One of the success stories of formal semantics is explicating responsive moves like answers to questions. There is, however, a significant lacune concerning the characterization of _initiating utterances_, which are strongly tied to the conversational activity [language game (Wittgenstein), speech genre (Bakhtin)], or—our terminology—_conversational type_, one is engaged in. To date there has been no systematic proposal trying to account for the range of possible _language games_/_speech genres_/_conversational types_ and their global structure. In particular, concerning the range of subject matter (...) that can and needs to be discussed and by whom—ultimately a semantic analogue of Laplace’s demon. We suggest that the subject matter problem for conversational types is a central task for any semantic theory for conversation. This paper develops a theory of conversational types, which embedded in the theory of conversational interaction KoS, enables this problem to be tackled for a wide range of conversational types drawn from the British National Corpus classification of conversational domains. The theory we develop treats conversational types as first class, not metatheoretical entities, in contrast to explications of corresponding notions in game theoretic approaches. We demonstrate that this allows us to explicate the possibilities interlocutors have to refer to and seek clarification about the types of conversations they are engaged in. (shrink)

Whether due to simplicity or hypocrisy, the question of access to patient data for biomedical research is widely seen in the public discourse only from the angle of patient privacy. At the same time, the desire to live and to live without disability is of much higher value to the patients. This goal can only be achieved by extracting research insight from patient data in addition to working on model organisms, something that is well understood by many patients. Yet, most (...) biomedical researchers working outside of clinics and hospitals are denied access to patient records when, at the same time, clinicians who guard the patient data are not optimally prepared for the data’s analysis. Medical data collection is a time- and cost-intensive process that is most of all tedious, with few elements of intellectual and emotional satisfaction on its own. In this process, clinicians and bioinformaticians, each group with their own interests, have to join forces with the goal to generate medical data sets both from clinical trials and from routinely collected electronic health records that are, as much as possible, free from errors and obvious inconsistencies. The data cleansing effort as we have learned during curation of Singaporean clinical trial data is not a trivial task. The introduction of omics and sophisticated imaging modalities into clinical practice that are only partially interpreted in terms of diagnosis and therapy with today’s level of knowledge warrant the creation of clinical databases with full patient history. This opens up opportunities for re-analyses and cross-trial studies at future time points with more sophisticated analyses of the same data, the collection of which is very expensive. (shrink)

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from a (...) non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

There are a number of recent attempts to introduce Confucian values to the ethical analysis of technology. These works, however, have not attended sufficiently to one central aspect of Confucianism, namely Ritual (‘Li’). Li is central to Confucian ethics, and it has been suggested that the emphasis on Li in Confucian ethics is what distinguishes it from other ethical traditions. Any discussion of Confucian ethics for technology, therefore, remains incomplete without accounting for Li. This chapter aims to elaborate on the (...) concept of Confucian Li and discuss its relevance to ethics of technology. Particularly, by referring to Li’s communicative, formative, and aesthetic function, I formulate an approach to ethics of technology with an emphasis on community, performance, and the aesthetic and demonstrate how this approach proceeds with the ethical analysis of technology. In doing so, I attempt to answer the question: why Confucianism matters in ethics of technology. (shrink)

I thought the paper by Kai-yee Wong and Chris Fraser was fascinating and insightful. Two things I especially appreciated are the clarity with which they summarize my views. I think they are quite fair and accurate. Second, I appreciate their suggestion that the way to deal with the practical problem of weakness of will has much to do with the role of the Background in shaping our actions. I think they are especially on the right track when they say (...) that the improvement of Background skills may actually narrow the range of real options for action, (p. 21) nonetheless, they do not decrease freedom. As they say, “It is a process of strengthening the self, and the agent is likely to experience the concomitant restriction of ‘live’ options not as a limitation but as strength of character.” (p. 21). That seems to me very much on the right track. What they are suggesting, and it is a powerful addition to my own writings, is that we should not just think of the Background as facilitating languages, games and social practices generally, but for morality as well (p. 23). (shrink)

The essence of the associated-proposition strategy is to distinguish the necessary proposition _expressed by_ a sentence.

