Machery et al. presented data suggesting the existence of cross-cultural variation in judgments about the reference of proper names. In this paper, we examine a previously overlooked confound in the subsequent studies that attempt to replicate the results of Machery et al. using East Asian languages. Machery et al. and Sytsma et al. claim that they have successfully replicated the original finding with probes written in Chinese and Japanese, respectively. These studies, however, crucially rely on uses of articleless, ‘bare noun (...) phrases’ in Chinese and Japanese, which according to the linguistic literature are known to be multiply ambiguous. We argue that it becomes questionable whether the extant studies using East Asian languages revealed genuine cross-cultural variation when the probes are reevaluated based on a proper linguistic understanding of Chinese and Japanese bare noun phrases and English definite descriptions. We also present two experiments on native Japanese speakers that controlled the use of ambiguous bare noun phrases, the results of which suggest that the judgments of Japanese speakers concerning the reference of proper names may not diverge from those of English speakers. (shrink)

Mental imagery of movement is a potentially valuable rehabilitation task, but its therapeutic efficacy may depend on the specific cognitive strategy employed. Individuals use two main strategies to perform the hand mental rotation task, which involves determining whether a visual image depicts a left or right hand. One is the motor imagery strategy, which involves mentally simulating one’s own hand movements. In this case, task performance as measured by response time is subject to a medial–lateral effect wherein the RT is (...) reduced when the fingertips are directed medially, presumably as the actual motion would be easier. The other strategy is to employ visual imagery, which involves mentally rotating the picture and is not subject to this medial–lateral effect. The rehabilitative benefits of the HMRT are thought to depend on the MI strategy, so it is essential to examine the effects of individual factors such as age, image perspective, and innate ability on the strategy adopted. When presented with pictures of the palm, all subjects in the current study used the MI strategy, regardless of age and ability. In contrast, when subjects were presented with pictures of the back of the hand, the VI strategy predominated among the young age group regardless of performance, while the strategy used by middle-age and elderly groups depended on performance ability. In the middle-age and elderly groups, the VI approach predominated in those with high performance skill, whereas the MI strategy predominated among those with low performance skill. Thus, higher-skill middle-aged and elderly individuals may not necessarily form a motion image during the HMRT, potentially limiting rehabilitation efficacy. (shrink)

Using Harvey Sacks’s concept of membership categorization devices, this article examines the help-search sequences in which Japanese rehabilitation team members use a set of categories to locate the availability of stroke family caregivers. Specifically, based on an analysis of audiovisual data from rehabilitation team conferences in Japan, the article illustrates the ways in which participants at the meetings: evaluate the expectable behaviors of various category incumbents; classify which category of person is proper to turn to for help; and arrive at (...) the conclusion that no one is available, and so the patient must be institutionalized. Analysis shows that participants routinely choose co-resident family members to fulfill the caregiver position. However, the position is not guaranteed unless the selected incumbent can satisfy additional criteria, especially physical strength and time availability. By exploring the ways in which participants use categories to negotiate discharge destinations, the article adds to Sacks’s analysis by illustrating methodical activities for deciding whether someone is unavailable to help. Moreover, it considers the applicability of Sacks’s notion of MCDs to Japanese data. (shrink)

Despite increasing interests and urgent needs for quality end-of-life care, there is no exact definition of what is the interval referred to as end of life or what end-of-life care is. The purpose of this article is to report our examination of terms related to end-of-life care and define end-of-life care from nursing ethics perspectives. Current terms related to end-of-life care, such as terminal care, hospice care, and palliative care, are based on a medical model and are restrictive in terms (...) of diagnosis and prognosis. Using codes of ethics for nurses as a framework, we attempt to identify people to whom nurses are responsible to provide end-of-life care and develop a definition of end-of-life care that is more inclusive and applicable to a broader range of people who would benefit from end-of-life care by nurses and other health-care providers. (shrink)

In this paper, we establish the first-order definability of sequents with consistent variable occurrence on bi-approximation semantics by means of the Sahlqvist–van Benthem algorithm. Then together with the canonicity results in Suzuki (2011), this allows us to establish a Sahlqvist theorem for substructural logic. Our result is not limited to substructural logic but is also easily applicable to other lattice-based logics.

