Does Conditional Affordance Imply Representational Non-Conceptual Content?

Jan Alm?ng believes that James J. Gibson’s notion of affordances offers a reason to reject John McDowell’s thesis that representational perceptual content is conceptual through and through. I argue that Alm?ng’s arguments for the claim that the perceptual content in which conditional affordances feature can be both representational and non-conceptual are questionable.     

From women to objects: Appearance focus, target gender, and perceptions of warmth, morality and competence

Most literally, objectification refers to perceiving a person as an object, and consequently, less than fully human. Research on perceptions of humanness and the stereotype content model suggests that humanness is linked to perceptions of warmth, morality and competence. Merging these insights with objectification theory, we hypothesized that focusing on a woman's, but not a man's, appearance should induce objectification, and thus reduce perceptions of these characteristics. In three studies, females, but not males, were perceived as less competent (Studies 2 and 3) and less warm and moral (Studies 1, 2 and 3) when participants were instructed to focus on their appearance. These findings support our position and help rule out stereotype activation as an alternative explanation to dehumanization. Further, they generalized to targets of different races, familiarity, physical attractiveness and occupational status. Implications for gender inequity and the perpetuation of objectification of women are discussed.     

Some reflections on Husserlian intentionality,intentionalism, and non-propositional contents

This paper discusses Husserl’s theory of intentionality and compares it to contemporary debates about intentionalism. I first show to what extent such a comparison could be meaningful. I then outline the structure of intentionality as found in Ideas I. My main claims are that – in contrast with intentionalism – intentionality for Husserl (i) covers just a region of conscious contents; that it is (ii) essentially a relation between act-processes and presented content; and that (iii) the side of act-processes contains non-representational contents. In the third part, I show that Husserl also (iv) offers resources against intentionalism’s exclusive concern with propositional content.     

Automatic thoughts as a predictor of internalizing and externalizing problems in Chinese adolescents: A test of the cognitive content‐specificity hypothesis with age effects

The main aim of the current study was to test the cognitive content‐specificity hypothesis across internalizing and externalizing problems in Chinese adolescents. The participants consisted of 2,158 adolescents aged 11–19 years from three middle schools, and they completed a number of measures assessing a wide range of automatic thoughts and syndromes related to internalizing and externalizing problems. Multivariate regression analyses demonstrated that thoughts about social threats, personal failure and hostility were the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression, and externalizing problems, respectively. Age was a statistically significant, albeit modest, moderator of the relationship between automatic thoughts about social threat and anxiety. The current study provides support for the cognitive content‐specificity hypothesis in internalizing and externalizing problems in a Chinese sample.     

Experiences,Seemings, and Perceptual Justification

Several philosophers have distinguished between three distinct mental states that play a role in visual recognition: experiences, propositional seemings, and beliefs. I clarify and offer some reasons for drawing this three-fold distinction, and I consider its epistemological implications. Some philosophers have held that propositional seemings always confer prima facie justification, regardless of a particular seeming's relation to experience. I add to criticisms of this view in the literature by arguing that it fails to solve a version of the ‘problem of the speckled hen’. A more promising view holds that propositional seemings confer justification only when appropriately related to experiences. I offer advice for developing such an account.     

Media framing of proposed nuclear reactors: An analysis of print media

Nuclear energy has received substantial recent attention, marketed as a ‘green’ solution to global climate change (GCC) with calls for new reactors. However, considerable debate exists about whether it represents a viable solution to GCC. Given the complexity and urgency of the issue, a full and balanced debate is desirable. Since media play an important role in shaping public perception, we examined print media coverage of proposed reactors in Georgia—one site in the southeastern United States, which has been the focus of such proposals. We analysed the content of editorials and news articles from two local newspapers—the Augusta Chronicle and Atlanta Journal‐Constitution. The former exclusively published pro‐nuclear opinion pieces whereas the latter published a mix of pro‐ and anti‐nuclear opinions. The majority of news articles in both newspapers generally presented balanced arguments. Pro‐ and anti‐nuclear arguments most often reflected economic and environmental benefits and risks, whereas informational text primarily detailed regulatory processes and financing. Findings suggested that informational text was not necessarily ‘neutral’, sometimes masking covert pro‐ and anti‐nuclear content. Implications for how findings might shape public opinion and strategies for shaping media and extending public deliberation are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Radical Semantics: A New Theory of Meaning

This paper extends Parikh’s earlier work in semantics with games of partial information and attempts to derive and represent the full content of an utterance from first principles. It also discusses various ways in which this content may be indeterminate.     

An exploratory study about Koreans’ attitudes towards counselling services

This mixed-method design research is an exploratory study of Korean college students’ perceptions of seeking counselling. The quantitative part of the study is a series of factor analyses of the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale (ATSPPH) to extract culturally valid items and constructs. The qualitative part of the study is a content analysis of the written responses to an open-ended question. The factor analyses of the ATSPPH resulted in selecting 15 items and extracting three constructs: Conditional Usefulness, Fear of Judgment, and Lack of Necessity. The content analysis of the written responses derived three additional constructs, including Utilities of Counselling, Provider and Environment of Counselling, and Socio-Cultural and Practical Issues. The meaning of the findings, implications, limitations, and strengths of this study were discussed.     

中外两种推理理论的实验比较研究

通过两个实验对中国学者提出的“推理题与推理者的推理知识双重结构模型”和Evans提出的“双重加工理论”进行了实验比较研究。实验一通过两种评定方法对相应性质命题进行评定后所得实验结果表明Evans等(1983)有关“信念效应”研究中的“结论可信性”变量可以视为与胡竹菁等(1996)实验中的“内容正确性”变量是同一性质的变量; 实验二根据“形式正确性”和“内容正确性”两个自变量设计的推理实验结果与Evans等(1983)的研究结果基本一致; 但增加“内容熟悉性”这一自变量设计的推理实验结果表明“推理题与推理者的推理知识双重结构模型”比Evans提出的“双重加工理论”能更好地解释推理者对性质三段论的推理结果。     

Trustworthy media news content retrieval from web using truth content discovery algorithm

Nowadays, the internet plays a major role in online information retrieval. As, we are well aware the web provides information related all the fields like national, lifestyle, movies, shopping, spirituality, sports, entertainment and much more. One cannot assume that the web retrieved information is believable or trustworthy due to multiple answers to the same query. The paper aims to study many research articles which are related to truth information discovery. However, the paper found that there is no proper research to find trustworthiness of news content which is extracted from multiple information sources with minimum misclassification error and retrieval time. To alleviate these issues, the truth content discovery algorithm is proposed to produce trustworthy information with minimal time along with multiple domain news information. The system provides reliable information from a various source of news provider with minimum classification error. The proposed method ranked the news content index based on query matches from extracted information. It minimizes the query retrieval time and classification error. Based on the experimental evaluation, proposed TCD + J48 algorithm produced the best result compared to existing approaches. It minimizes reduces 7.54 ms the query retrieval time (QRT), 5% Error rate (ER) and 0.98 and Mean Normalized Absolute Distance (MNAD).