Affirming Affectivity: On The Task of Philosophy in Lyotard’s Later Works

ABSTRACT

Jean-François Lyotard famously described the task of philosophy as “bearing witness to the differend”, a differend being a conflict that cannot be equitably solved due to the lack of a rule applicable to all parties involved. Lyotard expanded the notion of differend in his later works. With the name of “the differend itself”, Lyotard seeks to signal a more radical conflict: between articulate meaning and affect. This development changes the task of philosophy. In this article, bearing witness to the differend itself is conceptualized as a twofold process, consisting of a negative and a positive aspect. On the one hand, the differend itself cannot as such be written into language. On the other hand, however, philosophizing presupposes affect as its impetus. To signal this, an openness to affect and a freedom with regard to style are required, thereby showing that reason and affect are not opposed but presuppose each other.     

The effects of gender-typed labels on children’s performance

The present study examined the effect of gender-typed labeling of a task on the performance of children. A total of 72 boys and girls aged 11, 13 and 16 years took part in the study. The same measure of performance—a perceptual motor task—was used across all conditions. Two main dimensions were investigated: first, the effect of of directly labeling the task as gender appropriate or inappropriate; second, the effect of the instruction to role-enact a person competent at the task labeled gender appropriate or inappropriate. The results indicate that children of all ages studied perform better at the task labeled gender appropriate rather than inappropriate. Children also perform better when role-acting competence at a gender-typed labeled task than under conventional testing procedures. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Relationships of parents’ and child’s general attributional styles to academic performance

This study examined the relationships among student academic performance and child’s and parents’ attributional styles. One hundred seventy-nine students (87 boys and 92 girls) who were enrolled in primary public schools in New South Wales, Australia, and their parents volunteered to participate in the study. Only English-speaking, two-parent families were included. Participants completed age-appropriate attributional style questionnaires. Academic performance was obtained from student records of course grades. The results indicated that both mothers’ and fathers’ attributions for their own positive and negative life events were related to their children’s attributions for their academic performance. We present implications of these results for research on attributions and academic performance.     

Job satisfaction and firm performance: Can employees’ job satisfaction change the trajectory of a firm’s performance?

Contemporary trends in business have focused on enhancing the employee work experience. Proponents argue that doing so will improve employees’ productivity and ultimately the firm's performance. However, critics argue that job satisfaction has only a modest relationship with an employee's job performance, and therefore, such an investment will likely have little impact on the firm's financial performance. To investigate the relationship between employees’ job satisfaction and firm performance, we collected a sample of 404 employees working in 31 firms. We tested this relationship using latent growth modeling which allows us to latently examine how employees’ job satisfaction at one time point can predict the trajectory of firm performance. Study results indicated that job satisfaction predicted a positive linear change in two financial indices of firm performance (i.e., return on assets and return on equity) over the course of four years when controlling for three indicators of firm size. These results suggest that the effects of job satisfaction on firm performance are not immediate but rather take time to manifest.     

Relative performance and implicit incentives in the intergroup prisoner’s dilemma

This paper illustrates how the payoff matrices of the single group Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) and the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) differentially reinforce cooperation when participants care about relative performance. Examples of particular payoff patterns and thought experiments using a computational simulation demonstrate that withholding cooperation is not always the dominant strategy in the IPD. In the intergroup structure, three conditions differentially reinforce cooperation. When competing groups have equal numbers of cooperators, withholding cooperation is always the dominant strategy just as in the single group structure. In contrast, when one group has more cooperators than the other group, cooperation by its members can dominate withholding cooperation by members of the other group. Thus, the relative advantage of one group over another increases the payoff for cooperation in some configurations of the IPD over the payoff in the PD. Relative payoff is thus an untheorized variable motivating cooperation in the IPD.     

The effects of experience on performance in Wason’s selection task

The Wason selection task is a hypothetico-deductive reasoning problem employing the logical rule of implication. Recent studies have indicated that performance on this task may be related to subjects’ experience with the task content. Five versions of the task that differed in the manner in which they were related to the subjects’ experience with a familiar implication relationship were examined. The correct solution rate varied as a function of both the subjects’ extraexperimental and intraexperimental experience. A memory-cuing/reasoning-by-analogy explanation is proposed to account for the direct relationship between performance and the degree of similarity to subjects’ experience.     

