Over the past forty years, scientists have developed models of human reasoning based on the principle that human languages and classical logic involve fundamentally different concepts and different methods of interpretation. In The Emergence of Meaning Stephen Crain challenges this view, arguing that a common logical nativism underpins human language and logical reasoning. The approach which Crain takes is twofold. Firstly, he uncovers the underlying meanings of logical expressions and logical principles that appear in typologically different languages - (...) English and Mandarin Chinese - and he demonstrates that these meanings and principles directly correspond to the expressions and structures of classical logic. Secondly he reports the findings of new experimental studies which investigate how children acquire the logical concepts of these languages. A step-by-step introduction to logic and a comprehensive review of the literature on child language acquisition make this work accessible to those unfamiliar with either field. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, (...) early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax. (shrink)

In just a few years, children achieve a stable state of linguistic competence, making them effectively adults with respect to: understanding novel sentences, discerning relations of paraphrase and entailment, acceptability judgments, etc. One familiar account of the language acquisition process treats it as an induction problem of the sort that arises in any domain where the knowledge achieved is logically underdetermined by experience. This view highlights the cues that are available in the input to children, as well as childrens skills (...) in extracting relevant information and forming generalizations on the basis of the data they receive. Nativists, on the other hand, contend that language-learners project beyond their experience in ways that the input does not even suggest. Instead of viewing language acqusition as a special case of theory induction, nativists posit a Universal Grammar, with innately specified linguistic principles of grammar formation. The nature versus nurture debate continues, as various poverty of stimulus arguments are challenged or supported by developments in linguistic theory and by findings from psycholinguistic investigations of child language. In light of some recent challenges to nativism, we rehearse old poverty-of stimulus arguments, and supplement them by drawing on more recent work in linguistic theory and studies of child language. (shrink)

This paper investigates scalar implicatures and downward entailment in child English. In previous experimental work we have shown that adults’ computation of scalar implicatures is sensitive to entailment relations. For instance, when the disjunction operator or occurs in positive contexts, an implicature of exclusivity arises. By contrast when the disjunction operator occurs within the scope of a downward entailing linguistic expression, no implicature of exclusivity is computed. Investigations on children’s computation of scalar implicatures in the same contexts have led to (...) a slightly different picture. In particular it has proven difficult to demonstrate that children compute scalar implicatures (in non- downward entailing contexts) using the Truth Value Judgment task, a technique that has been used successfully in showing children’s sensitivity to other semantic phenomena. Adopting a different experimental technique called the Felicity Judgment task, however, we demonstrated children’s knowledge of the prerequisites to the computation of scalar implicatures (Chierchia, Crain, Guasti, Gualmini and Meroni, 2001). (shrink)

We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...) disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross-linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them. (shrink)

Many experimental investigations of human sentence processing have shown that listeners do not wait until they reach the end of a sentence before they begin to compute an interpretation. Rather, listeners incrementally make commitments to an interpretation as the linguistic input unfolds in real time. A consequence of this property of sentence comprehension is that it sometimes gives rise to so-called garden-path effects. In the presence of a temporary ambiguity, listeners may assign an interpretation that later turns out to be (...) unviable and must, therefore, be abandoned in favor of an alternative interpretation. Various explanations have been proposed to account for garden- path effects that have been documented in certain experimental contexts (Frazier and Rayner, 1982; Trueswell and Tanenhaus, 1994; MacDonald, 1994, among others). One line of research has claimed, however, that the referential contexts in which sentences ordinarily appear often mitigate, or even completely eliminate, garden-path effects. This is the Referential Theory proposed by Crain and Steedman (1985) and extended by Altmann and Steedman (1988). According to the Referential Theory, people experience garden-path effects primarily when sentences are interpreted outside any referential context or in infelicitous contexts. If the Referential Theory is correct, garden-path effects are largely experimental artifacts. Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip, (1999) suggests that children might not be sensitive to features of the referential context to the same.. (shrink)

