Can We Hear Silence?

Philosophia - We can hear silence because silence, an absence of sound, causes our hearing of it. Advocating this position, Roy Sorensen puts to use his own theory of the direct perception of...     

What are numbers?

A number is the number of a class which is an objective, nonactual, mathematical object. The concept of class is analyzed and it is concluded that a number is the number of a pure founded class. A tempting strategy of explaining numbers away is rejected. Some well‐known definitions of numbers are analyzed and it is concluded that this analysis purports the thesis that the unique notion of number does not exist. Numbers are conventional. Nevertheless, an argument is offered purporting the thesis that von Neumann's ordinal numbers are the ordinal numbers. Accordingly, the corresponding von Neumann's cardinal numbers are the numbers.     

Parsing as a Cue-Based Retrieval Model

This paper develops a novel psycholinguistic parser and tests it against experimental and corpus reading data. The parser builds on the recent research into memory structures, which argues that memory retrieval is content-addressable and cue-based. It is shown that the theory of cue-based memory systems can be combined with transition-based parsing to produce a parser that, when combined with the cognitive architecture ACT-R, can model reading and predict online behavioral measures (reading times and regressions). The parser's modeling capacities are tested against self-paced reading experimental data (Grodner & Gibson, 2005), eye-tracking experimental data (Staub, 2011), and a self-paced reading corpus (Futrell et al., 2018).     

Phenomenological approaches to personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on...     

Trust in alternative and professional media: The case of the youth news audiences in three European countries

Abstract

This exploratory paper applying cross-cultural and developmental perspective analyses and discusses trust in alternative media and its relation to trust in professional media, seeking to identify the national specifics of media trust and its developmental patterns. Employing 2016 survey data of Czech, Estonian and Greek youth (aged 14–25, N = 3654) collected as part of the international CATCH-EyoU project (Horizon 2020), the study outlines the typology of media trust, comprising trust in alternative and professional media, and compares social and political predictors influencing media trust in the three countries. The study illustrates the diversity of relations between the two types of media trust, concluding that differences in selected predictors of media trust and the distribution of media trust types across national sub-samples illuminate the strong role national context plays, illustrating the varying pathways development of media trust follows in these varied contexts along socioeconomic and cultural lines.     

Sexting as a predictor of sexual behavior in a sample of Czech adolescents

The purpose of this longitudinal study is to examine the relationship between teen sexting and offline sexual behavior. Using a sample of 1134 Czech adolescents aged 10–18 (M_age = 13.84, SD = 1.94, girls = 58.8%) from 55 schools, the latent growth model of offline sexual behavior with sexting as a time-varying covariate was employed. Participants differed at baseline for offline sexual behavior at both individual and school levels, and they varied in the growth rate of offline sexual behavior at the individual level. Only age and sensation seeking explained the variability at baseline of offline sexual behavior. The positive association between sexting and offline sexual behavior was not constant across time. However, sexting at baseline predicted offline sexual behavior a half year and one year later. Sexting may be treated as a precursor of offline sexual behavior.     

Battle Christologies as a risky act of resistance à la Jesus: A South African perspective

This study depicts African “battle Christologies” as a risky act of resistance à la Jesus, that is, concomitant of Jesus’ own life in terms of their modus operandi. Their christic features are discussed in contradistinction to the mainstream Western christological tradition. Only by probing the dynamics of power and difference inherent in the cultural appropriations of Jesus can their specific performative consequences be accurately captured. In light of the study, some methodological considerations are being offered with regard to the way in which prophetic theology should be done in post‐apartheid South Africa and the Global South in general.     

The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize “raw” visual experience, and post-decision wagering (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives.