The literature contains a disconnect between accounts of how humans learn lexical semantic representations for words. Theories generally propose that lexical semantics are learned either through perceptual experience or through exposure to regularities in language. We propose here a model to integrate these two information sources. Specifically, the model uses the global structure of memory to exploit the redundancy between language and perception in order to generate inferred perceptual representations for words with which the model has no perceptual experience. We (...) test the model on a variety of different datasets from grounded cognition experiments and demonstrate that this diverse set of results can be explained as perceptual simulation (cf. Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson, 2003) within a global memory model. (shrink)

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language. The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably (...) between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. (shrink)

Distributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co‐occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co‐occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co‐occurrences with vector accumulation. All of these models learned from positive information only: Words that occur together within a context become related to each other. A recent class of distributional models, referred to as (...) neural embedding models, are based on a prediction process embedded in the functioning of a neural network: Such models predict words that should surround a target word in a given context (e.g., word2vec; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). An error signal derived from the prediction is used to update each word's representation via backpropagation. However, another key difference in predictive models is their use of negative information in addition to positive information to develop a semantic representation. The models use negative examples to predict words that should not surround a word in a given context. As before, an error signal derived from the prediction prompts an update of the word's representation, a procedure referred to as negative sampling. Standard uses of word2vec recommend a greater or equal ratio of negative to positive sampling. The use of negative information in developing a representation of semantic information is often thought to be intimately associated with word2vec's prediction process. We assess the role of negative information in developing a semantic representation and show that its power does not reflect the use of a prediction mechanism. Finally, we show how negative information can be efficiently integrated into classic count‐based semantic models using parameter‐free analytical transformations. (shrink)

Distributional models of lexical semantics are capable of acquiring sophisticated representations of word meanings. The main theoretical insight provided by these models is that they demonstrate the systematic connection between the knowledge that people acquire and the experience that they have with the natural language environment. However, linguistic experience is inherently variable and differs radically across people due to demographic and cultural variables. Recently, distributional models have been used to examine how word meanings vary across languages and it was found (...) that there is considerable variability in the meanings of words across languages for most semantic categories. The goal of this article is to examine how variable word meanings are across individual language users within a single language. This was accomplished by assembling 500 individual user corpora attained from the online forum Reddit. Each user corpus ranged between 3.8 and 32.3 million words each, and a count‐based distributional framework was used to extract word meanings for each user. These representations were then used to estimate the semantic alignment of word meanings across individual language users. It was found that there are significant levels of relativity in word meanings across individuals, and these differences are partially explained by other psycholinguistic factors, such as concreteness, semantic diversity, and social aspects of language usage. These results point to word meanings being fundamentally relative and contextually fluid, with this relativeness being related to the individualized nature of linguistic experience. (shrink)

Recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) represent a form of psychosis. It may be useful to compare RCVH to another form of psychosis, catatonia. Both include a long list of medical illnesses and have been examined using several different hypotheses. Catatonia has a variety of hypotheses, including neurocircuitry, neurochemistry, and an integrated neuropsychiatric hypothesis. This hypothesis for catatonia supports Collerton et al.'s Perception and Attention Deficit model (PAD) for RCVH.

Catatonia resulting from a general medical condition (as defined in the DSM-IV) seems to account for a large percentage of patients presenting with catatonia in psychiatric settings. In view of Dr. Northoff's hypothesis, it is important to emphasize that medical catatonias provide additional information to support his neuropsychiatric hypothesis of the anatomical and biochemical mechanisms of catatonia.

There are few accounts of the theologies of African Independent Churches, or of how such texts might be developed from what is an essentially oral phenomenon. In consequence, AIC students encounter difficulties in obtaining theological training appropriate for their churches. This article is an interim report on the process of recording such a theology – that of the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa. Based on insights from recent scholars in the fields of African Pentecostal theology, and contextual and local (...) theologies, together with the work of practitioners in the network of the Organization of African Independent Churches, the article proposes a methodology for recording the faith of a predominantly oral church. It then describes a workshop held by the church in 2016, with attention to the ways in which this methodology was worked out in practice. The article explores some of the issues raised by academic engagement with an oral community of faith, and suggests one means by which the lack of dialogue between AIC oral theologies and theologies of the western academic traditions might be addressed. (shrink)

Generalized anxiety disorder is among the world’s most prevalent psychiatric disorders and often manifests as persistent and difficult to control apprehension. Despite its prevalence, there is no integrative, formal model of how anxiety and anxiety disorders arise. Here, we offer a perspective derived from the free energy principle; one that shares similarities with established constructs such as learned helplessness. Our account is simple: anxiety can be formalized as learned uncertainty. A biological system, having had persistent uncertainty in its past, will (...) expect uncertainty in its future, irrespective of whether uncertainty truly persists. Despite our account’s intuitive simplicity—which can be illustrated with the mere flip of a coin—it is grounded within the free energy principle and hence situates the formation of anxiety within a broader explanatory framework of biological self-organization and self-evidencing. We conclude that, through conceptualizing anxiety within a framework of working generative models, our perspective might afford novel approaches in the clinical treatment of anxiety and its key symptoms. (shrink)

John J. Cleary was an internationally recognised authority in ancient Greek philosophy. This volume of penetrating studies of Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus, philosophy of mathematics, and ancient theories of education, display Cleary’s range of expertise and originality of approach.