Studies of adult sentence processing have established that the referential context in which sentences are presented plays an immediate role in their interpretation, such that referential features of the context mitigate, and even eliminate, so-called ‘garden-path’ effects. Perceivers experience garden path effects almost exclusively when they are attempting to parse locally ambiguous linguistic structures in the absence of context, or in infelicitous contexts. The finding that the referential context ordinarily obviates garden path effects is compelling evidence for the Referential Theory (...) of parsing, advanced originally by Crain and Steedman, (1985) and extended in Altmann and Steedman (1988). Recent work by Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill and Logrip (1999) suggests, however, that children may not be as sensitive as adults to contextual factors in resolving structural ambiguities. This conclusion is not anticipated by the Referential Theory and, worse still, it runs counter to the Continuity Assumption, which supposes that children and adults access the same cognitive mechanisms in processing language (Crain 1991; 2002; Crain and Wexler 2000; Pinker 1984). The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the observations that have led researchers to conclude that children, unlike adults, may lack sensitivity to referential contexts in comprehension in certain circumstances. Adopting a research strategy which we call the method of subtraction, we present evidence that the performance systems of children and adult differ only minimally; that children are sensitive to the referential context; and that children make use of contextual factors to resolve structural ambiguities in on-line sentence interpretation. (shrink)

Poverty -of-stimulus arguments have taken new ground recently, augmented by experimental findings from th e study of child language. In this paper, we briefly review two variants of the poverty-of-stimulus argument that have received empirical support from studies of child language; then we examine a third argument of this kind in more detail. The case under discussion involves the structural notion of c-command as it pertains to children’s interpretation of disjunction in the scope of negation.

In this paper I argue that the trolley method of moral philosophy has three shortcomings not yet adequately addressed in the literature. First, trolley problems highlight high stakes ethical decisions. These decisions do not represent the majority of ethical decisions made by most people, and thus, the trolley method ignores most of moral life. Second, the trolley method operates by way of a faux-anonymization of moral agents. This process leads to descriptions of moral agents being unwittingly supplied by those to (...) whom the problems are presented and thereby the formation of a paradigmatic moral agent which excludes a considerable number of real world moral persons. Lastly, the trolley method mischaracterizes what most moral decision-making is like by presenting a moral agent's decision as isolated, uninfluenced, and made with full self-awareness. (shrink)

This chapter discusses some of the causal forces that enable young children to acquire language. It demonstrates that these causal forces are not readily apparent in the input that children experience. This discussion of the causal forces of language and the poverty of the stimulus focuses on just a fragment of human language. The chapter discusses four kinds of expressions. In English, these expressions are the words some, any, and or, and question words such as who and what. Although these (...) expressions appear to be unrelated, the chapter shows that they are all cut from the same cloth – they are governed by the same linguistic principles, which determine both their distributional properties and their meanings. Like any and or, linguists have proposed principles that amalgamate information‐seeking questions and their statement counterparts. The chapter describes the important role played by cross‐linguistic facts as a source of information about the deep forces that shape language. (shrink)

This study is concerned with the properties of the disjunction operator, or, and the acquisition of these properties by English-speaking children. Previous research has concluded that adult truth conditions for logical connectives are acquired relatively late in the course of language development. With particular reference to disjunction, the results of several studies have led to two claims. First, it has been argued that the full range of truth-conditions associated with inclusive-or is not initially available to children; instead, children are supposed (...) to interpret disjunction using the truth conditions that are associated with exclusive-or (e.g., Beilin and Lust 1975; Braine and Rumain 1981, 1983; Paris 1973). A second, related claim is that even when children respond as if they have access to the complete range of truth conditions, their responses result from the failure to distinguish or from and (Paris, 1973). (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the findings of two case studies of children’s semantic competence using sentences that contain the universal quantifier every. Children’s understanding of universal quantification, or lack of it, is probably the most controversial topic in current research on young children’s semantic competence. Even among researchers who draw upon linguistic theory in their investigations of child language, there seems to be a general consensus that preschool and even school-age children make ‘errors’ in interpreting sentences with the universal (...) quantifier, and that these ‘errors’ reveal non-adult grammatical knowledge of universal quantification. However, a handful of studies have recently demonstrated children’s knowledge of several aspects of universal quantification, and the present paper adds to that growing body of work. The studies we discuss assess preschool children’s awareness that the two arguments of the universal quantifier have different interpretative properties, because the restrictor of every (NP) is downward entailing, whereas its nuclear scope (VP) is upward entailing. The experimental findings of the present studies are difficult to reconcile on recent analyses that attribute non-adult grammatical knowledge to children. However, the findings fit well with the view that children’s grammars are essentially the same as those of adults, as the Continuity Assumption supposes. (shrink)

The Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and the Vatican Observatory have jointly sponsored a series of conferences exploring the overarching question: How can we conceive a personal God creating and active within the universe described by the natural sciences? The volumes include significant contributions to the field, although I highlight two important weaknesses: (1) theology is not adequately respected as an active conversation partner capable of advancing the agenda under discussion; and (2) insufficient attention is paid to the (...) many scientific and philosophical uncertainties that plague the overall project. (shrink)

This paper investigates the influence of contrastive stress in resolving potential semantic ambiguities. The sentences under investigation contain the focus operator only. Sentences with only have three main properties: (a) some sentential element is typically in focus, (b) the speaker presupposes that a set of alternatives to the focus element (the contrast set) has previously been introduced in the context; and (c) the speaker makes the assertion that the focus element has some unique property which other members of the reference (...) set lack. Previous literature on focus has concluded that stress plays a role in the interpretation of only-sentences in many natural languages, including English (Rooth, 1992). In processing terms, this suggests that contrastive stress could immediately determine which NP bears the semantic focus (and therefore the NP that presupposes a contrast set in the context). On this scenario, the processing cost associated with contrastive stress should be no greater than the cost associated with neutral stress. (shrink)

We think this is Chomsky's view, and also the view he finds in certain historical figures who participated in debates about innate ideas. Chomsky's contribution to the traditional debate lies in (i) his articulation and defense of a detailed nativist program in linguistics, showing _how_ experience plays only a restricted role in a broadly rationalist account of the acquisition of linguistic knowledge, and (ii) the framework this program suggests, given its empirical success, for the more general study of human cognition. (...) Linguistics -- where this includes not just the study of expressions and their properties, but also related work in psycholinguistics -- provides a case study of how to investigate _which aspects of_ human thought are due largely to human nature. Earlier chapters have addressed (i). We'll try to give the flavor of (ii) by discussing some historically important examples, and then by reviewing some recent discoveries, inspired by the Chomskian approach to human psychology, about the properties of linguistic expressions that have a direct bearing on logical reasoning. . (shrink)

Several recent papers propose that child and adult grammars differ in their underlying representations of universal quantification, e.g., “every” in English. These proposals attempt to explain children’s nonadult responses, in certain circumstances, in response to sentences that contain the universal quantifier. Blaming children’s nonadult behavior on their grammars is questionable, however, in view of the restrictiveness of the theory of Universal Grammar, which tightly constrains the hypothesis space children can navigate in the course of language development. The restrictiveness of the (...) initial state has led to the Continuity Hypothesis, i.e., the proposal that child language can differ from the local language only in ways in which distinct adult languages can differ from each other. Advocates of the Continuity Hypothesis point out that violations of universal constraints in children’s grammars would have far reaching negative consequences, resulting in myriad ‘errors’ by children both in production and comprehension. Before embracing an analysis that involves such violations, therefore, evidence that children make such errors is needed. In this paper, we draw out the implications of a recent account of children’s nonadult interpretation of universal quantification, by Geurts (2004). We demonstrate that children commit few, if any, any of the ‘errors’ that are predicted by the account, beyond the original nonadult behavior that it was specifically designed to explain. Moreover, the proposed analysis of children’s nonadult grammar is demonstrably inconsistent with their proven semantic competence in interpreting a variety of utterances containing the universal quantifier, alone and in combination with other logical expressions (e.g., disjunction, negative determiner phrases, etc.). These findings buttress previous alternative accounts of the observed differences between children and adults, thereby leaving the Continuity Hypothesis unscathed. (shrink)

