One challenge to creating realistic cognitive models of memory is the inability to account for the vast common–sense knowledge of human participants. Large computational knowledge bases such as WordNet and DBpedia may offer a solution to this problem but may pose other challenges. This paper explores some of these difficulties through a semantic network spreading activation model of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott false memory task. In three experiments, we show that these knowledge bases only capture a subset of human associations, while irrelevant (...) information introduces noise and makes efficient modeling difficult. We conclude that the contents of these knowledge bases must be augmented and, more important, that the algorithms must be refined and optimized, before large knowledge bases can be widely used for cognitive modeling. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Understanding in Epistemology Epistemology is often defined as the theory of knowledge, and talk of propositional knowledge has dominated the bulk of modern literature in epistemology. However, epistemologists have recently started to turn more attention to the epistemic state or states of understanding, asking questions about its nature, relationship … Continue reading Understanding in Epistemology →.

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

According to Susan Wolf's hybrid view about meaning in life, a life is meaningful in virtue of subjective attraction to objectively valuable pursuits. Recently, several philosophers have presented counterexamples to the subjective element in Wolf's view. We argue that these examples are not clearly successful and present a modified version which is even stronger in the face of them. Finally, we offer some positive reasons for accepting a subjective condition on a meaningful life.

The goal of perception is to infer the most plausible source of sensory stimulation. Unisensory perception of temporal order, however, appears to require no inference, since the order of events can be uniquely determined from the order in which sensory signals arrive. Here we demonstrate a novel perceptual illusion that casts doubt on this intuition: in three studies (N=607) the experienced event timings are determined by causality in real-time. Adult observers viewed a simple three-item sequence ACB, which is typically remembered (...) as ABC (Bechlivanidis & Lagnado, 2016), in line with principles of causality. When asked to indicate the time at which events B and C occurred, points of subjective simultaneity shifted so that the assumed cause B appeared earlier and the assumed effect C later, despite full attention and repeated viewings. This first demonstration of causality reversing perceived temporal order cannot be explained by post-perceptual distortion, lapsed attention, or saccades. (shrink)

This historical study aims to explain how the transition from student nurse service to fully qualified “graduate nurse” service in the United States in the 20th century affected assumptions about fundamental patient care in hospital wards and provide historical context for current apprenticeship programs. Through analysis of documents from 1920 when student nurse service, a nurse apprentice model, was the norm to 1960 when the nurse apprentice model was waning in favor of registered nurse service, this study found that the (...) replacement of student nurses with registered nurses led to weakened standardization of fundamental bedside care and the introduction of large numbers of unlicensed nursing assistants. While student nurses could perform all the functions of fully qualified graduate nurses, nursing assistants could not, resulting in a separation of fundamental nursing care from the professional nurse role and changes in assumptions and attitudes toward fundamental care. These changes had a negative effect on fundamental nursing care. New apprenticeship programs provide opportunities for improvement. (shrink)

Algorithms used in the public sector, e.g., for allocating social benefits or predicting fraud, often require involvement from multiple stakeholders at various phases of the algorithm’s life-cycle. This paper focuses on the communication issues between diverse stakeholders that can lead to misinterpretation and misuse of algorithmic systems. Ethnographic research was conducted via 11 semi-structured interviews with practitioners working on algorithmic systems in the Dutch public sector, at local and national levels. With qualitative coding analysis, we identify key elements of the (...) communication processes that underlie fairness-related human decisions. More specifically, we analyze the division of roles and tasks, the required skills, and the challenges perceived by diverse stakeholders. Three general patterns emerge from the coding analysis: (1) Policymakers, civil servants, and domain experts are less involved compared to developers throughout a system’s life-cycle. This leads to developers taking on the role of decision-maker and policy advisor, while they potentially miss the required skills. (2) End-users and policy-makers often lack the technical skills to interpret a system’s output, and rely on actors having a developer role for making decisions concerning fairness issues. (3) Citizens are structurally absent throughout a system’s life-cycle. This may lead to unbalanced fairness assessments that do not include key input from relevant stakeholders. We formalize the underlying communication issues within such networks of stakeholders and introduce the phase-actor-role-task-skill (PARTS) model. PARTS can both (i) represent the communication patterns identified in the interviews, and (ii) explicitly outline missing elements in communication patterns such as actors who miss skills or collaborators for their tasks, or tasks that miss qualified actors. The PARTS model can be extended to other use cases and used to analyze and design the human organizations responsible for assessing fairness in algorithmic systems. It can be further extended to explore communication issues in other use cases, design potential solutions, and organize accountability with a common vocabulary. (shrink)

