Translation theory and the philosophy of language have largely gone their separate ways (the former opting to rebrand itself as “translation studies” to emphasize its empirical and anti-theoretical underpinnings). Yet translation theory and the philosophy of language have predominately shared a common assumption that stands in the way of determinate translation. It is that languages, not texts, are the objects of translation and the subjects of semantics. The way to overcome the theoretical problems (...) surrounding the possibility and determinacy of translation is to marry the philosopher of language's concern for determinacy and semantic accuracy in translation with the notion of a “text-type” from the translation theory literature. The resulting text-type conception of semantics (TTS) is a novel alternative to the salient positions of Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism in the contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

Studies on bilingual word processing have demonstrated that the two languages in a mental lexicon can be parallelly activated. However, it is under discussion whether the activated, non-target language gets involved in the target language. The present study aimed to investigate the role of the first language translation in the second language word processing. The tasks of semantic relatedness judgment and lexical decision were both adopted, to explore the relation of the possible L1 involvement and (...) the task demand. Besides, bilinguals with relatively higher and lower L2 proficiency were recruited, to clarify the potential influence of L2 proficiency. Results showed that the manipulation of L1 translation exerted an influence on bilinguals’ task performances, indicating that L1 translation was involved, but did not just serve as a by-product when bilinguals were processing L2 words. And about the influence of L2 proficiency, the higher proficiency bilinguals performed better than the lower proficiency ones when the L1 translations could be taken advantage of, indicating a better access to L1 translation in L2 word processing, as bilinguals’ L2 proficiency increased. As for the task demands, the L1 translation was partially involved in Experiment 1 while a full involvement was observed in Experiment 2, suggesting a differed depth of L1 translation involvement, if the task demands allowed. The present study supplemented the previous ones due to its participants and tasks ; besides, it provided an interesting view into interpreting the “task schema” of the BIA+ model. (shrink)

‘Language and End Time’ is a translation of Sections I, IV and V of ‘Sprache und Endzeit’, a substantial essay by Günther Anders that was published in eight instalments in the Austrian journal FORVM from 1989 to 1991 (the full essay consists of 38 sections). The original essay was planned for inclusion in the third (unrealised) volume of The Obsolescence of Human Beings. ‘Language and End Time’ builds on the diagnosis of ‘our blindness toward the apocalypse’ that (...) was advanced in the first volume of The Obsolescence in 1956. The essay asks if there is a language that is capable of making us fully comprehend the looming ‘man-made apocalypse’. In response to this, it offers a critique of philosophical jargon and of the putatively ‘objective’ language of (nuclear) science, which are both dismissed as unsuitable. Sections I, IV and V introduce this core problematic. The selection of this text for inclusion in this special journal issue responds to present-day realities that inscribe Anders’s reflections on nuclear science and the nuclear situation into new contexts. The critique that ‘Language and End Time’ advances resonates with the way in which the (undemocratic) decisions of a few companies and individuals are shaping the future of life on earth. At the same time, the wider stakes of Anders’s turn against the language employed by (weapons) scientists are newly laid bare by the realities and politics of climate change and fake news. In this new context, the language of science is all too readily dismissed as if it were a mere idiom that can be ignored without consequence. It is against the backdrop of a future that is, if anything, more uncertain than at the time of Anders’s writing, that the essay’s reflections on popularisation, the limits of language and the nature of truth gain added significance. (shrink)

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In (...) order to test the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text. (shrink)

Responding to the interlocutors, Ricoeur, utilizing Kantian aesthetic theory, addresses the nature of the work of art, its universality and communicability, and explores its temporality — its ‘transhistoricity’ — by utilizing concepts derived from medieval philosophy, including ‘sempiternality’ and ‘monstration’. He expands on hermeneutics, defends it against charges of relativism, expatiates on the danger of aestheticism, and explains the value of mimesis in art. He explores the different art forms, focusing with Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne as a model of the ‘ipseity’ (...) of the artist; and he dwells particularly on the singularity of music and its ‘pathic’ moods. A discussion of literature culminates in an emphasis on the special importance of Holocaust texts. (shrink)

