Peirce wrote: Thus, in brief, my philosophy may be described as the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers... Demonstrative proof is not to be thought of. The demonstrations of metaphysicians are all moonshine. The best that can be done is to suppl...

T he power of visual stimulation in forming a persuasive argument cannot be understated. Poet Williams Carlos Williams famously wrote, “no ideas but in things....”2 In writing that line, it can be argued that Dr. Williams was simplifying a universal truth that carries over to modern-day courtrooms: The art of conveying ideas is most effectively done by showing, rather than telling, your audienc...

“Incomplete” definite descriptions (i.e. descriptions that violate the uniqueness constraint) have been offered various accounts in semantics. Among them, the so-called ellipsis account, which analyzes “the F” as elliptical for “the F which is that F”. I begin by arguing that the objections raised against this account have not been conclusive, and go on to supply a new argument against it, whic...

It is argued that the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘he’ are disguised complex demonstratives of the form ‘that female/male’. Three theories of complex demonstratives are examined and shown to be committed to the view that ‘s/he’ turns out to be an empty term when used to refer to a hermaphrodite. A fourth theory of complex demonstratives, one that is hermaphrodite friendly, is proposed. It maintains that...

This work offers experimental support for the hypothesis that some indefinite noun phrases do not only introduce new referents but also equip them with a certain ‘forward-looking potential’ which informs the hearer about the ‘importance’ of the referent in the subsequent discourse. Developing means to empirically account for the intuitions that exist with respect to English this-indefinites, I ...

The design and implementation of a demonstrative program for the interactive simulation of rigid objects based on physics (PICO) is presented. The program uses VRML for 3D visualization and External Authoring Interface (EAI) for the simulation’s interaction. A summary of the proposed model using Unified Modeling Language (UML) is presented in order to describe the strategies used in the impleme...

This paper reports our investigation of machine learning methods applied to anaphora resolution for Biology texts. Our primary concern is the investigation of features and their combinations for effective anaphora resolution. In this paper, we focus on the resolution of demonstrative anaphoric noun phrases. We propose several novel features that we call highlighting features and consider their ...