This paper reports an experimental investigation of presuppositions and scalar implicatures in language acquisition. Recent proposals posit the same mechanisms for generating both types of inferences, in contrast to the traditional view. We used a Covered Box picture selection task to compare the interpretations assigned by two groups of children and by adults, in response to sentences with presuppositions and ones with either ‘direct’ or ‘indirect’ scalar implicatures. The main finding was that the behavior of children and adults differed across (...) inference types. This asymmetry is consistent with the traditional perspective, but poses a challenge for the more recent uniform accounts. We discuss how the latter could be amended to account for these findings, and also relate the findings to previous results on presupposition processing. Finally, we discuss an unexpected difference found between direct and indirect scalar implicatures. (shrink)

"Golf day 2005 @ federal golf club, red hill." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (196), pp. 7.

In June 2020, representatives of eight photography organizations addressed ongoing challenges to the industry by introducing the “Photo Bill of Rights,” asserting “the rights of all lens-based workers and defining actions that build a safer, healthier, more inclusive, and transparent industry.” The bill centers what “lens-based workers” are owed by the media organizations that employ them. This study analyzes the bill’s contents and the explicit and implicit values within it, finding that the bill presents a normative (...) view of the work environment lens-based workers should expect as a baseline. In so doing, the bill connects what lens-based workers owe their respective publics to what their employers owe those same workers. The bill highlights the enabling environment that these workers need to satisfy their obligations to the public. The bill reminds employers of their duty to create an equitable environment that can enable the fulfillment of public responsibility. (shrink)

Over the past ten years, we have worked in a collaboration between educators and computer scientists at the University of Illinois to imagine futures for education in the context of what is loosely called “artificial intelligence.” Unhappy with the first generation of digital learning environments, our agenda has been to design alternatives and research their implementation. Our starting point has been to ask, what is the nature of machine intelligence, and what are its limits and potentials in education? This paper (...) offers some tentative answers, first conceptually, and then practically in an overview of the results of a number of experimental implementations documented in greater detail elsewhere. Our key finding is that artificial intelligence—in the context of the practices of electronic computing developing over the past three quarters of a century—will never in any sense “take over” the role of teacher, because how it works and what it does are so profoundly different from human intelligence. However, within the limits that we describe in this paper, it offers the potential to transform education in ways that—counterintuitively perhaps—make education more human, not less. (shrink)

In his comments, Richard Fumerton carefully develops two fundamental concerns with my views, which he interprets sympathetically, and almost entirely correctly. Before turning to these concerns, though, I must make one point about his concise opening statement of my principal claims. As I hope is clear from my précis, perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs not simply in virtue of sharing demonstrative content with them. The key idea is that a person cannot properly grasp the objective content of these (...) experiences—that is, he cannot actually have experiences of particular things in the mind-independent world around him—without understanding that his apprehension that things are thus and so out there is in part due to the fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content as his epistemic openness to the way things objectively are. This is clearly central to my overall position. (shrink)

Over the past ten years, we have worked in a collaboration between educators and computer scientists at the University of Illinois to imagine futures for education in the context of what is loosely called “artificial intelligence.” Unhappy with the first generation of digital learning environments, our agenda has been to design alternatives and research their implementation. Our starting point has been to ask, what is the nature of machine intelligence, and what are its limits and potentials in education? This paper (...) offers some tentative answers, first conceptually, and then practically in an overview of the results of a number of experimental implementations documented in greater detail elsewhere. Our key finding is that artificial intelligence—in the context of the practices of electronic computing developing over the past three quarters of a century—will never in any sense “take over” the role of teacher, because how it works and what it does are so profoundly different from human intelligence. However, within the limits that we describe in this paper, it offers the potential to transform education in ways that—counterintuitively perhaps—make education more human, not less. (shrink)

Allen, B., Arithmetizing Uniform NC, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 53 1–50. We give a characterization of the complexity class Uniform NC as an algebra of functions on the natural numbers which is the closure of several basic functions under composition and a schema of recursion. We then define a fragment of bounded arithmetic, and, using our characterization of Uniform NC, show that this fragment is capable of proving the totality of all of the functions in Uniform NC. Lastly, (...) in the spirit of Buss, we show that any function which is definable by a ∑b1-formula in our theory is a function which is in Uniform NC. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Possibility of Falsity The Involvement of Generality Notes References.

Ours are times of unprecedented ‘disruption’. The business pundits like this idea. ‘Disruptive innovation’, they are inclined to call it (Bower and Christensen 1995), a contemporary variation of Jo...

… in which we pass through eleven episodes in the history of cybernetics, each episode focusing on one of its perspectives on learning. We end with a coda where we define ‘cybersocial systems’ and...

Eşrefoğlu Rumi and Ümmî Kemal are prominent practitioners of Ottoman Sufi poetry—literature that emerged from the environment of Anatolian Sufi orders. The parallel histories of the transmission of their two divans help clarify details of the poets’ lives. Conversely, biographical facts may help explain details and oddities of those transmission histories, which themselves may also illuminate features of the late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman religious and political landscape of increasing theological rigidity in the face of Safavid pressure and probable persecution (...) of those deemed beyond the pale, features that are still poorly understood. In light of a recent essay by Walter Andrews on prevailing editing practices in Ottoman literature, I offer a critique of the recent handling of both divans. After noting previously unrecognized copies of each, I also make suggestions for further study of their poems. (shrink)

Simulation research has become a growing area of interest in the social studies in recent years. Problematically, the term simulation is used without consistency among practitioners and researchers. The conceptual confusion regarding what simulations are (or are not) muddies the field and makes it difficult for scholars to make sense of this phenomenon or to talk about simulations across findings. In order to bring clarity to the field, this paper is framed around two conceptual and analytic constructs: conceptual analysis and (...) the theory of language games. In this paper, I will provide a rationale for why the social studies field requires a specific definition for simulations. Next, simulations will be defined using four specific criteria: verisimilitude, dynamism, active human agents, and pedagogical mediation. Finally, simulations will be differentiated from three related phenomena with which they are often conflated: games, role-plays, and models. (shrink)

Suppose that wc identify physical objccts, in thc first instance, by extension, as things like stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world in which we live. Of course, there is a substantive question of what it is to be y such things in the way relevant to categorization as a physical object. So this can hardly be the final word on the matter. Still, it is equally clear that this gives us all a (...) perfectly respectable initial conception of what we are talking about; and it is an entirely adequate starting point for what follows. (shrink)

The motivations for rural and agricultural development in the twenty-first century are not different from previous centuries, but evolving technologies in the late twentieth century have altered many methods and institutional arrangements for accomplishing development. The internet has facilitated initiatives that in earlier decades would have required large, complex organizations in both donor and developing countries. We will compare the ethical and institutional strengths and weaknesses of two such initiatives in Malawi: a smallholder farmers organization involved in fair trade and (...) the Millennium Village Project. These are two of a large array of institutions which are currently being used to benefit smallholder agricultural producers. We will examine their relative merits through the lenses of various ethical paradigms and show that the institutional arrangements of the two programs are complimentary in the evolution of agricultural trading systems linking the global north and south. (shrink)

Quality and service improvement (QSI) research employs a broad range of methods to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery. QSI research differs from traditional healthcare research and poses unique ethical questions. Since QSI research aims to generate knowledge to enhance quality improvement efforts, should it be considered research for regulatory purposes? Is review by a research ethics committee required? Should healthcare providers be considered research participants? If participation in QSI research entails no more than minimal risk, is consent required? The (...) lack of consensus on answers to these questions highlights the need for ethical guidance. Three distinct approaches to classifying QSI research in accordance with existing ethical principles and regulations can be found in the literature. In the first approach, QSI research is viewed as distinct from other types of healthcare research and does not require regulation. In the second approach, QSI research falls within regulatory guidelines but is exempt from research ethics committee review. In the third approach, QSI research is deemed to be part of the learning healthcare system and, as such, is subject to a different set of ethical principles entirely. In this paper, we critically assess each of these views. While none of these approaches is entirely satisfactory, we argue that use of the ethical principles governing research provides the best means of addressing the numerous questions posed by QSI research. (shrink)

