Family Exploration: The Contribution of Stability and Change Processes

Building upon the redefinition of exploration as a family process, this study analyses how the processes of family stability and change may favour exploration by members of multiple family relational contexts. Sixty non-clinical family triads (mother, father, child) participated in an experimental observational study and were video-recorded while playing in different interactive configurations. The children (37 females and 23 males) were 4–5 years old (M?=?55 months). The mothers’ ages ranged from 29 to 45 (M?=?38) and the fathers’ ages ranged from 29 to 46 (M?=?39). All the parents were employed and were living together. All participants were Caucasians of Italian nationality. Using the Triadic Interactions Analytical Procedure (TIAP), the family morphostatic processes and the family morphogenetic processes were analysed in relation to the family members’ exploration. Data analyses showed that family stability continual construction (morphostasis) and family change (morphogenesis) involve different interactive and relational dynamics (χ²(8)?=?13.84, p?>?.05; CFI?=?.97, TLI?=?.94, SRMR?=?.06), even if they are intertwined processes (p?<?.001). Both morphostatic and morphogenetic processes were correlated to the level of exploration showed by family members (respectively r?=?.32, p?<?.05, and r?=?.59, p?<?.001), even if the morphogenetic processes had a stronger relation with family exploration (z?=?1.85, p _one-tailed ?<?.05).     

Analysing Gaze in Terms of Subjective and Objective Interpretation: Sartre and Lacan

Considering the Hegelian master–slave dichotomy over the exchange of the gaze, the paper focuses on the issue of vision and visibility, reinterpreted in Sartre’s phenomenological discussions in different ways. The Hegelian emphasis on recognition finds reflection in the treatment of vision as force expressed through visibility in Sartre and as an issue of self recognition in Lacan. Drawing the Hegelian tag with a comparative argument between Sartre and Lacan, the paper focuses on the different perspectives over the concept of gaze or look. It argues that even sharing the same Hegelian legacy regarding the notion of gaze and recognition Sartre and Lacan differs to a considerable extent in their treatment of the impact of gaze. While emphasising more on the phenomenological-existential analysis of the issue of individual recognition Sartre presents gaze as a strong alienating force released from another powerful subject affecting the intersubjective power relation, Lacan, stands on a non-reciprocal relation between seeing and seen by making a difference between the eyes of the subject that looks at and the gaze which is on the side of the object without having any capacity to become a subject. The paper concentrates on these issues over a broader argument on Sartre’s concept of intersubjective gaze.     

Recognition during recall failure: Semantic feature matching as a mechanism for recognition of semantic cues when recall fails

Research suggests that a feature-matching process underlies cue familiarity-detection when cued recall with graphemic cues fails. When a test cue (e.g., potchbork) overlaps in graphemic features with multiple unrecalled studied items (e.g., patchwork, pitchfork, pocketbook, pullcork), higher cue familiarity ratings are given during recall failure of all of the targets than when the cue overlaps in graphemic features with only one studied target and that target fails to be recalled (e.g., patchwork). The present study used semantic feature production norms (McRae et al., Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547–559, 2005) to examine whether the same holds true when the cues are semantic in nature (e.g., jaguar is used to cue cheetah). Indeed, test cues (e.g., cedar) that overlapped in semantic features (e.g., a_tree, has_bark, etc.) with four unretrieved studied items (e.g., birch, oak, pine, willow) received higher cue familiarity ratings during recall failure than test cues that overlapped in semantic features with only two (also unretrieved) studied items (e.g., birch, oak), which in turn received higher familiarity ratings during recall failure than cues that did not overlap in semantic features with any studied items. These findings suggest that the feature-matching theory of recognition during recall failure can accommodate recognition of semantic cues during recall failure, providing a potential mechanism for conceptually-based forms of cue recognition during target retrieval failure. They also provide converging evidence for the existence of the semantic features envisaged in feature-based models of semantic knowledge representation and for those more concretely specified by the production norms of McRae et al. (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547–559, 2005).     

