Revelation between Cognitive Science of Religion and Dialectical Theology

Abstract

The article critically discusses the contemporary relevance and challenges of Rudolf Bultmann's theology of revelation in relation to the basic claims of cognitive science of religion. Underlying the analysis is the assumption that his theology still has some relevance when confronted with the claims from this scientific approach to religion. There are nevertheless also good reasons for arguing that his notion of revelation needs a wider and more experiential focus. The argument for such an experiential-based notion of revelation is provided by an analysis of what features qualified revelatory experience may consist in.     

Fine-Tuning,Atheist Criticism,and the Fifth Way

Abstract

Like the “modern watchmaker” argument formulated by William Paley, the argument from fine-tuning should not be confused with Thomas Aquinas' fifth proof for the existence of God as expressed in the Summa Theologiae. While the former is based on efficient causality, the latter is based upon final causality. Though some atheist criticisms are relevant to the fine-tuning argument, they do not affect the Fifth Way. After briefly expositing the fine-tuning argument, I will argue that Aquinas' argument from the “governance of the world” offers a more convincing proof for God—one that evades atheistic criticisms leveled against design arguments.     

Evolution by Natural Selection: Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion

The argument-from-design, based on biological evidence, was elaborated by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802). It was revived in the 1990s by several authors, with a new moniker, the theory of intelligent design. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin advanced a scientific explanation of the design of organisms: evolution by natural selection. Organisms are pervaded by imperfections, dysfunctions, cruelties, and even sadism. The theory of evolution accounts for these mishaps, by natural selection, so that they need not be attributed to God's explicit design. The theory of evolution by natural selection is Darwin's gift to religion, in addition to its centrality in biology.     

The role of motion and speech in face recognition at birth

Newborns, a few hours after birth, already encounter many different faces, talking or silently moving. How do they process these faces and which cues are important in early face recognition? In a series of six experiments, newborns were familiarized with an unfamiliar face in different contexts (photographs, talking, silently moving, and with only external movements of the head with speech sound). At test, they saw the familiar and a new faces either in photographs, silently moving, or talking. A novelty preference was evidenced at test when photographs were presented in the two phases. This result supports those already evidenced in several studies. A familiarity preference appeared only when the face was seen talking in the familiarization phase and in a photograph or talking again at test. This suggests that the simultaneous presence of speech sound, and rigid and nonrigid movements present in a talking face enhances recognition of interactive faces at birth.     

Incorporating Demographic Embeddings Into Language Understanding

Meaning depends on context. This applies in obvious cases like deictics or sarcasm as well as more subtle situations like framing or persuasion. One key aspect of this is the identity of the participants in an interaction. Our interpretation of an utterance shifts based on a variety of factors, including personal history, background knowledge, and our relationship to the source. While obviously an incomplete model of individual differences, demographic factors provide a useful starting point and allow us to capture some of this variance. However, the relevance of specific demographic factors varies between situations—where age might be the key factor in one context, ideology might dominate in another. To address this challenge, we introduce a method for combining demographics and context into situated demographic embeddings—mapping representations into a continuous geometric space appropriate for the given domain, showing the resulting representations to be functional and interpretable. We further demonstrate how to make use of related external data so as to apply this approach in low‐resource situations. Finally, we show how these representations can be incorporated into improve modeling of real‐world natural language understanding tasks, improving model performance and helping with issues of data sparsity.     

Retroactive adjustment of perceived time

Accurately timing acoustic events in dynamic scenes is fundamental to scene analysis. To detect events in busy scenes, listeners must often identify a change in the pattern of ongoing fluctuation, resulting in many ubiquitous events being detected later than when they occurred. This raises the question of how delayed detection time affects the manner in which such events are perceived relative to other events in the environment.To model these situations, we use sequences of tone-pips with a time–frequency pattern that changes from regular to random (‘REG–RAND’) or vice versa (‘RAND–REG’). REG–RAND transitions are detected rapidly, but the emergence of regularity cannot be established immediately, and thus RAND–REG transitions take significantly longer to detect. Using a temporal order judgment task, and a light-flash as a temporal marker, we demonstrate that listeners do not perceive the onset of RAND–REG transitions at the point of detection (∼530 ms post transition), but automatically re-adjust their estimate ∼300 ms closer to the nominal transition.These results demonstrate that the auditory system possesses mechanisms that survey the proximal history of an ongoing stimulus and automatically adjust perception to compensate for prolonged detection time, allowing listeners to build meaningful representations of the environment.     

Assessing the Incremental Algorithm: A Response to Krahmer et al.

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non‐semantically‐balanced) corpora.     

管仲的王霸学思想及其精神源流

管仲是中国先秦哲学思想史上第一位思想家,他的王霸学思想既是对前先秦文化思想精神的时代性因革,又是对后来哲学思想的开启。管仲的政治思想是以民为本的刑赏主义法治思想和功利主义治政思想,其赖以支撑的伦理精神是自然主义人性论,思想基础是水本原论哲学。从历史源流看,管仲开辟了中国哲学思想“因人事而自然”的思维道路,是自然人性论功利主义伦理学和政治学的始祖,并以此开辟了“以刑入礼”的刑赏主义实践道路。管仲的思想之源,是夏商周三代所形成的以王道为目标、以天道为根据、以人道为途径的“王官之学”;管仲的思想之流,不仅涌动出法家思潮,而且激励并贯穿了先秦诸子各家学说。     

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact generative model underlying a wide class of languages, purely from observing samples of the language. We then describe a recently proposed practical framework, which quantifies natural language learnability, allowing specific learnability predictions to be made for the first time. In previous work, this framework was used to make learnability predictions for a wide variety of linguistic constructions, for which learnability has been much debated. Here, we present a new experiment which tests these learnability predictions. We find that our experimental results support the possibility that these linguistic constructions are acquired probabilistically from cognition-general principles.