Implicit Argument Research Articles

Introduction

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 156–157 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.12 Dialogue Neither Hobby nor Flourish: On the Place of the Lyrical in Writing on Religion Maia Kotrosits, S. Brent Plate Contents 1. Introduction 2. Maia Kotrosits, “Lyricism and Knowledge in the Study of Religion” 3. S. Brent Plate, “Poetic Images, Lyric Words” Introduction It started with a Tweet. Not a very scholarly way to begin but then again this is all about getting away from the constraints of academic writing. Maia Kotrosits complained on Twitter about footnotes, about the scholarly infatuation with a style of writing that delimits experience and, more importantly, delimits the ways we scholars are allowed to write about experience. Brent Plate hit the heart button on Maia’s tweet, and before long Cooper Harriss chimed in and we ended up agreeing to say something beyond 280 tweeted characters. The following two short essays make implicit and explicit arguments about how to write on religion. They are born from both authors’ frustrations with the narrow styles that are the orthopraxy of scholarly analysis. They are complaints Maia Kotrosits 157 against the myth of objectivity that pervades scholarship. And they are manifestos for finding lyrical and poetic writing to be not “hobby or flourish,” but part and parcel of the subject matter itself. Included on American Religion’s website is a briefly annotated list of readings and viewings (and one assignment) that would give lyricism a place in a method and theory course, and honor writing and artistic expression itself as crucial to the content. See https://american-religion.org/lyricalsyllabus. ...

Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture by Julie Peakman

Reviewed by: Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture by Julie Peakman Anne Greenfield Julie Peakman. Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xvi + 224. $102.60; $26.96 (paper). This collection of essays on eighteenth-century sexuality is ambitious in breadth, convincing in evidence, and refreshingly light on theorizing and jargon. Peakman’s book is richly illustrated with thirty-five supplemental images, and covers an impressive variety of topics, including sodomy, bestiality, flagellation, rape, prostitution, venereal disease, sexual fluids, erotic gardens—and more. Along the way, Peakman uses archival evidence, literary works, autobiographies, and insights by other recent scholars to explain and understand attitudes toward sexuality and sexual writing during the era. She makes clear from the outset, with a nod to her former mentor Roy Porter, that her book will not be overtly theoretical in nature: “theories and conceptual analyses are, of course, important in their place, but straightforward language, stories of people, and the place and time of when, where and how things happened, I believe, are more important.” This approach serves her well, and the result is a highly readable work that does not disenchant students and emerging scholars with abstruse theorizing. It also does not plague seasoned scholars by making them slog through what they already know. Peakman explains that her purpose is “to bring together a collection of disparate articles under one cover in order to make them more easily accessible.” The book consists of ten chapters, all authored by her, eight being reprinted here, so that only two are previously unpublished. The collection does more than fulfill the obvious purpose of showcasing her own research; it also draws heavily from the work of other prominent scholars on eighteenth-century sexuality. This approach yields little direct disagreement. Unlike the [End Page 91] polemics sometimes seen in traditional monographs, Peakman acknowledges the contributions of those who came before her without undoing them in the process. The value of the book is its ambitious breadth. One gains a broad sense of the variety of proclivities, fetishes, perversions, habits, and taboos of eighteenth-century Europeans. For instance, one may learn from her account when the sexualization of children in pornography first emerged, why female cross-dressing was not thought perverse in the way male cross-dressing was, why many writers turned to botany when writing about sex, and why whore biographies became so popular. Peakman is respectful of the many contexts that shaped (or were shaped by) attitudes toward sexuality during this era, including of the ways the law and the church impacted the issues of print availability, divorce, public shame, and children. In one recurring example, she makes an implicit argument that economic conditions were critical in shaping cultural attitudes toward sex. As a result, such topics as rates of migration to cities, changes in wages, and attitudes toward class difference, are shown to be relevant to sexual culture. Of course, Peakman’s breadth risks sacrificing depth. There are certainly places where we are left wanting more, particularly concerning sexual attitudes outside of Europe— the topic is mentioned in passing in the introductory chapter but never revisited. Indeed, ironically, the seeming inclusivity of her study may invite the assumption that even more should have been discussed. If female friendship (chapter 7) and gardens (chapter 10) are fair game in this volume, why not include more on the even more overtly sexual and topical subjects like the vogue for Italian castrati singers in opera and the church? Other minor complaints can be leveled, such as occasional repetitions of commentary from one chapter to the next, as is seen in her repeated argument that “heterosexual procreative sex was promoted as both normal and ideal” and that sex acts not aimed at procreation were therefore often considered perversions. Additionally, in a book that consistently and helpfully provides summative and concluding sections at the end of every chapter, it is surprising that it concludes as abruptly as it does, with no “Conclusion” but only with a rather flat sentence concerning erotic gardens: “The erotic garden had found its new, peculiarly British form of excitement in nose-gays and birches of the female...

Passive and anticausative constructions: A new perspective to morphosyntax and lexical semantic interfaces

There is a growing body of literature that recognises the relationship between verbal argument alternations such as passives and anticausatives. However, alternation types in Bantu languages have been treated in a rather fragmented way. In addition, the relationship between passive and anticausative constructions with regard to the realisation of an implicit external argument poses a challenge to the study of argument alternations within and across languages. The present article examines the morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic properties of passive and anticausative constructions in Kiwoso (Bantu), invoking different combinations of Voice, vCAUS and Root, as assumed in the syntactic decomposition approach. The properties of change of state verbs in licensing the anticausative and passive alternations form an integral part of this article. This article argues that the passive and anticausative in Kiwoso are distinguished on the basis of a Voice functional head, which determines the nature of events expressed by passive and anticausative verb constructions. The distinction between the (non-) occurrence of na- and ko-phrases in Kiwoso provides diagnostic evidence for this property.

Implicit Argument Prediction as Reading Comprehension

Implicit arguments, which cannot be detected solely through syntactic cues, make it harder to extract predicate-argument tuples. We present a new model for implicit argument prediction that draws on reading comprehension, casting the predicate-argument tuple with the missing argument as a query. We also draw on pointer networks and multi-hop computation. Our model shows good performance on an argument cloze task as well as on a nominal implicit argument prediction task.

The Politics of Writing Chinese Philosophy: Xiong Shili’s New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness and the “Crystallization of Oriental Philosophy”

This article situates Xiong Shili’s 熊十力 classic work New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (Xin Weishi Lun 新唯識論, 1932) within the central dilemma of post-May Fourth China surrounding the concerns with so-called modern universalism and Chinese particularism. I look at the way the text portrays its author as situated both within particular traditions and outside of them (in a realm of universality) in order to show how the figure of the author is presented as a site wherein Chinese/Asian particularism and universalism can be fused. My central aim, in doing so, is to argue that within the text’s discourse on the positioning of its author resides an implicit argument for the universality of Chinese or Asian philosophy—as interpreted and subsumed by the text—and against the hegemonic intentions of Western philosophy. Yet I also suggest that the text reiterates a conception of universality and an intention to monopolize the universal which are characteristic of hegemonic discourses.

Embedded taste predicates

ABSTRACTWide-ranging semantic flexibility is often considered a magic cure for contextualism to account for all kinds of troubling data. In particular, it seems to offer a way to account for our intuitions regarding embedded perspectival sentences. As has been pointed out by Lasersohn [2009. “Relative Truth, Speaker Commitment, and Control of Implicit Arguments.” Synthese 166 (2): 359â374], however, the semantic flexibility does not present a remedy for all kinds of embeddings. In particular, it seems ineffective when it comes to embeddings under operators with truth evaluative adverbs such as ‘correctly believes that’ and ‘incorrectly believes that’ and under factive verbs. This paper takes a closer look at the problematic embedding data with respect to predicates of personal taste. It argues that there is indeed no semantic solution for contextualism but a pragmatic way out.

On the Implicit Anaphoric Argument of Relational Nouns in Mandarin Chinese.

This paper provides experimental and theoretical evidence for the syntactic realization of an implicit possessor argument in Relational Nouns (RNs, e.g. father) in Mandarin Chinese. The results of Experiment 1 show that the antecedent of the implicit argument in RNs must be a noun phrase (NP) in the sentence where the RN is located, rather than an NP in the discourse context. Experiment 2 shows that the implicit argument of RNs must be bound by a c-commanding NP. The results exclude the possibility that the RNs' implicit argument is a pronominal that would link to a contextually salient NP and would not require a c-commanding referential antecedent. Rather, the experimental results show that the identification of the antecedent of the RNs' implicit argument is constrained by the same principle of binding theory that constrains the reflexive zìjǐ 'self', specifically requiring a c-commanding antecedent.

