Word learning depends critically on the use of linguistic context to constrain the likely meanings of words. However, the mechanisms by which children infer word meaning from linguistic context are still poorly understood. In this study, we asked whether adults (n = 58) and 2‐ to 6‐year‐old children (n = 180) use discourse coherence relations (i.e., the meaningful relationships between elements within a discourse) to constrain their interpretation of novel words. Specifically, we showed participants videos of novel animals exchanging objects. (...) These videos were accompanied by a linguistic description of the events in which we manipulated a single word within a sentence (and vs. because) in order to alter the causal and temporal relations between the events in the discourse (e.g., “One animal handed the baby to the other animal [and/because] the baby started crying in the talfa's arms”). We then asked participants which animal (the giver or the receiver) was the referent of the novel word. Across two experiments, we found evidence that young children used the causal and temporal relations in each discourse to constrain their interpretations of novel words. (shrink)

Prominent philosophers have argued that contradictions contain either too much or too little information to be useful. We dispute this with what we call the “Paradox of the Two Firefighters.” Suppose you are awakened in your hotel room by a fire alarm. You open the door. You see three possible ways out: left, right, straight ahead. You see two firefighters. One says there is exactly one safe route and it is to your left. The other says there is exactly one (...) safe route and it is to your right. While the two firemen are giving you contradictory information, they are also both giving you the perhaps useful information that there is a safe way out and it is not straight ahead. We give two analyses. The first uses the “Opinion Tetrahedron,” introduced by Dunn as a generalization of Audun Jøsang’s “Opinion Triangle.” The Opinion Tetrahedron in effect embeds the values of the “Belnap-Dunn 4-valued Logic” into a context of subjective probability generalized to allow for degrees of belief, disbelief, and two kinds of uncertainty—that in which the reasoner has too little information and that in which the reasoner has too much information. Jøsang had only a single value for uncertainty. We also present an alternative solution, again based on subjective probability but of a more standard type. This solution builds upon “linear opinion pooling.” Kiefer had already developed apparatus for assessing risk using expert opinion, and this influences the second solution. Finally, we discuss how these solutions might apply to “Big Data” and the World Wide Web. (shrink)

Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations (...) of motor control and active inference formulations of decision processes. We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms. (shrink)

In athletics, coaches and athletes share a unique and important relationship. Recently Jowett and her colleagues (Jowett & Cockerill, 2003; Jowett & Meek, 2000; Jowett & Ntoumanis, 2003, 2004; Jowett & Timson-Katchis, 2005) utilized relationship research (focusing on, for example, marital, familial and workplace relationships) from conjoining fields, and in particular social and cognitive psychology, to develop and test a four-component model (4 C’s) that depicts the most influential relational and emotional components (closeness, commitment, complementarity and co-orientation) of coach-athlete relationships. (...) Proceeding from a review of the literature on human touch communication to examine research on the power of touch to exchange relational and emotional messages (Hertenstein et al., 2006), the present study explores coaches’ and athletes’ collective experiences of communicating via touch, utilizing in-depth interviews with eight college coaches and athletes. A phenomenological approach was used to gather, analyze and interpret the data, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) philosophical exploration of perception and human experience, which emphasizes the body as a means of communicating with the world. The findings indicate that touch between coaches and athletes increased at major events when emotions and tensions ran high. In addition, touch involved showing appreciation, instructing, comforting and giving attention, and affected perceptions of relationships. The findings also show that touch communication is influenced by societal factors, such as gender, relational stage, and what spectators, parents and other athletes may think. By illustrating how touch is enacted and experienced by a group of college coaches and athletes, the study represents an initial step toward understanding touch communication in the coach-athlete dyad. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 7, Edition 2 September 2007. (shrink)

The current study examined the effects of cardiorespiratory fitness, identified with a continuous graded cycle ergometry, and aerobic exercise on cognitive functioning and entropy of the electroencephalogram (EEG) in 30 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 14 years. Higher and lower fit participants performed an executive function task after a bout of acute exercise and after rest while watching a film. EEG entropy, using the sample entropy measure, was repeatedly measured during the 1500ms post-stimulus interval to evaluate changes in (...) entropy over time. Analysis of the behavioural data for lower and higher fit groups revealed an interaction between fitness levels and acute physical exercise. Notably, lower fit, but not higher fit, participants had higher error rates for NoGo relative to Go trials in the rest condition, whereas in the acute exercise condition there were no differences in error rates between groups; higher fit participants also had significantly faster reaction times in the exercise condition in comparison with the rest condition. Analysis of EEG data revealed that higher fit participants demonstrated lower entropy post-stimulus than lower fit participants in the left frontal hemisphere, possibly indicating increased efficiency of early stage stimulus processing and more efficient allocation of cognitive resources to the task demands. The results suggest that EEG entropy is sensitive to stimulus processing demands and varies as a function of physical fitness levels, but not acute exercise. Physical fitness, in turn, may enhance cognition in adolescence by facilitating higher functionality of the attentional system in the context of lower levels of frontal EEG entropy. (shrink)

The widespread critical evidence surrounding executive compensation of listed corporations has boosted shareholder activism in recent decades. The say-on-pay (SOP) mechanism—a vote in which shareholders express their (dis)agreement with executive pay designs—is one of the corporate governance mechanisms that has led to this activism among listed firms. Merging agency and socioemotional wealth (SEW) arguments, this paper analyzes how effective SOP voting results are among listed family firms in terms of CEO compensation efficiency and equity. Using a sample of UK listed (...) firms from 2011 to 2018, our results show that SOP effectiveness is positively influenced by family ownership and is strongly moderated by family involvement in management and in governance as well as by family generation. Our findings stress the strong family effect and the ethical perceptions of family shareholders on SOP voting, showing how family participation in the firm encourages fairer and more aligned CEO compensation packages. SOP institutional and practical implications oriented to preserve shareholder value and family wealth are finally outlined. (shrink)

In Western countries, the ideal professional and ethical attributes of healthcare providers and the ideal patient-doctor relationship have been analysed in detail. Other cultures, however, may have different norms, arising in response to diverse healthcare needs, cultural values and offering alternative perspectives. In this paper, drawing a case study, we introduce the concept of Shinmi, used in Japan to describe a desirable approach to medical care. Shinmi means kind or cordial in Japanese. In the medical context, it refers to doctors (...) treating patients with a degree of emotional closeness as if they were the doctors’ own family. We analyse the concept of Shinmi, drawing on virtue ethics. We distinguish two different elements to a Shinmi-na attitude. As illustrated in our example, excessive Shinmi can be problematic for patients and doctors. Furthermore, elements of Shinmi may conflict with existing Western values (for example, norms that encourage emotional detachment and discourage doctors’ treatment of family members). However, if pursued appropriately, we argue that a balanced Shinmi-na approach can be conducive to the goals of medicine. The concept of Shinmi may be valuable for medical students, in Japanese and potentially other health care systems, and help them to cultivate a virtuous approach to meeting the emotional needs of patients. (shrink)

In their target article, Peterson et al. discuss the intriguing prospect of using psychedelics as a treatment for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD) (Peterson et al....

A unique description of the phenomena that arise from the interaction between quantum systems and their environment. Because of the novel character of the approach discussed, the book addresses scientists from all fields of physics and related disciplines as well as students of physics.

