Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a (...) different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input. (shrink)

The explicit objective for the 2014 Symposium hosted by the University of North Florida, which serves as the basis for this collection of papers, was to explore the relationship and potential for mutual support between the disciplines of child rights and pediatric bioethics in advancing the health and well-being of children in the United States and around the world. The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child served as the locus for this discussion. A significant question emerged in the (...) Symposium about whether the CRC could serve any beneficial purpose in the United States, where it has not yet been ratified. Further, there was.. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child can be useful in pediatric bioethics. Adopted in 1989, the CRC reflects norms that have been deliberated upon for a long period of time and endorsed by most nations. The United States is now the only country that has not ratified the CRC.1 International human rights law shares many key moral concepts with clinical pediatric bioethics, and the CRC provides a considered language common to many (...) jurisdictions that can assist bioethicists in their daily practice and help health-care organizations in their policy development and international interactions. There may, however, be practical challenges with using the CRC in the practice of.. (shrink)

This article suggests a way to circumvent some of the problems that follow from the lack of consensus on a definition of emotion (Izard, 2010; Kleinginna & Kleinginna, 1981) and emotion regulation (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004) by adopting a conceptual framework based on discrete emotions theory and focusing on specific emotions. Discrete emotions theories assume that neural, affective, and cognitive processes differ across specific emotions and that each emotion has particular motivational and regulatory functions. Thus, efforts at regulation should (...) target the specific dysregulated emotions. The positive effects of emotion regulation are more likely to be optimized when they result from or lead to emotion utilization—the constructive use of the energy of emotion arousal. Effective processes for regulation differ for basic emotions and emotion schemas. This article identifies neural systems that facilitate emotion experiences and emotion regulation processes. It considers the implications of the developmental change from basic emotions to emotion schemas, and also briefly discusses the effects of interventions on changes in emotion knowledge, emotion regulation, and social and emotional competence. (shrink)

The Religion of Humanity, first expounded by the founder of Positivism, Auguste Comte, focused the minds of a wide range of prominent Victorians on the possibility of replacing Christianity with an alternative religion based on scientific principles and humanist values. This new book traces the impact of Comte's 'religion' on Victorian Britain, showing how its ideas were championed by John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes before being institutionalised by Richard Congreve and Frederic Harrison, the leaders of the two main (...) centres of Positivist worship. Widely discussed by scientists, philosophers, and theologians, it also attracted the attention of numerous literary figures, including Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Leslie Stephen, achieving its widest circulation through the works of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and George Gissing. A wide-ranging and interdisciplinary contribution to the history of ideas, this book sheds new light on a significant but hitherto neglected strand of Victorian thought. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical research examines the effects of the so-called “social determinants of health” on health and health inequalities. Several high-profile publications have issued policy recommendations to reduce health inequalities based on a specific interpretation of this empirical research as well as a set of normative assumptions. This article questions the framework defined by these assumptions by focusing on two issues: first, the normative judgments about the fairness of particular health inequalities; and second, the policy recommendations issued on (...) this basis. We argue that the normative underpinnings of the approach are insufficiently supported and that the policy recommendations do not necessarily follow from the arguments provided. Furthermore, while many of the policies recommended—such as improving people's living conditions and reducing inequalities in wealth and power—are justified in their own right, the way these recommendations are tied to health is problematic. (shrink)

"The thought of Immanuel Kant has had incalculable - and, many would say, negative - impact on the modern estimation of religion, religious belief, and religious knowledge. Yet, Davidovich argues in the strikingly original interpretation, the chief lines and import of Kant's work on religion have been crippingly misunderstood." "Davidovich radically refigures Kant scholarship by focusing decisively on his Third Critique, long thought his weakest, where she finds Kant confronting the results of his strong distinction between theoretical and practical reason. (...) There he attempts a comprehensive theory of reflective judgment, in which contemplative thought of a moral designer of the universe is a principle that overcomes the bifurcation of scientific (rational) and moral (practical) activities." "Moreover, this specifically religious consciousness, which harmonizes the lawfulness of nature with the purposiveness of freedom, is further developed, Davidovich maintains, by Rudolf Otto's and Paul Tillich's influential theories of religion. Today it can safeguard the status of religion and a normative science of religion." "Davidovich's work is an outstanding contribution, breaking new ground in both Kantian scholarship and the theory of religion."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Traditionally, medicine has been considered a practical art. It seeks the patient’s well-being through technical means and specific skills in healing. On the other hand, healing means are connected to the life sciences, through which knowledge has developed systematically. Due to research and technological development, we can easily reveal the true meaning of medicine as science. Hippocratic practice and Aristotelian ethics have offered us a humanitarian approach, oriented to the sick person, which set the virtuous human character of each person (...) who practices the virtues. The medicine people approached to the medicine preserving an ancient picture of the practice. They have know-how of the practice, recognize the characteristics of each field of art or science appreciating its utility and benefits, but often they don’t know why or where the boundary between the two fields, science and art, falls. They are scientists and artists, too. In this article I intend to fix what science means and what art means, based on Aristotelian arguments, which lead to a perspective of a virtuous professional life. Also, it is relevant to find its common issues. No physicians can successfully practice their profession without respecting the rigor of science and training their creativity. I plead for a moral practice, for the understanding of humanity's state in any medical act. Medicine is the moral community where practice meets science and arts merge both. Medicine is not between practice and science; it is the art itself of medical practice and science. (shrink)

We upgrade [3] to a complete proof of the conjecture NP = PSPACE that is known as one of the fundamental open problems in the mathematical theory of computational complexity; this proof is based on [2]. Since minimal propositional logic is known to be PSPACE complete, while PSPACE to include NP, it suffices to show that every valid purely implicational formula ρ has a proof whose weight and time complexity of the provability involved are both polynomial in the weight of (...) ρ. As is [3], we use proof theoretic approach. Recall that in [3] we considered any valid ρ in question that had a “short” tree-like proof π in the Hudelmaier-style cutfree sequent calculus for minimal logic. The “shortness” means that the height of π and the total weight of different formulas occurring in it are both polynomial in the weight of ρ. However, the size, and hence also the weight, of π could be exponential in that of ρ. To overcome this trouble we embedded π into Prawitz’s proof system of natural deductions containing single formulas, instead of sequents. As in π, the height and the total weight of different formulas of the resulting tree-like natural deduction ∂1 were polynomial, although the size of ∂1 still could be exponential, in the weight of ρ. In our next, crucial move, ∂1 was deterministically compressed into a “small”, although multipremise, dag-like deduction ∂ whose horizontal levels contained only mutually different formulas, which made the whole weight polynomial in that of ρ. However, ∂ required a more complicated verification of the underlying provability of ρ. In this paper we present a nondeterministic compression of ∂ into a desired standard dag-like deduction ∂0 that deterministically proves ρ in time and space polynomial in the weight of ρ.2 Together with [3] this completes the proof of NP = PSPACE.Natural deductions are essential for our proof. Tree-to-dag horizontal compression of π merging equal sequents, instead of formulas, is not sufficient, since the total number of different sequents in π might be exponential in the weight of ρ – even assuming that all formulas occurring in sequents are subformulas of ρ. On the other hand, we need Hudelmaier’s cutfree sequent calculus in order to control both the height and total weight of different formulas of the initial tree-like proof π, since standard Prawitz’s normalization although providing natural deductions with the subformula property does not preserve polynomial heights. It is not clear yet if we can omit references to π even in the proof of the weaker result NP = coNP. (shrink)

Hunting and gathering is, evolutionarily, the defining subsistence strategy of our species. Studying how children learn foraging skills can, therefore, provide us with key data to test theories about the evolution of human life history, cognition, and social behavior. Modern foragers, with their vast cultural and environmental diversity, have mostly been studied individually. However, cross-cultural studies allow us to extrapolate forager-wide trends in how, when, and from whom hunter-gatherer children learn their subsistence skills. We perform a meta-ethnography, which allows us (...) to systematically extract, summarize, and compare both quantitative and qualitative literature. We found 58 publications focusing on learning subsistence skills. Learning begins early in infancy, when parents take children on foraging expeditions and give them toy versions of tools. In early and middle childhood, children transition into the multi-age playgroup, where they learn skills through play, observation, and participation. By the end of middle childhood, most children are proficient food collectors. However, it is not until adolescence that adults (not necessarily parents) begin directly teaching children complex skills such as hunting and complex tool manufacture. Adolescents seek to learn innovations from adults, but they themselves do not innovate. These findings support predictive models that find social learning should occur before individual learning. Furthermore, these results show that teaching does indeed exist in hunter-gatherer societies. And, finally, though children are competent foragers by late childhood, learning to extract more complex resources, such as hunting large game, takes a lifetime. (shrink)