Passant du cinéma d’animation pour enfants (en suivant les exemples de films comme Chicken Run et Le monde de Nemo ) aux artistes queer contemporaines qui ont embrassé l’échec comme un style à part entière, Jack Halberstam part à la recherche de modèles de parentés, d’alliances et de communautés pour faire alternative au monde néo-libéral et à l’idéologie du succès qui en façonne les subjectivités. Cette idéologie se déploie notamment au travers des multiples injonctions à « réussir » dans les (...) différents aspects de la vie sociale : il faut produire, accumuler et se reproduire – autant de maillons dans la chaîne de (re)production du capital. Dans The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam propose une méthode de déviance joyeuse par rapport à cette idéologie du succès : « d’abord, résister à la maîtrise » ; « ensuite, privilégier la naïveté et l’absurdité (la stupidité) ». (shrink)

It is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. The rationale and actions of the BSHS in creating its Global Digital History of Science Festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. The global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 meant that the society's usual annual conference – like everyone else's – had to be cancelled. Once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. (...) In the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team's decisions. (shrink)

In this paper, we pause to assess a long-standing and ongoing outreach programme by King’s College London and The Philosophy Foundation. In it, philosophy students at university are recruited and trained to facilitate philosophy sessions for pupils who go to schools with high rates of free school meals. This paper describes every stage of that programme, from the recruitment and training of students to the difficulties that can accrue along the way. It also argues that the programme has a benefit (...) which is underappreciated and understudied in the literature on philosophy in schools, which is that it fosters cultural capital among the pupils who participate in it. As such, the paper serves both as a proof of concept for a high-quality, cost-effective philosophical outreach programme and as an impetus for further research into the effects of such programmes. (shrink)

El libro Las generaciones que llegaron tarde presenta los resultados de un trabajo sobre los usos, las estrategias y las percepciones de las generaciones mayores en relación a las tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación. Las apropiaciones de los y las mayores en los ámbitos laboral, relacional y familiar, así como en el ocio, son objeto de análisis a partir de entrevistas en profundidad. Entre los principales resultados destaca el que, a pesar de la gran capacidad de adaptación (...) de las personas mayores a los nuevos entornos digitales, la sociedad informacional sigue avanzando a ritmos desiguales: mientras penetra y media en buena parte de las dinámicas sociales, sigue dejando en los márgenes a una parte de la población perteneciente a las generaciones de más edad. (shrink)

This article explores predominant uses of theory in social science research in relation to the approach of phenomenological philosophy. While phenomenology is sometimes interpreted as one theoretical or methodological paradigm amongst others in the field of qualitative research, this article explores key thinkers within the philosophical tradition of phenomenology to argue that this tradition can raise challenges for predominant conceptions of research and theorizing in the social sciences and certain philosophical idea(l)s that can be connected to them. The distinctive nature (...) of phenomenological description is outlined, and new possibilities for qualitative research are sketched. Also considered is the question of whether qualitative research should seek to enshrine the intellectual virtues of the arts, and resist the inclination towards the scientific -- and scientistic -- drive to theorize. (shrink)

It is well established that the temporal proximity of two events is a fundamental cue to causality. Recent research with adults has shown that this relation is bidirectional: events that are believed to be causally related are perceived as occurring closer together in time—the so‐called temporal binding effect. Here, we examined the developmental origins of temporal binding. Participants predicted when an event that was either caused by a button press, or preceded by a non‐causal signal, would occur. We demonstrate for (...) the first time that children as young as 4 years are susceptible to temporal binding. Binding occurred both when the button press was executed via intentional action, and when a machine caused it. These results suggest binding is a fundamental, early developing property of perception and grounded in causal knowledge. (shrink)

This book outlines and criticises the six main contemporary arguments for scepticism about the role of human enhancements in promoting well-being. It also defends important and concrete ways in which enhancement-permissive policies should be embraced with the aim of promoting well-being.

