We examine over 100 top performing Canadian firms in visibly polluting industries as we seek to answer four research questions: What specific environmental issues are firms addressing? How do these issues differ between industries? Are both symbolic and substantive actions financially beneficial? Does green-washing, measured as the difference between symbolic and substantive action, and/or green-highlighting, measured as the combined effect of symbolic and substantive actions, pay? We find that substantive actions of environmental issues (green walk) neither harm nor benefit firms (...) financially, but symbolic actions (green talk) are negatively related to financial performance. We also find that green-washing (discrepancy between green talk and green walk) has a negative effect on financial performance and green-highlighting (concentrated efforts of the talk and walk) has no effect on financial performance. In this article, we provide explanations of our findings and put forth future research directions. (shrink)

Introduction The Aesthetics of Symbolic Construction and Experience Bruce Kapferer and Angela Hobart The essays in this volume address aesthetic forms and ...

Twenty classes in ten schools with 627 sixth?grade students in five cities in Taiwan participated in this study. The research provides information on the performance differences among written computation, pictorial representation, symbolic representation and number sense. The results of One?way ANOVA analysis indicate that significant difference was found among WCT, PRT, SRT and NST tests, with F=536.327, p=0.000. The a posteriori comparisons show for each pair (WCT vs PRT, WCT vs SRT, WCT vs NST, PRT vs SRT and SRT vs (...) NST) significant difference at the 0.001 level (p=0.000), except for the pair comparison between PRT and NST. This implies that these Taiwanese students were highly skilled in written computation but their written skills were not equally transferred to use of non?computational paths that depended on symbolic representation, pictorial representation and number sense to solve similar problems. (shrink)

Symbolic arithmetic is fundamental to science, technology and economics, but its acquisition by children typically requires years of effort, instruction and drill1,2. When adults perform mental arithmetic, they activate nonsymbolic, approximate number representations3,4, and their performance suffers if this nonsymbolic system is impaired5. Nonsymbolic number representations also allow adults, children, and even infants to add or subtract pairs of dot arrays and to compare the resulting sum or difference to a third array, provided that only approximate accuracy is required6–10. Here (...) we report that young children, who have mastered verbal counting and are on the threshold of arithmetic instruction, can build on their nonsymbolic number system to perform symbolic addition and subtraction11–15. Children across a broad socio-economic spectrum solved symbolic problems involving approximate addition or subtraction of large numbers, both in a laboratory test and in a school setting. Aspects of symbolic arithmetic therefore lie within the reach of children who have learned no algorithms for manipulating numerical symbols. Our findings help to delimit the sources of children’s difficulties learning symbolic arithmetic, and they suggest ways to enhance children’s engagement with formal mathematics. We presented children with approximate symbolic arithmetic problems in a format that parallels previous tests of non-symbolic arithmetic in preschool children8,9. In the first experiment, five- to six-year-old children were given problems such as ‘‘If you had twenty-four stickers and I gave you twenty-seven more, would you have more or less than thirty-five stickers?’’. Children performed well above chance (65.0%, t1952.77, P 5 0.012) without resorting to guessing or comparison strategies that could serve as alternatives to arithmetic. Children who have been taught no symbolic arithmetic therefore have some ability to perform symbolic addition problems. The children’s performance nevertheless fell short of performance on non-symbolic arithmetic tasks using equivalent addition problems with numbers presented as arrays of dots and with the addition operation conveyed by successive motions of the dots into a box (71.3% correct, F1,345 4.26, P 5 0.047)8.. (shrink)

This article proposes a communicative, imitative, and reflective account of musical learning and expertise. It starts from an affirmative yet critical reading of Høffding and collaborators, notably their idea of a musical arch, meant to bridge distinctions between low-level procedural enactment and high-level reflective cognition. While we embrace much of their analysis, we argue that they uphold tensions between these levels. Drawing on recent enactivist thought, phenomenological and hermeneutic resources, and developmental psychology, we propose a ‘linguistic turn’ that allows us (...) to situate the enactive body in what has been called an ‘original communication-situation’. The original communication-situation encompasses procedural proto-linguistic behaviour and a reflexive level of linguistic co-intentionality procedurally coupled with other bodies. From this perspective, musical co-creation within the normative space of the musical arch is a dialectical actualization of vertical and horizontal experience, reflecting transformative accomplishments of symbolic bodies within a linguistic field of participatory sense-making. The normative space of musical performance is the result of emergent features of music as embodied social practice. (shrink)

