A colorful ruling by federal U.S. District Court Judge Patti B. Saris (Boston) dated June 21, 2007, proclaimed that some pharmaceutical manufacturers had been “unscrupulously taking advantage of the flawed AWP (average wholesale price) system . . . by establishing secret mega-spreads far beyond the standard industry markup,” describing this behavior as “unethical and oppressive.” The case invol...

Meaningful language use rests on the grounding of the language in the nonlinguistic world and in the practices of language users. This grounding is built up and maintained in interaction, through Conversational Grounding, which is the interactive process with which interlocutors build mutual understanding; Justification, the ability to explain and provide reasons for one’s language use; and Ada...

SUMMARY: GRW models of the physical world are severely criticized in the literature for involving wave function 'tails', the allegation being that the latter create fatal interpretive problems and even compromise standard arithmetic. I find such objections both unfair and misguided. But not all is well with the GRW approach. The complaint I articulate in this paper does not have to do with tail...