Erving Goffman’s “Asylums” is a key text in the development of contemporary, community-orientated mental health practice. It has survived as a trenchant critique of the asylum as total institution, and its publication in 1961 in book form marked a further stage in the discrediting of the asylum model of mental health care. In this paper, some responses from a range of disciplines to this text, 50 years on, are presented. A consultant psychiatrist with a special interest in cultural psychiatry and (...) mental health legislation, two collaborating psychotherapists in adult and forensic mental health, a philosopher, and a recent medical graduate, present their varying responses to the text. The editors present these with the hope of encouraging further dialogue and debate from service users, carers, clinicians, and academics and researchers across a range of disciplines. (shrink)

Since its introduction, multivariate pattern analysis, or ‘neural decoding’, has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. Underlying its influence is a crucial inference, which we call the decoder’s dictum: if information can be decoded from patterns of neural activity, then this provides strong evidence about what information those patterns represent. Although the dictum is a widely held and well-motivated principle in decoding research, it has received scant philosophical attention. We critically evaluate the dictum, arguing that it is false: decodability is (...) a poor guide for revealing the content of neural representations. However, we also suggest how the dictum can be improved on, in order to better justify inferences about neural representation using MVPA. 1Introduction 2A Brief Primer on Neural Decoding: Methods, Application, and Interpretation 2.1What is multivariate pattern analysis? 2.2The informational benefits of multivariate pattern analysis 3Why the Decoder’s Dictum Is False 3.1We don’t know what information is decoded 3.2The theoretical basis for the dictum 3.3Undermining the theoretical basis 4Objections and Replies 4.1Does anyone really believe the dictum? 4.2Good decoding is not enough 4.3Predicting behaviour is not enough 5Moving beyond the Dictum 6Conclusion. (shrink)

For years a debate has raged within the various literatures of philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology over whether, and to what degree, the concepts that characterize psychopathology are social constructions that reflect cultural values. While the majority position among philosophers has been normativist, i.e., that the conception of a mental disorder is value-laden, a vocal and cogent minority have argued that psychopathology results from malfunctions that can be described by terminology that is objective and scientific. Scientists and clinicians have tended to (...) endorse the objectivist position, with some notable exceptions. (shrink)

Despite there being deep lines of convergence between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and other classical American philosophers, it remains an open question whether Whitehead is a pragmatist, and conversation between pragmatists and Whitehead scholars have been limited. Indeed, it is difficult to find an anthology of classical American philosophy that includes Whitehead’s writings. These camps began separately, and so they remain. This volume questions the wisdom of that separation, exploring their connections, (...) both historical and in application. The essays in this volume embody original and creative work by leading scholars that not only furthers the understanding of American philosophy, but seeks to advance it by working at the intersection of experience and reality to incite novel and creative thought. This exploration is long overdue. Specific questions that are addressed are: Is Whitehead a pragmatist? What contrasts and affinities exist between American pragmatism and Whitehead’s thought? What new questions, strategies, and critiques emerge by juxtaposing their distinct perspectives? -/- . (shrink)

Major shifts in the field of model theory in the twentieth century have seen the development of new tools, methods, and motivations for mathematicians and philosophers. In this book, John T. Baldwin places the revolution in its historical context from the ancient Greeks to the last century, argues for local rather than global foundations for mathematics, and provides philosophical viewpoints on the importance of modern model theory for both understanding and undertaking mathematical practice. The volume also addresses the impact of (...) model theory on contemporary algebraic geometry, number theory, combinatorics, and differential equations. This comprehensive and detailed book will interest logicians and mathematicians as well as those working on the history and philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

The roots of cognitivism lie deep in the history of Western thought, and to develop a genuinely post-cognitivist psychology, this investigation goes back to presuppositions descended from Platonic/Cartesian assumptions and beliefs about the nature of thought.

John Taurek has argued that, where choices must be made between alternatives that affect different numbers of people, the numbers are not, by themselves, morally relevant. This is because we "must" take "losses-to" the persons into account (and these don't sum), but "must not" consider "losses-of" persons (because we must not treat persons like objects). I argue that the numbers are always ethically relevant, and that they may sometimes be the decisive consideration.

