La structure canonique de l’énoncé d’une langue naturelle procède de la diathèse active. Dès lors, toute autre construction syntaxique arborant une structure différente est considérée comme une construction particulière. Envisagé sous cet angle, le causatif fait partie des faits syntaxiques spécifiques. Ainsi, à la lumière du modèle théorique de l’"Échelle de Compacité" « Scale of Compactness » telle qu’élaborée par R.M.W. Dixon, nous nous sommes attelé à montrer les caractéristiques du causatif en koulango, ses aspects morphologique, syntaxique et sémantique. D’abord, (...) la construction de la causation recourt à un verbe lexical, dérivé ou une périphrase en dɛ̀ « faire ». Ensuite, le causatif se distingue syntaxiquement par l’augmentation ou la présence obligatoire d’un argument supplémentaire. Enfin, le domaine sémantique est marqué par l’engagement direct ou indirect du causeur dans la réalisation de l’événement. La construction de l’engagement direct fait appel au procédé lexical tandis que celle de l’indirect prend appui sur le moyen périphrastique en dɛ̀. Le procédé par dérivation peut être rattaché à la causation directe ou indirecte selon le cas. (shrink)

We argue that the meaning of smiles is interpreted from physical/contextual cues, and simulation may simply reinforce the information derived from these cues. We suggest that, contrary to the claim of the SIMS model, positive and negative smiles may invoke similar simulation processes. Finally, we provide alternative explanations for the role of eye contact in the processing of smiles.

Causal claims in physics may have two familiar kinds of support: theoretical and experimental. This paper claims that a rigorous mathematical derivation in a realistic model is necessary, though not sufficient, for full theoretical support. The support is not provided by the derivation itself; but rather it comes from a detailed back-tracing through the derivation, matching the mathematical dependencies, point by point, with details of the causal story. This back-tracing is not enough to pick out the correct causal story, however; (...) a good deal of background causal knowledge is required as well. These claims are illustrated by a detailed example of what causes the Lamb dip in gas lasers. (shrink)

Emoji have been ubiquitous in communication for over a decade, yet how they derive meaning remains underexplored. Here, we examine an aspect fundamental to linguistic meaning‐making: the degree to which emoji have conventional lexicalized meanings and whether that conventionalization affects processing in real‐time. Experiment 1 establishes a range of meaning agreement levels across emoji within a population; Experiment 2 measures accuracy and response times to word‐emoji pairings in a match/mismatch task. In this experiment, we found that accuracy and response time (...) both correlated significantly with the level of population‐wide meaning agreement from Experiment 1, suggesting that lexical access of single emoji may be comparable to that of words, even out of context. This is consistent with theories of a multimodal lexicon that stores links between meaning, structure, and modality in long‐term memory. Altogether, these findings suggest that emoji can allow a range of entrenched, lexicalized representations. (shrink)

Ordinary people often make moral judgments that are consistent with philosophical principles and legal distinctions. For example, they judge killing as worse than letting die, and harm caused as a necessary means to a greater good as worse than harm caused as a side-effect (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Are these patterns of judgment produced by mechanisms specific to the moral domain, or do they derive from other psychological domains? We show that the action/omission and means/side-effect distinctions affect nonmoral representations (...) and provide evidence that their role in moral judgment is mediated by these nonmoral psychological representations. Specifically, the action/omission distinction affects moral judgment primarily via causal attribution, while the means/side-effect distinction affects moral judgment via intentional attribution. We suggest that many of the specific patterns evident in our moral judgments in fact derive from nonmoral psychological mechanisms, and especially from the processes of causal and intentional attribution. (shrink)

This paper reviews and extends ideas of eukaryotization by endosymbiosis. These ideas are put within an historical context of processes that may have led up to eukaryotization and those that seem to have resulted from this process. Our starting point for considering the emergence and development of life as an organized system of chemical reactions should in the first place be in accordance with thermodynamic principles and hence should, as far as possible, be derived from these principles. One trend to (...) be observed is the ever-increasing complexity resulting in several layers of compartmentalization of the reaction system, either spatial (of which the eukaryotic cell is an example), or functional (as in the gradually deepening distinction between metabolic, enzymatic and information-storing functions within the cell). One of the causes of this complexification of living systems will have been the changes in environmental conditions, particularly the geochemical impoverishment of the biosphere during geological history, partly brought about by living systems themselves, and partly by the trend towards increasing efficiency and specificity of the reactions that occur. (shrink)