Newly learned word forms are abstract and integrated immediately after acquisition

A hotly debated question in word learning concerns the conditions under which newly learned words compete or interfere with familiar words during spoken word recognition. This has recently been described as a key marker of the integration of a new word into the lexicon and was thought to require consolidation Dumay & Gaskell, (Psychological Science, 18, 35–39, 2007; Gaskell & Dumay, Cognition, 89, 105–132, 2003). Recently, however, Kapnoula, Packard, Gupta, and McMurray, (Cognition, 134, 85–99, 2015) showed that interference can be observed immediately after a word is first learned, implying very rapid integration of new words into the lexicon. It is an open question whether these kinds of effects derive from episodic traces of novel words or from more abstract and lexicalized representations. Here we addressed this question by testing inhibition for newly learned words using training and test stimuli presented in different talker voices. During training, participants were exposed to a set of nonwords spoken by a female speaker. Immediately after training, we assessed the ability of the novel word forms to inhibit familiar words, using a variant of the visual world paradigm. Crucially, the test items were produced by a male speaker. An analysis of fixations showed that even with a change in voice, newly learned words interfered with the recognition of similar known words. These findings show that lexical competition effects from newly learned words spread across different talker voices, which suggests that newly learned words can be sufficiently lexicalized, and abstract with respect to talker voice, without consolidation.     

Contextual-Hierarchical Reconstructions of the Strengthened Liar Problem

In this paper we shall introduce two types of contextual-hierarchical (from now on abbreviated by ‘ch’) approaches to the strengthened liar problem. These approaches, which we call the ‘standard’ and the ‘alternative’ ch-reconstructions of the strengthened liar problem, differ in their philosophical view regarding the nature of truth and the relation between the truth predicates T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ of different hierarchy-levels. The basic idea of the standard ch-reconstruction is that the T r ⁿ⁺¹-schema should hold for all sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\). In contrast, the alternative ch-reconstruction, for which we shall argue in section four, is motivated by the idea that T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹ are coherent in the sense that the same sentences of \(\mathcal {L}^{n}\) should be true according to T r ⁿ and T r ⁿ⁺¹. We show that instances of the standard ch-reconstruction can be obtained by iterating Kripke’s strong Kleene jump operator. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how instances of the alternative ch-reconstruction can be obtained by a slight modification of the iterated axiom system KF and of the iterated strong Kleene jump operator.     

Imposing Order to See the Disorder: Student Depression and T.S. Eliot’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Waste Land:</Emphasis> A (Mis)reading/Diagnosis

Sometime ago, I found myself using the diagnosis of a student’s depression as a critical tool of interpretation, searching for signs of mental illness in her essay that explored order and disorder in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I realised that my reading had become a creative act, combining poem, poet, student essay and author to create, in a sense, one (un)readable text. The present paper is a reflection upon the processes of order and disorder located in a diagnosis of “madness” and the readings of writer and text this diagnosis initiated. I look to deconstruct acts of reading and diagnosis.     

Consequence Mining

The standard semantic definition of consequence with respect to a selected set X of symbols, in terms of truth preservation under replacement (Bolzano) or reinterpretation (Tarski) of symbols outside X, yields a function mapping X to a consequence relation \(\Rightarrow_X\). We investigate a function going in the other direction, thus extracting the constants of a given consequence relation, and we show that this function (a) retrieves the usual logical constants from the usual logical consequence relations, and (b) is an inverse to—more precisely, forms a Galois connection with—the Bolzano–Tarski function.     

Obligation as Optimal Goal Satisfaction

Formalising deontic concepts, such as obligation, prohibition and permission, is normally carried out in a modal logic with a possible world semantics, in which some worlds are better than others. The main focus in these logics is on inferring logical consequences, for example inferring that the obligation O q is a logical consequence of the obligations O p and O (p → q). In this paper we propose a non-modal approach in which obligations are preferred ways of satisfying goals expressed in first-order logic. To say that p is obligatory, but may be violated, resulting in a less than ideal situation s, means that the task is to satisfy the goal p ∨ s, and that models in which p is true are preferred to models in which s is true. Whereas, in modal logic, the preference relation between possible worlds is part of the semantics of the logic, in this non-modal approach, the preference relation between first-order models is external to the logic. Although our main focus is on satisfying goals, we also formulate a notion of logical consequence, which is comparable to the notion of logical consequence in modal deontic logic. In this formalisation, an obligation O p is a logical consequence of goals G, when p is true in all best models of G. We show how this non-modal approach to the treatment of deontic concepts deals with problems of contrary-to-duty obligations and normative conflicts, and argue that the approach is useful for many other applications, including abductive explanations, defeasible reasoning, combinatorial optimisation, and reactive systems of the production system variety.     