The least element 0 of a finite meet semi-distributive lattice is a meet of meet-prime elements. We investigate conditions under which the least element of an algebraic, meet semi-distributive lattice is a (complete) meet of meet-prime elements. For example, this is true if the lattice has only countably many compact elements, or if |L| < 2ℵ0, or if L is in the variety generated by a finite meet semi-distributive lattice. We give an example of an algebraic, meet semi-distributive lattice that (...) has no meet-prime element or join-prime element. This lattice L has |L| = |LC| = 2ℵ0 where Lc is the set of compact elements of L. (shrink)

This volume contains papers and abstracts of papers delivered at the colloquium at Tihany, Hungary in 1962. There were seven sections; mathematical logic, computers and automata theory, circuit theory, mathematical linguistics, computers and programming, applications of computers in economics, artificial intelligence. Among the more interesting—to the reviewer—were these papers: one by Church concerning an independence problem in recursive arithmetic; Muller—characterizing classes of recursive functions; a long and philosophically stimulating study by Watanabe on a formalization of inductive logic; Kiefer—applications of (...) set theoretic techniques in linguistics; Abraham and Salapina—recognition of synonymity by machine; Gelernter—problem-solving graphs and heuristic programming. A number of papers which were read are not included in this volume.—P. J. M. (shrink)

The duality between congruence lattices of semilattices, and algebraic subsets of an algebraic lattice, is extended to include semilattices with operators. For a set G of operators on a semilattice S, we have \ \cong^{d} {{\rm S}_{p}}}\), where L is the ideal lattice of S, and H is a corresponding set of adjoint maps on L. This duality is used to find some representations of lattices as congruence lattices of semilattices with operators. It is also shown that these congruence lattices (...) satisfy the Jónsson–Kiefer property. (shrink)

The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. With twenty-six chapters by leading researchers, the book connects and integrates findings from fields that range from philosophy of mind to sociology of sports. The chapters show not only that (...) sports can tell scientists how the human mind works but also that the scientific study of the human mind can help athletes succeed. Sports psychology research has always focused on the themes, notions, and models of embodied cognition; embodied cognition, in turn, has found striking confirmation of its theoretical claims in the psychological accounts of sports performance and athletic skill. Athletic skill is a legitimate form of intelligence, involving cognitive faculties no less sophisticated and complex than those required by mathematical problem solving. After presenting the key concepts necessary for applying embodied cognition to sports psychology, the book discusses skill disruption ; sensorimotor skill acquisition and how training correlates to the development of cognitive faculties; the intersubjective and social dimension of sports skills, seen in team sports; sports practice in cultural and societal contexts; the notion of “affordance” and its significance for ecological psychology and embodied cognition theory; and the mind's predictive capabilities, which enable anticipation, creativity, improvisation, and imagination in sports performance. Contributors Ana Maria Abreu, Kenneth Aggerholm, Salvatore Maria Aglioti, Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza, Duarte Araújo, Jürgen Beckmann, Kath Bicknell, Geoffrey P. Bingham, Jens E. Birch, Gunnar Breivik, Noel E. Brick, Massimiliano L. Cappuccio, Thomas H. Carr, Alberto Cei, Anthony Chemero, Wayne Christensen, Lincoln J. Colling, Cassie Comley, Keith Davids, Matt Dicks, Caren Diehl, Karl Erickson, Anna Esposito, Pedro Tiago Esteves, Mirko Farina, Giolo Fele, Denis Francesconi, Shaun Gallagher, Gowrishankar Ganesh, Raúl Sánchez-García, Rob Gray, Denise M. Hill, Daniel D. Hutto, Tsuyoshi Ikegami, Geir Jordet, Adam Kiefer, Michael Kirchhoff, Kevin Krein, Kenneth Liberman, Tadhg E. MacIntyre, Nelson Mauro Maldonato, David L. Mann, Richard S. W. Masters, Patrick McGivern, Doris McIlwain, Michele Merritt, Christopher Mesagno, Vegard Fusche Moe, Barbara Gail Montero, Aidan P. Moran, David Moreau, Hiroki Nakamoto, Alberto Oliverio, David Papineau, Gert-Jan Pepping, Miriam Reiner, Ian Renshaw, Michael A. Riley, Zuzanna Rucinska, Lawrence Shapiro, Paula Silva, Shannon Spaulding, John Sutton, Phillip D. Tomporowski, John Toner, Andrew D. Wilson, Audrey Yap, Qin Zhu, Christopher Madan. (shrink)

How do thought and language manage to be 'about' aspects of the world? J. Robert G. Williams investigates how representation arises out of a fundamentally non-representational world, showing the explanatory relations between the representational properties of language, of thought, and of perception and intention.

