Until fairly recently, psycholinguists and linguists have tended to provide an understanding of language without due concern to the situation in which it was spoken; it is as though they have largely considered context to be a static given. Such a viewpoint is rather surprising when most of us could recount instances during a day when our style of speech has changed. For instance, we are aware how often our speech becomes grammatically less complex with our children, that we tend (...) to speak more formally, enunciate more precisely with our superiors, talk more slowly for foreigners, and so forth. Indeed, the nature of the setting, the topic of discourse and the type of person to whom we are talking all interact to determine the way we speak in a particular situation. In many ways, sociolinguistics emerged as an attempt to fill this yawning gap in the language sciences and it has made a tremendous impact on psycholinguistic theory in the last decade. For example, people are now looking at language development not only with an emphasis on how children acquire rules of grammar (their linguistic competence), but also on the process which enables them to use these rules appropriately in different social situations (their communicative competence). Such thinking has also made a contribution to foreign language dearning techniques as educators seem more aware that if people are to become really skilled in another language they should not only know the grammatical rules for its use but the social ones as well. (shrink)

This commentary addresses emotional mimicry from a communication accommodation theory (CAT) perspective. After reviewing CAT, we outline commonalities between CAT and the Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulator view. We then discuss how CAT and the Emotional Mimicry as Social Regulator view can contribute to each other. Finally, we provide directions for future research on emotional mimicry informed by CAT, including ways to incorporate individual differences, listener-oriented perceptions, and variables relevant to families.

Few figures of the Middle Ages command the attention of so many modern disciplines as Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253). Theology, Philosophy, History, and Science are all areas which his life and thought continue to have significance and to inspire re-interpretation. Accompanied by a series of original commentaries, this new edition of Grosseteste's work, with English translation, draws together the perspectives of modern scientists and medieval specialists. Volume I of a six volume series, Knowing and Speaking presents two of the earliest (...) of Grosseteste's works, the treatises On the Liberal Arts and On the Generation of Sounds. These are accompanied by a significant Middle English treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts whose anonymous fifteenth-century author translated and excerpted passages from Grosseteste's treatises in a re-imagining of their structure and function.0Each work is treated separately within the volume, which is constructed in three parts. On the Liberal Arts sets Grosseteste's thoughts on the arts subjects and emphasises moral concerns about the purpose of learning. On the Generation of Sounds builds on the theories and statements of On the Liberal Arts in connection to the production of sound, elaborating the earlier position, relating the generation of sounds to human vocal and speech production. (shrink)

Most of our interactions with others occur within the framework of recurring social situations, and the language choices we make are intimately tied to situational features. Although the interdependence between language and social situations has been well recognized at least since G. H. Mead developed his symbolic interactionist theory, psychologists have been reluctant to devote much interest to this domain until recently. Yet it is arguable that a detailed understanding of the subtle links between situational features and language use must (...) lie at the heart of any genuinely social psychology. This volume contains original contributions from psychologists, linguists and philosophers from the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Australia who share an interest in the social-psychological aspects of language. Their work represents one of the first concentrated attempts to chart the possibilities of this exciting field. It is perhaps in order to say a few words about the origins of this book. The need for a volume integrating research on language and social situations first emerged during the 2nd International Conference of Language and Social Psychology at Bristol University in 1983, at which I was convening a symposium with a similar title at the request of the organizers, Peter Robinson and Howard Giles. When they first approached me with this idea in 1982, I gladly accepted, since my own research on cognitive representations of social episodes seemed eminently relevant to a symposium on language and social situations. (shrink)

The loss of the federally protected constitutional right to an abortion is a threat to the already tenuous autonomy of pregnant people, and may augur future challenges to their right to refuse unwanted obstetric interventions. Even before Roe’s demise, pregnancy led to constraints on autonomy evidenced by clinician-led legal incursions against patients who refused obstetric interventions. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court found that the right to liberty espoused in the Constitution does not extend to a (...) pregnant person’s right to an abortion. With Roe’s demise, the right to request specific types of care has been vitiated. The same argument underpinning that holding may now become ballast for attacks on the traditionally more robust right, the right to refuse. Here we discuss how the elevation of fetal and embryonic rights may lead to a cascade of medical intrusions and deprivations of liberty against pregnant persons, and offer an argument opposing these improprieties. (shrink)

