Expectation-based theories of language comprehension, in particular Surprisal Theory, go a long way in accounting for the behavioral correlates of word-by-word processing difficulty, such as reading times. An open question, however, is in which component of the Event-Related brain Potential signal Surprisal is reflected, and how these electrophysiological correlates relate to behavioral processing indices. Here, we address this question by instantiating an explicit neurocomputational model of incremental, word-by-word language comprehension that produces estimates of the N400 and the P600—the two most (...) salient ERP components for language processing—as well as estimates of “comprehension-centric” Surprisal for each word in a sentence. We derive model predictions for a recent experimental design that directly investigates “world-knowledge”-induced Surprisal. By relating these predictions to both empirical electrophysiological and behavioral results, we establish a close link between Surprisal, as indexed by reading times, and the P600 component of the ERP signal. The resultant model thus offers an integrated neurobehavioral account of processing difficulty in language comprehension. (shrink)

The paper investigates the epistemological and communicative competences the experts need to use and communicate evidence in the reasoning process leading to diagnosis. The diagnosis and diagnosis communication are presented as intertwined processes that should be jointly addressed in medical consultations, to empower patients’ compliance in illness management. The paper presents defeasible reasoning as specific to the diagnostic praxis, showing how this type of reasoning threatens effective diagnosis communication and entails that we should understand diagnostic evidence as defeasible as well. (...) It argues that metaphors might be effective communicative devices to let the patients understand the relevant defeasors in the diagnostic reasoning process, helping to improve effective diagnosis communication, and also encouraging a change in patients’ beliefs and attitudes on their own experience of illness and illness’ management. (shrink)

In his target article, Ismaili M’hamdi advocates for perfectionist public health policymaking, which entails fostering relevant and objectively valuable public health-related capabilities wh...

Problem solving can be readily described as one of the key activities regularly performed by professionals in any workplace setting. Despite its importance, however, there is relatively little linguistic research which looks at the complex ways in which problems are constructed in discourse. This article sees the enactment of a ‘problem’ as a discursive phenomenon with fluid boundaries. It draws on business meeting data recorded in multinational companies in Europe and focuses on excerpts identified by the participants as having a (...) PbS function. The data show that problem solving processes and practice are anchored to the structure of the organizations, the local history and employees’ shared perceptions of professional practices and hierarchies in their workplace. The analysis also shows two focal points in the PbS talk of the participants in this study, namely identification of a problem and its ownership. These, however, are not predetermined starting points but rather locally constructed in relation to the status, expertise and shared/past history of the interactants. (shrink)

Bayesian agents, argues Belot (2013), are orgulous: they believe in inductive success even when guaranteed to fail on a topologically typical collection of data streams. Here we shed light on how pervasive this phenomenon is. We identify several classes of inductive problems for which Bayesian convergence to the truth is topologically typical. However, we also show that, for all sufficiently complex classes, there are inductive problems for which convergence is topologically atypical. Lastly, we identify specific topologically typical collections of data (...) streams, observing which guarantees convergence to the truth across all problems from certain natural classes of effective inductive problems. (shrink)

In recent years, digital tools, such as WhatsApp, have been increasingly deployed to support group interaction and collaboration in higher education contexts. To understand contemporary, digitally-mediated collaborative dynamics – including the role played by tutors and the situated nature of group development – robust and innovative methodologies are needed. In this paper, we illustrate how integrating qualitative methods with quantitative tools used in qualitative ways makes it possible to trace how tutors adapt their style to support group development, which in (...) turn triggers student development in a circular and responsive process. To make visible this contemporary phenomenon, we combine thematic content analysis – a qualitative tool – with a quantitative method: Social Network Analysis. Drawing on data generated by two WhatsApp learning groups in research exploring the collaborative construction of boundary objects in a master’s level “E-learning Psychology” course, we suggest that our methodological approach has the potential to support interrogation of complex and dynamic digitally-mediated group interactions. Our results show the situational nature of an effective tutorship style through its complex adaptation to learners’ maturity, digital tools, and learning goals. (shrink)