Higher-order theories of consciousness and what-it-is-like-ness

Ambitious higher-order theories of consciousness aim to account for conscious states when these are understood in terms of what-it-is-like-ness. This paper considers two arguments concerning this aim, and concludes that ambitious theories fail. The misrepresentation argument against HO theories aims to show that the possibility of radical misrepresentation—there being a HO state about a state the subject is not in—leads to a contradiction. In contrast, the awareness argument aims to bolster HO theories by showing that subjects are aware of all their conscious states. Both arguments hinge on how we understand two related notions which are ubiquitous in discussions of consciousness: those of what-it-is-like-ness and there being something it is like for a subject to be in a mental state. This paper examines how HO theorists must understand the two crucial notions if they are to reject the misrepresentation argument but assert the awareness argument. It shows that HO theorists can and do adopt an understanding—the HO reading—which seems to give them what they want. But adopting the HO reading changes the two arguments. On this reading, the awareness argument tells us nothing about those states there is something it is like to be in, and so offers no support to ambitious HO theories. And to respond to the misrepresentation understood according to the HO reading is to simply ignore the argument presented, and so to give no response at all. As things stand, we should deny that HO theories can account for what-it-is-like-ness.     

Analytic Tableaux for all of <Emphasis Type="Italic">SIXTEEN</Emphasis><Subscript>3</Subscript>

In this paper we give an analytic tableau calculus P L _{1 6} for a functionally complete extension of Shramko and Wansing’s logic. The calculus is based on signed formulas and a single set of tableau rules is involved in axiomatising each of the four entailment relations ? _t , ? _f , ? _i , and ? under consideration—the differences only residing in initial assignments of signs to formulas. Proving that two sets of formulas are in one of the first three entailment relations will in general require developing four tableaux, while proving that they are in the ? relation may require six.     

Embracing Ritual Healing: The Case of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Sazuke</Emphasis> in Tenrikyo in Contemporary Taiwan

This paper will explore how the practice of ritual healing (sazuke) has played a prominent part in the propagation of a Japanese new religious movement (Tenrikyo) in Taiwan. The author firstly unravels the mystery of Tenrikyo’s healing ritual (sazuke) and its role in enabling Taiwanese followers’ potential to re-establish their relationship with the world. The author points out that sazuke is similar to Taiwanese folk therapy and fits into Taiwan’s multi-medical systems. The author also examines the features of Tenrikyo’s healing practice in Taiwan and discusses the evolution of sazuke from a non-institutionalised practice to a bureaucratised one. The author then advances to a more widely theoretical consideration by discussing how sazuke became a force that enabled Taiwanese people to respond to the changing world and how it facilitated peoples’ transformation when they were confronted by daily troubles and difficulties.     

Reasoning defeasibly about probabilities

In concrete applications of probability, statistical investigation gives us knowledge of some probabilities, but we generally want to know many others that are not directly revealed by our data. For instance, we may know prob(P/Q) (the probability of P given Q) and prob(P/R), but what we really want is prob(P/Q&;R), and we may not have the data required to assess that directly. The probability calculus is of no help here. Given prob(P/Q) and prob(P/R), it is consistent with the probability calculus for prob(P/Q&;R) to have any value between 0 and 1. Is there any way to make a reasonable estimate of the value of prob(P/Q&;R)? A related problem occurs when probability practitioners adopt undefended assumptions of statistical independence simply on the basis of not seeing any connection between two propositions. This is common practice, but its justification has eluded probability theorists, and researchers are typically apologetic about making such assumptions. Is there any way to defend the practice? This paper shows that on a certain conception of probability—nomic probability—there are principles of “probable probabilities” that license inferences of the above sort. These are principles telling us that although certain inferences from probabilities to probabilities are not deductively valid, nevertheless the second-order probability of their yielding correct results is 1. This makes it defeasibly reasonable to make the inferences. Thus I argue that it is defeasibly reasonable to assume statistical independence when we have no information to the contrary. And I show that there is a function Y(r, s, a) such that if prob(P/Q) = r, prob(P/R) = s, and prob(P/U) = a (where U is our background knowledge) then it is defeasibly reasonable to expect that prob(P/Q&;R) = Y(r, s, a). Numerous other defeasible inferences are licensed by similar principles of probable probabilities. This has the potential to greatly enhance the usefulness of probabilities in practical application.     

