This chapter provides an overview of the evolution of English morphology, focusing on inflection. Beside a largely synchronic account of the nominal and verbal morphology in the individual historical periods, the chapter explains the underlying mechanisms and motivations behind morphological developments pertinent to individual stages. These include changes such as loss of inflections, transformation of case, number and gender systems, or the restructuring of the formal marking of tense and mood. The typological drift which English experienced over the last 1300 years stays central to the discussion, as does language contact with Celtic, Norse and Norman French, whose role as a potential catalyst for morphological changes will be explored. The discussion emphasises the dynamic nature of the morphological system and the continuity of the processes involved in its gradual transformation over the centuries.

From the Middle English period grammatical relations that used to be coded by case-marked forms in Old English were increasingly expressed by prepositional constructions, without however completely replacing the former. Two prominent syntactic alternations arose as a result of this development, that is the dative and genitive variations: (1) Dative variation: John gave Mary a book vs. John gave a book to Mary. (2) Genitive variation: the king’s horse vs. the horse of the king. This chapter brings together research on these alternations, tracing their emergence and development, and focusing on the role of harmonic alignment (in particular, animacy). Although they are separate alternations, one operating on the VP level (datives) and the other on the NP level (genitives), their development shows some parallels, which are attributed to analogy based on functional overlap across the two alternations.

This chapter explores the intersection of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics by investigating the role of core psycholinguistic factors and phenomena in language change: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Recent research from cognitive sciences, particularly within a complex systems framework, reveals that language change is influenced by patterns of use and is interconnected with language acquisition and cognition. Bridging the gap between community and individual research, the chapter highlights studies that explore this relationship. It also examines the potential of psycholinguistic methodologies for diachronic research. Additionally, the chapter suggests avenues for further research where psycholinguistic perspectives have had less impact on the study of historical language change. Furthermore, it discusses how psycholinguistic factors have been incorporated into various theoretical approaches to English language change, such as generative and usage-based modelling.

Kant thinks it is possible to achieve nonperceptual cognition in three ways: (1) through practical action, (2) by analogy, and (3) through construction. The type of cognition available depends on the kind of object or concept being cognized. The fact that cognition of nonperceptual objects is possible in some cases opens the way for thought experiments to provide cognition in ways that go beyond providing fictional examples and exemplifications. In this chapter, I describe these other possibilities for cognition and show how they are at work in different kinds of thought experiments in philosophy.

This chapter proposes that thought experiments are a cognitive apparatus and situates this view among contemporary accounts of thought experiment. I set forward the project of the book, which is to (1) propose a new account of thought experiments as a method and (2) trace the historical foundations of the term and concept of “thought experiment” from Kant through Ørsted to Kierkegaard. I define “cognition” [Erkenntnis] for Kant as a synthesis of concepts with intuitions and propose that Kierkegaard, like Kant and Ørsted, views thought experiments as useful for achieving cognitions. I introduce the term Tanke-experiment in Kierkegaard and suggest why it has been little emphasized by Kierkegaard scholars and remains widely unacknowledged in contemporary descriptions of the history of thought experiment.

The chapter is divided into two parts, focusing on historiography and methodology, respectively, and linked by a survey of the functions of punctuation over time. The historiographical part offers a discussion on the principles of written language, the fundamental representational principles and functional designs in the history of English orthography, and the system and status of Present-Day English orthography in terms of the main historical lines as seen from structural as well as sociolinguistic viewpoints. The emphasis in the methodological part is on the development of new approaches and methodologies based on the expanding digitisation of historical texts that have grown in interdisciplinary ways out of the traditional philological paradigm – research primarily using large digital datasets and corpus-driven methodologies, as well as exploring the data in innovative ways to chart sociolinguistic networks.

Among the many transformations from the first to the third Critique, one concerns the role of imagination which is no longer connected to the problems of representation (Vorstellung) but with exhibition or presentation (Darstellung). The focus is no longer the reproduction in the mind of the appearances we experience, but reflection on the relation between the phenomenal and the noumenal levels. In § 59 of the third Critique, Kant speaks of a symbolic hypotyposis, that is, an exhibition on the part of imagination intended to prove the reality of our ideas. Indeed, subjectio ad aspectum and hypotyposis mean giving visibility to ideas. The fulcrum of the chapter will be an examination of how, in his understanding of the concept ‘symbol’ in KU, § 59, Kant retrieves the tradition of ancient rhetoric while he at the same time reverses its constitutive tenets. Imagination no longer has to do with the faculty for images, but with the exhibition of the supersensible in a sensible medium. Kant’s move prepares, but is essentially foreign to, the further development in German Romanticism that progressively makes symbol the equivalent of poetry and the coincidence of finite and infinite.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze Kant’s approach to writing philosophical texts, as such. By his own admission, Kant struggled with making his texts clear. He viewed this problem as not only technical, but as properly philosophical. It will be demonstrated that Kant carefully analyzed different types of linguistic clarity in his Lectures on Logic, that he fully recognized the difficulty of achieving them in practice, and that he nevertheless granted his readers the ‘right’ to ‘legitimately demand’ a certain level of clarity in principle. It will then be examined how and why Kant deployed various forms of metaphorical language to meet this challenge – a strategy which has, in turn, opened promising avenues for scholars interpreting his works. An analysis of the Critique of Pure Reason will illustrate how Kant ingeniously exploited metaphors to combine “discursive (logical) clarity” with “intuitive (aesthetic) clarity,” aiming for an ideal he termed “lucidity [Helligkeit].” In particular, the discursive structure of the Critique is represented here through an analogical model based on Kant’s vividly metaphorical description of moral character formation in the Anthropology.