The recent success in generating live offspring from embryonic stem cell –derived gametes in mice sparked visions of growing tailor-made sperm for men faced with infertility. However, although this development will almost certainly lead to new insights into the processes underlying spermatogenesis and thus in the possible causes of male infertility, it is less certain if deriving sperm from ES cells, which are in turn derived from a sterile man, can make someone a genetic parent. As the gap between newly (...) envisioned reproductive technologies and natural reproduction widens, the question thus needs to be asked if these possible therapies still lead to genetic parenthood. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One major problem in the process of knowledge assimilation is how to deal with inconsistency of new knowledge and the existing knowledge base. In this paper we present a formal, provably correct and yet computational methodology for assimilation of new knowledge into knowledge bases about actions and changes based on the slogan: what is believed is what is explained. Technically, we employ Gelfond and Lifschitz' action description language A to describe domains of actions. The knowledge bases on domains of (...) actions are defined and obtained by a new translation from domain descriptions in A into abductive normal logic programs, where a time dimension is incorporated. The knowledge bases are shown to be both sound and complete with respect to their domain descriptions. In particular, we propose a possible causes approach (PCA) to knowledge assimilation about evolving domains of actions, in contrast to Ginsberg's possible worlds approach (PWA) and Winslett's possible models approach (PMA). A possible cause of new knowledge consists of abduced occurrences of actions and value propositions about the initial state of the domain of actions, that would allow to derive the new knowledge. We show how to compute possible causes with abductive logic programming, and present some techniques to improve search efficiency. We use examples to compare our possible causes approach with syntax-based approaches, such as Ginsberg's possible worlds approach, and semantics-based approaches, such as Winslett's possible models approach, to belief revision/update. (shrink)

Concepts and methods originating in one discipline can distort the structure of another when they are applied to the latter. I exemplify this mostly with reference to systematic biology, especially problems which have arisen in relation to the nature of species. Thus the received views of classes, individuals (which term I suggest be replaced by units to avoid misunderstandings), and sets are all inapplicable, but each can be suitably modified. The concept of fuzzy set was developed to deal with species (...) and I defend its applicability. Taxa at all levels are real and participate in biological processes. Analysis of cause and pattern provides the deep structure in which metabiology is grounded; violation of this principle has led to diverse errors in biology. (shrink)

Lawyers pretend as if the process of application of laws, as well as its outcome, could be an analytic-deductive derivation; especially law students learn that legal decision-making is primarily a logic process. But we know that application of laws depends on analytic-logical as well as on voluntaristic (wilful) elements. Exact relations between these components are unknown and will be unknown. At most German law schools students as the most important imperative tool learn the so called “Auslegung” through the use of (...) theoretical instruments, which do not reflect the interpretation of law practice. These mentioned causes result in irrationality of legal decision-making. In order to achieve more rationality in the process and result of legal decision-making, the contribution makes four suggestions regarding legal methodology and legal education. These proposals consist of few long-term pragmatic approaches to more rationality of legal decision-making. (shrink)

Causal connectionists need to provide an account of causal linkage and of causal direction. This chapter distinguishes between two kinds of causal connection, namely, discrete and continuous. Causal connectionists have a number of options for explaining the linkage between causes and effects in the case of discrete causation. The chapter provides some popular options. If some causation is discrete, and the exercise of causal powers provides a direction to discrete causation, then the causal direction of processes can be derived from (...) the causal direction of discrete interaction. David Hume famously made the claim about the knowledge of causation in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume offers, in defense of his principle, a set of thought‐experiments that seem to show that we can always imagine any event's having a different result from the one we in fact observe. Causal processes like locomotion may provide counterexamples to Hume's Epistemic Principle. (shrink)

The relevance of Kant to Plessner’s work was long all but ignored and there is hardly any mention of Plessner in the Kant literature. The Plessner renaissance beginning in the 1990s, however, has brought with it a stronger focus on the methodological construction of his theory, so that the Kant connection has at least been acknowledged, but the particular relevance of Kant’s Critique of Judgement has not been systematically explicated. In this essay, I investigate the connection between Kant’s notion of (...) reflective—specifically teleological—judgment and Plessner’s theory. I begin by setting out the characteristics of teleological judgment, with two points being of particular importance: the temporal structure of the final cause and Kant’s reference to an understanding other than the human, that is, to an ordering power other than the human. In a second step, I work out Plessner’s conceptualization of the spatiotemporal appearance of organisms and the way he understands the other of human understanding as nature’s—or history’s—historically evolved and mutable capacity for self-order. He arrives at these conclusions by way of a methodologically controlled process of questioning derived from Kant, which he calls the “principle of the open question.”. (shrink)

As an answer to the humanistic, socially oriented critique of the information-processing paradigms used as a conceptual frame for library information science, this article formulates a broader and less objective concept of communication than that of the information-processing paradigm. Knowledge can be seen as the mental phenomenon that documents (combining signs into text, depending on the state of knowledge of the recipient) can cause through interpretation. The examination of these “correct circumstances” is an important part of information science. This article (...) represents the following developments in the concept of information: Information is understood as potential until somebody interprets it. The objective carriers of potential knowledge are signs. Signs need interpretation to release knowledge in the form of interpretants. Interpretation is based on the total semantic network, horizons, worldviews, and experience of the person, including the emotional and social aspects. The realm of meaning is rooted in social-historical as well as embodied evolutionary processes that go beyond computational algorithmically logic. The semantic network derives a decisive aspect of signification from a person’s embodied cultural worldview, which, in turn, derives from, develops, and has its roots in undefined tacit knowledge. To theoretically encompass both the computational and the semantic aspects of document classification and retrieval, we need to combine the cybernetic functionalistic approach with the semiotic pragmatic understanding of meaning as social and embodied. For such a marriage, it is necessary to go into the constructivistic secondorder cybernetics and autopoiesis theory of von Foerster, Maturana, and Luhmann, on the one hand, and the pragmatic triadic semiotics of Peirce in the form of the embodied Biosemiotics, on the other hand. This combination is what I call Cybersemiotics. (shrink)

