What Are Degrees of Belief?

Probabilism is committed to two theses:

Electrophysiological Evidence of Different Interpretative Strategies in Irony Comprehension

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.     

同声传译过程中的工作记忆与双语控制研究

同声传译是一项受时间限制的高度复杂的双语活动,译员在接收原语输入的同时要进行译入语输出。同传中译员要经过原语接收、理解、转换、译入语表达等一系列过程。近年来有研究者开始尝试同声传译过程中的工作记忆研究,认为工作记忆是同传作业的关键因素,并提出工作记忆在同传中的扩展模型。本文主要就同声传译的关键特征与多任务处理模型、工作记忆在同传中的作用机制和译入语提取时的双语控制机制等问题进行简要介绍,并提出了进一步的研究思路。     

主观解释的新发展:主体交互解释

主体交互解释是主观解释的发展,它比主观解释具有更为明显的客观性。本文探讨了主体交互概率的测度,主体交互概率形成的条件,主体交互解释与人造客体概率解释一道构造的从主观向完全客观延伸的谱系,以及主体交互解释的恰当性问题。通过探讨这个新近兴起的理论,为人们在确定基本概率时提供了普遍的适用性并使人们避免了主观的随意性。     

智力测验分数解释的发展趋势

智力测验分数的解释是智力心理学一个重要的研究领域。智力测验分数解释最基本的一个目的就是为了理解。随着智力理论和智力测验的发展,智力测验分数的解释出现了一些新的特点与趋势即注重智力测验分数解释的理论基础,注重智力测验分数解释的效度丰富化与从有用信息的抽取来解释测验分数的趋向。     

Judicial Responses to Civil Disobedience: A Comparative Approach

In this paper, I compare the extent of Anglo-American judicial engagement in response to civil disobedience with that of the French judiciary. I begin by examining what the civil disobedient can realistically expect to achieve in a court of law. I shall argue that his priority should be to require the judge, acting as a mouthpiece for the law, to respond to his complaints. To do this, the civil disobedient must be able to deny liability for the offence he has allegedly committed by urging a different interpretation of the law on the basis of an alternative -- but plausible -- reading of constitutional or human rights. If the civil disobedient can do this, he can claim a victory of sorts, even if his claims are ultimately unsuccessful. But legal culture can present a further barrier. Judges have different roles in different jurisdictions and therein lie further difficulties for the French civil disobedient.     

Experienced disgust causes a negative interpretation bias: a causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology

This paper reports the results of an experiment investigating the effect of induced disgust on interpretational bias using the homophone spelling task. Four groups of participants experienced a disgust, anxiety, happy or neutral mood induction and then completed the homophone spelling task which requires the participant to interpret ambiguous words presented through headphones. Both the disgust and anxiety groups interpreted significantly more threat/neutral homophones as threat than both the happy and neutral groups; the disgust group also interpreted significantly fewer positive/neutral homophones as positive than the happy group. These findings are consistent with the view that induced disgust causes a negative interpretational bias which is similar to that reported for anxiety. The results could not be interpreted in terms of the disgust induction concurrently raising levels of self-reported anxiety, but could be interpreted in terms of disgust maintaining existing levels of anxiety. The effect of disgust was to facilitate negative interpretations rather than emotional interpretations regardless of valence. These findings provide the basis for a causal role for disgust in anxious psychopathology. Because the effect is a non-specific emotion-congruent one, elevated disgust levels will result in a predisposition to interpret information in a threatening way across a broad range of anxious- and threat-relevant domains.     

Semantic interpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: the real meaning of the suppression task

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for human cognition. Byrne's "suppression" data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning.