Through Narcissus' Glass Darkly presents a genealogy and critique of the ideal of conscience in modern philosophical theology, particularly in the writings of ...

This article explores pupils’ responses to addressed questions in two third-year primary school classes, organized as plenary interaction and based on the next-speaker selection. In this context, unaddressed pupils often produce responses of various kinds spontaneously, showing that the next-speaker selection per se does not exclude unaddressed pupils from participating. Analysis of the design and position of these responses show their orderly nature as mainly depending on the following dimensions: the position of the address term in the question and who (...) has primary access to answers. Pupils’ responses display a high level of awareness of the next-speaker selection rule operating in this setting, and more globally, of the turn-taking system. This competence enables pupils to understand and navigate the other-selection rule, often gaining their right to speakership. In line with prior studies on multiparty interactions, the article shows that teachers’ questions pose multiple constraints on responses. (shrink)

This article examines two uses of third-person references — pronouns such as `he/she/they' or category terms such as `mother, father', etc. — as produced during first-visit encounters between formerly unacquainted guests and a family group. Members of the family use this practice to refer to another family member in a locally subsequent position, adjacent to a self-oriented turn by that same referrent. Two main functions are investigated: teasing and clarifications. It is pointed out that, besides employing the same practice and (...) being deployed in a locally subsequent position, both activities have a number of other features in common, whereby teasing gets constructed as if doing clarification. In this way, family members provide alternative versions of the same description of events as the prior adjacent turn, designing the teasing activity as an information-giving activity to the guests' benefit. Thus, family members display a privileged access to the events that have been described and propose themselves as knowledgeable about the group and its life; a type of knowledge grounded in their having family ties. (shrink)

In 1959, the Charles Darwin Station and the Galápagos National Park were established, formally inaugurating conservation on the archipelago. In the same year, a utopian colony from the United States arrived. Whereas scholars have dismissed the latter and focused on the former, this essay unveils the science-inspired utopianism common to both enterprises. Investing science with the exclusive role of producing all knowledge and steering politics, leaders of the two initiatives aspired not only to protect nature but also to forge a (...) new humanity. Describing how such ambitions burst along lines of race, class, and nationality, I argue that these enterprises consolidated the current understanding of the Galápagos as “pristine”: a site fit for research and tourism but unhospitable to people. Drawing on archival and historical documents, this essay aims to reinvigorate two conversations: one between science and technology studies and conservation, and the other between STS and utopian studies. If recent attempts at bridging the divide between science and imagination have emphasized how powerful actors shape human society, this essay considers the long-lasting effects of scientific imaginaries on a politics of nature. (shrink)

Autoscopic phenomena are complex experiences that include the visual illusory reduplication of one’s own body. From a phenomenological point of view, we can distinguish three conditions: autoscopic hallucinations, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences. The dysfunctional pattern involves multisensory disintegration of personal and extrapersonal space perception. The etiology, generally either neurological or psychiatric, is different. Also, the hallucination of Self and own body image is present during dreams and differs according to sleep stage. Specifically, the representation of the Self in REM dreams (...) is frequently similar to the perception of Self in wakefulness, whereas in NREM dreams, a greater polymorphism of Self and own body representation is observed. The parallels between autoscopic phenomena in pathological cases and the Self-hallucination in dreams will be discussed to further the understanding of the particular states of self awareness, especially the complex integration of different memory sources in Self and body representation. (shrink)

The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions (the OECD Convention) obligates signatory nations to make bribery of foreign public officials a criminal act on an extraterritorial basis. The purposes of this article are to describe the nature and consequences of bribery, outline the major provisions of the OECD Convention, and analyze its role in promoting transparency and accountability in international business. While the OECD Convention is not expected to totally eliminate the seeking or (...) taking of bribes, there are hopes that a uniform set of rules will curtail corrupt behavior, as long as those rules are both enforceable and enforced. (shrink)