This article explores the role that repetition plays in symbolic healing through a close examination of the speech patterns and actions performed by a healer in a Chol Maya ritual aimed at curing a woman of kisiñ—the “embarrassment-sickness.” The authors examine the repetition of speech patterns in the healing chant and the frequency with which other paralinguistic elements, such as taps, co-occur with the chant verses. The sound patterns generated during the ritual, specifically those created by the rhythmic tapping of (...) the patient's body with a bough bouquet, are yet another form of repetition often overlooked in analyses of healing rituals, which have concentrated on other symbolic elements used by healers. It is argued that the repetition of phrases in parallel verses serves as metapragmatic commentary on the healing process as a restructuring of the patient's body, which has been unstructured by the disease. (shrink)

Whether computational algorithms such as latent semantic analysis (LSA) can both extract meaning from language and advance theories of human cognition has become a topic of debate in cognitive science, whereby accounts of symbolic cognition and embodied cognition are often contrasted. Albeit for different reasons, in both accounts the importance of statistical regularities in linguistic surface structure tends to be underestimated. The current article gives an overview of the symbolic and embodied cognition accounts and shows how meaning induction attributed to (...) a specific statistical process or to activation of embodied representations should be attributed to language itself. Specifically, the performance of LSA can be attributed to the linguistic surface structure, more than special characteristics of the algorithm, and embodiment findings attributed to perceptual simulations can be explained by distributional linguistic information. (shrink)

Of course, music performance has a long “artisanal” history. After all, the training of musicians to perform has been the mainstay of academies and conservatoria for centuries. But the discipline of music performance as part of an academic musicology is a much more recent invention. We argue that it arises some time in the 1960s, when scholars could begin to write comparative histories of performance and think difference choices as to performance style. Against the now sterile authentic/non-authentic, modern/post-modern debates that (...) characterise contemporary music studies, we propose that the various approaches might be classified according to the three Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. We put forward a certain “Real” at stake in performance, although it could never be the basis of any practice, musical manifesto or even properly belong to a history of music performance. (shrink)

The text describes an experimental form of combining sociological research with collective artistic activity during the 17th Lublin Night of Culture. The study involved collecting TST (twenty statement tests) from festival participants. The "bridge" element between research and artistic activity was the choice of a framework identity or a counterpoint to the test – in the form of an aphorism. The artistic activity took the form of a flash mob using symbols identifying participants with selected aphorisms, and then proposing (...) new identifications. The last one broke all the previous ones, creating an ephemeral community. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to validate the computerized Symbol Digit Modalities Test in a Swiss pediatric cohort, in comparing the Swiss sample to the Canadian norms. Secondly, we evaluated sex effects, age-effects, and test–retest reliability of the c-SDMT in comparison to values obtained for the paper and pencil version of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test.MethodsThis longitudinal observational study was conducted in a single-center setting at the University Children’s Hospital of Bern. Our cohort consisted of 86 children aged from (...) 8 to 16 years. The cohort included both healthy participants and patients hospitalized for a non-neurological disease. Forty eight participants were assessed during two testing sessions with the SDMT and the c-SDMT.ResultsTest–retest reliability was high in both tests. A reliable change index was calculated for the SDMT and the c-SDMT corrected for practice effects. While a significant age effect on information processing speed was observed, no such effect was found for sex. When data on the c-SDMT performance of the Swiss cohort was compared with that from a Canadian cohort, no significant difference was found for the mean time per trial in any age group. Norm values for age groups between 8 and 16 years in the Swiss cohort were established.ConclusionNorms for the c-SDMT between the Swiss and the Canadian cohort were comparable. The c-SDMT is a valid alternative to the SDMT. It is a feasible and easy to administer bedside tool due to high reliability and the lack of motor demands. (shrink)

Math anxiety results in a drop in performance on various math-related tasks, including the symbolic number ordering task in which participants decide whether a triplet of digits is presented in order (e.g. 3-5-7) or not (e.g. 3-7-5). We investigated whether the strategy repertoire and reaction times during a symbolic ordering task were affected by math anxiety. In study 1, participants performed an untimed symbolic number ordering task and indicated the strategy they used on a trial-by-trial basis. The use of the (...) memory retrieval strategy, based on the immediate recognition of the triplet, decreased with high math anxiety, but disappeared when controlling for general anxiety. In the study 2, participants completed a timed version of the number order task. High math-anxious participants used the decomposition strategy (e.g. 5 is larger than 3 and 7 is larger than 5 to decide whether 3-5-7 is in the correct order) more often, and were slower in responding when both memory- and other decomposition strategies were used. Altogether, both studies demonstrate that high-math anxious participants are not only slower to decide whether a number triplet is in the correct order, but also rely more on procedural strategies. (shrink)