Transpersonal psychology: Dean, S. R. The ultraconscious mind. Arasteh, A. R. Final integration in the adult personality.--The nature of madness: First, E. Visions, voyages, and new interpretations of madness. Van Dusen, W. Hallucinations as the world of spirits.--Biofeedback: White, J. The yogi in the lab. Kiefer, D. EEG alpha feedback and subjective states of consciousness.--Meditation research: Griffith, F. F. Meditation research: its personal and social implications. Kiefer, D. Intermeditation notes: reports from inner space.--Psychic research: Honorton, C. Tracing ESP (...) through altered states of consciousness. Johnson, C. W. Unexplored areas of parapsychology.--Paraphysics: White, J. Plants, polygraphs, and paraphysics. Reiser, O. L. Messages to and from the galaxy.--Biotechnology: Beal, J. B. The new biotechnology. Tiller, W. A. Energy fields and the human body.--The neurosciences: Conway, H. Life, death, and antimatter. Floyd, K. Of time and mind: from paradox to paradigm.--Ecological consciousness: Smith, R. A. Our passport to evolutionary awareness. Esser, A. H. Synergy and social pollution in the communal imagery of mankind.--Space travel and extraterrestrial life: Mitchell, E. D. Global consciousness and the view from space. White, J. Exobiology--where science fiction meets science fact.--Death as an altered state of consciousness: Tietze, T. R. Some perspectives on survival. Noyes, R. Dying and mystical consciousness. (shrink)

A new way to transpose the virtue epistemologist’s ‘knowledge = apt belief’ template to the collective level, as a thesis about group knowledge, is developed. In particular, it is shown how specifically judgmental belief can be realised at the collective level in a way that is structurally analogous, on a telic theory of epistemic normativity (e.g., Sosa 2020), to how it is realised at the individual level—viz., through a (collective) intentional attempt to get it right aptly (whether p) by alethically (...) affirming that p. An advantage of the proposal developed is that it is shown to be compatible with competing views—viz., joint acceptance accounts and social-distributive accounts—of how group members must interact in order to materially realise a group belief. I conclude by showing how the proposed judgment-focused collective (telic) virtue epistemology has important advantages over a rival version of collective virtue epistemology defended in recent work by Jesper Kallestrup (2016). (shrink)

Strange inversions occur when things work in ways that turn received wisdom upside down. Hume offered a strangely inverted story about causation, and Darwin, about apparent design. Dennett suggests that a strange inversion also occurs when we project our own reactive complexes outward, painting our world with elusive properties like cuteness, sweetness, blueness, sexiness, funniness, and more. Such properties strike us as experiential causes, but they are really effects—a kind of shorthand for whole sets of reactive dispositions rooted in the (...) nuts and bolts of human information processing. Understanding the nature and origins of that strange inversion, Dennett believes, is thus key to understanding the nature and origins of human experience itself. This paper examines this claim, paying special attention to recent formulations that link that strange inversion to the emerging vision of the brain as a Bayesian estimator, constantly seeking to predict the unfolding sensory barrage. (shrink)

Moral philosophers tend to discriminate, explicitly or implicitly, three types of action from the point of view of moral worth. First, they recognize actions that are a duty, or obligatory, or that we ought to perform, treating these terms as approximately synonymous; second, they recognize actions that are right in so far as they are permissible from a moral standpoint and not ruled out by moral considerations, but that are not morally required of us, like the lead of this or (...) that card at bridge; third, they recognize actions that are wrong, that we ought not to do. (shrink)

The meta-problem is 'the problem of explaining why we think that there is a problem of consciousness' (Chalmers, 2018, p. 6). This presupposes that we think there is a problem in the first place. We challenge the breadth of this 'we', arguing that there is already sufficient empirical evidence to cast doubt on the claim. We then add to this body of evidence, presenting the results of a new cross-cultural study extending the work of Sytsma and Machery (2010).

