People discussing science and religion usually frame their conversations in terms of essentialist assumptions about science, assumptions requiring the existence (but not the specification) of criteria according to which science can be distinguished from other forms of inquiry. However, criteria functioning at a level of generality appropriate to such discussions may not exist at all. Essentialist assumptions may be avoided if science is understood within a broader context of human practices. In a philosophy of practices, to label a practice as (...) “scientific” is to make a practically motivated provision for a way of speaking. Charles Taylor and Joseph Rouse have produced complementary philosophies of practice that promote this kind of understanding. In this essay I review the work of Taylor and Rouse, identify apparent residues of essentialism that each seems to harbor, and offer a resolution to some of their disagreements. I also criticize a form of essentialism commonly employed in Christian circles and outline an anti-essentialist view of science that may be helpful in science-and-religion discussions. (shrink)

Why should we seek and tell the truth? Does anyone know what truth is? Many are skeptical about the relevance of truth. Truth Matters endeavours to show why truth is important in a world where the very idea of truth is contested. Putting philosophers in conversation with educators, literary scholars, physicists, political theorists, and theologians, Truth Matters ranges across both analytic and continental philosophy and draws on the ideas of thinkers such as Aquinas, Balthasar, Brandom, Davidson, Dooyeweerd, Gadamer, Habermas, Kierkegaard, (...) Plantinga, Ricoeur, and Wolterstorff. Some essays attempt to provide a systematic account of truth, while others wrestle with the question of how truth is told and what it means to live truthfully. Contributors address debates between realists and anti-realists, explore issues surrounding relativism and constructivism in education and the social sciences, examine the politics of truth telling and the ethics of authenticity, and consider various religious perspectives on truth. Most scholars agree that truth is propositional, being expressed in statements that are subject to proof or disproof. This book goes a step farther: yes, propositional truth is important, but truth is more than propositional. To recognize how it is more than propositional is crucial for understanding why truth truly matters. Contributors include Doug Blomberg (ICS), Allyson Carr (ICS), Jeffrey Dudiak (King’s University College), Olaf Ellefson (York University), Gerrit Glas (VU University Amsterdam), Gill K. Goulding (Regis College), Jay Gupta (Mills College), Clarence Joldersma (Calvin College), Matthew J. Klaassen (ICS), John Jung Park (Duke University), Pamela J. Reeve (St. Augustine’s Seminary), Amy Richards (World Affairs Council of Western Michigan), Calvin Seerveld (ICS), Ronnie Shuker (ICS), Adam Smith (Brandeis University), John Van Rys (Redeemer University College), Darren Walhof (Grand Valley State University), Matthew Walhout (Calvin College), and Lambert Zuidervaart (ICS). (shrink)

Resources the virtue of humility as an essential divine attribute through the works of Augustine, Barth, and Katherine Sonderegger.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern ArtMatthew ZiffPainting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001, 272 pp., $29.95.The relationship between the market value of paintings and the chronological point in an artist's working life when the paintings were produced is the driving mechanism for exploring creativity and innovation in David W. Galenson's book "Painting (...) Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art. The working thesis of this book is that Modern artists have worked creatively and innovatively in one of two distinctly different manners. The terminology Galenson uses to describe these distinct ways of working are "finders" and "seekers." Finders are artists like Pablo Picasso, who at age 26, make startling and important innovations with little advance indication that such a burst is about to take place. Seekers are artists like Paul Cezanne, whospend their entire working lives engaged in the pursuit of a singular approach or achievement. The differences between these methodologies are carefully presented through the details of the working lives of a variety of Modern artists. French nineteenth century and early twentieth-century artists and mid-twentieth-century American artists are used as the source data for these comparisons.Early in the book Galenson presents lists of chronological events within the lives of artists and market valuation of their work within this chronology. The dramatic clarity of the relationships presented in this data sets the stage for the detailed information that follows. Factors that in some cases only partly, and in others nearly completely, explain an artist's way of working are offered through biographic information, information about the aesthetic and cultural milieu, and about the economic and educational structures that are predominant during the relevant time in the life of the artist.The relationship between the aesthetic and cultural milieu surrounding an artist and the capacity or inclination of an artist to be innovative is an important aspect of the book's analysis. The scope of the book is limited to Modern artists because of the shift that took place at the outset of Modern art, during the mid 1860s, that brought a strong emphasis on innovation and change for their own sake as an important characteristic within a work of art. This emphasis "created incentives for painters to produce new approaches to art" (p. 111). Prior to the time of Modern art, innovation and change were often unnecessary for an artist to be successful. Modern art introduced the demand that innovation and change be necessary ingredients in art, and therefore the search for innovation became a significant element within the work of many artists. The manner in which this search took place, as presented through the data at hand, reveals how individual artists viewed the need for innovation and change within their own [End Page 123] work. Paul Cezanne, for example, was aware of the impact that his painting was having on the art world, but he insisted that he was not yet finished with discoveries that would reveal the truest expression of his beliefs about aesthetic expression.In the American movement, "Abstract Expressionism," Galenson finds a useful counter example to the art scene in Paris. In the United States, especially during the 1940s and 1950s — the peak years of creative output by Abstract Expressionist artists — the demand for their work was quite low. There were few economically viable outlets for the work of de Kooning, Pollack, Rothko, and the others of this group. Consequently there is a shift in the chronological point at which these artists achieve market value success. Nearly all of these artists receivedrecognition at an older age than the French artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The thesis of the book, that there are two fundamentally different ways of working to produce works of art, is directly applicable to, and useful in, exploring issues of teaching and learning in design education. As a teacher of interior architecture I was interested to follow the details that Galenson presented in support of his analysis of the careers of numerous Modern artists. The methodological differences between seeking and... (shrink)

