Categorical loudness scaling (CLS) measures provide useful information about an individual’s loudness perception across the dynamic range of hearing. A probability model of CLS categories has previously been described as a multi-category psychometric function (MCPF). In the study, a representative “catalog” of potential listener MCPFs was used in conjunction with maximum-likelihood estimation to derive CLS functions for participants with normal hearing and with hearing loss. The approach of estimating MCPFs for each listener has the potential to (...) improve the accuracy of the CLS measurements, particularly when a relatively low number of data points are available. The present study extends the MCPF approach by using Bayesian inference to select stimulus parameters that are predicted to yield maximum expected information (MEI) during data collection. The accuracy and reliability of the MCPF-MEI approach were compared to the standardized CLS measurement procedure (ISO16832:2006). A non-adaptive, fixed-level, paradigm served as a “gold-standard” for this comparison. The test time required to obtain measurements in the standard procedure is a major barrier to its clinical uptake. Test time was reduced from approximately 15 minutes to approximately 3 minutes with the MEI-adaptive procedure. Results indicated that the test-retest reliability and accuracy of the MCPF-MEI adaptive procedures were similar to the standardized CLS procedure. Computer simulations suggest that the reliability and accuracy of the MEI procedure were limited by intrinsic uncertainty of the listeners represented in the MCPF catalog. In other words, the MCPF provided insufficient predictive power to significantly improve adaptive-tracking efficiency under practical conditions. Concurrent optimization of both the MCPF catalog and the MEI-adaptive procedure have the potential to produce better results. Regardless of the adaptive-tracking method used in the CLS procedure, the MCPF catalog remains clinically useful for enabling maximum-likelihood determination of loudness categories. (shrink)

Psychophysical scaling models of the form R = f, with R the response and I some intensity of an attribute, all assume that people judge the amounts of an attribute. With simple biases excepted, most also assume that judgments are independent of space, time, and features of the situation other than the one being judged. Many data support these ideas: Magnitude estimations of brightness increase with luminance. Nevertheless, I argue that the general model is wrong. The stabilized retinal image (...) literature shows that nothing is seen if light does not change over time. The classification literature shows that dimensions often combine to produce emergent properties that cannot be described by the elements in the stimulus. These and other effects cannot be adjusted for by simply adding variables to the general model because some factors do not combine linearly. The proposed alternative is that people initially judge the entire stimulus – the object in terms of its environment. This agrees with the constancy literature that shows that objects and their attributes are identified through their relations to other aspects of the scene. That the environment determines judgments is masked in scaling studies where the standard procedure is to hold context constant. In a typical brightness study the essential stimulus might be the intensity of the light or a difference between the light and the background. The two are perfectly confounded. This issue is examined in the case of audition. Judgments of the loudness of a tone depend on how much that tone differs from the previous tone in both pitch and loudness. To judge loudness people first seem to process the stimulus object in terms of differences between it and other aspects in the situation; only then do they assess the feature of interest. Psychophysical judgments will therefore be better interpreted by theories of attention that are based in biology or psychology than those that are based in classical physics. (shrink)

There is no justice, only talk of justice, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. Characters invoke the symbolic balance scales but live at the unbalanced legalistic and merciful extremes. Equity, often suggested as a central theme, matters mostly for its loud absence. Indeed, if we separate equity, which recommends judicial leniency as the means to a just squaring of accounts, from mercy, which exceeds justice, we see that the play frustrates the Duke’s aspiration to virtuous rule by insisting that we must (...) have, and also that we cannot have, both justice and mercy. (shrink)

The Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 is an instrument in the assessment of mental health status. The current study recruited 1,532 Chinese hospital workers [74.4% female; mean age = 31.97 years] to examine the reliability, latent structure, and measurement invariance of the DASS-21 between genders. The Cronbach’s α values were greater than 0.90 for total score. This study examined four possible models of the DASS-21 using the confirmatory factor analysis in Chinese hospital workers. The results from CFA revealed that the latent (...) structure of the DASS-21 in medical staffs is best represented by a one-factor model. Then we used the one-factor model to examine measurement invariance across genders by using a multiple-group categorical CFA. All values of root mean square error approximation were less than 0.08, all Comparative Fix Index and Tucker–Lewis Index values were greater than 0.90, all ΔCFI values were less than 0.010, and ΔRMSEA were less than 0.015. These findings supported the gender invariance of the DASS-21 among Chinese hospital workers. (shrink)

An emerging perspective on human cognition and performance sees it as a kind of self-organizing phenomenon involving dynamic coordination across the body, brain and environment. Measuring this coordination faces a major challenge. Time series obtained from such cognitive, behavioral, and physiological coordination are often complicated in terms of non-stationarity and non-linearity, and in terms of continuous vs. categorical scales. Researchers have proposed several analytical tools and frameworks. One method designed to overcome these complexities is recurrence quantification analysis, developed in (...) the study of non-linear dynamics. It has been applied in various domains, including linguistic data or motion data. However, most previous studies have applied recurrence methods individually to categorical or continuous data. To understand how complex coordination works, an integration of these types of behavior is needed. We aimed to integrate these methods to investigate the relationship between language and motion directly. To do so, we added temporal information to categorical data, and applied joint recurrence analysis methods to visualize and quantify speech-motion coordination coupling during a rap performance. We illustrate how new dynamic methods may capture this coordination in a small case-study design on this expert rap performance. We describe a case study suggesting this kind of dynamic analysis holds promise, and end by discussing the theoretical implications of studying complex performances of this kind as a dynamic, coordinated phenomenon. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe present study describes the development and validation of a facial expression database comprising five different horizontal face angles in dynamic and static presentations. The database includes twelve expression types portrayed by eight Japanese models. This database was inspired by the dimensional and categorical model of emotions: surprise, fear, sadness, anger with open mouth, anger with closed mouth, disgust with open mouth, disgust with closed mouth, excitement, happiness, relaxation, sleepiness, and neutral. The expressions were validated using emotion classification and (...) Affect Grid rating tasks [Russell, Weiss, & Mendelsohn, 1989. Affect Grid: A single-item scale of pleasure and arousal. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 493–502]. The results indicate that most of the expressions were recognised as the intended emotions and could systematically represent affective valence and arousal. Furthermore, face angle and facial motion information influenced emot... (shrink)

Differences in infant caregiving behavior between cultures have long been noted, although the quantified comparison of touch-based caregiving using uniform standardized methodology has been much more limited. The Parent-Infant Caregiving Touch scale was developed for this purpose and programming effects of early parental tactile stimulation on infant hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal -axis functioning, cardiovascular regulation and behavioral outcomes, similar to that reported in animals, have now been demonstrated. In order to inform future studies examining such programming effects in India, we first aimed (...) to describe and examine, using parametric and non-parametric item-response methods, the item-response frequencies and characteristics of responses on the PICTS, and evidence for cross-cultural differential item functioning in the United Kingdom and India. Second, in the context of a cultural favoring of male children in India, we also aimed to test the association between the sex of the infant and infant “stroking” in both cultural settings. The PICTS was administered at 8–12 weeks postpartum to mothers in two-cohort studies: The Wirral Child Health and Development Study, United Kingdom and the Bangalore Child Health and Development Study, India. Mokken scale analysis, parametric item-response analysis, and structural equation modeling for categorical items were used. Items for two dimensions, one for stroking behavior and one for holding behavior, could be identified as meeting many of the criteria required for Mokken scales in the United Kingdom, only the stroking scale met these criteria in the sample from India. Thus, while a comparison between the two cultures was possible for the stroking construct, comparisons for the other non-verbal parenting constructs within PICTS were not. Analyses revealed higher rates of early stroking being reported for the United Kingdom than India, but no sex differences in rates in either country and no differential sex difference by culture. We conclude that PICTS items can be used reliably in both countries to conduct further research on the role of early tactile stimulation in shaping important child development outcomes. (shrink)

Small and medium-sized firms form 90% of the worldwide population of businesses. However, it has been argued that given their smaller scale of operations, resource access constraints and lower visibility, smaller firms are less likely to participate in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives. This article examines the different economic motivations of firms with varying combinations of visibility, resource access and scale of operations. Arguments are presented to propose that in terms of visibility, resource access and operating scale, very small and (...) very large firms are equally motivated to participate in CSR. However, the motivational bases for CSR participation are likely to be different. Medium-sized firms are the least motivated. This suggests a U-shaped relationship between firm size and CSR participation. This study contributes towards resolution of the long-standing debate on the effects of firm size on CSR participation, and highlights the importance of considering configurations of firm characteristics in the study of CSR outcomes. In conclusion, cautions are raised against the broad categorization of firms, without adequate attention to the underlying dimensions of such categorizations. (shrink)

The measurement of sensory intensity has had a long history, attracting the attention of investigators from many disciplines including physiology, psychology, physics, mathematics, philosophy, and even chemistry. While there has been a continuing doubt by some that sensation has the properties necessary for measurement, experiments designed to obtain estimates of sensory intensity have found that a general rule applies: Equal stimulus ratios produce equal sensory ratios. Theories concerning the basis for this simple psychophysical rule are discussed, with emphasis given to (...) the physical correlate theory, which considers judgments of subjective magnitudes to be based upon estimates of physical dimensions that vary regularly with changes in degree of stimulation. For the most thoroughly investigated sensory scales, brightness and loudness, the physical correlate is considered to be distance. Our “tacit knowledge” of the sensory effects of changing distance plays an essential role in matching motor activities to environmental conditions and in ensuring accurate perceptual evaluations through brightness and loudness constancies. In psychophysical experiments, subjects apparently use this same tacit knowledge when required to estimate relative subjective magnitudes. The evidence related to the physical correlate theory is summarized, and it is concluded that, while under appropriate conditions we demonstrate considerable skill in evaluating environmental relationships, we are quite unable to estimate the neurophysiological nature or quantity of sensory response. A psychophysics devoted to studying conditions required for accuracy and conditions producing errors in the perception of environmental relationships would seem to be more valuable than one devoted to subjective magnitudes. (shrink)