The Rite of Spring at 100 ed. by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef

Reviewed by: The Rite of Spring at 100 ed. by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef Peter J. Schmelz The Rite of Spring at 100. Edited by Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. [xxx, 520 p. ISBN 9780253024206 (hardback), $50; ISBN 9780253027351 (e-book), $49.99.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. In his plenary essay to this collection celebrating the centenary of Igor Stravinsky's landmark composition and its danced manifestations, Richard Taruskin throws cold water on assessments of The Rite of Spring [Vesna ] as an avatar of modernist difficulty: It is not, after all, a complex score. Its textures are simple, though very artfully and colorfully elaborated. What there is in it of counterpoint (beyond the prelude preceding the action) is uncomplicated. Its ostinato-driven forms are downright rudimentary, as is only right, given the subject and setting. Its dissonances are indeed harsh and grating but never mystifying (except to analysts), and neither are the irregular percussive rhythms. (p. 431) Yet he continues a sentence later, "The sounds of the music make a direct and compelling appeal to the listener's imagination, and the listener's body." Highlighting Stravinsky's "peerless handling of the immense orchestra," Taruskin says, these sounds "have a visceral, cathartic impact. They leave—and to judge from the history of the score's reception, have always left—most listeners feeling exhilarated." He concludes, "It is only the mythology of The Rite that would suggest anything else" (p. 431). And as his many influential publications on Stravinsky indicate, Taruskin's goal is to resist that mythology. One might, in turn, resist his counterintuitive, revisionist evaluation of this fiery score, as I at first did, but the criticism has merit. It rings true. Rather than being dismissive, Taruskin's critique clears away the clutter and amplifies what makes the score special. Whether the overall collection follows Taruskin's injunction to challenge The Rite is less clear. This book is a complex endeavor, to say the least, with three esteemed editors—Severine Neff, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, helped by John Reed—and a huge number of essays (twenty-seven in all, including one each by Neff, Carr, and Horlacher). The contributors include leading lights of musicology, theory, dance, and history. To list everyone involved and their work would take up this entire review and then some. Because of its breadth, the book serves several overlapping constituencies. It will both please and provoke many. "The Rite of Spring" at 100 originated as a pair of symposia, one held at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in October 2012, the other in Moscow, Russia, in May 2013. The Chapel Hill symposium, part of a yearlong festival held on the UNC campus and sponsored by Carolina Performing Arts, sounds like it was quite a party. It was much touted at the time, covered even by Alex Ross in the New Yorker ("Primal Scream," 19 November 2012, 92–93). Taruskin describes the festival as a "bacchanalia" and an "orgy of commemoration" that, he says, owes its existence [End Page 654] to the unique status of The Rite, belonging as it does to both the popular classical repertoire and the academic canon (p. 422). The resulting essay collection is a more sober affair. Carefully compiled and edited, with abundant illustrations and music examples, it includes an extremely useful bibliography, discography, and videography as well as an accompanying Web site of videos and sound clips for six of the twenty-five chapters. (I was surprised by this low number.) Millicent Hodson's essay explaining and defending her famous reconstruction of the original Rite choreography uses by far the most video and audio examples; the remainder is in the theory section. The section headings give some sense of the book's general contents and its implicit argument, as the topics move from dance to France to Russia and on to the "music itself" (perhaps revealing the priorities of the editors, music theorists all). Part 1 is "Dancing Le sacre across the Century"; part 2, "Le sacre and Stravinsky in France"; part 3, "Observations on Le sacre...

On the Existence and Instability of Solitary Water Waves with a Finite Dipole

This paper considers the existence and stability properties of two-dimensional solitary waves traversing an infinitely deep body of water. We assume that above the water is vacuum, and that the waves are acted upon by gravity with surface tension effects on the air--water interface. In particular, we study the case where there is a finite dipole in the bulk of the fluid, that is, the vorticity is a sum of two weighted $\delta$-functions. Using an implicit function theorem argument, we construct a family of solitary waves solutions for this system that is exhaustive in a neighborhood of $0$. Our main result is that this family is conditionally orbitally unstable. This is proved using a modification of the Grillakis--Shatah--Strauss method recently introduced by Varholm, Wahl\'en, and Walsh.

A framework for improving error messages in dependently-typed languages

Abstract Dependently-typed programming languages provide a powerful tool for establishing code correctness. However, it can be hard for newcomers to learn how to employ the advanced type system of such languages effectively. For simply-typed languages, several techniques have been devised to generate helpful error messages and suggestions for the programmer. We adapt these techniques to dependently-typed languages, to facilitate their more widespread adoption. In particular, we modify a higher-order unification algorithm that is used to resolve and type-check implicit arguments. We augment this algorithm with replay graphs, allowing for a global heuristic analysis of a unification problem-set, error-tolerant typing, which allows type-checking to continue after errors are found, and counter-factual unification, which makes error messages less affected by the order in which types are checked. A formalization of our algorithm is presented with an outline of its correctness. We implement replay graphs, and compare the generated error messages to those from existing languages, highlighting the improvements we achieved.

