EFFECTS OF MEMORY AIDS ON THE DYADIC CONVERSATIONS OF INDIVIDUALS WITH DEMENTIA

The effects of a prosthetic memory aid on the conversational content and social skills of dyads with dementia were evaluated. Six individuals with moderate to severe dementia served as either subject or partner in dyads during 5-min conversational probes conducted three times per week in daycare and nursing-home settings. During phases when a memory aid, consisting of personally relevant picture and sentence stimuli, was available, most subjects used their own aid to improve the quality of conversations by increasing the frequency of on-topic statements, diminishing nonproductive utterances, lengthening their conversational turn, and/or increasing the frequency of turns taken. Most partners demonstrated awareness of social discourse conventions by appropriately relinquishing conversational dominance, decreasing both content and nonproductive utterances, and increasing acknowledging or affirmative comments when subjects used memory aids. Naive judges' ratings of aided and unaided conversational samples on seven conversational dimensions reflected differences in perceptions of significant improvement as a function of the conversational discourse style of each dyad.     

Legal and Philosophical Fictions: At the Line Where the Two Become One

Anti-foundationalism is a central topic in recent legal scholarship. The critical legal studies movement (CLS) has mounted a strong challenge to the traditional belief that legal materials (constitutions, statutes, and precedents) determine legal outcomes and constrain judicial decision making. This scholarship has overlooked, however, the degree to which the debate between traditional legal determinacy and anti-foundational indeterminacy is yet another manifestation of a continuous debate in Western thought – one that has its roots in pre-Socratic rhetoric and philosophy.This paper traces the indeterminacy thesis back to the contest of ideas between Protagoras and Plato. I examine two well-known and elated Protagorean notions: first, that two arguments (logoi) are always set in opposition to one another with regard to every matter and, second, that the rhetorician can always make the weaker argument the stronger. I contend that taking these Protagorean notions seriously – perhaps even more seriously than self-avowed anti-foundationalists customarily do – leads paradoxically to a modified endorsement of foundationalism that is nevertheless wholly consistent with the Protagorean project. Calling upon texts by Aristotle, Seneca and René Girard, I focus upon how fictionality in representations of Platonically conceived Truth reveals a binarization in thought that is simultaneously untenable and unavoidable.     

‘Outdoing Lewis Carroll’: Judicial Rhetoric and Acceptable Fictions

This paper examines the functions of narrative within legal argumentation. My purposes are these: 1) to repudiate common assumptions that differentiate argumentation and storytelling in the law; 2) to begin to theorize anew how legal argumentation functions; 3) to explore the difficulties of evaluating the law's argumentative narratives; and 4) to trace some of the anxiety that judges themselves reveal about their roles as storytellers. I conclude that narrative is necessary to law's claims to authority, even as it complicates our understandings about how legislative policy decisions produce effects, and even as judges themselves seek to mask its importance.     

欧洲大陆法律心理学述评

对欧洲大陆国家的法律心理学发展状况作了述评。全文包括３部分：对相关概念（犯罪心理学、审判心理学、法律心理学、司法心理学）的辨析;欧洲大陆国家法律心理学的现状;简要评价。     

A Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Notion of Relative Importance of Criteria

Multiple-criteria decision aid almost always requires the use of weights, importance coefficients or even a hierarchy of criteria, veto thresholds, etc. These are importance parameters that are used to differentiate the role devoted to each criterion in the construction of comprehensive preferences. Many researchers have studied the problem of how to assign values to such parameters, but few of them have tried to analyse in detail what underlies the notion of importance of criteria and to give a clear formal definition of it. In this paper our purpose is to define a theoretical framework so as to analyse the notion of the importance of criteria under very general conditions. Within this framework it clearly appears that the importance of criteria is taken into account in very different ways in various aggregation procedures. This framework also allows us to shed new light on fundamental questions such as: Under what conditions is it possible to state that one criterion is more important than another? Are importance parameters of the various aggregation procedures dependent on or independent of the encoding of criteria? What are the links between the two concepts of the importance of criteria and the compensatoriness of preferences? This theoretical framework seems to us sufficiently general to ground further research in order to define theoretically valid elicitation methods for importance parameters.     

Reasoning with Factors

The paper proposes an analysis and a formalisation of factor-based reasoning. After examining the relevance of factors in legal reasoning, binary and scalable factors (dimensions) are distinguished and the relations between them are discussed. An account of a fortiori reasoning with both types of factors is developed. This article reports ideas which are discussed and developed in Sartor (2005). We refer to the latter work for the theoretical framework in which our analysis of factors is embedded.     

Liberalism and the Privatised Family: The Legacy of Rousseau

This article argues that the intellectual legacy of Rousseau is at the root of the failure of 20th century egalitarian theorists such as Rawls and Dworkin to engage intellectually with feminist theorists working within the liberal tradition. Through an extended critique of Rousseau’s delineation of the relationship between liberal citizenship and the private family, it argues that the failure of such liberal theorists to take gender hierarchy seriously is a consequence of their attempt to place the private family outside the sphere not only of politics, but also of justice.     

Welfare and Wealth, Poverty and Justice in Today’s World

This article argues that there is no sound basis for thinking that we have a general and strong duty to rectify disparities of wealth around the world, apart from the special case where some become wealthy by theft or fraud. The nearest thing we have to a rational morality for all has to be built on the interests of all, and they include substantial freedoms, but not substantial entitlements to others assistance. It is also pointed out that the situation of the worlds poor is not that of victims of disasters, but simply of less-developed technology, which can be repaired by full and free trade relations with others. The true savior of the worlds poor is the businessman, not the missionary. What we do need to do is strike down barriers to commerce, rather than requisition aid.     

Index of suspicion: feeling not believing

Throughout the U.S., state laws require professionals who work with children to report cases of suspected child abuse to child protection services. Both practically and conceptually, however, significant problems arise from a lack of clarity regarding the threshold that has been set for reporting. Specifically, there is no consensus as to what constitutes reasonable suspicion, and little direction for how mandated reporters should gauge their legal and professional responsibilities when they harbor suspicion. In this paper we outline the context of the problem, discuss the nature and scope of its conceptual underpinnings, and offer recommendations for moving towards a concrete, practical solution.