Abstract‘Raising aspirations’ for education among young people in low socioeconomic regions has become a widespread policy prescription for increasing human capital investment and economic competitiveness in so-called ‘knowledge economies’. However, policy tends not to address difficult social, cultural, economic and political conditions for aspiring, based in structural changes associated with globalization. Drawing conceptually on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Arjun Appadurai and authors in the Funds of Knowledge tradition, this article theorizes two logics for aspiring that are recognizable (...) in research with young people and families: a doxic logic, grounded in populist–ideological mediations; and a habituated logic, grounded in biographic–historical legacies and embodied as habitus. A less tangible third ‘logic’ is also theorized: emergent senses of future potential, grounded in lived cultures, which hold possibility for imagining and pursuing alternative futures. The article offers a sociological framework for understanding aspirations as complex social–cultural phenomena, and for capacitating emergent and hopeful aspirations through school- and community-based research and dialogue. (shrink)

A recurring concern about luck egalitarianism is that its implementation would make some individuals, in particular those who lack marketable talents, experience shame. This, the objection goes, undermines individuals’ self-respect, which, in turn, may also lead to unequal respect between individuals. Loss of (self-)respect is a concern for any egalitarian, including distributive egalitarians, inasmuch as it is non-compensable. This paper responds to this concern by clarifying the relationship between shame and (self-)respect. We argue, first, a luck egalitarian society and ethos (...) would be radically different from the current one and incompatible with shame over lack of talent, and, second, that while shame may still occur in a less than ideal luck egalitarian society, this kind of shame does not undermine egalitarian commitments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cocceius and the Jewish CommentatorsAdina M. YoffieThe case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). He (...) praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the "new" Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and "Calvinist Copernicanism" in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject [End Page 383] to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to "dogmatic humanism." As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that "almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives."4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves "Cocceians" battled the "Voetians," followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). Neither the De ratione nor his voluminous biblical commentary (except [End Page 384] for a short treatise on the last six chapters of Deuteronomy) was published in Cocceius's lifetime. His son Johann Heinrich released these and his father's... (shrink)

Assume this hypothetical situation: an American pharmaceutical company, Maxwell Fisch Pharmaceuticals, Inc., wishes to perform clinical trials involving a new antipsychotic medication, Klezac. Klezac is in its third phase of the clinical stage of the drug research process. Once the testing is complete, Maxwell plans to submit a New Drug Application, the official request to begin marketing Klezac, to the Food and Drug Administration. The new drug is expected to receive FDA approval in 2 or more years. The company decides (...) to shift its research and development activities to Z, a small, developing country. In doing so, Maxwell is following the course taken by numerous other drug companies who wish to take advantage of faster governmental approval in foreign sites and ensuing cheaper research costs. (shrink)

Running head: Functional neuroimaging Abstract Several recently developed techniques enable the investigation of the neural basis of cognitive function in the human brain. Two of these, PET and fMRI, yield whole-brain images reflecting regional neural activity associated with the performance of specific tasks. This article explores the spatial and temporal capabilities and limitations of these techniques, and discusses technical, biological, and cognitive issues relevant to understanding the goals and methods of neuroimaging studies. The types of advances in understanding cognitive and (...) brain function made possible with these methods are illustrated with examples from the neuroimaging literature. (shrink)

