MILL'S ARGUMENT FOR OTHER MINDS

Montesquieu's Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation, thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieu's method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient causality and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contrast to these predecessors, he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahe's recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites Israel to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. His scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieu's Considérations is a case in point.     

预先承诺的理论解释及其神经机制

预先承诺是指个体提前做出一个有长远目标的决定来限制对即时诱惑的选择,从而避免在未来决策中由于意志力缺乏而出现的自我控制失败。最后期限法和限制选择法是开展预先承诺研究的常用范式。本研究在系统回顾预先承诺的三种理论解释（自我控制资源模型、神经网络模型和时间差强化学习模型）的基础上,尝试提出一个整合性的认知神经机制模型来解释预先承诺的作用过程。未来研究可进一步丰富预先承诺的研究范式和应用范围,并探究预先承诺调控非理性决策的心理与神经机制。     

儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知

用设置故事情景的方法对儿童对他人情绪与过去经验的关系的认知进行了实验研究。研究表明,4～7岁儿童能够认知他人情绪与过去经验的关系,认知能力随年龄的增长不断提高。情绪效价和情绪情景的匹配性影响儿童对他人情绪与过去经验关系的认知。4、5岁儿童更能认识到正性情绪情景条件下体验到负性情绪的他人情绪与过去经验的关系,其得分显著高于其它情绪情景故事和行为故事。     

The effortful citizen: Discursive social psychology and welfare reform

The present study applies a broadly discursive approach to the representation of welfare reform and unemployment through an analysis of the deployment of an interpretative repertoire of effortfulness in posts to an internet discussion forum. It is argued that when posters construct versions of unemployed people or welfare recipients as characterized by ‘laziness’ or lack of ‘effort’ the attribution of responsibility for unemployment is frequently not the only piece of discursive business being attended to. In addition, posters attend to issues of their own accountability and, significantly, the accountability of the government or welfare system itself for the extent to which welfare recipients are formally held to account. It is argued that this approach extends previous social psychological work on the explanation of unemployment insofar as it pays attention to the context‐specific functions performed by such explanations. Moreover, in orienting to the welfare system as having a responsibility to hold welfare recipients to account, posters are drawing on a set of discursive resources which essentially treat the government of individual psychology as a legitimate function of the welfare system. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Functional role theories of representation and content explanation: with a case study from spatial cognition

The aim of this paper is to show that the widespread opinion, according to which functional role theories of representation fail to account for content explanations of human and animal behaviour, cannot be confirmed with respect to each type of functional role theory. Functional resemblance theories (as referred to by O’Brien and Opie in Representation in mind, Elsevier, 2004) allow for content explanations of successfully performed cognitive abilities as much as for explanations of systematic errors resulting from misrepresentation. How functional roles do their explanatory work in actual scientific research examples is shown by a detailed exploration of model assumptions about homing performances based on path integration mechanisms in humans and animals.

Information learned from generic language becomes central to children’s biological concepts: Evidence from their open-ended explanations

Generic sentences (e.g., “Snakes have holes in their teeth”) convey that a property (e.g., having holes in one’s teeth) is true of a category (e.g., snakes). We test the hypothesis that, in addition to this basic aspect of their meaning, generic sentences also imply that the information they express is more conceptually central than the information conveyed in similar non-generic sentences (e.g., “This snake has holes in his teeth”). To test this hypothesis, we elicited 4- and 5-year-old children’s open-ended explanations for generic and non-generic versions of the same novel properties. Based on arguments in the categorization literature, we assumed that, relative to more peripheral properties, properties that are understood as conceptually central would be explained more often as causes and less often as effects of other features, behaviors, or processes. Two experiments confirmed the prediction that preschool-age children construe novel information learned from generics as more conceptually central than the same information learned from non-generics. Additionally, Experiment 2 suggested that the conceptual status of novel properties learned from generic sentences becomes similar to that of familiar properties that are already at the category core. These findings illustrate the power of generic language to shape children’s concepts.     

关于知觉干扰效应的ERP研究

利用ERP技术,采用知觉干扰效应的经典实验范式,首次从神经生理水平上探究知觉干扰效应的内部机制。结果发现,递进条件和标准条件均诱发了P2,P3,N400和晚期正成分LPC。在P2,P3和LPC成分上,标准条件的波幅均显著大于递进条件;在N400成分上,递进条件比标准条件波幅更负,潜伏期更长。此外,对递进条件下靶字各模糊水平（Level 1～Level 5）的ERPs进行比较分析表明,N400成分的波幅在各模糊水平间的差异均不显著。基本支持失匹配理论及词汇自动加工理论。