Neuropsychological studies suggest the existence of lateralized networks that represent categorical and coordinate types of spatial information. In addition, studies with neural networks have shown that they encode more effectively categorical spatial judgments or coordinate spatial judgments, if their input is based, respectively, on units with relatively small, nonoverlapping receptive fields, as opposed to units with relatively large, overlapping receptive fields. These findings leave open the question of whether interactive processes between spatial detectors and types of spatial relations (...) can be modulated by spatial attention. We hypothesized that spreading the attention window to encompass an area that includes two objects promotes coordinate spatial relations, based on coarse coding by large, overlapping, receptive fields. In contrast, narrowing attention to encompass an area that includes only one of the objects benefits categorical spatial relations, by effectively parsing space. By use of a cueing procedure, the spatial attention window was manipulated to select regions of differing areas. As predicted, when the attention window was large, coordinate spatial transformations were noticed faster than categorical transformations; in contrast, when the attention window was relatively smaller, categorical spatial transformations were noticed faster than coordinate transformations. Another novel finding was that coordinate changes were noticed faster when cueing an area that included both objects as well as the empty space between them than when simultaneously cueing both areas including the objects while leaving the gap between them uncued. (shrink)

The Distributional Compositional Categorical model is a mathematical framework that provides compositional semantics for meanings of natural language sentences. It consists of a computational procedure for constructing meanings of sentences, given their grammatical structure in terms of compositional type-logic, and given the empirically derived meanings of their words. For the particular case that the meaning of words is modelled within a distributional vector space model, its experimental predictions, derived from real large scale data, have outperformed other empirically validated methods (...) that could build vectors for a full sentence. This success can be attributed to a conceptually motivated mathematical underpinning, something which the other methods lack, by integrating qualitative compositional type-logic and quantitative modelling of meaning within a category-theoretic mathematical framework. The type-logic used in the DisCoCat model is Lambekʼs pregroup grammar. Pregroup types form a posetal compact closed category, which can be passed, in a functorial manner, on to the compact closed structure of vector spaces, linear maps and tensor product. The diagrammatic versions of the equational reasoning in compact closed categories can be interpreted as the flow of word meanings within sentences. Pregroups simplify Lambekʼs previous type-logic, the Lambek calculus. The latter and its extensions have been extensively used to formalise and reason about various linguistic phenomena. Hence, the apparent reliance of the DisCoCat on pregroups has been seen as a shortcoming. This paper addresses this concern, by pointing out that one may as well realise a functorial passage from the original type-logic of Lambek, a monoidal bi-closed category, to vector spaces, or to any other model of meaning organised within a monoidal bi-closed category. The corresponding string diagram calculus, due to Baez and Stay, now depicts the flow of word meanings, and also reflects the structure of the parse trees of the Lambek calculus. (shrink)

Annotation: The article contains the research concerning the possible impact of Karl Barth`s figure and theological issues on the theology of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. There is a comparative analysis of how powerful and significant was the level of impact of Barth`s scientific experience on the theologians of his era, in comparison with the most prominent representatives of Christian thought from the earlier centuries, beginning with the times of ancient church, the Middle Ages, (...) the 16th century protestant Reformation, as well as his contemporaries. As it was clarified, Karl Barth made a striking impulse for the further radical deconstruction of what is considered to be the achievements of 19th`s century liberal protestant theology (which made him a lot of detractors among his colleagues), made a loud accent on the necessity of the Christocentric approach to all the spheres of theology, newly updated, actualized and convincingly demonstrated the importance of ancient church creeds and dogmas in the field of Triadology and Christology, as well as in an unusual way he intensified and revived the intellectual search in the protestant universities and academies by his reshaping and changing the paradigms of the whole western theology in a radical way. In the article were taken into account some reviews on Barth`s “Epistle to the Romans” (second edition, 1922), which caused lively discussions and prolonged controversy because of specific and non-standard hermeneutical approaches to the biblical text, which Barth demonstrated in this one of the most eminent theological works of the 20th century. The article reveals not only the attitude towards Barth`s theological heritage that was showed by his protestant colleagues, but also reveals the sincere admiration for his theology from some Orthodox researchers, in particular, the honored professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, John Karavidopulos, and the world famous specialist in the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr., who converted to Orthodoxy in 1998. In the article`s conclusion there`s a piece of information concerning the fact that the impact of Barth`s dogmatics and hermeneutics on the modern departments of theology is not so noticeable as one might expect. In particular, we can make such a conclusion because of (1) the absence of true consolidation and common vision about the methods of theologizing between the western universities and church seminaries, (2) the popularity of so called “natural theology” which nowadays often seems to be regarded as an important prerequisite for all further theological researches, while Barth himself was a categorical opponent of this discourse, (3) the domination of binary opposition between conservatives and liberals in context of some modern theological discussions, while Karl Barth always tried to organically combine his devotion to the protestant orthodoxy with his efforts to be relevant and adequate to the requirements of his time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Social, the Outer and the ReflexiveSome More Dimensions of Subjectivity, Schizophrenia, and Its RecoveryThe author reports no conflicts of interest.First of all, I want to express my gratitude to the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, and the Karl Jaspers Award Committee for their recognition of my paper "Institution or individuality? Some reflections on the lessons to be learned from personal accounts (...) of recovery from schizophrenia" (Wannberg, 2024). I am also very thankful for Dr. Paul B. Lieberman's (2024) and Pr. Elizabeth Pienkos' (2024) stimulating comments on the paper.In the original paper, I used the case of the first person accounts of recovery from schizophrenia as a paradigm to elucidate the components of subjectivity more generally, as well as their logical relations. My main point was that considering the "recovery claim" as potentially endowed with a meaning sufficiently close to the official definition of the "personal" sense of recovery at stake—that is, in brief, having "become oneself" despite recurring or residual symptoms—invites us to question current phenomenological, narrative and constructionist approaches of the self in psychopathology. By contrast to these, I stressed the need of a conception of the self more sensible to its social and interpersonal dimensions, which I attempted to sketch out notably by resorting to Wittgenstein's (1953/1997) idea of "grammar." I am very happy that both Lieberman and Pienkos see the appeal to the social as a welcome move with regard to prevailing approaches to schizophrenia and its recovery. But what does it really mean for the subjective or the individual to be socially and interpersonally constituted, and how are we to account for that? [End Page 75]At a first glance, appealing to the social seems to be in line with current trends in psychopathology, including, as Pienkos points out, in the phenomenological tradition. She elsewhere announces a "shift in emphasis" currently taking place within phenomenological psychopathology, characterized by an increasing interest in the situated and dated aspects of subjectivity (Pienkos et al., 2023). This is a valuable turn. However, I am quite dubious that the well-known distinction between an "experiential" and a "narrative" self to which Pienkos appeals is apt to do all the conceptual work required to attain a satisfactory conception of the self and its social dimensions. In my original paper, I took the "recovery account" to challenge both these notions. As concerns the experiential dimension, I held that this type of account questions the phenomenologist's assumption that subjectivity is ultimately grounded in lived (self-)experience. Provided that typical symptoms of schizophrenia (e.g., thought insertion) are expressions of a disorder situated at this most "fundamental" level of the self and provided that they are stemming, at least according to one of the most widespread phenomenological models, from a trait-like disposition present before the onset of psychosis (e.g., Henriksen et al., 2019), it is quite natural to think that these symptoms persist in some form in the context of recovery (e.g., as intrusive thoughts or as "thoughts spoken out loud"). This is indeed the case for several of the authors "in recovery" in the Schizophrenia Bulletin's archives (e.g., Greenblat, 2000), which provided the main source of my analysis. But if this is so, we cannot see their recovery claim as an expression of a "whole" self, so to speak. So we must either say that "personal" recovery from schizophrenia is an illusion or a contradiction, or else we must revise the foundational status of the experiential dimension (other possible options are left aside for the purposes of this brief comment). I argue for the revisionist option. For the equation between the subjective and the experiential does not only lead to an unwelcomed skepticism about the recovery account. There are also more straightforward philosophical reasons for refusing it. Wittgenstein (1980) made a first important step by inviting us to better take into account the variability of the psychological concepts. He notably made a crucial categorical distinction between "lived experiences" (like sensations and mental images) and "attitudes" (like beliefs and intentions) such that all concepts which, when used in the first person... (shrink)

Standing in front of perhaps the most crucial decade of the future to come, when mankind has just experienced three years of global pandemic, a raging war, extreme climate events and mass extinction of animals and plants, we have arrived at a crossroads. Decisions must be made on whether we charge at full speed to explore alternative social-ecological systems that lead to human well-being and regeneration of nature; or continue down a pathway built on resource extraction, unsustainable and unethical urbanization (...) and destruction of nature and lives. Recently, as countries seek to recover from the pandemic, many are contemplating large-scale infrastructure schemes and projects, which have been tried and proven means to drive extraction-based economic growth. This highlights the importance of environmental justice and resistance – an area from which voices are not often heard loud enough, yet offers fertile ground where radical, sustainable alternatives may emerge among people and communities that refuse to comply with the unjust development imposed on them. Our work seeks to contribute to research studying the potential of such phenomena, by designing a framework to capture key organizational, political and ethical features that make resistance a transformative practice. The outcome of this effort is a Resistance-Based Transformative Alternative (ReBasTA) Framework, which can be employed to inform both desktop-based data collection and analysis on resistance practices, as well as in-depth field research on deep drivers and leverage points for transformation. Moreover, the framework makes longitude study of transformative practice possible, by using a consistent set of criteria. This paper introduces the conceptual and methodological approach underlying our framework and the collaborative process employed in designing it and its key criteria. In the final section, we also discuss possible applications, with particular reference to resistance movements triggered by large-scale infrastructures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I am Not Obese. I am Just Fat.Sarah BrambletteMy body mass index classifies me as super morbidly obese, however my overall vital health statistics would indicate otherwise. I celebrated the American Medical Association’s classification of obesity as a disease for several reasons. First, obesity as a disease involves other medical complications of which I have none, so finally perhaps I can say I am not obese, I am just (...) fat. I am fat, as in my weight is caused by Lipedema and Lymphedema. Lipedema is a congenital condition, which causes my body to produce and accumulate abnormal amounts of adipose tissue in my legs, hips, thighs, and arms. There is not much known about Lipedema in the medical profession, even though it was identified in 1940 by doctors at the Mayo Clinic, and not many treatment options exist. Abnormal Lipedema tissue does not respond to restrictive caloric diet or exercise. Lymphedema is a condition of localized fluid retention and tissue swelling caused by a compromised lymphatic system. The second reason I celebrated obesity being classified as a disease was the hope that more research would be conducted on the actual causes and treatment of obesity and that research might include adipose tissue disorders. My vital health statistics are all normal, yet I still face challenges getting proper treatment in healthcare.My StoryAs I sat staring at the metal beast, I decided to make one final attempt to mount it. I placed my right foot on the step and used both hands to boost myself up, my lower legs were so large there was no room for my left foot. Immediately the exam table began to tip towards me, then slammed loudly against the tile floor as I quickly stepped off. It was a game of exam table teeter–totter I had played many times before and lost more often than won. I gave up, placed the sheet meant to cover my legs on the chair in the corner and squeezed myself down between its arms. The exam gown pinched my arms, barely covering the front of me and draped over my legs.My LegsOne of the main reasons I was seeing a new doctor, my first doctor visit in several years. My previous family doctor had retired. I was not ill, I was concerned. My weight had reached a point to where I was scared for my health and I wanted to get help and answers. I wanted answers about why my legs were so large and leaked fluid.The answer I got was one I had heard before “It’s your weight”.To the doctor’s credit, she did explain it a bit more, she said the fluid in my legs was due to my excess weight putting pressure on my legs. However, she did not actually know how much I weighed. The scale in her office only went to 350lbs, and even with the add–on weight it could not register a weight for me, so we only knew I weighed more than 400lbs. I asked her if she knew if the hospital or another office had a scale that could weigh me. She did not. She may have sent me home with a prescription for a diuretic, I do not remember. I know I was not sent home with any help for my weight or my legs, just a follow–up appointment. It was during that follow up appointment that I advocated for myself and asked if she would refer me for physical therapy, so that I could do some safe and monitored exercise. She agreed, and I began physical therapy in the pool.At the pool I met other people who looked similar to my size. I noticed their legs were normal size and wondered why? Then I thought about sumo wrestlers. Sumo wrestlers weigh hundreds of pounds and their legs are normal too. What was wrong with my legs? One day I heard a man in the pool tell another [End Page 85] patient that he had lost weight. I wondered where he was able to weigh himself, and hoped it was not rude to ask him. He told me... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:To Glimpse Beauty and Awaken Meaning:Scholarly Learning as Aesthetic ExperienceAnna NeumannIntroductionIn this article, I portray university professors' scholarly learning as a location for aesthetic experience. To do so, I explore the intellectual and creative narratives of individuals who, with tenure newly in hand, position themselves to engage with beauty and to pursue its meanings, expressed distinctively through the subjects, creations, and questions of scholarly disciplines and professional fields. In (...) interviews, scholars — professors with tenure in major research universities — described the sparks of beauty they experience in their scholarly work. For many, such moments of beauty, and often of deep engrossment, had recurred through life. Yet these were truly "moments": brief, bounded, hard to evoke, and by no means continuous, assured, or predictable. They were hard won. Many of the professors I interviewed referred to persistent struggles to craft scholarly agendas, communities, collaborations, and work lives that might invite the aesthetic glimmer, however brief. Many drew for insight and inspiration on childhood memories of beauty to guide their intellectual and creative pursuits in adulthood. They hitched present-day desires for moments of passionate thought to vivid memories — what they saw and felt in their earliest, often out-of-school encounters with an aesthetic they would pursue through their lives. Even now, in tenured university professorships, they relied on these deeply imprinted images to light their intellectual ways.1I also claim that scholars may experience aesthetic moments as deeply emotional and personal. This is not something I inferred; this is something the professors I interviewed said to me — directly, repeatedly, with emotion. [End Page 68] Yet I am something of an organizational realist, and the social sciences strand of my conscience impels me to pepper these scholars' accounts of recurrent beauty in their lives with less than beauteous recognition of a hard academic fact: that within the normative structure of academe, the personal (and emotional) meanings infusing professors' scholarly learning get short shrift. Public academic talk about the personal meanings of one's work, or the emotional content of study, is largely taboo. The press for institutional survival, social legitimacy, and financial and political gain typically call for presentations of scholarship as objective and outwardly directed, negating the personal origins of research in researchers' lives.2 Scholarly learning as an aesthetic awareness — as moments of fused insight and emotion, as dazzling sensations of coming to know, as frustration over ideas that unravel or that will not gel — is often lost in translation between the personal life from which it derives and the modern profession, career, and organization within which it is housed and enacted.I worry that this lost awareness of scholarly learning, occurring in large scale, forces questions about its social worth. Yet to persist, scholarly learning requires substantial social legitimation, appreciation, and support. I suggest further that this state of affairs calls for response: that to garner societal understanding for and support of scholarly learning as a setting for pursuits of beauty and as the communal mission of higher education, we must learn to talk out loud, and in educative ways, about it. However, we, as scholars and learners ourselves, must understand, first, what it is that we are defending and then represent its worth to publics who may learn to care about it. We must first define among ourselves what scholarly learning means, what it takes to engage it, and what it entails — cognitively, professionally, aesthetically, and emotionally. My aim in this paper is to advance this collegial conversation by addressing its possibly most contentious element: its beauty, its emotion, its personal meanings in scholars' lives.3Roots of the StudyGiven that we have no well-honed public-professional vocabulary for speaking coherently about professors' scholarly learning and aesthetic experience, I devote this article to defining and exploring these terms. In earlier writing on this topic, I used the psychology of peak experience, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, to frame professors' representations of passionate thought in scholarship.4 In this article, I seek to advance the concept of passionate thought as scholarly experience by exploring its aesthetic contents, namely its concerns with beauty. I begin by presenting the roots of the exploration — in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Story:Evolving ObesitiesAnonymous OneI am a 66–year–old Caucasian woman. I have always had, either in perception or fact, a “weight problem.” In my childhood and early teens when my weight was within the normal range, I felt fat and was always trying to lose weight. After gaining weight in college, I had a weight problem in body as well as mind. Weight concerns have consumed much of my energy (...) over the years. I have spent most of my life evolving toward a healthy way to manage my weight.Act 1: Obesity as MetaphorI can’t remember ever not feeling fat. Growing up I felt humiliated and shamed by my body, even though I was not overweight, just bigger than my peers, with a pear shape and heavy legs, thighs, and ankles. In high school my BMI, although not used at the time as a measuring tool, was 22.8. Yet despite these facts, I was made to feel fat.In my family being overweight was tantamount to sin. My father and sister were tall and skinny; my mother was petite and shapely. I took after another genetic code—the dumpy ones with knocked knees—the grotesque branch of the family tree. Hand–me–downs from my sister were supposed to fit me, but we were too different, and the difference was not celebrated.Other things were at play, a perfect storm of conditions that contributed to my feelings of worthlessness. I really shouldn’t have been born. The earth should have opened up and swallowed me. Of course I was not conscious of reasons for these feelings at the time. That awareness came later. But these feelings of loss, grief, terror, and terrible wrongness were the context of my struggles over the years.I developed a pattern of binge eating, which satisfied two contradictory impulses: my need to nurture myself combined with my desire to punish myself. The intensity of a binge–eating episode was also an avenue for rage. I was young so the extra calories didn’t result in weight gain, but the behavior had begun to take root.Stepping on the scale was like the final judgment. The scale did not measure weight; it measured value. I would see the number, as would the person weighing me, and my failure, as a person, would be evident. My secret shame would become public. I would be declared guilty for the worthless grub that was me.Nothing else mattered: that I was an A student; that I was kind and compassionate; that I had friends. These facts had no bearing. All that counted was the number on the scale. That number sent a shudder of condemnation down to my very soul. That number threatened to hurl me into a bottomless abyss from which I could not escape.I avoided being weighed. I was a very obedient youth, with an exaggerated respect for authority drilled into me by my father. The one time I ever cut class was in high school. I skipped health class where I had heard we would be weighed.The situations when I could not avoid being weighed confirmed my worst fears. Before one gym class we were publicly weighed in [End Page 96] assembly–line fashion. As I stepped off the scale my gym teacher yelled out “Diet” for all to hear. Doctors who knew nothing about me, to whom I had been sent for various required physicals, told me to lose weight.In the mysterious and internally logical way that the mind works, my weight became a metaphor for all that was reprehensible in me. With no comprehension of why I was so unhappy, it was easy for me to fixate on my weight. It was too horrible to contemplate that I was the problem. The problem with me was my size, my body.As I look back now, I am angry that because of its shape, this perfectly wonderful body was judged as wrong, and that there was no compassionate voice loud enough to contradict this message. But at the time I felt no anger. To feel anger over being made to feel bad requires self–respect... (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the recent rapid growth of ‘binge’ drinking in the UK. This means the rapid consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. British soccer fans have often exhibited this kind of behaviour abroad, but it has become widespread amongst young people within Britain itself. Vomiting, collapsing in the street, shouting and chanting loudly, intimidating passers-by and fighting are now regular night-time features of many (...) British towns and cities. A particularly disturbing aspect is the huge rise in drunken and anti-social behaviour amongst young females. Increasingly, policy makers in the West are concerned about how not just to regulate but to alter social behaviour. Smoking and obesity are obvious examples, and in the UK ‘binge’ drinking has become a focus of acute policy concern. We show how a simple agent based model approach, combined with a limited amount of easily acquired information, can provide useful insights for policy makers in the context of behavioural regulation. We show that the hypothesis that the rise in binge drinking is a fashion-related phenomenon, with imitative behaviour spreading across social networks, is sufficient to account for the empirically observed patterns of binge drinking behaviour. The results show that a small world network, rather than a scale-free or random one, offers the best description of the data. (shrink)

This paper studies the logical context-sensitivity of Aristotelian diagrams. I propose a new account of measuring this type of context-sensitivity, and illustrate it by means of a small-scale example. Next, I turn toward a more large-scale case study, based on Aristotelian diagrams for the categorical statements with subject negation. On the practical side, I describe an interactive application that can help to explain and illustrate the phenomenon of context-sensitivity in this particular case study. On the theoretical side, I show (...) that applying the proposed measure of context-sensitivity leads to a number of precise yet highly intuitive results. (shrink)

