Bird and the Dispositional Essentialist Account of Spatiotemporal Relations

The basic principles of dispositional essentialism do not require that the fundamental spatiotemporal relations are dispositional in nature. Nevertheless, Bird (who defends dispositional monism) argues that they possess dispositional essences in virtue of the fact that the obtaining of these relations can be characterised by the satisfaction of a certain counterfactual. In this paper I argue that his suggestion fails, and so, despite his attempt, the case of the spatiotemporal relations remains the ‘big bad bug’ for the thesis of dispositional monism.

Constructing the law: discourses and social practices

This paper presents an analysis of everyday understandings of the law, within the context of a dispute between colonial and indigenous land interests in New Zealand. The analysis is informed by developments in the areas of critical legal studies, methodological critique of legal psychology, the social constructionist movement within social psychology, and the application of discursive psychology to understandings of racism. Data for this work was drawn from a corpus of letters to the editor of a newspaper, published in the city where the land dispute took place. Writers constructed the dispute as a legal issue and deployed two divergent constructions of the law. When the ‘primacy’ of the law was invoked, indigenous interests and the protesters were positioned as lawbreakers. When ‘the law in context’ was the resource used, protesters became positioned as seekers of justice. These variable constructions are discussed in terms of the social practices they engender and their wider contribution to debates regarding indigenous and colonial interests. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Basic Constructive Logic for a Weak Sense of Consistency defined with a Propositional Falsity Constant

The logic B_Kc1 is the basic constructive logic in the ternaryrelational semantics (without a set of designated points) adequateto consistency understood as the absence of the negation ofany theorem. Negation is introduced in B_Kc1 with a negationconnective. The aim of this paper is to define the logic B_Kc1F.In this logic negation is introduced via a propositional falsityconstant. We prove that B_Kc1 and B_Kc1F are definitionally equivalent.     

Feeling good vibrations in dialogical relations

I engage phenomenological and empirical perspectives on dialogical relations in infancy in a mutually enlightening and challenging relation. On the one hand, the empirical contributions provide evidence for the primacy of first-to-second person interrelatedness in human sociality, as opposed to the claim of primary syncretism heralded by Merleau-Ponty, and also in distinction from the ego-alter ego model routinely used in phenomenology. On the other hand, phenomenological considerations regarding the lived affective experience of dialogical relatedness enrich and render intelligible the psychological accounts of dialogue in terms of observable behavior. Phenomenological and empirical perspectives on dialogical relatedness thus combine to offer an affectively charged and conversationally patterned notion of primary intersubjectivity in the I-you mode.

Nodal structure and the partitioning of equivalence classes

By definition, all of the stimuli in an equivalence class have to be functionally interchangeable with each other. The present experiment, however, demonstrated that this was not the case when using post-class-formation dual-option response transfer tests. With college students, two 4-node 6-member equivalence classes with nodal structures of A-->B-->C-->D-->E-->F were produced by training AB, BC, CD, DE, and EF. Then, unique responses were trained to the C and D stimuli in each class. The responses trained to C generalized to B and A, while the responses trained to D generalized to E and F. Thus, each 4-node 6-member equivalence class was bifurcated into two 3-member functional classes: A-->B-->C and D-->E-->F, with class membership precisely predicted by nodal structure. A final emergent relations test documented the intactness of the underlying 4-node 6-member equivalence classes. The coexistence of the interchangeability of stimuli in an equivalence class and the bifurcation of such a class in terms of nodal structure was explained in the following manner. The conditional discriminations that are used to establish a class also imposes a nodal structure on the stimuli in the class. Thus, the stimuli in the class acquire two sets of relational properties. If the format of a test trial allows only one response option per class, responding on those trials will be in accordance with class membership and will not express the effects of nodal distance. If the format of a test trial allows more than one response option per class, responding on those trials will be determined by the nodal structure of the class. Thus, the relational properties expressed by the stimuli in an equivalence class are determined by the discriminative function served by the format of a test trial.     

On the origins of emergent differential sample behavior

Two experiments evaluated the source(s) of emergent differential sample behavior in pigeons. Initially, pigeons learned two-sample, two-alternative symbolic matching in which different patterns of sample responding were required to produce the comparisons. Afterwards, two other samples nominally identical to the comparisons were added to the matching task. On new-sample trials, completion of either sample-response requirement produced comparison alternatives which were either the same as or different from the alternatives on the familiar-sample trials. Differential responding to the new samples developed only when the comparisons were the same as the familiar samples. The results are consistent with acquired sample equivalence and adventitious reinforcement accounts of emergent sample behavior and are inconsistent with bidirectional transfer (symmetry) between the response patterns explicitly required to the originally trained (familiar) samples and the subsequently reinforced comparisons.     

Cyborg intentionality: Rethinking the phenomenology of human–technology relations

This article investigates the types of intentionality involved in human–technology relations. It aims to augment Don Ihde’s analysis of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts, by analyzing a number of concrete examples at the limits of Ihde’s analysis. The article distinguishes and analyzes three types of “cyborg intentionality,” which all involve specific blends of the human and the technological. Technologically mediated intentionality occurs when human intentionality takes place “through” technological artifacts; hybrid intentionality occurs when the technological actually merges with the human; and composite intentionality is the addition of human intentionality and the intentionality of technological artifacts.

Interlevel Relations and Manipulative Causality

Summary  The topic of this article is the analysis of the relations between different levels of reality. The core argument is based on considerations of both an epistemology of action and manipulative causality as a criterion of object identity. The argumentation is extended towards the concepts of self-organization and self-regulation. Finally, several views on reduction and the problems of emergence and complexity are discussed.     

注意瞬脱对视觉空间关系判断的影响

将RSVP范式和视觉空间关系研究范式相结合,以两个实验探讨了注意瞬脱对视觉空间关系判断的影响。结果发现,类别和数量空间关系判断之间出现了实验性分离:类别空间关系判断表现出较大的注意瞬脱效应,数量空间关系判断只有轻度注意瞬脱效应。这说明,类别和数量空间关系加工子系统具有不同信息加工特性:前者依赖实时注意资源,其编码过程更多涉及控制性加工;后者较少依赖实时注意资源,其编码过程更多涉及自动加工。另外,还运用注意瞬脱理论对结果进行了解释。