By melodic landscape, this paper points to natural milieus such as mountains whose motifs are caught up in contrapuntal relations. With Merleau-Ponty, the structure of the world is a symphony, and the production of life which implicates both organism and environment as unfurling of Umwelt is ‘a melody that sings itself’. For the Chinese culture, mountains have been deemed virtuous in Confucianism, immortal by Daoists, and spiritual for a Buddhist to reach a substrate level of pure stream of a-subjective consciousness. (...) A Chinese painter-poet within the ‘mountain-water’ genre would consider mountains as performance of events, a concert of vibration of light, shape and sound, movement and rest. Insofar as art is to create energy transfer, Chinese artists of mountains aim at concerting with nature as organised by rhythms and conspecifics, unfolding contrapuntal melodies with all kinds of counterpoints. As Deleuze and Guattari's notion of refrains are the three forces or tempos of chaos, earth and world confronting/converging one another, this paper endeavours to find out, first, how Deleuze and Guattari's geological, organic and alloplastic stratifications can be put alongside mountains, animals, plants and arts, and second, how this notion can contribute to our new appreciation of the way Chinese mountains in arts can give out music. (shrink)

Design research has been positioned as an important methodological contribution of the learning sciences. Despite the publication of a handbook on the subject, the practice of design research in education remains an eclectic collection of specific approaches implemented by different researchers and research groups. In this paper, I examine the learning sciences as a design science to identify its fundamental goals, methods, affiliations, and assumptions. I argue that inherent tensions arise when attempting to practice design research as an analytic science. (...) Drawing inspiration and insight from Chinese philosophy and the practice of Chinese medicine, I propose that the learning sciences may better attain its claims to science through greater reliance on inductive synthesis rather than linear causal analysis. In so doing, I reposition the endeavor of science making within the metaphysics of process philosophy instead of classical Western philosophy. I suggest that theory building will be strengthened empirically and pragmatically by more careful observation and systematic generalization of the stability patterns of design related phenomena. It also needs to be more situated in its orientation. (shrink)

This paper asks how the intensity of individual local eParticipation affects users’ perception of democratically valuable effects. Drawing on participatory and deliberative theory literature we extract four participatory effects- internal political efficacy, common good orientation, tolerance, and legitimacy. Furthermore, the paper examines which cognitive factors may moderate the relationship between intensity of participation and perception of participatory effects. Drawing on online survey data from 670 citizens engaged in public budgeting online consultations on the local level, the conducted path analysis shows (...) that intensity of participation seems to foster the perception of common good orientation and tolerance. The other perceptions of participatory effects were not influenced by participation intensity. Findings on moderating factors indicate that the beneficial effects of online participation were not distributed unequally among participants. In conclusion, the research presents evidence for an optimistic view on local eParticipation that is able to promote democratically valuable user experiences. (shrink)

The Art of War application to education is about solving problems to improve student and school success. The Art of War describes the significance of a leader and his knowledge and prudent application of the strategies. At the core of theses strategies is the non-negotiable moral purpose of the leader to be reinforced by other fine qualities as wisdom, commitment, discipline, and courage.

Some researchers have concluded that nonverbal recognition is generally superior to verbal recognition memory performance. The present study involved two experiments designed to assess claims of superior nonverbal memory. Experiment 1 compared performance for letter (common words) and nonletter (meaningful line drawings) items with matched high-imagery values. Experiment 2 compared performance for matched low-imagery items consisting of letters (pseudowords) and nonletter items (geometric matrices). Performance did not differ significantly between verbal and nonverbal items in either experiment, although the expected effects (...) of presentation rate and type of retrieval task were significant. It was concluded that recognition memory performance is not necessarily dependent upon the “verbalness ” or “non-verbalness ” of stimulus items. (shrink)