If you do not know the correct answer, guess.Design addresses need, of various types. A designer “designs” to address, to propose a possibility, or to meet a need. A great variety of things are designed: shoes, posters, watches, houses, televisions, keyboards, movies, washing machines, toasters, belts, and cars, to mention only some.A designer, be he or she an architect, interior designer, graphic designer, product designer, or industrial designer, nearly always provides drawings, models, written descriptions, and overarching ideas in response to (...) a need, articulated, stated, by someone. The need might be one that the designer recognizes on his or her own and decides to address, or the need might come to the... (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry covering the growing literature on the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (and its rivals), the Knowledge Norm of Action (and pragmatic encroachment), the Knowledge Norm of Belief, and the Knowledge Norm of Disagreement.

What are species? Are they objective features of the world? If so, what sort of features are they? Do everyday intuitions that species are real stand up to philosophical and scientific scrutiny? Two rival accounts of species' reality have dominated the discussion: that species are natural kinds defined by essential properties and that species are individuals. Unfortunately, neither account fully accommodates biological practice. In Are Species Real?, Slater presents a novel approach to this question aimed at accommodating the attractions to (...) both realism and antirealism about species. (shrink)

This paper considers normative naturalism, understood as the view that (i) normative sentences are descriptive of the way things are, and (ii) their truth/falsity does not require ontology beyond the ontology of the natural world. Assuming (i) for the sake of argument, I here show that (ii) is false not only as applied to ethics, but more generally as applied to practical and epistemic normativity across the board. The argument is a descendant of Moore's Open Question Argument and Hume's Is-Ought (...) Gap. It goes roughly as follows: to ensure that natural ontology suffices for normative truth, there must be semantically grounded entailments from the natural truths to the normative truths. There are none. So natural ontology does not suffice for normative truth. (shrink)

_Kant and Applied Ethics_ makes an important contribution to Kant scholarship, illuminating the vital moral parameters of key ethical debates. Offers a critical analysis of Kant’s ethics, interrogating the theoretical bases of his theory and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses Examines the controversies surrounding the most important ethical discussions taking place today, including abortion, the death penalty, and same-sex marriage Joins innovative thinkers in contemporary Kantian scholarship, including Christine Korsgaard, Allen Wood, and Barbara Herman, in taking Kant’s philosophy in new (...) and interesting directions Clarifies Kant’s legacy for applied ethics, helping us to understand how these debates have been structured historically and providing us with the philosophical tools to address them. (shrink)

This paper argues that attempts to apply Alasdair MacIntyre’s positive moral theory to business ethics are problematic, due to the cognitive closure of MacIntyre’s concept of a practice. I begin by outlining the notion of a practice, before turning to Moore’s attempt to provide a MacIntyrean account of corporate governance. I argue that Moore’s attempt is mismatched with MacIntyre’s account of moral education. Because the notion of practices resists general application I go on to argue that a negative application, which (...) focuses on regulation, is more plausible. Large-scale regulation, usually thought antithetical to MacIntyre’s advocacy of small-scale politics, has the potential to facilitate practice-based work and reveals that MacIntyre’s own work can be used against his pessimism about the modern order. Furthermore, the conception of regulation I defend can show us how management is more amenable to ethical understanding than MacIntyre’s work is often taken to imply. (shrink)

Barker and Smart have argued that dispositional monism is just as susceptible to the ultimate regress problem as Armstrong’s contingent necessitation view of laws. In this response, I consider what implications this conclusion has for the dispositional essentialist project more generally. I argue that it is the monistic aspect of dispositional monism, rather than the dispositional essentialist aspect, which is the source of the problem raised by Barker and Smart. I then outline a version of dispositional essentialism which avoids the (...) ultimate problem by avoiding the commitment to monism. Despite the article by Barker and Smart, it is not time to give up on the dispositionalist project yet. (shrink)

It often seems that what one ought to do depends on what contingent ends one has adopted and the means to pursuing them. Imagine, for example, that you are applying for jobs, and a particularly attractive one comes your way. It offers excellent colleagues in a desirable location, the pay is good, and acquiring a job like this is one of your ends. If practicing your job talk is a means to getting the job, the following seems true: (1) If (...) you want1 to get the job, then you ought to practice your job talk. Let us call conditional ought sentences that purport to express an end in the antecedent and a means to the end in the consequent end-given oughts. Some end-given oughts run into the problem of detachment; i.e., some end-given oughts seem true, and yet we do not think the consequent by itself, detached from the conditional, is true even if the antecedent is true. Consider a case where you want revenge on Bill for some slight offense. You happen to have the opportunity to poison Bill’s drink while he is away, which is the only thing that would lead to his demise. What of: (2) If you want to kill Bill, then you ought to poison his drink. (2) runs up against the problem of detachment because of the following modus ponens argument: • If you want to kill Bill, then you ought to poison his drink. • You want to kill Bill. • Therefore, you ought to poison his drink. In fact, you ought not poison Bill’s drink. You ought to avoid him and seek counseling. (shrink)

For 2,000 years all Buddhist states were absolute monarchies. Between 1850 and 1950 every Buddhist state abandoned absolute monarchy and embraced some form of constitutional, representative government. This chapter examines whether this change was a cynical abandonment of the Buddhist tradition or a defensible reinterpretation of the earlier texts, by looking at how the transition from monarchy to republicanism took place in the several Buddhist-majority countries whose governments were explicitly Buddhist. It concludes that the transition was a bit of both, (...) to different degrees in the various nations, that traditional Buddhist political theory was monarchist but had some republican elements, and that Buddhist political theory today possesses resources helpful for the future. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the moral/ethical system of early Buddhism is best understood as being both naturalistic and irrealist/antirealist. It is naturalistic because it excludes all supernatural forces and explains morality/ethics in terms of natural facts. It is irrealist/antirealist because it consists of hypothetical imperatives rather than categorical imperatives. The chapter examines both primary texts and contemporary scholarship. It then argues that the Buddhist theory of ethics is very similar to the immanence/immanentist theory of William Connolly, and that such theories (...) may be uniquely helpful in creating stable political cooperation in pluralistic societies. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the three elements of Buddhist political theory—the doctrine of anattā /no-self, the theory of limited citizenship, and the theory of ethical naturalism and irrealism/anti-realism—are both similar to Western theories and different from them in important ways. Further, it argues that the three elements go together logically—if we assume that people are selves, it makes sense to ask whether they have rights and duties, and if so whether those are expressed through politics. Conversely, if we assume that (...) people are not selves, the questions of ethical realism and of robust citizenship may never arise. Finally, it argues that the Buddhist approach helps to clarify and resolve some problems in Western thought, such as the apparent impossibility of autonomy. (shrink)

