This paper tries to combine Peirce’s cosmology and metaphysics with current understanding in physics of the evolution of the universe, regarded as an ongoing semiotic process in a living cosmos. While the basic property of Life is viewed as an unexplainable Firstness inherent in the initial iconic state of the vacuous continuum we shall consider and exemplify two sign developing processes: (a) the transition from icon to index is considered as a symmetry breaking emergence of order actualising one among the (...) possibilities of the iconic vacuum; (b) the transition from index to symbol, regarded as a habit formation — an adaptation of the surroundings to the order that has emerged. While the iconic state is characterized by fractal self-similarity the transitions to index and symbol are modelled by the mean field theory of second order phase transitions. (shrink)

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

Recent advances in the field of statistical learning have established that learners are able to track regularities of multimodal stimuli, yet it is unknown whether the statistical computations are performed on integrated representations or on separate, unimodal representations. In the present study, we investigated the ability of adults to integrate audio and visual input during statistical learning. We presented learners with a speech stream synchronized with a video of a speaker’s face. In the critical condition, the visual (e.g. /gi/) and (...) auditory (e.g. /mi/) signals were occasionally incongruent, which we predicted would produce the McGurk illusion, resulting in the perception of an audiovisual syllable (e.g. /ni/). In this way, we used the McGurk illusion to manipulate the underlying statistical structure of the speech streams, such that perception of these illusory syllables facilitated participants’ ability to segment the speech stream. Our results therefore demonstrate that participants can integrate audio and visual input to perceive the McGurk illusion during statistical learning. We interpret our findings as support for modality-interactive accounts of statistical learning. (shrink)

In conversation, individuals work together to achieve communicative goals, complementing and aligning language and body with each other. An important emerging question is whether interlocutors entrain with one another equally across linguistic levels (e.g., lexical, syntactic, and semantic) and modalities (i.e., speech and gesture), or whether there are complementary patterns of behaviors, with some levels or modalities diverging and others converging in coordinated fashions. This study assesses how kinematic and linguistic entrainment interact with one another across levels of measurement, and (...) according to communicative context. We analyzed data from two matched corpora of dyadic interaction between—respectively—Danish and Norwegian native speakers engaged in affiliative conversations and task‐oriented conversations. We assessed linguistic entrainment at the lexical, syntactic, and semantic level, and kinetic alignment of the head and hands using video‐based motion tracking and dynamic time warping. We tested whether—across the two languages—linguistic alignment correlates with kinetic alignment, and whether these kinetic‐linguistic associations are modulated either by the type of conversation or by the language spoken. We found that kinetic entrainment was positively associated with low‐level linguistic (i.e., lexical) entrainment, while negatively associated with high‐level linguistic (i.e., semantic) entrainment, in a cross‐linguistically robust way. Our findings suggest that conversation makes use of a dynamic coordination of similarity and complementarity both between individuals as well as between different communicative modalities, and provides evidence for a multimodal, interpersonal synergy account of interaction. (shrink)

Empirical evidence from dialogue, both corpus and experimental, highlights the importance of interaction in language use – and this raises some questions for Christiansen & Chater's proposals. We endorse C&C's call for an integrated framework but argue that their emphasis on local, individual production and comprehension makes it difficult to accommodate the ubiquitous, interactive, and defeasible processes of clarification and repair in conversation.

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry “indirect evidence” about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of Reali and Christiansen (2005), who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the (...) nature of the indirect evidence that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally. (shrink)

Christiansen & Chater ignore the many linguistic universals that cannot be reduced to processing or cognitive constraints, some of which we present. Their claim that grammar is merely acquired language processing skill cannot account for such universals. Their claim that all other universal properties are historically and culturally based is a nonsequitur about language evolution, lacking data.

