Analysis and analogy in the perception of vowels

In two experiments, we investigated the creation of conceptual analogies to a contrast between vowels. An ordering procedure was used to determine the reliability of simple sensory and abstract analogies to vowel contrasts composed by naive volunteers. The results indicate that test subjects compose stable and consistent analogies to a meaningless segmental linguistic contrast, some invoking simple and complex relational properties. Although in the literature of psychophysics such facility has been explained as an effect of sensory analysis, the present studies indicate the action of a far subtler and more versatile cognitive function akin to the creation of meaning in figurative language.     

Patterns of Adjustment to the Career/Family Conflict of Technically Trained Women in the United States and Israel1

The number of women in technical/scientific careers is still very small worldwide. The aim of the present paper is to understand how women who are already pursuing technical careers experience and reconcile the demands of their professional and private lives in two different national contexts. Participants in the study were 453 women in two countries with different socioeconomic, political, and cultural backgrounds: the United States and Israel. The cross-cultural perspective is employed here in order to better understand the universal aspects of the phenomenon, as opposed to those that are tied to a particular situational or cultural context. Women in both countries face a practical dilemma in combining career and family as well as a femininity dilemma related to their identity as women. These dilemmas differ according to the life stage of the women, but the effects vary by national culture.     

Treating mothers of aggressive children: a research study

In this empirical investigation, three conditions in the group therapy of aggressive children were compared: Child only treatment, Mother + Child treatment, and a notreatment control. The 75 participating children, all Druze from two cities in Israel, were assigned equally and randomly to the three conditions, 25 children in each. In addition, the mothers of these children participated in the study, with 25 of them treated in groups. A semi-structured treatment program using bibliotherapy was conducted, with some modifications, in the two therapy conditions. Results indicated that, compared to the control group, both treatment conditions were effective in reducing aggression, although the Mother + Child condition showed significantly greater gains on the children's self-report measure. With regard to maternal coping, gains were greater in the Mother + Child treatment group than in the Child treatment group on four of six subscales. Finally, three associations were found between reductions in children's aggression and changes in maternal coping.     

The role of ‘action-effects’ and agency in toddlers’ imitation

We report an experiment on imitation by children between 14 and 26 months in which the presence or absence of an outcome of the procedure to be imitated was varied against whether the procedure was one performed by the experimenter or by a descending arrow. The presence of an outcome did not affect performance positively when the procedure was performed by the experimenter, but it did when it was performed by the descending arrow. When there was an outcome, performance on the experimenter-perform and the arrow-perform conditions did not differ. We argue that this result puts pressure on theories like ‘the theory of common coding’ (W. Prinz) which view the presence of an outcome as being crucial to imitation.     

Mexican Jewish? A conversation with Ilan Stavans

Mexican Jews are at a crossroads. Their history reaches back to after 1492, when a number arrived as conversos, crypto-Jews, and New Christians. The Holy Inquisition was founded in Mexico in 1535, with Bishop Juan de Zumárraga. Twenty-nine “deviants” were executed during this period. Ashkenazic and Sephardi Jews arrived at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, followed by a wave of refugees of the Second World War. Today the Jewish community is made up of Orthodox Jews, exiled Israelis, and others. With democracy a messy affair, the government unable to ascertain its authority, and the drug cartel in an intense battle for power and territory, their position is delicate at best. Ilan Stavans is arguably the most prominent Mexican Jew inside and out. In books like On Borrowed Words (2001), Return to Centro Histórico (2010), and El Iluminado (2012), as well as in movies such as My Mexican Shiva (2007), directed by Alejandro Springall and based on his story “Morirse está en hebreo,” he has reflected on the dilemmas—cultural, political, and religious—facing this minority of close to 40,000 in a national population of 115 million. This conversation took place in April 2014.     

The Dancing Jew and Other Characters: Art in the Jewish Settlement in Palestine During the 1920s

Contrary to the predictions of sociologists that modernity would spell Judaism’’s demise, Judaism in the last three centuries has shown itself to be remarkably productive. The inner dynamic of that productivity is not the bipolarity of assimilation and nationalism that historians have asserted, but rather the dialectic between apprehensions for survival on the one hand and messianic hopes and presentiments on the other. That dialectic has resulted in interlinked developments of secularization and sacralization that have occurred in three identifiable waves of change that have been formative for the modern period.     

The Slingshot Argument: An Improved Version

In the paper I exploit Frege's notions of sense and synonymity in order to amend the slingshot argument. The main emendation is to replace the assumption about logical equivalence by an assumption about synonymity. While the replaced assumption begs the question about the reference of sentences, the replacing assumption has much more theoretical support from Frege's general conception of sense and reference and the relation between them. In the paper I use a specific notion of synonymity which I believe is faithful to Frege's discussion of the subject. I notice that if a stronger (and to my mind implausible) notion of synonymity is used, my version of the argument fails. The failure is explained by showing that this stronger notion of synonymity enables the assignment of facts, and not truth values, as the references of sentences.     

Effect of Rater Nationality on the Relationships among Ratee Task,Contextual, and Counterproductive Behaviors and Salary Estimates

This study examined the moderating effect of rater nationality on the relationships among ratee task, contextual, and counterproductive behaviors, and rater salary estimates gauging the dollar value of overall job performance. As hypothesized, rater nationality had a significant moderating effect, such that the Lebanese sample showed stronger relationships between each of the three types of job performance and their dollar value estimates than did the American sample. In other words, results indicated that Lebanese participants made stronger salary differentiations among the different levels of task, contextual, and counterproductive performance. These results seem to suggest that Lebanese participants provided salary estimates using more of an equity approach, whereas American participants provided salary estimates using more of an equality approach. Results contribute to the growing evidence that national culture is important in evaluating job performance.     

The Phenomenal Sorites and Response Dependence 1

Natural-kind essentialism faces an important but neglected difficulty: the problem of complex essences (PCE). This is the question of how to account for the unity of an instantiated kind-essence when that essence consists of multiple distinct properties, some of which lack an inherent necessary connection between them. My central goal here is to propose an essentialism-friendly solution to this problem. Along the way I also employ some points from that solution to argue for the necessary truth of essentialism (necessary, that is, in all possible worlds in which there are material objects), and to support the essentialist ontology of laws over and against a major rival.