This study investigates the influence of contrastive stress on the on-line interpretation of ambiguous spoken sentences containing the focus operator only. The pattern of phonological stress was manipulated so as to associate different linguistic expressions with the focus operator only and to invoke different interpretations. Sentences with marked and neutral stress were evaluated relative to visually presented scenes, which depicted a situation consistent with alternative interpretations. Using a head-mounted eye-movement recording system, we measured the processing difficulty associated with phonological stress (...) and subjects’ fixation duration on the various objects in the scenes. Not only was response accuracy superior on sentences with marked stress, as compared to ones with neutral stress, the pattern of fixations revealed earlier resolution of ambiguity in the marked stress condition. The findings suggest that the parser computes multiple interpretations of ambiguous sentences on-line, with marked stress assisting in the rapid resolution of semantic ambiguity. (shrink)

Do children acquire language rapidly, or slowly? From the vantage point of linguistic theory, all normal children could be expected to have full command of a rich and intricate system of linguistic principles in just a few years. Experimental studies of child language, however, paint a different picture of language development: It appears that language learning extends over many years, with children making numerous missteps along the way. Attempts have been made to reconcile theory and data, by looking for features (...) of language development that might impede the emergence of linguistic knowledge, and by looking in more detail at the experimental findings themselves. We begin by reviewing the reasons, based on current linguistic theory, for anticipating the rapid growth of linguistic knowledge in children. Then we turn to the laboratory, to consider both findings that do not sit well with the expectations of linguistic theory, as well as ones that comport well with theory. (shrink)

This study is concerned with the acquisition of the disjunction operator, or, in English. Two mutually inconsistent claims have been made about the acquisition of disjunction. One claim is that the acquisition of the adult truth conditions for logical connectives, including disjunction, is a late and not fully universal, achievement. With particular reference to disjunction, the findings from several studies are interpreted as showing that only the truth conditions associated with exclusive-or are available to young children (e.g., Beilin and Lust (...) 1975; Braine and Rumain 1981, 1983; Paris 1973). There is a related claim, that even when children respond as if they have access to a broader range of truth conditions, namely those associated with inclusive-or, children's adult-like responses are the result of a failure to distinguish or from and (Paris 1973). (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory about the innate linguistic knowledge that child language learners bring to the task of language acquisition. This chapter examines the findings of experimental research on children's knowledge of one principle of UG, called Principle C. It presents the defining properties of Principle C. The chapter reviews empirical evidence showing that children apply Principle C to a range of disparate‐looking phenomena. It also presents empirical findings that document children's assignment of hierarchical structure to strings of (...) words. The empirical evidence supports a conclusion – that child language learners access a level of linguistic representation in addition to the constituent structure that is formed using Merge. This additional component of the language apparatus is called Logical Form. The chapter looks at a string of words where Principle C applies at the level of Logical Form. Cleft sentences are one such case. (shrink)

Here’s a recipe for one kind of argument from the poverty of the stimulus. To start, present an array of linguistic facts to be explained. Begin with a basic observation about form and/or meaning in some language (or, even better, an observation that crosses linguistic borders). Then show how similar forms and/or meanings crop up in other linguistic phenomena. Next, explain how one could account for the array of facts using domain-general learning mechanisms – such as distributional learning algorithms, ‘cut (...) and paste’ operations or analogy. Follow this by introducing other phenomena that resist explanation on a learning-theoretic account. Make it clear that domain-general learning mechanisms would leave the learner short of the target language or would cause the learner to overshoot, resulting in ‘generalizations’ that are not characteristic of the natural language(s) under consideration. The next step in the recipe is to show how the entire array of linguistic phenomena can be explained using ‘abstract’ principles of Universal Grammar. These principles are not likely to be ‘learned’ because, as just witnessed, the kinds of mechanisms that are offered by learning-theoretic approaches to language development would direct learners away from the target, rather than towards it. This raises the alternative to learning, i.e., innate specification. From that point onward, the proof is in the pudding – the argument should contain an empirical demonstration that children never form the kinds of mistaken generalizations that are anticipated by learning-theoretic accounts of language acquisition. Instead, the argument should be supported by a demonstration that children form the correct generalizations, despite the apparent complexity of the phenomena, and in the absence of supporting evidence in the input. QED. (shrink)