In this paper I address anew the problem of determinacy in translation by examining the Western philosophical and translation theoretic traditions of the last century. Translation theory and the philosophy of language have largely gone their separate ways (the former opting to rebrand itself as “translation studies” to emphasize its empirical and anti-theoretical underpinnings). Yet translation theory and the philosophy of language predominantly share a common assumption that stands in the way of determinate (...) translation. It is that languages, not texts, are the objects of translation and the subjects of semantics. The way to overcome the theoretical problems surrounding the possibility and determinacy of translation is to marry the philosopher of language’s concern for determinacy and semantic accuracy in translation with the notion of a “text-type” from the translation theory literature. The resulting theory capable of explaining determinacy in translation is what I call the text-type conception of semantics (TTS). It is a novel alternative to the salient positions of Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism in the contemporary philosophy of language. (shrink)

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave (...) their members in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence. (shrink)

In the midst of globalization, English is regarded as an international language, or Lingua Franca, but learning it as a second language (L2) remains still difficult to speakers of other languages. This is true especially for the speakers of languages distantly related to English such as Japanese. In this sense, exploring neural basis for translation between the first language (L1) and L2 is of great interest. There have been relatively many previous researches revealing brain activation patterns (...) during translations between L1 and English as L2. These studies, which focused on language translation with close or moderate linguistic distance (LD), have suggested that the Broca area (BA 44/45) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC; BA 46) may play an important role on translation. However, the neural mechanism of language translation between Japanese and English, having large LD, has not been clarified. Thus, we used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to investigate the brain activation patterns during word translation between Japanese and English. We also assessed the effects of translation directions and word familiarity. All participants’ first language was Japanese and they were learning English. Their English proficiency was advanced or elementary. We selected English and Japanese words as stimuli based on the familiarity for Japanese people. Our results showed that the brain activation patterns during word translation largely differed depending on their English proficiency. The advanced group elicited greater activation on the left prefrontal cortex around the Broca’s area while translating words with low familiarity, but no activation was observed while translating words with high familiarity. On the other hand, the elementary group evoked greater activation on the left temporal area including the superior temporal gyrus (STG) irrespective of the word familiarity. These results suggested that different cognitive process could be involved in word translation corresponding to English proficiency in Japanese learners of English. These difference on the brain activation patterns between the advanced and elementary group may reflect the difference on the cognitive loads depending on the levels of automatization in one’s language processing. (shrink)

Leopoldo Zea was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Though in English-language scholarship Zea is known primarily as a historian of ideas, his philosophical producti...

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of (...) the good corpus and Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

In this paper we present an approach to conditional reasoning tasks based on two main ideas. The first idea is that, in contrast with what is usually assumed, an ‘if… then…’ sentence is not an adequate translation in natural language of a logical formula containing a material implication as its principal operator. The second idea is that when subjects are required to check the validity of a sentence in a task, their inferences are not driven uniquely by the (...) content of the sentence, but also by other information embedded in the task scenario and, eventually, by their knowledge about the topic (i.e. information stored in memory). Data from 30 subjects tested on six different tasks are reported as evidence for our approach. The results show that conditional tasks are significantly more complex only when they are presented with ‘if… then…’ sentences and when the subject cannot rely on any extra information, such as contextual information or knowledge about the topic. (shrink)

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: that of the logician Gottlob Frege and that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning , to show how philosophy of (...) language can contribute to current feminist debates. (shrink)