Flying phobia is a highly prevalent anxiety disorder, which causes sufferers significant distress and life interference. The processes which maintain flying phobia remain poorly understood. A systematic search of the literature was performed to identify what research has been conducted into the processes which may be involved in the fear of flying and whether processes which are believed to maintain other anxiety disorder diagnoses have been investigated in flying phobia. The results of the literature review are presented and related to (...) existing cognitive behavioral theory and research. The results indicate that little research has been conducted into a number of areas considered important in the wider cognitive behavioral literature on anxiety disorders: namely attention, mental imagery, memory, worry, and safety-seeking behaviors. The review proposes a hypothetical model, derived from cognitive behavioral theory, for the processes which may be involved in maintaining flying phobia, and considers a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

While verbs and argument structure constructions are essential for deriving sentence meaning, their roles in sentence processing remains less known. To address this issue, the present study explored how a verb’s lexical properties and the strength of verb–construction associations influence second language (L2) sentence processing. In two self-paced reading experiments, Korean-speaking learners of English and native English speakers read English argument structure constructions containing verbs with varying lexical properties and association strength. In both Experiment 1 (involving the prepositional dative construction) (...) and Experiment 2 (involving the caused-motion construction), only the L2-English learners, and not the native speakers, spent more time integrating the target constructions with verbs of weaker associations than those with stronger associations. Furthermore, the learners exhibited greater difficulty with verb–construction integration when the verbs were less frequent and less concrete; L2 proficiency did not modulate these effects. Our findings support the constructionist approach, suggesting that both verbs and verb–construction associations play an instrumental role in sentence comprehension. (shrink)

Transfer RNAs (tRNAs) represent the most abundant class of RNA molecules in the cell and are key players during protein synthesis and cellular homeostasis. Aberrations in the extensive tRNA biogenesis pathways lead to severe neurological disorders in humans. Mutations in the tRNA splicing endonuclease (TSEN) and its associated RNA kinase cleavage factor polyribonucleotide kinase subunit 1 (CLP1) cause pontocerebellar hypoplasia (PCH), a heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders, that manifest as underdevelopment of specific brain regions typically accompanied by microcephaly, profound motor (...) impairments, and child mortality. Recently, we demonstrated that mutations leading to specific PCH subtypes destabilize TSEN in vitro and cause imbalances of immature to mature tRNA ratios in patient‐derived cells. However, how tRNA processing defects translate to disease on a systems level has not been understood. Recent findings suggested that other cellular processes may be affected by mutations in TSEN/CLP1 and obscure the molecular mechanisms of PCH emergence. Here, we review PCH disease models linked to the TSEN/CLP1 machinery and discuss future directions to study neuropathogenesis. (shrink)

Karen Neander’s (1991a, b) Selected Effects (SE) theory of biological proper functions argues that the function of a trait is the action for which it was “caused” to be selected by natural selection. Her life’s work has already left a lasting impact, however SE theory has yet to be more properly formalized as a conceptual analysis of biological functions. Although other SE theories have sought to build upon Neander’s work (e.g., Garson, 2017), there remains an ambiguity in the theory’s use (...) of causal descriptors. For the success of her successors, delineating the function of causality for SE theory is of utmost importance. Here, I systematize Neander’s theory according to the different senses of causation inherent to it. I argue that structuring SE theory in terms of causal transitivity and intransitivity reveals that Neander’s analysis not only supersedes her detractors but likely exposes areas of vulnerability in others’ SE theory derivatives. (shrink)

Mental disorders in university students are very frequent, therefore higher education institutions have established in-campus mental healthcare centres. These clinics have particular characteristics that differ from other mental health centres, as they report to and represent an educational institution, while at the same time looking after the interests and well-being of patients requesting assistance, thus generating unique bioethical conflicts. Ethics Committees are useful tools to offer support to mental health professionals in making ethical decisions. In order to respond to these (...) issues, it was decided that an Ethics Committee would be created in the mental health clinic of a private university in Mexico City. This article describes the implementation process for this Committee, its duties and scope, as well as the case work and review methodology. A list of the most frequent ethical conflicts is attached, jointly with the ethical analysis of the cases treated throughout the year and a half or work by the Committee. (shrink)

Derived from a rat model, the theory of Sagvolden et al. offers an all-explanatory model of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) anatomy, behaviour, and cognition as being caused predominantly by a hypo-dopaminergic mesolimbic (affecting the mesocortical and nigrostriatal) system, leading to abnormal reward and extinction processes. This model suffers from oversimplification and reductionism, reflecting the limitations of the use of animal models to explain higher mental disorders.

