Two models of unawareness: comparing the object-based and the subjective-state-space approaches

This article attempts to motivate a new approach to anti-realism (or nominalism) in the philosophy of mathematics. I will explore the strongest challenges to anti-realism, based on sympathetic interpretations of our intuitions that appear to support realism. I will argue that the current anti-realistic philosophies have not yet met these challenges, and that is why they cannot convince realists. Then, I will introduce a research project for a new, truly naturalistic, and completely scientific approach to philosophy of mathematics. It belongs to anti-realism, but can meet those challenges and can perhaps convince some realists, at least those who are also naturalists.     

Perceptual scaling of voice identity: common dimensions for different vowels and speakers

The aims of our study were: (1) to determine if the acoustical parameters used by normal subjects to discriminate between different speakers vary when comparisons are made between pairs of two of the same or different vowels, and if they are different for male and female voices; (2) to ask whether individual voices can reasonably be represented as points in a low-dimensional perceptual space such that similarly sounding voices are located close to one another. Subjects were presented with pairs of voices from 16 male and 16 female speakers uttering the three French vowels “a”, “i” and “u” and asked to give speaker similarity judgments. Multidimensional analyses of the similarity matrices were performed separately for male and female voices and for three types of comparisons: same vowels, different vowels and overall average. The resulting dimensions were then interpreted a posteriori in terms of relevant acoustical measures. For both male and female voices, a two-dimensional perceptual space was found to be most appropriate, with axes largely corresponding to contributions of the larynx (pitch) and supra-laryngeal vocal tract (formants), mirroring the two largely independent components of source and filter in voice production. These perceptual spaces of male and female voices and their corresponding voice samples are available at: section Resources.     

Effects of textual response prompts for adolescents in a substance abuse treatment program

Adolescents in a drug and alcohol treatment facility had behavioral deficits in having essential items ready for organized group adventure activities. Checklists (i.e., textual response prompts) were introduced. The data from five participants showed increases in the percentage of required items ready. Generalization was demonstrated across checklists for different activities, across staff and peer leaders, and a different day of the week. Performance was also maintained when the checklist was removed. It was concluded that the use of checklists can be a reliable and efficient strategy to improve performance in adolescents with a substance abuse history. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Causal Learning with Occam’s Razor

Studia Logica - Occam’s razor directs us to adopt the simplest hypothesis consistent with the evidence. Learning theory provides a precise definition of the inductive simplicity of a...