Annotation: The article contains the research concerning the possible impact of Karl Barth`s figure and theological issues on the theology of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st century. There is a comparative analysis of how powerful and significant was the level of impact of Barth`s scientific experience on the theologians of his era, in comparison with the most prominent representatives of Christian thought from the earlier centuries, beginning with the times of ancient church, the Middle Ages, (...) the 16th century protestant Reformation, as well as his contemporaries. As it was clarified, Karl Barth made a striking impulse for the further radical deconstruction of what is considered to be the achievements of 19th`s century liberal protestant theology (which made him a lot of detractors among his colleagues), made a loud accent on the necessity of the Christocentric approach to all the spheres of theology, newly updated, actualized and convincingly demonstrated the importance of ancient church creeds and dogmas in the field of Triadology and Christology, as well as in an unusual way he intensified and revived the intellectual search in the protestant universities and academies by his reshaping and changing the paradigms of the whole western theology in a radical way. In the article were taken into account some reviews on Barth`s “Epistle to the Romans” (second edition, 1922), which caused lively discussions and prolonged controversy because of specific and non-standard hermeneutical approaches to the biblical text, which Barth demonstrated in this one of the most eminent theological works of the 20th century. The article reveals not only the attitude towards Barth`s theological heritage that was showed by his protestant colleagues, but also reveals the sincere admiration for his theology from some Orthodox researchers, in particular, the honored professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, John Karavidopulos, and the world famous specialist in the history of Christianity and medieval intellectual history, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr., who converted to Orthodoxy in 1998. In the article`s conclusion there`s a piece of information concerning the fact that the impact of Barth`s dogmatics and hermeneutics on the modern departments of theology is not so noticeable as one might expect. In particular, we can make such a conclusion because of (1) the absence of true consolidation and common vision about the methods of theologizing between the western universities and church seminaries, (2) the popularity of so called “natural theology” which nowadays often seems to be regarded as an important prerequisite for all further theological researches, while Barth himself was a categorical opponent of this discourse, (3) the domination of binary opposition between conservatives and liberals in context of some modern theological discussions, while Karl Barth always tried to organically combine his devotion to the protestant orthodoxy with his efforts to be relevant and adequate to the requirements of his time. (shrink)

Being able to estimate quantity is important in everyday life and for success in the STEM disciplines. However, people have difficulty reasoning about magnitudes outside of human perception. This study examines patterns of estimation errors across temporal and spatial magnitudes at large scales. We evaluated the effectiveness of hierarchical alignment in improving estimations, and transfer across dimensions. The activity was successful in increasing accuracy for temporal and spatial magnitudes, and learning transferred to the estimation of numeric magnitudes associated with events (...) and objects. However, there were also a number of informative differences in performance on temporal, spatial, and numeric magnitude measures, suggesting that participants possess different categorical information for these scales. Educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

How do people stretch their understanding of magnitude from the experiential range to the very large quantities and ranges important in science, geopolitics, and mathematics? This paper empirically evaluates how and whether people make use of numerical categories when estimating relative magnitudes of numbers across many orders of magnitude. We hypothesize that people use scale words—thousand, million, billion—to carve the large number line into categories, stretching linear responses across items within each category. If so, discontinuities in position and response time (...) are expected near the boundaries between categories. In contrast to previous work that suggested only that a minority of college undergraduates employed categorical boundaries, we find that discontinuities near category boundaries occur in most or all participants, but that accurate and inaccurate participants respond in opposite ways to category boundaries. Accurate participants highlight contrasts within a category, whereas inaccurate participants adjust their responses toward category centers. (shrink)

The acoustic environments of small, central urban parks are often dominated by traffic sounds. Water sounds can be used to mitigate the negative impacts of unwanted sounds through masking. Studies comparing the effects of different water sounds are typically conducted using recordings in laboratory settings where ecological validity is limited. An urban redesign project in Montreal took the innovative approach of trying three sequential temporary designs of a new public square, each of which included a distinct water feature that produced (...) a lightly-audible mist. Here we report on a field experiment evaluating the effect of the water feature in each of the three designs. Respondents evaluated their experience with the three different designs using questionnaires including soundscape and restorativeness scales, and perceived loudness. The results indicate a significant interaction effect between the water feature and the design of the space, particularly on ratings of chaotic and loud. While two water feature designs had an overall “positive” effect on soundscape assessment, the third water feature design produced the opposite effect. These findings hold even after accounting for ambient temperature. This opportunity to test multiple water features in the same space revealed that water features do not automatically improve soundscape assessments. The visual design, function of the space and environmental conditions should be carefully considered and calls for more field studies. We discuss consequences and considerations for the use of water features in public spaces as well as the implications in terms of ecological validity of soundscape studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:My Patient, TeacherMarissa BlumI remember meeting Beatriz about 12 years ago when security was called to her office visit room by the fellow doctor-in-training who was seeing her. She was yelling loudly about her pain medications, causing a terrific commotion. I stepped in to relieve the fellow and tried to calm her down and move the visit along without anyone getting hurt or further upset. And from then on, (...) Beatriz was moved to my schedule from the fellow's for her monthly visits for her knee pain and refills of fentanyl and oxycodone. She had terrible knees and walked with a cane, almost always accompanied by her son. At one point, she came to our clinic asking to be seen but couldn't, and then fell onto her knees and rolled onto her back in the wait-room, clutching and waiving her cane, expelling expletives and railing at anyone who wanted to help but denying them that privilege. It was as though she relished exposing her pain and a lifetime of hardship for all to confront. I came down from my office to talk with her and when I couldn't convince her to get up on her own, we called EMS to assist and they took her away in an ambulance.For the first few years, I recoiled seeing her name on my schedule each month. I knew I would have to endure a barrage of labile emotions and complaints not just about her constant pain and feelings of inadequacy of her pain medications, but also about her other doctors and how they don't respond to her, or about how the rest of her family shows no care for her. Initially, these visits were hard because they were unpredictable and Beatriz also had bipolar disorder and maybe borderline personality too. I never knew which type of Beatriz I would walk in to see: Angry, tearful, lamentful, and all of those faces were difficult for me. But we met every month for years. During those visits, which almost always were attended by her son, who quietly sat by to either gently rebuff or passively agree with her, I learned so much about her and her very hard life. She was left to raise two children alone, unskilled and ill with hepatitis C, which led to liver cancer, followed later by breast cancer. She chose not to pursue additional therapy for breast cancer, expressing a fatalistic view of her life and intimating she in some way deserved the ailments that she developed. She saw me for disabling knee and hip arthritis that took away her independence and ability to scale the outdoor steps to her second-floor apartment and required the assistance of her son to dress, bathe and care for her. Beatriz never knew this, and I didn't share [End Page 18] it with her, but on one of my early morning drives into North Philadelphia, I saw her on a sun-baked unfriendly street, struggling to move around with her walker. She had many reasons to be angry, and the 30 minutes I spent with her every month became a catharsis for her to unload all that she felt.During my medical training, I encountered hundreds of patients—mostly all in the hospital setting—who might be characterized as difficult and understandably; no one who is relegated to the hospital setting, acutely or chronically ill and requiring inpatient care, could possibly be in the best mood of their lives. Somehow, it was easier for me to care for patients in these snapshot encounters that I controlled. I dictated my time in the room and didn't necessarily have to encounter the same challenging patient longitudinally, which made certain encounters much easier to bear. I realize now I wasn't fully processing the burdens carried by these patients in a way that enabled me to be a compassionate and fully present physician to them. It was an adaptation to the fast-paced life of residency, where one just has to get the job done and move on to the next task without time to process or reflect on difficult patient interactions. This is a... (shrink)

Consciousness has been and will continue to be one of the central problems of philosophy. In written works the fact that the consciousness can sing is presented as one of the most interesting and enigmatic properties of consciousness. That consciousness can sing, and in fact does so, and to prove that this is the case is relatively easy. It is enough to say that “one is singing within oneself”, not loudly and only one or various simple sounds in a way (...) so that the Phonologic system does not take part at all. The arguments over whether or not the consciousness can sing are based on comparisons of paragraphs 15 to 27 from the first and second editions of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” which were modified in the second edition, where no categorical statement about the similaritybetween reproduced representations and phenomenon is found. The problem between the similarity between the reproduced representations in the consciousness/brain and the consciousness/brain phenomenon were investigated by Kant in his first and second edition, where Kant reached his conclusion about the reproduced representations in the phenomenon. We are in agreement with Kant that there can exist in “the interior” of consciousness/brains of all human beings the state of similarity or difference between the represented and the perceived, but the unity of the consciousness can be found in only one state: the similarity between the represented and the perceived in the “interior”, of the consciousness/brain. In view of the similarity of the reproduced representations and the phenomenon of the consciousness/brain, the consciousness can sing and be united, or, if not, referring to the dissimilarity, the consciousness cannot sing and can be divided. (shrink)

Electroencephalography provides a non-invasive means to advancing our understanding of the development and function of the brain. However, the majority of the world’s population residing in low and middle income countries has historically been limited from contributing to, and thereby benefiting from, such neurophysiological research, due to lack of scalable validated methods of EEG data collection. In this study, we establish a standard operating protocol to collect approximately 3 min each of eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG data using a low-cost (...) portable EEG device in rural households through formative work in the community. We then evaluate the acceptability of these EEG assessments to young children and feasibility of administering them through non-specialist workers. Finally, we describe properties of the EEG recordings obtained using this novel approach to EEG data collection. The formative phase was conducted with 9 families which informed protocols for consenting, child engagement strategies and data collection. The protocol was then implemented on 1265 families. 977 children and 1199 adults provided resting-state data for this study. 259 children refused to wear the EEG cap or removed it, and 58 children refused the eyes-closed recording session. Hardware or software issues were experienced during 30 and 25 recordings in eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions respectively. Disturbances during the recording sessions were rare and included participants moving their heads, touching the EEG headset with their hands, opening their eyes within the eyes-closed recording session, and presence of loud sounds in the testing environment. Similar to findings in laboratory-based studies from high-income settings, the percentage of recordings which showed an alpha peak was higher in eyes-closed than eyes-open condition, with the peak occurring most frequently in electrodes at O1 and O2 positions, and the mean frequency of the alpha peak was found to be lower in children as compared to adults. We observed a deterioration in the EEG signal with prolonged device usage. This study demonstrates the acceptability, feasibility and utility of conducting EEG research at scale in a rural low-resource community, while highlighting its potential limitations, and offers the impetus needed to further refine the methods and devices and validate such scalable methods to overcome existing research inequity. (shrink)

So-called ‘anonymous’ tissue samples are widely used in research. Because they lack externally identifying information, they are viewed as useful in reconciling conflicts between the control, privacy and confidentiality interests of those from whom the samples originated and the public (or commercial) interest in carrying out research, as reflected in ‘consent or anonymise’ policies. High level guidance documents suggest that withdrawal of consent and samples and the provision of feedback are impossible in the case of anonymous samples. In view of (...) recent developments in science and consumer-driven genomics the authors argue that such statements are misleading and only muddle complex ethical questions about possible entitlements to control over samples. The authors therefore propose that terms such as ‘anonymised’, ‘anonymous’ or ‘non-identifiable’ be removed entirely from documents describing research samples, especially from those aimed at the public. This is necessary as a matter of conceptual clarity and because failure to do so may jeopardise public trust in the governance of large scale databases. As there is wide variation in the taxonomy for tissue samples and no uniform national or international standards, the authors propose that a numeral-based universal coding system be implemented that focuses on specifying incremental levels of identifiability, rather than use terms that imply that the reidentification of research samples and associated actions are categorically impossible. (shrink)

In this book, I will discuss three main topics: the roots and aims of scientific knowledge, scientific knowledge in society, and science and values I understand scientific knowledge as being a planned and continuous production of the general and common knowledge of scientific communities. I begin my discussion with a brief analysis of the main differences between sciences, on the one hand, and everyday experience, philosophies, religions, and ideologies, on the other. I define the concept of science as a set (...) of family resemblances (in Wittgenstein's sense). The sciences can be distinguished along three lines, in terms of the difference between empirical and non-empirical sciences, differences in degrees of theoretical and methodological structure among individual sciences and scientific disciplines. Scientific knowledge is based upon some grounds, paradigmatic knowledge bases. Scientific knowledge is founded on a unified paradigmatic knowledge base. The latter includes fundamental theories, basic facts, generally accepted empirical regularities (laws), scientific research methods, scientific explanations, and established relations to other sciences. Scientific knowledge in general is defined well in classical terms by the definition that knowledge is a true and rationally-justified belief. In this connection, scientific truth is relative, depending on the given paradigmatic knowledge base and on the precision and accessibility of the measurements and observations involved. In the book's first part, I consider the production and testing of scientific hypotheses, scientific explanations, the structure of scientific theories, and the problem of scientific realism. I consider explanation an integral part of a wider nexus of heuristic and theoretical activities in science like giving reasons, understanding, clarification, and founding. Continuous production of scientific explanations is a necessary condition for the systematic reproduction of scientific knowledge. Accordingly, it does not suffice to describe them in terms of the logical structure of the arguments on which they are based, but rather, scientific explanations ought to be given complete with an epistemic and pragmatic context of the explanation. I consider especially deductive-nomological, inductive-statistical, dispositional, teleological-functional, and genetic explanations. I emphasize the ever-increasing importance of explanations by analogy and by model. Orthogonal to these distinctions lies the distinction between causal and epistemic explanation. Epistemic explanations relate scientific discoveries to epistemic progress, and causal explanations are these epistemic explanations that relate scientific discoveries to reality too. Causal explanations inform us that certain changes occur in the world as agents of other changes, or rather, that certain changes are real consequences of other changes. Thus, by having explanations of causes, we can intervene in the world to induce by design certain changes in some course of phenomena. I consider scientific theories as logically and epistemically ordered wholeness of scientific knowledge in a realm of research that enables us to construct useful models of reality. After the discussion of different 'statement' views on theories and different interpretations of the theory-experience relation, I introduce the 'model' theoretical (non-statement) views on theories, especially the structural theory of science. The model views on theories transcend the realism-antirealism dualism by introducing models between theory and reality. Therefore, the question of scientific realism is not merely whether and, if so, which element(s), of scientific theories represent reality, but rather which conditions suffice to infer from a theory that one of its models truly expresses reality. In other words, under which conditions do models of a theory represent models of reality? Generally, models are just as much images of reality in a theory as they are images of a theory in reality. The actual problem of scientific realism doesn't originate in the observable-unobservable distinction (even if this distinction is otherwise theoretically loaded), but rather in ontological quandaries, of the sort especially encountered in modern physical theories such as quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and cosmological theories, although they are known to arise in other sciences as well. Scientific theories may be real, even if they describe nothing about the world. However, such theories can be given this status only if their formal, mathematical postulates exhibit some formal homology between reality and mathematical forms. The very fact that it is possible to describe reality with the help of mathematics even in cases, where every (representational, conceptual) language and thought fall short, would indicate that even mathematics itself is, in some sense, a part of reality, although 'outside' of the empirical world. It follows we have to distinguish the non-empirical reality and the empirical world. Formal objectivity and non-arbitrariness of theories do not emerge from either our language or thoughts, or from the world of facts, causes, and effects, but rather from non-empirical reality, which frames the world as some kind of objective transcendental condition for the possibility of the existence of the world, thoughts, and language. In the second part of the book, I consider the incorporation of scientific work and scientific knowledge into modern society and its relations to values and ethics. Production of scientific knowledge goes on as a parallel distributed process of a special kind of social (shared) cognition. The central part of this cognition is the presentation of parts of the world by scientific (theoretical) models which are warranted by the shared and public practice of justification, and in reflective acting in the world as it would. I consider various formal concepts of collective propositional knowledge (distributed, mutual, common knowledge). Scientific knowledge is an achievement to be ascribed to a scientific community or, indirectly, to all those who apply or expand it, rather than to individuals per se. It presents the continuous and partially planned production of non-trivial common knowledge of the research communities in modern societies. However, besides common knowledge, shared dispositional knowledge (knowledge how of scientific teams) and shared knowledge by acquiring (knowledge of fundamental similarities and differences in scientific teams) are parts of the real body of scientific knowledge. Scientific common knowledge implies the projection into idealized universal knowledge of all real or potentially rational and well-informed individuals. The respect of scientific knowledge thus presents the norm of rationality. Science as the intensively shared and socially distributed kind of cognition enters into modern society as a special kind of work (general work), as a productive force (social invention drive), and as a form of capital (human, social, cultural, informational, etc.). However any of these categories can adequately represent the socio-economical role of science in modern societies, and we are still waiting for a more adequate general concept that would theoretically cover the 'scientification' of modern societies. My thesis is that the most important general effect of scientification is (and will be) the growth of social processes that structurally resemble parallel distributed shared social cognition of science, and not so much the rise of the use of scientific knowledge and scientifically based information in all kinds of production. Scientification of modern societies inevitably includes a much stronger need for moral and social responsibility of scientists for their work and its effects in their local society and the global world. This need comes in contradiction with the quite large accepted idea (and even the 'norm') on value-free research. I discuss to some degree different arguments for the absence of non-epistemic values and ethical reasoning from science and find them non-convincing. The sound idea of value-free research lies in the need for the absence of categorical value statements from scientific explanations and theoretical deductions. Values and ethical judgment have, and sometimes they even have to play an important role in another part of research and its application in science or outside it. Not the value-loudness of research is a danger for science but its blind, non-reflective use. It leads to the ideologization and politicization of science. A similar danger lies in the purely value-neutrality of research. It leads to the instrumentalization of science to the technical or bureaucratic means for 'any' aims. (shrink)

Warren's major contention is that judgments of subjective magnitude are not possible, and therefore subjects base such judgments upon physical correlates of the dimension in question. It would appear that Warren's theory will almost surely fail as a comprehensive model, even though it does provide a heuristic account of judgments of loudness and brightness. In order for the theory to succeed, Warren must specify a physical correlate for judgments ofeverysubjective attribute that has yielded orderly data with Stevens's scaling (...) procedures. (shrink)