Minsky proposed classifying firms in three categories: hedge finance units which borrow no more than they are able to service in interest and principal out of operating cash flows, speculative finance units which are overleveraged to the point where they can service interest on their debt out of operating cash flows, but cannot repay the principal, and thus must continually roll over their existing debt, and Ponzi finance units, whose operating cash flows are inadequate even to service interest on their (...) debt. In Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis protracted prosperity leads endogenously to firms overleveraging themselves and transforming a market dominated by hedge finance into one dominated by speculative and Ponzi finance. Since Ponzi finance units are forced to sell off assets to service their existing interest payments, once the market is sufficiently dominated by Ponzi finance units, this creates an oversupply of assets offered for sale, and the resulting debt deflation causes a financial crisis and drastic shortage of liquidity. It appears this crisis state can be brought about by a deceptively low critical mass of Ponzi and speculative finance units. This paper uses a large 2002–2009 quarterly data set of all publicly traded North American firms and foreign firms traded on North American exchanges, a total of 8,905 stocks. Financial ratios are used to classify these firms in each quarter according to Minsky’s FIH categories. Market value is used to weight the categories, and average betas are computed as measures of volatility. Results provide dramatic support for the FIH. The FIH is then reinterpreted in terms of Austrian business cycle theory, which depends on inflationary credit expansion to drive the unsustainable prosperity. According to Minsky’s FIH, unsustainable prosperity emerges endogenously as long periods of economic expansion make borrowers and lenders alike more willing to engage in investment activities for which they fail to see the inherent risk. It becomes clear that this process is amplified and exacerbated by credit expansion. Minsky’s FIH helps flesh out some of the missing dynamics of the malinvestment liquidation phase of ABC theory, and the two views turn out to be surprisingly complementary. (shrink)

Language sciences have long maintained a close and supposedly necessary coupling between the infinite productivity of the human language faculty and recursive grammars. Because of the formal equivalence between recursion and non-recursive iteration; recursion, in the technical sense, is never a necessary component of a generative grammar. Contrary to some assertions this equivalence extends to both center-embedded relative clauses and hierarchical parse trees. Inspection of language usage suggests that recursive rule components in fact contribute very little, and likely nothing significant, (...) to linguistic creativity. Further than this, if the productivity of human language is considered as not rigidly bound, but not infinite, then the need for any sort of iteration in generative grammars vanishes and can be replaced with a Non-iterative Explicit Alternatives Rule grammar. The knock-on effects of dispensing with recursive grammar components are: that language diversity can simply be based on rule and lexicon combinatorics with no potentially infinite dimensions derived from recursive or iterative components of rules; the oddity of a vast, multiply-infinite competence set of ‘grammatical but unacceptable’ productions is gone; and the development of a language faculty based on rules that eschew iterative rule components avoids any need for explaining ‘special’ mechanisms. On the broader front of searching for the mechanisms of mind, our analysis can be similarly applied to the proposals for a recursive basis for mind as an explanation for humanity’s great leap forward. (shrink)

According to behavioural theories deriving from pragmatism, gestalt psychology, existentialism, and ecopsychology, knowledge about the world is gained by intentional action followed by learning. In terms of the neurodynamics described here, if the intending of an act comes to awareness through reafference, it is perceived as a cause. If the consequences of an act come to awareness through proprioception and exteroception, they are perceived as an effect. A sequence of such states of awareness comprises consciousness, which can grow in complexity (...) to include self-awareness. Intentional acts do not require awareness, whereas voluntary acts require self-awareness. Awareness of the action/perception cycle provides the cognitive metaphor of linear causality as an agency. Humans apply this metaphor to objects and events in the world to predict and control them, and to assign social responsibility. Thus, linear causality is the bedrock of technology and social contracts. Complex material systems with distributed non-linear feedback, such as brains and their neural and behavioural activities, cannot be explained by linear causality. They can be said to operate by circular causality without agency. The nature of self-control is described by breaking the circle into a forward limb, the intentional self, and a feedback limb, awareness of the self and its actions. The two limbs are realized through hierarchically stratified kinds of neural activity. Intentional acts are produced by the self-organized microscopic neural activity of cortical and subcortical components in the brain. Awareness supervenes as a macroscopic ordering state, that defers action until the self-organizing microscopic process has reached closure in reflective prediction. Agency, which is removed from the causal hierarchy by the appeal to circularity, re-appears as a metaphor by which events in the world are anthropomorphized, making them appear subject to human control. (shrink)

Rumination is a process of uncontrolled, narrowly focused negative thinking that is often self-referential, and that is a hallmark of depression. Despite its importance, little is known about its cognitive mechanisms. Rumination can be thought of as a specific, constrained form of mind-wandering. Here, we introduce a cognitive model of rumination that we developed on the basis of our existing model of mind-wandering. The rumination model implements the hypothesis that rumination is caused by maladaptive habits of thought. These habits of (...) thought are modeled by adjusting the number of memory chunks and their associative structure, which changes the sequence of memories that are retrieved during mind-wandering, such that during rumination the same set of negative memories is retrieved repeatedly. The implementation of habits of thought was guided by empirical data from an experience sampling study in healthy and depressed participants. On the basis of this empirically derived memory structure, our model naturally predicts the declines in cognitive task performance that are typically observed in depressed patients. This study demonstrates how we can use cognitive models to better understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying rumination and depression. (shrink)