Middle constructions in Romanian

Abstract The present paper aims to present an inventory of Romanian middle contructions (se‑verbal constructions), and to extend the analysis to other structures (with or without se) that were not previously investigated, but exhibit the same characteristics, and seem to allow middle reading (adjunct middles). Since Jespersen (1927), middles were attested cross-linguistically, and the focus on middles is justified if we consider the fact that this is an interesting testing ground for theories of syntax, semantics and their interaction (Fagan 1992). Starting from Grahek’s definition (2008, 44), in this paper, middles are a heterogeneous class of constructions that share formal properties of both active and passive structures: on the one hand, they have active verb forms, but, on the other hand, like passives, they have understood subjects and normally display promoted objects. The corpus analysis will focus on the particular contexts in which the middle reading is triggered: i) the adverbial modification; ii) the modal/procedural interpretation of the event; iii) the responsibility of the subject; iv) the arbitrary interpretation of the implicit argument which follows from the generic interpretation (Steinbach 2002).

Just Policy? An Ethical Analysis of Early Intervention Policy Guidance

Early intervention (EI) aims to identify children or families at risk of poor health, and take preventative measures at an early stage, when intervention is more likely to succeed. EI is concerned with the just distribution of “life chances,” so that all children are given fair opportunity to realize their potential and lead a good life; EI policy design, therefore, invokes ethical questions about the balance of responsibilities between the state, society, and individuals in addressing inequalities. We analyze a corpus of EI policy guidance to investigate explicit and implicit ethical arguments about who should be held morally responsible for safeguarding child health and well-being. We examine the implications of these claims and explore what it would mean to put the proposed policies into practice. We conclude with some remarks about the useful role that philosophical analysis can play in EI policy development.

Missing the Forest for the Trees: “Spiritual” Religion in a Secular Age

The rising popularity of the “spiritual but not religious” moniker across Canada and the West more generally has confounded scholars and laypersons alike. Against those who view the discursive shift from “religion” to “spirituality” in the twenty-first century as evidence of the incoherence of the contemporary spiritual landscape, I argue that, despite its apparent diversity, much of what goes by “spirituality” among this cohort exhibits striking uniformity in its basic structure. The implicit argument, then, is that observers who decry the fuzziness and indeterminacy of spirituality have focused too much on superficial differences at the expense of underlying similarities. In short, they have missed the forest for the trees. I begin by placing the rise of the spiritual but not religious in historical context. In this task, I follow philosopher Charles Taylor, whose insights into the massive subjective turn of modern culture have rarely been surpassed. I then outline the basic characteristics of the spiritual framework underlying the shift from religion to spirituality—what I call “self-spirituality.” Drawing from my qualitative research with Canadian millennials, I seek to locate self-spirituality within the current social and political landscape. Finally, in locating self-spirituality within a particular religious tradition, I turn to the social thought of Ernst Troeltsch, whose perceptive observations, made at the outset of the twentieth century, remain invaluable for making sense of recent religious developments. As we shall see, in light of Troeltsch’s insights, the rise of the spiritual but not religious looks quite different from what many have imagined.

Formalizing Constructive Projective Geometry in Agda

We present a formalization of Projective Geometry in the proof assistant and programming language Agda. We formalize a recent development in constructive Projective Geometry which has been shown appropriate to cover most traditional topics in the area applying only constructively valid methods. The equivalence with other well-known constructive axiomatic systems for projective geometry is proved and formalized.The implementation covers a basic fragment of intuitionistic synthetic Projective Plane Geometry including the axioms, principle of duality, Fano and Desargues properties and harmonic conjugates.We focus in an illustrative example of implementation of a complex and large proof which appears partially and vaguely described in the literature; namely the uniqueness of the harmonic conjugate.The most important details of our implementation are described and we show how to take advantage of several interesting properties of Agda such as modules, dependent record types, implicit arguments and instances which result very helpful to reduce the typical verbosity of formal proofs.