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a pervasive difficulty affecting number processing and arithmetic. It is encountered in around 6% of school-aged children. While previous studies have mainly focused on general cognitive functions, the present paper aims to further investigate the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit in dyscalculia. The performance of 10- and 11-year-old children with DD characterised by a weakness in arithmetic facts retrieval and age-matched control children was compared on various number comparison tasks. Participants were asked to compare a (...) quantity presented in either a symbolic (Arabic numerals, number words, canonical dots patterns) or a nonsymbolic format (noncanonical dots patterns, and random sticks patterns) to the reference quantity 5. DD children showed a greater numerical distance effect than control children, irrespective of the number format. This favours a deficit in the specialised cognitive system underlying the processing of number magnitude in children with DD. Results are discussed in terms of access and representation deficit hypotheses. (shrink)

The semi-commune “Little Home” is a cultural enclave whose beliefs and idiosyncratic, seemingly chaotic interactions are based on gender relations translated into the terms of the purity and impurity of the female body. This framework is the scene of fictional and real kinship relations that play distinct roles within this mini-society and are dominated by symbolic types, which determine their social context. This article examines a ritual of purification performed by the Father/leader of the semi-commune. In this ritual, the Father (...) enters into a symbolic type that is impure to restore male-perceived order and dominance. This is in response to the disordering capacity of a phenomenon I call a “wave,” which is perceived as the potential of the female. (shrink)

In recent years, the field of AI & Law has increasingly focused on predicting legal judgments, particularly in civil cases. While traditional neural network methods are highly effective at automatically learning patterns from large datasets, they often suffer from a lack of interpretability. To address this limitation, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework for legal judgment prediction, based on large language models (LLMs). This framework combines legal knowledge (e.g., legal rules), represented through first-order logic rules, with deep neural networks (DNNs), using (...) a discrepancy loss to minimize prediction differences between the two components. By integrating the logic module during end-to-end training, knowledge is effectively transferred to the model parameters. Additionally, we develop a Chain-of-Thought prompt that uses LLMs to extract fact elements from legal cases. These elements act as logical variables within the rules, supporting the reasoning process in the logic module and improving overall interpretability. To validate the effectiveness of this framework, we conduct extensive experiments on a large dataset of private lending cases. The results demonstrate that the framework not only improves predictive performance but also enhances the interpretability of judgment predictions. (shrink)

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of (...) environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

"This book explores the relationship between performance and activism in Chile as a form of political expression and citizen participation during the period 2010-2020. Since the student mobilizations of 2006, the social movements that have taken place in Chile are characterized, in many cases, by the appropriation of public space and the political use of the body. This became particularly evident during the social outbreak of October 2019. The social upheaval was accompanied by a cultural explosion, where the arts in (...) all their dimensions played a crucial role as new strategies of collective action. The research proposes two hypotheses about this cultural revolution. Firstly, that this explosion of artistic activism had been fermenting for at least a decade (2010-2020) within the social movements, using performance and art as expressions of collective action. These artistic drivers, catalysts of this cultural revolution, have been mobilized around three fundamental axes of social demands: human rights, education, and feminism. The second hypothesis is that artistic activism in Chile between 2010-2020 emerged to exercise citizenship and strengthen the diversity of cultural identities. Chilean artistic activism today, unlike other historical moments, is a direct expression of citizen participation. It is no longer just artists who contribute to social and protest movements with their work: now, it is the citizens who use artistic expression as a practice of political participation. From an intersectional and feminist perspective, this book is an invitation to study and reflect on the aesthetic and political dimension of performance and its potential to establish justice and symbolic reparation when the State is absent. Furthermore, it incentivises a conversation about the ritual, pedagogical, and visionary dimension of art and its infinite possibilities of expressive and discursive resources. Performance art reimagines possible futures embodying the political demand, always loaded with memory, reclaiming the public space. Performance as the 'art of action' conquers the realm of non-formal education, permeating public space and shaping a Pedagogy of memory and hope." -/- . (shrink)