The metaphysics of goodness in the ethics of Aristotle

Kraut (Against absolute goodness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011) and other neo-Aristotelians have argued that there is no such thing as absolute goodness. They admit only good in a kind, e.g. a good sculptor, and good for something, e.g. good for fish. What is the view of Aristotle? Mostly limiting myself to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), I argue that Aristotle is committed to things being absolutely good and also to a metaphysics of absolute goodness where there is a maximally best good that is the cause of the goodness of all other things in virtue of being their end. I begin (in Sect. 2) by suggesting that the notion of good as an end, which is present in the first lines of the NE, is not obviously accounted for by good in a kind or good for something. I then give evidence that good in a kind (in Sect. 3) and good for something (in Sect. 4) can explain neither certain distinctions drawn between virtues nor the determinacy ascribed to what is good “in itself.” I argue (in Sect. 5) contra Gotthelf (2012) that because several important arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics rely on comparative judgments of absolute value—e.g. “Man is the best of all animals”—Aristotle is committed to the existence of both absolute goodness and an absolutely best being. I focus (in Sect. 6) on one passage, Aristotle’s division of goods in NE I 12, which presupposes this metaphysical picture.     

The Recognition of Emotions in Music and Landscapes: Extending Contour Theory

While inanimate objects can neither experience nor express emotions, in principle they can be expressive of emotions. In particular, music is a paradigmatic example of something expressive of emotions that surely cannot feel anything at all. The Contour theory accounts for music expressiveness in terms of those resemblances that hold between its external and perceivable properties (i.e., its contour) and the typical contour of human emotional behavior. Provided that some critical aspects are emended – notably, the stress on the perception of similarity instead of the more plausible hypothesis that the listener perceives manifestations that are similar – we are inclined to endorse contour theory. In particular, we share its basic idea that expressive properties are perceived. Although other kinds of processes – high-level conceptual inferences, imagination – sometimes characterize our encounters with music, still perception constitutes the standard process underlying the detection of expressiveness. Moreover, we propose to extend contour theory to visual arts. Taking into consideration, as a case study, depicted landscapes, we observe that they frequently cannot but express emotions such as joy, sadness, liveliness or melancholy. The fact that pictures, unlike music, lack any temporal dimension is a prima facie reason for doubting the extendibility of contour theory’s conceptual arsenal to them. Nevertheless, while being obviously unable to behave somehow, we claim that depicted landscapes can perfectly convey dynamic information. If this is the case, the extension of the notion of contour to visuals art via the stress on the notion of dynamism would represent a second interesting revision of contour theory.     

Introduction: Judeophobia and Islamophobia in France Before and After <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Hyper Cacher

This article opens with an assessment of the narratives that emerged in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher events in January 2015. It does so by examining the differing hashtags of the moment—#jesuisCharlie, #jesuisjuif, #LassBat—and how each offered a distilled account of what the moment meant; these competing interpretations were echoed in the news coverage and the commentary that followed. The article proceeds to set out how this special issue reframes and reevaluates the recent history of relations between Jews and Muslims in France. Each author suggests that Judeophobia and Islamophobia are inextricably entangled in ways more complicated than simple formulas or hashtags can encapsulate. Taking on the suggestion that “Muslims are the new Jews” in France (or in Europe), the special issue instead urges an appreciation of the interlocked vulnerabilities and insecurities of both Jews and Muslims. Such an approach requires a recognition of the structural and institutional forces and ideologies that have shaped their interconnected destinies in the last generation.     