The early modern period witnessed an expansion of global trade that accelerated the movement of people, goods, and technologies, as well as cultural practices, languages, tastes, and ideas. This chapter examines the representation of commodities in the period by focussing on an illustrative example, coffee in early modern England, and the various literary forms to which it gave rise. It charts the passage of coffee from the Ottoman Empire to western Europe, the parallel circulation of textual material on coffee across works of travel, natural history, and natural philosophy, and the emergence of the coffeehouses and the new modes of literary sociability they produced. In doing so, it reveals the importance of this commodity to some of the most significant developments in the literary and intellectual culture of the period, including shifting conceptions of taste, fraught debates about identity and assimilation, and the invention of new forms of fiction.

Kant gives analogies a central place in cognition: We can apply concepts to objects of experience because we recognize similarities between them. The cognitive function is evident in Kant’s own use of metaphors and analogies, which shows how linguistic expression conveys philosophical content. For Kant, linguistic symbols and analogies serve a cognitive function: Symbols present concepts whose instances are nontangible to the senses and thereby provide a practical understanding of an abstract concept, whereas analogies illustrate structural similarities between two dissimilar objects and allow us to transfer an understanding of one relationship to the other. Kant’s theory of symbols and analogies suggests that his own metaphors and analogies might serve a cognitive function that could help us understand the nature of reason and its endeavors better. This chapter confronts Kant’s images drawn from law, biology, geography, and construction with his account of symbols and analogies and argues that each group of images illustrates a different aspect of Kant’s account of reason and systematic philosophy.

Chapter 6 builds on students’ understanding of conditionals and loops from Chapter 5, demonstrating how they can be used to solve complex problems. Two key problem-solving approaches are applied: means-end analysis, in which a larger problem is deconstructed in smaller subproblems; and analogy, wherein an approach from a previously-solved problem is translated to solve a new problem. Detailed examples of each are used to illustrate their utility: students learn how to simulate the dice game of craps, and how to solve two long-standing computational problems, namely the Traveling Salesman problem and the Knapsack problem. This kind of practice is essential for students at this point in the textbook, as it trains the valuable skill of translating complex real-world problems into forms MATLAB can solve, then using MATLAB to solve them.

Although the notion of analogy is often deprecated in linguistics because it has proved difficult to say precisely how it works, even words that can be considered to have regular patterns of formation can be seen to be influenced by analogy as well. The formalization of analogy may not be easy, but it is clear that we need to recognize the phenomenon.

This chapter offers a critical appraisal of two dominant approaches to pluralism, conflict, and difference in contemporary political theology, both of which draw on the thought of Augustine. Postliberal Augustinianism, represented by the “Radical Orthodoxy” of John Milbank, develops a highly sophisticated account of the metaphysics of human sociality, grounded in a creative reading of Trinitarian theology which construes political community in terms of harmonious difference. Augustinian civic liberalism, represented by Charles Mathewes and Eric Gregory, draws on Augustine’s understanding of love and difference in order to propose an ethics and ascetics of liberal citizenship. Both, however, thematize political community and difference in essentially oppositional terms, privileging one or the other, and reading conflict in decidedly negative terms. The limits of these political theological strategies reveal a need to reconceptualize the nature of political community and the place of conflict therein.

This chapter surveys some of the many types of models used in science, and some of the many ways scientists use models. Of particular interest for our purposes are the relationships between models and other aspects of scientific inquiry, such as data, experiments, and theories. Our discussion shows important ways in which modeling can be thought of as a distinct and autonomous scientific activity, but always models can be crucial for making use of data and theories and for performing experiments. The growing reliance on simulation models has raised new and important questions about the kind of knowledge gained by simulations and the relationship between simulation and experimentation. Is it important to distinguish between simulation and experimentation, and if so, why?

This chapter introduces chief postulates common to usage-based (UB) approaches to language. The UB approach maintains that speakers’ experiences with language shape how language is stored. Experiences with specific words and word combinations in particular linguistic, discursive, and social contexts accrue in memory and subsequently contribute to patterns of variability evident in speech productions. Usage-based approaches regularly consider independent effects on lexical representations of decontextualized prior probabilities (e.g. phone/word/bigram frequencies, type frequencies), and, increasingly, contextually informed counts (e.g. lexical items’ cumulative exposure to conditioning effects of the production contexts, phone/word probabilities) are considered. This chapter offers an overview of studies exploring the connection between usage patterns and bilingual sound systems as well as studies exploring evidence of interlingual influence arising from bilingual lexical storage (schematic ties in memory). The chapter suggests potential avenues for future UB research into bilingual phonetics and phonology.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.