Knowledge of Objective 'Oughts': Monotonicity and the New Miners Puzzle

In the classic Miners case, an agent subjectively ought to do what they know is objectively wrong. This case shows that the subjective and objective ‘oughts’ are somewhat independent. But there remains a powerful intuition that the guidance of objective ‘oughts’ is more authoritative—so long as we know what they tell us. We argue that this intuition must be given up in light of a monotonicity principle, which undercuts the rationale for saying that objective ‘oughts’ are an authoritative guide for agents and advisors

Evaluational adjectives

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions

Does the Supreme Court Matter? Civil Rights and the Inherent Politicization of Constitutional Law

More than a decade ago, in a colloquium sponsored by the Virginia Law Review, scholars of the civil rights movement launched a fierce assault on Michael J. Klarman\u27s interpretation of the significance of the Supreme Court\u27s famous school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Klarman\u27s backlash thesis, initially set forth in a series of law review and history journal articles and now serving as the centerpiece of his new book, revolves around two central claims. First, he argues that the advancements toward racial equality generally attributed to Brown were instead the inevitable products of long-term political, social, and economic transformations that would have undermined Jim Crow regardless of Supreme Court intervention. Second, he credits Brown with a role in this historical process only through a chain of indirect causation: the Supreme Court decision galvanized massive resistance and racial violence in the South, which civil rights activists capitalized upon by engineering televised confrontations that mobilized public opinion across the nation, which created the climate for the passage of the federal civil rights and voting rights legislation of the mid-1960s, which directly and profoundly transformed southern race relations. Although the contours of this general story are part of the standard historical narrative, firmly grounded in the secondary source literature and taught in almost every university classroom, Klarman\u27s specific charge that civil rights scholars have greatly exaggerated the importance of Brown set off a bit of a firestorm. The first wave, which accompanied the 1994 Virginia Law Review article, included not only the expected differences of historiographical analysis but also criticism of a surprisingly personal nature. The response by David J. Garrow, titled Hopelessly Hollow History, ascribed Klarman\u27s views on Brown to the professorial urge for interpretive novelty, which often produces useful advancements but in some unfortunate cases results in revisionist interpretations whose rhetorical excesses are quickly revealed for what they are when old, but indisputable historical evidence, is inconveniently brought back to the pictorial foreground. Garrow highlighted Klarman\u27s failure to acknowledge the direct influence of Brown on the instigation of the 1955 Montgomery [bus] boycott, a causal analysis that emphasizes the crucial inspiration for southern black activists who finally had the moral authority and legal force of the Supreme Court on their side. While conceding Klarman\u27s point that Brown resulted in little school desegregation during the decade after 1954, Garrow blamed the Court itself for emboldening resistance to its decree through the infamous all deliberate speed implementation guidelines known as Brown II. Under this scenario, primary fault for the limited reach of Brown rested in the justices\u27 constrained vision of enforcement rather than in their premature placement of desegregation on the nation\u27s political agenda. In the final sentence of his rejoinder, Garrow dismissed Klarman\u27s entire project with undisguised condescension for the law professor treading on historians\u27 turf: [C]commentators would be well-advised to keep their professional desire for interpretive novelty in check, for rhetorically excessive overstatements and oversimplifications oftentimes do turn out to be hopelessly hollow once a fuller understanding of the historical record is brought to bear

The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy by Richardson Dilworth

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97257/1/j.1538-165X.2005.tb01441.x.pd

A rational speech-act model of projective content

Certain content of a linguistic construction can project whenthe construction is embedded in entailment-canceling environ-ments. For example, the conclusion that John smoked in thepast from the utterance John stopped smoking still holds forJohn didn’t stop smoking, in which the original utterance isembedded under negation. There are two main approaches toaccount for projection phenomena. The semantic approach addsrestrictions of the common ground to the conventional meaning.The pragmatic approach tries to derive projection from generalconversational principles. In this paper we build a probabilisticmodel of language understanding in which the listener jointlyinfers the world state and what common ground the speakerhas assumed. We take change-of-state verbs as an exampleand model its projective content under negation. Under certainassumptions, the model predicts the projective behavior and itsinteraction with the question under discussion (QUD), withoutany special semantic treatment of projective content

Graduate Sessions 9: Keller Easterling

Keller Easterling is an architect, professor, urbanist, and writer whose books Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America offer original and provocative conflations of spatial theory and contemporary design

Leading a Campus Team to Navigate Through the Comprehensive Evaluation

What are some best practices to help your institution prepare for a comprehensive evaluation? This presentation will include discussion of how to gain broad campus community participation by assembling a team to help lead the process. Committee membership, information sharing, meeting topics and timelines will be shared

Intrinsic Terahertz Plasmons and Magnetoplasmons in Large Scale Monolayer Graphene

We show that in graphene epitaxially grown on SiC the Drude absorption is transformed into a strong terahertz plasmonic peak due to natural nanoscale inhomogeneities, such as substrate terraces and wrinkles. The excitation of the plasmon modifies dramatically the magneto-optical response and in particular the Faraday rotation. This makes graphene a unique playground for plasmon-controlled magneto-optical phenomena thanks to a cyclotron mass 2 orders of magnitude smaller than in conventional plasmonic materials such as noble metals.Comment: to appear in Nano Letter

Atomic-scale confinement of optical fields

In the presence of matter there is no fundamental limit preventing confinement of visible light even down to atomic scales. Achieving such confinement and the corresponding intensity enhancement inevitably requires simultaneous control over atomic-scale details of material structures and over the optical modes that such structures support. By means of self-assembly we have obtained side-by-side aligned gold nanorod dimers with robust atomically-defined gaps reaching below 0.5 nm. The existence of atomically-confined light fields in these gaps is demonstrated by observing extreme Coulomb splitting of corresponding symmetric and anti-symmetric dimer eigenmodes of more than 800 meV in white-light scattering experiments. Our results open new perspectives for atomically-resolved spectroscopic imaging, deeply nonlinear optics, ultra-sensing, cavity optomechanics as well as for the realization of novel quantum-optical devices