In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while (...) others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists. (shrink)

We suggest that as people move to construe robots as social agents, interact with them, and treat them as capable of social ties, they might develop (close) relationships with them. We then ask what kind of relationships can people form with bots, what functions can bots fulfill, and what are the societal and moral implications of such relationships.

This collection of quotes demonstrates the elegant simplicity of Ai Weiwei's thoughts on key aspects of his art, politics, and life. A master at communicating powerful ideas in astonishingly few words, Ai Weiwei is known for his innovative use of social media to disseminate his views. The book is organized into six categories: freedom of expression; art and activism; government, power, and moral choices; the digital world; history, the historical moment, and the future; and personal reflections. Together, these quotes span (...) some of the most revealing moments of Ai Weiwei's eventful career-from his risky investigation into student deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to his arbitrary arrest in 2011-providing a window into the mind of one of the world's most electrifying and courageous contemporary artists. Ai Weiwei is one of China's most influential and inspiring figures. Artist, architect, curator, and activist, he has been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government's stance on human rights and democracy. (shrink)

This paper establishes several algebraic embedding theorems, each of which asserts that a certain kind of residuated structure can be embedded into a richer one. In almost all cases, the original structure has a compatible involution, which must be preserved by the embedding. The results, in conjunction with previous findings, yield separative axiomatizations of the deducibility relations of various substructural formal systems having double negation and contraposition axioms. The separation theorems go somewhat further than earlier ones in the literature, which (...) either treated fewer subsignatures or focussed on the conservation of theorems only. (shrink)

Après les guerres du siècle dernier qui ont remis en cause l'idée de progrès, devant les formes multiples des guerres actuelles, peut-on encore penser la paix aujourd'hui? A l'encontre des idées conservatrices de la paix où cette dernière, conçue comme ordre et stabilité, a souvent été le corrélat des Etats policiers, la pensée de la paix, telle que l'élabore Levinas, relève d'une critique de l'autoritarisme politique et permet d'élaborer un nouveau concept de liberté affranchi de la tutelle des Etats. La (...) paix n'est pas ici une idée abstraite mais porte le sujet hors de toutes les formes de confort moral ou de conformisme politique. C'est à un Levinas neuf que nous avons ici à faire : tout en dialoguant avec la tradition moderne et contemporaine de la philosophie politique, il nous montre que la paix est une forme d'insubordination qui aspire à "désembourgeoiser la révolution". Une lecture intranquille de Levinas. (shrink)

Why do people comply with coronavirus disease 2019 public health guidance? This study considers cultural-psychological foundations of variation in beliefs about motivations for such compliance. Specifically, we focused on beliefs about two sources of prosocial motivation: desire to protect others and obligation to society. Across two studies, we observed that the relative emphasis on the desire to protect others as an explanation for compliance was greater in the United States settings associated with cultural ecologies of abstracted independence than in Chinese (...) settings associated with cultural ecologies of embedded interdependence. We observed these patterns for explanations of psychological experience of both others and self, and for compliance with mandates for both social distancing and face masks. Discussion of results considers both practical implications for motivating compliance with public health guidance and theoretical implications for denaturalizing prevailing accounts of prosocial motivation. (shrink)

It is proved that the variety of relevant disjunction lattices has the finite embeddability property. It follows that Avron's relevance logic RMImin has a strong form of the finite model property, so it has a solvable deducibility problem. This strengthens Avron's result that RMImin is decidable.

Objective: This study aimed to explore the relationship among cognitive fusion, experiential avoidance, and obsessive–compulsive symptoms in patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder.Methods: A total of 118 outpatient and inpatient patients with OCD and 109 healthy participants, gender- and age-matched, were selected using cognitive fusion questionnaire, acceptance and action questionnaire−2nd edition, Yale–Brown scale for obsessive–compulsive symptoms, Hamilton anxiety scale, and Hamilton depression scale for questionnaire testing and data analysis.Results: The levels of cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance in the OCD group were significantly (...) higher than those in the healthy control group. Regression analysis results showed that, in predicting the total score of obsessive–compulsive symptoms, AAQ-II and CFQ entered the equation, which explained 17.1% variance. In predicting anxiety, only AAQ-II entered the equation, which explained 13% variance. In the prediction of depression, AAQ-II entered the equation, which explained 17.7% variance.Conclusion: Cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance may be important factors for the maintenance of OCD, and experiential avoidance can positively predict the anxiety and depression of OCD patients. (shrink)

In the treatise On the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky divided the creation of art into three categories, the ultimate one of which is called Composition. In this article, I argue that Kandinsky’s classification is similar and comparable to the principle of semi-abstract Chinese freehand brushwork summarized by Zheng Xie in the Inscriptions on Painting - Bamboo. In an attempt to clarify the core of Kandinsky’s strategy of abstraction, i.e. the transformation from painting to writing, I then connect it with (...) the evolution of Chinese characters and the aesthetic theory of Chinese calligraphy, which is also in accord with Kandinsky’s idea of internal necessity and the spirit in art. Through this aesthetic dialogue across time and space, this article aims to bring a new dimension to the understanding of Western abstractionism from the perspective of the oriental philosophy of art. (shrink)