This essay explores the place in Clarice Lispector’s literature that seeks to touch a primary ground of the living with a language that exceeds the symbolic in order to read it from an anthropocenic, posthuman, and feminist present. It argues that the story “A menor mulher do mundo” (Laços de família, 1960) takes to an extreme what happens in all of Lispector’s literature at the point that we can find in Macabéa’s character from A hora da estrela (1976), a (...) sort of continuation of the smallest woman in the world. In both – the story and the novel – materiality comes to life and it is associated with a neutral background that goes beyond the difference between the human and the nonhuman, the feminine and the masculine, and that coincides with language, with the word. Both characters are residue and resistance, and operate in the stories in the same way that the word operates in Lispector’s writing. The Deleuzian concept of minor and its continuation on the concept of immanence are therefore read not only as a way to think beyond the species, but also as that which operates by destabilizing the concept of “woman” as a universal. Lispector’s writing, then, allows us to separate contemporary feminisms from an affirmation of the identity of the feminine and the masculine, to take them instead into an order that – regardless of whether embodied in woman – is outside the patriarchal. (shrink)

In this article Johann David Michaelis’s views of language and translation are juxtaposed with his own experience as a translated and translating author, especially with regard to the translations of his prize essay on the reciprocal influence of language and opinions (1759). Its French version originated in a close collaboration with the translators, while the pirated English edition was anonymously translated at second hand. The article reconstructs Michaelis’s relationship with the French translators and his renouncement of the (...) English version, publicly condemned in London by Robert Lowth at the author’s request. These two processes represent different contemporary modes of translation and shed new light on emerging theories of linguistic and cultural transfer. (shrink)

This article presents the first detailed analysis of the ways in which border-crossing author and balladeer John Jones (pseudonym ‘Jac Glan-y-Gors’) remodelled a range of Thomas Paine’s writings into Welsh republican pamphlets by translating key passages, interpolating culturally relevant indigenous material, and consolidating Paine’s anti-monarchical core vocabulary. In doing so, the article provides a blueprint for examining the operation of intellectual networks who transferred ideas and cultural artefacts to smaller or non-hegemonic cultures and the process of embedding them. Jones’s work (...) is analysed against the history of an early modern Welsh ‘translation culture’ that enabled a substantial expansion of radical translation activity, in tandem with the democratisation of the English press in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, transferring Enlightenment and revolutionary artefacts, formats and ideas to Wales and the Welsh language. Using publishing networks that linked metropolitan London to rural Wales, an indigenous Welsh intelligentsia combined English models with indigenous cultural forms to produce a radical print culture in their own language. Jones’s republican pamphlets, the only substantial reception of Paine’s writings in Welsh, are read in the context of these processes. (shrink)

One way to understand the Qur’an is by translating the message using Pegon script and Nadhom media. One expert who uses the method to teach students is Ahmad Dimyati. The purpose of this research is to investigate Ahmad Dimyati’s works, and one of his works was the translation of the Qur’an using the Pegon script and Nadhom media in the context of Priangan, West Java, Indonesia. This research explores how the media aligns with the socio-cultural condition in which it (...) becomes the crucial point of the research. This research belongs to both textual and field studies since it involves observation and documentation data from Ahmad Dimyati’s manuscript, and interviews with Kyai and Ustadz at Pondok Pesantren Sukamiskin, West Java, Indonesia. In addition, this research uses historical and hermeneutic approaches. The historical approach found that the selection of Pegon scripts and Nadhom media involved the segmentation of readers. At the same time, the hermeneutic approach is used to understand the contents of the text. The data obtained were analysed descriptively. This research found that the translation did not change the original meaning and can bridge the gap between Arabic and Sundanese languages so that the students can better understand the content of the quoted verses of the Qur’an. The selection of Nadhom as a media to translate the Qur’an is accurate as shown in its function that supports the achievement of the goal being revealed in the Qur’an. Thus, the use of Pegon script and Nadhom media to translate the Qur’an can bridge the gap between Arabic and Sundanese languages.Contribution: This research contributes to transferring the Qur’an translation into another language, making it easier for the reader to understand the content. (shrink)

