Grading the ‘cultural literacy’ project

The essay examines the argument advanced by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., for instituting ‘cultural literacy’ as a fundamental priority of schools. A number of confusions and equivocations in Hirsch's reasoning are identified, and the propensity of his project to indoctrinate is exposed. Among the features of Hirsch's argument shown to be troubling are his shifting construal of ‘language’, his inconsistency about the requirements of cultural literacy, and his uncritical relation to traditional images of the American past and present. The upshot is to raise the question why Hirsch's project has elicited wide support and praise.     

Referenzsemantik in der Partnermodellierung

How can we explain that an assertion on something perceived can be understood in the same manner by somebody who cannot perceive that scene? This problem bases the interest in computational linguistics in how listener modeling could possibly be harmonized with reference semantics. Mental images substituting real perception appear as a way out. The architecture of the listener model has to be adapted to the creation and use of such pictorial data structures. Furthermore, the relation between the latter and a verbal (i. e., propositional) representation must be understood. The resulting architecture of a listener model with reference semantics can be employed to solve communicational problems from three general classes in a better way, as is demonstrated by an example implementation.     

Norms and attitude change I: Polarization and styles of behaviour

The present article relates some of the conclusions obtained from a series of studies on the relation between normative climate and polarization. Emphasis is put on the fact that the introduction of norms in social psychology experiments must be linked to the place of norms in society. Similarly, styles of behaviour and their consistency are only effective in terms of their contents, which are socially determined. Those are the hypotheses confirmed by our experimental design: a confederate is introduced into group discussions, the experimental variables being defined by means of his role: radicalism, position with respect to the norms, and consistent or inconsistent styles of behaviour. The results shed some light on the conditions of the appearance of polarization.