In this article, we focus on the mentoring process, and we argue that the internal and external pressures extant at research universities may create a research culture that may be antithetical to appropriate mentoring. We developed a scale based on motivation theory to determine the perceived research culture in departments and research laboratories, and a mentoring scale to determine approaches to mentoring graduate students. Participants were 610 faculty members across 49 departments at a research oriented university. The findings were that (...) a mastery-oriented research climate and an outcome-oriented research climate were manifested at the university. More importantly, each research climate had its own unique impact on how the faculty approached mentoring graduate students. A mastery research climate was related to a more supportive approach to mentoring than the outcome research climate. We concluded by suggesting that the outcome research climate may have an adverse effect on effective mentoring and on maintaining research ethics. (shrink)

We consider the task of theorem proving in Lambek calculi and their generalisation to ‘multimodal residuation calculi’. These form an integral part of categorial logic, a logic of signs stemming from categorial grammar, of the basis of which language processing is essentially theorem proving. The demand of this application is not just for efficient processing of some or other specific calculus, but for methods that will be generally applicable to categorial logics.It is proposed that multimodal cases be treated by dealing (...) with the highest common factor of all the connectives as linear validity. The prosodic aspects are encoded in labels, in effect the term-structure of quantified linear logic. The correctness condition on proof nets can be implemented by SLD resolution in linear logic with unification on labels/terms limited to one way matching. A suitable unification strategy is obtained for calculi of discontinuity by normalisation of the ground goal term followed by recursive descent and redex pattern matching on the head term. (shrink)

Category-specific impairments of object recognition and naming are among the most intriguing disorders in neuropsychology, affecting the retrieval of knowledge about either living or nonliving things. They can give us insight into the nature of our representations of objects: Have we evolved different neural systems for recognizing different categories of object? What kinds of knowledge are important for recognizing particular objects? How does visual similarity within a category influence object recognition and representation? What is the nature of our semantic knowledge (...) about different objects? We review the evidence on category-specific impairments, arguing that deficits even for one class of object cannot be accounted for in terms of a single information processing disorder across all patients; problems arise at contrasting loci in different patients. The same apparent pattern of impairment can be produced by damage to different loci. According to a new processing framework for object recognition and naming, the hierarchical interactive theory, we have a hierarchy of highly interactive stored representations. HIT explains the variety of patients in terms of lesions at different levels of processing and different forms of stored knowledge used both for particular tasks and for particular categories of object. Key Words: category-specific deficits; functional imaging; hierarchical models; interactive activation models; neuropsychology; object recognition; perceptual and functional knowledge. (shrink)

(2006). Gray’s Elegy for Progress. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy: Vol. 9, The Political Theory of John Gray, pp. 227-241.

If all dependent expressions were adjacent some variety of immediate constituent analysis would suffice for grammar, but syntactic and semantic mismatches are characteristic of natural language; indeed this is a, or the, central problem in grammar. Logical categorial grammar reduces grammar to logic: an expression is well-formed if and only if an associated sequent is a theorem of a categorial logic. The paradigmatic categorial logic is the Lambek calculus, but being a logic of concatenation the Lambek calculus can only capture (...) discontinuous dependencies when they are peripheral. In this paper we present the displacement calculus, which is a logic of intercalation as well as concatenation and which subsumes the Lambek calculus. On the empirical side, we apply the new calculus to discontinuous idioms, quantification, VP ellipsis, medial extraction, pied-piping, appositive relativisation, parentheticals, gapping, comparative subdeletion, cross-serial dependencies, reflexivization, anaphora, dative alternation, and particle shift. On the technical side, we prove that the calculus enjoys Cut-elimination. (shrink)

This book aims to provide fresh perspectives on Vattimo and Zabala's groundbreaking foundational text, Hermeneutic Communism, from 2011. The contributors to this collection of essays explore various facets of Vattimo and Zabala's "anarchic hermeneutics" and "weak communism" in order to investigate the concepts resulting from them, such as "framed democracies," "armed capitalism" and "conservative impositions." Vattimo and Zabala's text is one of the most innovative contributions to the current debate on Communism, in which authors such as Badiou, Negri, and Rancière (...) have been the protagonists so far. The unique and original contribution of Vattimo and Zabala's position consists in letting politics evolve from one of the anarchic origins of hermeneutics: the end of truth. This triggers the essential question of how far politics is possible without truth. One of the essential, methodologically innovative characteristics of this collection is its dialogical, hermeneutical form, which is achieved by inserting Vattimo and Zabala's personal reactions to each essay in the book. By responding to each chapter in turn, Vattimo and Zabala establish a hermeneutic dialogue with the contributors. Thus hermeneutics will not only be a central topic, but also an epistemological, concrete application of Vattimo and Zabala's theories. An indispensable critical tool for students, researchers, professors, activists and general readers interested in the philosophical and political debate on Communism, which encompasses a wide variety of disciplines such as philosophy, political science, sociology, postcolonial studies, critical theory and Latin American studies. Offering an innovative first analysis of the new concepts of Hermeneutic Communism, this book represents a vital contribution to the understanding of the intriguing interrelation between philosophical hermeneutics and political communism. (shrink)

