Two experiments are reported that evaluated route learning of youth with DS, youth with Intellectual Disability and not DS (ID), and typically developing children (TD) matched on Mental Age (MA). In both experiments, participants learned routes with eight choice-points presented via computer. Several objects were placed along the route that could be used as landmarks. Participants were shown the correct route once and then were asked retraced the route without assistance. In Experiment 1 we found that the TD children and (...) ID participants performed very similarly. They learned the route in the same number of attempts, committed the same number of errors while learning the route, and recalled approximately the same number of landmarks. The participants with DS performed significantly worse on both measures of navigation (attempts and errors) and also recalled significantly fewer landmarks. In Experiment 2, we attempted to reduce TD and ID vs DS differences by focusing participants’ attention on the landmarks. Half of the participants in each group were instructed to identify the landmarks as they passed them the first time. The participants with DS again committed more errors than the participants in the ID and TD groups in the navigation task. In addition, they recalled fewer landmarks. While landmark identification improved landmark memory for both groups, it did not have a significant impact on navigation. Participants with DS still performed more poorly than did the TD and ID participants. Of additional interest, we observed that the performance of persons with DS correlated with different ability measures than did the performance of the other groups. The results the two experiments point to a problem in navigation for persons with DS that exceeds expectations based solely on intellectual level. (shrink)

Five symposia from the 25th annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy focus on cognitive suicide, the explanatory role of content, Cartesian error and the objectivity of perception, social content and psychological content, and belief attribution and context.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the sixth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy.

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the fifth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy.

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

This book intends to make known, in a detailed but accessible way to the general public, an old idea, but which has had a renewed interest in recent years: the proposal of attributing an unconditional basic income for all. This idea, often discarded and disqualified for allegedly belonging to the mere domain of utopia, understood in a pejorative sense as something unrealizable, has been the target of the interest of many people (academics, politicians, businesspeople, activists and, of course, all citizens (...) concerned with the common good) is presented as being feasible through several concrete experiences and pilot projects. (shrink)

This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But (...) Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Many debates in biomedical ethics today involve inconsistencies in defining the key term, person. Both sides of the abortion debate, for instance, beg the question about what constitutes personhood. This book explores the arguments concerning definitions of personhood in the history of modern philosophy, and then constructs a superior model, defined in terms of distinctive features. This model is shown to have distinct advantages over the necessary and sufficient condition models of personhood launched by essentialists. Philosophers historically have been correct (...) about what some of the pivotal distinctive features of personhood are, _e.q._, rationality, communications and self-consciousness, but they have been wrong about the _methods_ of recognizing and asserting personhood, and about the relative importance of feelings. In clinical care, complaints often surface that care is not personal. This book aims to improve care through providing a method of attending to patients as people. Charts in the Appendices show that where physicians attended to personal features important to their patients, sometimes the patients rated the care even higher than the physician did. The book will be useful to health-care providers whose goals include improving quality of care, listening to patients, and preventing malpractice. (shrink)

Grice proposed to investigate 'the total signification of the utterance'. One persistent criticism of Grice's taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information. This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: 'generalized implicature', 'explicature', 'unarticulated constituents', 'default heuristics', 'impliciture'. In this study we first take a sample of such phenomena and, from the point of view of pure pragmatics, survey the central descriptions of the content expressed and the mechanisms that (...) might deliver these contents. We then, from the point of view of experimental pragmatics, focus on two accounts: Levinson's I-heuristic, and Bach's standardization. We find experimental evidence for the existence of such implicitures, and for the use of language specific standardizations over language neutral background information. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

De Morgan's Formal Logic, which was published on virtually the same day in 1847 as Boole's The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, contains a logic of complex terms (LCT) which has been sadly neglected. It is surprising to find that LCT contains almost a full theory of Boolean algebra. This paper will: (1) provide some background to LCT; (2) outline its main features; (3) point out some gaps in it; (4) compare it with Boole's algebra; (5) show that it is a (...) lattice-theoretical formulation of Boolean algebra; (6) discuss some issues of historical priority; and (7) conclude with the puzzle of LCT's lack of influence. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to understand the method by which Thomas Solly (1816?1875), in his Syllabus of Logic (1839), provided a mathematical formulation of the traditional syllogism. The symbolism, in which analogues of multiplication, addition and subtraction are applied to term variables, is very puzzling at first. This paper provides a clear interpretation for this symbolism and explains why it works. It also addresses other notable features of the symbolism. The paper concludes by comparing the results which Solly obtained (...) by symbolic means with those which he obtained non?symbolically. (shrink)

In ‘The Pregnancy Rescue Case: why abortion is immoral’, Hendricks presents The Pregnancy Rescue Case. In this reply I argue that even if it would be better (i.e., less bad) for the abortion to be prevented in The Pregnancy Rescue Case, that does not mean that typical abortions are impermissible. I also argue that there is a possible explanation, consistent with the pro-choice view and empirically testable, as to why people would think it better for the abortion to be prevented (...) in The Pregnancy Rescue Case. (shrink)

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, _Thing Knowledge _demands that (...) we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more. (shrink)

Read this excellent collection of informative papers in the field to stimulate your ow the field and readers interested in the nature of the discipline of ...

It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Grice’s Razor is a methodological principle that many philosophers and linguists have used to help justify pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena over semantic explanations. A number of authors in the debate over contextualism argue that an invariant semantics together with Grice’s (1975) conversational principles can account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims. I show here that the defense of Grice’s Razor found in these “Gricean invariantists,” and its use against epistemic contextualism, display all the problems pointed out earlier in (...) Davis (1998). The everyday variation in acceptable knowledge claims is better explained in terms of implicature than indexicality, but general conversational principles shed little light on whether ‘know’ is used hyperbolically, meiotically, or loosely in a context, although this issue is crucial in deciding what if anything ‘S knows p’ implicates. I present reasons favoring an account of the representative bank case in terms of loose use, making clear how they differ from Grice’s Razor. (shrink)

An examination of the state of journalism and the need for change. For students and professionals on journalism fields.

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Questions of Meaning Theories of Meaning Language, Mind and Metaphysics: Questions of Priority Semantic Theories: Davidson's Programme Analysing the Concept of Meaning: Grice's Programme Pragmatics: Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory.

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...) add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of (...) modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)