On domain differences in categorization and context variety

Membership in many natural categories is considered all-or-none, while membership in most artifact categories is found to be graded. We introduce an alternative for the prevailing view that this domain difference in categorization results from representational differences. The context variety account posits that an item’s gradedness reflects the variety of contexts it appears in. Items that feature in a variety of contexts are assumed to be more likely to elicit a graded categorization response, since the suggested target category only provides one of many solutions to the question of the item’s identity. We review earlier work that suggested a domain difference in context variety, with artifactual items appearing in a greater variety of contexts than natural ones. The context variety domain difference is established in two separate experiments but is shown not to explain the domain difference in categorization. A selection of artifactual and natural items, for which the domain difference in context variety is reversed, is presented for categorization in a third experiment. This selection, too, fails to provide evidence for the context variety account of categorization differences. The domain difference in categorization is shown to be robust against this manipulation. Context variety appears to have no bearing on categorization, so the context variety account is not a sustainable alternative to accounts that posit representational differences between natural and artifact categories.     

Long-term antecedents and outcomes of perceived control

Perceived control plays an important role in shaping development throughout adulthood and old age. Using data from the adult lifespan sample of the national German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP; N > 10,000, covering 25 years of measurement), we explored long-term antecedents, correlates, and outcomes of perceived control and examined if associations differ with age. Targeting correlates and antecedents of control, findings indicated that higher concurrent levels of social participation, life satisfaction, and self-rated health as well as more positive changes in social participation over the preceding 11 years were each predictive of between-person differences in perceived control. Targeting health outcomes of control, survival analyses revealed that perceived control predicted 14-year hazard ratio for disability (n = 996 became disabled) and mortality (n = 1,382 died). The effect for mortality, but not for disability, was independent of sociodemographic and psychosocial factors. Overall, we found very limited support for age-differential associations. Our results provide further impetus to thoroughly examine processes involved in antecedent-consequent relations among perceived control, facets of social life, well-being, and health.     

Avoiding the Conditional Fallacy

Over-simple internalist accounts of practical reasons imply that we cannot have reasons to become more rational, because they claim that we have a reason to φ only if we would have some desire to φ if we were fully rational. But if we were fully rational, we would have no desire to become more rational. Robert Johnson has recently argued that in their attempts to avoid this problem, existing versions of internalism yield reasons which do not have an appropriate connection with potential explanations of action. I suggest that the problem is partly a result of failure to see that action-tokens are usually tokens of a wide variety of action-types, and that the internalist conditional need only be true of one of these types in order to justify a reason claim about the token.     

Bildung and Modernity: The Future of Bildung in a World of Difference

This paper asks whether there is afuture for the age-old educational ideal ofBildung. It is argued that the modernconception of Bildung in terms of``rational autonomy' should be understood as theeducational answer that was given to thepolitical question about citizenship in anemerging (modern) civil society. Raising thequestion about the future of Bildungtherefore means to ask what educationalresponse would be appropriate in our time. Itis argued that our time is one in which theidea of a universal or total perspective hasbecome problematic. We now live in a world ofdifference in which the rational autonomouslife is only one of the possible ways to live.Beyond totalisation and isolation, a possiblefuture of Bildung might be found in theexperience that we can only live our life withothers. In a ``world of difference' Bildung might follow from a questioning of``one's right to exist' (Levinas). In thisrespect Bildung can happen anywhere andnot necessarily in those parts of the ``Bildungssystem' that educators are mostfamiliar and comfortable with (i.e., theschool). Bildung becomes a lifelongchallenge and a lifelong opportunity.     

The Standard Meter by Any Name is Still a Meter Long

In §50 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wrote the sentence, "There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris." Although some interpreters have claimed that Wittgenstein's statement is mistaken, while others have proposed various explanations showing that this must be correct, none have questioned the fact that he intended to assert that it is impossible to describe the standard meter as being a meter long. Given that Wittgenstein introduces this sentence as analogous to the claim that "existence cannot be attributed to an element," and that the preceding passages discuss a language-game the simples of which can be described by their own names, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein did not intend to assert this infamous sentence.     