Using conversation analysis, this study investigates how Japanese rehabilitation team members use their geographic knowledge to search for long-term care facilities for stroke survivors in multidisciplinary team interactions. The study uncovers the orderly use of decision rules during discharge planning activities by exploring the following two questions: What decision criteria are discursively used? In what order are the criteria handled through sequential operations? The data comprise 65 video-recorded rehabilitation team meetings and ethnographic information regarding local care facilities and patients’ residential (...) addresses. The analysis shows that the participants deal with decision criteria in an orderly manner. They identify the type of facility and location preferred by the patient’s family and search for a facility accordingly. Moreover, they routinely select facilities closer to the patients’ and their families’ homes. However, these rules are modified if the family’s choice is inappropriate, or when a facility in a different location is preferred by the family. The study contributes to the conversation analytic understanding of interprofessional decision making and prioritization through the analysis of orderly methods of search procedures interactively accomplished by participants in ongoing medical team interactions. (shrink)

Among Japanese nurses ethics is perceived as being distant and unrelated to their practice, although this is filled with ethical concerns and the making of ethical decisions. The reasons for this dissociation are the primacy of western values in modern Japanese health care systems and the suppression of Japanese nurses’ indigenous ethical values because of domination by western ethics. A hermeneutic study was conducted to listen to the ethical voices of Japanese nurses. Seven ethical concerns were revealed. Although some of (...) these concerns may seem to share similar values with western ethical principles, the basis for the concerns was unique and rooted in the Japanese cultural value system. The meanings of each concern are explicated in conjunction with related background meanings. Listening and trying to understand these nurses’ voices in their own context suggests a way of bridging the gap between abstract and universal ethics and practical and local ethics. (shrink)

Japan has often been regarded as an ethnically homogeneous society whose restrictive immigration policies reflect the deep-seated cultural peculiarities of this ‘island nation’. By contrast, I shall argue that Japan’s post- 1945 cultural separation from the other countries of East Asia, and its strict border controls, were to a large extent products of Cold War politics. The postwar democratization of Japan went hand in hand with the introduction of tight restrictions on cross-border mobility: restrictions which had profound consequences for the (...) rights of ethnic minorities in Japan (particularly Koreans and Taiwanese). An exploration of the emergence and impact of this border control regime casts new light, not just on Japan’s role in the Northeast Asian region, but also on key limitations of nation-state centred notions of liberal democracy. (shrink)

This paper revisits one of the most celebrated verses on dao and ming in the Opening Chapter of the received Laozi Daodejing. I shall clarify two types of English interpretations which are possibly applicable to the verse and demonstrate that they are equally sustainable. It follows that a commitment to either one of these interpretations may thereby spoil the meta-perspective effect which the verse skillfully creates.

This paper attempts to reconcile the conceptual conflict between typological and population thinking to provide a philosophical foundation for extended evolutionary synthesis. Typological thinking has been considered a pre-Darwinian, essentialist dogma incompatible with population thinking, which is the core notion of Darwinism. More recent philosophical and historical studies suggest that a non-essentialist form of typology has some advantages in the study of evolutionary biology. However, even if we adopt such an epistemological interpretation of typological thinking, there still remains an epistemological (...) and methodological conflict between these two styles of thinking. How can we relate typological thinking with population thinking in pursuit of more integrated or interconnected research into evolutionary biology? I propose that homology thinking, which is another style of thinking that recognizes homologous characters, provides a common basis for typological representations of character states and for character dynamics in an evolving population. Good examples of this bridging role are found in teratology and breeding, where variation and novelty are recognized in developmental and morphological traits, gene expression patterns, and so on. Essentialism-free, dynamic views of homology have great potential to reconcile typological and population thinking and to set the stage for the EES. (shrink)

When an agent’s motivation is sensitive to how his supervisor thinks about the agent’s competence, the supervisor has to take into account both informational and expressive contents of her message to the agent. This paper shows that the supervisor can credibly express her trust in the agent’s ability only by being un- clear about what to do. Suggesting what to do, i.e., “directives,” could reveal the supervisor’s “distrust” and reduce the agent’s equilibrium effort level even though it provides useful information (...) about the decision environment. There is also an equilibrium in which directives are neutral in expressive content. However, it is shown that neologism proofness favors equilibria in which directives are double- edged swords. (shrink)

In this paper, we extend the canonicity methodology in Ghilardi & Meloni (1997) to arbitrary lattice expansions, and syntactically describe canonical inequalities for lattice expansions consisting of -meet preserving operations, -multiplicative operations, adjoint pairs, and constants. This approach gives us a uniform account of canonicity for substructural and lattice-based logics. Our method not only covers existing results, but also systematically accounts for many canonical inequalities containing nonsmooth additive and multiplicative uniform operations. Furthermore, we compare our technique with the approach in (...) Dunn et al. (2005) and Gehrke et al. (2005). (shrink)

The human environment is currently undergoing massive change amid the rapid adoption of information and communications technology (ICT). ICT can be characterized as offering an opportunity to consider the nature of humanity, create new values, and foster new cultures. As humans, the question that technical innovation relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robots thrusts before us is, “What is a human?” What exactly are the things that AI will never be able to do, no matter how close it gets to (...) human capabilities? What makes us humans, and what is it that only humans can do? This essay discusses the impact of AI technology on humans and society from the perspective of a turning point in how people perceive themselves and humanity. (shrink)