Nudges have become a popular tool for behaviour change; but, some interventions fail to replicate, even when the identical, previously successful intervention is used. One cause of this problem is that people default to using some of or all of the previously-successful existing nudges for any problem—the “kitchen sink” approach. We argue that the success of an intervention depends on understanding people’s current behaviour and beliefs to ensure that any nudge will actually “budge” them from their current beliefs. We introduce (...) the Beliefs–Barriers–Context model, with three components: understanding beliefs, barriers, and context to change behaviour through a budge. Designing a budge has the goal of identifying the psychological mechanism that drives a target behaviour, focusing on the psychology of the target population before attempting to change that behaviour. In contrast to the “kitchen sink” approach, budges are best complemented with mechanism experiments to identify what undergirds behaviour change. Moving away from simply nudging behaviour to budging minds—by understanding beliefs, barriers and context—has the potential to inform both the successes and failures of behavioural interventions. (shrink)

In an article published recently in this journal, one of us reconstructed how in 1899 J. J. Thomson, after having measured the mass-to-charge ratio of the corpuscle , achieved a measurement of its charge and consequently an estimate of its mass, obtaining in this manner ‘direct proof of the existence of particles smaller than the hydrogen atom’. In this paper, starting with an analysis of Zeeman's first measurements on the widening of spectral lines in a magnetic field, we show that (...) the existence of masses smaller than the atom was already a matter of discussion in early 1897, and that a qualitative estimate of the mass of the electron was made even before Thomson's measurements in 1899. In this process an important role was played by a research programme on the structure of matter carried out by Stoney in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This had in many aspects anticipated Zeeman's experimental observations, and its conclusions were in part formalized in the so-called Larmor theorem. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

A cavallo tra i due concili di Costanza e Basilea, che hanno fortemente influito sul giudizio della Chiesa in relazione alle donne visionarie, si staglia la figura di Francesca Bussa dei Ponziani. Le visioni politiche di Francesca rappresentano un fulgido esempio di come i modelli brigidini e cateriniani siano stati ripresi e rimodellati su un nuovo, mutato contesto storico. La sua consolidata autorità le consentì di ammonire a più riprese papa Eugenio IV riguardo alla sua partecipazione al concilio (...) di Basilea, intervenendo attivamente nello scenario religioso e politico romano. (shrink)

Entre los años 1869 y 1873, la preocupación de Nietzsche comienza a centrarse en las cuestiones relativas al lenguaje y al conocimiento de forma creciente. Luego de experimentar y ensayar con distintas teorías del lenguaje, Nietzsche adopta el abordaje retórico-lingüístico a partir del año 1872. En efecto, el filósofo alemán primero desarrolla la postura retórica-lingüística en el apunte de clases titulado Descripción de la retórica antigua, y un año más tarde, en el célebre texto póstumo Sobre verdad y mentira en (...) sentido extramoral. No obstante, son escasos los trabajos académicos que se ocupan exhaustivamente del análisis de Descripción de la retórica antigua y, dentro de este grupo de estudios, son más escasos aun los que se basan en la edición crítica de Colli-Montinari. En este contexto, el objeto del presente trabajo se circunscribe al estudio histórico-genético de la perspectiva retórico-lingüística del joven Nietzsche desarrollada en Descripción de la retórica antigua, a fin de mostrar la importancia que la consideración de este escrito tiene para la comprensión de la concepción tropológica del lenguaje del filósofo alemán durante ese período de tiempo. (shrink)

In the context of interspecies play involving humans, we find limitations when it comes to understanding most species. One reason for this may be the fact that we tend to anthropomorphize the other to be able to empathize with it. In light of this, how can we infer communication signs of other species so we are able to connect with the nonhuman world? We look for answers to this question by adopting a phenomenological approach that allows us to decentre from (...) the anthropocentric perspective. We highlight animal studies, especially those that extend to them the notion of play, and the studies on interspecies playful interaction conducted in the context of animal‐computer interaction. In addition, we propose considering empathy as an interspecies dialogical bridge with nonhumans. Finally, we argue about an expansion of the field of interaction design as an approach to the connection with the nonhuman world. (shrink)

In 1995, in his seminal paper introducing the abstract argumentation framework, Dung has also established the first relationship between this framework and a logical framework (in this case: logic...

