Moral Error Theory, Entailment and Presupposition

According to moral error theory, moral discourse is error-ridden. Establishing error theory requires establishing two claims. These are that moral discourse carries a non-negotiable commitment to there being a moral reality and that there is no such reality. This paper concerns the first and so-called non-negotiable commitment claim. It starts by identifying the two existing argumentative strategies for settling that claim. The standard strategy is to argue for a relation of conceptual entailment between the moral statements that comprise moral discourse and the statement that there is a moral reality. The non-standard strategy is to argue for a presupposition relation instead. Error theorists have so far failed to consider a third strategy, which uses a general entailment relation that doesn’t require intricate relations between concepts. The paper argues that both entailment claims struggle to meet a new explanatory challenge and that since the presupposition option doesn’t we have prima facie reason to prefer it over the entailment options. The paper then argues that suitably amending the entailment claims enables them to meet this challenge. With all three options back on the table the paper closes by arguing that error theorists should consider developing the currently unrecognised, non-conceptual entailment claim.     

Interlingual lexical competition in a spoken sentence context: Evidence from the visual world paradigm

We used the visual world paradigm to examine interlingual lexical competition when Dutch–English bilinguals listened to low-constraining sentences in their nonnative (L2; Experiment 1) and native (L1; Experiment 2) languages. Additionally, we investigated the influence of the degree of cross-lingual phonological similarity. When listening in L2, participants fixated more on competitor pictures of which the onset of the name was phonologically related to the onset of the name of the target in the nontarget language (e.g., fles, “bottle”, given target flower) than on phonologically unrelated distractor pictures. Even when they listened in L1, this effect was also observed when the onsets of the names of the target picture (in L1) and the competitor picture (in L2) were phonologically very similar. These findings provide evidence for interlingual competition during the comprehension of spoken sentences, both in L2 and in L1.     

Exemplar by feature applicability matrices and other Dutch normative data for semantic concepts

Features are at the core of many empirical and modeling endeavors in the study of semantic concepts. This article is concerned with the delineation of features that are important in natural language concepts and the use of these features in the study of semantic concept representation. The results of a feature generation task in which the exemplars and labels of 15 semantic categories served as cues are described. The importance of the generated features was assessed by tallying the frequency with which they were generated and by obtaining judgments of their relevance. The generated attributes also featured in extensive exemplar by feature applicability matrices covering the 15 different categories, as well as two large semantic domains (that of animals and artifacts). For all exemplars of the 15 semantic categories, typicality ratings, goodness ratings, goodness rank order, generation frequency, exemplar associative strength, category associative strength, estimated age of acquisition, word frequency, familiarity ratings, imageability ratings, and pairwise similarity ratings are described as well. By making these data easily available to other researchers in the field, we hope to provide ample opportunities for continued investigations into the nature of semantic concept representation. These data may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

How magic survived the disenchantment of the world

This article argues that the process described by Max Weber as the ‘disenchantment of the world’ is compatible with the continued vitality of ‘the occult’ in contemporary western culture. Focusing on the example of ‘hermetic’ magical traditions in western culture before and after the pivotal period of the Enlightenment, the article analyses the relation between continuity and change in the development of these traditions from three angles: their theories of magical efficacy, the nature of their practices and the ways in which magicians seek to legitimate magic to the wider society as well as to themselves. The discussion demonstrates that the transformation of magic under the impact of modernization and secularization resulted in the paradoxical phenomenon of a ‘disenchanted magic’. The article concludes by proposing a theory that explains why it is actually quite natural for magic to have survived the disenchantment of the world.     

Cue-switch effects do not rely on the same neural systems as task-switch effects

The cued task-switching paradigm is often used to study cognitive control. In this paradigm, people are generally slower and make more errors when switching tasks as compared with repeating the same task. When two cues are mapped to each task, these switch costs could result from a mixture of cue-switch effects (which are thought to reflect cue encoding) and task-switch effects (which are thought to reflect task set preparation). In the behavioral literature, there has been a lively debate on the degree to which cue-switch effects and task-switch effects indeed reflect different phenomena. In the present study, we used fMRI to examine whether and to what extent the neural network underlying task-switch effects is also involved in cue-switch effects. We found task-switch but no cue-switch effects in the frequently observed preparation-related activation in fronto-parietal areas. These results suggest that the fronto-parietal areas displaying preparatory activity in task-switching paradigms are engaged in task preparation but not in cue encoding and that task preparation and cue encoding rely on completely different processes.     

Order or disorder? Impaired Hebb learning in dyslexia

The present study offers an integrative account proposing that dyslexia and its various associated cognitive impairments reflect an underlying deficit in the long-term learning of serial-order information, here operationalized as Hebb repetition learning. In nondyslexic individuals, improved immediate serial recall is typically observed when one particular sequence of items is repeated across an experimental session, a phenomenon known as the Hebb repetition effect. Starting from the critical observation that individuals with dyslexia seem to be selectively impaired in cognitive tasks that involve processing of serial order, the present study is the first to test and confirm the hypothesis that the Hebb repetition effect is affected in dyslexia, even for nonverbal modalities. We present a theoretical framework in which the Hebb repetition effect is assumed to be a laboratory analogue of naturalistic word learning, on the basis of which we argue that dyslexia is characterized by an impairment of serial-order learning that affects language learning and processing.