implicit in human rights thinking: it is this, rather than abstract or absolute universals, that lays the basis for civil society and, in its Christian variants, “provides the safest havens for non-Christian religions to flourish without political control” (p. 49). It is the rights of each individual, not of communitarian entities, that are to be respected. The religions tend to be particularistic, but this does not mean that the sources of human rights thinking are necessarily secular humanist. Stackhouse leaves us with two very significant questions: “. . . whether we can form a global civil society that does not have a theologically based inner moral architecture,” and whether “human rights principles become more effective without attention to their roots and justifying ultimate legitimations” (p. 50). Terry Muck also confronts us with the tensions between universality and cultural specificity, the individual and the communal, arguing that religions all...

Missing persons: A case study in morphological universals

This article offers a case study of three absolute universals ranging over inventories of person marking in morphology. Certain logically possible distinctions are never drawn in morpheme inventories (either as pronouns or as agreement markers), though these distinctions may be expressed in other ways (and hence are not impossible a priori or for reasons of general cognition). After reviewing the literature, and dismissing apparent counter-examples, I submit that these universals bear on issues of formal versus functional explanation in linguistics, and suggest that the functionalist explanations of these facts currently on offer fall short of the mark. At least in this domain, it appears that there is a universal inventory of features which delimits the range of possible persons in language.

Universals in Phonology

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2007) (Commissioned for special issue of The Linguistic Review, 2008, Harry van der Hulst, ed.) Universals in Phonology Larry Hyman A BSTRACT This article asks what is universal about phonological systems. Beginning with universals of segment inventories, a distinction is drawn between descriptive universals (where the effect of different theoretical frameworks is minimized) vs. analytic universals (which are specific-theory- dependent). Since there are few absolute universals such as “all languages have stops” and “all languages have at least two degrees of vowel height”, theory-driven or “architectural” universals concerning distinctive features and syllable structure are also considered. Although several near- universals are also mentioned, the existence of conflicting “universal tendencies” and contradictory resolutions naturally leads into questions concerning the status of markedness and synchronic explanation in phonology. While diachrony is best at accounting for typologically unusual and language-specific phonological properties, the absolute universals discussed in this study are clearly grounded in synchrony. Introduction My colleague John Ohala likes to tell the following mythical story about a lecture that the legendary Roman Jakobson gives upon arrival at Harvard University some time in the 1940s. The topic is child language and phonological universals, a subject which Prof. Jakobson addresses in his Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941). In his also legendary strong Russian accent, Jakobson makes the pronouncement, “In all languages, first utterance of child, [pa]!” 1 He goes on to explain that it is a matter of maximal opposition: “[p] is the consonant most consonant, and [a] is the vowel most vowel.” As the joke continues, a very concerned person in the audience raises his hand and is called on: “But, professor, my child’s first utterance was [tSik].” Prof. Jakobson carefully considers this surprising remark. In his mind he systematically compares [tS] and [p], [i] and [a], and [k] and O, obviously with some concern. He then asks the man the following questions: “Did your child have any other initial consonant than [tS]?” The man answers no. “Did your child have any other vowel than [i]?” Again, the man answers no. “My last question: Did your child always have the final [k]?” “Yes,” the man replies. At this point Prof. Jakobson’s face lights up as he triumphantly exclaims: “Axa! Don’t you see? Phonyetic [tSik], phonological /pa/!” The above joke, I assume totally fabricated, never fails to get a laugh out of phonologists, who, I suspect, see a bit of themselves in this caricature. While funny, there is in fact a serious undertone to the above exchange. The story is quite impressive in how succinctly it reveals several major questions we face as phonologists interested in universal properties of sound systems: (1) What level of representation are we interested in? (2) How different can the levels be from each other? (3) What are the limits of theoretical interpretation? (4) How can claims of universality be validated or falsified? In other words, if [tSik] is not a counterexample to the claim, what would be? Cf. “Ordinary child language begins, and the aphasic dissolution of language preceding its complete loss ends, with what psychopathologists have termed the ‘labial stage’. In this phase speakers are capable only of one type of utterance, which is usually transcribed as /pa/” (Jakobson and Halle 1956:37).

