The Hoffman Report scandal demonstrates that ethics is not objective and ahistorical, contradicting the comforting progressive story about ethics many students receive. This modern-day ethical failure illustrates some of the weaknesses of the current ethics code: it is rule-based, emphasizes punishments for noncompliance, and assumes a rational actor who can make tricky ethical decisions using a cost–benefit analysis. This rational emphasis translates into pedagogy: the cure for unethical behavior is more education. Yet such an approach seems unlikely to foster ethical (...) behavior in the real world, either for students or for mature scientists. This article argues for an alternative ethical system and a different way of teaching ethical behavior. Virtue ethics emphasizes the development of ethical habits and traits through regular practice and reflection. We show how virtue ethics complements a feminist approach to science, in which scientists are encouraged to reflect on their own biases, rather than attempting to achieve an impossible objectivity. Our article concludes with pedagogical suggestions for teaching ethical behavior as a practical and intelligent skill. (shrink)

Previous studies of auditory statistical learning have typically presented learners with sequential structural information that is uniformly distributed across the entire exposure corpus. Here we present learners with nonuniform distributions of structural information by altering the organization of trisyllabic nonsense words at midstream. When this structural change was unmarked by low‐level acoustic cues, or even when cued by a pitch change, only the first of the two structures was learned. However, both structures were learned when there was an explicit cue (...) to the midstream change or when exposure to the second structure was tripled in duration. These results demonstrate that successful extraction of the structure in an auditory statistical learning task reduces the ability to learn subsequent structures, unless the presence of two structures is marked explicitly or the exposure to the second is quite lengthy. The mechanisms by which learners detect and use changes in distributional information to maintain sensitivity to multiple structures are discussed from both behavioral and computational perspectives. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trauma, Addiction, and Temporal Bulimia in Madame BovaryElissa Marder (bio)Lisez, et ne rêvez pas. Plongez-vous dans de longues études. Il n’y a de continuellement bon que l’habitude d’un travail entêté. Il s’en dégage un opium qui engourdit l’âme [Read and do not dream. The only thing that is continually good is the habit of stubborn work. It emits an opium that numbs the soul].—Gustave Flaubert to Louise ColetMadame Bovary (...) I daresay is about bad drugs.—Avital Ronell, Crack WarsIf Flaubert’s Madame Bovary remains so timely, it is because its heroine, Emma, suffers from the quintessential malady of modernity, the inability to incorporate time into experience. Emma’s missed encounter with her own life, her inability to “get a life,” as we say now in America, renders her our contemporary in the strangest sense of the word. She is our contemporary not because we live in the same time but because her failure to live in time has come to define our own. Paradoxically, Emma Bovary has been so well preserved (she is, in some sense, “more alive” now than ever) because she incarnates and inaugurates a modernity that can be defined by the erosion of the possibility of living in time. In Flaubert’s minute and meticulous descriptions of the particular temporal disorders that afflict Emma (as we shall see, she can neither bear witness to an event nor remember one, she can neither live in the present nor project a future, she is incessantly subject to bouts of involuntary forgetting even as she is preoccupied by obsessive rites of recollection, she attempts simultaneously to conjure up time and to stop it), we can read the prophetic traces of a depiction of the temporal structure of the many forms of trauma and addiction that have come to define contemporary American culture.But before turning to Flaubert’s prescient and powerful analysis of how Emma Bovary suffers from a “temporal disorder,” let us take a brief look at how the notions of trauma and addiction have been described in a contemporary analysis of modern culture. In his recent book On Flirtation, the British child psychoanalyst Adam Phillips redescribes ordinary neurosis as a traumatic response to an inability to live in time. He writes:People come to psychoanalysis when there is something they cannot forget, something they cannot stop telling themselves, often by their actions, about their lives. And these dismaying repetitions—this unconscious limiting or coercion of the repertoire of life stories—create the illusion of time having stopped (or [End Page 49] rather, people believe—behave as if they have stopped time). In our repetitions we seem to be staying away from the future, keeping it at bay.[153]Phillips goes on to explain that “[f]or Freud these repetitions are the consequence of a failure to remember.... Whatever cannot be transformed, psychically processed, reiterates itself. A trauma is whatever there is in a person’s experience that resists useful redescription. Traumas, like beliefs, are ways of stopping time” [153–54]. Phillips’s argument rings with a seductive simplicity: neurosis is defined as a temporal disorder, and the contemporary psychoanalytic “cure” does nothing less than promise time. It presumably offers the subject the option of accepting the contingencies of living in time over the pleasure and pain that attend the attempt to stop it.Nonetheless, Phillips’s claim, that contemporary neurosis can be expressed as an attempt to stop time, should perhaps make us pause. Stopping time, in the time of Balzac, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Flaubert, was once conceived of as part of the privileged domain reserved for art and the artist. We might have naively assumed that in the realm of the “real world,” for “real people” time remains an implacable fact of life. The task of falling out of time, after all, would seem to necessitate either an accident of enormous magnitude (a trauma in the traditional sense) or the reliance upon an external substance—hashish, opium, alcohol, or cocaine—one of those mind-altering substances that so preoccupied the nineteenth-century advocates of paradis artificiels. So what is surprising and particularly suggestive... (shrink)

Newport addresses a fundamental question in language learning: When, why, and how do learners come to form rules, given linguistic input that varies probabilistically? She presents several case studies that confirm and extend a long‐standing theme of her work: that young learners tend to form rules from variable input, whereas adult learners store and use its statistical probabilities. Thus, child and adult learners use quite different kinds of computations when learning language; the consequence is that operating on the very same (...) input to learning results in quite different outcomes of learning. (shrink)

Blending high-interest original writing with select primary sources on political theory, From Concept to Dialogue: An Introduction to Political Theory fosters appreciation for and critical thinking about major political concepts. The text poses thought-provoking questions that guide readers into drawing critical information out of challenging material. Section 1 of the text introduces key concepts and questions of political theory such as human nature, political change, justice, power, governance, and citizenship. Each chapter in this section contains engaging activities that allow readers (...) to apply these concept to their lives. In Section 2 readers are introduced to seminal thinkers including Aristophanes, Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill. Original works such as The Clouds, The Prince, the Apology of Socrates, and Leviathan are framed by introductions that place them in context. The discussion questions spark thought and discussion, support comprehension and retention, and encourage reflection on the concepts and questions in Section 1. Featuring foundational readings geared to students with no prior exposure to the discipline and original material that shows how they relate to our contemporary political world, From Concept to Dialogue is an ideal textbook for courses in introductory political science and political philosophy. Elissa Alzate holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Alzate is currently an assistant professor at Winona State University in Minnesota, where she has taught courses in the history of political thought, political ideologies, American political thought, political theories of education, religion and toleration in political thought, and feminist political theory. Her writing has appeared in Polity, and she is the author of the book Religious Liberty in a Lockean Society: Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which is forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan. Dr. Alzate is a member of the American Political Science Association and the Association for Political Theory. (shrink)

The language sciences—Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Computational Linguistics—have not been broadly represented at the Cognitive Science Society meetings of the past 30 years, but they are an important part of the heart of cognitive science. This article discusses several major themes that have dominated the controversies and consensus in the study of language and suggests the most pressing issues of the future. These themes include differences among the language science disciplines in their view of numbers and symbols and of modular and (...) distributed cognition, and the need for an increasing prominence of questions concerning language and the brain. (shrink)

An important element of Natural Language Processing is parts of speech tagging. With fine-grained word-class annotations, the word forms in a text can be enhanced and can also be used in downstream processes, such as dependency parsing. The improved search options that tagged data offers also greatly benefit linguists and lexicographers. Natural language processing research is becoming increasingly popular and important as unsupervised learning methods are developed. There are some aspects of the Albanian language that make the creation of a (...) part-of-speech tag set challenging. This research provides a discussion of those issues linguistic phenomena and presents a proposal for a part-of-speech tag set that can adequately represent them. The corpus contains more than 250,000 tokens, each annotated with a medium-sized tag set. The Albanian language’s syntagmatic aspects are adequately represented. Additionally, in this paper are morphologically and part-of-speech tagged corpora for the Albanian language, as well as lemmatize and neural morphological tagger trained on these corpora. Based on the held-out evaluation set, the model achieves 93.65% accuracy on part-of-speech tagging, The morphological tagging rate was 85.31 % and the lemmatization rate was 88.95%. Furthermore, the TF-IDF technique weighs terms and with the scores are highlighted words that have additional information for the Albanian corpus. (shrink)

Roper, Elissa The contemporary Catholic Church is experiencing a breakthrough into a fuller stage of self-understanding, and of self-appropriation as the Body of Christ, known as 'synodality'. It is an opening to the possibility of a new experience of transformation on all levels of being Church. Synodality is being promoted and provoked by the papacy of Pope Francis, which has been accompanied by the progressive uncovering of sexual abuse within the Church, prevalent and deeply wounding. Both synodality and the (...) scandal of abuse demand the transformation of all members, processes and structures of the Church. (shrink)

Any first step in organisational adaptation starts with individuals’ responses and willingness (or otherwise) to change an aspect of themselves given the transcontextual settings in which they are operating (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). This research explores the implications for organisational adaptation strategies when Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being embedded into the ecology of the organisation, and when employees have a dominant fixed or growth mindset (Dweck in Mindset: changing the (...) way you think to fulfil your potential. Robinson, London, 2017). Research participants were supplied with a single scenario based in 2030, where—as a result of Artificial Intelligence technology implementation—employees were going to be displaced. Using Torbert’s (Organizational wisdom and executive courage, New Lexington Press, San Francisco, 1998) ‘first, second and third person’ research theory, participants were asked to independently review their thoughts, sense, and image of the future from a fixed mindset position (considered to be the worst case), then from a growth mindset perspective (best case), and then do the same collectively. Five key findings are outlined which support the principle that having a growth mindset is a key component of adaptive capacity and futures literacy. The five key findings conclude that AI adaptation processes need to include compassion and authenticity, embodiment, fundamental needs and motivations, mutual learning and considering what lies beyond the edges of the organisation (Bateson in Small arcs of larger circles: framing through other patterns, Triarchy Press, Axminster, 2018). (shrink)

A code of ethics is used by individuals to justify their actions within an environment. Medical professionals require a keen understanding of specific ethical codes due to the potential consequences of their actions. Over the past thirty years there has been an increase in the scope and depth of ethics instruction in the medical profession; however the teaching of these codes is still highly variable. This inconsistency in implementation is problematic both for the medical practitioner and for the patient; without (...) standardized training, neither party can be assured of the practitioner's overall depth of knowledge. Within the field of ethics certain principles have reached a consensus of importance. Incorporation of these concepts in meaningful ways via a consistent curriculum would provide students with an appropriate skill set for navigating their ethical environment. Moreover, this curriculum should also be extended to residents and professionals who may have missed formal ethical training. This would provide a consistent framework of knowledge for practitioners, creating a basis for clear judgment of complex issues. (shrink)

Language-related potentials are increasingly used to objectify adaptive neuroplasticity in stroke-related aphasia recovery. Using preattentive [mismatch negativity ] and attentive phonologically related paradigms, neuroplasticity in sensory memory and cognitive functioning underlying phonological processing can be investigated. In aphasic patients, MMN amplitudes are generally reduced for speech sounds with a topographic source distribution in the right hemisphere. For P300 amplitudes and latencies, both normal and abnormal results have been reported. The current study investigates the preattentive and attentive phonological discrimination ability in (...) 17 aphasic patients at two timepoints during aphasia recovery. Between the two timepoints, a significant improvement of behavioral language performance in both languages is observed in all patients with the MMN latency at timepoint 1 as a predictive factor for aphasia recovery. In contrast to monolinguals, bilingual aphasic patients have a higher probability to improve their processing speed during rehabilitation, resulting in a shortening of the MMN latency over time, which sometimes progresses toward the normative values. (shrink)

