How to Do Things With Words

I. the origin of species by means of natural selection

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

http://bcpw.bg.pw.edu.pl/Content/1968/Rudiments.pdf

Rudiments of rough sets

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

/pdf/situations-and-attitudes-57f065zg2d.pdf

Situations and Attitudes.

Topology and mereology are independent. Topology cannot reduce to mereology in restricted domains. Maps can be given a formal, compositional semantics.

Parts and Places: Structures in Spatial Representation

Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay between mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and compactness), and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their wholes? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.

Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation

There is a basic distinction, in the realm of spatial boundaries, between bona fide boundaries on the one hand, and fiat boundaries on the other. The former are just the physical boundaries of old. The latter are exemplified especially by boundaries induced through human demarcation, for example, in the geographic domain. The classical metaphysical problems connected with the notions of adjacency, contact, separation, and division can be resolved in an intuitive way by recognizing this two-sorted ontology of boundaries. Bona fide boundaries yield a notion of contact that is effectively modeled by classical topology; the analogue of contact involving fiat boundaries calls, however, for a different account, based on the intuition that fiat boundaries do not support the open/closed distinction on which classical topology is based. In the presence of this twosorted ontology it then transpires that mereotopology-typology erected on a mereological basis-is more than a trivial formal variant of classical point-set topology.

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Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries

We can see mereology as a theory of parthood and topology as a theory of wholeness. How can the two be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes'? This paper examines three main ways of answering this question. On the first account, mereology and topology form two independent (though mutually related) domains. The second account grants priority to topology and characterizes mereology derivatively, by defining parthood in terms of wholeness (more specifically: connectedness). The third approach reverses the order, exploiting the idea that wholeness (connectedness) can be explained in terms of parthood along with other predicates or relations. The analysis and comparison of these strategies is mostly formal (and within the confines of standard first-order theories), but their relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning and representation is emphasized. Some more speculative strategies and directions for further research, such as the development of a unified framework based on a single mereotopological primitive of connected parthood, are also briefly considered.

/pdf/parts-wholes-and-part-whole-relations-the-prospects-of-2o9vs62nj3.pdf

Parts, wholes, and part-whole relations: the prospects of mereotopology

This investigation on the borderlines of metaphysics, everyday geometry and the theory of perception seeks to answer two basic questions: Do holes really exist? If they do, what are they? Holes are among entities that down-to-earth philosophers would like to expel from their ontological inventory. Casati and Varzi argues in favour of holes' existence, examining their ontology of holes, their geometry, their part-whole relations, their identity, their causal role and the ways we perceive them.

Achille C. Varzi

Papers

Parts and Places: Structures in Spatial Representation

Parts and Places: The Structures of Spatial Representation

Fiat and Bona Fide Boundaries

Parts, wholes, and part-whole relations: the prospects of mereotopology

Holes and Other Superficialities