Causal Generalisations in Policy-oriented Economic Research: An Inferentialist Analysis

The most common way of analysing the meaning of causal generalisations relies on referentialist semantics. In this article, we instead develop an analysis based on inferentialist semantics. According to this approach, the meaning of a causal generalisation is constituted by the web of inferential connections in which the generalisation participates. We distinguish and discuss five classes of inferential connections that constitute the meaning of causal generalisations produced in policy-oriented economic research. The usefulness of our account is illustrated with the analysis of generalisations about unemployment put forward by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in its highly influential 1994 OECD Jobs Study. The article ends with a discussion of some crucial philosophical questions about the use of inferentialism in the analysis of causal generalisations.     

BEYOND LITERAL MEANINGS: The Psychology of Allusion

When people understand expressions that are intended nonliterally, two kinds of meaning are simultaneously apprehended: the literal meanings of the words themselves and the speaker's intended figurative meaning. Standard models of language comprehension assume that the literal meanings of figurative expressions are rejected in favor of a nonliteral meaning. I propose an alternative approach in which literal meanings are systematically used to convey figurative meanings through the process of allusion: The use of an expression to refer to entities or situations that are prototypical exemplars of culturally shared concepts and symbols. This approach provides an account of how people use and understand figurative language in general, and metaphor and idioms in particular.     

Principles and Problems in the Assessment of Quality of Life in Health Care

A remarkable surge in efforts to assess the quality of life of patients has occurred in recent years in medical research. Philosophical discussions of these developments have focused, on the one hand, on epistemological reservations about the plausibility of measuring quality of life and, on the other hand, on moral and ethical qualms about the meaning of life conveyed in such assessments. Whilst providing an important note of caution, such critiques fail to recognise two basic principles of quality of life in medical research. Firstly it is intended to provide understanding about groups and categories of patients rather than individuals. Secondly the purpose of such research is to produce generalisations about the relative costs and benefits of specific health care interventions rather than absolute judgements regarding the quality of life of patients per se. Selecting a good quality of life measure for a clinical trial requires balancing criteria such as validity with practical feasibility. Such measures will play an increasingly central role in providing research evidence to improve health care.     

The externalist challenge to conceptual engineering

Unlike conceptual analysis, conceptual engineering does not aim to identify the content that our current concepts do have, but the content which these concepts should have. For this method to show the results that its practitioners typically aim for, being able to change meanings seems to be a crucial presupposition. However, certain branches of semantic externalism raise doubts about whether this presupposition can be met. To the extent that meanings are determined by external factors such as causal histories or microphysical structures, it seems that they cannot be changed intentionally. This paper gives an extended discussion of this ‘externalist challenge’. Pace Herman Cappelen’s recent take on this issue, it argues that the viability of conceptual engineering crucially depends on our ability to bring about meaning change. Furthermore, it argues that, contrary to first appearance, causal theories of reference do allow for a sufficient degree of meaning control. To this purpose, it argues that there is a sense of what is called ‘collective long-range control’, and that popular versions of the causal theory of reference imply that people have this kind of control over meanings.

     

Naive causality: a mental model theory of causal meaning and reasoning

This paper outlines a theory and computer implementation of causal meanings and reasoning. The meanings depend on possibilities, and there are four weak causal relations: A causes B, A prevents B, A allows B , and A allows not-B , and two stronger relations of cause and prevention. Thus, A causes B corresponds to three possibilities: A and B, not-A and B, and not-A and not-B, with the temporal constraint that B does not precede A; and the stronger relation conveys only the first and last of these possibilities. Individuals represent these relations in mental models of what is true in the various possibilities. The theory predicts a number of phenomena, and, contrary to many accounts, it implies that the meaning of causation is not probabilistic, differs from the meaning of enabling conditions, and does not depend on causal powers or mechanisms. The theory also implies that causal deductions do not depend on schemas or rules.     

The study of inhibitory processes in aging with the Faust et al. paradigm (1997): methodological issues

Information provided by a word activates various potential meanings. Comprehension involves the suppression of inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words in order to finetune the intended meaning of sentences. If older adults become less efficient at inhibiting contextually irrelevant information, then multiple meanings of ambiguous words would be activated regardless of contextual bias. An alternative to multiple access was that older adults activate only the most dominant meaning of ambiguous words. According to this reservation, support for an inhibition deficit would require evidence that older adults activated the multiple meanings of ambiguous words. The effects of aging on both activation and inhibition of different meanings of ambiguous words were studied using Faust et al. (1997) paradigms. Results showed that both activation and inhibition response latency differed for the dominant and subordinate target and that the dominant meaning for one subject was not the same for another one. The implication of these results is that studies of inhibition should take dominance meaning of ambiguous word for each subject into account.     