The Survey of Organizational Research Climate (SORC) is a validated tool to facilitate promotion of research integrity and research best practices. This work uses the SORC to assess shared and individual perceptions of the research climate in universities and academic departments and relate these perceptions to desirable and undesirable research practices. An anonymous web- and mail-based survey was administered to randomly selected biomedical and social science faculty and postdoctoral fellows in the United States. Respondents reported their perceptions of the research (...) climates at their universities and primary departments, and the frequency with which they engaged in desirable and undesirable research practices. More positive individual perceptions of the research climate in one’s university or department were associated with higher likelihoods of desirable, and lower likelihoods of undesirable, research practices. Shared perceptions of the research climate tended to be similarly predictive of both desirable and undesirable research practices as individuals’ deviations from these shared perceptions. Study results supported the central prediction that more positive SORC-measured perceptions of the research climate were associated with more positive reports of research practices. There were differences with respect to whether shared or individual climate perceptions were related to desirable or undesirable practices but the general pattern of results provide empirical evidence that the SORC is predictive of self-reported research behavior. (shrink)

In sentences with internal negation, Free Choice Inferences (FCIs) are cancelled (Chierchia 2013). The present study investigated the possibility that FCIs are negated, not cancelled, by external negation. In previous research, both Mandarin-speaking children and adults were found to license FCIs in affirmative sentences with a modal verb and the disjunction word huozhe ‘or’ (Zhou, Romoli & Crain 2103). The present study contrasted internal versus external negation in sentences that contained all the ingredients needed to license FCIs. Four experiments (...) were conducted using the Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain & Thornton 1998). Experiment 1 tested Mandarin-speaking children and adults using sentences with internal negation, a modal verb and disjunction. As expected, children did not license FCIs; rather, they assigned a ‘neither’ interpretation to disjunction. Also as expected, adults analyzed disjunction as taking scope over internal negation, yielding a ‘not both’ interpretation (Jing, Crain & Hsu 2005). Experiment 1 provided the benchmarks for sentences with external negation in Experiments 2-4. Experiment 2 confirmed that English-speaking adults distinguish between internal and external negation in sentences with disjunction. In Experiment 3, external negation was conveyed by the focus adverb zhiyou ‘only’. External negation eliminated the between-group differences observed in Experiment 1. Both children and adults analyzed external negation as taking scope over disjunction. Experiment 4 tested the effect of external negation on the computation of FCIs. The test sentences only differed from Experiment 1 by using external negation, rather than internal negation. Again, children and adults interpreted the test sentences in the same way. Most importantly, in contrast to Experiment 1 (with internal negation), both groups analysed external negation as negating, rather than cancelling, FCIs. The findings support the distinction between internal and external negation. (shrink)

There are universals of language; but is it also true, as the target article claims, that there are universals of reading? We believe there are no such universals, and invite others to refute our claim by providing a list of some universals of reading. If there are no universals of reading, there cannot be a universal model of reading.

Here's one way this chapter could go. After defining the terms 'innate' and 'idea', we say whether Chomsky thinks any ideas are innate -- and if so, which ones. Unfortunately, we don't have any theoretically interesting definitions to offer; and, so far as we know, Chomsky has never said that any ideas are innate. Since saying that would make for a very short chapter, we propose to do something else. Our aim is to locate Chomsky, as he locates himself, in (...) a rationalist tradition where talk of innate ideas has often been used to express the following view: the general character of human thought is due largely to human nature. (shrink)

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)

Phosphoinositides are inositol‐containing phospholipids whose hydrolysis is a key step in the rapid responses of animal cells to extracellular signals. Whether they play similar roles in plant cells has not been established, and some have suggested alternative roles as direct modulators of specific proteins. Nonetheless, evidence is accumulating that phosphoinositide hydrolysis mediates transduction of some signal in plants. The evidence is strongest for a role in triggering the shedding of flagella by the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under acid stress. Rapid (...) kinetic analysis indicates that phosphoinositide hydrolysis occures within half a second and could trigger the rapid loss of flagella. Plant responses to pathogens and osmotic stress, as well as the regulation of turgor changes which underlie stomatal opening and closing and the movement of leaves and flower parts, may also be mediated by phosphoinositide hydrolysis. The evidence thus indicates that at least one reason plants have phosphoinositides is to mediate transduction of environmental signals. (shrink)

