Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We hypothesized that speech recognition performance can (...) be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPhilosophers and psychologists have come to recognize contempt as a crucial concept for understanding moral and social life. Yet its conceptual history remains understudied. I argue that contempt underwent an important conceptual shift at the end of the 1640s with the publication of René Descartes’ Passions de l’âme. Prior to Descartes, early modern philosophers excluded contempt from their taxonomies of the passions, treating it instead as a form of indifference. To have contempt for something was to be free of passion (...) in the face of it. Following Descartes’ intervention, however, philosophers increasingly included contempt among the passions, those unruly perturbations of the mind that could have benign or dangerous effects depending on how they were moderated. This was a change that harboured practical as well as philosophical implications. For what had once been an emblem of self-mastery was now itself a passion in need of regulation. The contempt displayed by aristocrats, in particular, now signified a dangerous lack of self-control rather than a cool display of superiority. I conclude by drawing out the affinities between this mid-seventeenth-century reconceptualization of contempt as a passion and the current attempt by philosophers to redeem contempt as a morally justifiable attitude. (shrink)

InDemocracy in America, Tocqueville described the ideal wife of a democratic citizen as a capable domestic helpmeet who enables the citizen‐husband to endure the daily trials of political activity. Tocqueville's biographers have presented Tocqueville's own wife Mary Mottley as having approximated this ideal. Mottley's importance, it is claimed, lay in providing the domestic calm and psychological support that Tocqueville needed to think, act, and write as he did. My aim in this article is to challenge this interpretation by offering an (...) overdue reassessment of Mottley's life and work, uncovering the hidden labors she performed in Tocqueville's circle and giving scope, where possible, to her own political views and activities. Mottley, I argue, refused to confine herself to the domestic‐management and emotional‐support roles typical of a Tocquevillian citizen‐wife. Instead, she carved out a role for herself as Tocqueville's political and intellectual interlocutor. (shrink)

This is a basically expository article, with some new observations, tracing connections of the quantum potential to Fisher information, to Kähler geometry of the projective Hilbert space of a quantum system, and to the Weyl-Ricci scalar curvature of a Riemannian flat spacetime with quantum matter.

McCabe's interpretation of Mill as a socialist is convincing but does not render his writings any less available to liberals. The term ‘socialism' was a slippery one in nineteenth-century Britain. For the likes of Arnold Toynbee, even self-proclaimed Tories could become socialists if they embraced the right policies. The existence of such ‘Tory socialists’ serves as a reminder of the hybridity of political identity at the time Mill was writing (hyphenated socialists were socialists nonetheless). Several aspects of Mill's socialism – (...) his rejection of class antagonism, his discomfort with revolutionary change, and his focus on small-scale socialist experiments rather than achieving a socialist state – will reassure liberal readers that his socialism did not overwhelm his more liberal commitments. McCabe's book might thus be best read as supplementing the liberal reading of Mill rather than supplanting it. I conclude by suggesting that a Liberal-Socialist hybrid inspired by Mill could prove useful to the effort (begun recently by Axel Honneth) to re-found socialism on a non-Marxian basis. (shrink)

Caring for seriously ill and dying patients plays a key role in the patient-physician story. The emotional experience, while at times gratifying, can also be quite burdensome. In “The Inner Lives o...

Throughout the Old Testament, the stories, laws, and songs not only teach a way of life that requires individuals to be moral, but they demonstrate how. In biblical studies, character ethics has been one of the fastest-growing areas of interest. Whereas ethics usually studies rules of behavior, character ethics focuses on how people are formed to be moral agents in the world. This book presents the most up-to-date academic work in Old Testament character ethics, covering topics throughout the Torah, the (...) Prophets, and the Writings, in addition to the use of the Bible in the modern world. In addition to Carroll and Lapsley, contributors are Denise M. Ackermann, Cheryl B. Anderson, Samuel E. Balentine, William P. Brown, Walter Brueggemann, Thomas B. Dozeman, Bob Ekblad, Jose Rafael Escobar R., Theodore Hiebert, Kathleen O'Connor, Dennis T. Olson, J. David Pleins, Luis R. Rivera Rodriguez, J. J. M. Roberts, and Daniel L. Smith-Christopher. (shrink)

Few thinkers have provoked such violently opposing reactions as Edmund Burke. A giant of eighteenth-century political and intellectual life, Burke has been praised as a prophet who spied the terror latent in revolutionary or democratic ideologies, and condemned as defender of social hierarchy and outmoded political institutions. Ross Carroll tempers these judgments by situating Burke’s arguments in relation to the political controversies of his day. Burke’s writings must be understood as rhetorically brilliant exercises in political persuasion aimed less at defending (...) abstract truths than at warning his contemporaries about the corrosive forces – ideological, social, and political – that threatened their society. Drawing on Burke’s enormous corpus, Carroll presents a nuanced portrait of Burke as, above all, a diagnostician of political misrule, whether domestic, foreign, or imperial. Burke’s lasting value, Carroll argues, derives less from the content of his specific positions than from the difficult questions he forces us to ask of ourselves. This engaging and illuminating account of Burke’s work is a vital reference for students and scholars of history, philosophy, and political thought. (shrink)

For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it.

One of the more exhausting features of contemporary political debate is its intensely denunciatory tone. Progressives denounce their opponents as stubborn reactionaries or (worse) tepid liberals. I...

In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an interpretation and defence of Wollstonecraft's rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication within eighteenth-century (...) debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their... (shrink)

Few would deny that Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees was an effective satire. In it, Mandeville confronted his readers with the unpleasant fact that a flourishing commercial society depended on the m...