This article derives from the Buddhist Nikāya Suttas the idea that fear has an intentional object that is best analysed in anticipatory terms. Something is feared, I argue, if construed as dangerous, where to construe something as dangerous is to anticipate it will cause certain unwanted effects. To help explain what this means, I appeal to the concept of formal objects in the philosophy of emotions and to predictive processing accounts of perception. I demonstrate how this analysis of fear can (...) do exegetical work in the context of the Nikāya Suttas, and respond to philosophical issues concerning the relation between the intentional and anticipatory dimensions of fear; the relevant anticipated effects of feared objects; and whether fearing subjects necessarily know they anticipate unwanted effects. I also draw an analogy to allostatic sensations to engage issues concering how the anticipatory dimension of fear relates to the motivational. (shrink)

Standard derivations of the Bell inequalities assume a common-commoncause-system that is a common screener-off for all correlations and some additional assumptions concerning locality and no-conspiracy. In a recent paper Graßhoff et al., "The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science", 56, 663–680 ) Bell inequalities have been derived via separate common causes assuming perfect correlations between the events. In the paper it will be shown that the assumptions of this separate-common-cause-type derivation of the Bell inequalities in the case of perfect (...) correlations can be reduced to the assumptions of a common-common-cause-system-type derivation. However, in the case of non-perfect correlations a non-reducible separate-common-cause-type derivation of some Bell-like inequalities can be given. The violation of these Bell-like inequalities proves Szabo's ) conjecture concerning the non-existence of a local, non-conspiratorial, separate-common-cause-model for a δ-neighborhood of perfect EPR correlations. (shrink)

The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning (...) or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual-process models of cognitive architecture. (shrink)

The mystery of the rise of the affirmative, declarative (periphrastic) use of do in the thirteenth century and its decline by the start of the eighteenth century remains one of the principal unsolved problems for linguists working in historical research. Some of the main arguments on the origins of do discuss the needs of poetic rhyme (e.g., Engblom 1938), the positioning of the adverb (e.g., Ogura 1993), the elimination of awkward consonant clusters (e.g., Stein 1990), and the ambiguities of object (...) referents in questions (Hudson 1997), much of the earlier historical research relying on hypotheses relating to internal problems of the system. The present study examines the early causative origins of do, viewed from a diachronic, construction-based approach, and offers an explanation in which the reanalysis and subsequent loss of do as a declarative, affirmative auxiliary took place via a process known as hyperanalysis (Croft 2000), resulting in the gradual process of co-lexicalization of the causative verb meaning within the semantics of the main verb across an ever-increasing range of main verb environments. (shrink)

Sarcopenia is a process of progressive aging‐associated loss of skeletal muscle mass (SMM) recognized as a serious global health issue contributing to frailty and increased all‐cause mortality. Exercise and nutritional interventions (particularly intake of dairy products and milk) demonstrate good efficacy, safety, and broad applicability. Here, we propose that at least some of the well‐documented favorable effects of milk and milk‐derived protein supplements on SMM might be mediated by D‐galactose, a monosaccharide present in large quantities in milk in the form (...) of disaccharide lactose (milk sugar). We suggest that ingestion of dairy products results in exposure to D‐galactose in concentrations metabolized primarily via the Leloir pathway with the potential to (i) promote anabolic signaling via maintenance of growth factor (e.g., insulin‐like growth factor 1 [IGF‐1]) receptor mature glycosylation patterns; and (ii) provide extracellular (liver glycogen) and intracellular substrates for short (muscle glycolysis) and long‐term (muscle glycogen, intramyocellular lipids) energy availability. Additionally, D‐galactose might optimize the metabolic function of skeletal muscles by increasing mitochondrial content and stimulating glucose and fatty acid utilization. The proposed potential of D‐galactose to promote the accretion of SMM is discussed in the context of its therapeutic potential in sarcopenia. (shrink)