This research aim to investigate the effects of motor imagery, focused on the trajectory of the ball and the target area, and self-talk before the actual strike on the performance of the service in skilled tennis players. Thirty-three participants, competing in regional to national competitions, were randomly divided into three groups: Control, MI, and MI + self-talk. They performed a pre-test, 20 acquisition sessions, and a post-test similar to the pre-test, in match situations. The percentage of the first service, their (...) speed, and the efficiency scores, evaluated by experts, were use as dependent variables and indicators of performance. While there was no difference in service speed, this study showed an improvement in the first service percentage and efficiency in the participants of the MI and MI + self-talk groups. Additionally, analyses revealed greater efficiency when MI was combined with self-talk compared to other conditions. It, therefore, seems advantageous for skilled tennis players to use MI and motivational self-talk before performing the first service balls. (shrink)

Objectives“Attachment difficulties” is an umbrella term often used to describe various forms of non-secure attachment. Differentiating “attachment difficulties” from autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has been characterized as challenging. Few studies have explored how this happens in practice, from the perspective of professionals.DesignQualitative study.MethodsWe conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals from five NHS Foundation Trusts in the United Kingdom. Participants were recruited using a combination of snowballing, convenience and purposive sampling. Data were analyzed using a thematic (...) approach.ResultsWe identified six interrelated themes that might reflect difficulties with differential conceptualization. These include: a clinical lexicon of attachment; approaching attachment with caution; contextual factors; perceived characteristic behaviors; assessing attachment and adjacent supports; spotlighting intervention and dual conceptualization.ConclusionOur results indicate some of the ways suspicions around attachment are raised in practice. We advocate for more dialogue between research and practice communities on issues of differential conceptualization. We call for collaboration between a panel of experts consisting of attachment and neurodevelopmental orientated practitioners and researchers, to clarify issues around differentiating between attachment difficulties, ASD, and ADHD. (shrink)

In the year ending March 2020, an estimated 773,000 people in England and Wales were sexually assaulted. These types of crimes have lasting effects on victims’ mental health, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a large body of literature which identifies several factors associated with the likelihood of the victim reporting a sexual assault to the police, and these differences may be due to rape myth stereotypes which perpetuate the belief that rape is only “real” under certain (...) conditions. Less is known, however, about the effect these rape myths and stereotypes have on the investigation process itself and the subsequent police outcomes assigned to sex offences. This study aimed to address this gap, providing a profile of all RASSO (rape and serious sexual offences) committed over a 3-year period in one English police force, the police outcomes of these offences, and whether any offences, suspect, or victim variables were associated with different outcomes, in particular the decision to charge or cases where victims decline to prosecute. In line with previous research, the majority of victims were female while the majority of suspects were male, and the most frequent victim–suspect relationship was acquaintance, followed by partner/ex-partner. Charge outcomes were more likely in SSOs and less in rape offences, more likely with stranger offences and less likely than offences committed by partners/ex-partners and relatives, and some non-white suspects were more likely to be charged than suspects of other ethnicities, including white suspects. Victim attrition was more likely in cases where the suspect was a partner or ex-partner and least likely where the suspect was a stranger, more likely in SSOs than in rape cases, and more likely when the victim ethnicity was “other”. Law enforcement should be aware of the potential biases, both relating to rape myths and stereotypes and to the biased treatment of victims and suspects based on demographic characteristics, and work to eliminate these to ensure a fairer and more effective RASSO investigative process. (shrink)

It is often claimed that Margaret Cavendish was an anti-experimentalist who was deeply hostile to the activities of the early Royal Society—particularly in relation to Robert Hooke's experiments with microscopes. Some scholars have argued that her views were odd or even childish, while others have claimed that they were shaped by her gender-based status as a scientific ‘outsider’. In this paper I examine Cavendish's views in contemporary context, arguing that her relationship with the Royal Society was more nuanced than previous (...) accounts have suggested. This contextualized approach reveals two points: first, that Cavendish's views were not isolated or odd when compared with those of her contemporaries, and second, that the early Royal Society was less intellectually homogeneous than is sometimes thought. I also show that, although hostile to some aspects of experimentalism, Cavendish nevertheless shared many of the Royal Society's ambitions for natural philosophy, especially in relation to its usefulness and the importance of plain language as a means to disseminate new ideas. (shrink)

