Scalar implicatures depend on alternatives in order to avoid the symmetry problem. I argue for a structure-sensitive characterization of these alternatives: the alternatives for a structure are all those structures that are at most as complex as the original one. There have been claims in the literature that complexity is irrelevant for implicatures and that the relevant condition is the semantic notion of monotonicity. I provide new data that pose a challenge to the use of monotonicity and that support the (...) structure-sensitive definition. I show that what appeared to be a problem for the complexity approach is overcome once an appropriate notion of complexity is adopted, and that upon closer inspection, the argument in favor of monotonicity turns out to be an argument against it and in favor of the complexity approach. (shrink)

We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to ‘nand’ (= not and), ‘nevery’ (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn’s proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and to (...) account for a bigger typological puzzle, namely the absence of lexicalizations of ‘XOR’ (= exclusive or), ‘all-or-none’, and many other imaginable logical operators, one must restrict the basic lexicalizable elements to a small set of primitives. We suggest that an ordering based perspective, following Keenan and Faltz (Boolean semantics for natural language, 1985), makes the stipulated primitives that we arrive at more natural. We also propose a modification to Horn’s proposal, based on recent work on implicatures, in which only the implicature condition is operative and in which markedness is part of the definition of the alternatives for scalar implicatures rather than an independent condition. (shrink)

Music can reduce stress and anxiety, enhance positive mood, and facilitate social bonding. However, little is known about the role of music and related personal or cultural variables in maintaining wellbeing during times of stress and social isolation as imposed by the COVID-19 crisis. In an online questionnaire, administered in 11 countries, participants rated the relevance of wellbeing goals during the pandemic, and the effectiveness of different activities in obtaining these goals. Music was found to be the most effective activity (...) for three out of five wellbeing goals: enjoyment, venting negative emotions, and self-connection. For diversion, music was equally good as entertainment, while it was second best to create a sense of togetherness, after socialization. This result was evident across different countries and gender, with minor effects of age on specific goals, and a clear effect of the importance of music in people's lives. Cultural effects were generally small and surfaced mainly in the use of music to obtain a sense of togetherness. Interestingly, culture moderated the use of negatively valenced and nostalgic music for those higher in distress. (shrink)

Wherever there is life, there are lies. Slick-suited politicians lie on the podium, ready to tell voters what they want to hear. Cheating lovers, swindling businessmen, double-crossing villains – all liars. But nature lies too – the cheetah crouching in the tall grass waiting to pounce, its spots and straw-coloured fur blending in with its surroundings, the chameleon with its adaptable skin, the octopus hiding in its cave. Juan Jacinto Muñoz-Rengel uncovers the slippery history of lies, some dark and (...) elusive, others thunderous and dazzling. From primeval forests to modern politics, he explores the uncomfortable truths of our white lies, fudged facts and blatant deceptions. For centuries, philosophers, writers and poets have grappled with the paradox of what’s fact and what’s fiction. So who can we really believe? Our friends? Our partners? Our leaders? Can we even trust ourselves? Truly, this is the only book in which the abundance of lies on its pages is a sign of success. Or maybe it isn’t. Who can really tell? (shrink)

What solutions can we find in the research literature for preventing sexual violence, and what psychological theories have guided these efforts? We gather all primary prevention efforts to reduce sexual violence from 1985 to 2018 and provide a bird’s-eye view of the literature. We first review predominant theoretical approaches to sexual-violence perpetration prevention by highlighting three interventions that exemplify the zeitgeist of primary prevention efforts at various points during this time period. We find a throughline in primary prevention interventions: They (...) aim to change attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge (i.e., ideas) to reduce sexual-violence perpetration and victimization. Our meta-analysis of these studies tests the efficacy of this approach directly and finds that although many interventions are successful at changing ideas, behavior change does not follow. There is little to no relationship between changing attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge and reducing victimization or perpetration. We also observe trends over time, including a shift from targeting a reduction in perpetration to targeting an increase in bystander intervention. We conclude by highlighting promising new strategies for measuring victimization and perpetration and calling for interventions that are informed by theories of behavior change and that center sexually violent behavior as the key outcome of interest. (shrink)