This book is a survey of how law, language and translation overlap with concepts, crimes and conflicts. It is a transdisciplinary survey exploring the dynamics of colonialism and the globalization of crime. Concepts and conflicts are used here to mean 'conflicting interpretations' engendering real conflicts. Beginning with theoretical issues and hermeneutics in chapter 2, the study moves on to definitions and applications in chapter 3, introducing cattle stealing as a comparative theme and global case study in chapter 4. (...) Cattle stealing is also known in English as 'rustling, duffing, raiding, stock theft, lifting and predatorial larceny.' Crime and punishment are differently perceived depending on cultures and legal systems: 'Captain Starlight' was a legendary 'duffer'; in India 'lifting' a sacred cow is a sacrilegious act. Following the globalization of crime, chapter 5 deals with human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide. International treaties in translation set the scene for two world wars. Introducing 'unequal treaties' (e.g. Hong Kong), chapter 6 highlights disasters caused by treaties in translation. Cases feature American Indians (the 'trail of broken treaties'), Maoris (Treaty of Waitangi) and East Africa (Treaty of Wuchale). (shrink)

Moore, Gerard Review of: Lost in translation: The English language and the catholic mass, by Gerald O'Collins, with John Wilkins, pp. 122, paperback, $29.95.

In this paper, we investigate the possibility of translating a fragment of natural deduction system (NDS) for natural language semantics into modern type theory (MTT), originally suggested by Luo (2014). Our main goal will be to examine and translate the basic rules of NDS (namely, meta-rules, structural rules, identity rules, noun rules and rules for intersective and subsective adjectives) to MTT. Additionally, we will also consider some of their general features.

The book is an introduction to key concepts of Indian Philosophy, seen from the perspective of the influential school of Pr?bh?kara M?m??s? (flourished from the 7th until the 20th c. AD). It includes the edition and translation of R?m?nuj?c?rya's ??straprameyapariccheda.

The present paper—taking the example of the English translation of the Hungarian Civil Code of 2013—aims to give an overview on the legal and terminology-related challenges and pitfalls that might occur during the process of translating a civil code with civil law traditions into the language of the common law world. An attempt is made to categorise terminology-related conceptual problems and elaborate how the different types of translation methods could be applied; moreover, how a kind of legal-linguistic (...) checks-and-balances can be achieved through the well-dosed combination, having also the ratio of similarities to differences of legal concepts behind the respective terms in mind. Legal translators must act beyond the role of a simple translator: they must be comparatists, being aware of the legal origin of the relevant concepts and using the methods of comparative private law and translation studies at the same time, since both law and language are system-bound and are heavily influenced by the cultural and social environment. The authors strive to identify the significance of those problems from the perspective of how language-related aspects can perform some fine-tuning on the comparative methodology and findings, whether they are barriers only or provide also an opportunity to verify or refute prima facie comparative results. Comparative law—no doubt—supports legal translation, but their relationship is reciprocal: legal-linguistic subjects and problems emerging in the course of legal translation supply valuable feedback and further sources of inspiration. (shrink)

The expression of physical motion (the spider crawls across the net) and metaphorical motion (the fear crawls across her heart) shows strong inter-typological differences between language types (German, an S-language vs. Spanish, a V-language) and more subtle intra-typological differences within a language type (German vs. Polish, both S-languages). However, we know relatively less about the extension of these patterns to translated texts. In this study, we focused on physical and metaphorical motion descriptions in written texts in (...) original language and their translations to a language that belongs to the same or a different typological group, to determine whether motion expression in translated texts shows the same patterns of inter-typological and intra-typological variability as it does in original texts. We investigated this question by extracting 450 physical motion (150/language) and 450 metaphorical motion (150/language) descriptions from novels originally written in German, Polish, or Spanish and their translations to typologically different (i.e. inter-typological; German to Spanish, Spanish to German) or typologically similar (i.e. intra-typological; German to Polish, Polish to German) languages. Our results provided evidence for similar patterns of strong inter-typological and more subtle intra-typological variability in translations akin to those observed in original texts – with translated texts largely following the patterns of the target language in their expression of physical and metaphorical motion. Our results also highlighted specificity of event expression in a language as an important factor in the attainment of target language patterns in translated texts. (shrink)