There is a debate about the measure of IQ in children with ADHD. Some studies report that, compared to static assessment procedures, dynamic assessment of intelligence can better measure cognitive modifiability and plasticity. The present study was designed to examine children belonging to different ADHD subtypes in terms of both static and dynamic measures. Thirty-four children were compared to a sample of 27 typically developing children. Results indicate that only the inattentive and the combined subtypes, compared with the normative sample, (...) show lower IQ scores. The ADHD-I group presents generally low WISC scores and ADHD-H presents generally high WISC scores. Moreover, the ADHD-C group shows a low static score and a high dynamic score, indicating a wide breadth of Vygotskian children’s zone of proximal development. Static and dynamic measurements together can indeed be considered a comprehensive examination of intelligence levels in ADHD children and may be essential in predicting learning capacities. (shrink)

Recent accounts of “the biological” emphasize its thoroughgoing transformation. Accounts of biomedicalization, biotechnology, biopower, biocapital, and bioeconomy tend to agree that twentieth- and twenty-first-century life sciences transform the object of biology, the biological. Amidst so much transformation, we explore attempts to stabilize the biological through standards. We ask: how do standards handle the biological in transformation? Based on ethnographic research, the article discusses three contemporary postgenomic standards that classify, construct, or identify biological forms: the Barcoding of Life Initiative, the BioBricks (...) Assembly Standard, and the Proteomics Standards Initiative. We rely on recent critical analyses of standardization to suggest that any attempt to attribute a fixed property to the biological actually multiplies dependencies between values, materials, and human and nonhuman agents. We highlight ways in which these biological standards cross-validate life forms with forms of life such as publics, infrastructures, and forms of disciplinary compromise. Attempts to standardize the biological, we suggest, offer a good way to see how a life form is always also a form of life. (shrink)

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 234. H/b £?.??, $?.??, P/b £?.??, $?.??. If asked for an example of a rigid designator it is likely that one would suggest a name, like ‘Aristotle’ or ‘Tony Blair’, or a demonstrative, like ‘that book’ said whilst pointing at a certain text. Intuitively, what these expressions have in common is the central role they accord to perception of an object: you can see the book you want to talk about, there are (...) people around in our community who have bumped into Tony, and, although no one alive today perceived Aristotle directly, it seems plausible to claim that our ability to use the name now relies on the fact that someone, sometime, did perceive him directly. However, as anyone at all familiar with rigid designation knows, not all such expressions follow this model. Kripke himself stressed that certain definite descriptions have a constant extension across all possible worlds (for example, ‘the smallest prime number’, ‘the actual prime minister of Great Britain now’) and thus meet the criterion for being rigid designators; while Kaplan emphasized the role of a descriptive rule in determining the referent for a token utterance of an indexical, like ‘I’ or ‘tomorrow’. (shrink)

A beautiful and thoughtful collection of essays on reading, writing and learning, _Writing and Psychoanalysis_ grows out of a colloquium. The results are wondrous and impact on the reader at many different levels. In the act of writing, we all discover something about what we know previously unknown to us, and we learn more about our inner world that we knew before we set pen to paper. Patrick Mahony goes so far as to argue that Freud's self-analysis was essentially a (...) "writing cure." _Writing in Psychoanalysis_ is the first volume in the projected Monograph Series, Psychoanalytic Issues, the _Rivista di Psicoanalisi_ is undertaking in conjunction with Karnac Books. This series constitutes a major effort to bring about a dialogue among psychoanalysts who while ultimately bound together by a common psychoanalytic heritage nonetheless are separated in their thinking by different idioms, whether linguistic or theoretical. While featuring writers of very different idioms, this series will also present a venue to make some important Italian voices known to English speaking analysts. (shrink)

_Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Interreligious Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing the Religious Other_ examines the hermeneutics of interreligious encounter, investigating the implicit judgments of Judaism and Islam that often arise in contexts of conflict.