It is argued that to believe is to believe true. That is, when one believes a proposition one thereby believes the proposition to be true. This is a point about what it is to believe rather than about the aim of belief or the standard of correctness for belief. The point that to believe is to believe true appears to be an analytic truth about the concept of belief. It also appears to be essential to the state of belief that (...) to believe is to believe true. This is not just a contingent fact about our ordinary psychology, since even a non-ordinary believer must believe a proposition that they believe to be true. Nor is the idea that one may accept a theory as empirically adequate rather than as true a counter-example, since such acceptance combines belief in the truth of the observational claims of a theory with suspension of belief with respect to the non-observational claims of a theory. Nor is the fact that to believe is to believe true to be explained in terms of an inference governed by the T-scheme from the belief that P to the belief that P is true, since there is no inference from the former to the latter. To believe that P just is to believe that P is true. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Future Directions for Human Cloning by Embryo Splitting:After the HullabalooCynthia B. Cohen (bio)In October 1993, a paper entitled, "Experimental Cloning of Human Polyploid Embryos Using an Artificial Zona Pellucida," was presented at a joint meeting of the American Fertility Society and the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. Although it was awarded a prize, its authors, who are affiliated with George Washington University, decided against calling a press conference to (...) announce their findings. Word of their experiment soon leaked out, however, and the New York Times blazoned on its front page that human embryo cloning had been achieved. The story was accompanied by a diagram of cloning by nuclear transplantation.Newspapers and television networks around the world picked up the story and embellished it. The idea of unlimited, xeroxed copies of human beings gripped the public imagination. Wild scenarios of hundreds of Hitlers plotting to take over the world and of clones giving birth to their own twins enlivened media reports. Only gradually did it become clear that the term "polyploid" in the title of the paper referred to abnormal embryos that could never develop into living human beings and that "cloning" referred to embryo splitting or twinning, not to nuclear transplantation or the transfer of a donor nucleus into an enucleated egg. Once this sank into public consciousness, the "hullabaloo," as Dr. Howard W Jones, Jr., called it, died down.It left in its wake unanswered questions about the ethics of splitting embryos. During the height of the publicity given to the George Washington experiment, newspaper and TV stories had not delved in any depth into the ethical issues it raised. Ethicists, given limited time to discuss the ethical questions at stake, had been quoted in quick, simplistic responses. Some had offered little analysis of the rights and wrongs of embryo splitting, but, revealing tremendous creative talent, had spun out [End Page 187] imaginary and frightening applications of the procedure. This was a story essentially about ethics in which ethics was never really discussed.The National Advisory Board on Ethics in Reproduction* (NABER), an independent, multidisciplinary group that addresses ethical issues in modern reproductive science, technology, and care, became concerned about the sparsity of reflective ethical debate about embryo splitting. NABER's chair, Albert Jonsen, observed that "reporters phoning ethicists for comment and ethicists appearing on talk shows do not a debate make. Debate requires face to face (or at least essay to essay) argument among persons sharing the same information. This has yet to take place." Consequently, NABER decided to convene a workshop on human cloning by embryo splitting at the National Academy of Sciences in February 1994. The board invited participants who would provide a broad range of opinion about the ethical and public policy issues entailed by human embryo splitting. Embryologists, ethicists, reproductive biologists, public policy experts, staff from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), legal scholars, journalists, and infertility specialists were among those who participated. The feature articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal derive from that workshop. Their authors were given free rein to take whatever stance they deemed ethically supportable.The first article is designed to provide some understanding of the science of human cloning as a basis for exploring the ethical issues raised by this set of techniques. Jacques Cohen, a leading reproductive embryologist, and Giles Tomkin, a science writer, both of Cornell University Medical School, explain, in a way that is clear to laypersons and biologists alike, the meaning, nature, and function of cloning. They discuss recent: advances in this area and offer an assessment of feasible uses of human cloning procedures, hoping to dispel what they view as mistaken fears about its future applications. Dr. Howard W Jones, Jr., a pioneer infertility specialist, briefly comments on Cohen and Tomkin's paper, pointing out that embryo splitting may not improve pregnancy results if genetic heterogeneity is required for successful embryo transfer and implantation.In the next article, three major ethical arguments against human cloning by embryo splitting are analyzed and rejected by Ruth Macklin, an expert in reproductive ethics from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She finds the first argument, that the worth of individuals... (shrink)

Published in 1982 by CUP (pb. 2009) it discusses the forms of materialism then current, including Davidson, early Rorty, but concentrating on Smart and Armstrong, and arguing that central state materialism fails to give a better 'occurrent' account of conscious states than does behaviourism/functionalism, as Armstrong claims. The book starts with a version of the 'knowledge argument' and ends with a chapter claiming that our conception of matter/the physical is more problematic than our conception of mind.

