Idealizations and Concretizations in Laws and Explanations in Physics

The paper tries to provide an alternative to Hempel’s approach to scientific laws and scientific explanation as given in his D-N model. It starts with a brief exposition of the main characteristics of Hempel’s approach to deductive explanations based on universal scientific laws and analyzes the problems and paradoxes inherent in this approach. By way of solution, it analyzes the scientific laws and explanations in classical mechanics and then reconstructs the corresponding models of explanation, as well as the types of scientific laws appearing in it. Finally, it compares this reconstruction with the approaches of J. Woodward and C. Hitchcock, C. Liu and with the views of M. Thalos on analytic mechanics.

Cerebellar patients demonstrate preserved implicit knowledge of association strengths in musical sequences

Recent findings suggest the involvement of the cerebellum in perceptual and cognitive tasks. Our study investigated whether cerebellar patients show musical priming based on implicit knowledge of tonal-harmonic music. Participants performed speeded phoneme identification on sung target chords, which were either related or less-related to prime contexts in terms of the tonal-harmonic system. As groups, both cerebellar patients and age-matched controls showed facilitated processing for related targets, as previously observed for healthy young adults. The outcome suggests that an intact cerebellum is not mandatory for accessing implicit knowledge stored in long-term memory and for its influence on perception. One patient showed facilitated processing for less-related targets (suggesting sensory priming). The findings suggest directions for future research on auditory perception in cerebellar patients to further our understanding of cerebellar functions.     

Challenges to providing a support group for HIV-positive prisoners in South Africa

In prison populations around the world, the prevalence of HIV is often higher than that of the general population. The prison population is at high risk for HIV infection, particularly through the sharing of contaminated needles and high-risk sexual activity. Counselling is regarded as a key element in the prevention and treatment of HIV infection. Support groups provide essential supportive counselling for HIV-positive individuals struggling to cope. This paper looks at the challenges to providing a support group for HIV-positive prisoners. The author's experience of attempting to provide a support group highlights two key challenges: organisational issues which lead to disruptions for the group; and challenges to ensuring confidentiality, a core ethical principle in HIV counselling.     

Is Structure Dependence an Innate Constraint? New Experimental Evidence From Children's Complex‐Question Production

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987) , when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as Is the boy who smoking is crazy? because they have innate knowledge of structure dependence and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid such errors, on the basis of surface distributional properties of the input ( Lewis & Elman, 2001 ; Reali & Christiansen, 2005 ). Two new elicited production studies revealed that (a) children occasionally produce structure‐dependence errors and (b) the pattern of children's auxiliary‐doubling errors (Is the boy who is smoking is crazy?) suggests a sensitivity to surface co‐occurrence patterns in the input. This article concludes that current data do not provide any support for the claim that structure dependence is an innate constraint, and that it is possible that children form a structure‐dependent grammar on the basis of exposure to input that exhibits this property.     

Bigrams and the richness of the stimulus

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry "indirect evidence" about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of Reali and Christiansen (2005) , who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the nature of the indirect evidence that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally.     

SCIENCE‐AND‐RELIGION/SPIRITUALITY/THEOLOGY DIALOGUE: WHAT FOR AND BY WHOM?

In recent years the science‐and‐religion/spirituality/theology dialogue has flourished, but the impact on the minds of the general public, on society as a whole, has been less impressive. Also, religious believers and outspoken atheists face each other without progressing toward a common understanding. The view taken here is that achieving a more marked impact of the dialogue would be beneficial for a peaceful survival of humanity. I aim to argue the why and how of that task by analyzing three possible purposes of the dialogue and their logical interdependence, suggest conceivable improvements of the quality and extent of the current efforts toward a negotiated action plan, and consider an enlargement of the circle of the actors involved. The dialogue that has been carried on between science and religion/spirituality/theology could be expanded and usefully applied to some major problems in the present world.     

The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology

In ‘The Presuppositions of Religious Pluralism and the Need for Natural Theology’ I argue that there are four important presuppositions behind John Hick’s form of religious pluralism that successfully support it against what I call fideistic exclusivism. These are i) the ought/can principle, ii) the universality of religious experience, iii) the universality of redemptive change, and iv) a view of how God (the Eternal) would do things. I then argue that if these are more fully developed they support a different kind of exclusivism, what I call rational exclusivism, and become defeaters for pluralism. In order to explain rational exclusivism and its dependence on these presuppositions I consider philosophers J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga, who offer arguments for their forms of exclusivism but I maintain that they continue to rely on fideism at important points. I then give an example of how knowledge of the Eternal can be achieved.

Constructive Logic with Strong Negation is a Substructural Logic. II

The goal of this two-part series of papers is to show that constructive logic with strong negation N is definitionally equivalent to a certain axiomatic extension NFL _ew of the substructural logic FL _ew . The main result of Part I of this series [41] shows that the equivalent variety semantics of N (namely, the variety of Nelson algebras) and the equivalent variety semantics of NFL _ew (namely, a certain variety of FL _ew -algebras) are term equivalent. In this paper, the term equivalence result of Part I [41] is lifted to the setting of deductive systems to establish the definitional equivalence of the logics N and NFL _ew . It follows from the definitional equivalence of these systems that constructive logic with strong negation is a substructural logic. Presented by Heinrich Wansing     

Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements (lexical and syntactic) which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference.     

Personality Characteristics Associated with Persistent ADHD in Late Adolescence

This study focused on the personality characteristics associated with Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in a longitudinal sample of youth, with a particular focus on differences between those with and without persisting ADHD symptoms. Participants with ADHD (n = 90) were initially evaluated when they were 7–11 years old, and re-assessed at 16–22 years of age. Matched control subjects (n = 80) were recruited at the time of the follow-up evaluation. At follow-up, the Kiddie-SADS-PL, a semi-structured psychiatric interview, and the NEO-PI, a self-report personality inventory, were administered. Data were analyzed using multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA). Results indicate that childhood ADHD is associated with lower scores on the NEO Conscientiousness subscale in adolescents/young adults—irrespective of the degree of ADHD persistence. In contrast, ratings of Neuroticism and Agreeableness appear to be more closely linked to adolescent status; those with persisting symptoms only exhibited increased Neuroticism and decreased Agreeableness. These results suggest that ADHD, and the degree to which symptoms persist into adolescence, may be closely linked to personality structure.