Humans are often extraordinary at performing practical reasoning. There are cases where the human computer, slow as it is, is faster than any artificial intelligence system. Are we faster because of the way we perceive knowledge as opposed to the way we represent it? -/- The authors address this question by presenting neural network models that integrate the two most fundamental phenomena of cognition: our ability to learn from experience, and our ability to reason from what has been learned. This (...) book is the first to offer a self-contained presentation of neural network models for a number of computer science logics, including modal, temporal, and epistemic logics. By using a graphical presentation, it explains neural networks through a sound neural-symbolic integration methodology, and it focuses on the benefits of integrating effective robust learning with expressive reasoning capabilities. -/- The book will be invaluable reading for academic researchers, graduate students, and senior undergraduates in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive science and engineering. It will also be of interest to computational logicians, and professional specialists on applications of cognitive, hybrid and artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The class condition of women in contemporary Igbo society in particular and Africa in general, which is characterized by her peripherialization in the scheme of state building and knowledge production, has led to the need for the re-examination of her representation in specific cultural contexts in Africa prior to the major historical events (partition and colonization) in the continent. There is no doubt that the partition and colonization of Africa led to a pragmatic shift in local paradigms, and the significance (...) placed on the agencies of cultural transmission. This need to re-examine women s representation in cultures and societies in Africa has become imperative in order to make, where possible, a factual representation of women s place in specific cultural realities. This realization gives impetus for this paper. This article re-examines the perception that women have nothing to do with two key peace symbols—oji (kolanut) and ofo (staff of authority and justice)—in Igbo culture as has been presented in the literature on Igbo culture. Using a case study typology, the study uses Nanka in Anambra State, south-eastern Nigeria as the study area. It identifies the place of the Earth goddess in oji and ofo ritual performances and concludes that, as a key participant in these rituals, gender is mainstreamed in the usages of oji and ofo. (shrink)

The imagistic promotion of the iconic city form is increasingly achieved by the deployment of the CCTV webcam system. This not only presents new material to mediate people's engagement with this space, but also offers new ways to materialize its actual three-dimensional form. Recent design-based research conducted at the University of Technology, Sydney, shows that the function of the CCTV Internet cameras can be extended and adapted to provide a type of engagement with urban environments that subverts its more representational (...) role and converts it into one that is qualitative and experiential. The article will discuss how the performative aspects offered by this virtual environment can be productively employed by the Internet user to not only create a new type of engagement with public space, but also, ultimately, to curate this space. The article will also reveal how the strategic deployment of recently developed non-proprietary software can be used to intervene within the operational logic of the Internet camera to exploit its potential for use as a design tool. By the strategic recruitment of this software, raw virtual qualitative data from webcam images are processed to generate a formal response to civic space. This type of intervention, which utilizes the two-dimensional image as a platform for intervention within three-dimensional space, asks the designer to relinquish the techniques traditionally used to generate urban form and instead to capitalize upon the opportunities for material intervention offered by the spatial ambiguity of virtual and real-time environments. The exploration of the distortional optical properties associated with contemporary camera technology begins to suggest the development of a range of new techniques for design intervention that will continue to evolve in direct relationship to the technology they exploit. This article will therefore discuss how the utilization of the interactive potential of the CCTV system can produce a new understanding of urban space that replaces any symbolic role for form with the affect of form. This range of unprecedented techniques can be seen to offer a new paradigm for material intervention within both virtual and urban space. (shrink)

For Jews, the Jerusalem Temple is the historical focus of ritual practice and pilgrimage. After its destruction in 70 ce, synagogues gradually became important centres for community and ritual, yet the Temple remained a symbolic site of hope and longing in diasporic Judaism in manifold ways. By means of a case-study of a fifth-century synagogue in the town of Sepphoris, this article examines the synagogue and its mosaic floor to consider the hypoth­esis that the Jews that commissioned and used this (...) synagogue had a self-categorised religious identity (cf. Turner _et al_. 1987) which referenced a symbolic universe of the Temple (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966) and can be studied through visual, material and ritual symbols. It is further suggested that material and visual evidence must be seen in relation to the rituals performed in the synagogue, and the synagogue itself. (shrink)

Much research supports the existence of an Approximate Number System (ANS) that is recruited by infants, children, adults, and non-human animals to generate coarse, non-symbolic representations of number. This system supports simple arithmetic operations such as addition, subtraction, and ordering of amounts. The current study tests whether an intuition of a more complex calculation, division, exists in an indigene group in the Amazon, the Mundurucu, whose language includes no words for large numbers. Mundurucu children were presented with a video event (...) depicting a division transformation of halving, in which pairs of objects turned into single objects, reducing the array's numerical magnitude. Then they were tested on their ability to calculate the outcome of this division transformation with other large-number arrays. The Mundurucu children effected this transformation even when non-numerical variables were controlled, performed above chance levels on the very first set of test trials, and exhibited performance similar to urban children who had access to precise number words and a surrounding symbolic culture. We conclude that a halving calculation is part of the suite of intuitive operations supported by the ANS. (shrink)

