Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a (...) large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages. (shrink)

_One of the enduring queries in the development of human intellectual thought is, "What is human nature?" What does it mean to be a human tends to be defined by all disciplines, including religion? We all need theories about what makes people tick in order to predict how they will respond to their environment in various situations. Indeed, how we view human nature affects a number of things. People utilize it in their private lives to govern their daily routines, manage (...) their relationships, raise their children, and influence others. Additionally, our policies in areas of collective social life like politics, law, and education are influenced by how we view human nature. Steven Pinker critically explains the modern view of human nature and its theoretical presuppositions in his widely read book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker contends that this contemporary account of human nature faces significant challenges in light of recent developments in the fields of biology, genetics, evolution, and the brain sciences. Because it is built on axioms that we cannot accept in light of the advancements in science over the past few decades, the current theory of human nature is conceptually unsound. This research performs a comparative analysis between Pinker’s View of Human Nature and Dupré’s Critique of Evolutionary Psychology on the principles which serve as the foundation for the influential idea of human nature, and contributes significantly in our contemporary intellectual life._. (shrink)

Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment NOW" is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems we (...) now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. There is not a glimmering of an awareness of any of this in Pinker’s book. This flaw in Enlightenment NOW is serious indeed. (shrink)

Steven Pinker presents four ideals of Enlightenment in his popular book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. He argues his case brilliantly and convincingly through cogent arguments in a language comprehensible to the reader of the present century. Moreover, whether it is reason or science or humanism or progress, he defends his position powerfully. He justifies his views by citing 75 graphs on the upswing improvement made by humanity in terms of prosperity, longevity, education, equality of (...) men and women, health, political freedom and medical breakthroughs. Though Pinker makes an excellent case for the positive contributions of Enlightenment; however he ignores the negative aspects that are responsible for causing a great schism between the white race and others who are black and brown. The paper highlights some of these negative comments made by such Enlightenment thinkers as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Chambers, Down and Down and others. Through their literary and scientific writings, these scholars and researchers downgraded the black and brown races, thus causing a rift that led to slavery, colonialism and apartheid. The paper reveals these negative aspects ignored by Pinker in his otherwise well-researched book on Enlightenment. Since Pinker presents a one-sided case by including only the positive contributions of Enlightenment, I recommend that he should write a sequel to his present work outlining the negative aspects responsible for numerous political, social and environmental problems facing humanity today. By using dialectical logic in place of logic of contraries, he might be able to synthesize both the positive and negative aspects of Enlightenment. He can then argue that humanity might be propelled to make progress more efficiently at a faster pace toward humanism and world peace. (shrink)

Steven Pinker's How the mind works (HTMW) marks in my opinion an historic point in the history of humankind's attempt to understand itself. Socrates delivered his "know thyself" imperative rather long ago, and now, finally, in this behemoth of a book, published at the dawn of a new millennium, Pinker steps up to have psychology tell us what we are: computers crafted by evolution - end of story; mystery solved; and the poor philosophers, having never managed to obey Socrates' command, (...) are left alone to wander in the labyrinth of their benighted speculation forever. Unfortunately, though HTMW is to this point the crowning attempt of psychology to make systematic sense of persons by integrating everything relevant science knows, the book fails - and it fails so fundamentally and irremediably that we would do well to wonder anew whether we should supplant the basic view it promotes with what I call the super-mind hypothesis: the view that though mere animals are evolved computers, persons are more. (shrink)

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long-term decline in person-on-person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates the spread (...) of a cultural pattern of self-restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism.For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad-news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold-War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter-Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti-Communism. (shrink)

Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now makes a powerful argument that by every measure, the conditions of human life have been improving steadily for the past 200 years. This improvement can be attributed not just to the spread of the principles of enlightenment announced in the eighteenth century but also to the evolved properties of the human mind, which have been liberated by modernity. Pinker writes in support of this development and in opposition to the ideological and academic resistances to it. His (...) book has itself generated resistance among those he criticizes, and while many of these criticisms are unwarranted, Pinker's book raises serious questions that it does not fully address. (shrink)

Stephen Pinker sets out over a dozen arguments in The language instinct (Morrow, New York, 1994) for his widely shared view that natural language is inadequate as a medium for thought. Thus he argues we must suppose that the primary medium of thought and inference is an innate propositional representation system, mentalese. I reply to the various arguments and so defend the view that some thought essentially involves natural language. I argue mentalese doesn't solve any of the problems Pinker cites (...) for the view that we think in natural language. So I don't think I think the way he thinks I think. (shrink)

This note evaluates the claim of Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the advent of strong states led to a decline in violence. I test this claim in the modern context, measuring the effect of the strength of government in lower-income countries on reductions in homicide rates. The strength of government is measured using Polity IV, Worldwide Governance Indicators, and government consumption as a percentage of GDP. The data do not support Pinker’s hypothesis.