This paper investigates the interaction of prosodic information and discourse principles in child language, taking sentences with the focus operator only as a case study. For adults, prosodic information alone can influence the truthconditional interpretation of (otherwise) ambiguous sentences. However, the findings of two experiments demonstrate that children are not able to use prosodic information alone to resolve certain ambiguities involving the focus operator only. The next section reviews the semantic properties of the focus operator only. Then we review the (...) relevant prior literature on child language, before turning to our own experimental studies. (shrink)

The analogy between humans and computers as language processors has previously been exploited primarily with respect to the parsing or analysis phase of processing, as opposed to a synthesis phrase. Here we pursue the analogy on the synthesis side by positing cognitive algorithms that correspond to target language code generated by a compiler. We consider the computational resource demands of these cognitive algorithms and compare them to what is required to carry out syntactic and semantic processing. It is argued that (...) cognitive demands are responsible for certain empirical results in developmental psycholinguistics that have previously been attributed to syntactic complexity. The analysis suggests new empirical studies whose results, in turn, provide support for the analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify a form of epistemic insensitivity that occurs when someone fails to make proper use of the epistemic tools at their disposal in order to bring their beliefs in line with epistemically relevant evidence that is available to them. I call this kind of insensitivity agential insensitivity because it stems from the epistemic behavior of an individual agent. Agential insensitivity can manifest as a failure to either attend to relevant and available evidence, or appropriately interpret evidence (...) that is attended to. The concept of agential insensitivity allows us to conceptualize the kind of not-knowing involved in forms of ignorance that are cultivated and maintained by individual agents, especially when this ignorance is enabled or encouraged by social structures. I use the skepticism about racial disparities in policing practices that is displayed by many white Americans as a lens for exploring this connection. Understanding agential insensitivity thus provides insight into both social and epistemic phenomena. (shrink)

Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4th EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation. What is implied in this metonymy, this semantic shift? What is so new about RRI in comparison to ELSA? First of (...) all, for both labels, the signifier was introduced in a top-down manner, well before the concept that was signified by it had acquired a clear and stable profile. In other words, the signifier preceded the research strategies actually covered by these labels. Moreover, the newness of RRI does not reside in its interactive and anticipatory orientation, as is suggested by authors who introduced the term, but rather in its emphases on social-economic impacts. (shrink)

Kaplan and Craver claim that all explanations in neuroscience appeal to mechanisms. They extend this view to the use of mathematical models in neuroscience and propose a constraint such models must meet in order to be explanatory. I analyze a mathematical model used to provide explanations in dynamical systems neuroscience and indicate how this explanation cannot be accommodated by the mechanist framework. I argue that this explanation is well characterized by Batterman’s account of minimal model explanations and that it demonstrates (...) how relationships between explanatory models in neuroscience and the systems they represent is more complex than has been appreciated. (shrink)

While there is now considerable anxiety about whether the psychological theory presupposed by virtue ethics is empirically sustainable, analogous issues have received little attention in the virtue epistemology literature. This paper argues that virtue epistemology encounters challenges reminiscent of those recently encountered by virtue ethics: just as seemingly trivial variation in context provokes unsettling variation in patterns of moral behavior, trivial variation in context elicits unsettling variation in patterns of cognitive functioning. Insofar as reliability is a condition on epistemic virtue, (...) we have reason to doubt that human beings possess the cognitive materials required for epistemic virtue, and thereby reason to think that virtue epistemology is threatened by skepticism. We conclude that while virtue epistemology has resources for addressing this challenge, exploiting these resources forces tradeoffs between empirical and normative adequacy. (shrink)

Poor Eliza -- Pax Americana : the case of Show boat -- National brands, national body : Imitation of life -- Uncle Sam needs a wife : citizenship and denegation -- Remembering love, forgetting everything else : Now, voyager -- "It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes" : femininity, formalism, and Dorothy Parker -- The compulsion to repeat femininity : Landscape for a good woman and The life and loves of a she-devil.