Receiving a diagnosis of cancer can be devastating. Cancer continues to be one of the most feared diagnoses, and experiencing pain is a major fear for people diagnosed with cancer. Cancer pain is complex in aetiology and can be acute or chronic and can be caused by various compression, ischaemic, neuropathic or inflammatory processes. Many people with cancer will experience excruciating pain, which is often underreported and undertreated. The reasons for this are complex and include various factors including fears and (...) beliefs held by patients. Cognitive factors are important modulators of pain and the appraisals, meanings and beliefs that people have in relation to illness, cancer, and pain, have implications in regard to help-seeking behaviours and the coping strategies people adopt. Cancer pain can impact a range of psycho-social factors across its course. Cancer pain relates to higher rates of psychological distress, anxiety and low mood, and the perception of pain intensity is, in turn, influenced by psychological factors. Cancer pain can negatively affect psychological health, and psycho-social factors can affect the pain experience. It has been suggested that people with a life-limiting illness experience ‘total pain’, and this can encompass psychological, social, practical, spiritual domains. Research demonstrates that cancer is predominantly an illness affecting older people, yet there is a higher risk of under-treated pain in this age group and there is a paucity of research into the subjective experiences of older people managing their cancer pain. Many older people are required to self-manage cancer pain at home as outpatients, due to drivers to keep people out of inpatient care, such as the high healthcare costs of inpatient treatment, and patients wanting to manage their illness, and die, at home. Our own research into this area found that the self-management of cancer pain involves a sequential and temporal process, which centres on perceptions of control. We describe how the older people in our study experienced a perceived loss of control, followed by a sense of gaining control over pain through various experience of certain internal and external factors. The assessment and treatment of physical pain should be done in combination with assessment and treatment of psycho-social and spiritual pain, and interventions for cancer pain need to focus on increasing positive affect and reducing helplessness. No person should suffer with poorly controlled pain and we argue for the need for further research in this area to ensure adequate treatment for all.Clinical Implications: Assessment and treatment of physical pain in people with cancer needs to be conducted in combination with assessment and treatment of psycho-social issues and spiritual pain. Psychological and behavioural approaches have strong evidence supporting their efficacy for reducing cancer pain. Interventions should target helplessness and focus on increasing positive affect through positive psychological states including fighting spirit and resilience. Person-centred interventions that focus on helping people with the search for meaning may help those with cancer pain derive positive benefits. (shrink)

Imagination can be seen 1) as a mental faculty common to all people to some degree and 2) as an important principle in literary theory. We must think of imagination not as a simple power but a complex series of processes, involving the impression-idea-relationship and memory. The data derived thus are still bound to their epistemological context, and only imagination provides the possibility to transcend the space-time-determination and the cause-effect-relationship, so that it allows a freer display of the sense-data. This (...) structural and functional analysis of imagination tries to show its immense importance in everyday-life as well as in literary production and reception. (shrink)

This chaper discusses homelessness from the perspective of the corporeal consciousness. Psychologists such as Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud report and discuss a strange psychological state of Unheimliche. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan elaborate and analyze this alienating strangeness in our experience of the self and the world. Since the German word Heim means home, Unheimliche refers to a state of homelessness or unhomeliness. Unheimliche is often translated into English as uncanniness. Uncanniness refers to the disturbing and (...) puzzling experience of familiarly unfamiliar images or scenes. It is a mode of experience that reveals the in-between-ness of human existence and the primordial anxiety that derive from the dual nature of the body, i.e., the body as both an object of perception and a subject of feeling. From the perspective of the fundamental corporeality and the externalizing intimacy of human existence and consciousness, the author will argue that lived experience of uncanniness or homelessness is one of the intriguing aspects of human psychology and humane existence, caused by the continuous cycle of the familiarizing and the alienating processes of the intrinsically embodied mind. The conscious mind is living in this dual image of going home and going out to the world as it experiences the familiarly unfamiliar self that is intrinsically corporeal. The author will explain and analyze the homelessness and uncanniness from the viewpoint of the duality of corporeal consciousness. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold once declared that there were two “spiritual dangers” in not owning a farm, with one being “the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace”. The dangers that Leopold was signaling were various, of course, but in that essay they primarily gathered around the problems caused by human distance from nature’s operations, the manners in which we can become divorced from the roots of life by a failure to (...) recognize the processes from which food and heat derive. However, Leopold did not repudiate the technologies involved in running a farm-house, and he clearly recognized that significant paradoxes are involved in the use of... (shrink)

In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processes. The resulting account (...) of natural kinds as clusters of core causal properties that give rise to clusters of derivative properties enables us to distinguish genuine natural kinds from non-natural kinds. For instance, it enables us to say why some of the purely conventional categories derived from the social domain do not correspond to natural kinds, though other social categories may. (shrink)

Traditional methods for deriving property-based representations of concepts from text have focused on either extracting only a subset of possible relation types, such as hyponymy/hypernymy (e.g., car is-a vehicle) or meronymy/metonymy (e.g., car has wheels), or unspecified relations (e.g., car—petrol). We propose a system for the challenging task of automatic, large-scale acquisition of unconstrained, human-like property norms from large text corpora, and discuss the theoretical implications of such a system. We employ syntactic, semantic, and encyclopedic information to guide our extraction, (...) yielding concept-relation-feature triples (e.g., car be fast, car require petrol, car cause pollution), which approximate property-based conceptual representations. Our novel method extracts candidate triples from parsed corpora (Wikipedia and the British National Corpus) using syntactically and grammatically motivated rules, then reweights triples with a linear combination of their frequency and four statistical metrics. We assess our system output in three ways: lexical comparison with norms derived from human-generated property norm data, direct evaluation by four human judges, and a semantic distance comparison with both WordNet similarity data and human-judged concept similarity ratings. Our system offers a viable and performant method of plausible triple extraction: Our lexical comparison shows comparable performance to the current state-of-the-art, while subsequent evaluations exhibit the human-like character of our generated properties. (shrink)

