... and emotions could ‘increase, lessen, or alter a secretion’ such as tears or saliva. ³² Tears may have been ‘natural signs’ but the process of signification was neither natural nor transparent. Depending on their means of production and context of interpretation, tears could signify almost any...

... a “new probability” linked to the evidential testimony of natural signs or nondemonstrable facts. Although their vocabulary grew from medieval notions of probability, these experimentalists unwittingly secularized practical rationality in a way that transformed scientific, religious, and political...

...Reid distinguishes primary and secondary qualities according to their roles in his theory of perception. According to Reid, perceptions are rightly caused conceptions of and beliefs in their objects. Sensations serve as "natural signs" or triggers for perceptions but are in no way constitutive...

... of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs, including, especially, language. Most to be thanked is my husband, Donald Shankweiler, who took over most chores during my interrupting illness of nearly two years, always encouraging me to spend my good time writing. Nor has he...

... of nature allegorical interpretation of rhetoric natural signs and wonders caspar goltwurm apocalypticism In the years following publication of Job Fincel's Wonder Signs, the subject of miracles quickly grew to become a staple of evangelical theological speculation. Fincel addressed his...

... mannerism Marlowe Christopher Rudolf II Holy Roman emperor Shakespeare William Christoph Irenaeus Capar Goltwurm matthias flacius natural signs and wonders original sin gnesio-lutheranism If, as in some early modern prodigy tale, sixteenth-century stones and plaster could speak, they might reveal...

...How can a Cartesian idea represent ordinary physical objects? One possibility is that Descartes holds a theory of natural signs according to which ideas, including sensations (ideas of secondary qualities), represent states of the external world that are correlated with them. I deny that Descartes...

...Natural signs that express emotions, such as laughing or crying, are not limited to human animals. For Descartes, even machines could learn and use a limited language for responding, predictably, to stimuli. The flexibility provided by conventional signs, by abstraction, and by its associated...

...This chapter explicates the concept of a natural sign. The original Reidian concept of a natural sign is either a sensation or a perception that is causally linked “upstream” to what the sign signifies and “downstream” to the generation of a characteristic judgment. The author extends Reid's work...

... law to language, and legal validity to linguistic meaning. However, it is argued that Hobbes' deeper understanding of law and of language is not purely positivistic or relativistic or skeptical. In fact, his account of legal and linguistic stipulation rests on his account of natural signs. Greek...

... of meaning demonstratives indexicals lexical semantics natural signs To resolve the sort of practical problems explored in the last chapter we need to be able to answer a fundamental theoretical question: ‘What makes any linguistic sign meaningful?’ (or, in more general terms, when we...

...Chapter 3 treats the use of miracles in the works of the Lutheran natural philosopher, Job Fincel, who in the politically troubled years in the mid-sixteenth century published three widely read volumes of natural signs and miracles under the title Wonder Signs. Fueled by a sense...

... Martin Zittau flood as punishment for heresy and impiety Namsler David Jena Delumeau Jean Le Roy Ladurie Emmanuel Second Little Ice Age Thomas Keith disease as apocalyptic sign Langen Abraham Suarinus Abraham epicureanism Schilling Bernhard sola fides Andreas Hohndorff natural signs...

...This chapter serves as an introduction to Part Two. Two fundamentally different kinds of signs are introduced: “informational signs” or “infosigns” and “intentional signs” or “intensigns.” Natural signs are one example of infosigns. Information carried by infosigns is “natural-content information...

... effect of sign origin on meaning anaphoric natural signs ‘Russell’s Principal’ in Evans Some ways that identity of the referents of two signs may be marked are by recurrence of the same sign design (“duplicates markers”), by use of the same sign token over again (“Strawson markers”), and by various...

...Demonic possessions were part and parcel of daily life in early modern Europe. Evil spirits could possess the body as well as the soul and inflict physiological pains as well as mental disturbances. They could exhibit themselves in purely natural signs (such as ongoing pain) as well...

...This chapter considers an argument from design, meant for those without a technical scientific background, and based on Thomas Reid’s concept of natural signs. For Reid, sensations function as natural signs in perception when some object in the world causes sensations, on the basis of which one...

... of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other...

...Using a varied list of natural signs as examples, there are straightforward reasons to reject several familiar attemps, such as Dretske’s, to capture what they have in common. Correlational theories run into an obdurate problem of defining, in a principled way, the reference class within which...

... of Lutheranism Abraham Hebrew Patriarch astrology Adam and Eve and disease flood as punishment for heresy and impiety sweating sickness syphilis Martin Luther miracles cult of the saints natural signs and wonders portents angels The Protestant Reformation erupted in a world that was simultaneously...