Here we examine the hypothesis that symbolic understanding across domains is mediated by a fundamental ‘symbolizing’ ability in young children. We tested 30 children aged 2–4 years on symbolic tasks assessing iconic and non-iconic word-referent and picture-referent understanding and administered standardised tests of symbolic play and receptive language. Children showed understanding of the symbol-referent relation earlier for pictures than written words, and performance within domains was correlated and, importantly, predicted by a marker of general symbolic ability. Performance on picture and (...) written word tasks was also unrelated to language comprehension. Thus, symbolic abilities in specific domains are underpinned by a general symbolizing ability which arises early in development. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question question: How do individuals affect others cognitively and emotionally through performance? Performance here is broadly defined aspurposeful enactment or display behavior carried out in front of an audience. Following Alfred Schütz, Erving Goffman, Deborah Tannen and others, the paper posits that performance works through the creation of behavior that is embedded in cognitive “frames” that determine the symbolic interpretation of events. The framed event allows the performer to stimulate the emotions of the audience through pragmatically (...) determined communication in a psychologically protected environment. Both performer and audience utilize the natural human ability to predict the emotional states of others, currently known as Theory of Mind, in order to generate and feel these emotions in an act of co-creation of experience. It is posited that performance has evolutionary value in allowing humans to practice the experience of emotions, and to create group solidarity. (shrink)

A wide range of systems appear to perform computation: what common features do they share? I consider three examples, a digital computer, a neural network and an analogue route finding system based on soap-bubbles. The common feature of these systems is that they have autonomous dynamics — their states will change over time without additional external influence. We can take advantage of these dynamics if we understand them well enough to map a problem we want to solve onto them. Programming (...) consists of arranging the starting state of a system so that the effects of the system''s dynamics on some of its variables corresponds to the effects of the equations which describe the problem to be solved on their variables. The measured dynamics of a system, and hence the computation it may be performing, depend on the variables of the system we choose to attend to. Although we cannot determine which are the appropriate variables to measure in a system whose computation basis is unknown to us I go on to discuss how grammatical classifications of computational tasks and symbolic machine reconstruction techniques may allow us to rule out some measurements of a system from contributing to computation of particular tasks. Finally I suggest that these arguments and techniques imply that symbolic descriptions of the computation underlying cognition should be stochastic and that symbols in these descriptions may not be atomic but may have contents in alternative descriptions. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college students to perform symbolic (...) and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

Many amateur sportsmen in the West, have today started undertaking long and intensive ordeals where their personal capacity to withstand increasing suffering is the prime objective. Running, jogging, the triathlon and trekking are the sorts of ordeal where people without any particular ability are not pitting themselves against others but are committed to testing their own capacity to withstand increasing pain. Constantly called upon to prove themselves in a society where reference points are both countless and contradictory and where values (...) are in crisis, people are now seeking a one-to-one relationship by redical means, testing their strength of character, their courage and their personal resources. Going right on to the end of a self-imposed ordeal gives a legitimacy to life and provides a symbolic plank that supports them. Performance itself is of secondary significance; it has a value only to the individual. There is no struggle against a third party, only a method for reinforcing personal will-power and over-coming suffering by going right to the limit of a personally imposed demand. The physical limit has come to replace the moral limit that present-day society is failing to provide. Overcoming suffering tempers the individual, providing a renewed significance and value to his life. (shrink)

The Homeric Hymns are commonly taken to be religious poems in some general sense but they are often said to contrast with cult hymns in that the latter have a definite ritual function, whereas "literary" hymns do not. This paper argues that despite the difficulty in establishing a precise occasion of performance for the Homeric Hymns, we are nevertheless in a position to identify their ritual function: by intoning a Hymn of this kind, the singer achieves the presence of a (...) god before participants in a public festival. The key mechanism by which the hymnist does this is the evocation of a god via the elaboration of a typical unit of traditional hymnic discourse, what I call the "theme of recognition ." The pragmatic operation of narrative such as this is similar to the device known in the study of magical texts as the historiola, or short narrative that serves as a verbal model for a desired outcome in the patient's world. This kind of operation is called, in this paper, "symbolic action," a term borrowed from the rhetorician Kenneth Burke. The theme of recognition is traced in the fabric of the expansive Hymns , and the paper further argues that an important generic marker in the Hymns, the greeting of the god , discloses their pragmatic function, the hymnist's skillful deliverance of the god before his hearers. (shrink)

The persistent educational challenges that fractions pose call for developing novel instructional methods to better prepare students for fraction learning. Here, we examined the effects of a 24-session, Cuisenaire rod intervention on a building block for symbolic fraction knowledge, continuous and discrete non-symbolic proportional reasoning, in children who have yet to receive fraction instruction. Participants were 34 second-graders who attended the intervention (intervention group) and 15 children who did not participate in any sessions (control group). As attendance at the intervention (...) sessions was irregular (median = 15.6 sessions, range = 1–24), we specifically examined the effect of the number of sessions completed on their non-symbolic proportional reasoning. Our results showed that children who attended a larger number of sessions increased their ability to compare non-symbolic continuous proportions. However, contrary to our expectations, they also decreased their ability to compare misleading discretized proportions. In contrast, children in the Control group did not show any change in their performance. These results provide further evidence on the malleability of non-symbolic continuous proportional reasoning and highlight the rigidity of counting knowledge interference on discrete proportional reasoning. (shrink)

The target article provides a convincing argument that nonhuman animals cannot process role-governed rules, relational schemas, and so on, in a human-like fashion. However, actual human performance is often more similar to that of nonhuman animals than Penn et al. admit. The kind of rule-governed performance the authors take for granted may rely to a substantial degree on language on external symbol systems such as those provided by language and culture.