Navigating limits to confidentiality with adolescent clients can be ethically and professionally challenging. This study follows on from a previous quantitative survey of psychologists about confidentiality dilemmas with adolescents. The current study used qualitative methods to explore such dilemmas in greater depth. Twenty Australian psychologists were interviewed and asked to describe an ethically challenging past case. Cases were then used to facilitate discussion about the decision-making process and outcomes. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using interpretive content and thematic analysis. Three (...) key findings are discussed. First, it is of little use to perceive confidentiality dilemmas as binary choices because psychologists described 5 distinct options. These can be conceptualized on a spectrum of varying degrees of client autonomy, ranging from “no disclosure” to “disclosure without the client’s knowledge or consent”. Second, confidentiality dilemmas often involve balancing multiple and conflicting risks regarding both immediate and future harm. Third, a range of strategies are employed by psychologists to minimize potential harms when disclosing information. These are primarily aimed at maintaining the therapeutic relationship and empowering clients. These findings and the case studies described provide a valuable resource for teaching and professional development. (shrink)

In the ongoing research of the functions of consciousness, special emphasis has been put on integration of information: the ability to combine different signals into a coherent, unified one. Several theories of consciousness hold that this ability depends on – or at least goes hand in hand with – conscious processing. Yet some empirical findings have suggested otherwise, claiming that integration of information could take place even without awareness. Trying to reconcile this apparent contradiction, the “windows of integration” hypothesis claims (...) that conscious access enables signal processing over large integration windows. The hypothesis applies to integration windows defined either temporally, spatially, or semantically. In this review, we explain the hypothesis and re-examine it in light of new studies published since it was suggested. In line with the hypothesis, these studies provide compelling evidence for unconscious integration, but also demonstrate its limits with respect to time, space, and semantic distance. The review further highlights open questions that still need to be pursued to demonstrate the applicability of the WOI hypothesis as a guiding principle for understanding the depth and scope of unconscious processes. (shrink)

(2004). ‘Flexible Control’: Towards a conception of personal autonomy for postmodern education. Educational Philosophy and Theory: Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 3-17.

We examine the link between the growing emphasis on corporate social responsibility at the organizational level and beliefs about social responsibility at work (SRW) expressed by individuals. Drawing from theories of professionalism and diffusion of innovations (including practices and beliefs), we advance hypotheses about beliefs of managers and non-managers in 11 countries at two time periods, and use a unique international data set to test our hypotheses. Our general prediction that managers would score higher than non-managers on a measure of (...) SRW was not supported. However, further analysis revealed a more complex relationship moderated by the contextual factors of time frame and country inequality level. We discuss implications and extensions for future research. (shrink)

The discovery by Hans Spemann of the “organizer” tissue and its ability to induce the formation of the amphibian embryo’s neural tube inspired leading embryologists to attempt to elucidate embryonic inductions’ underlying mechanism. Joseph Needham, who during the 1930s conducted research in biochemical embryology, proposed that embryonic induction is mediated by a specific chemical entity embedded in the inducing tissue, surmising that chemical to be a hormone of sterol-like structure. Along with embryologist Conrad H. Waddington, they conducted research aimed at (...) the isolation and functional characterization of the underlying agent. As historians clearly pointed out, embryologists came to question Needham’s biochemical approach; he failed to locate the hormone he sought and eventually abandoned his quest. Yet, this study finds that the difficulties he ran into resulted primarily from the limited conditions for conducting his experiments at his institute. In addition, Needham’s research reflected the interests of leading biochemists in hormone and cancer research, because it offered novel theoretical models and experimental methods for engaging with the function of the hormones and carcinogens they isolated. Needham and Waddington were deterred neither by the mounting challenges nor by the limited experimental infrastructure. Like their colleagues in hormone and cancer research, they anticipated difficulties in attempting to establish causal links between complex biological phenomena and simple chemical triggering. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Medical AID organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières receive several requests from individuals and international academic institutions to conduct research at their implementation sites in Africa. Do AID agencies have an ethical duty to comply with research requests? In this paper we respond to the views and constructed theories (albeit unfounded) of one such researcher, whose request to conduct research at one of our sites in the Democratic Republic of Congo was turned down.

