Externalism and Memory: Jane Heal

Tye claims that an externalist should say that memory content invoking natural kind concepts floats free of the setting where the memory is laid down and is at later times determined by the context in which the memory is revived. His argument assumes the existence of 'slow switching' of the meaning of natural kind terms when a person is transported from Earth to Twin Earth. But proper understanding of natural kind terms suggests that slow switching (contrary to what is often presupposed) is likely never to be completed. Hence the situation of a person unknowingly transported to Twin Earth is not that his memories switch content but rather than he gets two natural kinds confused.     

Dyslexic and normal readers' eye movements

Dyslexic and normal readers' eye movements were compared while tracking a moving fixation point and in reading. Contrary to previous reports, the dyslexic and normal readers did not differ in their number of saccades, percentage of regressions, or stability of fixations in the tracking task. Thus, defective oculomotor control was not associated with or a causal factor in dyslexia, and the dyslexics' abnormal eye movements in reading must be related to differences in higher cognitive processes. However, individual differences in oculmotor efficiency, independent of reading ability, were found within both the dyslexic and normal groups, and these differences were correlated in reading and tracking tasks.     

Jane Ellen Harrison: Another life

Josef Franz Thiel Albert Doutreloux Heil und Macht, Approches du Sacré Vol. 22 1975 Studia Institut Anthropos

Haralds Biezais Religious Symbols and their functions 1979 Almqvist and Wiksell International Stockholm     

Baby X

The present study investigated adult behavior while interacting with a three-month-old infant under conditions in which the child was introduced as a boy, as a girl, or with no gender information given. Gender labels did not elicit simple effects, but rather interacted significantly with the sex of the subject on both toy usage and physical contact measures. There was a stronger tendency for both male and female adults to utilize sex-stereotyped toys when the child was introduced as a girl. Most of the findings, however, reflected a differential response of men and women to the absence of gender information. In this condition, male subjects employed a neutral toy most frequently and handled the child least; in contrast, females used more stereotyped toys and handled the child more. All subjects attempted to guess the gender of the child (with “boy” guesses more frequent, although the child was actually female) and all justified their guess on the basis of stereotyped behavioral or physical cues like strength or softness.     

Baby Wordsmith

ABSTRACT— How do infants acquire their first words? Word reference , or how words map onto objects and events, lies at the core of this question. The emergentist coalition model (ECM) represents a new wave of hybrid developmental theories suggesting that the process of vocabulary development changes from one based in perceptual salience and association to one embedded in social understanding. Beginning at 10 months, babies learn words associatively, ignoring the speaker's social cues and using perceptual salience to guide them. By 12 months, babies attend to social cues, but fail to recruit them for word learning. By 18 and 24 months, babies recruit speakers' social cues to learn the names of particular objects speakers label, regardless of those objects' perceptual attraction. Controversies about how to account for the changing character of word acquisition, along with the roots of children's increasing reliance on speakers' social intent, are discussed.     

Baby cries

In this report the history of cry studies will be reviewed and various phenomena associated with neonatal vocalization, including the processes of audition, respiration, phonation, and reflexive noisemaking are described. Some of the causes of crying are discussed, along with changes in the acoustical structure of cries as these relate to an infant's maturation. It may be concluded that crying has a powerful evocative effect generally. Cries also can arouse specific physiological responses (e.g., increased lactation) in mothers, and have a diagnostic value for the pediatrician. In the field of developmental linguistics, detailed analysis of crying, cooing, babbling, and other vocalizations of early life may shed light on the verbal and nonverbal aspects of speech, particularly as these grow out of the first few years of life. Rhythmic and musical elements of infant behavior seem to contribute to what has been called “postural conformity” in the infant-mother relationship, undoubtedly an important ingredient in attachment behavior and in the emotional development of the infant.     

The Dead Baby

The ghosts of Nazi history haunted my work with a German patient. The burnt landscape of the unresolved tragedy between Nazis and Jews saturated our work with transgenerational excess of unspeakable violence. My patient came to discover that she has not been able to avoid reenacting a horrific cycle of crime and punishment. Together we struggled to maintain solidarity and narrate history despite a pull towards reenacting an international tribune. The case brings to the fore the challenge of maintaining an ongoing analytic space and subjective sovereignty when powerful collective issues flood the field. When such a space is created, psychoanalytic work has the potential to join the forces that mend history.     

Baby X revisited

The present study is a replication of a study reported by Seavy, Katz, and Zalk (1975) in which subjects interacted with a 3-month-old female infant who was either introduced as a boy, a girl, or without any specific gender information. In the present study infants of both genders were used as stimuli, and 60 college undergraduates served as subjects. The results of the present study are similar to the findings of the original investigators. The gender labels provided to the subject resulted in highly sex-stereotyped behavior concerning toy choice.     

Killing Baby Suzy

In her (1996) Kadri Vihvelin argues that autoinfanticide is nomologically impossible and so that there is no sense in which time travelers are able to commit it. In response, Theodore Sider (2002) defends the original Lewisian verdict (Lewis 1976) whereby, on a common understanding of ability, time travelers are able to kill their earlier selves and their failure to do so is merely coincidental. This paper constitutes a critical note on arguments put forward by both Sider and Vihvelin. I argue that although Sider’s criticism starts out promisingly he doesn’t succeed in establishing that Vihvelin’s analysis fails, because (a) he neglects to rule out a class of counterfactuals to which Vihvelin’s sample-case may belong; and (b) (together with Lewis) he is wrong to suggest that future facts are irrelevant in the evaluation of time travelers’ abilities. I show instead that Vihvelin’s argument is viciously circular, indicating that even if there are nomological constraints on autoinfanticide these cannot be established a priori.