We develop an account of societal democratization that synthesizes cultural sociology and deliberative democracy. Cultural sociologists emphasize the symbolic inclusion of marginalized groups into the civil sphere. Deliberative democrats stress growth in the deliberative capacity of society. We argue that democratization entails the co-evolution of culture and reason. The basis of co-evolution is the performative construction of an inclusive demos, which requires a deliberative background but is also a source of the moral emotions that motivate deliberation. Since moral emotions (...) can also sweep people up and make them do reckless things, they must in turn be redeemable in inclusive deliberation. This synthesis sharpens a normative position for the evaluation of episodes of inclusion, extends current accounts of the place of emotion in cultural sociology and deliberative democracy, and provides a frame for comparative analyses of democratization. We illustrate with an examination of the exclusion and inclusion of Indigenous Australians. (shrink)

In the era of the digital economy, the important issue for enterprises is how to achieve optimal performance by balancing the development of digital technology and undertaking digital responsibility. Based on optimal distinctiveness theory, we explore how enterprises balance the tension between political strategy and competitive strategy from the perspective of corporate digital responsibility to achieve optimal firm performance. Observing data such as annual reports, patent application information, and operating conditions of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2021 reveals (...) the impact of corporate digital responsibility, substantive and symbolic digital technology on firm performance. The research results show that substantive digital technology innovation is superior to symbolic digital technology innovation in promoting firm performance. Mechanism analysis shows that symbolic digital technology innovation satisfies the firm's political strategy and positively impacts firm performance through management empowerment. In contrast, substantive digital technology innovation satisfies the firm's competitive strategy and improves performance by empowering the workforce. Further analysis find that corporate digital responsibility positively moderates the impact of substantive digital technology innovation on corporate performance and negatively moderates the relationship between symbolic digital technology innovation and corporate performance. This study incorporates digital technology innovation and digital responsibility into a unified research framework, which provides a new interpretative path for improving firm performance and contributes important practical references for firms to achieve a “win-win” situation that improves competitiveness and social value. (shrink)

The Zapatista Indigenous Movement from Chiapas, Mexico is an example of the anthropological dynamics between the visible and the invisible in Western culture and the possible revolution of perceiving reality as such since they had to cover their faces with masks in their rebel anti-system movement in order to be considered as having the same dignity as other human beings: they performed a revolutionary act that changed the symbolic order of the visible by the public exhibition of their colonial submission. (...) The mask gave them a face, disrupting the order of the visible with uncanny faces. In this article, a nondual model is proposed to capture the inessential ground of the given composed of endless perspectives in continuous transformation by the generation of ontological novelty: an open cognitive horizon of symbolically empty points of view irreducible to one perspective. For Krishnamurti, the revolutionary act is to see without an image in order to phenomenologically attend to things as they are beyond the known and the unknown such as Stilinovi? and Malevich pursued the dissolution of symbolic representations through art for the transformation of human reality. (shrink)

BackgroundInformation processing speed is a marker for cognitive function. It is associated with neural maturation and increases during development. Traditionally, IPS is measured using paper and pencil tasks requiring fine motor skills. Such skills are often impaired in patients with neurological conditions. Therefore, an alternative that does not need motor dexterity is desirable. One option is the computerized symbol digit modalities test, which requires the patient to verbally associate numbers with symbols.MethodsEighty-six participants were examined, 38 healthy and 48 hospitalized (...) for a non-neurological disease. All participants performed the written SDMT, c-SDMT, and the Test of Non-verbal Intelligence Fourth Edition. Statistical analyses included a multivariate analysis of covariance for the effects of intelligence and hospitalization on the performance of the SDMT and c-SDMT. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used to compare performance across c-SDMT trials between inpatients and outpatients.ResultsThe MANCOVA showed that hospitalization had a significant effect on IPS when measured with the SDMT but not with the c-SDMT, while IQ had no effect on IPS. Age was the best predictor of performance of both tests. The repeated measures ANOVA revealed no significant difference in within-test performance between outpatient and inpatient participants in the c-SDMT.ConclusionPerformance of the c-SDMT is not confounded by hospitalization and gives within-test information. As a valid and reliable measure of IPS for children and adolescents, it is suitable for use in both inpatient and outpatient populations. (shrink)