In this response to Andrew Benjamin, I examine the manner in which Working With Walter Benjamin interweaves destruction and inauguration to account for the ‘othering’ of the social order. The question of where to locate the normative index of a radically altered social and political world is particularly at issue. While Professor Benjamin argues that the ontological fabric of human relationality bears a ‘counter-measure’ to State sovereignty and capitalism, I insist on the power of concrete historical struggles against oppression to (...) prefigure and orient a transformed world. (shrink)

Many variants of categorial grammar assume an underlying logic which is associative and linear. In relation to left extraction, the former property is challenged by island domains, which involve nonassociativity, and the latter property is challenged by parasitic gaps, which involve nonlinearity. We present a version of type logical grammar including ‘structural inhibition’ for nonassociativity and ‘structural facilitation’ for nonlinearity and we give an account of relativisation including islands and parasitic gaps and their interaction.

We present work demonstrating that the nature of an object for our visual system depends on the actions we are programming and on the presence of action relations between stimuli. For example, patients who show visual extinction are more likely to become aware of two objects if the objects fall in appropriate visual locations for a common action. This effect of the action relations between objects is modulated both by the familiarity of the positioning of the objects for action, and (...) by the mere possibility of action (the ‘affordance’) between the objects. In addition, the programming of an action to a part of an object alters the representation of that object, making the ‘part’ into the object selected by the visual system. These results point to object coding being a rather flexible process, affected not only by the perceptual properties of stimuli but also by the relations between these properties and action. We discuss the implications for theories of perception as well as considering why action information, in particular, may be important for perception. (shrink)

\ is a 7000 line Prolog parser/theorem-prover for logical categorial grammar. In such logical categorial grammar syntax is universal and grammar is reduced to logic: an expression is grammatical if and only if an associated logical statement is a theorem of a fixed calculus. Since the syntactic component is invariant, being the logic of the calculus, logical categorial grammar is purely lexicalist and a particular language model is defined by just a lexical dictionary. The foundational logic of continuity was established (...) by Lambek while a corresponding extension including also logic of discontinuity was established by Morrill and Valentín :167–192, 2010). \ implements a logic including as primitive connectives the continuous and discontinuous connectives of the displacement calculus, additives, 1st order quantifiers, normal modalities, bracket modalities, and universal and existential subexponentials. In this paper we review the rules of inference for these primitive connectives and their linguistic applications, and we survey the principles of Andreoli’s focusing, and of a generalisation of van Benthem’s count-invariance, on the basis of which \ is implemented. (shrink)

Discontinuity refers to the character of many natural language constructions wherein signs differ markedly in their prosodic and semantic forms. As such it presents interesting demands on monostratal computational formalisms which aspire to descriptive adequacy. Pied piping, in particular, is argued by Pollard (1988) to motivate phrase structure-style feature percolation. In the context of categorial grammar, Bach (1981, 1984), Moortgat (1988, 1990, 1991) and others have sought to provide categorial operators suited to discontinuity. These attempts encounter certain difficulties with respect (...) to model theory and/or proof theory, difficulties which the current proposals are intended to resolve.Lambek calculus is complete for interpretation byresiduation with respect to the adjunction operation of groupoid algebras (Buszkowski 1986). In Moortgat and Morrill (1991) it is shown how to give calculi for families of categorial operators, each defined by residuation with respect to an operation of prosodic adjunction (associative, non-associative, or with interactive axioms). The present paper treats discontinuity in this way, by residuation with respect to three adjunctions: + (associative), (.,.) (split-point marking), andW (wrapping) related by the equations 1+s 2+s 3=(s 1,s 3)Ws 2. We show how the resulting methods apply to discontinuous functors, quantifier scope and quantifier scope ambiguity, pied piping, and subject and object antecedent reflexivisation. (shrink)

