Visual variability affects early verb learning

Research demonstrates that within‐category visual variability facilitates noun learning; however, the effect of visual variability on verb learning is unknown. We habituated 24‐month‐old children to a novel verb paired with an animated star‐shaped actor. Across multiple trials, children saw either a single action from an action category (identical actions condition, for example, travelling while repeatedly changing into a circle shape) or multiple actions from that action category (variable actions condition, for example, travelling while changing into a circle shape, then a square shape, then a triangle shape). Four test trials followed habituation. One paired the habituated verb with a new action from the habituated category (e.g., ‘dacking’ + pentagon shape) and one with a completely novel action (e.g., ‘dacking’ + leg movement). The others paired a new verb with a new same‐category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + pentagon shape), or a completely novel category action (e.g., ‘keefing’ + leg movement). Although all children discriminated novel verb/action pairs, children in the identical actions condition discriminated trials that included the completely novel verb, while children in the variable actions condition discriminated the out‐of‐category action. These data suggest that – as in noun learning – visual variability affects verb learning and children's ability to form action categories.     

Infants prefer motionese to adult‐directed action

In two studies, we investigated infants’ preference for infant‐directed (ID) action or ‘motionese’ ( Brand, Baldwin & Ashburn, 2002 ) relative to adult‐directed (AD) action. In Study 1, full‐featured videos were shown to 32 6‐ to 8‐month‐olds, who demonstrated a strong preference for ID action. In Study 2, infants at 6–8 months (n= 28) and 11–13 months (n= 24) were shown either standard ID and AD clips, or clips in which demonstrators’ faces were blurred to obscure emotional and eye‐gaze information. Across both ages, infants showed evidence of preferring ID to AD action, even when faces were blurred. Infants did not have a preference for still‐frame images of the demonstrators, indicating that the ID preference arose from action characteristics, not demonstrators’ general appearance. These results suggest that motionese enhances infants’ attention to action, possibly supporting infants’ learning.     

Of words,tools, and actions

The author rejects Leon Galis's claim (Inquiry, Vol. II, No. 2) that in ‘Of Words and Tools’ (Inquiry, Vol. 10, No. 2) he attacks a form of the ‘use’ theory of meaning that no one has held. Galis's other claim, that the author criticizes a needlessly weak form of the theory, is found to be justified, but the author argues that his procedure was adequate, and parallel to that oi Galis's own reconstruction of the ‘use’ theory in terms of ‘goal‐directed action’. Difficulties in this reconstruction are pointed out, and some meta‐semantic issues about theories of meaning raised.     

Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique

Additive theories of rationality, as I use the term, are theories that hold that an account of our capacity to reflect on perceptually‐given reasons for belief and desire‐based reasons for action can begin with an account of what it is to perceive and desire, in terms that do not presuppose any connection to the capacity to reflect on reasons, and then can add an account of the capacity for rational reflection, conceived as an independent capacity to ‘monitor’ and ‘regulate’ our believing‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐perception and our acting‐on‐the‐basis‐of‐desire. I show that a number of recent discussions of human rationality are committed to an additive approach, and I raise two difficulties for this approach, each analogous to a classic problem for Cartesian dualism. The interaction problem concerns how capacities conceived as intrinsically independent of the power of reason can interact with this power in what is intuitively the right way. The unity problem concerns how an additive theorist can explain a rational subject's entitlement to conceive of the animal whose perceptual and desiderative life he or she oversees as ‘I’ rather than ‘it’. I argue that these difficulties motivate a general skepticism about the additive approach, and I sketch an alternative, ‘transformative’ framework in which to think about the cognitive and practical capacities of a rational animal.     

Cultural influences on body dissatisfaction,body change behaviours,and disordered eating of Japanese adolescents

We administered a paper‐and‐pencil questionnaire to 133 female and 99 male Japanese high school students 13–18 years old (M = 15.9, SD = 1.57) from the Kansai area to examine cultural influences on their body image and body change behaviours. Our aim was to ascertain the independent and combined influences from traditional Japanese, modern Japanese, and Western values. Cluster analyses identified four ‘acculturative’ groups: ‘anti‐modern’, ‘traditional’, ‘pro‐modern/anti‐traditional’, and ‘pro‐Western/anti‐Japanese’. Pro‐modern and pro‐Western adolescents were most dissatisfied with their bodies, and pro‐Western adolescents were also most likely to attempt weight loss. The results demonstrate the value of assessing cultural interactions in Japan along three dimensions.     