What is the safety case for health IT? A study of assurance practices in England

ObjectiveHealth IT (HIT) systems are increasingly becoming a core infrastructural technology in healthcare. However, failures of these systems, under certain conditions, can lead to patient harm and as such the safety case for HIT has to be explicitly made. This study focuses on safety assurance practices of HIT in England and investigates how clinicians and engineers currently analyse, control and justify HIT safety risks. MethodsThree workshops were organised, involving 34 clinical and engineering stakeholders, and centred on predefined risk-based questions. This was followed by a detailed review of the Clinical Safety Case Reports for 20 different national and local systems. The data generated was analysed thematically, considering the clinical, engineering and organisational factors, and was used to examine the often implicit safety argument for HIT. ResultsTwo areas of strength were identified: establishment of a systematic approach to risk management and close engagement by clinicians; and two areas for improvement: greater depth and clarity in hazard analysis practices and greater organisational support for assuring safety. Overall, the dynamic characteristics of healthcare combined with insufficient funding have made it challenging to generate and explain the safety evidence to the required level of detail and rigour. ConclusionImprovements in the form of practical HIT-specific safety guidelines and tools are needed. The lack of publicly available examples of credible HIT safety cases is a major deficit. The availability of these examples can help clarify the significance of the HIT risk analysis evidence and identify the necessary expertise and organisational commitments.

Periodic travelling interfacial hydroelastic waves with or without mass II: Multiple bifurcations and ripples

In a prior work, the authors proved a global bifurcation theorem for spatially periodic interfacial hydroelastic travelling waves on infinite depth, and computed such travelling waves. The formulation of the travelling wave problem used both analytically and numerically allows for waves with multi-valued height. The global bifurcation theorem required a one-dimensional kernel in the linearization of the relevant mapping, but for some parameter values, the kernel is instead two-dimensional. In the present work, we study these cases with two-dimensional kernels, which occur in resonant and non-resonant variants. We apply an implicit function theorem argument to prove existence of travelling waves in both of these situations. We compute the waves numerically as well, in both the resonant and non-resonant cases.

Negotiating the marketization of higher education in East Africa: a comparative analysis of Tanzania and Kenya

Since the 2000s, the literature on the ongoing higher education reforms in Africa has been increasing. The scientific discussion converges in an implicit and recurrent argument about the drivers of these policies. Given the involvement of international experts in the policy design, university reforms are often described as the output of the incentives of international stakeholders and the representatives of international organizations. The aim of this paper is to add a new variable to understand higher education reforms in East Africa, which has been neglected by scholars. In fact, the article sheds light on the determining role of domestic actors in the (re)negotiation of policy processes in Tanzania and Kenya, especially administrative and academic staff and students. Rather than evaluating the success or the failure of the reforms, this paper aims to highlight the power plays between a various set of domestic actors who reshape the outcomes of higher education policies. The paper crosses the experiences from the reform processes of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the University of Nairobi in Kenya.

A dialectical approach to presupposition

AbstractThis paper advances an approach to presupposition rooted in the concept of commitment, a dialectical notion weaker than truth and belief. It investigates ancient medieval dialectical theories and develops the insights thereof for analyzing how presuppositions are evaluated and why a proposition is presupposed. In particular, at a pragmatic level, presuppositions are reconstructed as the conclusions of implicit arguments from presumptive reasoning, grounded on presumptions of different type and nature. A false (or rather unaccepted) presupposition can be thus represented as the outcome of a conflict of presumptions – the ones used by the speaker and the ones commonly accepted or backed by evidence. From an interpretative perspective, this defaulted presumptive reasoning can be explained by comparing the available presumptions and repaired by replacing the weaker and unacceptable ones.

Covert reflexive argument in inalienable relational nouns

This paper argues that inalienable relational nouns in Mandarin Chinese, specifically kinship nouns (e.g. father, sister) and body-part nouns (e.g. head, face), have an implicit reflexive argument. Based on a syntactic comparison between kinship nouns, body-part nouns, local- and long-distance bound reflexives, we argue that the implicit reflexive arguments of kinship nouns and body-part nouns differ from each other: The implicit argument of kinship nouns must be locally bound, whereas that of body-part nouns can either be locally bound or long-distance bound. Therefore, we conclude that these two types of implicit arguments in Mandarin Chinese correspond to local- long-distance bound reflexives, respectively. Finally, we relate this difference to binding theory concerning local and long-distance anaphors.

Foreign correspondence: journalism in the Germaine Greer Archive

Germaine Greer’s print journalism forms a significant portion of her archive. It needs to be reassessed and recognised as having equal value to her other types of writing. Greer’s journalism powers much of this major archive and it is important to acknowledge that this archive is as much a journalist’s one as it is the archive of a feminist, a performer or a literary scholar. Greer’s own methodical creation and re-creation of her print journalism legacy into a series of records in the Greer Archive is also an implicit argument for the value of her ‘smalls’. As a recordkeeper, she has gathered up ‘the madwoman’s underclothes’, the hundreds of articles published around the world.