Feeding the habit

Dot writes: it’s ironic (or maybe not – I no longer have any but the fuzziest sense of how to use that vastly overworked word) that just when we have stopped having a television Hugh has contracted a raging Bob the Builder addiction. He watches the DVDs on our computer. On Saturday morning I had [...]

A bheil Gáidhlig agad?

Ken writes:
About a year ago, I took delivery of Katherine Spadaro and Katie Graham’s “Colloquial Scottish Gaelic” from Routledge, which I got as part payment for doing a review for them. Perhaps it was a bit naughty asking for a non-philosophy book, since it was philosophy I was reviewing. At any rate, I never got [...]

Dark side of the Hugh

Dot writes: this is one of those sorry-I-haven’t-been-posting posts. I’ve been trying to be much more disciplined about not blogging at work (whoops, I’m blogging at work – I can take a short break, can’t I?), and the precious slot after Hugh goes to bed is fiercely contested between rival activities such as reading the [...]

A penny drops about mortgage rates

ken writes:
On the wireless this morning commentators were discussing the recent decision by the Permanent TSB building society (or is it a bank?) to raise interest rates on their mortgage loans by 0.5%. This has been criticised by the Irish unions who say financial institutions benefitting from the Irish government’s blanket debt guarantee owe it [...]

another way to be contrary

(cross-posted from the Dublin Philosophy Blog)
I posted a while ago with a list of the different ways I thought one could object to an argument; roughly, accept the form by deny a premise, accept the premises by deny the conclusion follows from those premises, or accept the conclusion, the form and the premises, but dismiss [...]

What is a sentence from a syntactic perspective?

Ken writes:
Spurred on by this, I’ve done some more research. I think I’ve found a definition of the sort they might have in mind in the appendix to John Lyons’ Chomsky (Harvester Press, 1977). It is a definition of ’sentence’ for the purposes of formal syntax and it doesn’t depend on any hidden semantic terms. [...]

Why Ask a Linguist?

Ken writes:
I sent the following question to Ask a linguist:
Chomsky made much of the independence or autonomy of syntax with respect to semantics, such as the fact that there are grammatically well-formed sentences that don’t seem to mean anything very much e.g. ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ or Russell’s ‘quadruplicity drinks procrastination’. But is [...]

I was not surprised to learn…

…that it was cats who chose to live with humans, and not the other way round (Dot writes). Not surprised, but as a hereditary cat-lover suitably honoured.

Cheese and choo choo

Dot writes: I’ve spent ages fretting over when Hugh would make some progress in talking (I am a silly person and worry about these things), so it is thrilling to report that over the last month he has finally begun to apply himself. Mind you, he still utters long and fascinating speeches in what my [...]

Some holiday snaps

Thanks to Kati (Dot’s mum) for taking most of these pictures and, more importantly, for sharing such a delightful holiday with us.