Personhood: What's in a name?

Although there are persistent metaphysical challenges to the notion of “natural kinds” of entities that are what they are essentially, all developed and useful taxonomies are based on just such notions. “Persons,” if they are to be distinguished from other kinds of things, must possess unique properties or the potential for acquiring such properties. Reductive strategies, far from locating these properties, ignore them and thus render the concept of “person” either ambiguous or unintelligible. The properties that count, it is argued here, are those associated with moral and civic forms of life.     

What's in a name?

Medical students pose as physicians during clinical training. This article presents three cases where students justify misrepresenting their status for different reasons: self-concern for career, necessity for clinical training, and belief that the truth could cause undue psychological stress in the patient. The author suggests that serious consequences of this practice should be constantly reviewed in a critical light.     

What's in a therapist's name?

For some years there has been interest in and research on the psychological and sociological influences of names. Little attention has been given to the influence of the names given to mental health professionals. The author describes some of the influence his own name has had on his personal and professional development as well as some of the effects names have had on students and colleagues. A rationale for the exploration of therapists' and clients' names is provided.Except for the name of the author and the names of his family members and those of public figures, all other names used in this article are pseudonyms designed to maintain anonymity and preserve individuals' privacy.     

What's in a name? Attachment-related attentional bias

Participants completed a dot probe task that presented pairs of first names: the participant's own name and a neutral name (Experiments 1-4), the name of their attachment figure and a neutral name (Experiments 1-4), or the name of a known person and a neutral name (Experiments 2-4). A significant attentional bias effect was found for the attachment name in attachment-related contexts, whether they were threatening or positive. The results of Experiments 2 and 4 showed that the attentional bias effects for the attachment name were not driven by familiarity effects and could not be interpreted in terms of salience. Attachment anxiety was associated with hypervigilance toward the attachment name in threatening and positive attachment contexts. Attachment avoidance was unrelated to any attentional bias effects.     

What's in a name? Typicality and relatedness effects in children

We studied how category typicality and out-of-category relatedness affect speeded category verification (vote "yes" if pictured object is clothing) in typically developing 4- to 14-year-olds and adults. Stimuli were typical and atypical category objects (e.g., pants, glove) and related and unrelated out-of-category objects (e.g., necklace, soup). Typical and unrelated out-of-category objects exhibited preferential processing (faster reaction times and fewer errors). Variations in typicality and relatedness disproportionately influenced children's performance, with developmental improvement associated with both verbal and nonverbal factors. Underextension versus overextension errors seemed to be associated with independent factors, namely multifaceted maturational factors versus receptive vocabulary skill, respectively. Errors were infrequent, suggesting spontaneous taxonomic classification by all participants. An experiment with printed words in adults replicated results, indicating that typicality and relatedness effects reflected organizational principles of the semantic system, not picture-related processes. This research establishes the viability of an online approach to assessing automatic components of semantic organization in children.     

What's in a name?: popular names are less common on frontiers

Voluntary settlement on a frontier may promote values of independence. At present, however, researchers know little about the behavioral consequences of this process. In this study, we examined regional variations in baby naming. Because baby naming is an act of considerable personal and familial significance, it reflects prevalent cultural values. In support of the hypothesized link between frontier settlement and independence, we found that babies receive popular names less frequently in western regions of the United States than in its eastern regions (Study 1). The same pattern holds in Canada (Study 2), with popular names being less frequent in western provinces than in eastern provinces. Moreover, popular names are less frequently given to babies in world regions in which Europeans have settled (e.g., Australia, the United States) than in European countries (Study 3). These findings have implications for cross-generational transmission of cultural values.     

What's in a name? access to information from people's names

Abstract

The processing of people's names is contrasted with face recognition and word recognition. The effects of the familiarity of initial and surnames and frequency of surnames (the number of people with the same surname) were investigated in several tasks. It was found that the effects of name familiarity and surname frequency were analogous to the effects of word frequency in tasks which did not require access to memory for individuals (a nationality decision and naming latency). In tasks which do require access to memory for individuals (familiarity decision and a semantic classification), the effect of surname frequency was analogous to the effect of distinctive-ness in face recognition. The results are discussed in terms of a functional model of name processing in which name recognition units mediate between the output of word recognition units and access to identity-specific semantics.     

What's in an author's name? Differential evaluations of performance as a function of author's name

Three hundred college students (150 female, 150 male) were asked to evaluate an academic article in the field of politics, psychology of women, or education (judged masculine, feminine, and neutral, respectively) that was written by either a male, a female, or an author with a sexually ambiguous name. The results indicated that ratings of the articles were differentially perceived and evaluated according to the name of the author. An article written by a male was valued more positively than if the author was not male. Furthermore, subjects' bias against women was stronger when they believed that sexually neutral authors were female.We thank Brad Waite for his help in data collection.     

What's in a function?

In this paper we argue that Revision Rules, introduced by Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap as a tool for the analysis of the concept of truth, also provide a useful tool for defining computable functions. This also makes good on Gupta's and Belnap's claim that Revision Rules provide a general theory of definition, a claim for which they supply only the example of truth. In particular we show how Revision Rules arise naturally from relaxing and generalizing a classical construction due to Kleene, and indicate how they can be employed to reconstruct the class of the general recursive functions. We also point at how Revision Rules can be employed to access non-minimal fixed points of partially defined computing procedures.I thank Nuel Belnap, Rich Thomason, Ken Manders, and Jamie Tappenden for much helpful advice given while I was trying to get clear on the ideas presented here. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this paper.     

What's in a look?

The most common behavioral technique used to study infant perception, cognition, language, and social development is some variant of looking time. Since its inception as a reliable method in the late 1950s, a tremendous increase in knowledge about infant competencies has been gained by inferences made from measures of looking time. Here we examine the logic, utility, and future prospects for further gains in our understanding of infant cognition from the use of looking time measures.     

What's in a taxon?

Whether taxometrics yields inferential knowledge to something latent is partly but not wholly a semantic question. Although the single variables are manifest indicator scores of individuals, the statistics computed from them via postulates of the formalism are not mere data summaries and will be incorrect or meaningless if the structural conjectures are false. The unidirectional derivability from postulates to data relations supplies the taxonic inferences' surplus meaning that constitutes conventional psychometric meaning of latency (e.g., latent class analysis). Surplus meaning beyond the purely mathematical may be provided by interpretive text attributing unobserved attributes or causal origin to taxon members.     

What's in a smile?

In positive social contexts, both adults and older infants show more Duchenne smiling (which involves high cheek raising) than non-Duchenne smiling (which does not). This study compared Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiles in early infancy for clues to their emotional significance. Infants (N = 13) from 1 to 6 months of age were videotaped weekly for 5 min in 208 face-to-face interactions with their mothers. Levels of Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiling were correlated within interactive sessions, and the 2 smiles had similar developmental trajectories. Duchenne smiles were typically preceded by non-Duchenne smiles. The results suggest these frequently contrasted types of smiles occur in similar situations and are often different temporal phases of a continuous emotional process. In contrast to adults, infant Duchenne smiles had longer durations than non-Duchenne smiles, suggesting infant smiling does not fit adult models of emotional functioning.     

What's in a Name?

This paper is about the mode of being of names. The paper begins by explaining why the joke is on commentators who see Lewis Carroll's White Knight as applying the use/mention distinction. Then it argues that the real problem with the distinction is that the idea that names are used to mention what they name depends on mistakenly conceiving of language as existing autonomously; and that philosophers have this conception because they fail to appreciate what they are doing when they philosophise about language. This failure also explains why philosophers mistakenly think of any manifestation of a name as a (physical) token.