Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing advantage over other words in an utterance, e.g. they are recognised more quickly and remembered better. More recently, studies have shown that listeners infer contextual alternatives to a focused word in a spoken utterance, when marked with a contrastive accent, even when the alternatives are not explicitly mentioned in the discourse. This has been shown by strengthened priming of contextual alternatives to the word, but not other noncontrastive semantic associates, (...) when it is contrastively accented, e.g. after hearing ``The {\em customer} opened the window", {\em salesman} is strongly primed, but not {\em product}. This is consistent with Rooth's (1992) theory that \deleted{the focus is not only the most informative part of an utterance, but also that} focus-marking signals the presence of alternatives to the focus. However, almost all of the research carried out in this area has been on Germanic languages. Further, most of this work has looked only at one kind of focus-marking, by contrastive accenting (prosody). This paper reports on a cross-modal lexical priming study in Mandarin Chinese, looking at whether focus-marking heightens activation, i.e. priming, of words and their alternatives. Two kinds of focus-marking were investigated: prosodic and syntactic. Prosodic prominence is an important means of focus-marking in Chinese, however, it is realised through pitch range expansion, rather than accenting. The results showed that focus\added{ed} words, as well as their alternatives, were primed when the subject prime word carried contrastive prosodic prominence. Syntactic focus-marking, however, did not enhance priming of focused words or their alternatives. Noncontrastive semantic associates were not primed with either kind of focus-marking. These results extend previous findings on focus and alternative priming for the first time to Chinese. They also suggest that the processing advantages of focus, including priming alternatives, are particularly related to prosodic prominence, at least in Chinese and Germanic languages. This research sheds light on what linguistic mechanisms listeners use to identify important information, generate alternatives and understand implicature necessary for successful communication. (shrink)

This paper investigates the vehicle platoon control problems with both velocity constraints and input saturation. Firstly, radial basis function neural networks are employed to approximate the unknown driving resistance of a vehicle’s dynamic model. Then, a bidirectional topology, where vehicles can only communicate with their direct preceding and following neighbors, is used to depict the relationship among the vehicles in the platoon. On this basis, a neural adaptive sliding-mode control algorithm with an anti-windup compensation technique is proposed to maintain the (...) vehicle platoon with desired distance. Moreover, the string stability and the strong string stability of the whole vehicle platoon are proven through the stability theorem. Finally, numerical simulations verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control method. (shrink)

Ted A. Warfield reviews the history of epistemology and argues that epistemologists mistakenly take for granted the inference that the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge is sufficient for the failure of epistemic closure. So he concludes that epistemologists should avoid using this inference to explain the failure of epistemic closure. However, I will defend the inference that epistemologists often employ in their discussions. My thesis is that although this inference is invalid, one can still legitimately conclude (...) the failure of epistemic closure from the failure of closure of some necessary condition on knowledge. (shrink)

Role ethics, broadly speaking, is a normative ethical theory that has a prominent emphasis on roles. Although it was prominent in ancient cultures, such as in China and Greece, role ethics waned during the Enlightenment era. Not until very recently has role ethics been articulated in its own terms. Among current discussions on roles, the most systematic role ethics are Confucian role ethics, Epictetus’ role ethics, Sarah Harper’s rolecentered morality and Jeremy Evans’ role ethics. They are my primary interlocutors as (...) I develop and defend an alternative approach to understanding, examining and guiding our ethical life. By arguing that our ethical life is pervasively structured by roles, and drawing on the lights that my primary interlocutors have shed, I propose a role-structured ethics or role ethics that addresses some central issues regarding the nature of roles, the self, role identification, role fulfillment, role conflicts, and changing roles. Importantly, I emphasize the place of traditions in constructing a complete normative role ethics. So throughout the dissertation, I outline and defend the basic structure of any plausible specific role ethics, which is neutral among various traditions. I call such a structure “Role Ethics.” In particular, I investigate the nature of roles and its relation to the self, role fulfillment and its relation to the concept of duties, virtues and skills, as well as the nature of role conflicts and how to approach them. Along these lines of exploration, I also argue that they have important implications on the dignity of persons, moral education, and the notion of practical wisdom. Last but not the least, due to the universality of roles in various traditions, I propose that Role Ethics can serve as a platform to bring various traditions into meaningful dialogue. (shrink)