The Youth Report 2014 recognizes the possibility to take positive action towards the others as an element that contributes to let young people achieve a sense of happiness. Despite this, we can observe in schools the presence of individualistic and competitive educational models affirming the predominance of fixed cognitive standards. That can bring to a situation of marginalization of those who are hegemonically located outside of a pre-established definition of norm. Considering these assumptions, the authors have developed an inclusive and (...) prosocial teaching model, based on the Cooperative Learning approach, aimed to encourage prosocial skills among students. The research, that used qualiquantitative data, has involved a sample of 42 students and 12 teachers of the Middle School. The comparison between pre and post test highlights a higher increase in helping dimension and in the subsample of males students, joint to general improvements within teaching-learning processes and relationships. (shrink)

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign‐function mapping optionality, one of acquisition‐dependent sign‐function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: (...) abandoning arbitrariness‐talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept. (shrink)

Implanting deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes in patients with Parkinson’s disease often results in the appearance of a non-infectious, delayed-onset edema that disappears over time. However, the time window between the DBS electrode and DBS stimulating device implant is often used to record local field potentials (LFPs) which are used both to better understand basal ganglia pathophysiology and to improve DBS therapy. In this work, we investigated whether the presence of post-surgery edema correlates with the quality of LFP recordings in (...) eight patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease implanted with subthalamic DBS electrodes. The magnetic resonance scans of the brain after 8.5 ± 1.5 days from the implantation surgery were segmented and the peri-electrode edema volume was calculated for both brain hemispheres. We found a correlation (ρ = −0.81, p < 0.0218, Spearman’s correlation coefficient) between left side local field potentials of the low beta band (11–20 Hz) and the edema volume of the same side. No other significant differences between the hemispheres were found. Despite the limited sample size, our results suggest that the effect on LFPs may be related to the edema localization, thus indicating a mechanism involving brain networks instead of a simple change in the electrode-tissue interface. (shrink)

Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign-function mapping optionality, one of acquisition-dependent sign-function coupling, and one of lack of motivatedness. We characterize these notions, illustrate the benefits of keeping them apart, and describe two reactions to our proposal: (...) abandoning arbitrariness-talk in favor of the newly introduced conceptual vocabulary, or feeding the distinctions back into the parent concept. (shrink)

The ratio-bias (RB) phenomenon refers to the perceived likelihood of a low-probability event as greater when it is presented in the form of larger (e.g. 10-in-100) rather than smaller (e.g. 1-in-10) numbers. According to cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), the RB effect in a game of chance in a win condition, in which drawing a red jellybean is rewarded, can be accounted for by two facets of concrete thinking, the greater comprehension (at the intuitive-experiential level) of single numbers than of ratios, and (...) of smaller than of larger numbers. In a lose condition, in which drawing a red jellybean is punished, the assumption of a third facet of concrete thinking, the ''affirmative-representation principle'', is necessary, as many participants reverse their focus of attention from the undesirable red to the desirable white jellybeans. Results supported the CEST explanation of the RB effect by demonstrating a predicted negative linear relation between the magnitude of the RB effect and the magnitude of the probability-ratios in the win condition and a positive linear relation in the lose condition. Support was also found for the associative principle of experiential processing. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to help refine the definition of humans as “linguistic animals” in light of a comparative approach on nonhuman animals’ cognitive systems. As Uexküll & Kriszat (1934/1992) have theorized, the epistemic access to each species-specific environment (Umwelt) is driven by different biocognitive processes. Within this conceptual framework, I identify the salient cognitive process that distinguishes each species typical perception of the world as the faculty of language meant in the following operational definition: the ability to (...) connect different elements according to structural rules. In order to draw some conclusions about humans’ specific faculty of language, I review different empirical studies on nonhuman animals’ ability to recognize formal patterns of tokens. I suggest that what differentiates human language from other animals’ cognitive systems is the ability to categorize the units of a pattern, going beyond its perceptual aspects. In fact, humans are the only species known to be able to combine semantic units within a network of combinatorial logical relationships (Deacon 1997) that can be linked to the state of affairs in the external world (Wittgenstein 1922). I assume that this ability is the core cognitive process underlying a) the capacity to speak (or to reason) in verbal propositions and b) the general human faculty of language expressed, for instance, in the ability to draw visual conceptual maps or to compute mathematical expressions. In light of these considerations, I conclude providing some research questions that could lead to a more detailed comparative exploration of the faculty of language. (shrink)