No doubt this breezily written and informative volume will fill a gaping lacuna in most JSE readers' knowledge of evidence for psychokinesis generally and poltergeist phenomena in particular. It certainly did for me. Healy and Cropper survey 52 different Australian cases, spanning the years 1845-2002. The first eleven chapters cover the authors' 11 strongest cases in considerable detail. Chapter 12 describes the remaining 41 cases more briefly, and catalogues all 52 cases in chronological order. Chapter 13 purports to wrap things (...) up, but it's followed by three appendices introducing additional cases outside Australia and brief discussions of similar or at least potentially relevant physical mysteries-for example, some Asian fire poltergeist cases, ball lightning, UFOs, and reported rains of fishes. The authors rate their cases on a five-star scale, which they apply judiciously. Ratings begin at zero for apparent or proven hoaxes, and then range from half a star ("for questionable or very poorly documented cases" [p. 7]) to five stars. Healy and Cropper write: "With only two exceptions, we have reserved the four and five-star rating for very well documented cases where we were able to interview the eyewitnesses or in which we had some other personal involvement" (p. 7). The case they consider the strongest-the Mayanup case from 1955-2002-is the only one to earn five stars. Humpty Doo (1998)-possibly the most famous, or notorious-gets four and a half. Several cases earned between three and four stars, and quite a few get either zero stars or half a star. The two highest-rated cases are genuinely interesting. In the Humpty Doo case, many credible observers witnessed the phenomena under conditions which quite clearly seemed to rule out chicanery, and which conformed to poltergeist reports in other parts of the world. The phenomena included "showers of stones both indoors and out, dangerous objects thrown with great force but without causing injury, objects falling unnaturally slowly yet producing unnaturally loud sounds on impact, objects observed levitating, objects observed materializing in mid-air" (p. 48), the intense heat of apported objects, and more. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 66–75 ~*~ We’re Doomed. Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a poetry written in the graveyard of philosophy. Pessimism is a lyrical failure of philosophical thinking, each attempt at clear and coherent thought, sullen and submerged in the hidden joy of its own futility. The closest pessimism comes to philosophical argument is the droll and laconic “We’ll never make it,” or simply: “We’re doomed.” Every effort doomed to failure, every (...) project doomed to incompletion, every life doomed to be unlived, every thought doomed to be unthought. Pessimism is the lowest form of philosophy, frequently disparaged and dismissed, merely the symptom of a bad attitude. No one ever needs pessimism, in the way that one needs optimism to inspire one to great heights and to pick oneself up, in the way one needs constructive criticism, advice and feedback, inspirational books or a pat on the back. No one needs pessimism, though I like to imagine the idea of a pessimist activism. No one needs pessimism, and yet everyone—without exception—has, at some point in their lives, had to confront pessimism, if not as a philosophy then as a grievance—against one’s self or others, against one’s surroundings or one’s life, against the state of things or the world in general. There is little redemption for pessimism, and no consolation prize. Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it. In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. ~*~ We’re Still Doomed. No one has time for pessimism. After all, there are only so many hours in a day. Whatever our temperament, happy or sad, engaged or disengaged, we know pessimism when we hear it. The pessimist is usually understood as the complainer, forever pointing out what is wrong with the world without ever once offering a solution. But more often than not pessimists are the quietest of philosophers, submerging their own sighs within the lethargy of discontent. What little sound it makes is of interest to no one—“I’ve heard it all before,” “tell me something I don’t know,” sound and fury, signifying nothing. In raising problems without solutions, in posing questions without answers, in retreating to the hermetic, cavernous abode of complaint, pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. Pessimism fails to live up to the most basic tenet of philosophy—the “as if.” Think as if it will be helpful, act as if it will make a difference, speak as if there is something to say, live as if you are not, in fact, being lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied. Had it more self-assurance and better social skills, pessimism would turn its disenchantment into a religion, possibly calling itself The Great Refusal. But there is a negation in pessimism that refuses even such a Refusal, an awareness that, from the start, it has already failed, and that the culmination of all that is, is that all is for naught. Pessimism tries very hard to present itself in the low, sustained tones of a Requiem Mass, or the tectonic rumbling of Tibetan chant. But it frequently lets loose dissonant notes at once plaintive and pathetic. Often, its voice cracks, its weighty words abruptly reduced to mere shards of guttural sound. ~*~ Maybe It’s Not So Bad, After All. If we know pessimism when we hear it, this is because we’ve heard it all before—and we didn’t need to hear it in the first place. Life is hard enough. What you need is a change of attitude, a new outlook, a shift in perspective... a cup of coffee. If we have no ears for pessimism, this is because it is always reducible to something as reliably mutable as a voice. If pessimism is so frequently disparaged, it is because it brings everyone down, determined as it is to view each day as a bad day, if only by virtue of the fact that it is not yet a bad day. For pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility, the collision of a bad mood with an impassive world. In fact, pessimism is the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world, a confusion that also prevents it from fully entering the hallowed halls of philosophy. If pessimism is so often dismissed, this is because it is often impossible to separate a “bad mood” from a philosophical proposition (and do not all philosophies stem from a bad mood?) The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope. ~*~ Anatomy of Pessimism. Though it may locate itself at the margins of philosophy, pessimism is as much subject to philosophical analysis as any other form of thought. Pessimism’s lyricism of failure gives it the structure of music. What time is to the music of sorrow, reason is to a philosophy of the worst. Pessimism’s two major keys are moral and metaphysical pessimism, its subjective and objective poles, an attitude towards the world and a claim about the world. For moral pessimism, it is better not to have been born at all; for metaphysical pessimism, this is the worst of all possible worlds. For moral pessimism the problem is the solipsism of human beings, the world made in our own image, a world-for-us. For metaphysical pessimism, the problem is the solipsism of the world, objected and projected as a world-in-itself. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism are compromised philosophically; moral pessimism by its failure to locate the human within a larger context, and metaphysical pessimism by its failure to recognize the complicity in the very claim of realism. This is how pessimism makes its music of the worst, a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos . Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. ~*~ Melancholy of Anatomy. There is a logic of pessimism that is fundamental to its suspicion of philosophical system. Pessimism involves a statement about a condition . In pessimism each statement boils down to an affirmation or a negation, just as any condition boils down to the best or the worst. With Schopenhauer, that arch-pessimist, the thinker for whom the philosopher and the curmudgeon perfectly overlap, we see a no-saying to the worst, a no-saying that secretly covets a yes-saying (through asceticism, mysticism, quietism), even if this hidden yes-saying is a horizon at the limits of comprehension. With Nietzsche comes the pronouncement of a Dionysian pessimism, a pessimism of strength or joy, a yes-saying to the worst, a yes-saying to this world as it is. And with Cioran yet another variation, futile yet lyrical, a no-saying to the worst, and a further no-saying to the possibility of any other world, in here or out there. With Cioran one approaches, but never reaches, an absolute no-saying, a studied abandonment of pessimism itself. The logic of pessimism moves through three refusals: a no-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-for-us, or Schopenhauer’s tears); a yes-saying to the worst (refusal of the world-in-itself, or Nietzsche’s laughter); and a no-saying to the for-us and the in-itself (a double refusal, or Cioran’s sleep). Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? ~*~ Cosmic Pessimism. Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism ... but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond. Words falter. And so do ideas. And so we have a cosmic pessimism, a pessimism that is first and last a pessimism about cosmos , about the necessity and possibility of order. The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick). ~*~ Song of Futility. An ethics of futility pervades pessimism. Futility, however, is different from fatality, and different again from simple failure (though failure is never simple). Failure is a breakage within the heart of relations, a fissure between cause and effect, a fissure hastily covered over by trying and trying again. With failure, there is always plenty of blame to go around; it’s not my fault, it’s a technical difficulty, it’s a miscommunication. For the pessimist, failure is a question of “when,” not “if”—failure as a metaphysical principle. Everything withers and passes into an obscurity blacker than night, everything from the melodramatic decline of a person’s life to the banal flickering moments that constitute each day. Everything that is done undone, everything said or known destined for a kind of stellar oblivion. When scaled up in this way, failure becomes fatality. Fatality is the hermeticism of cause and effect. In fatality, everything you do, whatever you do, always leads to a certain end, and ultimately to the end—though that end, or the means to that end, remain shrouded in obscurity. Nothing you do makes a difference because everything you do makes a difference. Hence the effects of your actions are hidden from you, even as you deceive yourself into thinking that, at last, this time you will outwit the order of things. By having a goal, planning ahead, and thinking things through carefully, we attempt, in a daily Prometheanism, to turn fatality to our advantage, to gain a glimpse of an order that seems buried deeper and deeper in the fabric of the universe. But even fatality has its comforts. The chain of cause and effect may be hidden from us, but that’s just because disorder is the order we don’t yet see; it’s just complex, distributed, and requires advanced mathematics. Fatality still clings to the sufficiency of everything that exists... When fatality relinquishes even this idea, it becomes futility. Futility arises out of the grim suspicion that, behind the shroud of causality we drape over the world, there is only the indifference of what exists or doesn’t exist; whatever you do ultimately leads to no end, an irrevocable chasm between thought and world. Futility transforms the act of thinking into a zero-sum game. ~*~ Song of the Worst. At the center of pessimism lies the term pessimus , “the worst,” a term as relative as it is absolute. The worst is about as bad as it gets, “the worst” as “the best” in disguise, shrouded by the passage of time or the twists and turns of fortune. For the pessimist, “the worst” is the propensity for suffering that gradually occludes each living moment, until it eclipses it entirely, overlapping perfectly in death... which, for the pessimist, is no longer “the worst.” Pessimism is marked by an unwillingness to move beyond “the worst,” something only partially attributable to a lack in motivation. In pessimism “the worst” is the ground that gives way beneath every existent—things could be worse, and , things could be better. “The worst” invariably implies a value judgment, one made based on scant evidence and little experience; in this way, pessimism’s greatest nemesis is its moral orientation. Pessimism’s propositions have all the gravitas of a bad joke. Perhaps this is why the true optimists are the most severe pessimists—they are optimists that have run out of options. They are almost ecstatically inundated by the worst. Such an optimism is the only possible outcome of a prolonged period of suffering, physical or metaphysical, intellectual or spiritual. But does this not also describe all the trials and tribulations of each day—in short, of “life?” It seems that sooner or later we are all doomed to become optimists of this sort (the most depressing of thoughts...) ~*~ Song of Doom. Rather than serving as a cause for despair, gloom and doom are the forms of consolation for any pessimist philosophy. Neither quite affects nor quite concepts, gloom and doom transform pessimism into a mortification of philosophy. Doom is not just the sense that all things will turn out badly, but that all things inevitably come to an end, irrespective of whether or not they really do come to an end. What emerges from doom is a sense of the unhuman as an attractor, a horizon towards which the human is fatally drawn. Doom is humanity given over to unhumanity in an act of crystalline self-abnegation. Gloom is not simply the anxiety that precedes doom. Gloom is literally atmospheric, climate as much as impression, and if people are also gloomy, this is simply the by-product of an anodyne atmosphere that only incidentally involves human beings. Gloom is more climatological than psychological, the stuff of dim, hazy, overcast skies, of ruins and overgrown tombs, of a misty, lethargic fog that moves with the same languorousness as our own crouched and