The work's central thesis is that meaningful discourse would be impossible unless the discoursers had distributive access to realities structured independently of language, such an access in fact as can service a metaphysically significant correspondence theory of truth. The thesis is deployed against the view, advanced by Hilary Putnam and by Richard Rorty, that we cannot exit the circle of words so as to secure any version of external realism. ;To establish the thesis, an intentionalist hermeneutics is developed: Due to (...) the plasticity of lexical meanings, the meaning of a text cannot be compositionally derived from linguistic conventions alone; the author's intentions, constituted in part by the extra-linguistic narrative matrices framing his life, must be consulted. The finding that a text's ontological commitments are determined by authorial intentions blocks Putnam's attempt to derive the ontological indeterminacy of human discourse from the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem. And his charge that this appeal to intentions is circular is faulted for its reliance on an inadequate, psycholinguistic model of intentions. ;It is then argued that meaningful discourse must be anchored, through narratively coherent transactions conducted without words, to realities structured beyond words: Our pre-linguistic ancestors could never have developed a meaningful description scheme unless its terms elicited among its original users sub-linguistic reality-negotiating strategies appropriate to encountered realities, strategies like those displayed by alexic brutes. The internal realist's claim that our grasp of reality is everywhere structured by language is consequently afforded a corrective supplement: That our grasp of language is everywhere structured by a sub-linguistic grasp of reality. The strategies our pre-linguistic ancestors used to locate and manage encountered realities indispensably underlie our present use of language and provide us with an extra-linguistic access to those realities, an access that is sufficient, it is argued, to support a substantive correspondence theory of truth: An assertion corresponds to reality as long as the reality-negotiating strategies it conjugates can be successfully implemented. And this truth-conferring conception of correspondence, constituted by an appropriateness to reality, can arguably sustain a robust version of realism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Legislative sovereignty is often discussed with one eye on the past and one eye on the procedural functions of law-making in the present. This limits the scope for a conceptual understanding of legislative sovereignty and hinders its theoretical progress. This article argues that legislative sovereignty contains within it the concept of an idol and that understanding the scope and impact of the idol of sovereignty is necessary for future development in this field. Theories from Kant, Nietzsche, von Mises and (...) Derrida are used to offer a divergent critique of legislative sovereignty while the author calls for a move towards a nuanced view of legislative and Parliamentary Sovereignty to account for its idolism. The key factor preventing the development of a truly nuanced and reflective theory of sovereignty is the devotion to former idols which are inoperable and inconsistent with modern geopolitical, inter-state relationships. The author also argues that our knowledge of sovereignty is synthetic a priori and that development in this area can only be by reason, as knowledge derived experientially is subject to the Kantian Transcendental Idealism. (shrink)

A period of exposure to trains of simultaneous but spatially offset auditory and visual stimuli can induce a temporary shift in the perception of sound location. This phenomenon, known as the 'ventriloquist aftereffect', reflects a realignment of auditory and visual spatial representations such that they approach perceptual alignment despite their physical spatial discordance. Such dynamic changes to sensory representations are likely to underlie the brain's ability to accommodate inter-sensory discordance produced by sensory errors (particularly in sound localization) and variability in (...) sensory transduction. It is currently unknown, however, whether these plastic changes induced by adaptation to spatially disparate inputs occurs automatically or whether they are dependent on selectively attending to the visual or auditory stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that robust auditory spatial aftereffects can be induced even in the presence of a competing visual stimulus. Importantly, we found that when attention is directed to the competing stimuli, the pattern of aftereffects is altered. These results indicate that attention can modulate the ventriloquist aftereffect. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. (shrink)

Technological changes affect Western culture in three ways: the ratio between the lifetimes of technologies and the human lifetime is inverted; the three principal realms of human life (the home, the workplace, and leisure activity), as well as political systems, are affected; and the cohesion of the social body is threatened. The impact on Eastern culture is softened by a clearer role assigned to school, the resulting level of education, and the influence of Confucian ethics. However, acculturation will vary among (...) countries, depending on the communication ability in the respective societies and the degree of development of social cellular structures, which are the most able to manage complexity. (shrink)

In early embryonic development, the cell cycle is paced by a biochemical oscillator involving cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases (cdks). Essentially the same machinery operates in all eukaryotic cells, although after the first few divisions various braking mechanisms (the so-called checkpoints) become significant. Haase and Reed have recently shown that yeast cells have a second, independent oscillator which coordinates some of the events of the G1 phase of the cell cycle.(1) Although the biochemical nature of this oscillator is not known,it seems (...) unlikely to be a redundant cyclin/cdk system. BioEssays 22:3–5, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Models of cognitive vulnerability claim that depressive symptoms arise as a result of an interaction between negative affect and cognitive reactions, in the form of dysfunctional attitudes and negative inferential style. We present a model that complements this approach by focusing on the appraisal processes that elicit and differentiate everyday episodes of emotional experience, arguing that individual differences in appraisal patterns can foster negative emotional experiences related to depression (e.g., sadness and despair). In particular, dispositional appraisal biases facilitating the elicitation (...) of these emotions more frequently and more intensely. This, in turn, is likely to have a negative influence on cognitive processing and emotion regulation in general. (shrink)

