The outline of a universal cell‐free translation system capable of site‐specific insertion of any types of labeled amino acids is presented. The system could be an invaluable tool for NMR spectroscopy by making the exclusive and exact labeling of the segments of interest possible. Although the development of such a system requires considerable efforts and can not be expected to be available in the next few years, we argue that recent findings concerning the translation apparatus provide clues for overcoming the (...) major difficulties that might arise. We propose a genetic code and a reactor expected to fulfill the specific requirements. Importantly, incomplete systems could also be useful to study selected functional aspects of a number of proteins, examples of which are also given. BioEssays 30:772–780, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this article Zoltán Somhegyi investigates the aesthetic qualities of Northern landscape representations, with a special focus on how contemporary examples are connected to classical ones. First he examines the history of the aesthetic appreciation of these sites, starting from their early modern reception and from the differentiation of “Northern” and “Mediterranean” landscapes: while the Mediterranean ones were highly valued already from the 15th–16th centuries on, the “wilder” Northern landscapes were admired mainly from Romanticism onwards. This has, among others, (...) an aesthetichistorical reason, namely the birth of the category of the sublime; and in this case the harmonious Mediterranean landscapes and the irregular yet impressive Northern ones relate to each other as the category of beautiful does to the sublime. This is why from Romanticism on Northern landscapes became not only aesthetically valuable, but even more capable than the Southern ones to move the spectator. This is especially because, from a gnoseological point of view, the landscape might be a place – and the landscape representation a means – of self-interpretation. The historical overview is then used to better understand some of the most important characteristics of contemporary Northern landscape interpretations and representations from leading artists of the region, which are analysed in the second part of the article. (shrink)

Leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics present brand-new papers on a major topic at the intersection of the two fields, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Anyone engaged with this issue in either discipline will find much to reward their attention here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Michael Glanzberg, Jeffrey C. King, Ernie Lepore, Stephen Neale, F. Recanati, Nathan Salmon, Mandy Simons, Scott Soames, Robert J. Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Gendler Szabo.

This chapter explores the relational critique of distributive conceptions of justice, according to which the proper focus of egalitarian justice is the egalitarian nature of social relations rather than the equal distribution of certain goods. It maintains that the relational critique constitutes a fundamental challenge to distributive egalitarianism only if it rejects the “core distributive thesis” that holds that the distribution of some nonrelational goods has relation-independent significance for justice. It argues that several relational proposals are compatible with that thesis, (...) and therefore constitute extensions or revisions of the distributive conception rather than alternatives to it, and that those relational views that reject the core distributive thesis are the least plausible ones. Finally, the chapter shows that relational views are often ambiguous regarding the nature of the significance of egalitarian relations, i.e. whether it consists in their contribution to well-being, or in being the fitting response to equal moral status. (shrink)

Combining up-to-date scholarship with clear and accessible language and helpful exercises, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction is an invaluable resource for all readers interested in metaphor. This second edition includes two new chapters--on 'metaphors in discourse' and 'metaphor and emotion' --along with new exercises, responses to criticism and recent developments in the field, and revised student exercises, tables, and figures.

No scientific conclusion follows automatically from a statistically non-significant result, yet people routinely use non-significant results to guide conclusions about the status of theories (or the effectiveness of practices). To know whether a non-significant result counts against a theory, or if it just indicates data insensitivity, researchers must use one of: power, intervals (such as confidence or credibility intervals), or else an indicator of the relative evidence for one theory over another, such as a Bayes factor. I argue Bayes factors (...) allow theory to be linked to data in a way that overcomes the weaknesses of the other approaches. Specifically, Bayes factors use the data themselves to determine their sensitivity in distinguishing theories (unlike power), and they make use of those aspects of a theory’s predictions that are often easiest to specify (unlike power and intervals, which require specifying the minimal interesting value in order to address theory). Bayes factors provide a coherent approach to determining whether non-significant results support a null hypothesis over a theory, or whether the data are just insensitive. They allow accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis to be put on an equal footing. Concrete examples are provided to indicate the range of application of a simple online Bayes calculator, which reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of Bayes factors. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present an explanation for the impact of normative considerations on people’s assessment of certain seemingly purely descriptive matters. The explanation is based on two main claims. First, a large category of expressions are tacitly modal: they are contextually equivalent to modal proxies. Second, the interpretation of predominantly circumstantial or teleological modals is subject to certain constraints which make certain possibilities salient at the expense of others.

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the (...) Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the concepts of social position and social status, the types of social position, as well as the determinedness of social statuses by the given positions in a new approach. In the first, introductory part of the article, I emphasize that the institutional sociological conception of social position in my approach is relatively closest to the structuralist position conception. In the second part, I introduce two different concepts, labelled social position and social status, and briefly review (...) the social determinedness of social status. In the third part, social positions are typified from the point of view of the two components of social position: on the one hand, from that of social power relations and on the other from that of interest relations. I point out that the different social positions promote the realization of interests to different degrees, that is, they make it possible to attain different social statuses. In a related article, I illustrate the concepts and connections in question with a case study carried out on an industrial shop floor. (shrink)

This book argues for the case that governments develop with inherent constraints. These constraints support the case for the normative political theoretical defense of moderate governing.

A distinction between interpretive processing and post-interpretive processing calls for a consideration of interface relations in systems of verbal memory. Syntactic movement of a phrase and the cognitive system of thought/mind interact. Systems of declarative memory and procedural memory interact.

This research explores the application of an innovative learning approach by using trading simulation tutorials to reinforce the conventional learning styles in a corporate finance subject at postgraduate level. The majority of surveyed students perceive that their learning experience has been significantly enhanced through simulated trading tutorials. The post-trading survey shows students also indicate feeling more confident to self-monitor their learning. Furthermore, themajority of students feel able to recognise ethical issues in relation to trading in securities. This research highlights some (...) potentially negative effects if trading simulations were to be used in isolation without providing students with a solid background in ethics. This issue is even more relevant in the post Global Financial Crisis environment. If carefully designed and implemented, trading simulations have a potential to mitigate some potentially negative effects of the use of technology and be an effective and inclusive teaching tool. (shrink)

We give inequational and equational axioms for semirings with a fixed-point operator and formally develop a fragment of the theory of context-free languages. In particular, we show that Greibach’s normal form theorem depends only on a few equational properties of least pre-fixed points in semirings, and eliminations of chain and deletion rules depend on their inequational properties . It follows that these normal form theorems also hold in non-continuous semirings having enough fixed points.

There is a striking similarity between the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Harry G. Frankfurt: they both argue that the temporal nature of human existence and agency is due to the fact that humans care about things. Even though Heidegger’s concept of care and Frankfurt’s concept of caring are very different, they are worth comparing because they play a similar role and have similar significance in their thinking. This comparison also offers an opportunity for a desired dialog between philosophers working (...) in those two different traditions. I argue that the two views can complement each other: Though Frankfurt provides a detailed psychological description of caring, his concept of caring is too mentalistic and leads to solipsism. Thus, his theory can be enriched with the help of Heidegger’s view based on the concept of Being-in-the-world. (shrink)

0. Abstract In this paper, I argue that although the behavior of adjectives in context poses a serious challenge to the principle of compositionality of content, in the end such considerations do not defeat the principle. The first two sections are devoted to the precise statement of the challenge; the rest of the paper presents a semantic analysis of a large class of adjectives that provides a satisfactory answer to it. In section 1, I formulate the context thesis, according to (...) which the content of a complex expression depends on the context of its utterance only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. If the context thesis is false, the content of some complex expression is not compositionally determined. In section 2, using an example due to Charles Travis, I construct an objection to the context thesis based on the behavior of the adjective ‘green’. In section 3 and 4, I look at some of the difficulties surrounding the semantics of ‘good’, which provide the motivation for the thesis that most adjectives are contextually incomplete one-place predicates. In section 5, I discuss how ‘green’ and other color adjectives can be treated within such a semantic theory. Since this theory is compatible with the context thesis, the objection against the compositionality of content looses its force. (shrink)

Aesthetic attraction and artful execution of the object, careful design and seemingly blatant falsification by the creator, voluntarily accepted counterfeit imitation and celebration of a melancholy-filled illusion – these, and many other, often contradictory, particularities can describe one of the most complex aesthetic phenomena, that of fake ruins. Questions of perfection and mistake, accurate planning and permissive randomness, genuineness and authenticity – or the convincing justification of aesthetic experience despite the complete lack of them – profound references to the nature (...) of decay, the transience of all human creation and nostalgia can all be found around this object of art. In this article I analyse the fakeness of fake ruins with regard to the multiple consequences that this type of fake can contribute to the better understanding of both their aesthetics and the concept of mistake. (shrink)

This paper considers two subjective measures of the existence of unconscious mental states - the guessing criterion, and the zero correlation criterion - and considers the assumptions underlying their application in experimental paradigms. Using higher order thought theory the impact of different types of biases on the zero correlation and guessing criteria are considered. It is argued that subjective measures of consciousness can be biased in various specified ways, some of which involve the relation between first order states and second (...) order thoughts, and hence are not errors in measurement of the conscious status of mental states; but other sorts of biases are measurement errors, involving the relation between higher order thoughts and their expression. Nonetheless, it is argued this type of bias does not preclude subjective measures - both the guessing criterion and the zero correlation criterion - as being amongst the most appropriate and useful tools for measuring the conscious status of mental states. (shrink)