Child safety is everybody's concern, but much professional activity is misinformed or based on a misrepresentation of the facts, and preventative action is rarely adequately evaluated. Written and edited by leading researchers with an active role in social policy, this new book challenges both our understanding of the problem of child safety and points to the impotence of "educational" approaches based on "knowledge enhancement". The strong message is that improving children's knowledge has little or no effect on their behaviour. From (...) the physical abuse of young children to drug abuse in adolescence, this book presents a radical new perspective on a key social issue. (shrink)

A Free Country: Australians’ Search for Utopia covers the years 1861–1901 and is the second of the five-volume series about what the publishers call “Australian liberalism.” The author is a well-known and respected Australian academic and was for some years a senior federal cabinet minister with portfolios in education, environment, and employment.This weighty tome provides superb coverage of the Australian continent’s political transformation from six more or less independent and competing British colonies into the independent nation of Australia in 1901. (...) It does this by focusing on the political and cultural tensions... (shrink)

This book's quirky title and strikingly beautiful cover will grab attention on any bookshelf. The image comes from an old watercolor tourism advertising poster, dreamily evocative of paradisiacal pristine lakes and towering mountains. The title comes from a supposed quote by an early nineteenth-century female convict who declared that what would make her life perfect would be "Duck and Green Peas! For Ever!".1There is much to enjoy about this book. It is written in a nonacademic, at times humorous, manner; is (...) well illustrated; and follows a logical format.The book opens with early explorers' fantasies of the lives of indigenous Tasmanians. While some regarded them as debased, not-quite-human, others thought... (shrink)

This paper sheds new light on the prevalence of evolutionary ideas in Scotland in the early nineteenth century and establish what connections existed between the espousal of evolutionary theories and adherence to the directional history of the earth proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Scottish disciples. A possible connection between Wernerian geology and theories of the transmutation of species in Edinburgh in the period when Charles Darwin was a medical student in the city was suggested in an important 1991 (...) paper by James Secord. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of this important episode in the history of evolutionary ideas and explore the relationship between these geological and evolutionary discourses. To do this it focuses on the circle of natural historians around Robert Jameson, Wernerian geologist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh from 1804 to 1854. From the evidence gathered here there emerges a clear confirmation that the Wernerian model of geohistory facilitated the acceptance of evolutionary explanations of the history of life in early nineteenth-century Scotland. As Edinburgh was at this time the most important center of medical education in the English-speaking world, this almost certainly influenced the reception and development of evolutionary ideas in the decades that followed. (shrink)

This paper draws on material from the dissertation books of the University of Edinburgh's student societies and surviving lecture notes from the university's professors to shed new light on the debates on human variation, heredity and the origin of races between 1790 and 1835. That Edinburgh was the most important centre of medical education in the English-speaking world in this period makes this a particularly significant context. By around 1800 the fixed natural order of the eighteenth century was giving way (...) to a more fluid conception of species and varieties. The dissolution of the ‘Great Chain of Being’ made interpretations of races as adaptive responses to local climates plausible. The evidence presented shows that human variation, inheritance and adaptation were being widely discussed in Edinburgh in the student circles around Charles Darwin when he was a medical student in Edinburgh in the 1820s. It is therefore no surprise to find these same themes recurring in similar form in the evolutionary speculations in his notebooks on the transmutation of species written in the late 1830s during the gestation of his theory of evolution. (shrink)

1. Introduction -- 2. Edinburgh's university and medical schools in the early nineteenth century -- 3. Natural history in Edinburgh, 1779-1832 -- 4. Geology and evolution -- 5. Edinburgh and Paris -- 6. The legacy of the 'Edinburgh Lamarckians' -- 7. Conclusion.

On 18 June 2003, just before the first strand of the UK government’s three‐strand (scientific, economic and social) inquiry into genetically modified (GM) foods was to publish its conclusions,1 The...

Slippery-slope arguments typically question a course of action by estimating that it will end in misery once the first unfortunate step is taken. Previous studies indicate that estimations of the long-term consequences of certain debated actions, such as legalizing physician-assisted suicide, may be strongly influenced by tacit personal values. In this paper, we suggest that to the extent that slippery-slope arguments rest on estimations of future events, they may be mere rationalizations of personal values. This might explain why there are (...) proponents even for strikingly poor slippery-slope arguments. (shrink)