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, (...) i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units. (shrink)

This paper considers the Cartesian theatre as a metaphor for the virtual reality models that the brain uses to make inferences about the world. This treatment derives from our attempts to understand dreaming and waking consciousness in terms of free energy minimization. The idea here is that the Cartesian theatre is not observed by an internal audience but furnishes a theatre in which fictive narratives and fantasies can be rehearsed and tested against sensory evidence. We suppose the brain is driven (...) by the imperative to infer the causes of its sensory samples; in much the same way as scientists are compelled to test hypotheses about experimental data. This recapitulates Helmholtz's notion of unconscious inference and Gregory's treatment of perception as hypothesis testing. However, we take this further and consider the active sampling of the world as the gathering of confirmatory evidence for hypotheses based on our virtual reality. The ensuing picture of consciousness resolves a number of seemingly hard problems in consciousness research and is internally consistent with current thinking in systems neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology. In this formalism, there is a dualism that distinguishes between the process of inference and the process that entails inference. This separation is reflected by the distinction between beliefs and the physical brain states that encode them. This formal approach allows us to appeal to simple but fundamental theorems in information theory and statistical thermodynamics that dissolve some of the mysterious aspects of consciousness. (shrink)

The causal nature of evolution is one of the central topics in the philosophy of biology. The issue concerns whether equations used in evolutionary genetics point to some causal processes or purely phenomenological patterns. To address this question the present article builds well-defined causal models that underlie standard equations in evolutionary genetics. These models are based on minimal and biologically plausible hypotheses about selection and reproduction, and generate statistics to predict evolutionary changes. The causal reconstruction of the evolutionary principles shows (...) adaptive evolution as a genuine causal process, where fitness and selection are both causes of evolution. 1 Introduction2 The Philosophical Puzzle3 Causal Models4 Causal Foundations of Evolutionary Genetics4.1 Univariate quantitative genetics model4.1.1 The causal graph4.1.2 Structural equations4.1.3 Deriving evolutionary transition functions4.2 One-locus population genetics model5 Evolution as a Causal Process5.1 Selection as a causal process5.2 Causes of evolutionary change6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Recent papers by a number of philosophers have been concerned with the question of whether natural selection is a causal process, and if it is, whether the causes of selection are properties of individuals or properties of populations. I shall argue that much confusion in this debate arises because of a failure to distinguish between causal productivity and causal relevance. Causal productivity is a relation that holds between events connected via continuous causal processes, while causal relevance is a relationship that (...) can hold between a variety of different kinds of facts and the events that counterfactually depend upon them. I shall argue that the productive character of natural selection derives from the aggregation of individual processes in which organisms live, reproduce and die. At the same time, a causal explanation of the distribution of traits will necessarily appeal both to causally relevant properties of individuals and to causally relevant properties that exist only at the level of the population. (shrink)

The causal nature of evolution is one of the central topics in the philosophy of biology. The issue concerns whether equations used in evolutionary genetics point to some causal processes or purely phenomenological patterns. To address this question the present article builds well-defined causal models that underlie standard equations in evolutionary genetics. These models are based on minimal and biologically plausible hypotheses about selection and reproduction, and generate statistics to predict evolutionary changes. The causal reconstruction of the evolutionary principles shows (...) adaptive evolution as a genuine causal process, where fitness and selection are both causes of evolution. 1 Introduction2 The Philosophical Puzzle3 Causal Models4 Causal Foundations of Evolutionary Genetics4.1 Univariate quantitative genetics model4.1.1 The causal graph4.1.2 Structural equations4.1.3 Deriving evolutionary transition functions4.2 One-locus population genetics model5 Evolution as a Causal Process5.1 Selection as a causal process5.2 Causes of evolutionary change6 Conclusion. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

We address an open problem in the philosophy of artificial intelligence (AI): how to justify the epistemic attitudes we have towards the trustworthiness of AI systems. The problem is important, as providing reasons to believe that AI systems are worthy of trust is key to appropriately rely on these systems in human-AI interactions. In our approach, we consider the trustworthiness of an AI as a time-relative, composite property of the system with two distinct facets. One is the actual trustworthiness of (...) the AI and the other is the perceived trustworthiness of the system as assessed by its users while interacting with it. We show that credences, namely, beliefs we hold with a degree of confidence, are the appropriate attitude for capturing the facets of the trustworthiness of an AI over time. Then, we introduce a reliabilistic account providing justification to the credences in the trustworthiness of AI, which we derive from Tang’s probabilistic theory of justified credence. Our account stipulates that a credence in the trustworthiness of an AI system is justified if and only if it is caused by an assessment process that tends to result in a high proportion of credences for which the actual and perceived trustworthiness of the AI are calibrated. This approach informs research on the ethics of AI and human-AI interactions by providing actionable recommendations on how to measure the reliability of the process through which users perceive the trustworthiness of the system, investigating its calibration to the actual levels of trustworthiness of the AI as well as users’ appropriate reliance on the system. (shrink)