Contours for a Public Lutheran Theology in the Face of Empire

Abstract : Three themes structure Lutheranism's interpretation of the biblical narrative as it intersects with the present challenges of Empire: justification by faith as a declaration of inclusiveness; God's threefold‐multidimensional action creating and sustaining democratic practices (two kingdoms); and the cross as the critical ‘weapon’ against the ‘glory’ of Empire. This implies placing our theology within the present cultural and religious debate in a way consistent with the methodology of the cross: a theology done from the bowels of Empire, revealing its true face behind its alleged ‘benevolent’ mask.     

The mind‐body relationship in Pāli Buddhism: A philosophical investigation

The Suttas indicate physical conditions for success in meditation, and also acceptance of a not‐Self life‐principle (primarily viññana) which is (usually) dependent on the mortal physical body. In the Abhidhamma and commentaries, the physical acts on the mental through the senses and through the ‘basis’ for mind‐organ and mind‐consciousness, which came to be seen as the ‘heart‐basis’. Mind acts on the body through two ‘intimations’: fleeting modulations in the primary physical elements. Various forms of rūpa are also said to originate dependent on citta and other types of rūpa. Meditation makes possible the development of a ‘mind‐made body’ and control over physical elements through psychic powers. The formless rebirths and the state of cessation are anomalous states of mind‐without‐body, or body‐without‐mind, with the latter presenting the problem of how mental phenomena can arise after being completely absent. Does this twin‐category process pluralism avoid the problems of substance‐dualism?     

Two notions of intentional action? Solving a puzzle in Anscombe’s Intention

The account of intentional action Anscombe provides in her (1957) Intention has had a huge influence on the development of contemporary action theory. But what is intentional action, according to Anscombe? She seems to give two different answers, saying first that they are actions to which a special sense of the question ‘Why?’ is applicable, and second that they form a sub-class of the things a person knows without observation. Anscombe gives no explicit account of how these two characterizations converge on a single phenomenon, leaving us with a puzzle. I solve the puzzle by elucidating Anscombe's two characterizations in concert with several other key concepts in ‘Intention’, including, ‘practical reasons’, the sui generis kind of explanation these provide, the distinction between ‘practical’ and ‘speculative’ knowledge, the formal features which mark this distinction, and Anscombe's characterization of practical knowledge as knowledge ‘in intention’.     

Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations

It is often argued that our obligations to address structural injustice are collective in character. But what exactly does it mean for ‘ordinary citizens’ to have collective obligations vis‐à‐vis large‐scale injustice? In this article, I propose to pay closer attention to the different kinds of collective action needed in addressing some of these structural injustices and the extent to which these are available to large, unorganised groups of people. I argue that large, dispersed, and unorganised groups of people are often in a position to perform distributive collective actions. As such, ordinary citizens can have massively shared obligations to address structural injustice through distributive action, but, ultimately, such obligations are ‘collective’ only in a fairly weak sense.     

From Buddha's speech to Buddha's essence: philosophical discussions of Buddha‐vacana in India and China1

This is a comparative study of the discourses on the nature of sacred language found in Indian Abhidharma texts and those written by 7th century Chinese Buddhist scholars who, unlike the Indian Buddhists, questioned ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. This issue labeled fo‐chiao t'i lun, the theory of ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching', was one of the topics on which Chinese Yogācāra scholars have shown a keen interest and served as the inspiration for extensive intellectual dialogues in their texts. It is in Hsüan‐tsang's massive and organized translation works, begun in 648, that various previous translations of the term buddhavacana from Indian Abhidharma texts were given the unified translation of fo‐chiao. (Fo‐chiao literally means “the Buddha's teachings,” and is the term used in the modern period for “Buddhism.”) By combining fo‐chiao with the term t'i, meaning ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ throughout his translations, Hsüan‐tsang attempted to define ‘the essence of the Buddha’s teaching'. In Indian Abhidharma texts, the nature of the Buddha's word was either ‘sound’ (?abdha), the oral component of speech, or ‘name’ (nāma), the component of language that conveys meaning, or some combination of the two. From the time of Hsüan‐tsang's translation, however, discourse on the nature of sacred language was no longer relegated to the category of language or of epistemological investigation, but became grounded in the Chinese discussion investigating the ‘essence’ or ‘substance’ of the Buddha's teaching, and even of ‘Buddhism’ itself. As such, it sought to transcend the distinction between language and meaning. This gradual but explicit process of inquiry into the nature of ‘the Buddha’s word' was a necessary antecedent to the transition to a ‘Chinese’ Buddhism.     