Steven Pinker argues that rationality represents both a “patrimony,” a human endowment exhibited even in the behaviors of “primitive” societies, and a powerful force for good. At the same time, Pinker describes rationality as a “scarce” resource in the contemporary world, one that must be defined, defended, and deployed against the many destructive forms of irrationality to which we are prone. In order to avert a looming “Tragedy of the Commons,” Pinker proposes that rationality should be considered not just a (...) cognitive benefit but a moral imperative. In doing so, however, he argues against the Enlightenment tradition in which the individual, rather than the “Commons,” is the final arbiter. The fundamental tension in Pinker’s argument is between a “primitive” process of collective reasoning that produces a stable but nonprogressive society and a “modern” orientation toward the individual that has brought us to the brink of political chaos and ecological disaster. (shrink)

This paper explores the relevance of Wittgenstein’s philosophi- cal psychology for the two major contemporary approaches to the relation between language and cognition. As Pinker describes it, on the ‘Standard Social Science Model’ language is ‘an insidious shaper of thought’. According to Pinker’s own widely–shared alternative view, ‘Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another’. I investigate Wittgenstein’s powerful challenges to the hypothe- sis that language is a device for communicating independently constituted (...) (or individuated) thoughts. I argue that Wittgenstein offers instead a subtle version of the thesis that language determines thought. (shrink)

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly to language and what is more, (...) sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The productive use of English past tense morphology in school-aged children (N= 74; 3 years, 8 months to 13 years, 5 months) is explored using on elicited production task. Errors represented 20% of the responses overall. Virtually all of the children demonstrated productivity with regular (e.g., good) and irregular patterns (zero-marking, e.g., sit + sit; vowel-change, e.g., ride -+ rid). Overall frequency of errors decreased with age, yet the tendency for certain types of irregularizations increased in the older groups. Analyses (...) across items indicated that all error types were predicted by combinations of item frequency, phonological chamcteristics of stems and past tense forms, and aspects of phonological past tense “neighborhoods.” Contrary to “hybrid” or dual-mechanism models incorporating a phonologically-insensitive default mechanism (e.g., Prasada & Pinker, 1993), these results suggest that children’s productivity with regular and irregular patterns is consistent with a phonologically-based constraint satisfaction system similar to that implemented in connectionist models (Daugherty & Seidenberg, 1992; Plunkett 81 Marchman, 1991,1993). (shrink)

Jerry Fodor has argued that a modular mind must include central systems responsible for updating beliefs, and has defended this position by appealing to shared properties of belief fixation and scientific confirmation. Peter Carruthers and Stephen Pinker have attacked this analogy between science and ordinary inference. I examine their arguments and show that they fail. This does not show that Fodor's more general position is correct.

Jerry Fodor has argued that a modular mind must include central systems responsible for updating beliefs, and has defended this position by appealing to shared properties of belief fixation and scientific confirmation. Peter Carruthers and Stephen Pinker have attacked this analogy between science and ordinary inference. I examine their arguments and show that they fail. This does not show that Fodor’s more general position is correct.

Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment NOW is in many ways a terrific book, from which I have learnt much. But it is also deeply flawed. Science and reason are at the heart of the book, but the conceptions that Steven Pinker defends are damagingly irrational. And these defective conceptions of science and reason, as a result of being associated with the Enlightenment Programme for the past two or three centuries, have been responsible, in part, for the genesis of the global problems (...) we now suffer from, and our current inability to deal with them properly. There is not a glimmering of an awareness of any of this in Pinker’s book. This flaw in Enlightenment NOW is serious indeed. (shrink)

In the academic year 1920-1921 at the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger gave a series of extraordinary lectures on the phenomenological significance of the religious thought of St. Paul and St. Augustine. The publication of these lectures in 1995 settled a long disputed question, the decisive role played by Christian theology in the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. The lectures present a special challenge to readers of Heidegger and theology alike. Experimenting with language and drawing upon a wide range of now (...) obscure authors, Heidegger is finding his way to Being and Time through the labyrinth of his Catholic past and his increasing fascination with Protestant theology. A Companion to Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religious Life is written by an international team of Heidegger specialists. (shrink)

In print for the first time in over ten years, Act and Crime provides a unified account of the theory of action presupposed by both Anglo-American criminal law and the morality that underlies it. The book defends the view that human actions are always volitionally caused bodily movements and nothing else. The theory is used to illuminate three major problems in the drafting and the interpretation of criminal codes: 1) what the voluntary act requirement both does and should require; 2) (...) what complex descriptions of actions prohibited by criminal codes both do and should require ; and 3) when two actions are 'the same' for purposes of assessing whether multiple prosecutions and multiple punishments are warranted. The book both contributes to the development of a coherent theory of action in philosophy, and it provides both legislators and judges a grounding in three of the most basic elements of criminal liability. (shrink)

In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavaillès evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin - logical or ontological - of scientific thought, arguing that, rather than seeking to found science in original intentional acts, a priori meanings, or foundational logical relations, any adequate theory must involve a history of the concept. Cavaillès insists on a historical epistemology that is conceptual rather than phenomenological, and a logic that is dialectical rather than transcendental. His famous call (cited by Foucault) to abandon "a (...) philosophy of consciousness" for "a philosophy of the concept" was crucial in displacing the focus of philosophical enquiry from aprioristic foundations toward structural historical shifts in the conceptual fabric. This new translation of Cavaillès's final work, written in 1942 during his imprisonment for Resistance activities, presents an opportunity to reencounter an original and lucid thinker. Cavaillès's subtle adjudication between positivistic claims that science has no need of philosophy, and philosophers' obstinate disregard for actual scientific events, speaks to a dilemma that remains pertinent for us today. His affirmation of the authority of scientific thinking combined with his commitment to conceptual creation yields a radical defense of the freedom of thought and the possibility of the new. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that philosophy’s potential to influence technological change is impeded by the presence of two common and influential myths surrounding technology—the myth of progress and the myth of technological determinism. Such myths, I suggest, hinder philosophy’s influence by presenting a distorted image of technology—respectively, as an unqualified good, and as an entity with its own autonomous logic. Steven Pinker and Martin Heidegger are selected as influential advocates for progress and technological determinism respectively, and their work is (...) explored in turn. The work of John Gray and of Herbert Marcuse is then employed to demythologise technology by articulating an alternative image of technology that is not just more accurate, but also more conducive to philosophical influence. Finally, the work of Hans Jonas and Luciano Floridi is used to ground the conclusion that, should philosophy wish to influence technological change, an effective method of doing so could be the articulation of ethical maxims and the supervision of their translation into a real world setting. (shrink)

Tri filosofskikh "opravdanii︠a︡" (teodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, antropodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, kosmodit︠s︡ei︠a︡ Serebri︠a︡nogo veka) -- Russkai︠a︡ sofiologii︠a︡ i kabbala -- S. Bulgakov : nauka sofiologii︠a︡ (ili konet︠s︡ religii) -- Tretiĭ Zavet o. Sergii︠a︡ Bulgakova -- Tretʹezavetnai︠a︡ misterii︠a︡ ("malai︠a︡" trilogii︠a︡ Bulgakova).

v. 1. pt. 1. Babaji's glimpses of the Tamil 18 Siddhas. pt. 2. [non-Roman data].

In Alfonso de Cartagena's 'Memoriale virtutum' (1422) María Morrás and Jeremy Lawrance offer a new edition from the manuscripts of a compilation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics addressed by the major Castilian intellectual of the day, bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, to the heir to the throne of Portugal, crown prince Duarte. The work was a speculum principis, an education for the future king in the virtues suitable to a statesman; Cartagena's choice of Aristotle was thus a significant index of the advent (...) of new Renaissance ideas. This edition shows how the "memorial" throws light on the ideological transformation of society those ideas would bring, setting new ethical guidelines for the ruling class at the crossroads between medieval feudalism and Renaissance absolutism. (shrink)

Abstract:During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth of the philosophy of Hegel. This article attempts to outline Hegel's organizational practice. It argues that Hegel's encyclopedia was a reaction against the Enlightenment encyclopedia, and that it attempted to restore the systematic mindset of pre-modern reference books. Yet it did this, not in a straightforward fashion, but by developing a (...) method for organizing material that both stresses the interconnectedness of knowledge and promises to be highly scalable. In its attempt to trace the Hegelian organizational method, this article revisits and calls attention to a forgotten work in Hegel scholarship by Michael John Petry, who was the first writer to seriously stress the importance of classification in Hegel's work. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Hegelianism and information organization can be brought into fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue. (shrink)