What use has approved

The meaning of a word is given by a customary rule for its use. I defend that claim and explain its implications by a comparison with customary rules in law. I address two problems about customary rules: first, how can the mere facts of social practice yield a norm? Secondly, how can we explain disagreement about the requirements of a custom, if those requirements are determined by the shared practice of the participants in a community? These problems can be resolved in a way that illuminates customary rules, and helps to explain the relation between the meaning of a word and the customary rule for its use. The meaning of a word is the usefulness that it has because of the customary rule for its use.     

The Middle Wittgenstein’s Critique of Frege

ABSTRACT

This article aims to analyse Wittgenstein’s 1929–1932 notes concerning Frege’s critique of what is referred to as old formalism in the philosophy of mathematics. Wittgenstein disagreed with Frege’s critique and, in his notes, outlined his own assessment of formalism. First of all, he approvingly foregrounded its mathematics-game comparison and insistence that rules precede the meanings of expressions. In this article, I recount Frege’s critique of formalism and address Wittgenstein’s assessment of it to show that his remarks are not so much a critique of Frege as rather a defence of the formalist anti-metaphysical investment.     

Assessment of generalised Bayesian structural equation models for continuous and binary data

The paper proposes a novel model assessment paradigm aiming to address shortcoming of posterior predictive $p$-values, which provide the default metric of fit for Bayesian structural equation modelling (BSEM). The model framework presented in the paper focuses on the approximate zero approach (Psychological Methods, 17 , 2012, 313), which involves formulating certain parameters (such as factor loadings) to be approximately zero through the use of informative priors, instead of explicitly setting them to zero. The introduced model assessment procedure monitors the out-of-sample predictive performance of the fitted model, and together with a list of guidelines we provide, one can investigate whether the hypothesised model is supported by the data. We incorporate scoring rules and cross-validation to supplement existing model assessment metrics for BSEM. The proposed tools can be applied to models for both continuous and binary data. The modelling of categorical and non-normally distributed continuous data is facilitated with the introduction of an item-individual random effect. We study the performance of the proposed methodology via simulation experiments as well as real data on the ‘Big-5’ personality scale and the Fagerstrom test for nicotine dependence.