Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in-the-moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this dynamic complexity with results from two lines of research on early word learning. The first demonstrates how the child's active engagement with objects and people supports referent (...) selection via memories for what objects were previously seen in a cued location. The second set of results highlights changes in the role of novelty and attentional processes in referent selection and retention as children's knowledge of words and objects grows. Together this work suggests that understanding systems for perception, action, attention, and memory, and their complex interaction, is critical to understand word learning. We review recent literature that highlights the complex interactions between these processes in cognitive development and point to critical issues for future work. (shrink)

Identifying the referent of novel words is a complex process that young children do with relative ease. When given multiple objects along with a novel word, children select the most novel item, sometimes retaining the word‐referent link. Prior work is inconsistent, however, on the role of object novelty. Two experiments examine 18‐month‐old children's performance on referent selection and retention with novel and known words. The results reveal a pervasive novelty bias on referent selection with both known (...) and novel names and, across individual children, a negative correlation between attention to novelty and retention of new word‐referent links. A computational model examines possible sources of the bias, suggesting novelty supports in‐the‐moment behavior but not retention. Together, results suggest that when lexical knowledge is weak, attention to novelty drives behavior, but alone does not sustain learning. Importantly, the results demonstrate that word learning may be driven, in part, by low‐level perceptual processes. (shrink)

It is well-established that toddlers can correctly select a novel referent from an ambiguous array in response to a novel label. There is also a growing consensus that robust word learning requires repeated label-object encounters. However, the effect of the context in which a novel object is encountered is less well-understood. We present two embodied neural network replications of recent empirical tasks, which demonstrated that the context in which a target object is encountered is fundamental to referent selection (...) and word learning. Our model offers an explicit account of the bottom-up associative and embodied mechanisms which could support children’s early word learning and emphasises the importance of viewing behaviour as the interaction of learning at multiple timescales. (shrink)

Much evidence cited by Cohen Kadosh & Walsh (CK&W) in support of their notation-specific representation hypothesis is based on tasks requiring automatic number processing. Several of these findings can be alternatively explained by differential expertise in mapping numerical symbols onto semantic magnitude representations. The importance of considering symbol-referent mapping expertise in theories on numerical representations is highlighted.

Theories of cognitive development must address both the issue of how children bring their knowledge to bear on behavior in‐the‐moment, and how knowledge changes over time. We argue that seeking answers to these questions requires an appreciation of the dynamic nature of the developing system in its full, reciprocal complexity. We illustrate this dynamic complexity with results from two lines of research on early word learning. The first demonstrates how the child's active engagement with objects and people supports referent (...) selection via memories for what objects were previously seen in a cued location. The second set of results highlights changes in the role of novelty and attentional processes in referent selection and retention as children's knowledge of words and objects grows. Together this work suggests that understanding systems for perception, action, attention, and memory, and their complex interaction, is critical to understand word learning. We review recent literature that highlights the complex interactions between these processes in cognitive development and point to critical issues for future work. (shrink)

I propose in this paper to examine and analyse the concept of śūnyatā as it is expressed in the Hrdaya sūtras of the Buddhist prajñā-pāramitā literature and in the Mū1amadhyamaka-kārikās of Nāgārjuna. I shall attempt to show some of the difficulties involved in seeking an objective referent or counter part for the concept and also in trying to preserve the tension implicit in the affirmation of the middle way. I hope to indicate that the via negativa approach has positive (...) implications for the understanding of śūnyatā and that in the final analysis we may have to look for its meaning in the way it is used. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 175-188 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 38 Bioethics Resources on the Web * Once described as an "enormous used book store with volumes stacked on shelves and tables and overflowing onto the floor" (Pool, Robert. 1994. Turning an Info-Glut into a Library. Science 266 (7 October): 20-22, p. 20), Internet resources now receive numerous levels of organization, from basic directory listings (...) to elaborate "links" (cross-references to other Internet documents) that flash and glow in the dark. In many ways, the Internet functions as a direct extension of the traditional library. Following linked references across various sites is an electronic version of browsing library stacks, and the serendipitous discoveries made while "surfing the Net" recall the wonders of physically going "book-to-book." Although many of the Internet's best aspects augment library strengths by eliminating physical distance from sources, Net resources pose unique problems for researchers. It is not always clear who is responsible for the content of Web documents, when the document was produced, or how often (if ever) it is updated. Internet resource tools, then, must enable researchers to identify appropriate resources and to evaluate what they find when they get there. Web Research as Taking "Snapshots" Given the Internet's visual nature and fluid content, the process of conducting research on the Web has been likened to taking an informal picture of information on a specific date at a particular time. This metaphor also conveys the "zoom-in" aspect of searching through Web pages by going from general to specific categories. In the first section of this Scope Note, National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature (NRCBL) staff present a snapshot of bioethics resources taken during the spring months of 2000. Entries are divided into the categories of directories, electronic journals, full-text documents, news/current awareness, and teaching resources. In the two subsequent sections, this series of categories is repeated for entries on a specific topic within bioethics-genetics-and again for general search and evaluation tools. Where a Web site may contain pages applicable [End Page 175] to more than one category, multiple entries are made for that site with appropriate information for each category.Much as telecommunication advances have strengthened the relationship of patients and providers as partners, the dynamic nature of the Internet acknowledges that the researcher functions as a librarian whenever accessing the Web. It is our hope that BIOETHICSLINE and the other NRCBL databases not only will enable researchers to search the Web more efficiently, but also will help them to evaluate what they find when they get there. Bioethicsline on the Web: An International Plan in Progress Once only available through libraries, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the funding agency for the ongoing development of the BIOETHICS LINE® database from the Kennedy Institute, has provided free Web access to that database of 63,000 citations since September 1998 through Internet Grateful Med. Plans are now underway to eliminate such specialty databases and incorporate all citations into PubMed (for journal articles) or LOCATORplus (for book-like materials and chapters in books). Both of these databases are likewise available at no cost on the Web. In the transition to PubMed and LOCATORplus some features of BIOETHICSLINE that presently are available may be lost. Researchers are encouraged to contact the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature with search requests or for search strategy assistance with either the current or the future system ([email protected]).The inclusion of bioethics citations in PubMed and LOCATORplus will have several advantages. First, unique keywords from the Bioethics Thesaurus will be considered for inclusion in Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the indexing vocabulary for PubMed and LOCATORplus, thereby enhancing retrieval of relevant clinical literature by offering more precise terminology covering ethical issues. Second, it will be easier to identify foreign-language materials, which are not currently included in the scope of BIOETHICSLINE. Third, the updating schedule will become more frequent. On the other hand, there may be some loss of searching precision because certain specialized features... (shrink)