We present a series of three analyses of young children's linguistic input to determine the distributional information it could plausibly offer to the process of grammatical category learning. Each analysis was conducted on four separate corpora from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) of speech directed to children under 2;5. We showthat, in accord with other findings, a distributional analysis which categorizeswords based on their co‐occurrence patterns with surroundingwords successfully categorizes the majority of nouns and verbs. In Analyses 2 and 3, (...) we attempt to make our analyses more closely relevant to natural language acquisition by adopting more realistic assumptions about howyoung children represent their input. In Analysis 2, we limit the distributional context by imposing phrase structure boundaries, and find that categorization improves even beyond that obtained from less limited contexts. In Analysis 3, we reduce the representation of input elements which young children might not fully process and we find that categorization is not adversely affected: Although noun categorization is worse than in Analyses 1 and 2, it is still good; and verb categorization actually improves. Overall, successful categorization of nouns and verbs is maintained across all analyses. These results provide promising support for theories of grammatical category formation involving distributional analysis, as long as these analyses are combined with appropriate assumptions about the child learner's computational biases and capabilities. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher D. Rodkey asks how the brain worships and responds by engaging ideas from neurological science, philosophy, ritual theory, and religious education. The Synaptic Gospel will prove to be a useful theoretical tool for pastors, religious educators, youth ministers, church music professionals, and seminary students.

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages (...) containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing (...) optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross-linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross-linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning. (shrink)

Many of Derrida's formative texts from 1967 about writing, the trace, supplementarity, death, and différance feature striking liminal references to the figure of the mother and are implicitly haunted by the question of birth. In a pivotal passage of De la grammatologie, Derrida links the very futurity of deconstruction to the emergence of ‘a reading discipline to be born’. In this essay, I show that through his readings of the ‘birth of language’ in Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau, Derrida implicitly invites us (...) to relate the inscription of this ‘discipline of reading yet to be born’ to a deconstructive writing of birth that still remains to be read. Birth, as it emerges through this re-reading of the 1967 texts, can neither be conceived as a fixed moment of past plenitude nor contained by a natural, human figure. Instead, it is an exorbitantly exorbitant supplement that is temporally dislocated, iterative, and fissured with non-being. (shrink)

Thomas J.J. Altizer is one of the most important theologians of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and all radical theology must pass through and be conversant with his work and the historical significance of his earlier contributions. This chapter presents Altizer’s essential ideas in a straightforward and accessible manner and provides a guide for the beginning reader.

Rare diseases, defined as having a prevalence inferior to 1/2000, are poorly understood scientifically and medically. Appropriate diagnoses and treatments are scarce, adding to the burden of living with chronic medical conditions. The moral significance of rare disease experiences is often overlooked in qualitative studies conducted with adults living with rare diseases. The concept of morally problematic situations arising from pragmatist ethics shows promise in understanding these experiences. The objectives of this study were to (1) acquire an in-depth understanding of (...) morally problematic situations experienced by adults living with rare diseases in the province of Québec and (2) to develop an integrative model of the concept of morally problematic situations. To this end, an online survey targeting this population was developed through a participatory action research project. Respondents provided 90 long testimonies on the most important morally problematic situations they faced, often in healthcare settings. An integrative model was developed based on various qualitative analyses of these testimonies and relevant literature. The integrative model showcases that morally problematic situations have causes (i.e., contextual and relational factors, personal factors, jeopardized valuations), have affective repercussions (i.e., emotions and feelings, internal tensions), prompt action (i.e., through empowerment strategies leading to the evolution of situations), and elicit outcomes (i.e., factual consequences, residual emotions and feelings, positive or negative resolutions). In sum, this study advances understanding of the moral experiences of adults living with rare diseases while proposing a comprehensive conceptual tool to guide future empirical bioethics research on moral experiences. (shrink)

