Developmental coordination disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that significantly impairs a child’s ability to learn motor skills and to perform everyday activities. The cause of DCD is unknown; however, evidence suggests that children with DCD have altered brain structure and function. While the cerebellum has been hypothesised to be involved in developmental coordination disorder, no studies have specifically examined cerebellar structure in this population. The purpose of our study was to examine cerebellar differences in children with DCD compared to typically-developing (...) children. Using voxel-based morphometry, we assessed cerebellar morphology in children 8–12 years of age. Forty-six children were investigated using high resolution T1-weighted images, which were then processed using the spatially unbiased atlas template of the cerebellum and brainstem toolbox for a region of interest-based examination of the cerebellum. Results revealed that children with DCD had reduced grey matter volume in several regions, namely: the brainstem, right/left crus I, right crus II, left VI, right VIIb, and right VIIIa lobules. Further, Pearson correlations revealed significant positive associations between the total motor percentile score on the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 and regions that had reduced grey matter volume in our cohort. These findings indicate that reductions in cerebellar grey matter volume are associated with poorer motor skills. Given the cerebellum’s involvement in internal models of movement, results of this study may help to explain why children with DCD struggle to learn motor skills. (shrink)

In the process of challenging epistemological assumptions that preclude relationships between knowers and the objects of knowing, feminist epistemologists Lorraine Code and Donna Haraway also can be interpreted as troubling forms of argumentation predicated on positivist-derived logic. Against the latter, Christopher Tindale promotes a rhetorical model of argument that appears able to better engage epistemologies of situated knowledges. I detail key features of the latter from Code, especially, and compare and contrast them with relevant parts of Tindale’s discussion of (...) context on the rhetorical model, and I suggest ways that his work could be expanded to accommodate rhetorical implications of situated knowledges. (shrink)

Brettschneider extends this analysis from freedom of expression to the freedoms of religion and association, and he shows that value democracy can uphold the protection of these freedoms while promoting equality for all citizens.

The ‘standard interpretation’ of John Taurek’s argument in ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ imputes two theses to him: first, ‘numbers scepticism’, or scepticism about the moral force of an appeal to the mere number of individuals saved in conflict cases; and second, the ‘equal greatest chances’ principle of rescue, which requires that every individual has an equal chance of being rescued. The standard interpretation is criticized here on a number of grounds. First, whilst Taurek clearly believes that equal chances are all-important, (...) he actually argues for a position weaker than the equal greatest chances principle. Second, the argument Taurek gives for the importance of equal chances ought to commit him to being more hospitable to the significance of numbers than he seems to be. Third, and as a result, Taurek should not have dismissed the significance of numbers but embraced a form of pluralism instead. Fourth, this result should be welcomed, because pluralism is more plausible than either the equal greatest chances principle or the saving the greater number principle. (shrink)