The Fall and Rise of Universals on Relativization

This article discusses linguistic universals concerning relative clause constructions, which are relatively well-studied, both by typologists and theoreticians. It turns out that several universal statements formulated in the past—e.g., in Downing’s (1978) seminal work— must be weakened to tendencies or less on the basis of present knowledge. Following Odden (2003), statistical universals are rejected for the reason that cross-linguistic statistics is inherently unreliable, and may have nonlinguistic causes. However, some absolute universals and universal implications concerning relativization still stand; moreover, some interesting new ones can be formulated. If these universals can be maintained, they constitute (indirect) hypotheses concerning the human language faculty, which need to find an explanation within a specific linguistic model.

'Transnational Criminal Law'?

International criminal law is currently subdivided into international criminal law stricto sensu — the so-called core crimes — and crimes of international concern — the so-called treaty crimes. This article suggests that the latter category can be appropriately relabelled transnational criminal law to find a doctrinal match for the criminological term transnational crime. The article argues that such a relabelling is justified because of the need to focus attention on this relatively neglected system, because of concerns about the process of criminalization of transnational conduct, legitimacy in the development of the system, doctrinal weaknesses, human rights considerations, legitimacy in the control of the system, and enforcement issues. The article argues that the distinction between international criminal law and transnational criminal law is sustainable on four grounds: the direct as opposed to indirect nature of the two systems, the application of absolute universality as opposed to more limited forms of extraterritorial jurisdiction, the protection of international interests and values as opposed to more limited transnational values and interests, and the differently constituted international societies that project these penal norms. Finally, the article argues that the term transnational criminal law is apposite because it is functional and because it points to a legal order that attenuates the distinction between national and international.

ETHICS AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF MORALITY

Ethics is one of the forces shaping the life of human societies and the ethical system contributes to the group's survival and to keep peace and order to satisfy social needs. The definitions of ethics, of what is good and what makes an action right or wrong, varies widely at different times and at different places. However, some basic moral elements are acceptable to most advanced societies. Furthermore, many modern scholastic writers defend the absolute universality of at least some ethical laws. The limitations of universality survives in war, in race discrimination, etc. In modern times, it might be appropriate to search for principles for the universality of morality in ecological considerations. Progress in ethics is lagging far behind and we must understand now, when the complete annihilation of human species is a real possibility, that ethics and philosophy are at least as important as science.

Some Arguments Concerning the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Cosmological Proofs