This volume contains a collection of 17 essays on Philo written by Peder Borgen between 1987 and 2018. The first six studies deal with important issues in Philo's religious thought and social world, such as his views on Flaccus, prayers, and his eschatology. The next five essays illustrate how an understanding of Philo can contribute to the interpretation of Paul, especially his Letter to the Galatians. The final six studies deal with the importance of Philo's writings for the interpretation (...) of the Revelation of John, a subject too rarely touched upon in recent scholarship. (shrink)

The gamer’s dilemma :31–36, 2009) asks whether any ethical features distinguish virtual pedophilia, which is generally considered impermissible, from virtual murder, which is generally considered permissible. If not, this equivalence seems to force one of two conclusions: either both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are permissible, or both virtual pedophilia and virtual murder are impermissible. In this article, I attempt, first, to explain the psychological basis of the dilemma. I argue that the two different action types picked out by “virtual (...) pedophilia” and “virtual murder” set very different expectations for their token instantiations that systematically bias judgments of permissibility. In particular, the proscription of virtual pedophilia rests on intuitions about immoral desire, sexual violations, and a schematization of a powerful adult offending against an innocent child. I go on to argue that these differences between virtual pedophilia and virtual murder may be ethically relevant. Precisely because virtual pedophilia is normally aversive in a way that virtual murder is not, we plausibly expect virtual pedophilia to invite abnormal and immorally desirous forms of engagement. (shrink)

The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

The scientific evidence is reviewed for claims that a global transition to “green” fuels and technologies by global treaty obligations is needed. The likely equity implications of these efforts are discussed, and it is argued that this evidence remains shaky. Measures based on this contested knowledge cannot be defended on grounds of either environmental effectiveness or equity. Rather, they rely on commercial expectations and promises of secondary benefits usually requiring state intervention. Poorer groups and nations are unlikely to benefit from (...) proposals to redirect energy policies to “combat global warming.” The advocated decarbonization of global energy supplies is more likely to increase political instability than prevent climatic change. To support this argument, three areas of knowledge are consulted: controversies about the causation and likely impacts of global warming, advocated technical and fiscal solutions, and the interests of technical, commercial, and political elites. (shrink)

Resumen La pretensión de que la violencia es un fenómeno apto para el abordaje objetivo es altamente cuestionable. En este artículo se indicarán algunos aspectos que subyacen en los enfoques más clásicos sobre tal tópico y se destacará el potencial violentogénico que encapsulan. El núcleo de las ideas expuestas apunta a plantear que la epistemología objetivista induce a una violencia simbólica enquistada en el principio del tercero excluido. En consecuencia, los esfuerzos por convertir a la violencia en un tema de (...) investigación objetiva terminan transformándose en una flagrante retroalimentación de la misma violencia que se proponen observar. Ahora bien, en contraste con esa anquilosada postura objetivista, se explorará un enfoque epistemológico de corte socio-construccionista que complejiza el abordaje de la violencia al enmarcarla dentro de una "investigación de segundo orden".The claim that violence is a phenomenon suitable for the objective approach is highly questionable. In this article, some aspects underlying the more classical approaches about such topic will be indicated, and their intrinsic violent potential will be emphasized. The core of the ideas that aims to raise the objectivist epistemology leads to a symbolic violence entrenched in the principle of the excluded middle. Consequently, efforts to make violence a topic of objective research end up becoming a flagrant feedback of the same violence they intend to observe. However, in contrast to the ossified objectivist position, a socio-constructionist epistemological approach will be explored. It focuses on violence as a complex reality, by framing it within a "Second-Order Research". (shrink)

In this review article, Christiansen provides a historical perspective on the two research traditions, implicit learning and statistical learning, thus nicely setting the scene for this special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science. In this “tale of two literatures”, he first traces the history of both literatures before sketching a framework that provides a basis for understanding implicit learning and statistical learning as a unified phenomenon.

Why are children better language learners than adults despite being worse at a range of other cognitive tasks? Here, we explore the role of multiword sequences in explaining L1–L2 differences in learning. In particular, we propose that children and adults differ in their reliance on such multiword units in learning, and that this difference affects learning strategies and outcomes, and leads to difficulty in learning certain grammatical relations. In the first part, we review recent findings that suggest that MWUs play (...) a facilitative role in learning. We then discuss the implications of these findings for L1–L2 differences: We hypothesize that adults are both less likely to extract MWUs and less capable of benefiting from them in the process of learning. In the next section, we draw on psycholinguistic, developmental, and computational findings to support these predictions. We end with a discussion of the relation between this proposal and other accounts of L1–L2 difficulty. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that human learning and the structure of human languages are intimately related. This relationship is frequently suggested to derive from a language-specific biological endowment, which encodes universal, but communicatively arbitrary, principles of language structure (a Universal Grammar or UG). How might such a UG have evolved? We argue that UG could not have arisen either by biological adaptation or non-adaptationist genetic processes, resulting in a logical problem of language evolution. Specifically, as the processes of language change (...) are much more rapid than processes of genetic change, language constitutes a both over time and across different human populations, and, hence, cannot provide a stable environment to which language genes could have adapted. We conclude that a biologically determined UG is not evolutionarily viable. Instead, the original motivation for UG arises because language has been shaped to fit the human brain, rather than vice versa. Following Darwin, we view language itself as a complex and interdependent which evolves under selectional pressures from human learning and processing mechanisms. That is, languages themselves are shaped by severe selectional pressure from each generation of language users and learners. This suggests that apparently arbitrary aspects of linguistic structure may result from general learning and processing biases deriving from the structure of thought processes, perceptuo-motor factors, cognitive limitations, and pragmatics. (shrink)

Establishing and maintaining mutual understanding in everyday conversations is crucial. To do so, people employ a variety of conversational devices, such as backchannels, repair, and linguistic entrainment. Here, we explore whether the use of conversational devices might be influenced by cross‐linguistic differences in the speakers’ native language, comparing two matched languages—Danish and Norwegian—differing primarily in their sound structure, with Danish being more opaque, that is, less acoustically distinguished. Across systematically manipulated conversational contexts, we find that processes supporting mutual understanding in (...) conversations vary with external constraints: across different contexts and, crucially, across languages. In accord with our predictions, linguistic entrainment was overall higher in Danish than in Norwegian, while backchannels and repairs presented a more nuanced pattern. These findings are compatible with the hypothesis that native speakers of Danish may compensate for its opaque sound structure by adopting a top‐down strategy of building more conversational redundancy through entrainment, which also might reduce the need for repairs. These results suggest that linguistic differences might be met by systematic changes in language processing and use. This paves the way for further cross‐linguistic investigations and critical assessment of the interplay between cultural and linguistic factors on the one hand and conversational dynamics on the other. (shrink)

The Danish marine biologist Anton Frederik Bruun (1901–1961) is chiefly remembered as an explorer of the deep-sea fauna and a key figure in international scientific organizations during the 1950s. As the Cold War increasingly permeated the marine sciences and it became too expensive for small states to operate deep-sea research vessels, he became an asset to the USA's oceanographic establishment as it sought to first assess Soviet strength (in terms of research, technology and logistical capacity) and then to build up (...) American oceanography in response. Bruun's contacts with the USSR – including a visit in 1957 – strengthened his contacts to the American military as well as American oceanographers. His enthusiasm for raising interest in the marine sciences in developing countries could also be matched to American geopolitical goals. Bruun's participation in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography's Naga expedition to the South China Sea and Gulf of Thailand captured the mutually beneficial nature of his American connections. Bruun was able to use the USA to reach distant oceans, while the USA in turn gained from Bruun's prestige as it forged connections with friendly states through science, an increasingly important arena for Cold War competition. (shrink)

