A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

In the academic world, a researcher's number of publications can carry huge professional and financial rewards. This truth has led to many unethical authorship assignments throughout the world of publishing, including within faculty-student collaborations. Although the American Psychological Association passed a revised code of ethics in 1992 with special rules pertaining to such collaborative efforts, it is widely acknowledged that unethical assignments of authorship credit continue to occur regularly. This study found that of the 604 APA-member respondents, 165 felt they (...) had been involved in an unethical or unfair authorship assignment. Furthermore, nontenured faculty members and women were statistically more likely to be involved in an unethical or unfair assignment of authorship credit than tenured faculty members or men. (shrink)

A central job for propositions is to be the objects of the attitudes. Propositions are the things we doubt, believe and suppose. Some philosophers have thought that propositions are sets of possible worlds. But many have become convinced that such an account individuates propositions too coarsely. This raises the question of how finely propositions should be individuated. An account of how finely propositions should be individuated on which they are individuated very finely is sketched. Objections to the effect that the (...) account individuates propositions too finely are raised and responses to the objections are provided. It is also shown that theories that try to individuate propositions less finely have serious problems. (shrink)

This article examines a key question emerging from the strong program in cultural sociology — can art provide a window into social life? An examination of Giacometti's Standing Woman shows that art attempts to express cultural structures via immersion into and through the material surfaces of aesthetic form. Through an analysis of the iconic significance of family photos, furniture and celebrities, the article goes on to suggest that such iconic experience remains at the basis of contemporary social life. It explains (...) how we feel part of our surroundings, how we experience the ties that bind us to the people we know and how we develop a feeling for cultural hierarchy. (shrink)

This article suggests an iconic turn in cultural sociology. Icons can be seen, it is argued, as symbolic condensations that root social meanings in material form, allowing the abstractions of cognition and morality to be subsumed, to be made invisible, by aesthetic shape. Meaning is made iconically visible, in other words, by the beautiful, sublime, ugly, or simply by the mundane materiality of everyday life. But it is via the senses that iconic power is made. This new approach to meaning (...) is compared with others — with materialism, semiotics, aestheticism, moralism, realism, and spiritualism. (shrink)

A challenge to the orthodoxy, which shows that quantificational accounts are not only as effective as direct reference accounts but also handle a wider range of ...

Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

The works of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus--two of the most compelling political thinkers of the "resistance generation" that lived through World War II--can still provide penetrating insights for contemporary political reflection. Jeffrey C. Isaac offers new interpretations of these writers, viewing both as engaged intellectuals who grappled with the possibilities of political radicalism in a world in which liberalism and Marxism had revealed their inadequacy by being complicit in the rise of totalitarianism. According to Isaac, self-styled postmodern writers (...) who proclaim the death of grandiose ideologies often fail to recognize that such thinkers as Camus and Arendt had already noted this. But unlike many postmodernists, these two sought to preserve what was worthy in modern humanism--the idea of a common human condition and a commitment to human rights and the dignity of individuals. Isaac shows that both writers advanced the idea of a democratic civil society made up of self-limiting groups. Although they criticized the typical institutions of mass democratic politics, they endorsed alternative forms of local and international organization that defy the principle of state sovereignty. Isaac also shows how Arendt's writings on the Middle East, and Camus's on Algeria, urged the creation of such institutions. The vision of a "rebellious politics" that Arendt and Camus shared is of great relevance to current debates in democratic theory and to the transformations taking place in Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. (shrink)