Theoretical accounts of negative expressives such as damn have ascribed two main properties to this type of adjective, namely that they are typically speaker-oriented, and that they can be flexible with regard to their syntactic attachment. However, it is not clear what this means during online sentence processing. For example, is it effortful for comprehenders to derive the speaker's negative attitude conveyed by an expressive adjective, or is it a rapid, automatic process? And do comprehenders understand the speaker's attitude regardless (...) of the expressive's syntactic position? The current work provides the first evidence supporting theoretical claims by investigating the incremental processing of Italian negative expressive adjectives. In an eye-tracking study, we show that expressive content is rapidly integrated with information about the speaker's attitude, resulting in the anticipation of an upcoming referent, regardless of the expressive's syntactic realization. We argue that comprehenders use expressives as an ostensive cue that allows for automatic retrieval of the speaker's negative attitude. (shrink)

In the summer of 2012, “meat” themed posters were hung throughout the city of Edmonton, Alberta. A textual analysis of three of the posters from this collection revels that the concept of sacrifice is more appropriate to describe “meat”-eating in Alberta than the concept of the absent referent. These posters celebrate the consumption of “meat” and unabashedly make evident the living animal origins of “meat.” I argue that that the prominence of the cattle industry relative to Alberta’s economy, and (...) its ties to the production and reproduction of dominant Albertan identity negate the requirement of the absent referent. The consumption of “beef” is largely considered an expression of loyalty to the region, and as a means to preserve Alberta’s heritage. The noncriminal putting to death of nonhuman animals can instead be understood as symbolic and literal sacrifices in the constitution of dominant Albertan identity and economy. As such, this paper makes an intervention into ecofeminist literature as well as vegan literature written for mainstream populations that employ the absent referent in the aim of countering “meat”-eating practices. (shrink)

In this paper, I challenge the long-established view that the term phlogiston fails to refer. After a close examination of the reference of phlogiston during Lavoisier’s Chemical Revolution, I show that it referred throughout to a natural substance, fire matter. I state that Lavoisier eliminated the term but not its referent, which he renamed caloric, and I claim that it is in the historical and cultural context of the Chemical Revolution that the Lavoisier’s intentions can be understood.

Ontological realism aims at the development of high quality ontologies that faithfully represent what is general in reality and to use these ontologies to render heterogeneous data collections comparable. To achieve this second goal for clinical research datasets presupposes not merely (1) that the requisite ontologies already exist, but also (2) that the datasets in question are faithful to reality in the dual sense that (a) they denote only particulars and relationships between particulars that do in fact exist and (b) (...) they do this in terms of the types and type-level relationships described in these ontologies. While much attention has been devoted to (1), work on (2), which is the topic of this paper, is comparatively rare. Using Referent Tracking as basis, we describe a technical data wrangling strategy which consists in creating for each dataset a template that, when applied to each particular record in the dataset, leads to the generation of a collection of Referent Tracking Tuples (RTT) built out of unique identifiers for the entities described by means of the data items in the record. The proposed strategy is based on (i) the distinction between data and what data are about, and (ii) the explicit descriptions of portions of reality which RTTs provide and which range not only over the particulars described by data items in a dataset, but also over these data items themselves. This last feature allows us to describe particulars that are only implicitly referred to by the dataset; to provide information about correspondences between data items in a dataset; and to assert which data items are unjustifiably or redundantly present in or absent from the dataset. The approach has been tested on a dataset collected from patients seeking treatment for orofacial pain at two German universities and made available for the NIDCR-funded OPMQoL project. (shrink)