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

The idea that introspection is transparent—that we know our minds by looking out to the world, not inwards towards some mental item—seems quite appealing when we think about belief. It seems that we know our beliefs by attending to their content; I know that I believe there is a café nearby by thinking about the streets near me, and not by thinking directly about my mind. Such an account is thought to have several advantages—for example, it is thought to avoid (...) the need to posit any extra mental faculties peculiar to introspection. In this paper I discuss recent attempts to extend this kind of outwards-looking account to our introspective knowledge of desire. According to these accounts, we know our desires by attending to what in the world we judge to be valuable. This, however, does not deal satisfactorily with cases where my value judgments and introspective knowledge of my desires come apart. I propose a better alternative for the proponent of transparency, but one that requires giving up on the supposed metaphysical advantages. (shrink)

In ‘Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions in Being and Time’, we explicated the crucial role that Martin Heidegger assigns to our capacity to affectively find ourselves in the world. There, our discussion was restricted to Division I of Being and Time. Specifically, we discussed how Befindlichkeit as a basic existential and moods as the ontic counterparts of Befindlichkeit make circumspective engagement with the world possible. Indeed, according to Heidegger, it is primarily through moods that the world is ‘opened (...) up’ and revealed to us as a world that is suffused with values and entities that already matter to us. In this companion essay, our aim is to expand our analysis of affectivity in the following ways: first, we revisit our discussion of Befindlichkeit in light of Heidegger's discussion of temporality in Division II of BT; second, we discuss the basic or fundamental mood of boredom and its ontological significance; we conclude by providing a brief characterization of how Heidegger's notion of mood changes in his later thinking. (shrink)

A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of wh-phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite renhe “any” and wh-words (...) in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items when they are bound by deontic modals or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier dou “all”. The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe. A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier dou generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability. (shrink)

Slurring language has had a lot of recent interest, but the focus has been almost exclusively on racial slurs. Gendered pejoratives, on the other hand—terms like “slut,” “bitch,” or “sissy”—do not fit into existing accounts of slurring terms, as these accounts require the existence of neutral correlates, which, I argue, these gendered pejoratives lack. Rather than showing that these terms are not slurs, I argue that this challenges the assumption that slurs must have neutral correlates, and so that a new (...) approach to thinking about the meaning of slurring terms is required. (shrink)

In the United States, the dominant model of decision‐making capacity (DMC) is the “four abilities model,” which judges DMC according to four criteria: understanding, appreciation, reasoning, and communicating a choice. Some critics argue that this model is “too cognitive” because it ignores the role of emotions and values in decision‐making. But so far there is no consensus about how to incorporate such factors into a model of DMC while still ensuring that patients with unusual or socially disapproved values still have (...) their autonomous decisions respected. In this paper, we aim to give an account of the role of values in decision‐making which can answer some of the lingering questions about capacity. In the current literature, defenders of the inclusion of values in DMC tend to propose solutions which focus on the distorted or incoherent attributes of the values themselves. We argue that shifting the focus onto valuing as an ability is a better solution and that a complete picture of capacity includes understanding, appreciation, reasoning, communicating a choice, and the ability to value. On the basis of a conceptual analysis of the necessary conditions for autonomous decision‐making, we derive a conception of the ability to value. On our account, the ability to value has four components: the possession of values, the ability to access those values, the ability to engage in practical reasoning with one's values, and the ability to act on the result of that reasoning. We describe the positive components of the ability to value, some indicators of impairment, and some implications of our account. (shrink)

