Some of my mental states are conscious and some of them are not. Sometimes I am so focused on the wine in front of me that I am unaware that I am thinking about it; but sometimes, of course, I take a reflexive step back and become aware of my thinking about the wine in front of me. What marks the difference between a conscious mental state and an unconscious one? In this paper, I focus on Durand of St.-Pourçain’s rejection (...) of the higher-order theory of state consciousness, according to which a mental act is conscious when there is another, suitably related, mental (reflex) act that exists at the same time with it. Durand rejects such higher-order theories on the grounds that they violate the thesis that a given mental power can have or elicit only one mental act at a given time. I first go over some of Durand’s general arguments for this thesis. I then turn to Durand’s application of the thesis to the issue of state consciousnes and reflex acts. I close by considering the objection that Durand’s same-order theory of state consciousness makes consciousness ubiquitous. (shrink)

In the ideological construction of colonialism and, more widely, of any hierarchy of human communities, a crucial role is played by discourse on language. English nationalism and imperialism, in particular, developed extensive argumentations on language as an interpretation of the encounter with the other, on the basis of internal cultural developments that assigned to language the role of social discriminator. The paper investigates a strand of such argumentations during the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the concept of (...) “primitive” languages, described in a positive or, more often, in a negative light. The former arguments employ tones related to the idea of the “good savage” and stand in connection with narratives on the “language of Adam” and of the “Welsh Indians”, the latter uses a rhetoric extolling “progress” and “civilization” against the “immaturity” and “backwardness” of primitive languages, a perspective that was later to influence Darwinism. (shrink)

This article correlates fine-grained semantic variability and change with measures of occurrence frequency to investigate whether a word’s degree of semantic change is sensitive to how often it is used. We show that this sensitivity can be detected within a short time span (i.e., 20 years), basing our analysis on a large corpus of German allowing for a high temporal resolution (i.e., per month). We measure semantic variability and change with the help of local semantic networks, combining elements of deep (...) learning methodology and graph theory. Our micro-scale analysis complements previous macro-scale studies from the field of natural language processing, corroborating the finding that high token frequency has a negative effect on the degree of semantic change in a lexical item. We relate this relationship to the role of exemplars for establishing form–function pairings between words and their habitual usage contexts. (shrink)

The original, prescientific Western belief that the mantis is a pious, helpful creature became a widely held explanation for the mantid's unique resting posture, and for one of its cryptic displays. This belief was a characteristic part of a broader discourse about nature in which ancient authority, religious beliefs, and superstition, but few original observations, mixed freely. Gradually, the belief in mantid gentleness and piousness became a commonplace through the continual retelling of the myths and superstitions surrounding this fascinating insect.By (...) the seventeenth century, a growing interest in observation had begun to replace blind reliance on established wisdom and ancient authority. However, the various young sciences to which the period gave rise did not progress equally, and neither did the subdisciplines within each scientific field; biology, especially entomology, was particularly slow to free itself from past beliefs and contemporary superstitions. In the specific case of the praying mantis, the situation may have been at its worst.Early observers of nature found evidence that seemed, at first, to disconfirm the well-established belief that mantids are gentle creatures. These few observers, faced with startling firsthand information about mantid voraciousness, created a new characterization of mantids as merciless predators and then often juxtaposed the two images in their descriptions. However, it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the two characterizations-gentleness versus cruelty— became reconciled.An amalgamation of these seemingly mutually exclusive characterizations was achieved by an interesting accommodation of each to the other. That is, while it could no longer be maintained that mantids are simply gentle insects, neither could it be accepted that they are all cruelty and viciousness. The melding of the two characterizations yielded a hybrid explanation which claimed that the praying mantis actually hastwo sides to its character! On the one hand, and like other creatures, mantids must nourish themselves, and do so quite reasonably by capturing small insects for food. However, even when “well nourished,” and without “the excuse of hunger,” their other, vicious side may surface; when this happens, the darkest of behaviours, cannibalism, is the result.To understand the remainder of the story one must pause to consider what had happened in the other sciences up to this point. In the mid-seventeenth century, professional scientific societies were established throughout Europe. The societies, and the various journals and periodicals that they produced or encouraged, represented an institutionalization of both science and its special, structured discourse. However, as we have stated, entomology lagged behind; and in the case of some insects, superstitions and anthropomorphisms did not fade from descriptions of their behavior for centuries to come.By the time the new scientific discourse was applied to mantids the creatures were already firmly shackled with a dual personality, and this assumption was never challenged. In fact, it was functionally impossible to disconfirm. Captures of small prey were considered part of the mantid's normal side; captures of large prey were considered part of the mantid's abnormal side. There was no alternative explanation.As luck would have it, by the time that the strictures of scientific discourse had tightened sufficiently to disallow the use of anthropomorphisms in the explanation of insect behavior, another acceptable explanation of mantid cannibalism became immediately available: cannibalism became part of mantid mating behavior. That is, the fundamental explanatory model remained unchanged; it was merely couched in more appropriate terms. The acceptance of this new explanation for cannibalism was virtually immediate and complete. For instance, no one ever asked the following questions: If the headless male remains able to mate as a putative precaution against female cannibalism, for what reason does the headless female remain able to fashion “a perfectly constructed ootheca”? Or: If female-on-male cannibalism plays a role in mating behavior, what role is played by genderindifferent cannibalism, especially that among immature mantids? The latter phenomena were simply ignored — they were just uninteresting artifacts of insect life. However, the grand logic of nature was immediately apparent in the headless male's ability to mate. The ruling theory, to use Chamberlin's term, had been able to accommodate itself to, and assimilate, the new scientific discourse. It remained unscathed.A persistent question posed by several historians of this particular topic has been, Why did not the results of Ken Roeder's experiments debunk the myth that males are regularly cannibalized by the females with which they mate? The reason, which we hope is now clear, is that there were two interdependent ruling theories operating here. If one accepts the argument that mantids' cannibalism is simply a normal part of their prey-catching behavior, then one attacks not only the theory that mantids have two separate predatory strategies, but also the more recent theory that mantids have evolved to be the ideal fly-catching machines. This second theory found its first confirming support in the centuries-old practice of feeding flies to captive mantids. Again, the disconfirming evidence of mantids eating prey of various sizes had no impact on the theory. Confirming observations were accepted: disconfirming observations were seen as anomalies.Additional confirmation of both ruling theories was garnered in experiments done in the mid-twentieth century. These experiments were based on the assumption that the original conceptualizations were correct, and consequently they did not test other hypotheses. The combined strength of the two theories is evidenced especially in the Raus' failure to account for the fact that their empirical observations were at odds with many of the conclusions that they drew, and in the fact that Roeder's work is still used to support the belief in the regularity of mating-related cannibalism despite the fact that Roeder, himself, argued the opposite. with both theories well entrenched, it is virtually impossible to promote an alternative theory of mantid behavior: namely, that mantids are generalized, opportunistic predators that manage to survivein spite of the fact that cannibalism sometimes occurs. (shrink)