SOME ARGUMENTS CONCERNING THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON AND COSMOLOGICAL PROOFS "Laws like the principle of sufficient reason . . . are about the net and not about what the net describes." (Ludwig Wittgenstein) "What a pity science cannot resolve to keep people under discipline and to keep itself in check!" (Kierkegaard 's Vigilius Haufniensis) RCENT literature concerning cosmological proofs for the existence of God has stressed their employment of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). Though in the past many critics of theistic arguments have not only not recognized the operation of this principle but also have criticized theists for employing a version of the principle of causality explicitly rejected by many in the theistic tradition/ contemporary criticism has generally acknowledged the functioning of the PSR. This is not to .say, however, that the principle has not been found wanting. In fact, confining ourselves just to discussions of what we might call in a preliminary way its " truth," two types of criticism seem to have been advanced. The first type, developing a characterization used by James F. Ross, might be called "Humean" so as to stress its epistemological character as well as its similarity with standard empiricist procedures against the principleof causality. The other type, which might be called " theological," attempts to reveal the incompatibility of the PSR with the existence of 1 See W. Norris Clarke, S. J., "A Curious Blindspot in the Anglo-American Tradition of Anti-Theistic Argument," The Monist, 54 (1970), pp. 181-~00. ~58 SUFFICIENT REASON AND COSMOLOGICAL PROOFS fl59 a free creator God; the PSR must thus be repudiated by traditional theists themselves. Our first concern, in section I, will be a presentation of various " Humean" arguments as they have been developed by Professor Ross 2 and by Professor William L. Rowe.3 In section II we shall develop and discuss their criticisms of the PSR in an effort to come to a correct understanding of the meaning, status, and function of the principle. Our contention will be that both critics and defenders have not always been clear on these issues, especially on the difference between " Rationalist " and " Aristotelian " understandings of the PSR and cosmological argumentation. We shall argue that there are at least two ways the PSR oan be denied, that there is a different type of absurdity involved in each denial, and that the context and nature of the denials must be stressed by one who would successfully defend the principle. In view of the complex structure of the " theological " ·argumentation of both Ross and Rowe, and since much of what we would say in response would be a reiteration of what was developed earlier, we shall confine ourselves in section III to a presentation of what we consider the basic claims of this type of critique. Our analysis in section IV will stress the essential modesty of the " Aristotelian " PSR; instead of providing the basis for an overbearing rationalism, scientism, and determinism, this PSR seemingly functions to render philosophical theology a discipline which attains its goal in a simultaneous recognition of its essential incompleteness with regard to possible truths about the divine. 2 James F. Ross, Philosophical Theology (Indianapolis and New York: The BobbsMerrill Company, 1969). 3 In "The Cosmological Argument and the Principle of Sufficient Reason," Man and World, 1 (1968), pp. ~78-9~. In "The Cosmological Argument," No-Us, 5 (1971), pp. 49-61, Rowe presents a "theological" argument, but in the process clarifies his formulations of the PSR. (Our essay was written previously to the publication of Rowe's more detailed analyses in his The Cosmological Argument (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975)). 260 CHARLES J. KELLY I. The following four objections to the PSR havebeen advanced (the first two by James F. Ross, the third and fourth byWilliam L. Rowe): 1. Since the principle that everything has (must have) an explanation or sufficient reason is assumed without proof, how is it known to be true? Any attempt to establish it as true runs into the dilemma: a) If the PSR is known by induction its absolute universality cannot be established. It can only be a synthetic principle of doubtful truth, since a finite body of evidence is available which could...

Some Thoughts on "Universals" in World Music

and our own that captured our interest in the first place and we, as well as the next man, respond to the unique, the fascinating, the exotic. It follows naturally that much of our discourse is devoted to the differences between musics, but we spend so much of our time on these differences, brought to us from every corner of the world, and sometimes from our own backyards, that we can't help wondering if there are not also great overruling similarities. The plenary session on at the November, 1970, annual meeting of the Society was an attempt to consider these similarities in the broadest perspective. We are drawn together at our various kinds of meetings because we share an interest and we do not doubt for a moment that this interest is music, however it is defined and whatever the culture from which it derives. One of the odd things about us is how heterogeneous we are as a Society: we are made up of anthropologists, ethnologists, folklorists, dancers, dance ethnographers, linguists, sociologists, and I haven't even begun to enumerate the musicians and the scholars of music among us, who constitute the greater part of our numbers. When we are assembled, it sometimes occurs to us to ask what we really have in common. If there are elements of music that are found everywhere, then these are what we share. A sharpened awareness of such elements could be valuable in helping us understand ourselves as a group. Let me venture the opinion, first, that there are probably no absolute universals in music. I say this simply on the grounds of human variability and complexity. Any student of man must know that somewhere, someone is doing something that he calls music but nobody else would give it that name. That one exception would be enough to eliminate the possibility of a real universal. But I think there are plenty of near-universals and, even though such a term contradicts itself, a near-universal is near enough for our purposes. I will be satisfied if nearly everybody does it. I will just mention some of these and then go on to the one that interests me the most. Almost everywhere there is some sense of the tonic, some kind of a tonal center in music. Almost everywhere music establishes a tendency. It seems to be going somewhere, whatever its terms are, and the joy