This essay explores the significant role that the writings and Stoic philosophy of Marcus Aurelius came to play in the life and work of William James. James’s correspondence reveals that he first read Aurelius’s Meditations during the troubled ‘crisis years’ of his twenties. Moreover, these writings were a source of solace for James and informed his personal life philosophy during this period. There is evidence that it was from a Stoic standpoint that he contested his father’s faith. And, in later (...) years, it is his interrogation of the experiential divide between a life lived under Stoicism and one lived as a ‘religious’ believer that lies at the heart of his Varieties of Religious Experience. (shrink)

The Ways We Think critiques predominant approaches to the development of thinking in education and seeks to offer a new account of thought informed by phenomenology, post-structuralism and the ‘ordinary language’ philosophical traditions. Presents an original account of thinking for education and explores how this alternative conception of thought might be translated into the classroom Explores connections between phenomenology, post-structuralism and ordinary language philosophical traditions Examines the relevance of language in accounts of how we think Investigates the philosophical accounts of (...) Gilbert Ryle, Martin Heidegger, John Austin and Jacques Derrida Draws upon experience of own teaching practice as philosopher-in-residence. (shrink)

A model-theoretic realist account of science places linguistic systems and their corresponding non-linguistic structures at different stages or different levels of abstraction of the scientific process. Apart from the obvious problem of underdetermination of theories by data, philosophers of science are also faced with the inverse (and very real) problem of overdetermination of theories by their empirical models, which is what this article will focus on. I acknowledge the contingency of the factors determining the nature – and choice – of (...) a certain model at a certain time, but in my terms, this is a matter about which we can talk and whose structure we can formalise. In this article a mechanism for tracing "empirical choices" and their particularized observational-theoretical entanglements will be offered in the form of Yoav Shoham's version of non-monotonic logic. Such an analysis of the structure of scientific theories may clarify the motivations underlying choices in favor of certain empirical models (and not others) in a way that shows that "disentangling" theoretical and observation terms is more deeply model-specific than theory-specific. This kind of analysis offers a method for getting an articulable grip on the overdetermination of theories by their models – implied by empirical equivalence – which Kuipers' structuralist analysis of the structure of theories does not offer. (shrink)

Minimal semantics is sometimes characterised as a ‘neo-Gricean’ approach to meaning. This label seems reasonable since a key claim of minimal semantics is that the minimal contents possessed by sentences (akin to Grice’s technical notion of ‘what is said by a sentence’) need not be (and usually are not) what is communicated by a speaker who utters those sentences. However, given an affinity between the two approaches, we might expect that a well-known challenge for the Gricean – namely that their (...) account fails to fit with the psychological evidence concerning linguistic understanding – could also be levelled at the minimalist, and indeed this seems to be the basis of Recanati’s challenge to minimalism from his ‘availability principle’ (Recanati 2004). This paper aims to explore the relationship between semantics and psychology and show how both Gricean and minimalist approaches can avoid the challenge from psychological evidence. I conclude by suggesting that the way in which minimalism avoids this challenge also helps the account to defuse Clapp’s ‘naturalistic objection’ (Clapp 2007) that there are no grounds for selecting a correct minimal semantic theory. (shrink)

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as (...) well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm. Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach. Borg's defence of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics - concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content - can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defence holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics. (shrink)

Artist, poet, educationalist and autobiographer, Marion Milner is considered one of the most original of psychoanalytic thinkers whose life spans a century of radical change. _Marion Milner: The Life_,_ _is the first biography of this extraordinary woman. It introduces Milner and her works to the reader through her family, colleagues and, above all through her books, charting their evolution and development as well as their critical reception and contribution to current twenty-first century debates and discourses. In this book _Emma Letley (...) _draws_ _on primary sources, including the newly-opened Marion Milner Collection at the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London, as well as interviews and the re-contextualised series of Milner texts. She traces the process of Milner's writing of her books, her discovery of psychoanalysis, her training and her place in that world from the 1940's onwards. _Marion Milner: The Life _includes discussion of Milner's connection with D.W. Winnicott and her emergence as a most individual member of the Independent Group. Letley also shows how Milner's Personal Notebooks offer fascinating insights into her relationships, both personal and professional, and into many of her important ideas on creativity, the body-mind relationship, her revolutionary ideas on education and her particular personality as clinician working with both children and adults. Further, _Letley _explores Milner's literary character from her very early diaries and narratives to her last book written in her 90's published in 2012. Marion Milner: The Life places Marion Milner firmly in her Edwardian family setting and contains new material from primary sources, including a new view of her collegial connections. It provides a wealth of material on her life and works that will be invaluable to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, students, those involved with life writing and autobiography, and the general reader. (shrink)