Several important physical implications left out in The Five Dimension Space-Time Universe: A creation and grand unified field theory model. Book, are presented under rigorous mathematical theorems. It was found that Temperature, a classical variable, must be added as an imaginary component to time, under the Quantum uncertainty dt∙dE = h/2π, so that the Gell-Mann Quark model can be verified, with gauge invariance, to form hadrons at the Bethe Fusion Temperature. Accordingly from the corresponding uncertainty dp∙dr = h/2π. Pairs of (...) Diagonal Long Range Ordered gravitons, with continuous frequency spectrum together with those represented by magnetic monopoles must be formed within the space r, of the homogenous 5D manifold, without the presents of photons, thus defines the 5D as a Black Hole. Then from which we can derive the classical Newtonian Law of attractive Gravity, as the 5D manifold is mapped by Perelmann Ricci-flow entropy mapping and the DLRO graviton pair symmetry is broken and converted into two masses, with motions satisfying Special Relativity in the doughnut shape Lorentz manifold, thus indirectly verifies the principle of Covariant Riemannian curvatures and General Relativity theory. (shrink)

In this book, David B. Wong defends an ambitious and important new version of moral relativism. He does not espouse the type of relativism that says anything goes, but he does start with a relativist stance against alternative theories such that there need not be only one universal truth. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities existing across different traditions and cultures, all with one core human question as to how we can all live (...) together. (shrink)

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing on past grief research, religion, and new media studies, a thematic analysis of 1,046 messages was conducted on three mediated sites (Twitter, TMZ.com, and Facebook). Results suggested that social media served as grieving spaces for people to accept Jackson’s death (...) rather than denying it or expressing anger over his passing. The findings also illustrate how interactive exchanges online helped recycle news and “resurrected” the life of Jackson. Additionally, as fans of deceased celebrities create and disseminate web-based memorials, new social media practices such as “Michael Mondays” synchronize tweets within everyday life rhythms and foster practices to hasten the grieving process. (shrink)

The conception of saviour siblings using preimplantation genetic diagnosis coupled with human leukocyte antigen typing or HLA typing alone is controversial and receives a wide divergence of legal responses among countries around the world. The resulting child conceived through this procedure is dubbed a ‘saviour sibling’ as the child can potentially act as a compatible donor for an elder ailing sibling who needs a haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. At present, the acceptability of this procedure in Malaysia is ambiguous as there (...) is no specific statute governing assisted reproductive technology, and the guideline issued by the Malaysian Medical Council does not expressly address this issue. The ethical arguments relating to the conception of saviour siblings in the current literature are mainly thought to reflect a liberal viewpoint which is predominantly Western in nature. This paper seeks to explore the perception of selected key stakeholders on the acceptability of and ethical concerns related to this procedure in the Malaysian context. The findings indicate that stakeholders generally support the conception of saviour siblings and some of their concerns echo the Western viewpoint. Interestingly, many were highly anxious about its economic implication, which is rarely discussed in the current literature on saviour siblings. (shrink)

Drama pedagogy has evolved in recent years as one the most creative and adaptable tools for engaged learning in language teaching. This paper discusses the teaching of modern Chinese play selected to be a prescribed text in pre-university Chinese literature curriculum. The play in focus is Teahouse by the renowned Chinese writer, Lao She. The study aims to pilot qualitative research through concrete individual teaching, in order to perform a preliminary classification and analysis of how teaching methods of modern plays (...) are carried out. These include the use of the Theatre in Education and Drama in Education models to conduct the teaching of modern plays. The study purported that the use of Theatre in Education and Drama in Education are methods to trigger students’ interest in learning before lessons and to carry out warm-up activities and to evaluate lesson results. These methods also aid students to familiarize the core of the original texts and use meaningful, theatrical real scenarios for the teaching of language and literature. Keywords - Education, drama pedagogy, classroom pedagogy, qualitative design, Singapore. (shrink)

Many current theories of human rights are flawed in that they fail to recognise differences between fundamental human rights and others of lesser significance. If some rights are superior to others than it is possible to formulate a hierarchy of rights, and rules to resolve potential conflicts of rights. Only by self-examination can we determine what is personally significant in how we live meaningful and directed lives. This in turn aids in defining social values and determining the rights individuals should (...) reasonably expect to be provided by society. (shrink)

The present study investigates the dynamics of emotional processing and awareness using an affective facial priming paradigm in conjunction with a multimodal assessment of awareness. Key facial primes are visually masked, and are presented for brief and extended durations. Using a preference measure, we examine whether the effects of the primes differ qualitatively . We show that: unconscious affective priming with faces emerges strongly in initial presentations and diminishes rapidly with repetition; conscious affective priming also emerges strongly in initial presentations, (...) however it persists in strength with repetition; and in contrast to other reports on the salience of negative stimuli, happy faces appear more salient than sad faces when presented outside awareness. We discuss the limits and extensions of unconscious affective priming with faces, and consider several methodological and conceptual questions concerning emotional processing out of awareness. (shrink)

The view defended is one sense externalist on the relation between moral reasons and motivation: A's having a moral reason to do X does not necessarily imply that A has a motivation that would support A's doing X via some appropriate deliberative route. However, it is in another sense externalist in holding that there are the kind of moral reasons there are only if the relevant motivational capacities are "generally present" in human beings, if not in all individuals. The process (...) of socialization is an attempt to embed the recognition of what we have moral reason to do in the intentional content of one's feelings. E.g., learning that about others' suffering embeds their suffering as a reason to help in the intentional content of incipient compassionate feelings. This endows the reason with motivational efficacy while conferring further direction to the feelings in ways that shape us for social cooperation. (shrink)

This paper is to inform the recent situations of work by the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Hong Kong through the lens of Covid-19. Through the interviews with seven informants — two employers and five FDWs, stories describing the changes in their working conditions, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment related to the impacts of Covid-19 were collected. They were analysed through three theoretical tools — visibility/invisibility, mobility/immobility, and work boundary. The findings show that under the Covid-19 crisis, the (...) FDWs experienced more hardships and struggles in both the home country and host country. The paradoxes of visibility/invisibility and mobility/immobility together with blurred work boundary were found in their experience of work, rights and entitlement, and the contextual environment. On one hand, the employers’ power of controlling FDWs has increased, but the agency to resist by the FDWs has decreased making them to turn to more passive means of resistance which could harm the FDWs’ physical and mental health and wellbeing. (shrink)