sullen listening to a disinterested world. In a sense, gloom is the counterpoint to doom—what futility is to the former, fatality is to the latter. Doom is marked by temporality—all things precariously drawn to their end—whereas gloom is the austerity of stillness, all things sad, static, and suspended, a meandering smoke hovering over cold lichen stones and damp fir trees. If doom is the terror of temporality and death, then gloom is the horror of a hovering stasis that is life. At times I like to imagine that this realization alone is the thread that connects the charnel ground Aghori and the graveyard poets. ~*~ Song of Spite. There is an intolerance in pessimism that knows no bounds. In pessimism spite begins by fixing on a particular object of spite—someone one hardly knows, or someone one knows too well; a spite for this person or a spite for all of humanity; a spectacular or a banal spite; a spite for a noisy neighbor, a yapping dog, a battalion of strollers, the meandering idiot walking in front of you on their smart phone, large loud celebrations, traumatic injustices anywhere in the world regurgitated as media blitz, spite for the self-absorbed and overly performative people talking way too loud at the table next to you, technical difficulties and troubleshooting, the reduction of everything to branding, spite of the refusal to admit one’s own errors, of self-help books, of people who know absolutely everything and make sure to tell you, of all people, all living beings, all things, the world, the spiteful planet, the inanity of existence... Spite is the motor of pessimism because it is so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok, stumbling across intuitions that can only half-heartedly be called philosophical. Spite lacks the confidence and the clarity of hatred, but it also lacks the almost cordial judgment of dislike. For the pessimist, the smallest detail can be an indication of a metaphysical futility so vast and funereal that it eclipses pessimism itself—a spite that pessimism carefully places beyond the horizon of intelligibility, like the experience of dusk, or like the phrase, “it is raining jewels and daggers.” ~*~ Song of Sleep. A paraphrase of Schopenhauer: what death is for the organism, sleep is for the individual. Pessimists sleep not because they are depressed, but because for them sleep is a form of ascetic practice. Sleep is the askesis of pessimism. If, while sleeping, we have a bad dream, we abruptly wake up, and suddenly the horrors of the night vanish. There is no reason to think that the same does not happen with the bad dream we call “life.” ~*~ Song of Sorrow. Nietzsche, commenting on pessimism, once castigated Schopenhauer for taking things too lightly. He writes: ...Schopenhauer, though a pessimist, really —played the flute. Every day, after dinner: one should read his biography on that. And incidentally: a pessimist, one who denies God and the world but comes to a stop before morality—who affirms morality and plays the flute... what? Is that really—a pessimist? We know that Schopenhauer did possess a collection of instruments, and we also know that Nietzsche himself composed music. There is no reason to think that either of them would ever banish music from the Republic of philosophy. But Nietzsche’s jibes at Schopenhauer are as much about music as they are about pessimism. For the pessimist who says no to everything and yet finds comfort in music, the no-saying of pessimism can only be a weak way of saying yes—the weightiest statement undercut by the flightiest of replies. The least that Schopenhauer could’ve done is to play the bass. I’m not a big fan of the flute, or, for that matter, wind instruments generally. But what Nietzsche forgets is the role that the flute has historically played in Greek tragedy. In tragedy, the flute ( aulos ) is not an instrument of levity and joy, but of solitude and sorrow. The Greek aulos not only expresses the grief of tragic loss, but it does so in a way that renders weeping and singing inseparable from each other. The classicist Nicole Loraux calls this the mourning voice . Set apart from the more official civic rituals of funerary mourning, the mourning voice of Greek tragedy constantly threatens to dissolve song into wailing, music into moaning, and the voice into a primordial, disarticulate anti-music. The mourning voice delineates all the forms of suffering—tears, weeping, sobbing, wailing, moaning, and the convulsions of thought reduced to an elemental unintelligibility. In the collapsed space between the voice that speaks and the voice that sings, pessimism discovers its mourning voice. Pessimism: the failure of sound and sense, the disarticulation of phone and logos . Have we rescued Schopenhauer from Nietzsche? Probably not. Perhaps Schopenhauer played the flute to remind himself of the real function of the mourning voice—sorrow, sighs, and moaning rendered indistinguishable from music, the crumbling of the human into the unhuman. Failure par excellence of pessimism. ~*~ Song of Nothing. In Buddhist thought, the First Noble Truth of existence is encapsulated in the Pali term dukkha , conventionally translated as “suffering,” “sorrow,” or “misery.” The Buddhist teachings are clear, however, that this is an objective claim, and not simply one point of view among others. Existence is suffering and sorrow—and yet this is not, the teachings tell us, a pessimistic attitude. It is likely that Schopenhauer, reading the Buddhist texts available to him, recognized some filiation with the concept of dukkha . But dukkha is a multi-faceted term. There is, certainly, dukkha in the usual sense of the suffering, strife, and loss associated with living a life. But this is, in turn, dependent on the finitude and temporality of dukkha , existence as determined by impermanence and imperfection. And this ultimately points to the way in which both suffering and finitude are grounded by the paradoxical groundlessness of dukkha as a metaphysical principle—the insubstantiality and the emptiness of all that is. Beyond what is worse to me, beyond a world ordered for the worst, there is the emptiness of dukkha as an impersonal suffering... the tears of the cosmos. In this context, it is easy to see how Schopenhauer’s pessimism attempts to compress all the aspects of dukkha into a nothingness at the core of existence, a Willlessness coursing through the Will. Though one thing for certain is that with Schopenhauer we do not find the “ever-smiling” countenance of Buddhism—or do we? The texts of the Pali Canon also contain lists of the different types of happiness—including the happiness of renunciation and the strange happiness of detachment. But Buddhism considers even the different types of happiness as part of dukkha , in this final sense of nothingness or emptiness. Perhaps Schopenhauer understood Buddhism better than he is usually given credit for. Thus the experiment of Schopenhauer’s philosophy—the point at which a Western pessimus and an Eastern dukkha overlap or exchange glances. Empty sorrow, a lyricism of indifference. The result is a strange, and ultimately untenable, nocturnal form of Buddhism. ~*~ Cioran once called music a “physics of tears.” If this is true, then perhaps metaphysics is its commentary. Or its apology. ~*~ Pessimism would be more mystical were it not for its defeatism. Mysticism is much too proactive for the pessimist, and pessimism too impassive even for the mystic. At the same time, there is something enviable about mysticism—despite its sufferings. There is a sense in which pessimists are really failed mystics. ~*~ You, the Night, and the Music. In a suggestive passage, Schopenhauer once noted that, “music is the melody to which the world is the text." Given Schopenhauer’s view on life—that life is suffering, that human life is absurd, that the nothingness before my birth is equal to the nothingness after my death—given all this, one wonders what kind of music Schopenhauer had in mind when he described music as the melody to which the world is text—was it opera, a Requiem Mass, a madrigal, or perhaps a drinking song? Or something like Eine kleine Nachtmusik , a little night music for the twilight of thought, a sullen nocturne for the night-side of logic, an era of sad wings sung by a solitary banshee. Perhaps the music Schopenhauer had in mind is music eliminated to non-music. A whisper would suffice. Perhaps a sigh of fatigue or resignation, perhaps a moan of despair or sorrow. Perhaps a sound just articulate enough that it could be heard to dissipate. ~*~ Teach me to laugh through tears. ~*~ Pessimism always falls short of being philosophical. My back aches, my knees hurt, I couldn’t sleep last night, I’m stressed-out, and I think I’m finally coming down with something. Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique. We didn’t really think we could figure it out, did we? It was just passing time, taking a piss, something to do, a bold gesture put forth in all its fragility, according to rules that we have agreed to forget that we made up in the first place. Every thought marked by a shadowy incomprehension that precedes it, and a futility that undermines it. That pessimism speaks, in whatever voice, is the singing testimony to this futility and this incomprehension—take a chance and step outside, lose some sleep and say you tried... ~*~ Is there a music of pessimism? And would such a music be audible? ~*~ The impact of music on a person compels them to put their experience into words. When this fails, the result is a faltering of thought and language that is itself a kind of music. Cioran writes: “Music is everything. God himself is nothing more than an acoustic hallucination.” ~*~ If a thinker like Schopenhauer has any redeeming qualities, it is that he identified the great lie of Western culture—the preference for existence over non-existence. As he notes: “If we knocked on the graves and asked the dead whether they would like to rise again, they would shake their heads.” In Western cultures it is commonly accepted that one celebrates birth and mourns death. But there must be a mistake here. Wouldn’t it make more sense to mourn birth and celebrate death? Strange though, because the mourning of birth would, presumably, last the entirety of that person’s life, so that mourning and living would the be same thing. ~*~ To the musical idea of the harmony of the universe corresponds the philosophical principle of sufficient reason. Like the music of mourning, pessimism gives voice to the inevitable breakdown of word and song. In this way, music is the overtone of thought. ~*~ The Patron Saints of Pessimism. The patron saints of pessimism watch over suffering. Laconic and sullen, the patron saints of pessimism never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Lest we forget, there do exist patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones. There is, for instance, the fourth century Saint Catherine of Alexandria, or Catherine of the Wheel, named after the torture device used on her. A precocious fourteen year old scholar, Catherine was subject to continual persecution. After all forms of torture failed—including the “breaking wheel”—the emperor finally settled for her decapitation, a violent yet appropriate reminder of the protector of philosophers. There are also patron saints of music and musicians, but theirs too are sad stories. In the second century, Saint Cecilia was also subject to persecution and torture. As she knelt to receive the blade that would separate her head from her body, she ardently sang a song to God. It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. Does pessimism not deserve its own patron saints, even if they are unworthy of martyrdom? But in our search, even the most ardent nay-sayers frequently lapse into brief moments of enthusiasm—Pascal’s love of solitude, Leopardi’s love of poetry, Schopenhauer’s love of music, Nietzsche’s love of Schopenhauer, and so on. Should one then focus on individual works of pessimism? We could include Kierkegaard’s trilogy of horror— Sickness Unto Death , The Concept of Dread , and Fear and Trembling —but all these are undermined by their fabricated and unreliable authors. Besides, how can one separate the pessimist from the optimist in works like Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life , Shestov’s Postetas Clavium , or Edgar Saltus’ under-read The Philosophy of Disenchantment ? Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete—witness Cioran’s trajectory, from his first book, On the Heights of Despair , to the last unpublished notebooks of acrid and taut aphorisms. And this is to say nothing of literary pessimism, from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s underground man, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler; Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui, the mystical Satanism of Huysmans and Strindberg, the hauntologies of Mário de Sá-Carniero, Izumi Kyoka, H.P. Lovecraft, grumpy old Beckett... even the great pessimist comedians. All that remains are singular, perhaps anomalous statements of pessimism, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into fortune cookies. Patron saints are traditionally named after a locale, either a place of birth or of a mystical experience. Perhaps the better approach is to focus on the places where pessimists were forced to live out their pessimism—Schopenhauer facing an empty Berlin lecture hall, Nietzsche mute and convalescent at the home of his sister, Wittgenstein the relinquished professor and solitary gardener, Cioran grappling with Alzheimer’s in his tiny writing alcove in the Latin Quarter. ~*~ There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. ~*~ If pessimism has any pedagogical value, it is that the failure of pessimism as a philosophy is inextricably tied to the failure of pessimism as voice. I read the following, from Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness : When a person is young he writes because it seems to him he has discovered a new almighty truth which he must make haste to impart to forlorn humankind. Later, becoming more modest, he begins to doubt his truths: and then he tries to convince himself. A few more years go by, and he knows he was mistaken all round, so there is no need to convince himself. Nevertheless he continues to write, because he is not fit for any other work, and to be accounted a superfluous person is so horrible. (shrink)

