What is a word? Recognizing polymorphemic lexical items in DLI.

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to "morphological families" in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.     

What is the signal in signal detection?

This study concerns the nature of the stimulus represented along the decision axis in the yes/no auditory detection task. Two contrasting interpretations, absolute and difference representation of the stimulus, are tested by raising the carrier tone embedded within the background “noise” to the level of the signal, on occasional “catch” trials. Results indicate that difference detection may be the preferred mode of operation when a carrier tone is present and the task is a difficult one. Implications for the TSD model are discussed in terms of the relative efficiency of the two detection mechanisms.     

What is the reference in reference repulsion?

Reference repulsion is a mechanism posited to explain systematic biases of direction judgment of single drifting dot displays (Rauber and Treue, 1998 Perception 27 393-402). Rauber and Treue obtained systematic but, surprisingly, very different effects depending upon whether standard and comparison stimuli were presented simultaneously or successively. Successive effects were described as exhibiting repulsion from both vertical and horizontal cardinal axes, whereas simultaneous effects showed repulsion from horizontal only. We contend that the proposed mechanism makes no testable predictions because the so-called reference can only be specified a posteriori, a fact acknowledged by Rauber and Treue. We attempted to replicate Rauber and Treue's experiments, but we obtained no systematic biases of direction judgment. Comparisons across several studies suggest that errors in direction judgments of single drifting dot patterns vary widely in magnitude and direction, as might be expected with what are essentially baseline or pretest measures. In our view, reference repulsion describes neither a real perceptual mechanism nor a predictable pattern of direction misjudgments.     

What is a Thing?

“Thing” in the titular question of this paper should be construed as having the utmost generality. In the relevant sense, a thing just is an entity, an existent, a being. The present task is to say what a thing of any category is. This task is the primary one of any comprehensive and systematic metaphysics. Indeed, an answer provides the means for resolving perennial disputes concerning the integrity of the structure in reality—whether some of the relations among things are necessary merely given those relata themselves—and the intricacy of this structure—whether some things are more or less fundamental than others. After considering some reasons for thinking the generality of the titular question makes it unanswerable, the paper propounds the methodology, original inquiry, required to answer it. The key to this methodology is adopting a singular perspective; confronting the world as merely the impetus to inquiry, one can attain an account of what a thing must be. Radical ontology is a systematic metaphysics—broadly Aristotelian, essentialist, and nonhierarchical—that develops the consequences of this account. With it, it is possible to move past stalemate in metaphysics by revealing the grounds of a principled choice between seemingly incommensurable worldviews.     

What is a City?

Cities are mysteriously attractive. The more we get used to being citizens of the world, the more we feel the need to identify ourselves with a city. Moreover, this need seems in no way distressed by the fact that the urban landscape around us changes continuously: new buildings rise, new restaurants open, new stores, new parks, new infrastructures… Cities seem to vindicate Heraclitus’s dictum: you cannot step twice into the same river; you cannot walk twice through the same city. But, as with the river, we want and need to say that it is the same city we are walking through every day. It is always different, but numerically self-identical. How is that possible? What sort of mysterious thing is a city? The answer, I submit, is that cities aren’t things. They are processes. Like rivers, cities unfold in time just as they extend in space, by having different temporal parts for each time at which they exist. And walking though one part and then again through another is, literally, walking through the same whole.

     

What is a Line?

Since the discovery of incommensurability in ancient Greece, arithmeticism and geometricism constantly switched roles. After ninetieth century arithmeticism Frege eventually returned to the view that mathematics is really entirely geometry. Yet Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl and Bernays are mathematicians opposed to the explication of the continuum purely in terms of the discrete. At the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘continuum theorists’ in France (Longo, Thom and others) believe that the continuum precedes the discrete. In addition the last 50 years witnessed the revival of infinitesimals (Laugwitz and Robinson—non-standard analysis) and—based upon category theory—the rise of smooth infinitesimal analysis and differential geometry. The spatial whole-parts relation is irreducible (Russell) and correlated with the spatial order of simultaneity. The human imaginative capacities are connected to the characterization of points and lines (Euclid) and to the views of Aristotle (the irreducibility of the continuity of a line to its points), which remained in force until the ninetieth century. Although Bolzano once more launched an attempt to arithmetize continuity, it appears as if Weierstrass, Cantor and Dedekind finally succeeded in bringing this ideal to its completion. Their views are assessed by analyzing the contradiction present in Grünbaum’s attempt to explain the continuum as an aggregate of unextended elements (degenerate intervals). Alternatively a line-stretch is characterized as a one-dimensional spatial subject, given at once in its totality (as a whole) and delimited by two points—but it is neither a breadthless length nor the (shortest) distance between two points. The overall aim of this analysis is to account for the uniqueness of discreteness and continuity by highlighting their mutual interconnections exemplified in the nature of a line as a one-dimensional spatial subject, while acknowledging that points are merely spatial objects which are always dependent upon an extended spatial subject. Instead of attempting to reduce continuity to discreteness or discreteness to continuity, a third alternative is explored: accept the irreducibility of number and space and then proceed by analyzing their unbreakable coherence. The argument may be seen as exploring some implications of the view of John Bell, namely that the “continuous is an autonomous notion, not explicable in terms of the discrete.” Bell points out that initially Brouwer, in his dissertation of 1907, “regards continuity and discreteness as complementary notions, neither of which is reducible to each other.”     

What is a Natural Conception of the World?

Continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann and analytic philosophers such as Ryle, Strawson, and Jennifer Hornsby may be interpreted as using competing intellectual strategies within the framework of one and the same research programme, the programme of developing a natural conception of the world. They all argue that the Manifest Image of the world (to use Sellars's terminology) is compatible with, or even more fundamental than, the Scientific Image. A comparative examination of these strategies shows that Hartmann's strategy of stratification is superior to those of Heidegger, Ryle, and Strawson.