Music is a natural human expression present in all cultures, but the functions it serves are still debated. Previous research indicates that rhythm, an essential feature of music, can enhance coordination of movement and increase social bonding. However, the prolonged effects of rhythm have not yet been investigated. In this study, pairs of participants were exposed to one of three kinds of auditory stimuli (rhythmic, arrhythmic, or white‐noise) and subsequently engaged in five trials of a joint‐action task demanding interpersonal coordination. (...) We show that when compared with the other two stimuli, exposure to the rhythmic beat reduced the practice effect in task performance. Analysis of the behavioral data suggests that this reduction results from more temporally coupled motor movements over successive trials and that shared exposure to rhythm facilitates interpersonal motor coupling, which in this context serves to impede the attainment of necessary dynamic coordination. We propose that rhythm has the potential to enhance interpersonal motor coupling, which might serve as a mechanism behind its facilitation of positive social attitudes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Berel Lang PLOTTING PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN THE ACTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE When Hegel wrote that philosophy's Owl of Minerva takes wing only at the falling of dusk, he did not mean that philosophy is always tardy, only that it comes late in the day. It may, however, seem both late and tardy to call attention now to the role of genres in philosophical writing, and still more beside the (...) point to assess the importance of philosophical genres to our philosophical and not only to our literary understanding. Even if we find a way past the varieties of aesthetic nominalism for which any allocation to genres is a snare and a trap— recall here Croce's declaration of"eternal war" against the obscurantism of genres1—we confront the growing skepticism of literary theory as it now disputes not only the formalism presupposed in the taxonomic distinctions of genre, but also the mimetic or representational function of discourse more generally.2 If texts as such can no longer rely on a mimetic ground, it would be impossible for the formal features ofgenre, rooted in the then archaic distinction between form and content, to represent a literary (or indeed any kind of) idea; that is, it would be impossible for them to be philosophically significant. This difficulty only intensifies, of course, for philosophical writing: philosophy, we learn, ought no longer to delude itself with hopes for success as a "mirror of nature" (in Rorty's phrase of opprobrium),3 and it would then be delusion added to delusion to believe that the genres of philosophical discourse might, at another remove, mirror an object which philosophy had mistakenly been supposed to represent in the first place. That original "representation" turns out now to represent nothing at all—and Plato's attack on the deceptions ofart thus discovers a new and finer object in philosophy itself: his indictment of art at least 190 Berel Lang191 supposed that there was something for art to be deceptive about. On this postmodernist account, then, there could be no philosophical point in plotting the course of philosophical genres; and indeed there could hardly be any other point except perhaps for antiquarians intent on finding a place for genres among the other historical curiosities which philosophers, quite inexplicably, once took seriously, like Descartes's piece of wax or Plato's aviary or Berkeley's tar water. Such intimations of the death of genres, however, may be not only premature but misdirected in rather a special way. For even in a less suspicious age, when the prima facie claims for the existence of genres might have been accepted at face value, their role was shadowy, fixed in a rhetorical limbo. Evidently (or so I would argue), there have existed generic conventions of which philosophical writers have been aware and to which their writings conformed. But even among writers in whom this pattern is most explicit and self-conscious, it is not as though the writer, after first reviewing a list of genres, would then simply choose the one among them that most recommended itself. No doubt, a writer's style—including the genre of his writing—is deliberate, in some sense a matter of choice. But the conception of "choice" in this context is an unusual one. Plotting genre could not be like trying on suits until one finds a likely fit— because this would imply that when the philosopher is trying out various possibilities, what he measures them by exists in his own mind as a philosophical Ur-genre, something which itself transcends the requirements of genre. We might suspect the presence here of the genre of all genres that is not itself, however, the member of a genre. And although it is possible that such a philosophical bedrock exists—this would be, in a way, a true philosopher's stone—all that philosophers have turned up in their history as a matter offact is a considerable number and variety of—well, we have to say it—philosophical genres. Genres, in other words, have rarely been read or written as "natural kinds," and yet they have surely been read and written. The distinctions among them and even the broad tide... (shrink)

John Taurek famously argued that, in ‘conflict cases’, where we are confronted with a smaller and a larger group of individuals, and can choose which group to save from harm, we should toss a coin, rather than saving the larger group. This is primarily because coin-tossing is fairer: it ensures that each individual, regardless of the group to which he or she belongs, has an equal chance of being saved. This article provides a new response to Taurek’s argument. It proposes (...) that there are two possible types of unfairness that have to be avoided in conflict cases, as far as possible: ‘selection unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not giving individuals an equal chance of being saved; and ‘outcome unfairness’, which is the unfairness of not actually saving them, when others are saved. Since saving the greater number generates less outcome unfa-irness than coin-tossing, it is argued that, in many conflict cases, fairness demands that we save the greater number. (shrink)

This 1999 book demonstrates a method for reading the texts of Aristotle by revealing a continuous line of argument running from the Physics to De Caelo. The author analyses a group of arguments that are almost always treated in isolation from one another, and reveals their elegance and coherence. She concludes by asking why these arguments remain interesting even though we now believe they are absolutely wrong and have been replaced by better ones. The book establishes the case that we (...) must rethink our approach to Aristotle's physical science and Aristotelian texts, and as such will provoke debate and stimulate new thinking amongst philosophers, classicists, and historians of science. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the ‘Da ti’ chapter of the Han Feizi 韓非子. This chapter is often read as one of the so-called Daoist Chapters of text. However, a deeper study of this chapter allows us to see that, while Daoist terminology is employed, it is done so in a way that is certainly not reminiscent of either the Zhuangzi 莊子 or the Laozi 老子. Neither, though, does it have quite the flavor of other chapters in the Han Feizi (...) where scholars have often read Han Fei s advocating a system of government based on laws promulgated by the ruler, the content of which is left solely to the ruler’s discretion. Throughout this paper, I hope to demonstrate that a reading of the ‘Da ti’ chapter allows us to understand that Han Fei is not simply advocating a system of government based on laws promulgated by the ruler, the content of which is left solely to the ruler’s discretion. This chapter can help us begin to understand that Han Fei has a much more nuanced system and that he advocates law that accords with the overarching pattern of the universe. In doing this, I will show that the idea of fa 法 (standard, law) that we see utilized by Han Fei, both in these chapters do not fall neatly into Western conceptions of law, and thus previous scholars who have worked based on these conceptions have missed important aspects of Han Fei’s thought. I also attempt to demonstrate that this interpretation of law is consistent with the way that it is used in the rest of the Han Feizi. (shrink)