While across the animal kingdom offspring are born smaller than their parents, notable exceptions exist. Several dipteran species belonging to the Hippoboscoidea superfamily can produce offspring larger than themselves. In this essay, the blood‐feeding tsetse is focused on. It is suggested that the extreme reproductive strategy of this fly is enabled by feeding solely on highly nutritious blood, and producing larval offspring that are soft and malleable. This immense reproductive expenditure may have evolved to avoid competition with other biting flies. (...) Tsetse also transmit blood‐borne parasites that cause the fatal diseases called African trypanosomiases. It is discussed how tsetse life history and reproductive strategy profoundly influence the type of vector control interventions used to reduce fly populations. In closing, it is argued that the unusual life history of tsetse warrants their preservation in the areas where human and animal health is not threatened. (shrink)

Patient decision aids enable patients to be better informed about the potential benefits and harms of their healthcare options. Certification of patient decision aids at the national level in the United States is a critical step towards responsible governance—primarily as a quality measure that increases patients’ safety, as mandated in the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Certification would provide a verification process to identify conflicts of interest that may otherwise bias the scientific evidence presented in decision aids. (...) Certification also benefits clinicians who may otherwise face malpractice claims based on harm to patients caused by possible reliance on patient decision aids that are inaccurate, incomplete, or presented in a manner that biases the patient’s decision. Existing work by the International Patient Decision Aid Standards Collaboration could guide the establishment of a certification process within the U.S. This article argues for national certification of patient decision aids and discusses how that may be achieved. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the mentoring process, and we argue that the internal and external pressures extant at research universities may create a research culture that may be antithetical to appropriate mentoring. We developed a scale based on motivation theory to determine the perceived research culture in departments and research laboratories, and a mentoring scale to determine approaches to mentoring graduate students. Participants were 610 faculty members across 49 departments at a research oriented university. The findings were that (...) a mastery-oriented research climate and an outcome-oriented research climate were manifested at the university. More importantly, each research climate had its own unique impact on how the faculty approached mentoring graduate students. A mastery research climate was related to a more supportive approach to mentoring than the outcome research climate. We concluded by suggesting that the outcome research climate may have an adverse effect on effective mentoring and on maintaining research ethics. (shrink)

I propose in this paper to examine and analyse the concept of śūnyatā as it is expressed in the Hrdaya sūtras of the Buddhist prajñā-pāramitā literature and in the Mū1amadhyamaka-kārikās of Nāgārjuna. I shall attempt to show some of the difficulties involved in seeking an objective referent or counter part for the concept and also in trying to preserve the tension implicit in the affirmation of the middle way. I hope to indicate that the via negativa approach has positive implications (...) for the understanding of śūnyatā and that in the final analysis we may have to look for its meaning in the way it is used. (shrink)

To generate coherent behaviour, the brain needs to attend selectively to the many objects that are present in the environment, but this poses several questions. How does the brain know which objects 'belong together'? How does the information from different senses get combined? How does this help to plan and carry out actions? The subject of attentional mechanisms has a long history in cognitive psychology, as it is the key to making sense of the visual world. However, new developments in (...) cognitive neuroscience, and greater understanding of how attention and action are integrated, have transformed the field. This book is the first to bring together leading researchers to discuss the convergence of experimental findings in the following areas: Visual selective attention Attention and perceptual integration Spatial representation and attention Visual attention and action Control of attention Attention, Space, and Action provides a unique combination of perspectives that will appeal to students and researchers from psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy. (shrink)

Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event develops Hegel's radical perspective of speculative thought as a way of reclaiming and revitalizing the sense of the future and its possibilities. Engaging with such figures as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Fredric Jameson, Glyn Daly articulates the distinctness of speculative philosophy and draws its implications for new debates in areas of science, politics, capitalism, ideology, ethics, and the event." -- Publisher's description.

This article focuses on the recent work of Slavoj Žižek and his extensive critique of poststructuralism and deconstruction from a Lacanian perspective. In this context, it examines Žižek's provocative approach to questions of social reality, ideology and nationalism, and explores the potential of such an approach for an analysis of crucial themes in British political culture. In addition, the article investigates the nature of the encounter between psychoanalysis and deconstruction — and especially where explicit referral is made to the terrain (...) of politics — with a view to breaking the apparent deadlock that has emerged. Through the development of a post-Marxist critique, it is argued that an alternative perspective can be formulated which combines the insights of both psychoanalysis and deconstruction and, at the same time, is able to transcend the limitations of each. (shrink)