Sociopolitical attitudes are often the root cause of conflicts between individuals, groups, and even nations, but little is known about the origin of individual differences in sociopolitical orientation. We test a combination of economic and evolutionary ideas about the degree to which the mating market, sex, age, and income affect sociopolitical orientation. We collected data online through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk from 1108 US participants who were between 18 and 60, fluent in English, and single. While ostensibly testing a new online (...) dating website, participants created an online dating profile and described people they would like to date. We manipulated the participants’ popularity in the mating market and the size of the market and then measured participants’ sociopolitical attitudes. The sociopolitical attitudes were reduced to five dimensions via Principal Components Analysis. Both manipulations affected attitudes toward wealth redistribution but were largely not significant predictors of the other dimensions. Men reported more unrestricted sociosexual attitudes, and more support for benevolent sexism and traditional family values, than women did, and women supported wealth redistribution more than men did. There was no sex difference in accepting nonconforming behaviors. Younger people and people with lower incomes were more liberal than older people and people with higher incomes, respectively, regardless of sex. Overall, effects were largely not interactive, suggesting that individual differences in sociopolitical orientation may reflect strategic self-interest and be more straightforward than previously predicted. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to introduce a Merleau-Pontyan reading of the Four Theses of Dipesh Chakrabarty. In the first part of this article, we identify the theoretical problems that undergird Chakrabarty’s claims by connecting them to an attempt to rethink the concept of history in a non-historicist manner in light of the questions raised by the Anthropocene and by anthropogenic climate change. Our hypothesis, which we explore in the second part of the article, is that the idea of (...) history developed by Merleau-Ponty, which finds in the concepts of “institution” and “transcendental geology” its fundamental theoretical articulations, can provide the framework for a rereading of the Four Theses. In the last section, we attempt to provide an interpretation of Chakrabarty’s proposition by reading the problem of the relationship between geological history, life history, and human history as a relationship of institution. In conclusion, we indicate some potential developments for this proposition that move in the direction of a narrower intersection between philosophy and earth system science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 2. © 2018 by Francesca T. Royster 503 Francesca T. Royster Stories We Tell After Orlando We are in Laila’s backyard for a Sunday barbecue, a cool and windy Chicago June day that immediately followed one of the very hottest days so far this year. My partner Annie and I have brought our fouryear -old daughter Cece and her best friend Gilda to (...) the barbecue, and they’ve dressed themselves in layers, with leggings and hoodies and dresses, girlie but survivalist at the same time in their sequins and metallic purple, discowear for preschoolers. We are at the end of a daylong play date, and we’ve already survived two playgrounds and several tearful standoffs, the ups and downs that come with friends so young. So Annie and I come hungry for some time with our adult friends. The closely packed, brick, three-flat apartment buildings on either side of Laila’s yard provide us with some protection from the wind for a good part of the afternoon. But as the sun goes down and the light dims, we pile on more jackets and scarves over our T-shirts and shorts. Gusts of wind randomly fan the flames until they’re visible over the lid of the grill as Laila cooks. I look out for Laila at the grill while Annie plays catch with the little girls. But I have to do so in stealth, because Laila is as stubborn as she is glamorous. She has insisted on wearing a jacket with green flowing sleeves as she tends the fire, and while she has put her long, graying blond hair up in a chop-sticked bun, she has also pulled out long wispy strands to achieve high femme style. It flies around her face in the wind, flirting with the flames. 504 Francesca T. Royster We are all getting together because later this week Laila will be boarding a plane for the twelve-hour flight home to spend time with her aging mother and father for the summer. “Home” is Lebanon, and we have already experienced losing Laila for a several months in 2006 during a visit home when Israel and Lebanon’s tensions grew into a violent series of bombings that came very close to her Beirut apartment. At the nadir of that time, Laila sent us frantic group letters conveying her worry, sometimes her despair, and her flashbacks to her childhood experiences in wartime Beirut in the 1970s and also in the war of 1982. For a few agonizing weeks her letters stopped coming altogether. The afternoon of our barbecue was the same day as the early morning shootings in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where forty -nine people were killed, and at least fifty others were wounded. The victims were all killed while practicing a rite that all of us considered as sacred and necessary as going to church might be for some—dancing the night away in a gay nightclub. This morning we had woken up to this news, blinking still without our glasses, the magnitude of the news headline hard to fathom as it flashed across the screens of our phones. It’s wrong that mass shootings have become part of the fabric of our lives, and probably will be for the lives of Cece and Gilda. The story feels both shocking and sadly familiar: the apparently easy availability of weapons and a pattern of anger taken to the next outrageous step. And then there’s the gay part. Even when I first heard that the shooting took place at a gay bar, I wondered if the killer, Omar Mateen might be gay himself. “Why Orlando?” I thought. Why a mostly unknown dance club? I thought of the messy, red-hot fury of hate and desire when they get mixed up together. As Annie and I talked about the shooting in hushed voices on the playground that morning, we thought of Matthew Shepard. We thought of the recent theory that Shepard most likely knew his killers; that he hung out with them, maybe did drugs with them. Some have written that the narrative that Mateen is gay only confirms the... (shrink)

