Choices rarely deal with certainties; and, where assertoric logic and modal logic are insufficient, those seeking to be reasonable turn to one or more things called “probability.” These things typically have a shared mathematical form, which is an arithmetic construct. The construct is often felt to be unsatisfactory for various reasons. A more general construct is that of a preordering, which may even be incomplete, allowing for cases in which there is no known probability relation between two propositions or between (...) two events. Previous discussion of incomplete preorderings has been as if incidental, with researchers focusing upon preorderings for which quantifications are possible. This article presents formal axioms for the more general case. Challenges peculiar to some specific interpretations of the nature of probability are brought to light in the context of these propositions. A qualitative interpretation is offered for probability differences that are often taken to be quantified. A generalization of Bayesian updating is defended without dependence upon coherence. Qualitative hypothesis testing is offered as a possible alternative in cases for which quantitative hypothesis testing is shown to be unsuitable. [NB: There is a transcription error in (A6), the quantification “∀(Y,c₂)” should be applied within the large parentheses to the proposition on the third row. You have my apologies!]. (shrink)

Choices rarely deal with certainties; and, where assertoric logic and modal logic are insufficient, those seeking to be reasonable turn to one or more things called “probability.” These things typically have a shared mathematical form, which is an arithmetic construct. The construct is often felt to be unsatisfactory for various reasons. A more general construct is that of a preordering, which may even be incomplete, allowing for cases in which there is no known probability relation between two propositions or between (...) two events. Previous discussion of incomplete preorderings has been as if incidental, with researchers focusing upon preorderings for which quantifications are possible. This article presents formal axioms for the more general case. Challenges peculiar to some specific interpretations of the nature of probability are brought to light in the context of these propositions. A qualitative interpretation is offered for probability differences that are often taken to be quantified. A generalization of Bayesian updating is defended without dependence upon coherence. Qualitative hypothesis testing is offered as a possible alternative in cases for which quantitative hypothesis testing is shown to be unsuitable. (shrink)

Despite recognizing many adverse impacts, the climate science literature has had little to say about the conditions under which climate change might threaten civilization. Discussions of the mechanisms whereby climate change might cause the collapse of current civilizations has mostly been the province of journalists, philosophers, and novelists. We propose that this situation should change. In this opinion piece, we call for treating the mechanisms and uncertainties associated with climate collapse as a critically important topic for scientific inquiry. Doing so (...) requires clarifying what "civilization collapse" means and explaining how it connects to topics addressed by climate scientists. [Open access] -/- . (shrink)

Highlights: -/- • -/- Proposes forward-looking approach to studying climate collapse risks. • -/- Suggests diminishing returns on climate adaptation as a collapse mechanism. • -/- Suggests strategies for sustainable adaptation pathways in face of climate change. • -/- Illustrates analysis with examples of small island states and global food security. -/- Abstract: -/- This article proposes a forward-looking approach to studying societal collapse risks related to climate change. Such an approach should indicate how to study emerging collapse risks and (...) suggest strategies for adapting to them. Our approach is based on three postulates that facilitate a forward-looking approach: (1) collapse, if it occurred, would be a lengthy process rather than an abrupt event; (2) significant collapse risks already exist in some places; and (3) diminishing returns on adaptation to intensifying climate impacts are a key driver of collapse risks. The first two postulates suggests that collapse risks can be studied in process, while the third points to strategies for adaptation pathways that avoid unsustainable diminishing returns. Applying diminishing returns to climate change adaptation, rather than sociopolitical complexity or resource extraction, is also a novel theoretical contribution to collapse literature. [Open access]. (shrink)

Despite growing interest in risks of societal collapse due to anthropogenic climate change, there exists no consensus about how collapse should be understood. In this article, we critically examine existing definitions and argue that none adequately address the challenges for conceptualizing collapse that climate change presents. We therefore propose an alternative conception, which regards collapse as a reduction of collective capacity resulting in a pervasive and difficult-to-reverse loss of basic functionality. Our conception is dynamic in that it focuses on the (...) interrelations of constituent subsystems. It also distinguishes collapse from transformations needed to address climate change and provides insight into the relationship between collapse and sustainability. [Open access]. (shrink)

In this article, we claim that recent developments in climate science and renewable energy should prompt a reframing of debates surrounding climate change mitigation. Taken together, we argue that these developments suggest (1) global climate collapse in this century is a non-negligible risk, (2) mitigation offers substantial benefits to current generations, and (3) mitigation by some can generate social tipping dynamics that could ultimately make renewables cheaper than fossil fuels. We explain how these claims undermine familiar framings of climate change, (...) wherein mitigation is understood as self-sacrifice that individuals and governments must be morally persuaded or incentivized to undertake. [Open access]. (shrink)