The purpose of this study is to expand our understanding of the factors that influence ethical behavioral intentions of public accountants. Recent scandals have dominated the news and have caused legislators, regulators and the public to question the role of the accounting profession. Legislative changes have brought about major structural changes in the profession and continued scrutiny will surely lead to further changes. Thus, developing an understanding of the personal and contextual factors that influence ethical decisions is critical. An extension (...) of the theory of planned behavior [Ajzen, I.: 1985, Action Control-From Cognition to Behavior ], the model used in this study examined the influence of personal, social and organizational factors on ethical intentions. Specifically, the individual level model tested direct eects of attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, moral sensitivity and ethical climate. Professionals from five accounting firms completed a survey that measured responses to ethical dilemmas related to the public accounting domain. To minimize the potential impact of common method bias, the survey instrument was administered in two phases. Hypotheses were evaluated using a structural modeling technique, partial least squares. Results show strong support for a direct relationship between attitudes and ethical intentions. The proposed direct eect of subjective norms was not supported. However, a significant relationship between subjective norms and attitudes was found. Professionals' attitudes towards ethical issues clearly influence intentions. Moreover, this study illustrates the potential influence of social factors in attitude formation. Future research should explore the factors in the public accounting domain that most strongly influence attitude formation. This study suggests that the theory of reasoned action oers a useful framework for exploring these issues. (shrink)

This article examines where Kant stands on the question of the redistribution of wealth and income both nationally and globally. Kant is rightly seen as a radical reformer of the world order from a political standpoint seeking a republican, federative worldwide system; can he also be seen as wanting to bring about an equally dramatic shift from an economic perspective? To answer this question we have first of all to address the question of whether he is an egalitarian or an (...) inegalitarian at the national level. Certainly there are certain social and material inequalities within a civil society Kant is prepared to accept and there are some he is not. This would imply that he would affirm certain inequalities at an international level and that there are others upon which he would recommend action. Thus the question arises as to whether or not it is appropriate for Kantians to regard the current enormous inequalities in wealth and income between individuals living in different parts of the globe as scandalous and in need of change. The paper throughout relates the problem of distributive justice within the state to the problem of distributive justice amongst states, arguing that this approach is warranted by Kant's own method. Particular attention is paid to how Kant's own approach to political philosophy may be deployed to underpin a change to a distinctive type of international distributive justice. (shrink)

This article argues against two theories that obscure our understanding of emotions whose objects are other emotions. The tripartite model of emotional intentionality holds that an emotion's relation to its object is necessarily mediated by an additional representational state; I argue that metaemotions are an exception to this claim. The hierarchical model positions metaemotions as stable, epistemically privileged higher-order appraisals of lower-level emotions; I argue that this clashes with various features of complex metaemotional experiences. The article therefore serves dual purposes, (...) offering metaemotions as a counterexample to an intuitive thesis about emotional intentionality, and examining their intentional structure in its own right. (shrink)

"Now we can join Gandhi and Tolstoy and nameless others who encountered this vigorous and invigorating book. Welcome to a company of radicals who believed we could and should stop eating non-human animals. They brought vegetarianism out of history and into the here and now." -- from the introductionEthical vegetarianism is no recent development, as this unrivaled historical anthology dramatizes. When it was first published 120 years ago, countless people read and endorsed The Ethics of Diet. But then it became (...) a rare book, hard to find even in libraries. For countless more readers, it is at last available again. In this classic of vegetarian writing, Howard Williams presents a line of thought, a continuous thread, a tradition, a catena of protestation against living on "Butchery." What he finds striking is the variety of the witnesses, the prophets of "Reformed Dietetics" who have "shrunk from the rgime of blood," including Gautama Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, Hesiod, Epicurus, Seneca, Ovid, Thomas More, Montaigne, Mandeville, Pope, Voltaire, Swedenborg, Wesley, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Lamar-tine, Michelet, Bentham, Sinclair, Schopenhauer, and Thoreau. Their words are accompanied by the vigorous narrative voice of Williams himself, who put to rest, once and for all, the idea that vegetarianism is a fad. (shrink)