Marxist Philosophy in China is an important task is to use the basic theory of Marxist philosophy, viewpoint and method to sort, extract of traditional Chinese culture, philosophy. And the "legitimacy of Chinese philosophy," the discussion, while filling the job of "legitimacy" has also been a certain degree of skepticism. Including how to look at the cultural characteristics of Chinese philosophy, Western academic norms on how to look at the impact of Chinese philosophy and how to look at the transformation (...) of traditional Chinese philosophy, it is clear from the theoretical work to clarify the legality of the key. The main task of sinicizing Marxist philosophy is how to abstract philosophical thoughts from traditional Chinese culture with the guide of basic Marxist theories, viewpoints and methods. However, the validity problem of Chinese philosophy in a degree makes the validity of this project become a problem as well. How to understand the cultural identity of Chinese philosophy? How to evaluate the impact Western academic discourses left on Chinese philosophy? And how to judge the transformation of Chinese philosophy? We hold that theoretically, these three questions are the key points for the validity illumination of the project mentioned above. (shrink)

This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new relationships between knowledge (...) and the city. The design of the proposed ‘open university space’ responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges: that posed to architecture, and that posed to science. The university would embody the meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructure and the knowledge infrastructure. The purpose is thus also to develop the notion of knowledge, embodied in institutions, as urban infrastructure. (shrink)

The epistemological problems that are implicit in Marx’s theory on the “sensible world” indicate that Marx’s philosophy in fact contains within itself the topics of pure philosophy, but Marx did not involve himself in these topics. Through comparing with Husserl’s epistemological critique and Heidegger’s existentialism, we can clearly see that there are theoretical spaces in which we can develop Marx’s philosophy to the realm of pure philosophy, however, we must devote our creative efforts to the exploration of the spaces.

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

In nature, gregarious animals, insects, or bacteria usually exhibit paradoxical behaviors in the form of group fission and fusion, which exerts an important influence on group’s pattern formation, information transfer, and epidemiology. However, the fission-fusion dynamics have received little attention compared to other flocking behavior. In this paper, an intermittent selective interaction based control algorithm for the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system is proposed, which bridges the gap between the two conflicting behaviors in a unified fashion. Specifically, a hybrid (...) velocity coordination strategy that includes both the egalitarian and selective interactions is proposed, where the egalitarian interaction is to maintain the flock’s order and achieve the fusion behavior while the selective interaction strategy is for the response to external stimulus information and generates the fission behavior. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed control algorithm can realize the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system under a unified framework. The influences of the main control parameters on the performance of the fission-fusion behavior are also discussed. In particular, the trade-off parameterαbalances the exploration and exploitation behaviors of flocking system and significantly enhances its movement flexibility and environmental adaptivity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nonlinear vehicle platoon control problems with external disturbances. The quadratic spacing policy is applied into the platoon control, in which the desired intervehicle distance is a quadratic function in terms of the vehicle’s velocities. Comparing with the general constant time headway policy, the QSP is more suitable to the human driving behaviors and can improve the traffic capacity. Then, a novel platoon control scheme is proposed based on the distributed integrated sliding mode. Since the external disturbances (...) are taken into consideration, the sliding mode method is employed to handle the disturbances. Moreover, the stability and string stability of the proposed platoon control system are strictly analyzed. In final, numerical simulations are provided to verify the proposed approaches. (shrink)

Although current literature demonstrates how parents benefit from parent empowerment programs, the development of a quantitative measure of parent empowerment has garnered limited attention in parenting research. The goal of this research was therefore to develop and validate a quantitative measure for the assessment of practitioners’ attitudes and competence in parent empowerment. In the process of item generation, the qualitative findings derived from four studies in relation to the perceived outcomes and experiences in parent empowerment were synthesized in the first (...) stage. In the second stage, a list of narratives that articulated different themes of parent empowerment was generated, which resulted in an item pool containing 28 items. In the third stage, the research team converted the 28 items into a survey instrument. In the fourth stage, a first-scale validation study was conducted to explore the factor structure of the initial 28-item questionnaire. The exploratory factor analysis on the first sample of 366 practitioners yielded a twofold factor structure with 17 items, including practitioners’ attitudes in parent empowerment and practitioners’ competence in parent empowerment. In the final stage, a second-scale validation study was undertaken to verify the fit of the twofold factor structure. A confirmatory factor analysis on the second sample of 170 practitioners demonstrated a good model fit. The results of reliability tests for the whole scale and two subscales also indicate satisfactory internal consistency. The Parent Empowerment via Transformative Learning Questionnaire was thus developed and confirmed as a scale with sufficient factorial validity and internal consistency to be used for assessing parenting practitioners’ attitudes and competence in parent empowerment and for evaluating the effectiveness of parent empowerment programs. (shrink)