The introduction argues that Western political theory has overlooked the political philosophy of Buddhism, and that it would benefit from engaging with Buddhism as a political theory. The Buddhist political philosophy rests on three ideas, which are both similar to and different from the concerns of Western scholars: that human beings are not selves; that politics is necessary but not very important; and that moral norms are advice for wise living rather than categorical obligations. The introduction summarizes the author’s understandings (...) of political theory and Buddhism generally, and argues that Western political theorists stand to benefit from learning more about Buddhism. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the Buddha and Friedrich Nietzsche have very similar theories about the self. Both agree that there is no metaphysical self—no soul or permanent personal essence. Both agree that false beliefs about the self are the primary cause of personal and social conflict. But whereas Nietzsche concludes that we must always believe that we are a self, even as we continuously try to overcome its particular content and limitations, the Buddha argues that we can let go of (...) the idea of being a self altogether and that we would be much better off if we did so. (shrink)

This chapter examines the political theory found in the primary texts of early Buddhism and related contemporary scholarship. It argues that the early texts contain both a theory of government, which endorses enlightened monarchy based on a primitive social contract, and a political theory, which rests on the ideas that human beings are not selves, that politics is necessary but not very important, and that moral norms are advice rather than absolute duties. This reading directly contradicts the long Western tradition (...) of seeing Buddhism as anti-political. It also argues that modern readings of the Buddhist political tradition as republican are mistaken. (shrink)

Buddhism acknowledges that politics and government are inevitable, necessary, and helpful but also argues that they are relatively unimportant compared with the primary human goal of enlightenment. This theory of “limited citizenship” has parallels in the Western theories of Epicurus, Henry David Thoreau, and John Howard Yoder. The Buddha’s practical advice to citizens is to fulfill the basic/customary duties of citizenship but otherwise to put little time or energy into politics and government. The chapter considers various criticisms of this view (...) of citizenship, and ultimately argues that the Buddhist or “limited citizenship” approach is not only defensible, but may be superior to more familiar theories that require an unrealistic level of political engagement from ordinary citizens. (shrink)

This chapter examines the primary texts relevant to political theory from the traditional period of Buddhism. It argues that the traditional-period texts largely continue the early period’s theory of more-or-less absolute monarchy with a relatively enlightened king, while also seeking to connect the mythological first king to the Buddha, and contemporary kings both to the Buddha and the first king. The texts of this period attempted to sacralize kingship and reduce the differences between the spiritual and temporal realms. These texts (...) also demonstrate a remarkable unity, despite being produced over a long period of time, in many different locations, by authors identified with various sects of Buddhism. (shrink)

This paper examines the roles played by instruments and their associated practices in the development of the field of planetary geology. Specifically, remote sensing instruments and the images produced by instrument users are discussed. It is argued that through these instruments and images the first two generations of planetary geologists were able to 'domesticate' the planets and make them suitable for geological study. But this was not a straightforward process. The instruments themselves had to be 'domesticated' as geological tools, and (...) the definition of 'geologist' had to be broadened to include such tools and extraterrestrial terrains. This paper looks first at the first generation of planetary geologists associated with the mapping and study of the Moon in the 1960s and 70s, then focuses on the second generation that emerged during the exploration and mapping of Mars. Within this second section, the paper focuses on the introduction of one new type of instrument -- the orbiting infrared spectrometer, and examines three such instruments and the visual claims made with its images. (shrink)

It is common to talk about options, where an option is a course of action an agent can take. A course of action, in turn, is that which can be the object of intention. It has not often been noticed in the literature, though, that there are two ways to understand what makes something an option: first, an option just is some course of action physically open (or, to be maximally liberal, logically open) to an agent; second, an option just (...) is some course of action that the agent either in fact deliberates about taking or is psychologically capable of deliberating about taking. At any given time, there are far more courses of action open to an agent than the agent can or does deliberate about taking. What determines which courses of action an agent deliberates about as an option, and why do so many other courses of action remain out of deliberative view? I argue that while values, ends, the demands of both means-end coherence and consistency of beliefs contribute to the determination of which courses of action an agent sees as options, they cannot be the whole story. I argue that another mechanism, which I call the practical imagination, is primarily responsible for which courses of action an agent sees as options. Drawing upon both recent work in developmental and social psychology and a strain of philosophical argument that has attempted to show how human beings have a practical understanding of themselves that is mediated by what we can call a narrative identity, I argue that the norms governing the construction of a narrative identity are among the most important, albeit not the only, norms governing the practical imagination and that, just as we should look to the norms of practical reason to explain and critically reflect on practical deliberation, we should look to the norms of practical imagination to explain and critically reflect on the process by which an agent comes to see some course of action as an option. (shrink)