The reception of the rational sciences, scientific practice, discourse and methodology into Arabic Islamic society proceeded in several stages of exchange with the transmitters of Iranian, Christian-Aramaic and Byzantine-Greek learning. Translation and the acquisition of knowledge from the Hellenistic heritage went hand in hand with a continuous refinement of the methods of linguistic transposition and the creation of a standardized technical language in Arabic: terminology, rhetoric, and the genres of instruction. Demonstration more geometrico, first introduced by the paradigmatic (...) sciences-mathematics, astronomy, mechanics-and adopted by philosophers embracing the cosmology of Neoplatonism, was complemented and superseded by the methods of syllogistic demonstration. Faced with the establishment of philosophy as a demonstrative science, which claimed absolute and universal knowledge, even the hermeneuti. (shrink)

Debates about commercial sex occupy a prominent place on the agenda of both global and Russian-language feminist communities. Sex wars have a major impact on the organization and political imagination of the feminist movement. On the other hand, some sex workers and their representatives consider some feminists (neo-abolitionists) to be one of the biggest enemies in the struggle for their rights. Trying to understand this contradiction, the article raises issue on how neo-abolitionist discourse is designed and what political impact (...) it produces. The author proceeds under the assumption that the neo-abolitionist discourse about commercial sex is a way to cope with the two fundamental anxieties of the feminist movement: the anxiety of foundation and the anxiety of translation. This hypothesis is tested through an analysis of Russian and English-language feminist texts on commercial sex, as well as through analysis of existing research literature. The author comes to the conclusion that the construction of sex work as a homogeneous situation of patriarchal violence against women allows it to be used as a metaphor. One of its effects is the legitimation of universalist and essentialist constructions of radical feminism/neo-abolitionism. At the same time, this discourse excludes the voices of women engaged in sex work and reduces the diversity and heterogeneity of their experience. As a result, neo-abolitionism becomes problematic if we consider feminism an inclusive and emancipatory project. In conclusion, the author calls for the formation of a more inclusive and polyphonic version of feminism towards people engaged in commercial sex. (shrink)

This book provides the first English translations of pivotal essays and debates on the role of language politics, linguistics, and translation in Antonio Gramsci's influential cultural theory. It also includes new works from leading and up-and-coming anglophone scholars to create a vital resource for a wide variety of readers interested in Gramsci across many disciplines including cultural studies, critical political economy, social and political theory, literature, sociology, post-colonialism, and philosophy.

Using the cases of three Russian chemistry textbooks from the 1860s—authored by Freidrich Beilstein, A. M. Butlerov, and D. I. Mendeleev—this essay analyzes their contemporary translation into German and the implications of their divergent histories for scholars' understanding of the processes of credit accrual and the choices of languages of science.

One of the most important students of Franz Brentano was Anton Marty, who made it his task to develop a philosophy of language on the basis of Brentano’s analysis of mind. It is most unfortunate that Marty does not receive the attention he deserves, primarily due to his detailed and distracting polemics. In the analysis presented here his philosophy of language and other aspects of his thought, such as his ontology , are examined first and foremost in their (...) positive rather than critical character. The analysis is moreover supplemented by translations of four important works by Marty, including his entire work On the Origin of Language. These are in fact the first English translations of any substantial writings by him. The resulting picture that emerges from the analysis and translations is that Marty has much to say that proves to be of enduring interest for the philosophy of language on a range of topics, especially the meanings of statements, of emotive expressions, and of names as regards both their communicative and their ontological aspects. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also to historians of linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