The advancement of human reproductive technology has made it possible for parents with a child affected by a haematological disorder to select and bring into being, a prospective child who can act as a matched stem cell donor. This can be done through the use of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) coupled with human leukocyte antigen (HLA) typing (PGD-HLA typing), or HLA tying as a standalone procedure, where a healthy embryo, which is an HLA match to the existing sick sibling, is (...) chosen for implantation. The creation of such a sibling (saviour sibling) is normally taken as a last resort when there is no related or unrelated matched donor. While the conception of a saviour sibling may serve as a reliable and realistic treatment option for the ailing child, it also poses new moral questions that challenge a religiously pluralistic society such as Malaysia. The use of PGD-HLA typing may be controversial as it involves creating a life to save a life, selection of compatible human embryos and destruction of the unselected embryos. At present, there is no legal framework regulating the conception of saviour siblings. The development of ethically sound and appropriate local laws and policies should consider the views of religious communities, especially when it involves a controversial subject such as the conception of saviour siblings. This article seeks to explore the perceptions of religious scholars and representatives of the major religions professed and practised in Malaysia, namely Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, through qualitative interviews. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hermeneutics, Neuroscience and PsychiatryMichael T. H. Wong, MBBS, MD, MA, MDiv, PhD, FRCPsych, FRANZCP, FHKAM (bio)Hermeneutic practice in mental health has been a theme in Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology (PPP) since its very beginnings. In this essay I argue that hermeneutics, the theory and practice of interpretation, promotes therapeutic interaction between mental health professionals, patients and their family.Why does this patient present in such a way at this (...) particular point in time? The distressing symptoms are there. The changes in behavior are obvious. Impairments of functions are hurting. A mental illness clearly runs in the family. There were early losses of loved ones, physical abuse at home, bullying by peers and self-medication with drugs and alcohol. Three in four adults with a mental illness first experienced that before they turned 24. The brain goes through major reorganization during adolescence and early adulthood. If synaptic pruning went wrong, psychoses emerged. When stresses activated the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis the elevated cortisol level impacted the size and function of the hippocampus and amygdala in the genetically vulnerable; anxiety, depression, bipolar, and personality disorders developed. The patient needs a voice/language to describe all these experiences and events and the psychiatrist needs a discourse to make sense of them.Eisenberg laments the swings between "brainlessness" and "mindlessness" in psychiatry. Engel argues for a "biopsychosocial" discourse. The major challenge for psychiatry is how to organize clinical information of different nature (categories, dimensions, narratives; i.e., objective vs. subjective, personal vs. interpersonal) into a coherent and comprehensible account for us all. Mental illnesses are not only neuropsychiatric spectrum disorders but also dysfunctions of social relationship and environmental/ecological adaptation. Psychiatry as a clinical neuroscience per se lacks the semantics to address the rich interactions between the physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual in the illness experience of our patients. Explanation in the diagnostic formulation (objective scientific discourse on cause and effect) and understanding in the patient narrative (subjective ordinary everyday discourse on significance and meaning) are irreducible to each other (Wong, 2018). They instead interact with one another to achieve an integrative formulation, not through merging different discourses into a single assertion/monologue but via the dialectic/dialogue of "explaining more in order to understand better," as Ricoeur puts it, and between "the whole and the parts," as Schleiermacher highlights.This "therapeutic hermeneutic circle" of "explanation vs understanding" and "the whole vs the parts" includes symptoms behavior function and life events. It correlates between bio-psychosociocultural-spiritual dimensions/perspectives and does not reduce them to any particular/single [End Page 13] stance. The whole integrates the parts and the parts enrich the whole. It explains but does not explain away. It understands through an articulation of meaning and significance. This discourse is a multilayered (bio-psycho-social-cultural-spiritual) personal narrative that formulates diagnosis and care in a correlative (linking different voices/discourses) and non-reductive (no particular voice/discourse is prejudiced against) manner that is comprehensible to us all (Wong, 2021).PPP will be an excellent forum for discussing clinical hermeneutics in the future. In this digital era of social media and virtual reality, hermeneutics has the never-ending task to tackle the unprecedented challenges to meaning illness and health posed by polarizing discourses.Michael T. H. Wong Michael T.H. Wong, MBBS, MD, MA, MDiv, PhD, FRCPsych, FRANZCP, FHKAM, is Hon Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, China. Michael is Chair, Section of Philosophy & Humanities in Psychiatry, World Psychiatric Association. He is an Organizational Partner & International Lead with The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, St Catherine's College Oxford. He is Advisor to the Chinese Health Foundation of Australia.ReferencesWong M. T. H. (2018). Ricoeur and the third discourse of the person: From philosophy and neuroscience to psychiatry and theology. London: Lexington Books. Google ScholarWong, M. T. H. (2021). Values, meanings, hermeneutics and mental health. In Stoyanov, D., Fulford, K. M. W. F., Stanghellini, G., Van Staden, W., & Wong, M. TH. (Eds.), International perspectives in values-based mental health practice: Case studies and commentaries (pp. 341–349... (shrink)

Translation of western philosophical concept into Chinese is often considered to be challenging. This is attributed to both linguistic and cultural differences. This article discusses these challenges under four categories, namely terminology, semantic understanding and context, philosophical disputes, and language reconstruction and combination. For each category, one or two examples are presented to illustrate the challenges. How each of these challenges is resolved is also discussed so as to provide the readers with some guidelines if they encounter similar challenges in (...) their work. (shrink)

Hegel’s famous criticism of Laozi in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, has been a center of controversy in comparative philosophy. It is often regarded as an example of the unfair treatment of Chinese philosophy by its Western counterpart, that the West is measuring the East according to its own standard, imposing on the latter its understanding of what philosophy should be, passing judgment on China that it has no mature philosophy, or, if it has, that it is still (...) in an unsophisticated, primitive stage. However, there has been little serious and detailed discussion about Hegel’s argument in this important and representative document in the dialogue between Western and Chinese philosophy. Most of the .. (shrink)