The role of entrenchment in children’s and adults’ performance on grammaticality judgment tasks

Between the ages of 3 and 7 years, children have been observed to produce verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (e.g., Don’t giggle me; Bowerman, 1982, 1988; Pinker, 1989). A number of recent studies have begun to find evidence that the precise distributional properties of the input may provide an important part of the explanation for why children retreat from overgeneralization errors (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999; Brooks, Tomasello, Dodson, & Lewis, 1999). The current study evaluates the role of entrenchment (Braine & Brooks, 1995) in constraining argument structure overgeneralization errors using a grammaticality judgment task. The 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults were presented with examples of argument structure errors containing high and low frequency verbs matched for semantic class and asked to indicate whether, or the extent to which they found the sentences to be grammatical. The data show that across all groups, sentences with argument structure errors containing low frequency verbs were judged to be significantly more grammatical than those containing high frequency verbs. These findings provide further support for the entrenchment hypothesis and suggest that verb frequency plays an important and continuing role in determining a speaker’s choice of verb argument structure.     

Inhibition and young children’s performance on the Tower of London task

Young children, when performing problem solving tasks, show a tendency to break task rules and produce incomplete solutions. We propose that this tendency can be explained by understanding problem solving within the context of the development of “executive functions” – general cognitive control functions, which serve to regulate the operation of the cognitive system. This proposal is supported by the construction of two computational models that simulate separately the performance of 3–4 year old and 5–6 year old children on the Tower of London planning task. We seek in particular to capture the emerging role of inhibition in the older group. The basic framework within which the models are developed is derived from Fox and Das’ Domino model [Fox, J., & Das, S. (2000). Safe and sound: Artificial intelligence in hazardous applications. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] and Norman and Shallice’s [Norman, D.A., & Shallice, T. (1986). Attention to action: Willed and automatic control of behaviour. In R. Davidson, G. Schwartz, & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Consciousness and Self Regulation (Vol. 4). New York: Plenum] theory of willed and automatic action. Two strategies and a simple perceptual bias are implemented within the models and comparisons between model and child performance reveal a good fit for the key dependent measures (number of rule breaks and percentage of incomplete solutions) of the two groups.     

Timing in the performance of Erik Satie's ‘Vexations’

In traditional studies of single cue probability learning the subject's errors and the covariation he/she establishes between the judgments and the cue (cue dependency) are confounded. Learning results in increased cue dependency which is necessarily accompanied by decreasing errors. This paper presents a method for disentangling errors from cue dependency. This is done by (1) making the criterion contingent upon the judgments instead of the cue, and (2) giving standard instructions, implying that the cue is informative about the criterion. In this way errors are controlled independently of any covariation that the subject may create between the cue and the judgments, and indirectly between the cue and the criterion (task regularity). The paper examines whether subjects aim at small errors or task-regularity when the task does not allow them to do both. It was found that error reduction does occur only when task-regularity can be maintained. Conclusion: task regularity, and thus cue-dependency, has priority to error reduction under the standard conditions used in single cue probability learning experiments. The study may be viewed as an example of conditions under which a cue illusion (false beliefs in the validity of a cue) arises.     

Children’s street crossing performance when auditory information about traffic is lacking

PurposeThe current study examined the impact on children’s street crossing behaviors of not having auditory-based information about traffic when crossing streets.MethodUsing a fully-immersive virtual reality system, numerous indices of children’s street crossing behaviors were measured both when they had auditory-based information about traffic and when this was lacking.ResultsThe lack of traffic sounds did not influence the inter-vehicle gap size that children crossed into but it did result in slower initiations and, ultimately, more high-risk outcomes (close calls and hits).ConclusionTraffic sounds significantly contribute to enhance children’s safety when crossing streets. Cars with reduced sounds (e.g., electric) and anything that interferes with children accessing auditory-based traffic information (e.g., wearing headphones) could increase their risk of pedestrian injury.     

A Response to Wiebe Koopal’s Review of Inhuman Educations: Jean-François Lyotard,Pedagogy, Thought

Studies in Philosophy and Education -     

Do performance avoidance goals moderate the effect of different types of stereotype threat on women’s math performance?

Stereotype threat is considered to be a robust effect that explains persistent gender gaps in math performance and scientific career trajectories. Some evidence suggests stereotype threat effects are buffered by adoption of performance avoidance goals (Chalabaev, Major, Sarrazin, & Cury, 2012). With 590 American female participants, we closely replicated Chalabaev et al. (2012). Results showed no significant main or interaction effects for stereotype threat or performance avoidance goals, despite multiple controls. We conclude that effects of stereotype threat might be smaller than typically reported and find limited evidence for moderation by avoidance achievement goals. Accordingly, stereotype threat might not be a major part of the explanation for the gender gap in math performance, consistent with recent meta-analyses (Flore & Wicherts, 2015).     

Laterality of repetitive finger movement performance and clinical features of Parkinson’s disease

Impairments in acoustically cued repetitive finger movement often emerge at rates near to and above 2 Hz in persons with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) in which some patients move faster (hastening) and others move slower (bradykinetic). The clinical features impacting this differential performance of repetitive finger movement remain unknown. The purpose of this study was to compare repetitive finger movement performance between the more and less affected side, and the difference in clinical ratings among performance groups. Forty-one participants diagnosed with idiopathic PD completed an acoustically cued repetitive finger movement task while “on” medication. Eighteen participants moved faster, 10 moved slower, and 13 were able to maintain the appropriate rate at rates above 2 Hz. Clinical measures of laterality, disease severity, and the UPDRS were obtained. There were no significant differences between the more and less affected sides regardless of performance group. Comparison of disease severity, tremor, and rigidity among performance groups revealed no significant differences. Comparison of posture and postural instability scores revealed that the participants that demonstrated hastening had worse posture and postural instability scores. Consideration of movement rate during the clinical evaluation of repetitive finger movement may provide additional insight into varying disease features in persons with PD.     

Time’s up! Involvement of metamemory knowledge,executive functions,and time monitoring in children’s prospective memory performance

This study examined time-based prospective memory (PM) in children and explored the possible involvement of metamemory knowledge and executive functions in the use of an appropriate time-monitoring strategy depending on the ongoing task’s difficulty. Specifically, a sample of 72 typically developing children aged 4, 6, and 9 years old were given an original PM paradigm composed of both an ongoing procedural activity and a PM task. Half of the participants (expert group) were trained in the ongoing activity before the prospective test. As expected, results show that time monitoring had a positive effect on children’s PM performance. Furthermore, mediation analyses reveal that strategic time monitoring was predicted by metamemory knowledge in the expert group but only by executive functions in the novice group. Overall, these findings provide interesting avenues to explain how metamemory knowledge, strategy use, and executive functions interact to improve PM performance during childhood.     

McTaggart’s Paradox and Crisp’s Presentism

In his review of The Ontology of Time, Thomas Crisp (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2005a) argues that Oaklander's version of McTaggart's paradox does not make any trouble for his version of presentism. The aim of this paper is to refute that claim by demonstrating that Crisp's version of presentism does indeed succumb to a version of McTaggart's argument. I shall proceed as follows. In Part I I shall explain Crisp's view and then argue in Part II that his analysis of temporal becoming, temporal properties and temporal relations is inadequate. Finally, in Part III, I shall demonstrate that his presentist ontology of time is susceptible to the paradox he so assiduously sought to avoid.     

Cross-lagged relations between kindergarten teachers’ causal attributions, and children’s interest value and performance in mathematics

The present study investigated mathematics performance and related interest value as the antecedents and consequences of teachers?? causal attributions concerning children??s academic outcomes during their kindergarten year. Sixty-nine children (5?C6?years old at the baseline) and their teachers were examined twice during the kindergarten year. Children were tested in mathematics performance and interviewed about their interest value. Teachers rated their causal attributions in the fall and spring. The results showed that the higher the interest value in mathematics children showed, the more the teacher attributed their success to ability and effort. Teachers?? ability attributions for success, in turn, contributed to an increase in children??s interest value in mathematics. Moreover, attributing children??s success and failure to external causes decreased children??s mathematics-related interest value.     

Wallace’s and Darwin’s natural selection theories

Synthese - This work takes a stand on whether Wallace should be regarded as co-author of the theory of natural selection alongside Darwin as he is usually considered on behalf of his alleged...