[Newspaper opinion] If you’re like most people, you’ve been taught that climate action is a sacrifice. Cutting emissions from fossil fuels, you’ve probably been told, is the economy-squeezing price we must pay for a livable planet. But our research explains why we should look at this issue through a different frame. -/- Frames help us think about complex issues. They suggest starting assumptions, problems to be solved and point towards possible solutions. Sacrifice frames begin with the assumption that climate action (...) is a burdensome cost. Given that assumption, it naturally follows that climate action is all about convincing people to make sacrifices. But scholars have criticized sacrifice frames for being bad at motivating action. Tell a person to sacrifice, and they’re likely to give you a list of reasons why they shouldn’t have to do it. -/- We suggest a different approach. Instead of explaining why you should sacrifice for the climate, we explain why climate action isn’t a sacrifice. We also suggest an alternative, more hopeful frame that fits with current science. [Open access]. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 52 Heft: 1 Seiten: 119-155.

From dogs to gods, the science of understanding mysterious minds--including your own. Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club." It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of mind do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who (...) have discovered that minds--while incredibly important--are a matter of perception. Their research opens a trove of new findings, with insights into human behavior that are fascinating, frightening and funny. The Mind Club explains why we love some animals and eat others, why people debate the existence of God so intensely, how good people can be so cruel, and why robots make such poor lovers. By investigating the mind perception of extraordinary targets--animals, machines, comatose people, god--Wegner and Gray explain what it means to have a mind, and why it matters so much. Fusing cutting-edge research and personal anecdotes, The Mind Club explores the moral dimensions of mind perception with wit and compassion, revealing the surprisingly simple basis for what compels us to love and hate, to harm and to protect. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the newly developed network approach in neuroscience and biology provides a basis for formulating a unique type of realization, which I call topological realization. Some of its features and its relation to one of the dominant paradigms of realization and explanation in sciences, i.e. the mechanistic one, are already being discussed in the literature. But the detailed features of topological realization, its explanatory power and its relation to another prominent view of realization, namely the (...) semantic one, have not yet been discussed. I argue that topological realization is distinct from mechanistic and semantic ones because the realization base in this framework is not based on local realisers, regardless of the scale but on global realizers. In mechanistic approach, the realization base is always at the local level, in both ontic and epistemic accounts. The explanatory power of realization relation in mechanistic approach comes directly from the realization relation-either by showing how a model is mapped onto a mechanism, or by describing some ontic relations that are explanatory in themselves. Similarly, the semantic approach requires that concepts at different scales logically satisfy microphysical descriptions, which are at the local level. In topological framework the realization base can be found at different scales, but whatever the scale the realization base is global, within that scale, and not local. Furthermore, topological realization enables us to answer the “why” questions, which according to Polger 2010 make it explanatory. The explanatoriness of topological realization stems from understanding mathematical consequences of different topologies, not from the mere fact that a system realizes them. (shrink)

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance ofHomo sapiensas an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (...) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology's central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change. (shrink)

We derive a probabilistic account of the vagueness and context-sensitivity of scalar adjectives from a Bayesian approach to communication and interpretation. We describe an iterated-reasoning architecture for pragmatic interpretation and illustrate it with a simple scalar implicature example. We then show how to enrich the apparatus to handle pragmatic reasoning about the values of free variables, explore its predictions about the interpretation of scalar adjectives, and show how this model implements Edgington’s Vagueness: a reader, 1997) account of the sorites paradox, (...) with variations. The Bayesian approach has a number of explanatory virtues: in particular, it does not require any special-purpose machinery for handling vagueness, and it is integrated with a promising new approach to pragmatics and other areas of cognitive science. (shrink)

Moral philosophy is often said to be about what we owe to each other. Do we owe anything to ourselves?

Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion should be taken to protect two distinct sets of moral considerations. The former protects the ability of the agent to reflect critically upon the moral and political issues that arise in her society generally, and in her professional life more specifically. The latter protects the individual's ability to achieve secure membership in a set of practices and rituals that have as a moral function to inscribe her life in a temporally extended narrative. Once (...) these grounds are distinguished, it becomes more difficult to grant healthcare professionals' claims to religious exemptions on the basis of the latter than it is on the basis of the former. While both sets of considerations generate ‘internal reasons’ for rights to accommodation, the relevant ‘external’ reasons present in the case of claims of moral conscience do not possess analogues in the case of claims of religious conscience. However, the argument applies only to ‘irreducibly religious’ claims, that is to claims that cannot be translated into moral vocabulary. What's more, there may be reasons to grant the claims of religious persons to exemptions that have to do not with the nature of the claims, but with the beneficial effects that the presence of religious persons may have in the context of the healthcare institutions of multi-faith societies. (shrink)

A large body of research in political science claims that the way in which democratic citizens think about politics is motivationally biased by partisanship. Numerous critics argue that the evidence for this claim is better explained by theories in which party allegiances influence political cognition without motivating citizens to embrace biased beliefs. This article has three aims. First, I clarify this criticism, explain why common responses to it are unsuccessful, and argue that to make progress on this debate we need (...) a more developed theory of the connections between group attachments and motivated reasoning. Second, I develop such a theory. Drawing on research on coalitional psychology and the social functions of beliefs, I argue that partisanship unconsciously biases cognition by generating motivations to advocate for party interests, which transform individuals into partisan press secretaries. Finally, I argue that this theory offers a superior explanation of a wide range of relevant findings than purely non-motivational theories of political cognition. (shrink)

Detection of deception and confirmation of truth telling with conventional polygraphy raised a host of technical and ethical issues. Recently, newer methods of recording electromagnetic signals from the brain show promise in permitting the detection of deception or truth telling. Some are even being promoted as more accurate than conventional polygraphy. While the new technologies raise issues of personal privacy, acceptable forensic application, and other social issues, the focus of this paper is the technical limitations of the developing technology. Those (...) limitations include the measurement validity of the new technologies, which remains largely unknown. Another set of questions pertains to the psychological paradigms used to model or constrain the target behavior. Finally, there is little standardization in the field, and the vulnerability of the techniques to countermeasures is unknown. Premature application of these technologies outside of research settings should be resisted, and the social conversation about the appropriate parameters of its civil, forensic, and security use should begin. (shrink)

El artículo se propone elucidar la lectura deconstructiva que Derrida lleva a cabo de la filosofía de Marx y, más ampliamente, de los presupuestos metafísicos de la filosofía marxista. Espectros de Marx (1993) funciona como el punto de partida de un análisis histórico y conceptual que rastrea algunas de las principales hipótesis de este libro en publicaciones, entrevistas, cursos y seminarios fechados entre 1964 y 2004. La pregunta que sirve como hilo conductor de este trabajo es cómo interpretar filosófica y (...) políticamente la deconstrucción de la ontología marxista. (shrink)

Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), was I'ound to correlate with n>casurcs of obsessional thinking and depressive and anxious al'lect, t pridic( signs «I' clinical «hscssion ainong individuals prone (oward «h»c»»i«n >I (hi>>king, (« predict depression tive (h (», and to predict I''iilurc «I' electr«dermal responses to habituate am«ng pci>pic having emotional thoughts. The WBSI was inversely correlated with repression as assessed by the Repression-Sensitization Scale, and so tap» a trait that i» itc unlike rcprc»si«n:is traditi«n;illy c«nccivcd.

Faith plays a valuable role in sustaining relationships through various kinds of challenges, including through evidentially unfavorable circumstances and periods of significant doubt. But if, as is widely assumed, both faith in God and faith that God exists require belief that God exists, and if one’s beliefs are properly responsive to one’s evidence, the capacity for faith to persevere amidst significant and well-grounded doubt will be fairly limited. Taking Mother Teresa as an exemplar of Christian faith and exploring the close (...) connection between faith and faithfulness in the context of committed covenantal relationships, I set out a view of Relational Faith that does not assume that faith requires belief and allows wide room for honestly wrestling with doubt from within the Judeo-Christian tradition. (shrink)

In _The Priority of Prudence_, Daniel Mark Nelson proposes a reappropriation of a moral perspective that focuses on the cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, justice, and prudence. The study aims to recover and rehabilitate the virtue of prudence as a way of resuming a moral conversation that has been stalemated for too long. Nelson's main source for reviving the virtue of prudence is St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the cardinal virtues in the _Summa Theologica_. A primary problem with using (...) Aquinas as a source for reviving an ethics of virtue centered on prudence is that he is commonly perceived as the most prominent figure in the conflicting natural-law tradition. According to Nelson's reinterpretation, however, Aquinas teaches that moral understanding depends first and foremost on prudence working in accord with other cardinal virtues and that natural law functions to explain moral reasoning rather than to guide it. This study serves to advance the debate about the contemporary relevance of an ethics of virtue by way of its significantly more detailed explication of prudence. Nelson makes important connections between influential reinterpretations of the ethical theory of Aquinas that have been published during the last thirty years and widespread interest in an ethics of virtue that has been expressed by Alasdair Maclntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, William Sullivan, Robert Bellah, and others. _The Priority of Prudence _represents a significant contribution to the scholarly literature both in the study of Aquinas and in the debate on the ethics of virtue. (shrink)

