Legal Audiences

This paper approaches legal argumentation from a rhetorical perspective. It discusses the nature of the audiences that are (and should be) targeted by judges in the legal process. Judicial opinions reach diverse groups of people with very different attitudes and expectations: other judges, lawyers, litigants, concerned citizens, etc. One important way in which these groups differ is that some of them are more likely to be persuaded by legalistic, precedent or statute-based arguments, while others expect judges to decide on grounds of justice or equity. So, judges face the challenge of determining whether they should select particular groups for special attention, or whether they have alternative rhetorical means to approach the problem of audience diversity. One strategy that is likely to be recommended by rhetorical scholars is that judges should not try to accommodate the various preferences of their actual readership, but that they should rather invoke an idealized audience or some version of Chaïm Perelman’s universal audience. However, the paper tries to show that the universal audience is of limited value for a discussion about how judges ought to proceed in the face of audience diversity. In particular, the idea of a universal audience does not help judges to make the choice between a legalistic or an equity-based approach to legal decision-making. By showing that this is so, the paper also raises doubts about the common thought that to invoke the universal audience in law is to appeal to natural law (as distinct from written, positive law).     

Reaching a verdict

Two experiments, using a mock legal case, confirmed the causal role of arguments in verdict decisions and explored the process involved. Experiment 1 showed that verdicts varied with the strength of counter-arguments and Experiment 2 showed that the use of background information that undermined such arguments determined the verdict reached. Such results confirm the causal role of arguments but do not speak to the representations constructed. In both experiments we analysed the reasons proposed for verdicts. Participants generally represented the state of affairs, and conjectured state of affairs, to which the arguments referred. Experiment 2 also asked participants about the number of causal possibilities they envisaged. Confidence in the verdict was moderated by the strength of counter-arguments but in different ways for those who envisaged a single causal account as opposed to two causal accounts. In the former case, confidence decreased with the rated strength of counter-arguments. In the latter case, confidence increased. We suggest that verdicts are abductive explanations of the events generated through a process of mental simulation.     

Reaching while walking: Reaching distance costs more than walking distance

Surprisingly little is known about how people plan and control everyday physical actions, such as walking along and picking up objects. In order to explore this topic, we conducted an experiment in which university students were asked to pick up a common object (a child’s beach bucket) that stood on a table several meters from the participant’s start position. The bucket stood either on the left side, in the middle, or on the right side of the table and, depending on instructions, was to be carried to a farther target whose horizontal position was also varied. The questions were which side of the table the participant would walk along when picking up the bucket and which hand the participant would use to pick up and carry the bucket. Participants, most of whom were righthanded, preferred to walk along the left side of the table and to pick up the bucket with the right hand, although they departed from that preference when the reaching distance across the table was uncomfortable or if the target was too far to the right. The data were well fit with a mathematical model that included a right-hand bias and an estimate of functional distance that expressed the cost of reaching over some distance as approximately twice the cost of walking over the same distance.     

Audiences,relevance, and cognitive environments

This paper discusses the fundamental sense in which the components of an argument should be relevant to the intended audience. In particular, the evidence advanced should be relevant to the facts and assumptions that are manifest in the cognitive environment of the audience. A version of Sperber and Wilson's concept of the cognitive environment is applied to argumentative concerns, and from this certain features of audience-relevance are explored: that the relevance of a premise can vary with the audience; that irrelevant premises can be made relevant; that evidence can be relevant by degrees; and that this notion of relevance will assist the argumentation analyst in the identification and assessment of hidden premises.     

Interdisciplinary epistemology

In commemorating Piaget we should not remember his psychology alone. He hoped for a biologically grounded epistemology, which would require interdisciplinary effort. This paper mentions some recent research in biology, embryology, and philosophy that is consonant with Piaget's epistemological aims. The authors do not cite Piaget as a prime intellectual influence, there being no distinctive Piagetian methodology outside psychology. But they each mention him as someone whose work is relevant to theirs and whose interdisciplinary aims will be achieved only if studies like these can be integrated in the future.This paper originally appeared as a chapter in the 1983 book Jean Piaget: An Interdisciplinary Critique, edited by Sohan Modgil, Celia Modgil, and Geoffrey Brown, and published by Routledge & Kegan, Paul, London.     

Interdisciplinary auditory neuroscience

The Organization of Hearing, Speech and Music in the Human Auditory System, Wellcome Trust Frontier Meeting 22–23 March 1999, Cambridge, UK.     