The Analytic Truth and Falsity of Disjunctions

Disjunctive inferences are difficult. According to the theory of mental models, it is because of the alternative possibilities to which disjunctions refer. Three experiments corroborated further predictions of the mental model theory. Participants judged that disjunctions, such as Either this year is a leap year or it is a common year are true. Given a disjunction such as Either A or B, they tended to evaluate the four cases in its ‘partition’: A and B, A and not‐B, not‐A and B, not‐A and not‐B, as ‘possible’ or ‘impossible’ in ways that bore out the difference between inclusive disjunctions (‘or both’) and exclusive disjunctions (‘but not both’). Knowledge usually concerns what is true, and so when participants judge that a disjunction is false, or contingent, and evaluate the cases in its partition, they depend on inferences that yield predictable errors. They tended to judge that disjunctions, such as follows: Either the food is cold or else it is tepid, but not both, are true, though in fact they could be false. They tended to infer ‘mirror‐image’ evaluations that yield the same possibilities for false disjunctions as those for true disjunctions. The article considers the implications of these results for alternative theories based on classical logic or on the probability calculus.     

Kung‐sun lung on the point of pointing: The moral rhetoric of names

Graham compares Kung‐sun Lung's “White Horse not Horse” [Graham, A.C. (1990) Studies in Chinese Philosophy and Philosophical Literature (Albany, SUNY Press)] loith the use of a synecdoche in English, “Sword is not Blade”. The Blade as part stands in here for the whole which is the Sword. But just as Sword as ‘hilt plus blade’ is more than blade, then via analogia, White Horse as ‘white plus horse’ is more than the part that is just ‘horse’. Graham had taken over this Part/Whole argument from Chad Hansen who argues that since Chinese does not require the word ma for ‘horse/horses’ to be used with prefixed articles or numerals, ma is a ‘mass‐noun’ similar to certain English mass‐nouns like ‘sand’ which also has no plural form unlike the count‐noun ‘horse’ [Hansen, Chad, (1983) Language and Logic in Ancient China (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press)]. Hansen then equates “White Horse is not Horse” to the Mohist argument for “Ox Horse is not Horse”. Ox‐Horse is a ‘mixed herd’ of Ox and Horse that is not (just) that part that is Horse. The same it is with the mass‐sum that is White Horse. It is like saying in English “White Sand is not Sand”. Sand being this spread of sand on the beach, it is more than just a patch of that beach that is white. But this attribution of a Part/Whole logic to Kung‐sun Lung runs up against a basic dictum stated in his thesis on ‘Pointing and Thing’. There it is noted how all things can be pointed out except thing itself because the word “thing” leaves nothing to exclude for it to be stand out. Since that thesis is derived from the law of the excluded middle where a thing is either X or not X, it is not possible for Kung‐sun Lung to subscribe to a Part/Whole logic which basically argues for a thing being both X and not X.     

DVD pirating intentions: Angels,devils, chancers and receivers

Digital piracy is perceived as a considerable problem by the film industry, and numerous preventative strategies have been introduced, but so far with limited success. This paper explores DVD piracy in particular, and focuses on identifying different types of pirating behaviour and the antecedents to this behaviour. Four distinct types of ‘pirates’ were identified, based on a cross‐sectional sample of UK adults. These groups were serious pirates (‘Devils’), opportunists (‘Chancers’), receivers (‘Receivers’) and non‐pirates (‘Angels’). A structural equation modelling approach was used to establish the importance of key antecedents for the overall sample and the four sub groups. The base model fitted the overall sample very well as for the sub group ‘Chancers’, but as expected, there were significant differences in model fit and the importance of key variables between the different behaviour types. The construct of ‘perceived harm’ emerged as an important differentiator in all models. The results suggest that targeting anti‐pirating measures specifically at different types of behaviour and their antecedents may increase the effectiveness of such measures and also assist with the efficient allocation of limited resources in this area. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The public good that does the public good: A new reading of Mohism