Those who advocate a “historicist” outlook on moral responsibility often hold that people who unwillingly acquire corrupt dispositions are not blameworthy for the wrong actions that issue from these dispositions; this contention is frequently supported by thought experiments involving instances of forced psychological manipulation that seem to call responsibility into question. I argue against this historicist perspective and in favor of the conclusion that the process by which a person acquires values and dispositions is largely irrelevant to moral responsibility. While (...) the thought experiments introduced by historicists raise perplexing questions about personal identity and involve clear instances of moral wrongs done to the manipulated subjects, neither of these considerations bear on the question of moral responsibility. Rather, questions about moral responsibility in manipulation cases should be answered, I argue, by considering whether a manipulated agent is capable of expressing through her actions the objectionable attitudes that make blame appropriate in normal cases of wrongdoing. (shrink)

Proponents of the dispositional theory of properties typically claim that their view is not one that offers a realist, governing conception of laws. My first aim is to show that, contrary to this claim, if one commits to dispositionalism then one does not automatically give up on a robust, realist theory of laws. This is because dispositionalism can readily be developed within a Platonic framework of universals. Second, I argue that there are good reasons for realist dispositionalists to favour a (...) Platonic view. This is because the alternative Aristotelian version of dispositionalism, on which universals are immanent entities, is unstable for various reasons. My final aim is to address a common criticism facing Platonic theories of laws, which is the problem of how external entities can play an explanatory role where the world’s law-like patterns of behaviour are concerned. I argue that the Platonists’ response to the one over many problem can help to shed light on this matter, and a possible solution is sketched, one which makes use of the notions of essence, constitution and ontological dependence. (shrink)

According to the principles derived from his theory of discourse ethics, Habermas's model of deliberative democracy is justified only if the public is capable of making political decisions that advance the common good. Recent public‐opinion research demonstrates that the public's overwhelming ignorance of politics precludes it from having such capabilities, even if radical measures were taken to thoroughly educate the public about politics or to increase the salience of politics in their lives.

*The views in this article are the author's alone and should not be construed as policy statements of the American Medical Association.

We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the hearer’s recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in the sense of Pollack [18]. We argue that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the representation and reasoning used (...) in generating sentences. The representation must support the generator’s simultaneous consideration of syntax and semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its (incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and realization. (shrink)

* Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author's own. This article should not be construed as representing policies of the American Medical Association.

According to cognitive non-naturalism, normative judgments are standard beliefs that purport to be about non-natural properties. An influential plurality of normative theorists, including non-naturalist realists, error theorists and skeptics, share this view. But it is mistaken. For it predicts an epistemic profile for normative judgments that they do not have. In particular, they are not disposed to extinguish in light of accepted evidence that the any non-natural properties are absent, and they are not disposed to come into existence in light (...) of accepted evidence for any non-natural property. So normative judgments might be beliefs, and there might be non-natural properties, but normative judgments are not beliefs about non-natural properties. (shrink)

The three primary ethical challenges in preparing for public health emergencies - addressing questions of rationing, restrictions and responsibilities - all entail confronting uncertainty. But the third, considering whether people and institutions will live up to their responsibilities in a crisis, is perhaps the hardest to predict and therefore plan for. The quintessential example of a responsibility during a public health emergency is that of health care professionals' obligation to continue caring for patients during epidemics. Historically, this 'duty to treat' (...) has sometimes gone unrecognized or ignored, but it has also famously been adhered to, including during the recent SARS epidemic. And non-crisis examples of health professionals working in the face of personal risk are very common. The duty to treat should be circumscribed by several considerations, including the levels or risk and benefit at issue, the degree of public reliance on health professional action, and the nature of the individual health professional's acceptance of greater than usual risk. Examining the professional duty to treat and the legitimate questions it raises can provide insight into other actors' responsibilities. Public health ethics as well as professional ethics can help frame answers to some key questions: How strong are ethical responsibilities during crises? To whom do they apply? Should they be more explicit - and hence more circumscribed - or less explicit and hence largely aspirational? And how can public health policies encourage responsible actions? (shrink)

Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving (...) a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation. (shrink)

*The views represented are the author's alone and should not be construed as representing policies of the American Medical Association.