Fruits and vegetables categorized: an application of the generalized context model

In the study reported in this paper, we investigated the categorization of well-known and novel food items in the categories fruits and vegetables. Predictions based on Nosofsky’s (1984, 1986) generalized context model (GCM), on a multiplicative-similarity prototype model, and on an instantiation model as applied in Storms, De Boeck, and Ruts (2001) were compared. Despite suggestions in the literature that prototype models predict categorization from large categories better than exemplar models do, our results showed that the exemplar-based GCM yielded clearly better predictions than did a (multiplicative-similarity) prototype model.     

The ethics of assessing health technologies

Health technology assessment (HTA) consists of thesystematic study of the consequences of theintroduction or continued use of the technology in aparticular context, with the explicit objective toarrive at a judgment of the value or merit of thetechnology. Ideally, it is aimed at assessing allaspects of a given technology or group oftechnologies, including non-technical, e.g.socio-ethical, aspects. However, methods for assessingsocio-ethical implications of health technology arerelatively undeveloped and few mechanisms exist totake action based on the results of such evaluations.Still, the examples of cochlear inplants (CI) and other cases illustratethat HTA is not a matter of merely collecting thefacts about a technology. The facts must beplausible and relevant from a particular framework,which is not always shared by different groups. It ishere that socio-ethical aspects are encountered. Ifhealth technology assessment aims to enhance theaccountability of the decision making processregarding funding and use of health technology, it isa major challenge to assessors of health technologiesto deal adequately with existing value pluralism. Inthis respect interactive evaluation may have somethingto offer.     

Maintaining perceived control with unemployment facilitates future adjustment

Unemployment is a major challenge to individuals' development. An important personal resource to ameliorate the negative impact of unemployment may be perceived control, a general-purpose belief system. Little is known, however, about how perceived control itself changes with the experience of unemployment and what the antecedents, correlates, and consequences of such change in perceived control are in different ages. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (N = 413 who experienced unemployment and N = 413 case-matched controls; time period of data collection: 1994–1996) to examine whether perceived control changes with unemployment, explore the role of socio-demographic, psychosocial and health factors in moderating such change, and investigate whether levels of perceived control prior to unemployment and unemployment-related change in perceived control predict unemployment-related outcomes up to five years following. Results indicated that, on average, perceived control remained relatively stable with unemployment, and that younger and older workers did not differ in this regard. However, there were sizeable individual differences in change in perceived control, with women and those with fewer years of education experiencing greater unemployment-related declines in perceived control. Lower levels of perceived control prior to unemployment and steeper unemployment-related decrements in perceived control were each associated with a higher risk of remaining unemployed in the 12 months immediately following unemployment. Steeper unemployment-related declines in perceived control also predicted lower life satisfaction up to five years following. We discuss possible pathways by which perceived control may facilitate adjustment to unemployment, consider the role of perceived control for better understanding the dynamics of unemployment, and suggest routes for further more process-oriented inquiry.     

Can the Dead be Brought into Disrepute?

Queen Christina of Sweden was unconventional in her time, leading to hypotheses on her gender and possible hermaphroditic nature. If genetic analysis can substantiate the latter claim, could this bring the queen into disrepute 300 years after her death? Joan C. Callahan has argued that if a reputation changes, this constitutes a change only in the group of people changing their views and not in the person whose reputation it is. Is this so? This paper analyses what constitutes change and draws out the implications to the reputation of the dead. It is argued that a reputation is a relational property which can go through changes. The change is “real” for the group changing their views on Queen Christina and of a Cambridge kind for the long dead queen herself. Cambridge changes result in new properties being acquired, some of which can be of significance. Although the dead cannot go through any non-relational changes, it is possible for the dead to change properties through Cambridge changes. In this sense changes in reputation do affect the dead, and thus Queen Christina can acquire a new property, in this case possibly a worse reputation.