Qualitative-consciousness arises at the sensory level of olfactory processing and pervades our experience of smells to the extent that qualitative character is maintained whenever we are aware of undergoing an olfactory experience. Building upon the distinction between Access and Phenomenal Consciousness the paper offers a nuanced distinction between Awareness and Qualitative-consciousness that is applicable to olfaction in a manner that is conceptual precise and empirically viable. Mounting empirical research is offered substantiating the applicability of the distinction to olfaction and showing (...) that olfactory qualitative-consciousness can occur without awareness, but any olfactory state that we are aware of being in is always qualitative. Evidence that olfactory sensory states have a qualitatively character in the absence of awareness derives from research on mate selection, the selection of social preference for social interaction and acquaintances, as well as the role of olfactory deficits in causing affective disorders. Furthermore, the conservation of secondary processing measures of olfactory valence during olfactory imagery experiments provides verification that olfactory awareness is always qualitatively conscious—all olfactory consciousness smells phenomenal. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

An increasing body of institutional research has examined organizations’ response to conflicting institutional logics, but few studies have looked into how cross-sector organizational actors experiencing institutional complexity strategize their response mechanisms to create value in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR). We conduct a comparative case study of nine social partnerships between multinational companies (MNCs) and nonprofits in China. We identify a partnership logic among the value-creating partnerships where partners guided by an either/and mindset take joint ownership of the (...) social or sustainability issue/cause and integrate it into their core set of activities and goals. By contrast, the less successful partnerships guided by an either/or mindset pursue a substitution logic in which the issue and project are kept separate and marginalized from core activities and goals. We contribute to an understanding of the value creation of cross-sector social partnerships by revealing the institutional embeddedness of such partnerships and deriving a process model of collaborative value creation through institutional works in social partnerships. (shrink)

The pressure of oversight and scrutiny in the business-to-business purchasing process has the potential to cause psychological distress in purchasing professionals, giving rise to apprehensions about being ethically inappropriate. Utilizing depth interviews with public sector purchasing professionals in a phenomenological approach, the authors develop the notion of ethical purchasing dissonance to explain the psychological distress. An inductively derived conceptual framework is presented for ethical purchasing dissonance that explores its potential antecedents and consequences; illustrative propositions are presented, and managerial implications are (...) discussed. (shrink)

Is cognition an exclusive property of the individual or can groups have a mind of their own? We explore this question from the perspective of complex adaptive systems. One of the principal insights from this line of work is that rules that govern behavior at one level of analysis can cause qualitatively different behavior at higher levels. We review a number of behavioral studies from our lab that demonstrate how groups of people interacting in real-time can self-organize into adaptive, problem-solving (...) group structures. A number of principles are derived concerning the critical features of such “distributed” information processing systems. We suggest that while cognitive science has traditionally focused on the individual, cognitive processes may manifest at many levels including the emergent group-level behavior that results from the interaction of multiple agents and their environment. (shrink)

Corporate Philanthropy is multi-dimensional, differs between sectors and involves both individual and organisational decision-making to achieve business and social goals. However, the CP literature characteristically focuses on strategic decisions made by business leaders and ignores the role of employees, especially those in lower status and lower paid positions. To redress this imbalance, we conducted a qualitative study of employees’ involvement in CP processes in ten workplaces in the South East of England to identify whether and how they are involved in (...) CP decision-making and to capture their perspective on the nature of CP and the benefits generated by such activities. We specifically chose to study workplaces where employees are involved in the actual execution of the CP strategy, prioritising companies with a visible presence on the high street. The results illustrate the benefits of involving employees in CP decision-making, which we argue derives in part from the ‘liminal-like states’ that typify CP activities organised by shop floor staff, involving the temporary overturning of hierarchies, humanising of workplaces and opportunities for lower level staff to prioritise their personal philanthropic preferences and signal their charitable identity to colleagues and customers. Whilst the data also suggest that CP decision-making remains predominantly top-down and driven by profit-oriented goals, we conclude that employees should be involved in choosing charitable causes as well as in designing and implementing workplace fundraising, in order to maximise the advantages of CP for the company and for wider society. (shrink)

: American society traditionally has assumed a univocal notion of "death," largely because we have only one word for it and, until recently, have not needed a more nuanced notion. The reality of death-processes does not preclude the reality of death events. Linguistically, "death" can be understood only as an event; there are other words for the process. Our death vocabulary should expand to reflect multiple events along the process from sickness to decomposition. Depending on context, some death-related events may (...) constitute a more obvious discontinuity than others and more justifiably may be considered "death" within that context. There is no reason to assume a priori that there must be an overarching, unitary concept of death from which all diagnostic criteria must derive. Regarding organ transplantation, the relevant question is not "Is the patient dead?" but rather "Can organs X, Y, Z . . . be removed without causing or hastening death or harming the patient?". (shrink)