Dispositional ascriptions do not entail the counterfactuals we might expect, as interfering factors may be poised to prevent the disposition from manifesting in its very stimulus conditions. Such factors are commonly called finks and masks. It is thought, however, that finks and masks cannot be intrinsic to the disposition bearer; if an intrinsic property of the object would prevent a particular response in certain conditions, the object fails to have the corresponding disposition. I argue that we should accept intrinsic finks (...) and masks if we think there are finks and masks at all, and also if we maintain that paradigmatic dispositions are intrinsic. This last point is particularly problematic for the claim that there cannot be intrinsic finks and masks, for if paradigmatic dispositions are not intrinsic then the central argument for the impossibility of intrinsic finks and masks is undermined. (shrink)

Damon Tweedy is a psychiatrist, lawyer, and writer. He's also Black. While in his first year as a medical student at Duke University, one of his professors approached him in the classroom and asked why the light bulb in the room hadn't been changed, as requested. Tweedy realized that his professor assumed he was a maintenance worker, not a student. Tweedy never took up this incident with the professor, nor did the professor ever apologize. Tweedy recounts that his best "revenge" (...) would be to excel in the class, which he ultimately did. At the end of the semester, upon learning that Tweedy received the second highest grade of over one hundred students, this professor invited him to work as a research assistant in his... (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the novel case of Phoenix, a non-binary adult requesting ongoing puberty suppression to permanently prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics, as a way of affirming their gender identity. We argue that the aim of OPS is consistent with the proper goals of medicine to promote well-being, and therefore could ethically be offered to non-binary adults in principle; there are additional equity-based reasons to offer OPS to non-binary adults as a group; and the ethical defensibility (...) of facilitating individual requests for OPS from non-binary adults also depends on other relevant considerations, including the balance of potential benefits over harms for that specific patient, and whether the patient’s request is substantially autonomous. Although the broadly principlist ethical approach we take can be used to analyse other cases of non-binary adults requesting OPS apart from the case we evaluate, we highlight that the outcome will necessarily depend on the individual’s context and values. However, such clinical provision of OPS should ideally be within the context of a properly designed research study with long-term follow-up and open publication of results. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work has explored the distinction between causal and non-causal forms of explanation. In this literature, topological explanation is viewed as a clear example of the non-causal variety–it is claimed that topology lacks temporal information, which is necessary for causal structure. This paper explores the distinction between topological and causal forms of explanation and argues that this distinction is not as clear cut as the literature suggests. One reason for this is that some explanations involve both topological and causal (...) information. In these “borderline” cases scientists explain some outcome by appealing to the causal topology of the system of interest. These cases help clarify a type of topological explanation that is genuinely causal, but that differs from standard topological and interventionist accounts of explanation. (shrink)

In the United States, sex education is more than just an uncomfortable rite of passage, it's an amorphous curriculum that varies widely based on the politics, experience, resources, and biases of the people teaching it. Most often, it's a train wreck, overemphasizing or underemphasizing STIs, teen pregnancy, abstinence, and consent. In Touchy Subject, philosopher Lauren Bialystok and historian Lisa M. F. Andersen make the case for thoughtful sex education, explaining why it's worth fighting for and which kind most deserves (...) our fight, despite all the inconveniences and compromises along the way. They argue that democratic and humanistic aims can be used to provide the tools to reason about the content and form of sex education. In practice, this amounts to a curriculum that meets what are currently considered highly comprehensive standards, incorporates ethics and civics education, and substantially modifies some aspects of teacher training and school design; it also assigns different responsibilities to different actors inside and outside schools, and it responds to the salient features of young people's evolving worlds, including the inequities that put some students at much higher risk of sexual harm than others. Throughout their inquiry, the authors show the reader how sex education has progressed and how the very concept of "progress" remains contestable. (shrink)

Although case-based training is popular for ethics education, little is known about how specific case content influences training effectiveness. Therefore, the effects of (a) codes of ethical conduct and (b) forecasting content were investigated. Results revealed richer cases, including both codes and forecasting content, led to increased knowledge acquisition, greater sensemaking strategy use, and better decision ethicality. With richer cases, a specific pattern emerged. Specifically, content describing codes alone was more effective when combined with short-term forecasts, whereas content embedding codes (...) within context was more effective when combined with long-term forecasts, leading to greater knowledge acquisition and sensemaking strategy use. (shrink)