The contemporary world is a harsh environment for many languages and cultures. Globalisation is one of the powerful forces that are increasing the pressure on some languages to become extinct. The questions that, therefore, arise for Bible translation include: Does it still make sense to translate the Bible into languages that are being threatened by extinction? Are there perhaps certain indicators that should be present for the translation of the Bible into endangered languages to make sense and to (...) possibly also contribute towards the revival of languages that are being threatened by extinction? The discussion of these and related questions is not new but has to continue because the issues can be viewed from a variety of angles. This article is offered as a biblical theological exploration of the issues. It is, therefore, also a biblical theological motivation for Bible translation into endangered languages. The article argues that the existence of a growing church that is committed to the use of the Bible in a particular translation should be viewed as one of the critical indicators when assessing the merits of such translation projects.Contribution: The primary contribution of this article is that it approaches the issues pertaining to language endangerment from a biblical theological angle; and demonstrates that the issues regarding language endangerment are connected to the core of the Bible’s message. Language endangerment is one of the results of Adam’s fall into sin. God’s redemptive work will end language endangerment when God’s gracious work of saving creation and fallen humanity is consummated at Christ’s return. (shrink)

Legal texts are in the focus of both lawyers and translators. This paper discusses the binary opposition of these two views especially in the light of contract law. There is one crucial epistemic difference between the point of view of the translator and the lawyer when it comes to the interpretation of legal texts. In the translator’s view legal text is traditionally conceived as static as to its nature; something that already exists in the form of text. Traditionally, the translator (...) is interested in the text itself as it was written down in a document, i.e. the translator needs to go back to the frozen moment when a legal document was constructed and finalised. The lawyer, in contrast, is very much interested not only in the text of the legal document but also in the contextual surroundings of the text. In fact, for legal interpretation, sometimes the key-elements for the interpretation come from outside of the text itself. This paper concludes that legal translation is in many cases closer to transcreation than it is to traditionally understood translation. (shrink)

This book provides the first English translations of pivotal essays and debates on the role of language politics, linguistics, and translation in Antonio Gramsci's influential cultural theory. It also includes new works from leading and up-and-coming anglophone scholars to create a vital resource for a wide variety of readers interested in Gramsci across many disciplines including cultural studies, critical political economy, social and political theory, literature, sociology, post-colonialism, and philosophy.

This book considers the relation between language and thought. Robert Wardy explores this huge topic by analyzing linguistic relativism with reference to a Chinese translation of Aristotle's Categories. He addresses some key questions, such as, do the basic structures of language shape the major thought patterns of its native speakers? Could philosophy be guided and constrained by the language in which it is done? And does Aristotle survive rendition into Chinese intact? Wardy's answers will fascinate philosophers, (...) Sinologists, classicists, linguists and anthropologists, and make a major contribution to the scholarly literature. (shrink)

This book is a translation of Petrus Hispanus' 13th century text.

There are legitimate worries about gaps between scientific evidence of brain states and function (for example, as evidenced by fMRI data) and legal criteria for determining criminal culpability. In this paper I argue that behavioral evidence of capacity, motive and intent appears easier for judges and juries to use for purposes of determining criminal liability because such evidence triggers the application of commonsense psychological (CSP) concepts that guide and structure criminal responsibility. In contrast, scientific evidence of neurological processes and function (...) – such as evidence that the defendant has a large brain tumor – will not generally lead a judge or jury to directly infer anything that is relevant to the legal determination of criminal culpability . (Vincent 2008) In these cases, an expert witness will be required to indicate to the fact-finder what this evidence means with regard to mental capacity; and then another inference will have to be made from this possible lack of capacity to the legal criteria for guilt, cast in CSP terms.<br><br>To reliably link evidence of brain function and structure and assessment of criminal responsibility, we need to re-conceptualize the mental capacities necessary for responsibility, particularly those that are recognized as missing or compromised by the doctrines of “legal capacity” (Hart 1968) and “diminished capacity.” I argue that formulating these capacities as executive functions within the brain can provide this link. I further claim that it would be extremely useful to consider evidence of executive function as related to the diminished capacity doctrine at sentencing. This is because it is primarily at this stage in criminal proceedings where the use of the diminished capacity doctrine is most prevalent, as evidenced by the recent Supreme Court cases of Atkins v. Virginia (536 U.S. 304 (2002)) and Roper v. Simmons (543 U.S. 551 (2005)).<br>. (shrink)

The text is translated from the book by D. Davidson: Truth, Language, and History. Oxford University press, 2005.pp. 127-141.