Acceptability of Dative Argument Structure in Spanish: Assessing Semantic and Usage‐Based Factors

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage‐based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine‐grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of different semantic classes occur naturally in alternative dative constructions, a pattern quite different from English. The fact that dative alternation appears independent of semantic classes challenges traditional semantic‐based approaches. Second, acceptability rating tasks reveal that dative constructions containing highly entrenched word combinations and frequent word order are judged more acceptable regardless of the verbs' semantics. The results are interpreted in favor of usage‐based accounts: Acceptability of dative constructions may be language‐specific and depend on patterns of use and conventionalization.     

Understanding the Immediacy of Other Minds

In this paper we address the epistemological debate between emerging perceptual accounts (PA) of knowing other minds and traditional theory of mind (ToM) approaches to the problem of other minds. We argue that the current formulations of the debate are conceptually misleading and empirically unfounded. Rather, the real contribution of PA is to point out a certain ‘immediacy’ that characterizes episodes of mindreading. We claim that while the intuition of immediacy should be preserved for explaining the nature and function of some cognitive processes of mindreading, the notion of immediacy should apply for describing a particular epistemic attitude and not a particular type of epistemic access. We draw on Wittgenstein's discussions of one's relation to other minds to elaborate our claims and to move the epistemological discussions beyond stalling debates between ToM and PA.     

Effects of ownership expressed by the first-person possessive pronoun

The present study examined the behavioral effects of the first-person possessive pronoun. In each trial, a noun (e.g. cup or bread) was presented to participants after visual presentation of a possessive pronoun “wo de” (Chinese for “my”) or “ta de” (Chinese for “his”), which formed ownership. Half participants were assigned to contextual encoding (CE) condition in which they were required to judge whether they liked the item expressed by a noun from the first or third-person perspective. The rest were assigned to perceptual encoding (PE) condition in which they were asked to judge what color the noun was. A subsequent recall test was performed. The results showed that there were significant memory and response advantages for nouns in “my” ownership under both conditions. The results were discussed with reference to self-specificity and other effects in the current study.     

Trust maintenance as a function of construal level and attributions: The case of apologies

When do recipients of an apology (“trustors”) base their decision to trust a perpetrator (a “trustee”) on the attributional information embedded in an apology? Attributions provide a detailed account of the trustee's causal involvement in committing a transgression. We therefore argue that trustors in a low construal level mindset use this information in their trusting decision. However, trustors in a high construal level mindset likely consider all apologies as simple statements of regret, regardless of the attributional information they contain. We find support for this argument in four laboratory experiments. This research nuances the idea that to restore trust by means of an apology, the trustee must only use an effective attribution for a negative outcome. We also present a more realistic understanding of the process leading from apologies to trust than has been offered in previous work by simultaneously considering the role of the trustor and that of the trustee in the trust restoration process.     

PETER HARRISON,LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN,AND THE PROBLEM OF PRE‐MODERN RELIGION

Peter Harrison's Gifford Lectures demonstrate that the modern concepts of “religion” and “science” do not correspond to any fixed sphere of life in the pre‐modern world. Because these terms are incommensurate and ideological, they misconstrue the past. I examine the influence and affinities of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy on Harrison's study in order to argue that Harrison's project approaches Wittgenstein's. Harrison's book is a therapeutic history, untying a knot in scholarly language. I encourage Harrison, however, to clarify how future scholars can progress in their study of phenomena once termed “scientific” or “religious” without succumbing to these same mistakes.     

Subject‐Involving Luck

In recent years, philosophers have tended to think of luck as being a relation between an event (taken in the broadest sense of the term) and a subject; to give an account of luck is to fill in the right‐hand side of the following biconditional: an event e is lucky for a subject S if and only if ____. We can call such accounts of luck subject‐relative accounts of luck, since they attempt to spell out what it is for an event to be lucky relative to a subject. This essay argues that we should understand subject‐relative luck as a secondary phenomenon. What is of philosophical interest is giving an account of subject‐involving luck, i.e., filling in the right‐hand side of this biconditional: it is a matter of luck that S ?s iff ____. The essay argues that one of the upshots of focusing on subject‐involving luck is that lack of control accounts of luck (LCALs) become more attractive. In particular, a range of counterexamples to LCALs of subject‐relative luck do not apply to LCALs of subject‐involving luck.     

Psychological distress in the local hillsborough or ‘host’ community following the Hillsborough football stadium diaster

This paper describes levels of psychological distress and accounts of disaster among the local host community following the Hillsborough Football Stadium disaster. Thirty-two participants were interviewed 4–6 months after the event. Rates of psychological distress symptoms were high in the sample as measured by PTSD (DSM III criteria), Impact of Events Scale (IES) and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28). The study also explores the relationships between levels of exposure, levels of distress and participants' accounts of the disaster. Implications for community outreach projects after disasters are discussed.     

A role for ownership and authorship in the analysis of thought insertion

Philosophers are interested in the phenomenon of thought insertion because it challenges the common assumption that one can ascribe to oneself the thoughts that one can access first-personally. In the standard philosophical analysis of thought insertion, the subject owns the ‘inserted’ thought but lacks a sense of agency towards it. In this paper we want to provide an alternative analysis of the condition, according to which subjects typically lack both ownership and authorship of the ‘inserted’ thoughts. We argue that by appealing to a failure of ownership and authorship we can describe more accurately the phenomenology of thought insertion, and distinguish it from that of non-delusional beliefs that have not been deliberated about, and of other delusions of passivity. We can also start developing a more psychologically realistic account of the relation between intentionality, rationality and self knowledge in normal and abnormal cognition.

Experience and self-consciousness

Does all conscious experience essentially involve self-consciousness? In his Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person, Dan Zahavi answers “yes”. I criticize three core arguments offered in support of this answer—a well-known regress argument, what I call the “interview argument,” and a phenomenological argument. Drawing on Sartre, I introduce a phenomenological contrast between plain experience and self-conscious experience. The contrast challenges the thesis that conscious experience entails self-consciousness.