Creating Brand Meaning: A Review and Research Agenda

In this paper I review, from the perspective of experimental research, studies that have examined how brands acquire cultural meaning, and suggest future research directions. McCracken's (Journal of Consumer Research, 13 , 1986 and 71) model of the meaning transfer process gained influence about thirty years ago, but experimental studies of the processes it posited have been limited in their scope. The review is organized around three questions. First, what should be the dependent variables: the types of meanings that can adhere to brands? Second, what have we learned from studies on the types of visual, sensory, and human cues that are the sources of particular types of brand meaning—our independent variables? Third, what do we know, and need to know, about the inferential and other processes through which consumers “take possession” of these brand meanings from these cues? The review concludes with a research agenda.     

Responding to indirect speech acts

Indirect speech acts, like the request Do you know the time?, have both a literal meaning, here “I ask you whether you know the time,” and an indirect meaning “I request you to tell me the time.” In this paper I outline a model of how listeners understand such speech acts and plan responses to them. The main proposals are these. The literal meaning of indirect speech acts can be intended to be taken seriously (along with the indirect meaning) or merely pro forma. In the first case listeners are expected to respond to both meanings, as in Yes, I do—it's six, but in the second case only to the indirect meaning, as in It's six. There are at least six sources of information listeners use in judging whether the literal meaning was intended seriously or pro forma, as well as whether there was intended to be any indirect meaning. These proposals were supported in five experiments in which ordinary requests for information were made by telephone of 950 local merchants.     

Processing idioms with multiple meanings

Three experiments are presented that examine understanding of idioms with one or more meaning. The results of Experiment 1 showed that subjects took longer to read and make paraphrase judgments for idioms when both their idiomatic and literal meanings are intended than it did to comprehend idioms meant only literally or idiomatically. In Experiments 2 and 3, subjects were faster at making phrase classification judgments for idioms with several different nonliteral interpretations than they were to make the same judgments for idioms with only one idiomatic interpretation. These findings suggest that idioms with more entries in the mental lexicon are accessed faster because it is more likely that one of their meanings will be encountered in a short time. The data overall support the idea that idioms are represented differently depending on their number of associated meanings.This research was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the University of California, Santa Cruz. We wish to thank Dennis Johnston for his assistance in running subjects.     

语义分解性在惯用语理解中的作用

惯用语是比喻性语言的一种。语义分解性的作用是惯用语理解机制争论的焦点。通过语义启动任务, 探究了汉语动宾结构的惯用语和偏正结构的惯用语的意义理解模式, 揭示语义分解性在短的SOA (300 ms)和长的SOA (800 ms)下的作用。结果发现, 语义分解性独立地影响惯用语的意义激活：当SOA短时, 语义高分解的两类惯用语均表现出显著的字面义激活效应; 当SOA长时, 语义低分解的偏正结构的惯用语的意义激活的正确率优势明显。同时, 两类惯用语的语义分解性不同导致了语义激活启动效应的差异：当SOA短时, 语义低分解的动宾结构的惯用语存在两种意义的激活效应, 语义高分解的动宾结构的惯用语和偏正结构的惯用语存在字面义的激活效应; 当SOA长时, 语义低分解的动宾结构的惯用语存在两种意义的激活效应, 语义高分解的偏正结构的惯用语存在比喻义的激活效应。研究证实语义分解性在惯用语加工早期即发挥作用, 在加工晚期, 语义高分解的动宾结构的惯用语的多种意义同时激活削弱了两种意义的启动优势。整个研究结果支持惯用语理解的混合表征模型和层级显性意义假说。     

READING SKILL AND SUPPRESSION REVISITED

Abstract— In a previous issue of Psychological Science, we (Gernsbacher, 1993) reported that less skilled readers are less able than more skilled readers to quickly suppress irrelevant information (e.g., the contextually inappropriate meaning of a homonym, such as the playing-card meaning of spade, in the sentence He dug with the spade, or the inappropriate form of a homophone, such as patience, in the sentence He had lots of patients). In the current research, we investigated a ramification of that finding. If less skilled readers are less able to suppress a contextually inappropriate meaning of a homonym, perhaps less skilled readers might be better than more skilled readers at comprehending puns. However, intuition and previous research suggest the contrary, as do the results of the research presented here. On a task that required accepting, rather than rejecting, a meaning of a homonym that was not implied by the sentence context, more skilled readers responded more rapidly than less skilled readers. In contrast, on a task that required accepting a meaning of a homonym that was implied by the sentence context, more and less skilled readers performed equally well. We conclude that more skilled readers are more able to rapidly accept inappropriate meanings of homonyms because they are more skilled at suppression (which in this case involves suppressing the appropriate meanings).     

Manipulationism,Ceteris Paribus Laws,and the Bugbear of Background Knowledge

According to James Woodward’s manipulationism, to explain an event is to show how it could be changed by manipulating its cause. The relevant intervention must be a ‘serious possibility’, distinct from mere logical or physical possibility and approximating something I call ‘scientific possibility’. I argue that background knowledge is indispensable for judgements of scientific possibility and that ‘invariant’ generalisations, the primary vehicles of explanation in manipulationism, are not well adapted to encoding this often implicit knowledge, especially in the social sciences. A survey of key social scientific research methods (case and comparative studies, randomised control trials, ethnography, and structural equation modelling) shows that the output of these methods is generated by causal and non-causal background knowledge meshing in a way that is better encapsulated in an updated theory of ceteris paribus generalisations.     

Adolescent risk-taking and social meaning: A commentary

Adolescent risk-taking can be illuminated through an understanding of the development of the brain, of dual-processing theories, and of social norms and meanings. When adolescents take unjustified risks, it is often because of the weakness of their analytic systems, which provide an inadequate check on impulsive or ill-considered decisions. Social meaning plays a large role in increasing or decreasing adolescent risk-taking. For purposes of policy, one implication is that “meaning entrepreneurs,” in the private and public sectors, should be able to move behavior in better directions.     

A Problem for Generic Generalisations in Scientific Communication

Generic generalisations like ‘Opioids are highly addictive’ are very useful in scientific communication, but they can often be interpreted in many different ways. Although this is not a problem when all interpretations provide the same answer to the question under discussion, a problem arises when a generic generalisation is used to answer a question other than that originally intended. In such cases, some interpretations of the generalisation might answer the question in a way that the original speaker would not endorse. Rather than excising generic generalisations from scientific communication, I recommend that scientific communicators carefully consider the kinds of questions their words might be taken to answer and try to avoid phrasing that might be taken to provide unintended answers.     

Engineering Objects for Collaboration: Strategies of Ambiguity and Clarity at Knowledge Boundaries

Prior research suggests that boundary objects gain meaning through group interaction. Drawing from the literature on strategic ambiguity, we explore the possibility that individuals strategically create potential boundary objects in an attempt to shape the meanings that groups develop. From ethnographic observations of automotive engineers, we identify 2 creation strategies: ambiguity (to create objects that support multiple meanings) and clarity (to create objects that permit a particular meaning). We detail design activities that engineers undertook to create objects under each strategy. We find that, when creating objects, engineers favored a strategy of ambiguity, which they believed would foster healthy long‐term group interactions, over a strategy of clarity, which they tended to employ only when they expected resistance to their ideas.     

Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.     

Context effects in sentence comprehension: A study of the subjective lexicon

These studies explore the role of context in determining what information about the meanings of words is activated in memory at the time a word is encountered in a sentence. Using a color-naming paradigm, it was shown that both meanings of a word that has two distinct meanings are activated in memory at the time the word is heard in a sentence. This activation occurs even when there is sufficient contextual information to indicate which meaning was intended by the speaker. These results support the hypothesis that there exists in memory an isolable subjective lexicon. They suggest that context which is effective in disambiguating lexical ambiguities in the language has its effect only at a relatively late stage in the cognitive processing involved in language comprehension.     

Literal meaning and psychological theory

This paper evaluates the psychological status of literal meaning. Most linguistic and philosophical theories assume that sentences have well-specified literal meanings which represent the meaning of a sentence independent of context. Recent debate on this issue has centered on whether literal meaning can be equated with context-free meaning, or whether a sentence's literal meaning is determined only given a set of background assumptions. Neither of these positions meet the demands of a psychological theory of language understanding. Sentences do not have well-defined literal meanings, regardless of whether these are determined in light of a set of background assumptions. Moreover, the putative literal meanings of sentences do not contribute in systematic ways toward the understanding of speakers' utterance meanings. These observations suggest that the distinctions between literal and metaphoric meanings, and between semantics and pragmatics, have little psychological validity.     

What Can Causal Claims Mean?

How can Hume account for the meaning of causal claims? The causal realist, I argue, is, on Hume's view, saying something nonsensical. I argue that both realist and agnostic interpretations of Hume are inconsistent with his view of language and intentionality. But what then accounts for this illusion of meaning? And even when we use causal terms in accordance with Hume’s definitions, we seem merely to be making disguised self-reports. I argue that Hume’s view is not as implausible as it sounds by exploring his conception of language.