Religion can have an important influence in moral decision-making, and religious reminders may deter people from unethical behavior. Previous research indicated that religious contexts may increase prosocial behavior and reduce cheating. However, the perceptual-behavioral link between religious contexts and decision-making lacks thorough scientific understanding. This study adds to the current literature by testing the effects of purely audial religious symbols (instrumental music) on moral behavior across three different sites: Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and the USA. Participants were exposed to one (...) of three kinds of auditory stimuli (religious, secular, or white noise), and subsequently were given a chance to dishonestly report on solved mathematical equations in order to increase their monetary reward. The results showed cross-cultural differences in the effects of religious music on moral behavior, as well as a significant interaction between condition and religiosity across all sites, suggesting that religious participants were more influenced by the auditory religious stimuli than non-religious participants. We propose that religious music can function as a subtle cue associated with moral standards via cultural socialization and ritual participation. Such associative learning can charge music with specific meanings and create sacred cues that influence normative behavior. Our findings provide preliminary support for this view, which we hope further research will investigate more closely. (shrink)

AbstractIn her article from 2019, Fleur Johns describes a change: from a style of development work marked by a propensity for ‘planning’, to one marked by a propensity for ‘prototyping’. Our project in this paper is to propose a modest shift in perspective. Where Johns traces a transition from old to new styles, we emphasise the enduring links between planning and prototyping, such that both styles are best understood through their ongoing relationships and entanglements. Returning to Pulse Lab Jakarta (PLJ), (...) the site of Johns’ initial inquiry, we offer a reinterpretation of what might be novel about PLJ for development practice. Our claim is that to understand the particular intervention that PLJ represents, and the new modes of practice it produces, it may be helpful to understand PLJ's work in the manner of a ‘modular’ attachment to existing development apparatuses, that combines big data analytics with design thinking. We then develop some reflections and speculations on the forms and novelty of PLJ in light of our redescription of its work in the language of modularity. (shrink)

When the Supreme Court in 2003 struck down a Texas law prohibiting homosexual sodomy, it cited the right to privacy based on the guarantee of "substantive due process" embodied by the Constitution. But did the court act undemocratically by overriding the rights of the majority of voters in Texas? Scholars often point to such cases as exposing a fundamental tension between the democratic principle of majority rule and the liberal concern to protect individual rights. Democratic Rights challenges this view by (...) showing that, in fact, democracy demands many of these rights. Corey Brettschneider argues that ideal democracy is comprised of three core values--political autonomy, equality of interests, and reciprocity--with both procedural and substantive implications. These values entitle citizens not only to procedural rights of participation but also to substantive rights that a "pure procedural" democracy might not protect. What are often seen as distinctly liberal substantive rights to privacy, property, and welfare can, then, be understood within what Brettschneider terms a "value theory of democracy." Drawing on the work of John Rawls and deliberative democrats such as Jürgen Habermas, he demonstrates that such rights are essential components of--rather than constraints on--an ideal democracy. Thus, while defenders of the democratic ideal rightly seek the power of all to participate, they should also demand the rights that are the substance of self-government. (shrink)