交叉学科——神经眼科学

神经眼科学是一门交叉学科,至少横跨了眼科、神经内科和神经外科。在神经眼科疾病的诊断上,以各个专科有限的专业知识来分析整个人体复杂的病情,难免会有其局限性或引起判断失误。我国神经眼科学发展缓慢,神经眼科这一交叉学科是相关科室的共同薄弱环节,因此有必要对神经眼科学进行探讨和哲学思考,以引起更多的重视。     

Re-conceptualizing Museum Audiences: Power,Activity, Responsibility

ABSTRACT

This article offers a theoretical overview of how diverse disciplines, such as cultural studies, sociology, philosophy of art, education, and marketing, have contributed to the evolving conceptualization of museum audiences over the past 50 years. Audience research has moved through different paradigms. Every shift in the way audiences are viewed unavoidably influences the way museum professionals view themselves, their role, and the way they interact with their audiences. The most recent audience conceptualization envisions visitors as active interpreters who selectively construct meaning based on their personal experiences, associations, biases, and sense of identity, whereas the museum is envisioned as an open work that is only completed by the visitor. However, certain challenges loom over this new audience conceptualization. It is argued that such visualization underestimates power issues while romanticizing the power of audience activity, thereby ignoring issues of responsibility.     

Perception of Maximum Reaching Height When the Means of Reaching Are No Longer in View

Previous research has shown that perception of maximum reaching height is relative to reaching ability even when the means of performing this behavior would bring about (future) changes in reaching ability. Two experiments investigate whether this continues to be the case even when the means of reaching are no longer in view. The results show perception of maximum reaching height reflects impending changes to reaching ability both when the means of performing the reaching task (and changing reaching ability) are present and when they are no longer in view. The results are discussed in the context of prospectivity, retrospectivity, and flexibility—3 fundamental hallmarks of goal-directed behavior.     

采用跨学科概念图推进中学生跨学科学业成就

为了检验跨学科概念图在跨学科知识整合中的作用,设计了跨学科概念图干预计划,以180名中学生为被试,采用实验组与控制组对比实验方法,探讨了跨学科概念图对跨学科学业成就的影响。结果表明:(1)跨学科概念图干预计划显著提高了实验组被试的跨学科学业成绩;(2)对于不同成就者而言,干预计划显著提高了中低成就者的跨学科学业成绩,而对高成就者跨学科学业成绩的影响不显著。这意味着跨学科概念图作为跨学科知识整合领域的智力适应工具能够有效提高学习者的跨学科学业成就,但是其对不同层次学习者跨学科学业成就的影响具有适应性差异。     

Reaching the Champions of Social Justice

Since the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948, the ecumenical voice against social injustice in the church and society has been strengthening. As one expression of unity among the fellowship, the WCC embarked in 2013 on a Pilgrimage of Justice and Peace to work, pray, and walk together for life-affirming economies, climate change, nonviolent peace building, and reconciliation and human dignity. Champions of these issues exist within the ecumenical movement. Yet one also finds that champions of one theme are pushing back on another theme. Sometimes it is due to diversity of contexts and biblical and theological interpretations. At other times it is due to unconscious bias about the holistic nature of God's mission of justice for all God's people and creation. This paper grapples with this question: Why are people who are so alive to economic and ecological injustice sometimes blind to racial and gender injustice? To answer this, I explore the existence of conscious and unconscious bias despite the many powerful ecumenical statements that have been issued on racial justice.     

Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Philosophy

Many philosophers would, in theory, agree that the methods and tools of philosophy ought to be supplemented by those of other academic disciplines. In practice, however, the sociological data suggest that most philosophers fail to engage or collaborate with other academics, and this article argues that this is problematic for philosophy as a discipline. In relation to the value of interdisciplinary collaboration, the article highlights how experimental philosophers can benefit the field, but only insofar as they draw from the distinctive methods of philosophy and overcome the charge of “amateur psychology” by more consistently collaborating with the scientists they seek to emulate. It concludes that philosophers ought to collaborate with other academics in order to gain an experience‐based understanding of the methods of other disciplines in addition to an understanding of the content of these disciplines.     

Pathways of Interdisciplinary Cognition

In this article, I propose that at the juncture of disciplines, the mind is involved in at least 3 cognitive activities: overcoming internal monologism or monodisciplinarity, attaining provisional integration, and questioning the integration as necessarily partial. This claim is supported by interview data I collected primarily from faculty involved in the development and teaching of interdisciplinary courses in programs including the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, Swarthmore College's Interpretation Theory, and the NEXA Program at San Francisco State University. I suggest that interdisciplinary thinking is fundamentally similar to dialogical exchanges occurring in language and in collaborative activities in which epistemological positions are bartered. Bakhtin's (1981) theory of dialogic understanding and subsequent linguistic theories of conceptual metaphor and blending serve as a constructive theoretical framework for the understanding of interdisciplinary cognition. Viewing disciplines broadly as languages, epistemologies, and collaborative practices helps uncover some underlying cognitive mechanisms that deserve further investigation.