Love: gloriously amoral and arational

I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or evaluational love would be propositional, and it therefore allows that the people we love are tradable commodities. A moralized conception of love is no less committed to treating those we love as tradable commodities; it is just that they are tradable moral commodities. An evaluative criterion of adequacy, I suggest, encourages the opposite view – a non-rational and non-evaluational concept of love. Such a love can set up partial obligations, which may even demand that one sacrifice one's life. Only a love that has causes but not reasons can have the kind of value that we think love has, and thus it would only be rational to pursue and foster such a love.     

Holism and eclecticism in the theory of concepts

Abstract

Howard (1992) defines concepts as the information that a person has about a category, and argues for an eclectic theory of concepts on the basis of this definition. We argue that this definition is unacceptable and hence that eclecticism does not follow. First, the definition is circular as it stands. Secondly, when it is modified to avoid circularity, it implies conceptual holism, according to which concepts are not useful explanatory constructs in psychology. Thirdly, we argue that Howard's argument relies essentially on this unacceptable definition: alternative accounts of concepts, namely categorisational or representational views, do not support it. Having countered the argument for eclecticism, we then argue against it directly on methodological grounds.     

A simplicity principle in unsupervised human categorization

We address the problem of predicting how people will spontaneously divide into groups a set of novel items. This is a process akin to perceptual organization. We therefore employ the simplicity principle from perceptual organization to propose a simplicity model of unconstrained spontaneous grouping. The simplicity model predicts that people would prefer the categories for a set of novel items that provide the simplest encoding of these items. Classification predictions are derived from the model without information either about the number of categories sought or information about the distributional properties of the objects to be classified. These features of the simplicity model distinguish it from other models in unsupervised categorization (where, for example, the number of categories sought is determined via a free parameter), and we discuss how these computational differences are related to differences in modeling objectives. The predictions of the simplicity model are validated in four experiments. We also discuss the significance of simplicity in cognitive modeling more generally.     

Messages about sex in the workplace: A content analysis of primetime television

Because television has the potential to shape cultural beliefs about both sexual norms and appropriate workplace behavior, it seems important to examine TV’s portrayal of “sexual etiquette” in the workplace. In a content analysis of two episodes of every primetime comedy aired on all broadcast and cable networks during fall 2000, we coded every sexual remark and behavior made in a workplace scene. Across all networks, 85 percent of programs and one in four workplace interactions contained some type of sexual content. Overall, a viewer is likely to hear eleven sexual remarks and see two to three sexual behaviors in a workplace setting per hour; this jumps to twenty-three remarks and nine behaviors on cable networks. Sexual remarks were mostly explicit, made in an office setting, by White men, and were rarely (1.4%) about sexual harassment or discrimination. Although sexual content in the workplace was generally less common on broadcast than cable networks, a broadcast network (Fox) actually had the highest overall rate, with sexual content in 38 percent of workplace scenes. Given that research suggests that TV teaches youth about sexuality and cultivates sexual attitudes and beliefs consistent with televised portrayals, it is alarming that youth may learn from television that sex in the workplace is not only commonplace, but also to be tolerated and enjoyed.     

Giovanna Borradori,Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Understanding the contribution of target repetition and target expectation to the emergence of the prevalence effect in visual search

Behavior in visual search tasks is influenced by the proportion of trials on which a target is presented (the target prevalence). Previous research has shown that when target prevalence is low (2 % prevalence), participants tend to miss targets, as compared with higher prevalence levels (e.g., 50 % prevalence). There is an ongoing debate regarding the relative contributions of target repetition and the expectation that a target will occur in the emergence of prevalence effects. In order to disentangle these two factors, we went beyond previous studies by directly manipulating participants’ expectations regarding how likely a target was to appear on a given trial. This we achieved without using cues or feedback. Our results indicated that both target repetition and target expectation contribute to the emergence of the prevalence effect.     

Probabilities,causation, and logic programming in conditional reasoning: reply to Stenning and Van Lambalgen (2016)

Oaksford and Chater (2014 Oaksford, M., &; Chater, N. (2014). Probabilistic single function dual process theory and logic programming as approaches to non-monotonicity in human vs. artificial reasoning. Thinking and Reasoning, 20, 269–295. doi:10.1080/13546783.2013.877401[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Thinking and Reasoning, 20, 269–295) critiqued the logic programming (LP) approach to nonmonotonicity and proposed that a Bayesian probabilistic approach to conditional reasoning provided a more empirically adequate theory. The current paper is a reply to Stenning and van Lambalgen's rejoinder to this earlier paper entitled ‘Logic programming, probability, and two-system accounts of reasoning: a rejoinder to Oaksford and Chater’ (2016) in Thinking and Reasoning. It is argued that causation is basic in human cognition and that explaining how abnormality lists are created in LP requires causal models. Each specific rejoinder to the original critique is then addressed. While many areas of agreement are identified, with respect to the key differences, it is concluded the current evidence favours the Bayesian approach, at least for the moment.     

Connectionist Natural Language Processing: The State of the Art

This Special Issue on Connectionist Models of Human Language Processing provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in speech processing, morphology, sentence processing, language production, and reading are described. We argue that connectionist psycholinguistics has already had a significant impact on the psychology of language, and that connectionist models are likely to have an important influence on future research.