Williams’s well-known critique of the ‘moralism’ of liberal political philosophy—its disconnect from political reality—holds special significance for the theory and practice of constitutional adjudication, where calls for ‘realism’ increasingly resound. Is constitutional discourse also guilty of moralism—as Williams himself thought—or might it succeed where political philosophy has failed? This paper reconstructs Williams’s critique of political moralism as one that decries the empty idealism of the philosophical project of abstraction: the quest for general, timeless, and universal principles drains theory of its (...) prescriptive force. It then argues that legal-constitutional reasoning, even in its most ambitious ‘forum of principle’ conception, is not a flight to abstraction but precisely a pragmatist negotiation of the concreteness-abstraction tension through acts of justification. But constitutional discourse in its current form remains moralistic in another distinct sense: it idealizes the political, thereby failing to account for the social and political pressures on courts and the proper normative significance of institutional considerations. Constitutional discourse could only offer a solution to the ailments of political philosophy if it cures its own chronic idealization. (shrink)

The article asks why and how Hannah Arendt framed The Human Condition as a history of modern science. It answers that, in telling the history of instrumental rationality and the work of the experim...

People living in areas of intractable conflicts experience extreme negative emotions which ultimately lead to support of aggressive policies. Emotion regulation and particularly cognitive reapprais...

The critic of substance immobility through negation constitutes the starting point of the ‘voyage of discovery’ of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, in which mind and body experiences are considered in terms of mutual recognition, without denying the subjectivity. In this article I am discussing some aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit after Nietzsche’s ‘experimentalism’ and Dennett’s theory of mind, in order to articulate, through Bergson, two fundamental reasons. The first concerns the subject and the dramatic awareness of its constitutional temporality (...) and, at the same time, the possibility to transcend the limit of ‘here’ and ‘now’. On this basis, the second regards the indefensibility of nihilism, because, thanks to consciousness and its continuous activity, the temporal subject, from Hegel to Bergson, persists as a ‘dark side’, in which a constant ‘overcoming’ (élan) of an implicitly normative and essentially social practice takes place. (shrink)

The semantics of association with focus and the pragmatic conditions governing the appropriateness of focus in discourse are usually taken to depend on focus alternatives. According to a common view, these alternatives are generated by a permissive process. This permissive view has been challenged by Michael Wagner, who has noted that certain alternatives are systematically excluded from consideration. Wagner describes a more restrictive view, on which only contrastive alternatives are relevant for association with focus and for the appropriateness of focus (...) in discourse. I use recent work on the role of contradiction to show that the standard, permissive view derives the same results as the contrast-based view for the basic cases. These basic cases involve a contradiction that prevents us from using them to distinguish the two approaches. I show that when this contradiction is eliminated, evidence of non-contrastive alternatives emerges, supporting the permissive standard view over the restrictive contrast-based one. (shrink)

I initially characterize what I consider to be a growing consensus regarding the relationship between science and nature. This consensus contradicts the definition of scientific activity as a device for the instrumentalization of the natural world – something that it has been since its birth. Next, I criticize the Hegelian notion that science is endowed with an egalitarian politics vis-à-vis nature. Finally, I outline the broad outlines of what could turn out to be an authentic politics of this kind: only (...) possible within a set of polytheistic beliefs. In this environment, the conditions for the deobjectification of nature and the subjectification of the subject would be established – processes without which relations would remain defined in a hierarchical structure. From this change, more egalitarian relations between human beings and nature could be promoted: the basis for sustaining a truly ecological way of life. This would make it possible to overcome the slave mechanism of modern science whose gears take momentum from the spiritual impoverishment of nature. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA careful look at societies facing threat reveals a unique phenomenon in which liberals and conservatives react emotionally and attitudinally in a similar manner, rallying around the conservative flag. Previous research suggests that this rally effect is the result of liberals shifting in their attitudes and emotional responses toward the conservative end. Whereas theories of motivated social cognition provide a motivation-based account of cognitive processes, it remains unclear whether emotional shifts are, in fact, also a motivation-based process. Herein, we propose (...) that under threat, liberals are motivated to feel existential concern about their group’s future vitality to the same extent as conservatives, because this group-based emotion elicits support for ingroup protective action. Within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we tested and found support for this hypothesis both inside and outside the laboratory. We d... (shrink)

