The Fallacy of Many Questions: On the Notions of Complexity, Loadedness and Unfair Entrapment in Interrogative Theory

The traditional fallacy of many questions, also known as the fallacy of complex question, illustrated by the question, "Have you stopped sexually harassing your students?", has been known since ancient times, but is still alive and well. What is of practical importance about this fallacy is that it represents a tactic of entrapment that is very common in everyday argumentation, as well as in special kinds of argumentation like that in a legal trial or a parliamentary debate. The tactic combines the use of loaded questions with the complexity of the question. A key notion is that of the presupposition of the question. How to deal with such questions is a point of departure for interrogative theory, and for any attempts to construct formal dialogues of a kind that can be used as normative models of argumentation.     

Evaluating sex discrimination claims: the mediating role of attributions.

The role of attributions in judgments of sex discrimination was examined in 2 laboratory experiments. In Study 1, participants read 1 of 12 brief scenarios in which limited information about the strength of evidence against a fictitious corporation and occupational gender stereotype were manipulated. Results suggested that attributions mediated the relationships between participants' gender, strength of evidence, and discrimination judgments. In Study 2, participants were provided with 1 of 3 detailed, typewritten summaries of evidence presented in a sex discrimination trial. Results indicated that jurors' gender was again significantly related to attributions and to sex discrimination judgments even in the face of substantial objective information related to the case. The variance in observers' judgments associated with gender, however, appeared to be greatest when information about the organization's guilt or innocence was equivocal.     

The intermodal representation of speech in newborns

It has been proposed that speech is specified by the eye, the ear, and even the skin. Kuhl and Meltzoff (1984) showed that 4-month-olds could lip-read to an extent. Given the age of the infants, it was not clear whether this was a learned skill or a by-product of the primary auditory process. This paper presents evidence that neonate infants (less than 33 h) show virtually identical patterns of intermodal interaction as do 4-month-olds. Since they are neonates, it is unlikely that learning was involved. The results indicate that human speech is specified by both eye and ear at an age when built-in structural sensitivities provide the most plausible explanation.     

George Steiner's Wager On Transcendence

The paper seeks to explore the roots of Steiner's thought and particularly the theme of transcendence understood in terms of the mystery of immanence he expresses in terms of real presence. Steiner sees a significant breaking of the classic covenant between word and world occurring in the later nineteenth century. This insight, I suggest, is reinforced by a consideration of the distinction between such thinkers as Ruskin and Nietzsche and a way out of the dilemma is plotted by the linguistic philosophy which takes its cue from the work of Frege. One of the significant influences on the work of Steiner seems to be Heidegger. His study of Heidegger leads him to a consideration of language and an attempt to offer an argument for transcendence from a linguistic context. This paper suggests that Steiner offers a late twentieth-century, linguistic version of Aquinas's Five Ways, a movement from the agnosticism of 'I do not know' to the affirmation 'there is an Unknown'. Steiner argues that we come to a sense of this transcendence in the mystery of human creativity. This is a discovery made in the midst of the ordinary business of human living. It is significant, however, that the sense of Being that we encounter as we mediate on the act of artistic creation seems not to be an attempt to argue for a restatement of the ontological argument. Nietzsche's lesson has to be learnt: God cannot be talked of as an object, his presence cannot be indicated by way of ostensive definition. Steiner offers a context which allows for an encounter with the mystery of God but this encounter remains purely gratuitous.     

Processing capacity defined by relational complexity: implications for comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A binary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, because both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by "segmentation" or "conceptual chunking." In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are "collapsed" to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed.     

Tracking Substance Abusers in Longitudinal Research: Understanding Follow-Up Contact Difficulty

Studies examining follow-up contact difficulty provide useful information for planning longitudinal studies and for assessing the validity of follow-up data. Contact difficulty was examined among 96 substance abusers following substance abuse treatment. Interview completion rates at the 3-month and 6-month follow-ups were 93 and 97%, respectively. The extent of contact efforts required to complete follow-up interviews varied substantially but tended to be greater at the 3-month follow-up than at the 6-month follow-up. Contact difficulty was related to reuse of substances at the 3-month and at the 6-month follow-ups with reusers requiring greater contact efforts than abstainers. None of the baseline individual and contextual variables examined significantly predicted level of contact effort at follow-ups. Attrition-related validity implications are discussed along with practical suggestions for planning tracking efforts.     

Hand-hemispace spatial compatibility,precueing, and stimulus-onset asynchrony

Summary The role of attention and the resolution of coding conflicts in hand-hemispace spatial-compatibility effects was examined in a precueing experiment in which visual and vibrotactile precues, with various stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs), were presented in blocked and random order. It was expected that precues at the shorter SOAs would fail to facilitate the shifting of attention, as they occur too close to the imperative stimulus to be informative. The task would therefore approximate one of choice reaction time (RT), resulting in a hand-hemispace spatial-compatibility effect. Conversely, the longer SOAs would provide the subject with sufficient time in which to shift attention fully, and would therefore result in a task more like that of simple reaction time (SRT). It was expected that the hand-hemispace spatial-compatibility effect would then be absent. As was expected, this effect was present at the shorter SOAs, and absent at the longer SOAs. In Experiments 2 and 3, provision of a visual precue further facilitated attentional deployment, as did blocking the presentation of various SOAs in Experiment 3. Vibrotactile and visual precues did not differ in their ability to direct attention, implying that these modalities orient attention and precue location in essentially similar ways. These findings are discussed within the context of the mechanisms thought to underlie the time course of spatial compatibility and the dissipation of a fading trace of interfering spatial codes.