This essay seeks to unsettle the overrepresented, Eurocentric grounds of a pivotal debate in the history of Western philosophy. The debate between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on the topic of madness has had central significance for twentieth-century continental thought due to its lasting impact on the development, reception, and stakes of the respective thinker’s methodologies. While heavily written on and analyzed from the perspective of Western academic philosophy, little attention has been paid to the racialized, ‘Third World’ origins and (...) structures of the debate and its content. I contend that the work of Sylvia Wynter addresses, critiques, and ameliorates these structures in heretofore previously unacknowledged ways. Specifically, Wynter’s work in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, her diptych on the Ceremony (Must Be) Found, and her critical engagements with the submerged “abducting logic” of Western thought marks an incisive critique of both Foucault and Derrida’s interpretation of reason and madness in Western philosophy. As I argue, Wynter is committed to deconstructing the binary of madness/reason so as to unsettle the overrepresentation of Western logos. She does so through the liminal figure of the “black cogito” which disrupts and shakes the foundations of the debate, nor can either conflicting interpretation neatly assimilate this figure. That is, by deconstructing the debate on the history of madness Wynter demonstrates the paucity of their arguments about, on the one hand, the history of reason and the exclusion of madness, and, on the other, the metaphysical ambiguity of the Cartesian cogito. This essay aims to set out on an alternative history of the deconstruction of Western metaphysics initiated from the demonic grounds of being. (shrink)

The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...) comes where -- In defense of some received views -- Some assumptions that will be in play -- The laws are propositions -- The laws are true -- The logically contingent consequences of the laws are laws themselves -- At least some laws are metaphysically contingent -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- Laws of nature, laws of science, laws of theories -- The first-order conception versus the meta-theoretic conception -- What is a law of nature? -- Some examples of meta-theoretic accounts -- The virtues of the meta-theoretic conception -- Weighing the virtues and shortcomings of the meta-theoretic conception -- An epistemological argument for the meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The discoverability thesis, the governing thesis, and the first-order conception -- The main argument -- The objection from bad company -- The objection from inference to the best explanation -- The objection from bayesianism -- The objection from contextualist epistemology -- The objection from the threat of inductive skepticism -- Laws, governing, and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- What would things have to be like in order for the laws of nature to govern the universe? -- Lawhood, inevitability, counterfactuals -- What is it for a proposition to be inevitably true? -- What is it for a whole class of propositions to be inevitably true? -- What is it for lawhood to confer inevitability? -- NP and supporting counterfactuals -- The worry about context-variability -- A solution and a look ahead -- When would the laws have been different? -- Where we are now -- The God cases -- Other counterexamples to NP -- A moral-theoretic counterexample to NP -- Scientific contexts and non-scientific contexts -- Scientific God cases? -- Lewisian non-backtracking counterexamples -- Where things stand now -- How could science show that the laws govern? -- Why the law-governed world-picture must include the science-says-so thesis -- What is extra-scientific? -- How can the science-says-so thesis be true? -- NP as a consequence of the presuppositions in any scientific context -- Np as true in all possible scientific contexts -- But how could it be so? -- Attack of the actual-factualists -- Measurement and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- Measurements, reliability, counterfactuals -- A general principle that captures the relation between measurement and counterfactuals -- What we can learn about lawhood from what we have learned about the counterfactual commitments of science -- A first-order account of laws or a meta-theoretic account of laws? -- What methods are presupposed to be legitimate measurement procedures? -- Why we must adopt a meta-theoretic account of laws -- What lawhood is -- Where we are now -- The measurability account of laws -- Brief review of the case for the mal -- A note about hedged laws -- How plausible is the mal? -- What if we don't care about the law-governed world-picture? -- Newton's God and Laplace's demon -- Beyond humean and non-humean -- Two views of laws -- Humean supervenience and the meta-theoretic conception -- Alleged counterexamples to humean supervenience -- Governing and non-trivial necessity -- How the mal lets us have it all -- Humeanism? non-humeanism? -- What is the significance of the idea of the law-governed universe? -- Where in the world are the laws of nature? -- Appendix: The mal in action : a few examples -- Of scientific theories and their laws -- Newton's theory as a paradigm example -- Classical special-force laws -- Geometrical optics and one of its laws -- Local deterministic field theories. (shrink)

We introduce the notion T does not omit obstructions. If a stable theory does not admit obstructions then it does not have the finite cover property . For any theory T, form a new theory $T_{\rm Aut}$ by adding a new unary function symbol and axioms asserting it is an automorphism. The main result of the paper asserts the following: If T is a stable theory, T does not admit obstructions if and only if $T_{\rm Aut}$ has a model companion. (...) The proof involves some interesting new consequences of the nfcp. (shrink)

I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the world (...) and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