Evaluative contexts can be stressful, but relatively little is known about how different individuals who vary in responses to self-evaluation make emotion regulatory choices to cope in these situations. To address this gap, participants who vary in self-esteem gave an impromptu speech, rated how they perceived they had performed on multiple evaluative dimensions, and subsequently chose between disengaging attention from emotional processing and engaging with emotional processing via changing its meaning, while waiting to receive feedback regarding these evaluative dimensions. According (...) to our framework, distraction can offer stronger short-term relief than reappraisal, but, distraction is costly in the long run relative to reappraisal because it does not allow learning from evaluative feedback. We predicted and found that participants with lower self-esteem react defensively to threat of failure by seeking short-term relief via distraction over the long-term benefit of reappraisal, as perceived failure increases. Implications for the understanding of emotion regulation and self-esteem are discussed. (shrink)

The sensitivity of focus to context has often been analyzed in terms of focus-based anaphoric relations between sentences and surrounding discourse. The literature, however, has also noted empirical difficulties for the anaphoric approach, and my goal in the present paper is to investigate what happens if we abandon the anaphoric view altogether. Instead of anaphoric felicity conditions, I propose that focus leads to infelicity only indirectly, when the semantic processes that it feeds—in particular, exhaustification and question formation—make an inappropriate contribution (...) to discourse. I outline such an account, in line with Roberts (In Papers in semantics, Vol. 49 of Working papers in linguistics, 91–136, The Ohio State University, 1996 ) and incorporating recent insights from Büring (In Questions in discourse, Vol. 36 of Current research in the semantics/pragmatics interface, 6–44, Leiden: Brill, 2019 ) and Fox (In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, 403–434, 2019 ). This account, which I motivate on conceptual grounds, has no anaphoric conditions on focus placement and has only an economy condition as a potential felicity condition on focus. However, there are cases where the fine control offered by anaphoricity seems needed, either to block deaccenting that would be licensed by a question or to allow local deaccenting that is not warranted by a question. Such cases challenge non-anaphoric accounts such as the present one and appear to support recent anaphoric proposals such as Schwarzschild (In Making worlds accessible. Essays in honor of Angelika Kratzer, 167–192, 2020 ), Wagner (In The Wiley Blackwell companion to semantics, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020 ), and Goodhue (Journal of Semantics 39: 117–158, 2022 ). I argue that this potential motivation for anaphoricity is only apparent and that to the extent that anaphoric conditions on focus from the literature are not inert, they are in fact harmful. (shrink)

Résumé Ce texte se compose de trois extraits de l’ouvrage de Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye. Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, dans lequel l’auteure explore les représentations des « indigènes » non occidentaux au début du XX e siècle, entre cinéma, culture populaire et ethnographie. Elle met en évidence le rôle des images dans la perception de l’altérité à travers la notion de « troisième œil », soit l’expérience consistant à regarder tout en étant soi-même regardé comme un Autre. (...) Entre récit autobiographique, réflexion sur la relation entre histoire et narration, et une analyse des films de Zora Neale Hurston, ce texte aborde des stratégies de résistance qui déjouent les constructions occidentales du « sauvage ». (shrink)

In our age now deprived of the traditional metaphysical certainties, to study the moral dimension of subjectivity in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit is to make one's object of investigation that which is one of the themes of greatest philosophical interest, precisely owing to its great topicality. Hegel deals with the moral issue in a particularly profound manner, aware both of the contradictory and dramatic aspects of that experience and of the centrality of the motif of the «beyond». On the (...) basis of this interpretative thesis, the analyses of Hegel's text made in this research are devoted to focussing on the experiences of the subject's constitution and legitimization together with the unexpected consequences deriving from the problematic relationship that the consciousness establishes with the self-sufficient immobility of substance. The result is a historiographical and theoretical study that slots effectively into the contemporary debate on the great topicality of Hegel's thought. (shrink)

The news media form major sources of information to the general public in matters of science and health. And yet journalists and experts differ in what they consider as newsworthy and relevant. This article analyses in detail a current affair interview with a health expert reporting on a new research on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Applying Bamberg’s three-level model for positioning analysis, the interview is searched for the stories that speakers introduce, attend to their embedding in the design of questions (...) and answers and examine how their tellers are positioned therein as knowledgeable regarding ADHD. The narratives identified are shown to enable the adopting and shifting between various expert positions including that of the scientific researcher, the advice-giving expert and the more specific identity of the public health clinician. Shifts between these positions are shown to reflect the claims and counter-claims that the interviewee and interviewers are making and backing. These findings are discussed for their implications regarding the use of narratives in presenting science to media audiences. (shrink)