Critical Reflections on Teacher Education argues that educational philosophy can improve the quality of teacher education programs in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The book documents the ways in which the market model of education propagated by governments and outside agencies hastens the decline of philosophy of education and turns teachers into technicians in hierarchical school systems. A grounding in educational philosophy, however, enables future teachers to make informed and qualified judgements defining their professional lives. In a (...) clear and accessible style, Howard Woodhouse uses a combination of reasoned argument and narrative to show that educational philosophy, together with Indigenous knowledge systems, forms the basis of a climate change education capable of educating students about the central issue of our time. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider in detail a paper in which Peter Winch discusses the absolute nature of the moral ought. Anscombe had argued that the notion of an absolute ought presupposes the idea of divine law. Winch's aim is to show her mistaken. On his view, it is the idea of divine that depends on the notion of an absolute ought.It is argued that Winch is not successful in his criticism. Indeed, were we to accept his (...) assumptions, we should be forced to conclude that the moral ought is not absolute at all, but relative. (shrink)

This is a reply to Alex Grzankowski’s comment on my paper, ‘To Believe is to Believe True’. I argue that one may believe a proposition to be true without possessing the concept of truth. I note that to believe the proposition P to be true is not the same as to believe the proposition ‘P is true’. This avoids the regress highlighted by Grzankowski in which the concept of truth is employed an infinite number of times in a single belief.

In his own lifetime Confucius never attained real power and he died feeling that his life had been a failure; yet his teaching came to dominate the political and ritual life of China for thousands of years and to inspire many thinkers in the outside world. Howard Smith describes China in the sixth century B.C. and shows how its history of internal conflict, together with the cult of ancestor worship, gave rise to Confucius' central doctrines of order and 'piety'. He (...) relates how a few disciples kept this teaching alive after Confucius' death and how it came finally to be accepted throughout the huge Chinese empire as the basis for political, educational and ceremonial life. He describes also how Confucianism was slowly changed by the rival philosophies and religions with which it had to compete. This book is therefore not only a history of one of the world's greatest systems of belief but also a study of how such a system both creates and is created by the society in which it exists. -- From publisher's description. (shrink)

A central dispute in the ethics of belief concerns what kinds of considerations can be reasons for belief. Nishi Shah has recently argued that the correct explanation of transparency in doxastic deliberation—the psychological phenomenon that only considerations taken to bear on the truth of p can be deliberated from to conclude in believing that p—settles this debate in favor of strict evidentialism, the view that only evidence can be a reason for belief. I argue that Shah’s favored explanation of transparency (...) fails to imply this result—that it leaves open the possibility that there can be non-evidential reasons for belief. The upshot is that practical non-evidentialists—those who hold that there are at least some non-evidential, practical reasons for belief—can happily accept the fact of transparency, and Shah’s explanation of it, without having to abandon their view. (shrink)

We study the relationship between the countable axiom of choice and the Tychonoff product theorem for countable families of topological spaces.

A survey of editors shows they do claim to enforce ethics provisions in the newsrooms and raises questions editors are encouraged to explore relative to newsroom ethics. This report is on a study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors Ethics Committee, Heath J Meriwether, vice?chair. Printed with permission.

In this paper I provide an interpretative reading Spencer and Gillen. What is read depends in part on what one is looking for, on the purposes for which it is being read, and, what is there to be read depends partly on the audiences that the author has in. I provide a critique of social Darwinist and post-colonial readings of their work. I employ the concept of a motivating theme, which can be applied to segments of the text, which share (...) a common purpose. The themes reflect the ways in which different scholars — historians and anthropologists — have read into the text. I will consider three categories of motivating themes: general contextualisations, ethnographic descriptions, and explanations of data. My discussion of their explanatory approach is centred on their analysis of ritual performances. The accounts of the rituals are not just unanalysed ethnography but are ordered by relating ritual event to social organisation. The centrality of ritual to Aboriginal society has contributed to the lasting impact of their work. (shrink)

In previous research Libet discovered that a critical time period for neural activation is necessary in order for a stimulus to become conscious. This necessary time period varies from subject to subject. In this current study, six subjects for whom the time for neural activation of consciousness had been previously determined were administered a battery of psychological tests on the basis of which ratings were made of degree of repressiveness. As hypothesized, repressive subjects had a longer critical time period for (...) neural activation of consciousness, suggesting the possibility that this neurophysiological time factor is a necessary condition for the development of repression. (shrink)