Criminal liability for acts committed by AI systems has recently become a hot legal topic. This paper includes three different contributions. The first contribution is an analysis of the extent to which an AI system can satisfy the requirements for criminal liability: accomplishing an actus reus, having the corresponding mens rea, possessing the cognitive capacities needed for responsibility. The second contribution is a discussion of criminal activity accomplished by an AI entity, with reference to a recent case involving an online (...) bot, the Random Darknet Shopper. This discussion will provide the context for the analysis of commonalities and differences between criminal activities by humans and by artificial systems. The third contribution concerns the evaluation of different ways of addressing criminal activities by AI systems in a regulatory perspective. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to introduce a philosophical analysis of a widely neglected condition which affects between 3% and 18% of the population. People affected by this condition experience a lower level of wellbeing than the average population and are discriminated against in both their professional and their personal life. I will argue that this form of discrimination should be taken more seriously in philosophical debate and that social, legal and medical measures ought to be taken in order (...) to improve the quality of life of people affected by this condition. (shrink)

In Poggiolesi we have introduced a rigorous definition of the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding; in the present paper our aim is to construct a logic for the notion of complete and immediate formal grounding based on that definition. Our logic will have the form of a calculus of natural deduction, will be proved to be sound and complete and will allow us to have fine-grained grounding principles.

In his examination of the concepts of evil and impermanence, entitled “Evil and the Problem of Impermanence in Medieval Japanese Philosophy”, Yujin Nagasawa addresses four responses to the problem of impermanence, arguing that the only satisfactory response to the problem leads to an implication about supernaturalism. As Nagasawa puts it, “the problem of impermanence can be construed as a partial argument for supernaturalism and against naturalism”. In response to Nagasawa, I will take up the challenge of naturalism by trying to (...) deconstruct the arguments against indifferentism in order to reformulate and thus strengthen Nagasawa’s response to the problem of impermanence. I will then turn to the radicalization of this thesis by drawing out implications through a comparison with Dōgen’s thought. (shrink)

This book offers a reconstruction of the debate on non-Euclidean geometry in neo-Kantianism between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Kant famously characterized space and time as a priori forms of intuitions, which lie at the foundation of mathematical knowledge. The success of his philosophical account of space was due not least to the fact that Euclidean geometry was widely considered to be a model of certainty at his time. However, such (...) later scientific developments as non-Euclidean geometries and Einstein’s general theory of relativity called into question the certainty of Euclidean geometry and posed the problem of reconsidering space as an open question for empirical research. The transformation of the concept of space from a source of knowledge to an object of research can be traced back to a tradition, which includes such mathematicians as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, Richard Dedekind, Felix Klein, and Henri Poincaré, and which finds one of its clearest expressions in Hermann von Helmholtz’s epistemological works. Although Helmholtz formulated compelling objections to Kant, the author reconsiders different strategies for a philosophical account of the same transformation from a neo-Kantian perspective, and especially Hermann Cohen’s account of the aprioricity of mathematics in terms of applicability and Ernst Cassirer’s reformulation of the a priori of space in terms of a system of hypotheses. This book is ideal for students, scholars and researchers who wish to broaden their knowledge of non-Euclidean geometry or neo-Kantianism. (shrink)

Il presente articolo esplora il significato del concetto di “istituzione”, prestando particolare attenzione all’esposizione che Merleau-Ponty ne dà nelle pagine del corso tenuto al Collège de France nel 1954-1955, _L’institution, la passivité_. Il saggio mira a mostrare come, attraverso tale nozione, sia possibile pensare una concezione dell’agire, della prassi e quindi della storia che connette il lato attivo e passivo del fare. Il contributo prende le mosse da un’analisi delle critiche che Merleau-Ponty rivolge a Sartre nel corso de _Le avventure (...) della dialettica_, per mostrare il bersaglio polemico al quale si rivolge la concezione dell’azione sviluppata nel corso sull’istituzione. Dopodiché, prende in considerazione più da vicino l’articolazione del tema nel corso sull’istituzione. Infine, cerca di descrivere la concezione della storia che emerge da tale plesso concettuale. In conclusione, il contributo propone un’apertura del problema dell’istituzione a problemi della contemporaneità, come quello dell’agency. (shrink)