Nature did not equip any of its creatures with wheels, but that means of locomotion was discovered anyway; an even swifter vehicle for the mind has been found in the atom—that irreducible unit which by virtue of its ubiquity provides reason with immediate access to alien objects, naturalizes nature, and urges an essential likeness beneath appearances so diverse that only an improbable imagination would even have placed them in a single world. The goal of atomism is to find one entity, (...) a building block which then in multiples constitutes the structures of reality and appearance. All that is needed, given this once and future One, is a set of transformational rules—and everything comes to life that has been dreamed of in the topologies of geometry, physics, history, even of metaphysics: a full representation of the world as it has been, is, will be. The ideology of atomism includes the assumption that, for structures distinguishable into parts and wholes, the parts precede the whole, temporally and logically. For the atomist, all structures can be analyzed in this way; that, in fact, turns out to be his definition of structure. This premise is already evident in the building-block universe first depicted by Democritus and Leucippus; it is no less present in the heady days of twentieth-century physics . It is slightly more pliable in latter-day atomists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky and their descendent structuralists; but here, too, atomic units of linguistic or social discourse are claimed as blind first causes of the sighted and complex structures allegedly derived from them. And if the followers of even these contemporary advocates find themselves still waiting for the promises of atomism to be kept, the imaginative turns of those promises—the binary code, the rules of an innate grammar—keep old expectations alive. In contrast to this general ideological assertion, the search for artistic atoms by poetics and aesthetic theory has lagged noticeably. We can see this disparity in the characteristic resistance to fragmentation by works of art; for many writers, the will of artistic appearance to exhibit itself as a whole, to insist on an undivided surface rather than on the elements within or beneath it, is precisely what distinguishes the structures of art from others. Even where a craftsmanlike impulse breaks into the surface of artistic unity , the pieces are usually counted teleologically: they matter as contributions to an effect, retrospectively. The artist himself, it is implied, deployed them in the first place to anticipate the unified surface; we , in turn, then understand them only in terms of that whole, not—with the atomist—by conjuring a unity from the earlier accidental joining of what then become accidental parts. (shrink)

A sequent calculus with the subformula property has long been recognised as a highly favourable starting point for the proof theoretic investigation of a logic. However, most logics of interest cannot be presented using a sequent calculus with the subformula property. In response, many formalisms more intricate than the sequent calculus have been formulated. In this work we identify an alternative: retain the sequent calculus but generalise the subformula property to permit specific axiom substitutions and their subformulas. Our investigation leads (...) to a classification of generalised subformula properties and is applied to infinitely many substructural, intermediate, and modal logics. We also develop a complementary perspective on the generalised subformula properties in terms of logical embeddings. This yields new complexity upper bounds for contractive-mingle substructural logics and situates isolated results on the so-called simple substitution property within a general theory. (shrink)

In recent years there have been growing calls for forging greater connections between education and cognitive neuroscience. As a consequence great hopes for the application of empirical research on the human brain to educational problems have been raised. In this article we contend that the expectation that results from cognitive neuroscience research will have a direct and immediate impact on educational practice are shortsighted and unrealistic. Instead, we argue that an infrastructure needs to be created, principally through interdisciplinary training, funding (...) and research programs that allow for bidirectional collaborations between cognitive neuroscientists, educators and educational researchers to grow. We outline several pathways for scaffolding such a basis for the emerging field of ‘Mind, Brain and Education’ to flourish as well as the obstacles that are likely to be encountered along the path. (shrink)

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true.

Wikipedia is known as a free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia uses largely transparent writing and editing processes, which aim at providing the user with quality information through a democratic collaborative system. However, one aspect of these processes is not transparent—the identity of contributors, editors, and administrators. We argue that this particular lack of transparency jeopardizes the validity of the information being produced by Wikipedia. We analyze the social and ethical consequences of this lack of transparency in Wikipedia for all users, but (...) especially students; we assess the corporate social performance issues involved, and we propose courses of action to compensate for the potential problems. We show that Wikipedia has the appearance, but not the reality, of responsible, transparent information production. (shrink)

Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings is about new approaches to many of the big topics in philosophy of science today, but with a very different take. To begin with, we are urged to reject the received Cartesian-Laplacean myths: Descartes’ certainty and Laplace’s computational omniscience. Instead, Wimsatt re-engineers a philosophy for human beings with all their cognitive limitations. His approaches find their starting point in the actual practices of scientists themselves, which he strongly identifies with engineering practices as the source of (...) researchers’ solutions for dealing with a complex world. He aims to construct an understanding of scientific methodology around the central role of reduction. But he dismisses eliminative reductionism in favor of a heuristic-based realist view. Wimsatt’s world is a complex one, and this means that science needs to do away with all the absolute and simple answers, because they do not reflect the world we are living in. A complex world requires the mindset and tinkering of an engineer to uncover its reality. The appropriate response must be heuristics all the way down as we constantly seek out reliable inferences on often shifting ground. To this end, we aim for models and theories that are robust, just as engineers aim to build robust machines. And although errors occur and approaches are fallible, they allow us to continually adapt the heuristics applied and sharpen our perceptions so as to develop more refined tools for investigating and understanding the world. (shrink)

