Gold von Königen und Götter: Zur Bedeutung von Goldobjekten in den syrisch-nordlevantinischen Königtümern der Mittleren und Späten Bronzezeit ausgehend von den Funden aus den Grüften von Qaṭna. By Ivana Puljiz. Qaṭna Studien, vol. 10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2021. Pp. xlvi + 609, illus. €178.

Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant. By Marian H. Feldman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Pp. xvii + 250, illus. $70.

Benchmarks against which healthcare ethics consultation (HCEC) services can assess their performance are needed. As first-generation benchmarks continue to be developed, it is the obligation of the field to continually evaluate how these measures reflect the performance of any single HCEC service. This will be possible only with widespread reporting of standardized data points. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Glover and colleagues provide a valuable preliminary approach for assessing appropriate consult volumes for a (...) HCEC service. The limitations of their study read as a call to action for the field of clinical ethics to expand and standardize data reporting so that more robust metrics can be developed. In response to this call by Glover and colleagues, the Cleveland Clinic HCEC service provides consult data from 2015 through 2019 for one of its medical centers, and offers an additional volumebased metric, consult-to-ICU-to-bed ratio (CiBR), that may add nuance to any normative assessment of HCEC service consult volume. Given that volume-based metrics are the native language of the clinical environment, efforts to improve such metrics in the field through transparency and standardization are warranted. However, the expositive power of volume-based metrics is limited; additional domains related to quality and outcomes are needed. (shrink)

Die Wandmalereien aus Tell Mišrife/Qaṭna im Kontext überregionaler Kommunikation. By Constance von Rüden. Qaṭna Studien, vol. 2. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011. Pp. x + 278, 70 plts. €84.

Much of the progress in the fields constituting cognitive science has been based upon the use of explicit information processing models, almost exclusively patterned after conventional serial computers. An extension of these ideas to massively parallel, connectionist models appears to offer a number of advantages. After a preliminary discussion, this paper introduces a general connectionist model and considers how it might be used in cognitive science. Among the issues addressed are: stability and noise‐sensitivity, distributed decision‐making, time and sequence problems, and (...) the representation of complex concepts. (shrink)

We incorporate social reasoning about groups of informants into a model of word learning, and show that the model accounts for infant looking behavior in tasks of both word learning and recognition. Simulation 1 models an experiment where 16-month-old infants saw familiar objects labeled either correctly or incorrectly, by either adults or audio talkers. Simulation 2 reinterprets puzzling data from the Switch task, an audiovisual habituation procedure wherein infants are tested on familiarized associations between novel objects and labels. Eight-month-olds outperform (...) 14-month-olds on the Switch task when required to distinguish labels that are minimal pairs, but 14-month-olds' performance is improved by habituation stimuli featuring multiple talkers. Our modeling results support the hypothesis that beliefs about knowledgeability and group membership guide infant looking behavior in both tasks. These results show that social and linguistic development interact in non-trivial ways, and that social categorization findings in developmental psychology could have substantial implications for understanding linguistic development in realistic settings where talkers vary according to observable features correlated with social groupings, including linguistic, ethnic, and gendered groups. (shrink)

In a recent note, D. Braund has challenged my identification of the Pollio at whose home in Rome Herod's sons Alexander and Aristobulus stayed in 22 b.c. as Gaius Asinius Pollio, the famous consul of 40 b.c., who was a close friend of Julius Caesar and to whom Virgil dedicated his Fourth Eclogue. Braund's argument rests upon five grounds. If this Pollio were a man of the stature of Asinius Pollio, we would expect Josephus to make his identity clear and (...) not to describe him solely as one of Herod's most devoted friends. Josephus' reference to Pollio here is different from the definite references to Asinius Pollio elsewhere in Josephus, where he is referred to as Asinius or Gaius Asinius Pollio. In the latter passage his name is spelled Πωλίωνος, whereas the name of the host of Herod's sons is spelled Πολλίωνος. When Herod sent two other sons to Rome, they stayed ‘with a certain Jew’, and hence it seems likely that the two other sons likewise stayed with a Jew. Asinius' role in the elevation by the Roman Senate of Herod to the kingship of Judaea was no greater than that of any other magistrate. (shrink)

The FDA's new table of surrogate endpoints used for drug approvals is an important step forward for overseeing the use of biomarkers in clinical trials. Nevertheless, we present several ways in which the table can be improved.

As children gradually master grammatical rules, they often go through a period of producing form‐meaning associations that were not observed in the input. For example, 2‐ to 3‐year‐old English‐learning children use the bare form of verbs in settings that require obligatory past tense meaning while already starting to produce the grammatical –ed inflection. While many studies have focused on overgeneralization errors, fewer studies have attempted to explain the root of this earlier stage of rule acquisition. In this work, we use (...) computational modeling to replicate children's production behavior prior to the generalization of past tense production in English. We illustrate how seemingly erroneous productions emerge in a model, without being licensed in the grammar and despite the model aiming at conforming to grammatical forms. Our results show that bare form productions stem from a tension between two factors: (1) trying to produce a less frequent meaning (the past tense) and (2) being unable to restrict the production of frequent forms (the bare form) as learning progresses. Like children, our model goes through a stage of bare form production and then converges on adult‐like production of the regular past tense, showing that these different stages can be accounted for through a single learning mechanism. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

We focus on the recent non-causal theory of reasons explanationsof free action proffered by a proponent of the agency theory, Timothy O'Connor. We argue that the conditions O'Connor offersare neither necessary nor sufficient for a person to act for a reason. Finally, we note that the role O'Connor assigns toreasons in the etiology of actions results in further conceptual difficulties for agent-causalism.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 4, April 2022.

Many different analyses of the concept of de re belief have been proposed in recent years. Most of these analyses may be called ‘reductionist’ since they attempt to “reduce” de re belief to de dicta belief or to analyze de re belief in terms of de dicta belief. Some reductionist analyses are extremely liberal in their attribution of de re beliefs — they imply that people have de re beliefs in a variety of situations in which more restrictive analyses have (...) no such implication. In this paper I will show that the most liberal of the reductionist theories, those Roderick Chisholm calls “latitudinarian theories”, are unacceptable.Latitudinarian analyses have been proposed by many philosophers, including Ernest Sosa, Mark Pastin, and also, perhaps, W. V. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. (shrink)