This chapter presents two cross-linguistic studies of knowledge-how attributions that compare English and Japanese speakers. The first study investigates the felicity judgements of ordinary people about knowledge-how sentences, where we find a large difference in judgements about the sentences in which a person lacks an ability to perform a certain action but is nevertheless attributed the relevant knowledge of how to perform that action. The second study investigates the frequency of the natural occurrences of knowing-how constructions in English and Japanese (...) through Google search and corpora, where we find virtually no natural occurrence of Japanese knowing-how constructions. These results suggest that the attribution of knowledge-how in Japanese is radically different from the English counterpart in that it neither requires nor is required by the relevant physical ability. We then explore the philosophical implications of these radical differences in the use of knowing-how constructions between English and Japanese speakers for the debate between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. One such implication is that English “know how” sentences themselves may not delineate a philosophically significant category of knowledge. (shrink)

Some properties of Kripke-sheaf semantics for super-intuitionistic predicate logics are shown. The concept ofp-morphisms between Kripke sheaves is introduced. It is shown that if there exists ap-morphism from a Kripke sheaf 1 into 2 then the logic characterized by 1 is contained in the logic characterized by 2. Examples of Kripke-sheaf complete and finitely axiomatizable super-intuitionistic (and intermediate) predicate logics each of which is Kripke-frame incomplete are given. A correction to the author's previous paper Kripke bundles for intermediate predicate logics (...) and Kripke frames for intuitionistic modal logics (Studia Logica, 49(1990), pp. 289–306 ) is stated. (shrink)

Tyler Burge's theory of proper names is being revived with the help of Generative Grammar. The complex syntax of DPs appears to encourage the Burgean analysis of proper names which attributes complex semantic structures to the uses of proper names. I will argue, however, that the Millian view of proper names which hypothesizes simple semantics for names is also compatible with the complex syntactic structures. In order to defend this thesis, I will show that Paul Elbourne's implementation of Burge's insight (...) is no better than the Millian semantics of proper names. (shrink)

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not (...) always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life. (shrink)

The functional independence measure is a clinical scale which is used to evaluate the amount of assistance disabled persons need to conduct their daily living activities. Drawing on 65 video-recorded rehabilitation team meetings and medical records collected from a Japanese hospital, this article utilizes ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to uncover how Japanese rehabilitation team members use the FIM to track changes in the functional status of patients and decide the length of stay in ongoing interactional sequences. Analysis shows that a (...) series of the FIM scores assembled and arranged in situ provide a sequential framework for members to understand the progress of rehabilitation and predict the plateau phase. Moreover, a particular expert is asked about patients’ capacity for further improvements and his or her opinions are treated as a basis for clinical decisions. In this way, diagnostic and clinical decision-making is produced through the ongoing collaborative work of various specialists. (shrink)

One criterion of constructive logics is the disjunction, property (DP). The Halldén-completeness is a weak DP, and is related to the relevance principle and variable separation. This concept is well-understood in the case of propositional logics. We extend this notion to predicate logics. Then three counterparts naturally arise. We discuss relationships between these properties and meet-irreducibility in the lattice of logics.

A decision maker (DM) selects a project from a set of alternatives with uncertain productivity. After the choice, she observes a signal about productivity and decides how much effort to put in. This paper analyzes the optimal decision problem of the DM who rationally filters information to deal with her post-decision cognitive dissonance. It is shown that the optimal effort level for a project can be affected by unchosen projects in her choice set, and the nature of the choice set-dependence (...) is determined by the signal structure. Some comparative statics of choice set-dependence is also provided. Finally, based on the results, the optimal choice set design is also explored. This paper offers a simple framework to explain the experimental finding in psychology that people’s effort level for a project can be enhanced when the project is chosen by themselves rather than by others. (shrink)

Zen and Japanese Culture is one of the twentieth century's leading works on Zen, and a valuable source for those wishing to understand its concepts in the context of Japanese life and art. In simple, often poetic, language, Daisetz Suzuki describes his conception of Zen and its historical evolution. He connects Zen to the philosophy of the samurai, and subtly portrays the relationship between Zen and swordsmanship, haiku, tea ceremonies, and the Japanese love of nature. Suzuki's contemplative work (...) is enhanced by anecdotes, poetry, and illustrations showing silk screens, calligraphy, and examples of architecture. Since its original publication in 1938, this important work has played a major role in shaping conceptions of Zen's influence on Japanese traditional arts. Richard Jaffe's introduction acquaints a new generation of readers with Suzuki's life and career in both Japan and America. Jaffe discusses how Zen and Japanese Culture was received upon its first publication and analyzes the book in light of contemporary criticism, especially by scholars of Japanese Buddhism. (shrink)

フレーゲ、ラッセル、クリプキ以後の名前の意味論。固有名、確定記述から日本語名詞へと広がる言語哲学の最前線。.