The essays by Hans Kellner, Wulf Kansteiner, and Robert Braun in the Forum, "Representing the Holocaust" attack historical realism as a legitimate form of such representation. Like any other part of narrative, "facts" do not speak for themselves in respect to the Holocaust or any other historical "event"; they are context-dependent and thus speak only in the voice of their interpreters. The symposiasts adopt this view on the assumption that an alternative to historical realism will yet reaffirm the primary data (...) of the Holocaust: the number of deaths, identities, places, dates. But I argue to the contrary: that ontologically there is but one alternative to historical realism, and that this alternative offers no ground even in principle for acknowledging a contradiction between an assertion and a denial that, for example, "On January 20th, l942, Nazi officials at Wannsee formulated a protocol for the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question.'" Thus, at least in respect to items of chronicle, historical realism must be granted--unless one is ready to affirm, as the symposiasts apparently are not, a radical epistemic and moral skepticism. (shrink)

In much of pre-Qin political philosophy, including those thinkers usually labeled Confucian, Daoist, or Mohist, at least part of the justification of the political state comes from their views on morality, and the vision of the good ruler was quite closely tied to the vision of the good person. In an important sense, for these thinkers, political philosophy is an exercise in applied ethics. Han Fei, however, offers an interesting break from this tradition, arguing that, given the vastly different goals (...) of moral theory and political theory, it would be disastrous to rely upon the former to undergird the latter. He develops a distinctly amoral political philosophy that avoids many of the problems he sees as arising from a reliance on particular virtues on the part of the ruler or others within the state. In this paper, I analyze the source of normativity in Han Fei’s political philosophy, arguing that he demonstrates a keen understanding of the problems inherent in any system that relies upon moral standards to develop a strong, stable, and prosperous state. Rather, he demonstrates how an understanding of human nature, along with a recognition of facts about the natural world, allows for the development of a non-moral political philosophy that relies on a systematic bureaucracy and an inviolate system of law, one which will be much more successful, he believes, than anything his competitors can construct. (shrink)

We consider the relation between past and future events from the perspective of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which holds that episodic simulation of future events requires a memory system that allows the flexible recombination of details from past events into novel scenarios. We discuss recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that support this hypothesis in relation to the theater production metaphor.

How We Fight: Ethics in War contains ten groundbreaking essays by some of the leading philosophers of war. The essays offer new perspectives on key debates including pacifism, punitive justifications for war, the distribution of risk between combatants and non-combatants, the structure of 'just war theory', and bases of individual liability in war.

Our view is that fundamental appetitive and defensive motivation systems evolved to mediate a complex array of adaptive behaviors that support the organism’s drive to survive—defending against threat and securing resources. Activation of these motive systems engages processes that facilitate attention allocation, information intake, sympathetic arousal, and, depending on context, will prompt tactical actions that can be directed either toward or away from the strategic goal, whether defensively or appetitively determined. Research from our laboratory that measures autonomic, central, and somatic (...) reactions when processing emotional scenes is described which indicates that motivationally relevant cues, whether appetitive or defensive, capture attention preferentially, prompt enhanced perceptual processing and information gathering, and occasion metabolic arousal that mobilizes the organism for coping actions. (shrink)

Jonathan Quong argues for the “moral status” account of defensive liability. According to the moral status account, what makes it the case that assailants lack rights against the imposition of defensive violence on them is that they are treating defenders as if those defenders lack rights against the imposition of aggressive violence on them. This “as if” condition can be met in some situations in which one person, A, commands very good but factually inaccurate evidence that another person, B, poses (...) a lethal danger to her. In this “Mistaken Attacker” case, A will be entirely blameless. Nonetheless, A is defensively liable, because A assumes that B is defensively liable despite the fact that B is not defensively liable. In other cases, A may threaten B, who is innocent and hence defensively non-liable, without treating B as if B lacks rights. For example, in the “Conscientious Driver” case, A may have lost control of her car, having taken all due precautions, and be posing a lethal threat to an innocent pedestrian, B, but A is not treating B as if B lacks rights because B’s interests have already been taken fully into account in arriving at the verdict that careful driving is morally permissible. In this paper, I explore and criticize Quong’s account. I argue that the distinctions Quong draws between Conscientious Driver and Mistaken Attacker cannot be sustained in ways that uphold the moral status account, and I suggest that the moral status account’s focus on the “as if” condition is morally undermotivated. The drift of my argument is that we should take much more minimal accounts of defensive liability more seriously than we typically do. (shrink)