Monkey business: Children’s use of character identity to infer shared properties

Children’s toys provide a rich arena for investigating conceptual flexibility, because they often can be understood as possessing an individual identity at multiple levels of abstraction. For example, many dolls (e.g., Winnie-the-Pooh) and action figures (e.g., Batman) can be construed either as characters from a fictional world or as physical objects in the real world. In two experiments, 72 4- and 5-year-olds took part in a property extension task, the results of which provide evidence of an understanding that (1) two representations of a character share certain properties in virtue of their shared character identity, and this sharing does not stem simply from having the same name, and (2) one representation of a character is more likely to share properties with another representation of the character if the properties were acquired by the character than if they were acquired by the representation. Children’s understanding of a representational object’s abstract character identity thus enabled them to transcend using its unique spatio-temporal history as a sole basis for inferring its idiosyncratic properties.     

On the Emotions

Art historians and philosophers often talk about the interpretive significance of titles, but few have bothered with their historical origins. This omission has led to the assumption that an artwork's title is its proper name, since names and titles share the essential function of facilitating reference to their bearers. But a closer look at the development of our titling practices shows a significant point of divergence from standard analyses of proper names: the semantic content of a title is often crucial to the identification, individuation, and interpretation of its associated artwork. This paper represents a first step towards an empirically centred study of our titling practices. I argue that, in order to accept titles as proper names, we must first recognize the social, rather than the referential, function of naming.     

Searching for interference effects in learning new face–name associations

In three experiments we attempted to increase interference using experimental manipulations in a face–name learning paradigm. All experiments included young and older adult participants because ageing is associated with increases in both susceptibility to interference and difficulty in learning face–name associations. None of the experiments produced interference for either age group: The inclusion of confusable (i.e., ambiguous) names and occupations, having to learn an additional piece of information in association with each face, and requiring participants to guess when uncertain all failed to negatively impact name learning. Interference does not appear to be the critical mechanism underlying the difficulty of learning proper names, and it cannot account for older adults' disproportionate decline in name-learning ability.     

Perceptions of Married Women and Married Men with Hyphenated Surnames

A predominately European American sample of 197 middle-class college students rated married women and men with hyphenated surnames on the Big Five personality factors (R. Lippa, 1991), the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (J. T. Spence & R. L. Helmreich, 1978), the adjectives masculine and feminine, and 12 adjective phrases reflecting different aspects of marriage. Both men and women perceived women and men with hyphenated last names as different from other married people. In comparison with the average married woman, the woman with a hyphenated name was perceived as more friendly, good-natured, industrious, and intellectually curious. She was also perceived as well educated and as more likely to have a career. Men with hyphenated surnames were also perceived as accommodating and good-natured, and viewed as being both nurturing and committed to their marriage. Women and men with hyphenated names were generally perceived as having higher levels of both instrumental and expressive traits than other married people. Women appear to have more positive perceptions than men, particularly of the man with a hyphenated name. The results suggest that college students have generally positive perceptions of married people with hyphenated names.     

The problem of empty names and Russellian Plenitude

‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express different propositions, even though neither ‘Ahab’ nor ‘Holmes’ has a referent. This seems to constitute a theoretical puzzle for the Russellian view of propositions. In this paper, I develop a variant of the Russellian view, Plenitudinous Russellianism. I claim that ‘Ahab is a whaler’ and ‘Holmes is a whaler’ express distinct gappy propositions. I discuss key metaphysical and semantic differences between Plenitudinous Russellianism and Traditional Russellianism and respond to objections that stem from those differences.     

Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names

Russellians can have a no proposition view of empty names. I will defend this theory against the problem of meaningfulness, and show that the theory is in general well motivated. My solution to the problem of meaningfulness is that speakers’ judgements about meaningfulness are tracking grammaticality, and not propositional content.