Conventionality in family conversations about everyday objects

Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local notion of conventions as flexibly negotiated in activity.     

On the expression and experience of surprise: no evidence for facial feedback, but evidence for a reverse self-inference effect

Three studies examined the effects of experimentally manipulated surprise expressions on the experience of surprise. Surprise was induced by a sudden, unannounced change of the stimulus presentation during a computerized task. Facial expression was manipulated by leading participants to adopt an expression akin to surprise, or by forcing them to look up steeply to a monitor. The expression manipulations had no intensifying effect on the experience of surprise, whereas manipulations of unexpectedness and mental load had strong effects. In addition, mental load was found to affect beliefs about facial expression, suggesting that the participants used their feelings of surprise to infer their probable facial displays. Path analyses supported this reverse self-inference hypothesis.     

The sad truth about depressive realism

In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are nondepressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high—the “outcome-density effect”. In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed “depressive realism”, and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as “sadder but wiser”. We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.*     

Processing of Syllables in Production and Recognition Tasks

Empirical evidence for a functional role of syllables in visual word processing is abundant, however it remains rather heterogeneous. The present study aims to further specify the role of syllables and the cognitive accessibility of syllabic information in word processing. The first experiment compared performance across naming and lexical decision tasks by manipulating the number of syllables in words and non-words. Results showed a syllable number effect in both the naming task and the lexical decision task. The second experiment introduced a stimulus set consisting of isolated syllabic and non-syllabic trigrams. Syllable frequency was manipulated in a naming and in a decision task requiring participants to decide on the syllabic status of letter strings. Results showed faster responses for syllables than for non-syllables in both tasks. Syllable frequency effects were observed in the decision task. In summary, the results from these manipulations of different types of syllable information confirm an important role of syllabic units in both recognition and production.     

Erkenntnistheorie der Zahldefinition und philosophische Grundlegung der Arithmetik unter Bezugnahme auf einen Vergleich von Gottlob Freges Logizismus und platonischer Philosophie (Syrian, Theon von Smyrna u.a.)

The epistomology of the definition of number and the philosophical foundation of arithmetic based on a comparison between Gottlob Frege's logicism and Platonic philosophy (Syrianus, Theo Smyrnaeus, and others). The intention of this article is to provide arithmetic with a logically and methodologically valid definition of number for construing a consistent philosophical foundation of arithmetic. The – surely astonishing – main thesis is that instead of the modern and contemporary attempts, especially in Gottlob Frege's Foundations of Arithmetic, such a definition is found in the arithmetic in Euclid's Elements. To draw this conclusion a profound reflection on the role of epistemology for the foundation of mathematics, especially for the method of definition of number, is indispensable; a reflection not to be found in the contemporary debate (the predominate ‘pragmaticformalism’ in current mathematics just shirks from trying to solve the epistemological problems raised by the debate between logicism, intuitionism, and formalism). Frege's definition of number, ‘The number of the concept F is the extension of the concept ‘numerically equal to the concept F”, which is still substantial for contemporary mathematics, does not fulfil the requirements of logical and methodological correctness because the definiens in a double way (in the concepts ‘extension of a concept’ and ‘numerically equal’) implicitly presupposes the definiendum, i.e. number itself. Number itself, on the contrary, is defined adequately by Euclid as ‘multitude composed of units’, a definition which is even, though never mentioned, an implicit presupposition of the modern concept ofset. But Frege rejects this definition and construes his own - for epistemological reasons: Frege's definition exactly fits the needs of modern epistemology, namely that for to know something like the number of a concept one must become conscious of a multitude of acts of producing units of ‘given’ representations under the condition of a 1:1 relationship to obtain between the acts of counting and the counted ‘objects’. According to this view, which has existed at least since the Renaissance stoicism and is maintained not only by Frege but also by Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Dummett, and others, there is no such thing as a number of pure units itself because the intellect or pure reason, by itself empty, must become conscious of different units of representation in order to know a multitude, a condition not fulfilled by Euclid's conception. As this is Frege's main reason to reject Euclid's definition of number (others are discussed in detail), the paper shows that the epistemological reflection in Neoplatonic mathematical philosophy, which agrees with Euclid's definition of number, provides a consistent basement for it. Therefore it is not progress in the history of science which hasled to the a poretic contemporary state of affairs but an arbitrary change of epistemology in early modern times, which is of great influence even today. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.