Consider the class of contextually sensitive expressions whose context invariant meanings arguably do not suffice to secure semantic values in context. Demonstratives and demonstrative pronouns are the examples of such expressions that have received the most attention from philosophers. However, arguably this class of contextually sensitive expressions includes among other expressions modals, conditionals, tense, gradable adjectives, possessives, ‘only’, quantifiers, and expressions that take implicit arguments (e.g. ‘ready’ in sentences like ‘Molly is ready.’). Most theorists, including me, think that since the (...) context invariant meanings of such expressions do not by themselves secure semantic values in context for these expressions, they must be supplemented in some way in context in order to secure semantic values in context. For this reason, I call these expressions supplementives. I just said that supplementives need some sort of supplementation to secure semantic values in context. Of course, the question of what form the supplementation in context takes is controversial. For example, ever since Kaplan claimed that the semantic value of a demonstrative or demonstrative pronoun in context is the demonstratum of its associated demonstration, there has been a lively controversy over whether that or some other account is the correct one. Call an account of how a given supplementive secures a semantic value in context a metasemantics for the supplementive. In King [2018] I argue that all supplementives have felicitous uses in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context. This conclusion is somewhat surprising, since many uses of supplementives in which they have not been assigned unique semantic values in context are quite infelicitous. I call felicitous uses of supplementives in which they haven’t been assigned unique semantic values in context instances of felicitous underspecification. The central idea is that in cases of felicitous underspecification, supplementives get assigned a range of candidates for being their semantic values in contexts rather than being assigned unique semantic values in contexts. Consider an example. Glenn and I are out surfing at Lost Winds beach. There are some surfers to our south stretching a quarter mile or so down the beach. I notice that some surfers in an ill-defined group to our immediate south are getting incredible rides. I say to Glenn looking south toward them ‘Those guys are good.’ It seems easy to imagine that nothing in the context of utterance determines a unique group of surfers as the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. For example, it is easy to imagine that I didn’t intend any specific, unique group to be the semantic value in context. Instead, there is a range of overlapping groups that are legitimate candidates for being the semantic value in context of ‘Those guys’. Nonetheless, my utterance is felicitous: Glenn had no qualms about my utterance and took it to be impeccably acceptable. So this is an instance of felicitous underspecification. As its title suggests, felicitous underspecification is the main topic of the present book. Here is a summary of what is in each chapter. Chapter 1 provides examples of felicitous underspecification for a variety of supplementives. In each case of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1, I say how I think conversational participants update the Stalnakerian common ground after accepting the utterance of the sentence containing a felicitous underspecified use of a supplementive. I do so without there formulating a principle that determines the updates in question. In Chap. 2, I formulate such a principle and illustrate its predictions with some of the cases of felicitous underspecification considered in Chap. 1. I claim the principle correctly predicts the updates discussed in Chap. 1. In Chap. 3, I consider and discuss the mechanism that I claim associates ranges of candidate semantic values in context with felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives. In Chap. 4, I discuss cases in which felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are embedded in certain ways: under negation, and under ‘believes’ and ‘doubts’. In Chap. 5 I take up I take up the question of why sentences containing felicitous underspecified uses of supplementives are felicitous in the contexts in which they are uttered. In particular, I formulate a notion of a context being appropriate for an LF, where an LF is felicitous in a context only if the context is appropriate for the LF. In particular, an LF ϕ containing a use of an underspecified supplementive in a context c will be felicitous only if c is appropriate for ϕ. In Chap. 6, I take up some problems that arise with underspecified uses of pronouns, demonstratives and possessives and consider revising the appropriateness condition of Chap. 5. (shrink)

In this study, we used Terrance L. Furin’s concept of transformational countering to examine six Holocaust education resources designed to address Holocaust trivialization and antisemitism. While academic comparisons are useful to helping students understand challenging content, superficial Holocaust analogies for political purposes are identified as Holocaust trivialization. Given that the current context consists of a growing white nationalist movement characterized by authoritarianism, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories, we enter the study understanding that Holocaust trivialization and far-right extremism must be understood together. (...) We, therefore, examined the type of support teachers receive from Holocaust and human rights organizations in countering extremism and Holocaust trivialization. After analyzing the six resources, our findings demonstrate that resources produced to counter Holocaust trivialization become quickly outdated given the rapid evolution of extremism. Also, findings indicate that teachers receive stronger support in countering extremism and Holocaust trivialization from organizations that focus broadly on supporting human rights compared to the organizations that focus exclusively on Holocaust education. (shrink)

