Humans routinely generalize universal relationships to unfamiliar instances. If we are told "if glork then frum," and "glork," we can infer "frum"; any name that serves as the subject of a sentence can appear as the object of a sentence. These universals are pervasive in language and reasoning. One account of how they are generalized holds that humans possess mechanisms that manipulate symbols ...

Since Greenberg the recognition of linguistic universals has been the backbone of language typology. Earlier Garvin had already divided universals into absolute and potential ones, the former uncontested cornerstones of linguistic theory, the latter commonly accepted generalizations among experienced professionals. The 'universals' to be discussed here are of the latter type: tried and tested p...

This document consists of three papers: \Virtual Relations", by Dale Jacquette; a reply, \Virtual Universals", by William J.

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal uF = {x | F (...

For much of the High Middle Ages, the conflict between Plato and Aristotle took the form of lengthy debates over the nature of universals. Philosophers of a Platonic bent came to be known as “Realists” because they argued that universals had a real existence apart from the specific objects in which they dwelled. For example, we observe birds of many different shapes, sizes, and colors, but stil...

We now return to the three narrative universals from another viewpoint, that of false cognitivist pretenders to the title. The chief pretenders, as in Brewer et al., appear at times under the guise and the very name of the genuine article, yet essentially align with their naked disciplinary equivalents. You may therefore want to refresh your memory of the original definitions cited in section ...

In 1991 the cultural anthropologist Don Brown bucked anthropology’s tabula rasa tradition by identifying over 300 “human universals”—individual and sociocultural traits that are found in every known human society (Brown 1991; universals enumerated in Pinker 2003). The items he identified include both psychological traits (e.g., wariness around snakes, sweets preferred, sexual jealousy) and soci...

This paper reviews an approach to the enterprise of paring away universals of attested languages to reveal the essential universals that require their own explanation. An example, discussed at this conference, is the long-standing puzzle presented by the Extended Projection Principle (EPP, Chomsky 1981). I am suggesting an explanation for the EPP based on the learner’s need for constructions to...