1. Katachi no odissei -- 2. Rinshō no chi -- 3. Aku no tetsugaku nōto 4. Zōho 21-seiki mondaigun ; Jutsugoshū II -- 5. Shūkyō to kagaku; Jinruichi shō -- 6. Shinpen Nihon bunka ni okeru aku to tsumi ; Shōnenba -- 7. Jutsugoteki sekai to seido -- 8. Seishin no fūga -- 9. Shinpen Pasukaru to sono jidai -- 10. Shinpen kindai Nihon ni okeru seido to shisō.

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context (Imai & Gentner, 1997) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of (...) labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity?On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context. (shrink)

Grammatical gender is independent of biological sex for the majority of animal names (e.g., any giraffe, be it male or female, is grammatically treated as feminine). However, there is apparent semantic motivation for grammatical gender classes, especially in mapping human terms to gender. This research investigated whether this motivation affects deductive inference in native German speakers. We compared German with Japanese speakers (a language without grammatical gender) when making inferences about sex-specific biological properties. We found that German speakers tended to (...) erroneously draw inferences when the sex in the premise and grammatical gender of the target animal agreed. An over-generalization of the grammar–semantics mapping was found even when the sex of the target was explicitly indicated. However, these effects occurred only when gender-marking articles accompanied the nouns. These results suggest that German speakers project sex-specific biological properties onto gender-marking articles but not onto conceptual representations of animals per se. (shrink)

We propose an efficient algorithm for deciding the reachability between any nodes on XML data represented by connected directed graphs. We develop a technique to reduce the size of the reference table for the reachability test. Using the small table and the standard range labeling method for rooted ordered trees, we show that our algorithm answers almost queries in a constant time preserving the space efficiency and a reasonable preprocessing time.

The essay is a written version of a talk Nakamura Yūjirō gave at the College international de philosophie in Paris in 1983. In the talk Nakamura connects the issue of common sense in his own work to that of place in Nishida Kitarō and the creative imagination in Miki Kiyoshi. He presents this connection between the notions of common sense, imagination, and place as constituting one important thread in contemporary Japanese philosophy. He begins by discussing the significance of (...) place (basho) that is being rediscovered today in response to the shortcomings of the modern Western paradigm, and discusses it in its various senses, such as ontological ground or substratum, the body, symbolic space, and linguistic or discursive topos in ancient rhetoric. He then relates this issue to the philosophy of place Nishida developed in the late 1920s, and after providing an explication of Nishida’s theory, discusses it further in light of some linguistic and psychological theories. Nakamura goes on to discuss his own interest in the notion of common sense traceable to Aristotle and its connection to the rhetorical concept of topos, and Miki’s development of the notion of the imagination in the 1930s in response to Nishida’s theory. And in doing so he ties all three—common sense, place, and imagination—together as suggestive of an alternative to the modern Cartesian standpoint of the rational subject that has constituted the traditional paradigm of the modern West. (shrink)

This article addresses how Asian racialization grounds contemporary social media experimentation on—and comprehensive surveillance of—users. To make this point, we focus on the relationship between the sentimentality of white benevolence as an expression of US empire and the social scientific history of sentiment analysis, which derives from early twentieth-century analyses of women workers and Japanese internment camps. The drive to “read” the inscrutable other—framed as a benevolent alternative to direct coercion—underlies methods to better capture and control individuals by understanding their (...) reactions within experimental and disruptive environments. In tracing these histories, we contribute to larger efforts to unpack the centrality of racial formations to current forms of social media and to reveal how contemporary digital campaigns to protect Asian Americans sustain the mutually constitutive logic of white love and white hate. We conclude by reading for moments of Asian affective opacity as ways to move beyond the sentimental economy of love and hate that so easily feeds the digital economy of sentiment analysis. These examples of opacity make possible contradictory meanings to any particular affective response and makes possible practices of care that coexist with, but exceed, the extractive logics of sentiment analysis. (shrink)

The East has not been a cultural unit as a whole. In the East there have been several cultural areas, the most important of which must have been those centering in India and in China. Japan has a peculiar and unique significance of her own in comparison with these two.The notion of history differs greatly according to these cultural areas. We shall discuss them one by one.

科学に代表される“近代の知”は大きな成果を生んだ。しかし今日、その限界も指摘されはじめている。人間存在の多面的な現実に即した“臨床の知”が構築されねばならない。著者の積年の思索の結実である本書は、人間 の知のあり方に新たな展望を開き、脳死や臓器移植などの医学的臨床の問題にたいしても明快な視点を提供する。.

Clique sizes for chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) grooming and for human conversation are compared in order to test Robin Dunbar’s hypothesis that human language is almost three times as efficient a bonding mechanism as primate grooming. Recalculation of the data provided by Dunbar et al. (1995) reveals that the average clique size for human conversation is 2.72 whereas that of chimpanzee grooming is shown to be 2.18. The efficiency of human conversation and actual chimpanzee grooming over Dunbar’s primate grooming model (always (...) one-to-one and a one-way interaction) is 1.27 and 1.25, respectively, when we take role alternation into account. Chimpanzees can obtain about the same efficiency as humans in terms of quantity of social interactions because their grooming is often mutual and polyadic. (shrink)

Sound-symbolism is the nonarbitrary link between the sound and meaning of a word. Japanese-speaking children performed better in a verb generalization task when they were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on existing Japanese sound-symbolic words, than novel nonsound-symbolic verbs (Imai, Kita, Nagumo, & Okada, 2008). A question remained as to whether the Japanese children had picked up regularities in the Japanese sound-symbolic lexicon or were sensitive to universal sound-symbolism. The present study aimed to provide support for the latter. In (...) a verb generalization task, English-speaking 3-year-olds were taught novel sound-symbolic verbs, created based on Japanese sound-symbolism, or novel nonsound-symbolic verbs. English-speaking children performed better with the sound-symbolic verbs, just like Japanese-speaking children. We concluded that children are sensitive to universal sound-symbolism and can utilize it in word learning and generalization, regardless of their native language. (shrink)

In German, nouns are assigned to one of the three gender classes. For most animal names, however, the assignment is independent of the referent’s biological sex. We examined whether German-speaking children understand this independence of grammar from semantics or whether they assume that grammatical gender is mapped onto biological sex when drawing inferences about sex-specific biological properties of animals. Two cross-linguistic studies comparing German-speaking and Japanese-speaking preschoolers were conducted. The results suggest that German-speaking children utilize grammatical gender as a cue (...) for inferences about sex-specific properties of animals. Further, we found that Japanese- and German-speaking children recruit different resources when drawing inferences about sex-specific properties: Whereas Japanese children paralleled their pattern of inference about properties common to all animals, German children relied on the grammatical gender class of the animal. Implications of these findings for studying the relation between language and thought are discussed. (shrink)