Here I examine the major theories of ethical intuitions, focusing on the epistemic status of this class of intuitions. We cover self-evidence theory, seeming-state theory, and some of the recent contributions from experimental philosophy.

Current theoretical account of judgment has a difficult time saying anything positive about the experience of judging and, when they do offer positive accounts, they seem to overlook much that we know about the capacity already in our daily lives. Following the work of Martin Heidegger and Hubert Dreyfus, this article provides a phenomenological consideration of the structure of judging that considers judgment not as an intellectual act, but as a comportment. The article proceeds in two parts. The first offers (...) a brief consideration of the assumptions of intellectualist accounts and shows why, ultimately, they may be unable to bring judging into focus. The second section offers a phenomenological account of judging. The argument of section two is that deliberate judgment is a continuation of the structure of judgment understood as comportment and, in turn, that intellectualist accounts come onto the scene too late. (shrink)

The generalizability crisis is compounded, or even partially caused, by a lack of specificity in psychological theories. Expanding the use of mechanistic models among psychologists is therefore important, but faces numerous hurdles. A cultural evolutionary approach can help guide and evaluate interventions to improve modeling efforts in psychology, such as developing standards and implementing them at the institutional level.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently recommended that HIV screening should become routine for all adults in the United States. Implicit in the CDC proposal is the notion that pre-test counseling would be more limited than at present, and that written informed consent to screening would no longer be required. If widely implemented, routine testing would mark a tremendous shift in the US HIV screening strategy. There are a number of considerations used to determine what screening tests (...) should be routine, and HIV fits the bill in almost every regard. Yet the stigma associated with HIV infection remains, making the CDC's recommendation highly controversial. Will minimizing requirements for pre-test counseling and special written informed consent lead to unexpected or unwanted HIV testing, or do these stringent counseling and consent requirements needlessly scare people away? Will widespread and routine testing be associated with declining stigmatization, or will it drive some patients away from seeking desperately needed health care? These are high stakes questions, and we're about to find out the answers. (shrink)

In the processing of subject-verb agreement, non-subject plural nouns following a singular subject sometimes “attract” the agreement with the verb, despite not being grammatically licensed to do so. This phenomenon generates agreement errors in production and an increased tendency to fail to notice such errors in comprehension, thereby providing a window into the representation of grammatical number in working memory during sentence processing. Research in this topic, however, is primarily done in related languages with similar agreement systems. In order to (...) increase the cross-linguistic coverage of the processing of agreement, we conducted a self-paced reading study in Modern Standard Arabic. We report robust agreement attraction errors in relative clauses, a configuration not particularly conducive to the generation of such errors for all possible lexicalizations. In particular, we examined the speed with which readers retrieve a subject controller for both grammatical and ungrammatical agreeing verbs in sentences where verbs are preceded by two NPs, one of which is a local non-subject NP that can act as a distractor for the successful resolution of subject-verb agreement. Our results suggest that the frequency of errors is modulated by the kind of plural formation strategy used on the attractor noun: nouns which form plurals by suffixation condition high rates of attraction, whereas nouns which form their plurals by internal vowel change (ablaut) generate lower rates of errors and reading-time attraction effects of smaller magnitudes. Furthermore, we show some evidence that these agreement attraction effects are mostly contained in the right tail of reaction time distributions. We also present modeling data in the ACT-R framework which supports a view of these ablauting patterns wherein they are differentially specified for number and evaluate the consequences of possible representations for theories of grammar and parsing. (shrink)

A version of this paper is forthcoming in Nous.

In this book Nicholas Wolterstorff, a well-known proponent of “Reformed epistemology,” sets out to investigate the modern origins of the evidentialist and foundationalist tradition that he opposes. He locates these origins in book 4 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Wolterstorff tells us that he had to overcome strong prejudices in writing the book, for “in the philosophical world I inhabit, Locke has the reputation of being boringly chatty and philosophically careless”. He suggests that the earlier parts of the Essay (...) deserve that reputation, but says that while reading book 4 he felt himself to be “present at the making of the modern mind”. To Wolterstorff’s credit, he seems to have vanquished some of his prejudices, for this book offers careful and charitable readings of many important strands in Locke’s epistemology. (shrink)

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as (...) granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)