One’s own reasoning

Abstract

Responding to Cappelen and Dever’s claim that there is no distinctive role for perspectivality in epistemology, I argue that facts about the outcomes of one’s own reasoning processes may have a different evidential significance than facts about the outcomes of others’.     

Rhythmic ostensive gestures: How adults facilitate infants’ entrance into early triadic interactions

For decades, the literature on the emergence of triadic interactions considers the end of the first year of life as the time when children become able to communicate with others intentionally about a referent. Prior to that, children only relate in dyads, either with someone else or with an object. However, several researchers claim that referents are not naturally given in human communication and that they need to be established in interaction with others.In this study, we focus on earlier triadic interactions initiated by adults, when young babies still require an adult to bring the material world within their reach. In these early triadic interactions, ostensive gestures (with the object in the hand) are one of the first means of enabling the establishment of shared reference. Such gestures are easier to understand since sign (gesture) and referent (object) coincide. We conducted a longitudinal study with 6 babies filmed at 2, 3 and 4 months old in interaction with their mothers and a sounding object (a maraca). We analyzed different communicative initiatives by the adult and the child’s responses.The results show that children come to understand the adult’s communicative intention gradually through interaction. Adults include children in organized communicative “niches” based on ostensive actions, both through ostensive gestures and demonstrations of the use of the object. Consequently, the first shared understandings between adult and child take place around the object and its uses. Rhythm is a powerful tool used to structure the interaction. Eventually, adults provide space to children to actively interact with the sounding object themselves. These results highlight the importance of considering ostensive actions as a communicative tool that favors joint attention and action. They also bring some light to the interdependence between a child who actively perceives and acts, and the structured situation that the adult organizes for them.     

Do personality characteristics and beliefs predict intra‐group bullying between prisoners?

This study assesses how beliefs about aggression and personality can predict engagement in intra‐group bullying among prisoners. A sample of 213 adult male prisoners completed the DIPC‐SCALED (bullying behavior), the EXPAGG (beliefs toward aggression), and the IPIP (a five‐factor measure of personality). It was predicted that bullies would hold greater instrumental beliefs supporting the use of aggression than the other categories, with perpetrators reporting lower scores on agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience, and higher scores on neuroticism (i.e. low scores on emotional stability) than the remaining sample. Bullies and bully‐victims endorsed greater instrumental aggressive beliefs than the victim category. Only one perpetrator group, bullies were predicted by reduced levels of agreeableness and increased levels of neuroticism, whereas bully/victims were predicted by decreased levels of neuroticism. Limitations of this study and directions for future research are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 36:261–270, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.