L�entrée de la Métaphysique d�Aristote en Europe occidentale a provoqué fascination et embarras. Les lectures nouvelles d�Aristote entrèrent souvent en confrontation avec les exégèses bibliques ; des problématiques spécifiquement médiévales, comme celle de l�être et de l�essence, sont alors apparues. Nous proposons ici la traduction d�une Question appartenant à un cours sur la Métaphysique donné à la fin du XIIIe siècle par Siger de Brabant, maître à la Faculté des arts de l�Université de Paris. La Question 7 propose une solution (...) originale au problème de l�être et de l�essence : le débat est détourné de sa perspective ontologico-théologique et resitué dans le contexte linguistique. (shrink)

Work-themed play may allow children to learn complex skills, and ethno-typical and gender-typical behaviors. Thus, play may have made important contributions to the evolution of childhood through the development of embodied capital. Using data from Aka foragers and Ngandu farmer children from the Central African Republic, we ask whether children perform ethno- and gender-typical play and work activities, and whether play prepares children for complex work. Focal follows of 50 Aka and 48 Ngandu children were conducted with the aim of (...) recording children’s participation in 12 categories of work and work-themed play. Using these data, we test a set of hypotheses regarding how age, gender, ethnicity, and task complexity influence children’s activities. As hypothesized, we find performance of work-themed play is negatively correlated with age. Contrary to our hypothesis, children do not play more than they work at complex tasks, but they work more than they play at simple ones. Gender and ethnicity are associated with play and work at culturally salient activities, despite availability of other-gender and other-ethnicity social partners. Our findings show that ethnic and gender biases are apparent in the play and work behavior of Aka and Ngandu children. Moreover, our results show that play helps both forager and farmer children learn complex skills, consistent with play having an adaptive learning function. (shrink)

Thought experiments have played a central role in philosophical methodology, largely as a means of elucidating the nature of our concepts and the implications of our theories.1 Particular attention is given to widely shared “folk” intuitions – the basic untutored intuitions that the layperson has about philosophical questions.2 The folk intuition is meant to underlie our core metaphysical concepts, and philosophical analysis is meant to explicate or sometimes refine these naïve concepts. Consistency with the deliverances of folk intuitions is a (...) sign that the philosopher is making contact with his object of interest. In order to explore folk concepts, people are often asked to provide their intuitions about a state of affairs in some alternate universe or possible world, one that differs in particular, precise ways from the way things are in the actual world. Here we provide evidence that people’s intuitions about moral responsibility sometimes diverge across worlds even when the facts about these worlds are the same. Which world one considers actual affects at least some philosophical judgments, suggesting that it is not just possible worlds to which our intuitions are tied. We will present several possible explanations for the asymmetry we have identified, and we’ll consider some implications for philosophical intuition. (shrink)

ics. Each of these can be pursued independently to a large extent, but perhaps most intriguing is to contem- plate how progress in each will affect the other. The past several months have seen heightened interest <blockquote> _<b>The Ethics of Neuroscience</b>_ </blockquote> in the intersection of ethics and neuroscience. In the The ethics of neuroscience can be roughly subdivided popular press, the topic grabbed headlines in a May.

At the beginning of the third millennium we are entering a new era. I call it "The Integration/Disintegration Era" because the Integration/ Disintegration Problem is one of the basic problems our world is facing today. Philosophy attempts to work out an integrated view of the universe, of human nature, and of society. The specific philosophical science which has concerned itself with integration/ disintegration, is Integratism. This is the common denominator of different particular problems in the integration /disintegration of the universe, (...) society and personality; and it supplies a possible philosophical solution to the general problem of disintegration. The main concept of integratism is integration [Lat. integer, complete]. My theoretical and empirical study of various aspects of integration/ disintegration problems in modern science and education has led to the formulation of a new, rather systematic and, I believe, quite useful conception of contemporary integratism that contributes not only to the attempt to develop a theory of integration/disintegration processes in various biological and social systems but also to practical problems of developing contemporary integrated educational systems. Further concepts of contemporary integratism are: integrative level, IDon, adaptive disintegration, ADon, disadaptive disintegration, adaptive reintegration, sanosphere, pathosphere, etc. The philosophy of integratism might provide a possible philosophical solution to the general problem of disintegration and in this way assign priority to certain particular problems concerning the disintegration of the world. (shrink)