Subjunctive Conditional Probability

There seem to be two ways of supposing a proposition: supposing “indicatively” that Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, it is likely that someone else did; supposing “subjunctively” that Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, it is likely that nobody would have written the play. Let P(B//A) be the probability of B on the subjunctive supposition that A. Is P(B//A) equal to the probability of the corresponding counterfactual, A □→B? I review recent triviality arguments against this hypothesis and argue that they do not succeed. On the other hand, I argue that even if we can equate P(B//A) with P(A □→B), we still need an account of how subjunctive conditional probabilities are related to unconditional probabilities. The triviality arguments reveal that the connection is not as straightforward as one might have hoped.     

Deontological evidentialism and <Emphasis Type="Italic">ought</Emphasis> implies <Emphasis Type="Italic">can</Emphasis>

Deontological evidentialism is the claim that S ought to form or maintain S’s beliefs in accordance with S’s evidence. A promising argument for this view turns on the premise that consideration c is a normative reason for S to form or maintain a belief that p only if c is evidence that p is true. In this paper, I discuss the surprising relation between a recently influential argument for this key premise and the principle that ought implies can. I argue that anyone who antecedently accepts or rejects this principle already has a reason to resist either this argument’s premises or its role in support of deontological evidentialism.     

A Daily Process Approach to Depict Satisfaction with Life during the Menopausal Transition: Physical (In)activity,Symptoms, and Neuroticism

The main objectives of the present study were (1) to examine the between- and within-person association of physical (in)activity and satisfaction with life (SWL), and (2) to identify relevant top-down and bottom-up influences associated with daily well-being in menopausal women using a daily process approach. As part of a 21-day diary study, community-dwelling middle-aged women (N = 103; age range 40–60 years) wore an accelerometer for the objective assessment of physical activity and completed daily Internet surveys at the end of their day. Multilevel analyses indicated the between-person effects of physical activity on SWL were negligent but that on days when a woman was more physically active than her usual, she reported greater SWL (B = 12.01, p < .05). Sedentary behavior did not demonstrate a between- or within-person association with SWL. Women also experienced reduced SWL on days when greater symptom burden was reported (B = ?2.47, p < .05). Neuroticism also emerged as a top-down personality trait with a negative relation to SWL (B = ?1.47, p < .05). Higher levels of neuroticism predicted reduced daily life satisfaction particularly on days characterized by heightened symptom burden (B = ?0.26, p < .05). In this sample of midlife women, daily physical activity had a positive influence on SWL, whereas daily symptom burden and the personality trait of neuroticism had detrimental consequences on a woman’s daily well-being.     

Normative accuracy and response time data for the computerized Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT-<Emphasis Type="Italic">c</Emphasis>)

We report normative data from a large (N = 307) sample of young adult participants tested with a computerized version of the long form of the classical Benton Facial Recognition Test (BFRT; Benton & Van Allen, 1968). The BFRT-c requires participants to match a target face photograph to either one or three of six face photographs presented simultaneously. We found that the percent accuracy on the BFRT-c (81%–83%) was below ceiling yet well above chance level, with little interindividual variance in this typical population sample, two important aspects of a sensitive clinical test. Although the split-half reliability on response accuracy was relatively low, due to the large variability in difficulty across items, the correct response times measured in this version—completed in 3 min, on average—provide a reliable and critical complementary measure of performance at individual unfamiliar-face matching. In line with previous observations from other measures, females outperformed male participants at the BFRT-c, especially for female faces. In general, performance was also lower following lighting changes than following head rotations, in line with previous studies that have emphasized participants’ limited ability to match pictures of unfamiliar faces with important variations in illumination. Overall, this normative data set supports the validity of the BFRT-c as a key component of a battery of tests to identify clinical impairments in individual face recognition, such as observed in acquired prosopagnosia. However, this analysis strongly recommends that researchers consider the full test results: Beyond global indexes of performance based on accuracy rates only, they should consider the time taken to match individual faces as well as the variability in performance across items.