How is language acquired when infants are exposed to multiple language input from birth and when adults are required to learn a second language after early childhood? How do adult bilinguals comprehend and produce words and sentences when their two languages are potentially always active and in competition with one another? What are the neural mechanisms that underlie proficient bilingualism? What are the general consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for language and thought? This handbook will be essential reading for (...) cognitive psychologists, linguists, applied linguists, and educators who wish to better understand the cognitive basis of bilingualism and the logic of experimental and formal approaches to language science. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 3 Heft: 1 Seiten: 209-241.

(Toutes références données aux pages de la traduction, et non de l’œuvre originale traduite). Plus d’un siècle après sa première parution (Breslau 1894), la dissertation latine de W. Kroll (ci-après : K.), ouvrage majeur qui fit accéder l’étude des Oracles chaldaïques (ci-après : OC) à un statut scientifique, trouve une seconde naissance à travers la traduction donnée par H. D. Saffrey (ci-après : S.). Cette entreprise, aussi bien, constitue un hommage d’un savant d’une longévité exceptionnel...

This article presents a critique of an article previously featured in Nursing Philosophy (10: 26–33) by Ursula Naue and Thilo Kroll, who suggested that people living with dementia are assigned a negative status upon receipt of a diagnosis, holding the identity of the ‘demented other’. Specifically, in this critique, we suggest that unwitting use of the adjective ‘demented’ to define a person living with the condition is ill-informed and runs a risk of defining people through negative (self-)attributes, which has (...) a deleterious impact upon that person's social and relational personae. Moreover, use of the locution ‘demented’ reinforces a divide between the ‘demented’ (them) and the ‘healthy others’ (us). Social constructionist theory, malignant positioning and viewing people with dementia as semiotic subjects are the philosophical pillars through which we construct the main arguments of the critique. The article concludes with the voice of one of the authors, a younger person with dementia, asking for language in dementia care to be carefully reconsidered and reframed and for the recognition of the diagnosed person's agency in the conduct of their day-to-day lives. (shrink)

Reading Medieval Chinese Poetry: Text, Context, and Culture. Edited, with an introduction, by Paul W. Kroll. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 117. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Pp. vi + 310. €126, $164.

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for the directedness of dispositions. I focus (...) on two aspects of TAD: the Activation Principle, and the proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for being a dispositional property. (shrink)

This article offers a critical examination of Kroll’s (Natural Language Semantics 16: 359–372, 2008) arguments against Elbourne’s (Situations and individuals, 2005) treatment of bishop sentences.

"What is indeed striking is the degree to which the essays reveal a shared set of interests and adopt languages and concerns that reflect back and forth in stimulating ways."--Richard W. Kroll, author of "The Material World".

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hildegard and HolismSuzanne M. Phillips (bio) and Monique D. Boivin (bio)Keywordsbiopsychosocial, integration, medieval, mental illnessWe appreciate the careful and enriching commentary offered by Kroll and by Radden on our paper about holistic views of mental illness in the writings of the twelfth-century abbess and healer Hildegard of Bingen. Both reviewers are well-established figures in the study of historical perspectives on mental illness, an area that we have just (...) begun to explore. We are glad for the opportunity to respond to their observations and thereby to continue the dialogue.First, we would like to clarify our purpose in preparing this paper. Nowhere do we claim that Hildegard used a biopsychosocial model of mental illness, either in addressing the needs of the particular case of Sigewiza, or more generally in her writings on illness and health. In fact, we agree with Kroll (2007, 370), when he states that Hildegard did not use a biopsychosocial model. We use the term “biopsychosocial” only three times in the paper, always by contrast with what we see in Hildegard’s writings. The present-day biopsychosocial model focuses on getting a range of perspectives on the table, encouraging the consideration of biological, psychological, and social issues when thinking about mental illness. This is a good thing, but we argue that it does not go far enough. Specifically, there has been insufficient attention to ways these perspectives might interact.How, then, might we describe Hildegard’s way of conceptualizing mental illness? In place of the label “biopsychosocial model,” Kroll suggests that Hildegard’s approach could be described as a “religious model” (p. 372). Here we disagree. By our reading, Hildegard’s description of mental illness involves religious components, certainly, but also humoral, astrological, interpersonal, community, and intrapsychic components. Radden correctly notes that we are not so much interested in the particular components as we are in their interactions. We are attracted to Hildegard’s writings because she attends to these interactions. Our students, like Kroll’s (p. 371), are curious about mind–body relationships, which represent one example of the interplay between components. Our concern is that the current biopsychosocial model often fails to satisfy our own, and our students’, interest in the nature of those interactions. Our hope is that Hildegard’s writings might help us to think more richly about the interactions.As Radden (2007, 373) points out, present-day psychiatrists and psychologists do in fact use mul-ticausal accounts of depression. And we agree that such accounts need not be reductionistic (Kroll, 371). But we also recognize that psychology and psychiatry have well-established reductionist (more specifically, materialist) habits. To borrow [End Page 377] Kroll’s phrase, the biological model threatens “to swallow all other models” (p. 371). We must guard against such reductionism, given the habits of our disciplines. As we noted, McHugh and Slavney (1998) respond to that threat by building walls between the perspectives, suggesting that we might use different perspectives when thinking about different sorts of problems. We think that there ought to be more synthetic, holistic ways of responding to that threat, and we are hopeful that Hildegard’s writings can help us to develop those.At a basic level, we see Hildegard asking different questions than people ask today. On the first page of his commentary, for example, Kroll poses the question of “which of these three modalities [bio-, psycho-, social] may be sufficient” (p. 369) in the particular medieval text. We found that the sufficiency of one modality or another does not concern Hildegard. We are not able to speak to the general point that Kroll raises, that one or another element is emphasized depending on the goal of the medieval text; we can report our experience in reading Hildegard, where we found no sense in which one or another component is privileged. Even though Hildegard operated within a thoroughly religious context, we did not find examples of her subsuming other factors under religion. Everything interacts with spiritual concerns, to be sure, but everything also interacts with the biological, and with the interpersonal, and with the astrological. Although it may seem odd to us post-Darwinian thinkers, Hildegard’s model is essentially... (shrink)

Why does Catullus in his eleventh poem tell Furius and Aurelius to take an unpleasant message to his girl-friend? After all, in the eighth poem he imagines himself able to do the job alone: ‘uale puella’ . Has his courage just evaporated? Or is it that he wants to put his messengers, whom he perhaps does not like, in an awkward position ? Kroll is not sure why the poet chooses intermediaries. Some think they came in the first place (...) from the girl, who wanted reconciliation, and that this poem is Catullus' response. But the poet is usually able to make it plain, as in poems 7 and 85, that he is replying to a question ; here that standard device is missing, and should not be introduced. This note offers a new solution to the problem, and identifies the imagined situation in such a way that the eleventh poem can be seen to be in harmony with the poet's attitude to his idealised love-affair. (shrink)

No ancient has told us in any surviving writing when Iambulos lived. Lucian says no more than that he composed a work obviously fabulous but quite amusing; Diodoros of Sicily, the only other author to mention him at all, earns our gratitude by excerpting his romance, apparently under the impression that it was sober fact. Moderns are accordingly vague in dating him. It is obvious that he must be earlier than or contemporary with Diodoros, whose historical work mentions no date (...) later than 54 B.C, but his allusions to events of his own life indicate that he was old enough to take an intelligent interest in the world as early as about 60 B.C, and still alive as late as 21 B.C. Kroll contents himself with indicating that Iambulos is later than Megasthenes, which gives us a range of close on 250 years. I think, however, that we may reduce this very considerably and place Iambulos, if not in any definite year, at least within a period of less than a century. (shrink)

We argue against accounting for dispositions (and of the progressive aspect) in terms of a fundamentally teleological metaphysics, and we defend our previous conditional account from some novel objections. -/- In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll offers a novel theory of dispositions in terms of primitive directed states. Kroll is clear that his notion of directedness “outstrips talk of goals, purposes, design, and function”, and that it commits him to “primitive teleological facts”. This notion may strike some as outdated (...) and unscientific, but Kroll argues that it has an important theoretical role to play. In particular, he holds that a primitive notion of directedness can provide a theory of dispositions, an explanation of the link between dispositions and conditionals, and an account of the progressive aspect in English. In this paper, we raise some worries for each of these claims. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Reason and Religion”: The Science of AnglicanismRaymond D. TumblesonThis essay explores a rhetoric of “reason” in Anglican anti-Catholic polemics during the short and turbulent reign of James II. This reign witnessed an intense propaganda battle between Catholic and Anglican pamphleteers because the former for the first time in over a century were permitted openly to put their case, and in response the latter defended their doctrine and status as (...) the established church with a new urgency. For the first time, the possibility, feared by English Protestants and hoped for by Catholics, that given encouragement many people would convert to Catholicism, “the most conspicuous deviant element in society,” seemed credible, although, unsurprisingly given the brevity of James’s rule, both hope and fear proved groundless. 1 In addition to reiterated claims to have scripture and antiquity on their side, apologists for the Church of England offered a third and clinching argument against Catholicism—that reason itself was with them. They saw no contradiction between what Richard Sherlock calls a “scripture-based argumentative framework” and “the priority of natural reason.” 2 In A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion Edward Stillingfleet developed what would become the predominant Anglican theological case against Catholicism twenty years later, when he endorsed “the judgement of Sense” as the means to a “certainty “ independent of the Papal “Infallibility “ that “Destroy[s] the obligation to Faith which ariseth from the rational evidence of Christian Doctrine.” 3 Far from mutually [End Page 131] exclusive, Protestantism and reason seemed naturally complementary, even identical, to Anglican polemicists: only Popery, in its superstition, idolatry, and implicit faith, was antagonistic to reason. As Richard W. F. Kroll observes, the “defense of contingency, premised on a skeptical empiricism, becomes not the chief discourse of dissent but, again, its opposite: the language of the most visible institutions returned to power after the Restoration.” 4 Reason and the Anglican monopoly of worship are consistently identified by Anglican apologists of the 1680s, and Popery threatens both.What Terry Eagleton has called “the Enlightenment dream of a world entirely transparent to reason, free of the prejudice, superstition and ob-scurantism of the ancien regime” has unacknowledged antecedents in Protestant polemics against “the prejudice, superstition and obscurantism” of Catholicism. 5 This essay examines the differences between the polemical literatures of the reigns of Charles II and James II, the ways in which “reason” becomes an important force against Catholicism, and the method in which this usage entangles anti-Catholicism in the construction of modern science. In 1685, the year of James’s coronation, John Williams argued that religious services ought to be conducted “in a Tongue understood of the people,” recommending that “we consult the reason of the thing.” 6 In attacking Catholicism, Anglican theologians redefined religion itself as based more on reason than on faith, because Papists could lay equal claim to faith, but only the Church of England possessed reason as they defined it. Stillingfleet’s theological career is paradigmatic for Restoration Angli-canism’s enlistment of reason in sectarian disputes: his Originae Sacrae (1662) defends Christianity as rational, then in 1665 A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion narrows religious rationality to exclude Catholicism; in the wake of the Exclusion Crisis, the 1681 The Unreasonableness of Separation chides Dissenters for being “unreasonable” because they do not conform to the Church of England; and finally in 1687 The Doctrine of the Trinity and Transubstantiation Compared, as to Scripture, Reason, and Tradition returns to the subject of A Rational Account, tightening its six hundred learned pages into colloquial propaganda aimed at lay readers. 7 In the clear light of reason, where the only static—in Michel [End Page 132] Serres’s sense—is corruption, disagreement (with Anglicanism) becomes impossible. 8This paper examines sectarian polemics in order to approach the relation between science, the paradigmatic modern intellectual structure, and theology, the paradigmatic premodern intellectual sructure, from an unaccustomed angle. The immense wave of propagandistic Anglican theologizing under James II establishes the superiority of the Church of England to Rome by re-borrowing the methods and conventions of rationality which scientific experimentalism itself had originally derived from theology. 9 In these tracts... (shrink)