Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying ‘inexplicable gaps’, that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to ‘immediate experience’, and that this principle has ‘severe’ consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical ‘gaps’ supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominai possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the ‘immediate experience’ restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Pirahã for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett.

The editors of the special issue on panpsychism and pan(en)theism introduce the issue. This includes brief summaries of each of the articles.

We present results from the first application of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS; e.g., the Global Positioning System, GPS) for radio beam calibration using a commercial GNSS receiver with the Deep Dish Development Array (D3A) at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO). Several GNSS satellites pass through the main and sidelobes of the beam each day, enabling efficient mapping of the 2D beam structure. Due to the high SNR and abundance of GNSS satellites, we find evidence that GNSS can probe several sidelobes of the beam through repeatable measurements of the beam over several days. Over three days of measurements, the smallest observed difference in the primary beam’s main lobe was 0.56 dB-Hz. We also compare our results in the sidelobes to simulations and find rough agreement in shape. When scaling the observations and simulations to match the main lobe power levels, we find deviations in at least one of the first few nulls of approximately 5 dB or less. There is saturation in the main lobe for most satellites, which can likely be mitigated by better attenuation before the receiver input. We compare our work to other satellite systems that have been successful and are likely complementary to this technique. However, GNSS offers key advantages, including continuous transmission, broader frequency coverage relevant to CHORD, SKA-mid, and the DSA-2000, as well as more frequent satellite passes, making it a promising calibration method. These results also motivate further development of this technique for radio astronomy applications.

We are in a metacrisis caused by exponential growth, extraction and entitlement. When we strive to abolish the abundant absurdities of the current system (i.e., modernity) with rehabilitative or reformist responses, we risk reproducing, even reinforcing, the very dynamics we seek to transform. The sensing seed is a visual heuristic and practice of resonant embodied ethics to aid in unravelling the machinations of modernity. The seed identifies three polarities that reflect salient patterns of modernity: separateness, linearity and abstraction. The sensing seed is designed to surface the many materialisations of modernity while elucidating ethical entrées that are decolonially discordant with dominant dispositions by enabling reflexive, visceral and committed praxes of the many adjacent alternatives available, but largely imperceptible, even unimaginable, to modern humans. Through radical acceptance, attention to aesthesis and action, we can show up, cultivate connexion, kindle kin, grow groundward, tarry with trouble, abide in aporias and wallow in wiser lifeways akin to those of our pre-modern (i.e., primal) ancestors.

This article introduces a fungal framework, both metaphorically and methodologically, for reimagining power, resistance, and world-making in International Relations (IR). Drawing on relational ontologies and ecological insights, it examines how fungal processes of decomposition and regeneration shed light on the entangled relations that constitute the pluriverse—a world of many worlds. By centering decay as a site of transformation, the framework proposes an ethic of research grounded in humility and care. It critiques the epistemic closures that structure dominant IR paradigms and offers tools for engaging ontological multiplicity beyond Eurocentric frames. In doing so, the article contributes to emerging debates on decolonial methodology, more-than-human agency, and pluriversal ethics, advocating for approaches that accompany, rather than assimilate, multiple worlds.

Huainanzi 淮南子 contributes a model of sage rulership as, among other things, rule through wuwei 無為, or “non-action.” Through analysis of several concepts core to the text’s political cosmology of governance by wuwei—qi 氣 (vital breath, energy-matter), resonance (gan-ying 感應), and sincerity (cheng 誠)—this article suggests that Huainanzian sagely wuwei refers to an act that seemingly straddles a patterned level of reality of distinct forms, on the one hand, and a primordial, chaos-like reality, beyond the bounds of form, on the other. In an effort to grasp, first, how a singular Huainanzian cosmos may present two seemingly structurally antithetical faces, and second, how the sage-ruler’s program may not only embrace, but put to powerful political effect, the paradoxical union of these two “faces,” this paper draws on a heuristic of fractal and Euclidean geometries, simplified from modern mathematics. The article thereby contributes a further representational modality for thinking through Huainanzi’s extensive, multi-faceted political cosmology, joining in discourse a recent swell of research interested in the same.

Since the inception of the United States, religion has long permeated its politics, so much so that racial construction cannot be fully understood without first dissecting America’s cosmological underpinnings. This article maps the founding of ethnic democracy within European modernity and its centrality to the development of the American nation-state. I contend that American ethnic democracy emerges when ethno-racial tyranny expresses itself as white supremacy that is built and sustained through a cosmological justification for its political existence. The political ramifications reveal an unfolding of transhistorical racial terror against the Black as a precondition for ethno-democratic continuity. Nevertheless, contestations against the US ethno-democratic state emerge via the heretical praxis of Black rebels who, through a commitment to subversive belief systems, struggle for Black freedom as a recovery of abolition–democracy.