Mohism has long been misrepresented. Mo‐tzu is usually called a utilitarian because he preached a universal love that must benefit. Yet Mencius, who pined the Confucian way of virtue (humaneness and righteousness) against Mo‐tzu's way of benefit, basically borrowed Mo‐tzu's thesis: that the root cause of chaos is this lack of love—except Mencius renamed it the desire for personal benefit. Yet Mo‐tzu only championed ‘benefit’ to head off its opposite, ‘harm’, specifically the harm done by Confucians who with good intent (love) perpetuated rites that did people more harm than good. Mo‐tzu wanted his universal love to be the public good that would actually do the public good (i.e. benefit the collective). And he derived this from Confucius’ teaching of ‘Love (all) men’ and his Golden Rule: Render not what others would not desire. No man desires harm. As a critic of Confucian rites (especially the prolonged funeral), Mo‐tzu worked to replace the blind custom of rites with his rational measure of ‘rightness’: what is right must do good (i.e. benefit the intended recipient). It is not true that Mohists were ‘joyless’ ascetics; they would gladly celebrate a good harvest with wine and folk song—not expensive court music—with the people. Since Mohist discourse is ‘public’ (that is, accountable), it is also only proper that what is ‘right’ should be outer (means‐end efficacy) and not inner as Mencius would insist.     

Objectless activity: Marx's ‘theses on feuerbach’

According to Friedrich Engels (Ludwig Feuerbach and the end of classical German philosophy) the so‐called ‘Thesen über Feuerbach’ are ‘the brilliant germ of the new world conception’. For Karl Korsch ('Review of Vernon Venable’, Journal of Philosophy 42 [1945], no. 26) there are ‘magnificently summed up’ in them the ‘texts of Marx and Engels's first (Hegelian and post‐Hegelian) period’. Even given the important distinction between the ‘young’ and the ‘mature’ Marx these two opinions are not incompatible. The present paper's concern, however, is with the relationship of the ‘Thesen’ to the materialist conception of history. Once the ‘Thesen’ are read as a consistent whole it is clear that they are incompatible with any non‐social (non‐human) nature; hence with the ontological independence of nature from man; hence with any materialism, historical or otherwise. Furthermore, taken as a whole the ‘Thesen’ form an attempted solution to the problem of the justification of ideals, a solution both activist and dogmatist. Since the attitude expressed in the ‘Thesen’ underlies both Marx's ‘theory of alienation’ and his ‘critique of political economy’ neither of these can lay claim to the status of knowledge.     

A Contextualist Approach to Higher‐Order Vagueness

According to contextualism about vagueness, the content of a vague predicate is context sensitive. On this view, when item a is in the penumbra of the vague predicate ‘F’, speakers may (truly) utter ‘Fa’, or they may (truly) utter ‘not‐Fa’, without contravening the literal meaning of ‘F’. Unlike its more popular variants, the version of contextualism I defend rejects the principle of tolerance, a principle according to which small differences should not affect the applicability of a vague predicate. My goal is to show how such a rejection allows for a plausible treatment of higher‐order vagueness, and for a dissolution of paradoxes of higher‐order vagueness.     

Conventionalism,scientific discovery and the sociology of knowledge*

In this paper the basic aim of the so‐called ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of knowledge is examined. The ‘strong programme’ is considered (and rightly so) as an extreme version of the anti‐realist view of science. While the problem of scientific realism has normally been dealt with from the point of view of the ‘context of justification’ of theories, the paper focuses on the issues raised by law‐discovery. In this context Herbert Simon's views about the existence of a ‘logic of scientific discovery’ are discussed and criticized. The main thesis of the paper is that if the structure of both discovery and prediction is properly understood, then the basic anti‐realist claims become untenable. A fortiori, the ‘strong programme’ appears to be unable to explain some basic features of the structure of science.