This collection of original essays brings a dramatically different perspective to bear on the contemporary "crisis of journalism." Rather than seeing technological and economic change as the primary causes of current anxieties, The Crisis of Journalism Reconsidered draws attention to the role played by the cultural commitments of journalism itself. Linking these professional ethics to the democratic aspirations of the broader societies in which journalists ply their craft, it examines how the new technologies are being shaped to sustain value commitments (...) rather than undermining them. Recent technological change and the economic upheaval it has produced are coded by social meanings. It is this cultural framework that actually transforms these "objective" changes into a crisis. The book argues that cultural codes not only trigger sharp anxiety about technological and economic changes, but provide pathways to control them, so that the democratic practices of independent journalism can be sustained in new forms. (shrink)

Webb has articulated a clear, multi-dimensional framework for discussing simulation models and modelling strategies. This framework will likely co-evolve with modelling. As such, it will be important to continue to clarify these dimensions and perhaps add to them. I discuss the dimension of generality and suggest that a dimension of integrativeness may also be needed.

Andrews et al. argue for adaptationism in cognitive research. However, the problem of evolvability brings into question the number of genes required for the evolution of cognitive mechanisms. Are there enough? Also, greater consideration should be given to alternative vicarious selection processes, which may produce cognitive mechanisms. Finally, identifying constraints with optimality arguments is more difficult than the authors think.

In a recent paper, Armstrong and Stanley argue that despite being initially compelling, a Russellian account of singular thought has deep difficulties. I defend a certain sort of Russellian account of singular thought against their arguments. In the process, I spell out a notion of propositional constituency that is independently motivated and has many attractive features.

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually sensitive expressions. In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘today’, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sensitive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextually sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms , possessives and quantifi ers . With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as to the mechanism (...) whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions. In a recent paper, I proposed a candidate for being this mechanism and defended the claim that it is such. Because, as I suggested, these issues have been most extensively discussed in the case of demonstratives, I focused on these expressions by way of contrasting the mechanism I proposed with others in the literature. In the present work, I simply state what I claim is the mechanism by means of which demonstratives secure semantic values in contexts without defending the claim that it is so. I then consider some claims made by Kent Bach, and arguments for those claims, which would undermine the account I propose of how demonstratives secure semantic values in context. (shrink)

Despite anxieties about the growing power of neo-liberalism, the crisis of the EU and the upsurge of right-wing political movements, it is important to recognize that utopian movements on the left have also in recent years been symbolically revitalized and organizationally sustained. This article analyses three recent social upheavals as utopian civil society movements, placing the 2008 US presidential campaign of Barack Obama, the Egyptian uprising in Tahrir Square and the Occupy Movement in the USA inside the narrative arc that (...) began with the non-violent democratic uprisings against authoritarian governments four decades earlier. In this new utopian surge, however, there is an unprecedented connection of eastern and western impulses, demonstrating that the tide of democratic thought and action is hardly confined to Judeo-Christian civilizations. (shrink)

At least since Russell’s influential discussion in The Principles of Mathematics, many philosophers have held there is a problem that they call the problem of the unity of the proposition. In a recent paper, I argued that there is no single problem that alone deserves the epithet the problem of the unity of the proposition. I there distinguished three problems or questions, each of which had some right to be called a problem regarding the unity of the proposition; and I (...) showed how the account of propositions formulated in my book The Nature and Structure of Content [2007 Oxford University Press] solves each of these problems. In the present paper, I take up two of these problems/questions yet again. For I want to consider other accounts of propositions and compare their solutions to these problems, or lack thereof, to mine. I argue that my account provides the best solutions to the unity problems. (shrink)

This book argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses in which they lack unique semantic values in context. It formulates a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground in cases in which an accepted sentence contains an expression lacking a unique semantic value in context.