The question of whether grammaticality is a binary categorical or a gradient property has been the subject of ongoing debate in linguistics and psychology for many years. Linguists have tended to use constructed examples to test speakers’ judgements on specific sorts of constraint violation. We applied machine translation to randomly selected subsets of the British National Corpus (BNC) to generate a large test set which contains well-formed English source sentences, and sentences that exhibit a wide variety of grammatical infelicities. (...) We tested a large number of speakers through (filtered) crowd sourcing, with three distinct modes of classification, one binary and two ordered scales. We found a high degree of correlation in mean judgements for sentences across the three classification tasks. We also did two visual image classification tasks to obtain benchmarks for binary and gradient judgement patterns, respectively. Finally, we did a second crowd source experiment on 100 randomly selected linguistic textbook example sentences. The sentence judgement distributions for individual speakers strongly resemble the gradience benchmark pattern. This evidence suggests that speakers represent grammatical well-formedness as a gradient property. (shrink)

Microbiome research shows that human health is foundationally intertwined with the ecology of microbial communities living on and in our bodies. This challenges the categorical separation of organisms from environments that has been central to biomedicine, and questions the boundaries between them. Biomedicine is left with an empirical problem: how to understand causal pathways between host health, microbiota and environment? We propose a conceptual tool – environmentality – to think through this problem. Environmentality is the state or quality of (...) being an environment for something else in a particular context: a fully perspectival proposition. Its power lies partly in what Isabelle Stengers has called the efficacy of the word itself, contrasting the dominant sense of the word environment as something both external and fixed. Through three case studies, we argue that environmentality can help think about the causality of microbiota vis-a-vis host health in a processual, relational and situated manner, across scales and temporalities. We situate this intervention within historical trajectories of thought in biomedicine, focusing on the challenge microbiome research poses to an aperspectival body. We argue that addressing entanglements between microbial and human lives requires that the environment is brought into the clinic, thus shortening the conceptual gap between medicine and public health. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the view that Berkeley endorses a spirit-idea dualism, and I explain what this dualism amounts to. Central to the discussion is Berkeley's claim that spirits and ideas are "entirely distinct." Taken as a Cartesian real distinction, the "entirely distinct" claim seems to be at odds with Berkeley's view that spirits are substances that support ideas by perceiving them. This has led commentators to deflate Berkeley's notion of "entire distinction" by reading it as analogous to the (...) categorical distinction between substance and accident. I argue that rather than taking Berkeley's notion of "entire distinction" in either of these ways, it ought to be understood as insisting upon a radical dissimilitude between spirits and ideas. This dissimilitude requires that ideas cannot be viewed as analogous to modes or accidents which inhere in a substance. Moreover, spirits and ideas cannot be understood in terms of a single, gradated scale of reality. Instead, for Berkeley spirits and ideas occupy two entirely different scales of reality and consequently the very term 'thing' applies to them in different senses. In this way, Berkeley endorses a severe dualism that occurs at the highest level of his ontology. En este trabajo defiendo que Berkeley sostiene un dualismo espíritu-idea y explico qué significa tal dualismo. Es central en la discusión la afirmación de Berkeley que los espíritus y las ideas son "totalmente distintos". Considerada como una distinción real cartesiana, la tesis "totalmente distintos" parece estar en tensión con la concepción de Berkeley de que los espíritus son sustancias que "support ideas by perceiving them". Esto ha llevado a los comentadores a disminuir la noción de Berkeley de "distinción total" leyéndola como un análogo a la distinción categorial entre sustancia y accidente. Yo argumento que en lugar de considerar a la noción de Berkeley de "distinción total"en alguno de esos modos, debe ser comprendida como insistiendo en una radical diferencia entre espíritus e ideas. Esta diferencia requiere que las ideas no se vean como análogas a modos o accidentes de la sustancia. Además espíritus e ideas no pueden ser entendidos en términos de una única escala graduada de realidad. En cambio para Berkeley espíritus e ideas ocupan dos escalas totalmente distintas de realidad y en consecuencia, el término mismo "cosa" se aplica en sentidos distintos. De este modo, Berkeley sostiene un dualismo severo que acaece al más alto nivel de su ontología. (shrink)

Helicopter cabin noise was simulated by combining a broadband signal (pink noise, or PN) with a triad of pure tones (PT) at 650,1900, and 5000 Hz. Each component was presented at four loudness levels (0,60,70, and 80 dB[A]), with all 16 combinations arranged in two unsystematic orders. Intelligibility was measured by means of sentences to be judged as true or false. A male speaker presented 10 sentences at each noise condition. One group of subjects heard the sentences at 50 (...) dB(A) and another group at 55 dB(A). The annoyance of each noise combination was rated by the same subjects on a 5-point scale. Both sources and their interaction were significantly related to reduced intelligibility and increased annoyance at both speech levels. In general, the PN component was more responsible for loss of intelligibility, and the PT component more responsible for annoyance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Religious Pluralism:Buddhist and Christian Perspectives1John D'Arcy MayThe question of how the concept of human rights—so crucially important for the implementation of justice in a rapidly globalizing world—relates to the plurality of cultures and religions has still not been solved. Controversies such as those over land rights in Aboriginal Australia and Asian values in Southeast Asia have shown this repeatedly. In such cases, discussion eventually (...) becomes focused on the universality of human rights, not just the global scope of the idea itself but the universal validity of catalogues of specific rights such as those contained in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948). There is something arbitrary and unsystematic about such charters, as is shown by the rather different emphases in the African and Islamic documents which were meant to correct the UN's lack of universality.2 But if, in attempting to explore this problem seriously, one appears to tamper with the principle of universality, one can easily be accused of diluting the ethical force of human rights by questioning their applicability to every human being without exception. Nothing could be further from my mind, so before explaining what I wish to do in this paper I shall first set out some presuppositions that I take to be axiomatic:1. Our starting point is the dignity of the human, the unique value of each individual human life as a world constituted by consciousness, an originating source of free acts, which is therefore an end in itself and must never be misused as a means to other people's ends.3 This principle is reflected in formulations such as dignitas humana in the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which goes back to the biblical doctrine of the creation of human beings in the image of God, or in the unique status of the human being in the Buddhist scale of existence, on which neither animals nor gods but only humans are in a position to grasp the reality of their situation and strive for definitive release from the chain of becoming; hence the severity of the prohibition on taking human life as the third of the four cardinal offences (pārājika).42. The concept of "human rights" is one way of acknowledging this unique moral status of human dignity, in that rights accrue to the individual person [End Page 51] simply by virtue of his or her being rational, autonomous, and free. To this extent human rights language belongs within the Western tradition of liberal discourse, which lies at the heart of Western democracies and was profoundly influenced by Christianity. Conceptions of what it is that makes the human uniquely valuable, however, are very differently constructed in different cultural and religious traditions.53. What rights language tries to express in the conceptual framework provided by European culture has universal validity, although it is otherwise expressed in other cultures, for example, in terms of "duty," "obedience," "taboo," and so on. Problematic as it is in the context of postmodern discourse, the sameness-in-difference of the human as the criterion for rights everywhere and without exception is a categorical imperative on which the effectiveness of human rights as an instrument of justice depends.4. Conceptions of universality, however, may themselves be culturally determined and usually arise in contexts of domination: what is taken to be universally valid is often somebody's particular version of the truth of things which by virtue of a claim to universality is then imposed on others as "the" truth. Such conceptions are necessarily generalizations, whereas the moral impulse arises in the face-to-face encounter with the alien, unexpected and unwanted "other," as Levinas has shown.5. Universality is thus not available a priori but remains implicit in the intersubjectivity of human interaction until it is realized through shared practice and the negotiation of meanings; this applies all the more to interactions between religions and across cultures.66. Rights language, though a powerful instrument for the implementation of justice, is thus incomplete unless its Western (and Christian) conceptual presuppositions are complemented by the metaphors, stories, and... (shrink)

Long-term studies of whales, dolphins, and porpoises (the cetaceans) in nature abruptly began about 50 yr ago, preceded by several decades of terrestrial animal studies, often of charismatic large mammals. Fifty years ago, intensive whaling was still occurring, and arguments against whaling largely centered around impending extinctions due to over-hunting, not the idea that cetaceans should not be killed due to natural or inherent goodness. In the 1970s, several USA and other government agencies promulgated rules to help control pollution and (...) other insults to nature, often effective in the short term but not in stopping an overall decline in the health of nature. While there appeared a general societal awakening towards greater appreciation of nature and intrinsic animal rights, researchers largely stayed focused on their research, with little attention to using knowledge to increase ecosystem and animal health. Attitudes of direct scientific involvement in calling for environmental action have changed, as it is becoming increasingly (but not universally) appreciated that researchers who know the problems are well-suited to alert governments, industry, and society to them, and loudly call for action. I have no good answers for how to accomplish large-scale rapid reversals of environmental declines. One laudable action is to be an active vocal part of appropriate web-based conservation advocacy groups. Involving the young of all genders and races for a groundswell of support is likely most effective in generating a new world view of so much respect for nature that we radically alter our present ways of subjugating and diminishing it in the name of supposed human progress. Above all, we scientists must no longer dither with opinions on environmental problems and urgent needs for action; we must proclaim them intelligently, forcefully, and as broadly as possible. (shrink)

Maternal insightfulness or the capacity to see things from the child’s point of view, is considered to be a crucial construct for therapeutic change. In the present study, we aimed to implement the knowledge gleaned from the studies on attachment theory and maternal insightfulness into clinical practice to create an intervention program for mothers of children-at-risk due to inadequate parental care. We used drama therapy to “practice” maternal insightfulness in more “experiential” ways, because the use of creative expressive means may (...) be accessible and effective for the target population of the study and help improve maternal care. We used a manualized 10-week drama therapy-group intervention, focusing on the core concepts of maternal insightfulness: insightfulness, separateness, complexity, and acceptance. We used various dramatic means to explore and experience these components of maternal insightfulness. Forty mothers of children-at-risk took part in eight groups of parental insightfulness drama therapy. To evaluate the efficacy of the intervention, we used the Insightfulness Assessment interview, which produces 10 scales and a final classification of PI and non-PI. The Child Behavior Check List was used to evaluate a change in children’s behavior problems. The assessment took place at three time points: before the intervention, right after the end of the intervention, and 6 months following the intervention. Results at T2 showed a significant improvement compared to T1 in some of the maternal insightfulness scales, but not in the maternal insightfulness categorical classification. At T3, there was a significant change in the classification of the mothers, from non-insightful to positively insightful. At T3, there was also a significant decline in the children’s externalized and general behavioral problems. The results of this study contribute to an evidence-based practice of using drama therapy in the treatment of mothers and children at risk. (shrink)