A central puzzle of contemporary moral and political philosophy is that while most of us believe that all or almost all human beings enjoy the same moral status, human beings possess the capacities that supposedly ground moral status to very unequal levels. This paper aims to develop a novel strategy to vindicate the idea of moral equality against this challenge. Its central argument is that the puzzle emerges only if one accepts a usually unstated theoretical premise about value and the (...) proper response to value. The premise holds that if the presence of a valuable property warrants a certain kind of response towards its bearers, then every variation in the degree to which the property is present necessarily constitutes a reason for a corresponding variation in the response that is warranted towards its bearers. It argues that despite its intuitive appeal, the premise is not plausible as a general view about the proper way of responding to value, and as a view about responding to the value of rational beings in particular. It proposes an account of the proper manner of valuing rational beings that supports a distinctive version of the so-called threshold approach to justifying equal moral status. (shrink)

A recent version of the mental file framework argues that the antirealist theory of fictional objects can be reconciled with the claim that fictional utterances involving character names express propositions that are true in the real world. This hybrid view rests on the following three claims: character names lack referents but express a mode of presentation, fictional utterances introduce oblique contexts where character names refer to their modes of presentation, and modes of presentation are mental files. In this critical paper, (...) I will argue that the proposed view runs into a number of theory-internal problems. These problems arise partly from the unclarities inherent in the notion of mental file, and partly from a mistaken semantics for character names. I will also argue that adherents of fictional realism can make use of the notion of mental file without encountering similar difficulties. (shrink)

I argue that sentences like ‘ John is building a house’ entail the existence of some thing John is building, althoguh they do not entail that this thing is a house. It is a house in progress. On the way, I argue against intensional analyses of the progressive. This is a follow-up of my earlier paper ‘On the Progressive and the Perfective.’.

A stubborn problem for reflectance physicalism about color is to account for individual differences in normal trichromat color perception. The identification of determinate colors with physical properties of visible surfaces in a universal, perceiver-independent way is challenged by the observation that the same surfaces in identical viewing conditions often look different in color to different human subjects with normal color vision. Recently, leading representatives of reflectance physicalism have offered some arguments to defend their view against the individual differences challenge. In (...) this paper I challenge their defense. I argue thateven though individual differences are present in shape perception as well as in color perception, the mechanisms of shape perception and those of color perception differ in ways which make them completely different regarding their evidential status for certain identity claims. Thus comparing color perception to shape perception offers no support for identifying hues with reflectances. On the other hand, drawing a parallel between the temperature-mean kinetic energy of molecules (MKE) identification and the proposed hue-reflectance identities is no support for reflectance physicalism either, since there is an important disanalogybetween the two cases. While individual differences obtain in color perception, the effects of temperature (e.g., melting, thermal expansion) do not exhibit analogous variation, which makes the temperature-MKE identification unproblematic compared to the hue-reflectance identification. One motivation for this ongoing debate is that the success or failure of reflectance physicalism has far-reaching consequences regarding externalist theories of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

The implicit-explicit distinction is applied to knowledge representations. Knowledge is taken to be an attitude towards a proposition which is true. The proposition itself predicates a property to some entity. A number of ways in which knowledge can be implicit or explicit emerge. If a higher aspect is known explicitly then each lower one must also be known explicitly. This partial hierarchy reduces the number of ways in which knowledge can be explicit. In the most important type of implicit knowledge, (...) representations merely reflect the property of objects or events without predicating them of any particular entity The dearest cases of explicit knowledge of a fact are representations of one's own attitude of knowing that fact. These distinctions are discussed in their relationship to similar distinctions such as procedural-declarative, conscious unconscious, verbalizable-nonverbalizable, direct-indirect tests, and automatic voluntary control. This is followed by an outline of how these distinctions can be used to integrate and relate the often divergent uses of the implicit-explicit distinction in different research areas. We illustrate this for visual perception, memory, cognitive development, and artificial grammar learning. (shrink)

How do we make sense of our experience? In order to understand how we construct meaning, the varied and complex relationships among language, mind, and culture need to be understood. While cognitive linguists typically study the cognitive aspects of language, and linguistic anthropologists typically study language and culture, Language, Mind, and Culture is the first book to combine all three and provide an account of meaning-making in language and culture by examining the many cognitive operations in this process. In addition (...) to providing a comprehensive theory of how we can account for meaning making, Language, Mind, and Culture is a textbook for anyone interested in the fascinating issues surrounding the relationship between language, mind, and culture. Further, the book is also a "practical" introduction: most of the chapters include exercises that help the student understand the theoretical issues. No prior knowledge of linguistics is assumed, and the material is accessible and useful to students in a variety of other disciplines, such as anthropology, English, sociology, philosophy, psychology, communication, rhetoric, and others. Language, Mind, and Culture helps us make sense of not only linguistic meaning but also of some of the important personal and social issues we encounter in our lives as members of particular cultures and as human beings. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are problems with the foundations of the current version of physicalism about color. In some sources laying the foundations of physicalism, types of surface reflectance corresponding to (veridical) color perceptions are characterized by making reference to properties of the observer. This means that these surface attributes are not objective (i.e. observer-independent). This problem casts doubt on the possibility of identifying colors with types of surface reflectance. If this identification cannot be maintained, that in (...) turn threatens representationalist theories of phenomenal consciousness: there remains no objective, observer-independent property that color experiences represent - hence no representational content, in terms of semantic externalism, can be attributed to color experiences. I offer an alternative account of color and conclude that further empirical study is required to do justice to the basic claims of color physicalism. (shrink)

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing (...) regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors. (shrink)

First religion explained how the mind emerged, language developed, and overall consciousness came into being. Many of these explanations were challenged during the "age of reason," grand metaphysical theories gradually displaced many of the religious perceptions of the world, only to be displaced by scientific advances at the start of the century. Now, Zoltan Torey, an Australian psychologist, freelance science writer, and science journalist for ABC Radio National in Australia, offers a new science-based theory of the human mind. Torey spent (...) ten years using a process he calls reverse engineering, a process with a solid grounding in neuroscience, linguistics, and biological modelling to identify what we call the mind. He shows how it emerged, relates to language, generates consciousness, and yet remains hidden from insight. Sure to be controversial, The Crucible of Consciousness provides a unified description of the human mind, an antidote to the fragmented world and other simplistic belief-systems that occupy the cultural middleground. (shrink)

We make three points. First, the concept of productance value that the authors propose in their defense of color physicalism fails to do the work for which it is intended. Second, the authors fail to offer an adequate physicalist account of what they call the hue-magnitudes. Third, their answer to the problem of individual differences faces serious difficulties.

Sandberg et al. show that the Perceptual Awareness Scale scale is sensitive compared to confidence ratings and wagering in detecting accurate perception. They go on to argue that the PAS scale is hence a sensitive measure of conscious perception compared to confidence ratings, a claim disputed here. The fact that some visual content is conscious does not entail that the visual content relevant to making a discrimination is conscious. For example, if one saw a square but was only aware of (...) seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square. When PAS and confidence ratings come in conflict, we suggest that it is confidence ratings that more reliably indicate the conscious status of contents allowing discrimination. (shrink)

The paper examines the so-called principle of all-affected interests (PAAI), which holds that political decisions ought to be made in such a manner that all those whose interests are affected by them have appropriate opportunity to participate in them. In conjunction with factual observations regarding global economic interdependence, the PAAI is frequently proposed as the normative premise of arguments for global democracy. The paper argues that these arguments underspecify the supposed wrong of affectedness. It argues that the perceived wrongness of (...) some situations of being affected without an opportunity to participate can be fully captured in terms of inequality rather than exclusion. (shrink)

Avia Pasternak’s admirably clearly and tightly argued book defends four broad theses. First, it argues that contemporary states are appropriately regarded.

In this paper I offer an explanation of the ineffability (linguistic inexpressibility) of sensory experiences. My explanation is put in terms of computational functionalism and standard externalist theories of representational content. As I will argue, many or most sensory experiences are representational states without constituent structure. This property determines both the representational function these states can serve and the information that can be extracted from them when they are processed. Sensory experiences can indicate the presence of certain external states of (...) affairs but they cannot convey any more information about them than that. So, format- or code-conversion mechanisms that link different systems of representation (linguistic and perceptual) to each other will fail to extract any relevant information from sensory experiences that could be coded in language. They only way to establish specific roles for sensory experiences in communication and the organization of behavior is to attach to them, by associative links, words, or other behavioral responses. If a sensory experience has no linguistic label associated to it in a particular subject, then no linguistic description can token, or activate, that state in the subject. In other words, no linguistic description can cause a subject to undergo an unlabeled perceptual state. On the contrary, complex, or syntactically structured perceptual states can be built up, on the basis of descriptions, by mechanisms of constructive imagination (conceived here as one sort of format conversion). It is this difference between complex and unstructured representational states that gives us an understanding of the phenomenon we call the ineffability of qualia. (shrink)

We explore three methods for measuring the conscious status of knowledge using the artificial grammar learning paradigm. We show wagering is no more sensitive to conscious knowledge than simple verbal confidence reports but is affected by risk aversion. When people wager rather than give verbal confidence they are less ready to indicate high confidence. We introduce a “no-loss gambling” method which is insensitive to risk aversion. We show that when people are just as ready to bet on a genuine random (...) process as their own classification decisions, their classifications are still above baseline, indicating knowledge participants are not aware of having. Our results have methodological implications for any study investigating whether people are aware of knowing. (shrink)