Arrow Logic and Infinite Counting

We consider arrow logics (i.e., propositional multi-modal logics having three -- a dyadic, a monadic, and a constant -- modal operators) augmented with various kinds of infinite counting modalities, such as 'much more', 'of good quantity', 'many times'. It is shown that the addition of these modal operators to weakly associative arrow logic results in finitely axiomatizable and decidable logics, which fail to have the finite base property.     

Arbitrariness in nature: synergetics and evolutionary laws of prohibition

The philosophical consequences of synergetics, the interdisciplinary theory of evolution and self-organization of complex systems, are being drawn in the paper. The idea of discreteness of evolutionary paths is in the focus of attention. Although the future is open, and there are many alternative evolutionary paths for complex systems, not any arbitrary (either conceivable or desirable) evolutionary path is feasible in a given system. There are discrete spectra of possible evolutionary paths which are determined exclusively by inner properties of the corresponding systems. Synergetics allows us to reveal general laws of self-organization and, therefore, certain limits of arbitrariness of nature in choosing possible paths of evolution as well as in constructing of a complex evolutionary whole. A comparative analysis between the modern synergetic notions and a few ideas of the Western philosophy (F. Nietzsche, N. Hartmann, M. Heidegger) and of the Eastern teachings (Taoism, Buddhism) is made. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cosmopolitics of a Regulatory Fit: The Case of Nanocellulose

Nanocellulose is an organic material envisioned to have the capacity to replace potentially harmful, non-renewable materials such as plastics. Before the material can be utilized commercially within the EU, its safety needs to be officially proven. This is envisioned to happen through the REACH chemicals regulation that controls the market entry of new substances. The regulation proposes concepts to support regulatory discretion and test methods to be used in risk assessments. While so doing, REACH puts forward assumptions pertaining to the critical qualities of innovations. However, when regulation is used to appraise radically new innovations, the assumptions need to be re-evaluated. Yet, analysis of expert accounts suggests that nanocellulose cannot be easily fit into the categorizations and analytical engagements that REACH proposes. For the purposes of a regulatory adoption, the problems are transformed into epistemological issues to be resolved through the incremental closing of knowledge gaps. Some of the key qualities of the material seem not to gain recognition in the regulatory realm that is in the making. At worst, the official strategy may create conditions for risks which the regulation is supposed to eradicate while, at the same time, hindering the development of plastic-substituting solutions.     

Seeing behind the surface: communicative demonstration boosts category disambiguation in 12‐month‐olds

In their first years, infants acquire an incredible amount of information regarding the objects present in their environment. While often it is not clear what specific information should be prioritized in encoding from the many characteristics of an object, different types of object representations facilitate different types of generalizations. We tested the hypotheses that 1‐year‐old infants distinctively represent familiar objects as exemplars of their kind, and that ostensive communication plays a role in determining kind membership for ambiguous objects. In the training phase of our experiment, infants were exposed to movies displaying an agent sorting objects from two categories (cups and plates) into two locations (left or right). Afterwards, different groups of infants saw either an ostensive or a non‐ostensive demonstration performed by the agent, revealing that a new object that looked like a plate can be transformed into a cup. A third group of infants experienced no demonstration regarding the new object. During test, infants were presented with the ambiguous object in the plate format, and we measured generalization by coding anticipatory looks to the plate or the cup side. While infants looked equally often towards the two sides when the demonstration was non‐ostensive, and more often to the plate side when there was no demonstration, they performed more anticipatory eye movements to the cup side when the demonstration was ostensive. Thus, ostensive demonstration likely highlighted the hidden dispositional properties of the target object as kind‐relevant, guiding infants’ categorization of the foldable cup as a cup, despite it looking like a plate. These results suggest that infants likely encode familiar objects as exemplars of their kind and that ostensive communication can play a crucial role in disambiguating what kind an object belongs to, even when this requires disregarding salient surface features.     

Are All Kids Alike? The Magnitude of Individual Differences in Personality Characteristics Tends to Increase from Early Childhood to Early Adolescence

Do individual differences in personality traits become more or less pronounced over childhood and adolescence? The present research examined age differences in the variance of a range of personality traits, using parent reports of two large samples of children from predominantly the USA and Russia, respectively. Results indicate (i) that individual differences in most traits tend to increase with age from early childhood into early adolescence and then plateau, (ii) that this general pattern of greater personality variance at older childhood age is consistent across the two countries, and (iii) that this pattern is not an artefact of age differences in means or floor/ceiling effects. These findings are consistent with several (noncontradictory) developmental mechanisms, including youths' expanding behavioural capacities and person–environment transactions (corresponsive principle). However, these mechanisms may predominantly characterize periods before adolescence, or they may be offset by countervailing processes, such as socialization pressure towards a mature personality profile, in late adolescence and adulthood. Finally, the findings also suggest that interpreting age trajectories in mean trait scores as pertaining to age differences in a typical person may sometimes be misleading. Investigating variance should become an integral part of studying personality development. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Cross-cultural differences in the structure of infant temperament: United States of America (U.S.) and Russia

Conducted Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) of the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised (IBQ-R; Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003) with samples of U.S. and Russian infants, examining cross-cultural differences in the structure of temperament. A generally consistent pattern of factor loadings across the two cultures was obtained following model modification.     

Contrasting cue-density effects in causal and prediction judgments

Many theories of contingency learning assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that predicting whether an outcome will occur should be easier than making a causal judgment. Previous research suggests that outcome predictions would depart from normative standards less often than causal judgments, which is consistent with the idea that the latter are based on more numerous and complex processes. However, only indirect evidence exists for this view. The experiment presented here specifically addresses this issue by allowing for a fair comparison of causal judgments and outcome predictions, both collected at the same stage with identical rating scales. Cue density, a parameter known to affect judgments, is manipulated in a contingency learning paradigm. The results show that, if anything, the cue-density bias is stronger in outcome predictions than in causal judgments. These results contradict key assumptions of many influential theories of contingency learning.