This essay traces the pivotal—although largely unspoken—relation between the mother and language in Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. Derrida’s gloss of the “idiom” in Heidegger’s text leads to a reflection on the language of gestation through the family of words linking “tragen” to “austragen”. Following Derrida, the essay proposes that Heidegger’s conception of the time of the “unborn” in his essay “Language in the Poem” is the time of the promise and the promise of a (...) future that would not be conceived according to a vulgar conception of time. Heidegger’s idiomatic use of the prefix “un-” in the terms “unspoken” and “unborn” can be read as a temporal inflection that opens up another kind of thinking about birth. The essay concludes by asking how the place of the mother is inscribed otherwise in this unthinking of birth. (shrink)

This article argues that climate change puts excessive demands on the psyche. The omnipresent specter of climate change and global warming cannot be processed by individual psyches because there is little – if anything – that individual people can do to stop the devastation that hovers on the horizon. Unlike other disasters and calamities that have affected humans (war, genocide, nuclear destruction, pandemics, despotism) climate change presents unique challenges to the human psyche as it engages traumatic temporality on a global (...) scale. The inexorably real threat of climate change threatens the psyche’s ability to establish a rational relation to reality. The scale and speed of the catastrophic destruction underway calls for a reconsideration of the force and quality of the denial that accompanies it. Some of the most ‘wellmeaning’ forms of denial may turn out to be the most insidious as they attempt to rationalize, humanize and normalize actions and events that ought to force us to reckon with what we cannot bear to know. (shrink)

In Hesiod’s legendary account of how humans came to be, two extrahuman characters, Prometheus and Pandora, play decisive roles. Both figures intercede and intervene in man’s world and indeed inaugurate the series of events that culminates in the becoming human of man.1 Although neither Prometheus nor Pandora is human, they both participate actively in human life, and through their respective actions the race of men becomes not only alienated from the realm of gods and animals but also from its own (...) prior, prelapsarian existence. The irrevocable and irreducibly self- alienated and internally contradictory status of the human emerges as a direct consequence of the actions of these two “extrahuman” figures. These two .. (shrink)

This paper suggests that The Interpretation of Dreams contains some of Freud's most provocative, far-reaching, and powerful psychoanalytic insights regarding futurity, intersubjective communication, and the relationship between the dream, the dreamer, and the world. By focusing on the specific status and function of the dream (as opposed to all other psychic actions), this paper explores how and why the singular language of dreams—and the very possibility of dream interpretation—provide a specifically psychoanalytic model of translation. The essay examines the specific status (...) of the dream by appealing to a selection of important and influential philosophical readings of Freud's text by Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean Laplanche, and Jean-François Lyotard. Building upon the differences in their respective approaches to the question of dream, the essay argues that because the language of every dream is radically singular, and because dreams trouble all temporal boundaries so that they cannot be located in a particular space or time, they open up the pathway to the future. Furthermore, by showing that dreams produce effects over time and that they leave material traces, the essay also argues that dreams produce real events in the real world. Close attention to Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams reveals that Freud's “dreambook” combines elements of an ethics, a politics, and a poetics. This paper concludes by suggesting that the dream is the fragile bridge that joins the subject to the social world through a form of language that has no presence, and that belongs to no one. (shrink)

Que les violences sexuelles fassent partie intégrante de la guerre est un constat aujourd’hui largement accepté. Pourtant, lorsqu’il s’agit de la Wehrmacht, cela reste une question controversée et un domaine de recherche récent. Pendant trop longtemps la Guerre froide, rendant difficile voire impossible l’accès aux archives soviétiques, avait favorisé le mythe d’une Wehrmacht “propre” (saubere Wehrmacht). Parce que c’est bien le front de l’Est qui était le théâtre des violences les plus extrê...

This paper celebrates the work of Pleshette DeArmitt. In this essay, I show how Pleshette DeArmitt's book, The Right to Narcissism, is haunted by Freud's essay "On Narcissism.".