Inspired by the idea of documentation as a valuable tool for making learning visible, pedagogical narration offers an opportunity to move beyond checklists and quick answers to a more complex understanding of how children learn, and how teachers might facilitate and support that learning in innovative ways. The authors use stories they collected during a collaborative study to offer a range of possibilities for alternative childhood pedagogies. Cutting edge, yet practical; detailed in its analysis, yet inspiring, this book is a (...) boon to the field of early childhood and primary education studies. (shrink)

Le volume recueille les actes du colloque organisé à Florence, en novembre 2011, par la Società Italiana delle Storiche (SIS) [Société Italienne des Historiennes], en collaboration avec l’Université de Florence et en conclusion d’une année dense en célébrations pour les 150 ans de l’Unité italienne (cf. L’Italia alla prova dell’Unità, a cura di S. Soldani, Milano, Angeli, 2011). Il s’agit du deuxième volume de la nouvelle collection Storia delle donne e di genere [Histoire des femmes et du ge...

The present paper is focused on the way Vayākaraṇas and Ālaṃkārikas analysed a specific kind of karmadhāraya compounds, taught in Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.1.56 and 72 and later associated with the upamā- and the rūpaka-figures respectively. On the basis of a fresh interpretation of the relevant grammatical sources, the authors try both to understand how the theorists involved them in their analysis and to reconstruct the several steps of the inquiries realized by the modern scholarship on this topic. Nonetheless their research is (...) targeted on the interpretation of these two Pāṇini rules and they conclude that these rules do not actually target similes and metaphorical identifications, but, on the one hand, A 2.1.55-56 deal with a functional pair of figurative compounds involving an upamāna and an upamita, i.e. a reference standard and something which is benchmarked, and, on the other, A 2.1.72 closes a series of karmadhāraya-rules, aimed at illustrating A 2.1.57. Furthermore, they exclude that Pāṇini in A 2.1.55-56 used the term sāmānya as a tertium comparationis, even though Patañjali had already advanced—but eventually rejected—this interpretation. (shrink)

This paper discusses the discursive and interpersonal functions conveyed by the Italian negative operator no(?) ‘no’, suggesting a possible pathway of functional enrichment that can account for its high degree of polyfunctionality. Drawing on the KIParla corpus of contemporary spoken Italian, we chart the values of no(?) as a discourse marker, which are all clearly connected to the incremental co-construction of discourse in interaction, either in terms of turn management or of shared knowledge and mutual alignment. We then explore its (...) sociolinguistic distribution, showing that register variation plays a major role in this respect. We argue that conversational uses of no(?) as a discourse marker, including its role as a pause-filler, are motivated by cooperative needs in discourse construction, shaping its functional profile at the intersection of mental processes and communicative practices. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a methodology to maximize the benefits of interdisciplinary cooperation in AI research groups. Firstly, we build the case for the importance of interdisciplinarity in research groups as the best means to tackle the social implications brought about by AI systems, against the backdrop of the EU Commission proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act. As we are an interdisciplinary group, we address the multi-faceted implications of the mass-scale diffusion of AI-driven technologies. The result of our exercise (...) lead us to postulate the necessity of a behavioural theory that standardizes the interaction process of interdisciplinary groups. In light of this, we conduct a review of the existing approaches to interdisciplinary research on AI appliances, leading to the development of methodologies like ethics-by-design and value-sensitive design, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. We then put forth an iterative process theory hinging on a narrative approach consisting of four phases: definition of the hypothesis space, building-up of a common lexicon, scenario-building, interdisciplinary self-assessment. Finally, we identify the most relevant fields of application for such a methodology and discuss possible case studies. (shrink)

Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly (...) sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint. (shrink)

Research in the field of management has increasingly focused on strategies and tools related to corporate sustainability. Of the tools examined, codes of ethics have been found to play a primary role. Many studies have investigated the content of such codes, as well as their capacity to condition the behaviour of people within organizations. However, few studies have considered the intrinsic quality of codes of ethics. This study aims to investigate the impact that specific factors—firm size, degree of internationalization and (...) industry effect—can have on the quality of codes of ethics. Based on a sample of 248 listed Italian companies, the results of the empirical analysis show that the quality standard is particularly high in larger companies and in those firms operating in industries in which relationships established with critical stakeholders—and disclosure to those stakeholders—play a crucial role. These results have interesting implications for both researchers and practitioners. (shrink)