In the generative tradition, the language faculty has been shrinking—perhaps to include only the mechanism of recursion. This paper argues that even this view of the language faculty is too expansive. We first argue that a language faculty is difficult to reconcile with evolutionary considerations. We then focus on recursion as a detailed case study, arguing that our ability to process recursive structure does not rely on recursion as a property of the grammar, but instead emerge gradually by piggybacking on (...) domain-general sequence learning abilities. Evidence from genetics, comparative work on non-human primates, and cognitive neuroscience suggests that humans have evolved complex sequence learning skills, which were subsequently pressed into service to accommodate language. Constraints on sequence learning therefore have played an important role in shaping the cultural evolution of linguistic structure, including our limited abilities for processing recursive structure. Finally, we re-evaluate some of the key considerations that have often been taken to require the postulation of a language faculty. (shrink)

Our understanding of language, its origins and subsequent evolution, is shaped not only by data and theories from the language sciences, but also fundamentally by the biological sciences. Recent developments in genetics and evolutionary theory offer both very strong constraints on what scenarios of language evolution are possible and probable, but also offer exciting opportunities for understanding otherwise puzzling phenomena. Due to the intrinsic breathtaking rate of advancement in these fields, and the complexity, subtlety, and sometimes apparent non-intuitiveness of the (...) phenomena discovered, some of these recent developments have either being completely missed by language scientists or misperceived and misrepresented. In this short paper, we offer an update on some of these findings and theoretical developments through a selection of illustrative examples and discussions that cast new light on current debates in the language sciences. The main message of our paper is that life is much more complex and nuanced than anybody could have predicted even a few decades ago, and that we need to be flexible in our theorizing instead of embracing a priori dogmas and trying to patch paradigms that are no longer satisfactory. (shrink)

This article investigates the nature and appeal of morally ambiguous protagonists, or anti-heroes, through an evolutionary lens. It argues that morally ambiguous protagonists navigate conflicts between prosocial and antisocial motivational pulls. In so doing they present audiences with a window onto the conflicts inherent in human sociality. Working from this premise, the article analyzes the morally ambiguous protagonist Walter White from the TV series Breaking Bad, complementing the analysis with survey results. The article finally discusses critically the role of moral (...) disengagement in enjoyment of stories with morally ambiguous protagonists. (shrink)

This is a review and discussion of Ask Vest Christiansen’s book Gym Culture, Identity and Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Tracing a Typology of Steroid Use. As indicated by the title, the book...

Recent research suggests that language evolution is a process of cultural change, in which linguistic structures are shaped through repeated cycles of learning and use by domain-general mechanisms. This paper draws out the implications of this viewpoint for understanding the problem of language acquisition, which is cast in a new, and much more tractable, form. In essence, the child faces a problem of induction, where the objective is to coordinate with others (C-induction), rather than to model the structure of the (...) natural world (N-induction). We argue that, of the two, C-induction is dramatically easier. More broadly, we argue that understanding the acquisition of any cultural form, whether linguistic or otherwise, during development, requires considering the corresponding question of how that cultural form arose through processes of cultural evolution. This perspective helps resolve the “logical” problem of language acquisition and has far-reaching implications for evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

The ability to convey our thoughts using an infinite number of linguistic expressions is one of the hallmarks of human language. Understanding the nature of the psychological mechanisms and representations that give rise to this unique productivity is a fundamental goal for the cognitive sciences. A long-standing hypothesis is that single words and rules form the basic building blocks of linguistic productivity, with multiword sequences being treated as units only in peripheral cases such as idioms. The new millennium, however, has (...) seen a shift toward construing multiword linguistic units not as linguistic rarities, but as important building blocks for language acquisition and processing. This shift—which originated within theoretical approaches that emphasize language learning and use—has far-reaching implications for theories of language representation, processing, and acquisition. Incorporating multiword units as integral building blocks blurs the distinction between grammar and lexicon; calls for models of production and comprehension that can accommodate and give rise to the effect of multiword information on processing; and highlights the importance of such units to learning. In this special topic, we bring together cutting-edge work on multiword sequences in theoretical linguistics, first-language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computational modeling, and second-language learning to present a comprehensive overview of the prominence and importance of such units in language, their possible role in explaining differences between first- and second-language learning, and the challenges the combined findings pose for theories of language. (shrink)

(2004). A vindication of the rights of brutes. Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 259-264.