Materialism in late Enlightenment Germany: a neglected tradition reconsidered

ABSTRACT

Late Enlightenment German materialism has hardly attracted any scholarly attention in the past, in spite of the fact that there were quite a few exponents of it. In this paper, I identify the philosophically most important ones and examine to what extent they were connected with each other. In fact, there are local concentrations of materialists at universities and academic circles in Göttingen, Halle, and Gießen. I then discuss the spectrum of materialist positions held by them, from empiricist naturalism in the case of Michael Hißmann to emergentism and Spinozism in the case of Karl von Knoblauch. Finally, I examine how German materialists conceived of the nature of soul and its immortality. It turns out that most of them were mortalists, with the exception of August Wilhelm Hupel, and some of them also endorsed Socinianism.     

Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of neuromotor behaviour in children with a specific speech and language disorder

Several studies have described problems in a wide area of motor functions in language impaired children. The purpose of this study was to identify the nature of the motor deficits in two subgroups of language impaired children. A standard neurological examination was performed on 18 children with an expressive language disorder and 21 children with a receptive language disorder. The motor performance of the language disordered children was compared with the motor performance of 23 normal children. The standard neurological examination allowed for a qualitative and quantitative assessment of five specific neurological subsystems. Handedness was determined for all children. The language impaired children had more motor problems than the control children on most neurological subsystems. There were few statistically significant differences between the two groups of language impaired children. An excess in left‐handedness was established in the group of children with a receptive language disorder. There was a co‐occurrence of verbal and non‐verbal deficits in language impaired children. As these motor problems put an additional burden on the development of language impaired children, they should be diagnosed as early as possible. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Comparison of Modern and Popular Approaches to Calculating Reliability for Dichotomously Scored Items

Recent work on reliability coefficients has largely focused on continuous items, including critiques of Cronbach’s alpha. Although two new model-based reliability coefficients have been proposed for dichotomous items (Dimitrov, 2003a,b; Green & Yang, 2009a), these approaches have yet to be compared to each other or other popular estimates of reliability such as omega, alpha, and the greatest lower bound. We seek computational improvements to one of these model-based reliability coefficients and, in addition, conduct initial Monte Carlo simulations to compare coefficients using dichotomous data. Our results suggest that such improvements to the model-based approach are warranted, while model-based approaches were generally superior.     

J. N. Mohanty: Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,Edited by Tara Chatterjea,Sandhya Basu,and Amita Chatterjee

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research -     

Abstract: Inference and Interval Estimation for Indirect Effects With Latent Variable Models

Models specifying indirect effects (or mediation) and structural equation modeling are both popular in the social sciences. Yet relatively little research has compared methods that test for indirect effects among latent variables and provided precise estimates of the effectiveness of different methods.

This simulation study provides an extensive comparison of methods for constructing confidence intervals and for making inferences about indirect effects with latent variables. We compared the percentile (PC) bootstrap, bias-corrected (BC) bootstrap, bias-corrected accelerated (BC _a ) bootstrap, likelihood-based confidence intervals (Neale & Miller, 1997), partial posterior predictive (Biesanz, Falk, and Savalei, 2010), and joint significance tests based on Wald tests or likelihood ratio tests. All models included three reflective latent variables representing the independent, dependent, and mediating variables. The design included the following fully crossed conditions: (a) sample size: 100, 200, and 500; (b) number of indicators per latent variable: 3 versus 5; (c) reliability per set of indicators: .7 versus .9; (d) and 16 different path combinations for the indirect effect (α = 0, .14, .39, or .59; and β = 0, .14, .39, or .59). Simulations were performed using a WestGrid cluster of 1680 3.06GHz Intel Xeon processors running R and OpenMx.

Results based on 1,000 replications per cell and 2,000 resamples per bootstrap method indicated that the BC and BC _a bootstrap methods have inflated Type I error rates. Likelihood-based confidence intervals and the PC bootstrap emerged as methods that adequately control Type I error and have good coverage rates.     

Alkoholabhängigkeit in der psychiatrischen Klinik

In Germany 2.4?% of the population suffer from alcohol dependency and 3.8?% of adults from alcohol abuse. Despite an extensive number of options available for addiction therapy only a minority of affected persons receive addiction-specific therapy. This results in a chronification of the disease and a reduction of approximately 15 years in life expectancy. Background knowledge of the foundations of alcohol addiction leads to a new understanding of the processual course of the disease as well as to new therapy interventions. Individualized treatment includes a combination of outpatient, partial inpatient or inpatient therapeutic measures and range from medical advice for reduction of alcohol consumption, to qualified withdrawal treatment up to pharmacological relapse prophylaxis and long-term weaning treatment. Under current therapeutic conditions abstinence quotas of 50-70?% over 1 year can be achieved. Treating physicians must have sufficient diagnostic certainty and furthermore must be in command of motivating discourse techniques, knowledge on the therapeutic options of outpatient and inpatient withdrawal treatment, pharmaceutical relapse prophylaxis and mediation in rehabilitation measures.     

Using the visual world paradigm to study language processing: a review and critical evaluation

We describe the key features of the visual world paradigm and review the main research areas where it has been used. In our discussion we highlight that the paradigm provides information about the way language users integrate linguistic information with information derived from the visual environment. Therefore the paradigm is well suited to study one of the key issues of current cognitive psychology, namely the interplay between linguistic and visual information processing. However, conclusions about linguistic processing (e.g., about activation, competition, and timing of access of linguistic representations) in the absence of relevant visual information must be drawn with caution.     

Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake-But only for skilled producers

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, "The boy eats a big cake," 2-year-olds fixate edible objects in a visual scene (a cake) soon after they hear the semantically constraining verb eats and prior to hearing the word cake. Importantly, children's prediction skills were significantly correlated with their productive vocabulary size-skilled producers (i.e., children with large production vocabularies) showed evidence of predicting upcoming linguistic input, while low producers did not. Furthermore, we found that children's prediction ability is tied specifically to their production skills and not to their comprehension skills. Prediction is really a piece of cake, but only for skilled producers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).