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of symbolic regression. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical (...) expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a blackbox performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance. (shrink)

This study aims to reveal the impact and response to the apartheid system in shaping the collective trauma of African society through symbolic representations of suffering and social performativity through political action in “Amnesty” short story by Nadine Gordimer. This study used the cultural trauma theory by Jeffrey Alexander with descriptive qualitative method. The results of this research found that social suffering is symbolically represented with a humanist and theocentric images. Even so, the two seemingly different treatments are essentially the (...) same suffering, disguised by social and cultural symbols. Then, as a response to this suffering, there was social performativy through the political actions of social agents carried out by the Labor Union. These actions occur after going through of socio-cultural processes such as gathering, organizing, rioting, speeches, demonstrations, and accommodating or representing pain as well as distributing social awareness to arrive at the point where the apartheid system is the cause of all forms of suffering they experience. (shrink)

Socio-economic status and mathematical performance seem to be risk factors of mathematics anxiety in both children and adults. However, there is little evidence about how exactly these three constructs are related, especially during early stages of mathematical learning. In the present study, we assessed longitudinal performance in symbolic and non-symbolic basic numerical skills in pre-school and second grade students, as well as MA in second grade students. Participants were 451 children from 12 schools in Chile, which differed in school vulnerability (...) index, an indicator of SES. We tested an explanatory model of MA that included SES and longitudinal performance in basic numerical skills as predictors. The results showed a direct effect of SES on MA and a mediating effect of performance in symbolic and non-symbolic comparison tasks in pre-school. However, in second grade, only performance in symbolic comparison significantly mediated the SES-MA relationship. These findings suggest that performance in non-symbolic comparison plays an important role in explaining MA at initial stages, but that its influence is no longer significant by the time children reach formal instruction in second grade. By contrast, as children’s formal educational experience in mathematics increases, MA becomes linked primarily to symbolic numerical tasks. In sum, SES affects MA and this is due in part to the effect of SES on the development of numerical learning in pre-school, which in turn has an impact on subsequent, more complex learning, ultimately leading to differences in MA. We discuss the implications of these findings for preventing and acting upon the emergence of MA. (shrink)

This article discusses Neo-Pagan journeys to archaeological or heritage sites (such as ancient temples and stone circles) associated with pre-Christian religions and deities. It argues that within the rationale of a Neo-Pagan worldview, several common binaries dissolve and reveal themselves as continuities at sacred sites: human body and earth body, the past and the present, inner and outer worlds, self and other, human and deity. In the course of Pagans’ bodily performances at sites, inner and outer landscapes co-create and flow (...) into one another: the lived body becomes a fundamental text and starting point for knowledge. Through somatic modes of attention - by attending to and with their bodies in surroundings that frequently include the embodied presence of others - Neo-pagan pilgrims experience themselves not as isolated subjectivities but as sharing an intersubjective milieu with other pilgrims and with the Earth itself. For women in particular, journeys to sacred sites potentially contribute to a radical re-inscription of the female body by exposing women to alternative representations of the feminine and by providing contexts in which the feminine can be re-imagined, re-experienced and performed differently through symbolic activity and ritual. In Butlerian terms, women potentially perform gender differently at sacred sites. (shrink)

Despite its prevalence today, the practice of purely performative resuscitation (PPR)—paradigmatically, the ‘slow code’—has attracted more critics in bioethics than defenders. The most common criticism of the slow code is that it’s fundamentally deceptive or harmful, while the most common justification offered is that it may benefit the patient’s loved ones, by symbolically honoring the patient or the care team’s relationship with the family. I argue that critics and defenders of the slow code each have a point. Advocates of (...) the slow code are right that not all PPR is wrongly deceptive or harmful to the patient or his family, and that the symbolic aspect of medicine is itself morally significant. But the critics are also correct: slow codes are prima facie wrong. I argue that pursuing a slow code amounts to treating the patient as a tool for others’ benefit—hence, treating him as an object—and that this instrumentalizing quality constitutes one core prima facie wrong of the practice. I also build a case for the idea that the slow code may not always be all-things-considered wrong, specifying certain limited conditions under which acts of PPR might ultimately be permissible. Thus, the symbolic dimension of medical treatment is indeed morally important, both in morally favorable and in morally problematic respects—namely, in its symbolic denial of the patient’s humanity. (shrink)