The conservation of energy and momentum have been viewed as undermining Cartesian mental causation since the 1690s. Modern discussions of the topic tend to use mid-nineteenth century physics, neglecting both locality and Noether’s theorem and its converse. The relevance of General Relativity has rarely been considered. But a few authors have proposed that the non-localizability of gravitational energy and consequent lack of physically meaningful local conservation laws answers the conservation objection to mental causation: conservation already fails in GR, so there (...) is nothing for minds to violate. This paper is motivated by two ideas. First, one might take seriously the fact that GR formally has an infinity of rigid symmetries of the action and hence, by Noether’s first theorem, an infinity of conserved energies-momenta. Second, Sean Carroll has asked how one should modify the Dirac–Maxwell–Einstein equations to describe mental causation. This paper uses the generalized Bianchi identities to show that General Relativity tends to exclude, not facilitate, such Cartesian mental causation. In the simplest case, Cartesian mental influence must be spatio-temporally constant, and hence 0. The difficulty may diminish for more complicated models. Its persuasiveness is also affected by larger world-view considerations. The new general relativistic objection provides some support for realism about gravitational energy-momentum in GR. Such realism also might help to answer an objection to theories of causation involving conserved quantities, because energies-momenta would be conserved even in GR. (shrink)

Autonomous Knowledge: Radical Enhancement, Autonomy, and the Future of Knowing motivates and develops a new research programme in epistemology that is centred around the concept of epistemic autonomy.

A change in sense of self is an outcome commonly associated with Buddhist meditation. However, the sense of self is construed in multiple ways, and which changes in self-related processing are expected, intended, or possible through meditation is not well understood. In a qualitative study of meditation-related challenges, six discrete changes in sense of self were reported by Buddhist meditators: change in narrative self, loss of sense of ownership, loss of sense of agency, change in sense of embodiment, change in (...) self-other or self-world boundaries, and loss of sense of basic self. Changes in sense of self could be transient or enduring, positive or distressing, enhancing or impairing. These changes were also given varied appraisals, ranging from insights associated with Buddhist doctrines to psychopathologies such as depersonalization. In this study of practitioners reporting meditation-related challenges, more global changes in sense of self were associated with higher levels of impairment. These results have implications for both Buddhist meditation as well as mindfulness-based interventions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe seminal work of David Marr, popularized in his classic work Vision, continues to exert a major influence on both cognitive science and philosophy. The interpretation of his work also co...

In the paper, the originator of the hiddenness argument, J. L. Schellenberg, responds to papers that challenge his reasoning. In his remarks he puts an emphasis on the concept of divine love and he explains why it is not only connected to the idea of the Christian God. He also clarifies his position on ultimism.

Here I reply to criticisms by Jeroen de Ridder and S. Kate Devitt to my "Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology".

Conceptual clarity is essential when engaging in dialogue to avoid unnecessary disagreement and to promote mutual understanding. In this issue devoted to clinical bioethics, the authors exemplify the virtue of careful conceptual analysis as they explore complex clinical questions regarding the essential nature of medicine, the boundaries of killing and letting die, the meaning of irreversibility in definitions of death, the argument for a right to try experimental medications, the ethical borders in complex medical billing, and the definition and modeling (...) of complex disease states. (shrink)

Minimally, metaphysical realists hold that there exist some mind-independent entities. Metaphysical realists also hold that we can speak meaningfully or truthfully about mind-independent entities. Those who reject metaphysical realism deny one or more of these commitments. This Element aims to introduce the reader to the core commitments of metaphysical realism and to illustrate how these commitments have changed over time by surveying some of the main families of views that realism has been contrasted with: such as scepticism, idealism, and anti-realism.

