Cultural Difference in Hand Preference: Evidence from India and Japan

Indian (N = 400) and Japanese (N = 502) adult subjects were examined for their hand preference on a 7-point scale (1 = left always, 7 = right always) of the 32-item Waterloo Handedness Questionnaire (Steenhuis & Bryden, 1989). Factor analyses of the data yielded a two-factorial structure of hand preference: skilled and unskilled. Interaction of Culture × Hand preference indicated that Indians had more right-hand preference for unskilled activities whereas Japanese subjects had more right-hand preference for skilled activities. Further analyses revealed that the frequency of middle category responses was more common in Japanese subjects. Indian subjects were found to give more extreme responses for either right- or left-hand preference. Findings are discussed in the light of cultural training given to the individuals in these two societies, which are essentially collective in nature.     

Truth Incorporated

What is the cognitive value of the concept of truth? What epistemic difference does the concept of truth make to those who grasp it? This paper employs a new perspective for thinking about the concept of truth and recent debates concerning it, organized around the question of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. The paper aims to defend a substantively correct and dialectically optimal account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth. This perspective is employed in understanding the critical discussion around what Hartry Field (2001a) has called “the incorporation model” for extending a deflationary view of truth to foreign sentences. Field's original intentions in discussing the incorporation model were to defend the deflationary view from some counterintuitive consequences concerning the understanding of truth attributions to foreign sentences. However, more recently, philosophers unencumbered by deflationary commitments have taken over the incorporation model for their own inflationary purposes. In particular, and in my terms, these philosophers can be understood as making what I argue is the ultimately too radical suggestion that the cognitive value of the concept of truth is to allow the incorporation not only of the linguistically foreign, but also of the conceptually alien. I clarify this dialectic en route to explaining and arguing for the cognitive inflationary view, according to which the cognitive value of the concept of truth is is to make possible the proprietary kind and quality of knowledge allowed by reflective clarity over the concepts and thoughts that one already has.     

Indeterminacy,A Priority,and Analyticity in the Quinean Critique

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