The detrimental effect of the public recital on the quality of epic production in the first century is a stock theme both in ancient and in modern literary criticism. While previous studies on the epic recital emphasize its negative effects, or aim at its reconstruction as social reality, I focus on its conflicting representations by the ancients themselves and the lessons that we can learn from them. The voices of critics and defenders reveal anxieties about who controls the prestigious high (...) genre of epic and about the construction of gender and social status through epic's public performance. Critics of the recitatio such as Horace, Persius, Petronius and Juvenal represent it as an informal and popular event that panders to public taste and incurs infamy. These critics charge that the epic recital has an effeminizing effect both on the recitator and on his audience, a charge traditionally advanced against orators and actors. Because the epic recital in Rome lacks a performative context similar to the rhapsodic performances in Greece, its public image mirrors that of other public performances . The main point of divergence is the presence of the book, the symbol of permanent fame, which casts upon the recital the shadow of an evanescent entertainment. Defenders see the recital as instrumental to the maintenance of literature's value in society. This means that well into the first century there were those who felt nostalgia for the epic recital as a bulwark of male aristocratic values and who wanted to reclaim its prestige. Both Statius as a poet, who performed regularly at Domitian's court, and Suetonius, who acted as Hadrian's ab epistulis some twenty years after Statius' death, defend the waning reputation of the contemporary epic recital in an effort to reclaim it as a prestigious component of imperial literary culture. While critics unanimously negate the recital's role in the achievement of poetic fame in favor of the book, Suetonius chooses anecdotal evidence about the early performances by grammarians grammarians that show the important role of the recital in forging poetic fame. The emperor and the members of the new aristocracy whom Statius explicitly names as the target audience of his epic recitals have a stake in reclaiming for imperial culture an institution that went back to the second century B.C.E. and carried the prestige of an aristocratic event. (shrink)

This paper invokes the conceptual framework of Bourdieu to analyse the mechanisms, which help to maintain inappropriate authorship practices and the functions these practices may serve. Bourdieu’s social theory with its emphasis on mechanisms of domination can be applied to the academic field, too, where competition is omnipresent, control mechanisms of authorship are loose, and the result of performance assessment can be a matter of symbolic life and death for the researchers. This results in a problem of game-theoretic nature, where (...) researchers’ behaviour will be determined more by the logic of competition, than by individual character or motives. From this follows that changing this practice requires institutionalized mechanisms, and change cannot be expected from simply appealing to researchers’ individual conscience. The article aims at showing that academic capital is translated into honorary authorship. With little control, undetected honorary authorship gives the appearance of possessing intellectual capital. In this way a dominant position is made to be seen as natural result of intellectual ability or scientific merit, which makes it more acceptable to those in dominated positions. The final conclusion of this paper is that undemocratic authorship decisions and authorship based performance assessment together are a form of symbolic violence. (shrink)

This article presents a process account of some typicality effects and related similarity-dependent accuracy and response time phenomena that arise in the context of supervised concept acquisition. We describe Symbolic Concept Acquisition (SCA), a computational system that acquires and activates category prediction rules. In contrast to gradient representations, SCA performs by probing for prediction rules in a series of discrete steps. For learning new rules, it acquires general rules but then incrementally learns more specific ones. In describing SCA, we emphasize (...) its functionality in terms of accuracy and efficiency and motivate its design within the set of symbolic mechanisms and memory structures defined by the Soar architecture (Laird, Newell & Rosenbloom, 1987). For replicating human behavior, we first show how SCA exhibits some typicality effects in the course of learning responding faster and more accurately to more typical test examples. Then, using data from human experiments, we evaluate SCA's qualitative predictions on accuracy and response time on individual dataset instances. We show how SCA's predictions correlate with human data across three experimental conditions concerning the effect of instruction on learning strategy. (shrink)

The montage of personal and social identities displayed in the documentary Rize indicate that there are multiple historical, psychological, and performative responses to racialized conditions. This essay analyzes how the body is used as an instrument of resistance against a society that operates within and among racial symbol systems. Drawing upon critical ethnography and race philosophies, this essay suggests David LaChapelle’s examination of Krump dancers is a process of performative decolonization. To begin, Rize is articulated as a project (...) representative of critical performance ethnography. Next, a discussion of the genesis of race as a political instrument of oppression is offered. In conclusion, an analysis of the dialectal tension between the spiritual and material realms within the documentary Rize is discussed. (shrink)

To deal with reactive sequential decision tasks we present a learning model Clarion which is a hybrid connectionist model consisting of both localist and dis tributed representations based on the two level ap proach proposed in Sun The model learns and utilizes procedural and declarative knowledge tapping into the synergy of the two types of processes It uni es neural reinforcement and symbolic methods to perform on line bottom up learning Experiments in various situations are reported that shed light on (...) the working of the model.. (shrink)