Typescripts, essays, and an authoritative edition of Knowing and the known, Dewey's collaborative work with Arthur F. Bentley. In an illuminating Introduction T. Z. Lavine defines the collaboration's three goals-the construction of a new language for behavioral inquiry, a critique of formal logicians, in defense of Dewey's Logic, and a critique of logical positivism. In Dewey's words: Largely due to Bentley, I've finally got the nerve inside of me to do what I should have done years ago. What is it (...) to be a linguistic sign or name? and Values, valuations, and social facts, ' both written in 1945, are published here for the first time. (shrink)

This book explores emerging conflicts about religious liberty and discrimination. In point-counterpoint format, it brings together longtime LGBT rights advocate John Corvino and rising conservative thinkers Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis to debate Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, anti-discrimination law, and age-old questions about identity, morality, and society.

While there are numerous differences between the approaches taken by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James J. Gibson, the basic motivation of the two thinkers, as well as the internal logic of their respective views, is extraordinarily close. Both were guided throughout their lives by an attempt to overcome the dualism of subject and object, and both devoted considerable attention to their "Gestaltist" predecessors. There can be no doubt but that it is largely because of this common cause that the subsequent development (...) of their ideas is so similar. It is not my objective in what follows merely to demonstrate a similarity between two lines of thought. Instead, I will try to show that each approach gains considerably from attention to the other. There are numerous ways to begin such a project, each about as arbitrary as the next. For present purposes, I shall take as of central importance the question of the character of the perceived world, both in relation to the traditionally opposed mental and material "substances", and in relation to its identification and individuation of things vis a vis one another and vis a vis ourselves. This will implicate especially Gibson's "affordances" and Merleau-Ponty's thesis concerning the "materiality of meaning.". (shrink)

There is a great deal that might be said about justice in property claims. The strategy that I shall employ focuses attention upon the initial acquisition of property -- the most sensitive and most interesting area of property theory. Every theory that discusses property claims favorably assumes that there is some justification for transforming previously unowned resources into property. It is often this assumption which has seemed, to one extent or another, to be vulnerable to attack by critics of particular (...) justifications of property. Nevertheless, this assumption is frequently left undefended by property theorists, and where it is defended, the defense is often remarkably weak. That some initial claim to property be defensible is required by any theory which holds that certain present distributions may be justified, that certain transfers of property are justified, or that restitution ought to be made for previous injustice in transfer or acquisition. The initial acquisition of property, and its justification, is crucial to the remainder of property theory. (shrink)

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.

CHAPTER 1 Combinatorial Geometries and Infinitary Logics In this chapter we introduce two of the key concepts that are used throughout the text. ...

The growing power of communication and information technologies and their reliance on systems, poses great challenges to cultural and religious diversity, and even education. Will these technological systems continue to homogenize cultures and religions? Will this process lead to increasing strife? Or is there a possibility of maintaining both identity and diversity in a peaceful manner? This paper explores an early attempt to consider this problem. It will focus on the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā and their attempt to construct an encyclopedic system (...) to coordinate knowledge during the flowering of Islamic Civilization in the tenth century. It will primarily deal with Epistle or Rasā'il twenty-two – a fable concerning a debate between the humans, the animals and the Jinn. It will discuss their debate and show how the major concern for the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā was not only to embrace the diversity of knowledge but also the need to navigate through this diversity. I would like to suggest through this analysis that a culture gains its richness and identity by recognizing perfections outside of their own identity. This is analogous to the way that the individual human being gains meaning and dignity by reaching beyond its individuality. It also shows the importance of cultural and religious diversity and how the world cannot be unified by a single all-encompassing system. This approach is important because it shows the possibility of maintaining cultural and religious identity while participating in a technological world involving the flow of information on one hand, and global cultural diversities on the other. (shrink)

We give a general account of the goals of axiomatization, introducing a variant on Detlefsen’s notion of ‘complete descriptive axiomatization’. We describe how distinctions between the Greek and modern view of number, magnitude, and proportion impact the interpretation of Hilbert’s axiomatization of geometry. We argue, as did Hilbert, that Euclid’s propositions concerning polygons, area, and similar triangles are derivable from Hilbert’s first-order axioms. We argue that Hilbert’s axioms including continuity show much more than the geometrical propositions of Euclid’s theorems and (...) thus are an immodest complete descriptive axiomatization of that subject. (shrink)

We introduce the notion T does not omit obstructions. If a stable theory does not admit obstructions then it does not have the finite cover property (nfcp). For any theory T, form a new theory by adding a new unary function symbol and axioms asserting it is an automorphism. The main result of the paper asserts the following: If T is a stable theory, T does not admit obstructions if and only if has a model companion. The proof involves some (...) interesting new consequences of the nfcp. (shrink)