The patient was a woman in her 30s who, until the rapid progression of an ultimately fatal neurologic disease, had been a very successful professional, enjoying athletics and an active social life. In the 6 months of swift deterioration, she had gone from being extremely vibrant and energetic to being totally unable to care for her personal needs. There had been no loss of intellectual capacity. Her sister later recounted to Dr. J., the emergency department physician, that she had found (...) the patient unconscious and unresponsive at home and had immediately called the patient's neurologist in a neighboring city. He directed her to call the paramedics. (shrink)

: To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals’ responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation and a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

Really statistical explanation is a hitherto neglected form of noncausal scientific explanation. Explanations in population biology that appeal to drift are RS explanations. An RS explanation supplies a kind of understanding that a causal explanation of the same result cannot supply. Roughly speaking, an RS explanation shows the result to be mere statistical fallout.

Everybody negotiates. But not everybody negotiates ethically. One driver of unethical negotiation behavior is power. Yet, we still haven’t discovered the principalmoderating and mediating influences between power and ethical negotiation behavior. In this pair of experimental studies we’re interested in finding out how resilience and moral identity affect an individual’s ethical behavior in both simple and complex negotiations when primed for power.

The essays explore virtually all of Johnson's writings: each of his novels, his numerous short stories, the range of his nonfiction essays, his many book ...

Clahsen has added to the body of evidence that, on average, regular and irregular inflected words behave differently. However, the dual-mechanism account he supports predicts a crisp distinction; the empirical data instead suggest a fuzzy one, more in line with single-mechanism connectionist models.

Successful surgical treatment of patients with focal drug-resistant epilepsy remains challenging, especially in cases for which it is difficult to define the area of cortex from which seizures originate, the seizure onset zone. Various diagnostic methods are needed to select surgical candidates and determine the extent of resection. Interictal magnetoencephalography with source imaging has proven to be useful for presurgical evaluation, but the use of ictal MEG data remains limited. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether pre-ictal (...) variations of spectral properties of neural activity from ictal MEG recordings are predictive of SOZ location.We performed a 4 h overnight MEG recording in an 8-year-old child with drug-resistant focal epilepsy of suspected right fronto-temporal origin and captured one ~45-s seizure. The patient underwent a right temporal resection from the anterior temporal neocortex and amygdala to the mid-posterior temporal neocortex, sparing the hippocampus proper. She remains seizure-free 21 months postoperatively. The histopathological assessment confirmed frank focal cortical dysplasia type IIa in the MEG-defined SOZ, which was based on source imaging of averaged ictal spikes at seizure onset. We investigated temporal changes together with spatial differences in spectral parameters of background brain activity, namely the aperiodic broadband offset and slope, and assessed how they confounded the interpretation of apparent variations of signal power in typical electrophysiological bands. Our data show that the SOZ was associated with a higher aperiodic offset and exponent during the seizure compared to control regions. Both parameters increased in all regions from 2 min before the seizure onwards. Regions anatomically closer to the SOZ also expressed higher values compared to contralateral regions, potentially indicating ictal spread. We also show that narrow-band power changes were caused by these fluctuations in the aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity. Our results indicate that the broadband aperiodic component of ongoing brain activity cannot be reduced to background noise of no physiological interest, and rather may be indicative of the neuropathophysiology of the SOZ. We believe these findings will inspire future studies of ictal MEG cases and confirm their significance. (shrink)

Cooperation is common across nonhuman animal taxa, from the hunting of large game in lions to the harvesting of building materials in ants. Theorists have proposed a number of models to explain the evolution of cooperative behavior. These ultimate explanations, however, rarely consider the proximate constraints on the implementation of cooperative behavior. Here we review several types of cooperation and propose a suite of cognitive abilities required for each type to evolve. We propose that several types of cooperation, though theoretically (...) possible and functionally adaptive, have not evolved in some animal species because of cognitive constraints. We argue, therefore, that future modeling efforts and experimental investigations into the adaptive function of cooperation in animals must be grounded in a realistic assessment of the psychological ingredients required for cooperation. Such an approach can account for the puzzling distribution of cooperative behaviors across taxa, especially the seemingly unique occurrence of cooperation observed in our own species. (shrink)

We highlight the need to focus on the underlying determinants and production mechanisms to fully understand the nature of facial expression of emotion and to settle the theoretical debate about the meaning of motor expression. Although emotion theorists have generally remained rather vague about the details of the process, this has been a central concern of componential appraisal theories. We describe the fundamental assumptions and predictions of this approach regarding the patterning of facial expressions for different emotions. We also review (...) recent evidence for the assumption that specific facial muscle movements may be reliable symptoms of certain appraisal outcomes and that facial expressions unfold over time on the basis of a sequence of appraisal check results. (shrink)