In his concept of an anthropological physiology, F.J.J. Buytendijk has tried to lay down the theoretical and scientific foundations for an anthropologically-oriented medicine. The aim of anthropological physiology is to demonstrate, empirically, what being specifically human is in the most elementary physiological functions. This article contains a sketch of Buytendijk''s life and work, an overview of his philosophical-anthropological presuppositions, an outline of his idea of an anthropological physiology and medicine, and a discussion of some episternological and methodological problems. It is (...) demonstrated that Buytendijk''s design of an anthropological physiology is fragmentary and programmatic and that his methodology offers few points of contact for specific anthropological experimental research.Notwithstanding, it is argued that Buytendijk''s description of the subjective, animated body forms a pre-eminent point of reference for all research in physiology and psychology in which the specific human aspect is not ignored beforehand. (shrink)

Flew's challenge to the religious believer asks him to specify what would count as a disproof for, e.g. ‘There is a God’. A statement of such a specifiable condition I called an ‘empirical denial’. In my earlier paper I was concerned to show that a statement is a statement whether or not it has such an empirical denial. I was not particularly concerned to show that there are some statements which do not have an empirical denial; my concern was to (...) show that it is not essential that they do. It was in connection with this point that the statement ‘John loves Mary’ was discussed. But this very same example may indeed serve as an example of a statement for which, in certain complex situations, there is no empirical denial. That is, in some circumstances, no matter what empirical conditions are specified, when the statement ‘John loves Mary’ is made, they could obtain and still John might love Mary, as the developing situation would make clear. If the condition specified is that John is cruel to Mary and shows no concern for her, details could always emerge in such a situation to explain why, even though he loved her, he was cruel and showed no concern. And so on. (shrink)

Everyone interested in Arabic and Persian literature, in Islam and in comparative religion, regrets the death of Arthur J. Arberry, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. Arberry combined rare human qualities and exceptional professional attainment, and this enabled him to make a unique contribution both to learning and to mutual understanding between East and West. He had a deep sense of vocation, which he brought to his unremitting labours as a skilled editor of texts, especially (...) in the field of Islamic mysticism, and as an imaginative translator of these texts of the Koran and of Arabic and Persian poetry, and as a sympathetic interpreter of Sūfism. (shrink)

Why is there a 'hard problem' of consciousness? Why do we seem unable to grasp intuitively that physical brain processes can be identical to experiences? Here I comment on the 'meta-problem' (Chalmers, 2018), based on previous ideas (Storm, 2014; 2018). In short: humans may be 'inborn dualists' ('neuroscepticism'), because evolution gave us two (types of) brain systems (or functional modes): one (Sp) for understanding relatively simple physical phenomena, and another (Sm) specialized for mental phenomena. Because Sp cannot deal with the (...) immense complexity of the brain processes underlying consciousness, it represents them as fundamentally different from nonmental physical phenomena (dualist intuition), using 'simulations' to produce 'Sm-type understanding'/predictions that seems radically different from 'Sp-type understanding'. (By analogy, different sensory modalities, handled by distinct brain systems, evoke qualitatively different experiences.) Brain systems for Sp representations of our brain processes never evolved, because they would be useless. When lacking a single 'template' matching different aspects of reality (objective vs. subjective = simulated), complementary 'models' are needed ('neuro-complementarity'), like the wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics. Thus, it seems plausible that Sp and Sm evolved because they were needed to cope with different challenges, and that 'problem intuitions' are side effects of these useful but different brain systems. (shrink)

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its (...) still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis. (shrink)

Semantic Scholar extracted view of "Animal Welfare and Rights: V. Zoos and Zoological Parks" by J. Dunlap et al.