According to L. A. Paul (2014), transformative experiences pose a challenge for decision theory, as their subjective value is not epistemically accessible. However, several authors propose that the subjective values of options are often irrelevant to their ranking; in many cases, all we need for rational transformative decision-making are the known non-subjective values. This stance is in conflict with Paul’s argument that the subjective value can always swamp the non-subjective value. The approach presented in this paper takes Paul’s argument into (...) account and shows how potential swamping can be controlled given that one desires the transformative outcome: If one knows from previous decisions that desired transformative outcomes are associated with positive subjective value and if, in addition, testimony confirms this association for the current decision situation, one can infer that a desired outcome’s expected subjective value has a positive valence. Accordingly, one can rationally choose the desired transformative option if its non-subjective value is no lower than the overall value of any other option. (shrink)

Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally chosen (...) and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own. (shrink)

There is considerable interest in the use of neuroimaging techniques for forensic purposes. Memory detection techniques, including the well-publicized Brain Fingerprinting technique (Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc., Seattle WA), exploit the fact that the brain responds differently to sensory stimuli to which it has been exposed before. When a stimulus is specifically associated with a crime, the resulting brain activity should differentiate between someone who was present at the crime and someone who was not. This article reviews the scientific literature on (...) three such techniques: priming, old/new, and P300 effects. The forensic potential of these techniques is evaluated based on four criteria: specificity, automaticity, encoding flexibility, and longevity. This article concludes that none of the techniques are devoid of forensic potential, although much research is yet to be done. Ethical issues, including rights to privacy and against self-incrimination, are discussed. A discussion of legal issues concludes that current memory detection techniques do not yet meet United States standards of legal admissibility. (shrink)

_Youth in Education_ explores the multiple, interrelated social contexts that young people inhabit and navigate, and how educational institutions cope with increasing ethnic, cultural and ideological diversity. Schools, families and communities represent important settings in which young people must make successful transitions to adulthood, and the classroom often becomes a battleground in which these contexts and values interact. With contributions from the UK, Belgium, Germany and Canada, the chapters in this book explore rich examples from Europe and North America to (...) suggest strategies that can help to counter negative perceptions, processes of stigmatization and disengagement, instead prioritising peer support and cooperative learning to give pupils a renewed sense of worth. This book takes the growing ethno-cultural diversity in education systems to heart and studies the various related educational processes from a multidisciplinary and multi-method approach. It aims to offer more insight into underlying mechanisms that are often implicit, but can be important factors that positively or negatively influence educational trajectories and outcomes. It is essential reading for researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of education, sociology, higher education, policy and politics, and social and cultural geography. (shrink)

In ‘Colonialism, territory and pre-existing obligations,’ Cara Nine argues that Lea Ypi’s account of the wrongness of colonialism has a hole in it: Ypi leaves open the possibility of justified settler colonialism. Nine suggests that we can patch this hole by attaching value to existing political associations. But Nine’s solution has its own hole. Many political associations exist due to settler colonialism, and thus if we endorse the value of these associations we seem to endorse colonialism. In response, we could (...) say that past colonial injustices have been remediated or superseded. Or, we could leave the hole open: colonialism is sometimes justified. I argue that, surprisingly, the second option is likely preferable, because it does not require us to say that the injustices of colonialism are gone, and because it points towards a better theory of colonialism’s wrongness than Ypi’s: cosmopolitan instrumentalism, according to which colonialism is wrong only when it is unjust according to one’s overall theory of cosmopolitan justice. (shrink)