At the beginning of the third millennium we are entering a new era. I call it "The Integration/Disintegration Era" because the Integration/ Disintegration Problem is one of the basic problems our world is facing today. Philosophy attempts to work out an integrated view of the universe, of human nature, and of society. The specific philosophical science which has concerned itself with integration/ disintegration, is Integratism. This is the common denominator of different particular problems in the integration /disintegration of the universe, (...) society and personality; and it supplies a possible philosophical solution to the general problem of disintegration. The main concept of integratism is integration [Lat. integer, complete]. My theoretical and empirical study of various aspects of integration/ disintegration problems in modern science and education has led to the formulation of a new, rather systematic and, I believe, quite useful conception of contemporary integratism that contributes not only to the attempt to develop a theory of integration/disintegration processes in various biological and social systems but also to practical problems of developing contemporary integrated educational systems. Further concepts of contemporary integratism are: integrative level, IDon, adaptive disintegration, ADon, disadaptive disintegration, adaptive reintegration, sanosphere, pathosphere, etc. The philosophy of integratism might provide a possible philosophical solution to the general problem of disintegration and in this way assign priority to certain particular problems concerning the disintegration of the world. (shrink)

In our previous work we proved the conjecture NP = PSPACE by advanced proof theoretic methods that combined Hudelmaier’s cut-free sequent calculus for minimal logic with the horizontal compressing in the corresponding minimal Prawitz-style natural deduction. In this Addendum we show how to prove a weaker result NP = coNP without referring to HSC. The underlying idea is to omit full minimal logic and compress only “naive” normal tree-like ND refutations of the existence of Hamiltonian cycles in given non-Hamiltonian graphs, (...) since the Hamiltonian graph problem in NPcomplete. Thus, loosely speaking, the proof of NP = coNP can be obtained by HSC-elimination from our proof of NP = PSPACE. (shrink)

Metaethical questions are typically held to be a priori , and therefore impervious to empirical evidence. Here I examine the metaethical claim that motive-internalism about belief , the position that moral beliefs are intrinsically motivating, is true. I argue that belief-internalists are faced with a dilemma. Either their formulation of internalism is so weak that it fails to be philosophically interesting, or it is a substantive claim but can be shown to be empirically false. I then provide evidence for the (...) falsity of substantive belief-internalism. I describe a group of brain-damaged patients who sustain impairment in their moral sensibility: although they have normal moral beliefs and make moral judgments, they are not inclined to act in accordance with those beliefs and judgments. Thus, I argue that they are walking counterexamples to the substantive internalist claim. In addition to constraining our conception of moral reasoning, this argument stands as an example of how empirical evidence can be relevantly brought to bear on a philosophical question typically viewed to be a priori. (shrink)

This paper argues that a putative conflict between negative rights and positive rights is not a genuine conflict. The thought that they might conflict presupposes, I argue, that the two rights are valid. This is the first assumption of my argument. The second is that general rights impose duties on everyone, not just the party who faces a conflict of correlative duties. These two assumptions yield the conclusion that positive rights impose enforceable duties on the holder of the negative right; (...) no right is thus infringed if this duty is enforced so no conflict occurs. If this is correct, it means that we can include welfare or socio-economic rights in a set of general rights without generating conflicts with negative rights to non-interference; this might clear some space for arguments that favour egalitarian redistribution although it does not show that general positive rights do exist. (shrink)

Images come in many varieties, but for evidential purposes, photographs are privileged. Recent advances in neuroimaging provide us with a new type of image that is used as scientific evidence. Brain images are epistemically compelling, in part because they are liable to be viewed as akin to photographs of brain activity. Here I consider features of photography that underlie the evidential status we accord it, and argue that neuroimaging diverges from photography in ways that seriously undermine the photographic analogy. While (...) neuroimaging remains an important source of scientific evidence, proper interpretation of brain images is much more complex than it appears. ‡This work was supported in part by a grant from the Leslie Humanities Center at Dartmouth College. I thank John Kulvicki for helpful comments, and Kim Sterelny, for making it possible for me to spend some time at the ANU with a grant from the Australian Research Council. †To contact the author, please write to: Dartmouth College, Department of Philosophy, Hanover, NH 03755; e-mail: adina[email protected]. (shrink)