When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally. The physical parameters of the harm may not differ—your toe is flattened in both cases—but the psychological experience of pain is changed nonetheless. Intentional harms are premeditated by another person and have the specific purpose of causing pain. In a sense, intended harms are events initiated by one mind to communicate meaning (malice) to another, and this could shape (...) the recipient’s experience. This study examined whether self-reported pain is indeed higher when the events producing the pain are understood as intentionally (as opposed to unintentionally) caused by another person. Although pain was traditionally conceived to be solely physical in nature (Aydede, 2005), its experience varies substantially with psychological context. The placebo analgesia effect, for example, is the reduction of pain without a change in physical stimulation when context, expectations, or sugar pills challenge the interpretation of a sensation as painful (e.g., Fields, 2008). The nocebo effect, in turn, is the experience of pain without any physical stimulation—as when participants report headaches when told that a (nonexistent) electric current is passing through their heads (Schweiger & Parducci, 1981). These variations in pain experience seem to depend on the meaning of the stimulus: A sugar pill is meant to decrease pain, whereas electric current is meant to increase pain. In an interpersonal context, the meaning of an action is derived from the would complete. perceiver’s perceptions of the actor’s intention (Clark, 1996). (shrink)

According to L. A. Paul, the subjective value of an outcome is normally assessed by running a cognitive model of what it would be like if that outcome were to occur. However, cognitive models, along with the expectations in which they result, are unreliable for application to transformative experiences because we cannot know what it would be like for an outcome to occur if we have never experienced it before. This paper argues that despite their unreliability, expectations are still important (...) in the case of chosen and unchosen transformative experiences because expectations about an outcome can systematically influence the very experience of that outcome. More precisely, empirical research shows that affective experiences tend to assimilate to affective expectations. In turn, more positive affective experiences lead, ceteris paribus, to higher subjective value. Therefore, rational agents confronting transformative outcomes should form or cultivate positive/optimistic affective expectations since, all else being equal, that maximizes subjective value. (shrink)

Traditionally, the language faculty was supposed to be a device that maps linguistic inputs to semantic or conceptual representations. These representations themselves were supposed to be distinct from the representations manipulated by the hearer’s perceptual and motor systems. Recently this view of language has been challenged by advocates of embodied cognition. Drawing on empirical studies of linguistic comprehension, they have proposed that the language faculty reuses the very representations and processes deployed in perceiving and acting. I review some of the (...) evidence and arguments in favor of the embodied view of language comprehension, and argue that none of it is conclusive. Moreover, the embodied view itself blurs two important distinctions: first, the distinction between linguistic comprehension and its typical consequences; and second, the distinction between representational content and vehicles. Given that these distinctions are well-motivated, we have good reason to reject the embodied view of linguistic understanding.Keywords: Language; Comprehension; Perception; Action; Embodied cognition; Representation. (shrink)

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...) work. In this paper, we show how this argument by analogy is flawed with respect to the case of second‐order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples possess enormously rich and articulated knowledge of the natural world. A major goal of research in anthropology and ethnobiology as well as ecology, conservation biology, and development studies is to find ways of integrating this knowledge with that produced by academic and other institutionalized scientific communities. Here I present a challenge to this integration project. I argue, by reference to ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological studies, that the models of the world developed within specialized academic disciplines do not map (...) onto anything existing within traditional beliefs and practices for coping with nature. Traditional ecological knowledge is distributed across a heterogeneous array of overlapping practices within Indigenous cultures, including spiritual and ritual practices that invoke categories, properties, and causal-explanatory models that do not in general converge with those of the academic sciences. In light of this divergence I argue that we should abandon the integration project, and conclude by sketching a notion of knowledge coordination as a possible successor framework. (shrink)

We consider the relation between past and future events from the perspective of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which holds that episodic simulation of future events requires a memory system that allows the flexible recombination of details from past events into novel scenarios. We discuss recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that support this hypothesis in relation to the theater production metaphor.

Inductive reasoning is a fundamental and complex aspect of human intelligence. In particular, how do subjects, given a set of particular examples, generate general descriptions of the rules governing that set? We present a biologically plausible method for accomplishing this task and implement it in a spiking neuron model. We demonstrate the success of this model by applying it to the problem domain of Raven's Progressive Matrices, a widely used tool in the field of intelligence testing. The model is able (...) to generate the rules necessary to correctly solve Raven's items, as well as recreate many of the experimental effects observed in human subjects. (shrink)

There are good reasons to think natural languages are compositional. But compound nominals (CNs) are largely productive constructions that have proven highly recalcitrant to compositional semantic analysis. I evaluate existing proposals to treat CNs compositionally and argue that they are unsuccessful. I then articulate an alternative proposal according to which CNs contain covert indexicals. Features of the context allow a variety of relations to be expressed using CNs, but this variety is not expressed in the lexicon or the semantic rules (...) of the language. This proposal accounts for the diversity of contents CNs can be used to express while preserving compositionality. Finally, I defend this proposal against some recent anti-contextualist arguments. (shrink)