In this paper I draw together the notion of the absent referent as proposed by Carol J. Adams, and the notions of literal and symbolical sacrifice by eating the other — or ingestion — advanced by Jacques Derrida, to characterize how animals are commonly perceived, which ultimately forbids productive arguments for vegetarianism. I discuss animals as being literally and definitionally absent referents, and I argue, informed by Derrida’s philosophy, that it is impossible to aim at turning them into present (...) referents without reinforcing symbolic ingestion by linking symbolic ingestion to epistemic appropriation or conceptualization. With this, I highlight the ethical importance of discussing symbolic ingestion in animal philosophy. (shrink)

Judgments of direct comparisons, probabilities, proportions, and ranks can all be considered referent-specific judgments, for which a good estimate requires a target to be compared against...

L’histoire récente des mathématiques non standard est mise en pers­pective de manière à faire apparaître une modification dans le langage utilisé et dans la pratique de la référentiation des énoncés qui pourrait conduire, si on le souhaitait à rapprocher la langue mathématique d’une langue de communi­cation. La profusion des constructions ensemblistes peut être limitée grâce à un vocabulaire un peu plus riche permettant de « dire l’indétermination », l’indiscernabilité, l’inaccessibilité… quand cela est nécessaire et d’explorer plus finement par le langage (...) mathématique, par une sorte de traduction du langage courant, des concepts sur lesquels le langage des mathématiques convention­nelles est presque muet : concepts de point, de grandeur infinie ou infinitésimale etc…. (shrink)

L’histoire récente des mathématiques non standard est mise en pers­pective de manière à faire apparaître une modification dans le langage utilisé et dans la pratique de la référentiation des énoncés qui pourrait conduire, si on le souhaitait à rapprocher la langue mathématique d’une langue de communi­cation. La profusion des constructions ensemblistes peut être limitée grâce à un vocabulaire un peu plus riche permettant de « dire l’indétermination », l’indiscernabilité, l’inaccessibilité… quand cela est nécessaire et d’explorer plus finement par le langage (...) mathématique, par une sorte de traduction du langage courant, des concepts sur lesquels le langage des mathématiques convention­nelles est presque muet : concepts de point, de grandeur infinie ou infinitésimale etc…. (shrink)

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Focusing with special intensity on scenes that feature still photographs in the Italian films Blow-Up, Three Brothers, and The One Hundred Steps, this paper traces a progressive return to the neorealist call for a cinema of truth-telling on the threshold on the new millennium.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical, methodological, and technical framework for the semiotic delimitation and analysis of those systems ofmaterial objects and practices which do not belong primarily to the sphere of signification. For the purposes of this paper, we will call such systems (for example economic, urban, or demographic systems) non-communication systems. By their very nature, the study of such systems does not fall wholly within the domain of semiotics, if we consider this domain as (...) coextensive with the study of cultural attitudes and practices. Thus, these systems differ structurally from communication systems, such as language, literature, and the arts, whose primary function is to be used for communication between members of a society and whose structure is primarily semiotic. (shrink)

A recent contribution to the moral decision-making literature argues that individuals' moral behavior is partially shaped by the amount of moral approbation they expect to receive from their moral referent groups (Jones and Ryan, 1997). This paper examines the nature and content of these previously underexamined sources of moral guidance. In an open-ended empirical test of undergraduate business students (n = 369), we found that 1) significant differences exist between individuals' moral referent groups and work-related referent groups, (...) 2) females were more likely than males to include themselves in their moral referent groups, 3) females were more likely than males to be designated as moral referents, and 4) females were more likely to be included in moral referent groups than in work-related referent groups. The paper also includes a general description of the membership of these business subjects' moral referent groups and presents a variety of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elizabeth Hanson-Smith AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS: THE CONCRETE REFERENT The chief problem facing critics who would consider the Confessions as both a literary work and a philosophical treatise remains the connection between the first nine books, the autobiography, and the last four, the metaphysical speculations on time, eternity, epistemology, and theology. A persistent desire to justify the work as an aesthetic whole has led critics on a search for thematic (...) and structural unity; they have been more successful in the former endeavor than in the latter. The interpretation of the work's plot as a peregrinatio animae, a pilgrimage of the soul, is now generally accepted as definitive; but attempts to find structural unity within that broad outline have not progressed beyond Marrou's characterization of the work as a "musical composition."1 His analogy to music has not been anchored to any concrete structural features of the Confessions and does not illuminate the connections between its content and its form. I shall attempt to prove that a unified structural model for the development of the soul in the Confessions does indeed exist and is outlined in Augustine's earlier discursive work, the De quantitate animae.2 The seven degrees or steps (gradus) of the soul's ascent to God, as sketched in the De quantitate, are deliberately fleshed out and translated into a mimetic, narrative version in the Confessions. Placing the two works side by side gives us a unique opportunity to examine a typically medieval literary form, the educative journey, in its relationship to its philosophical premises. Such a study reveals the inner formal unity of the literary work and, further, provides us with significant evidence for a re-examination of Augustine's Neo-Platonism, his supposed dualism, and his influence on later works, both literary and philosophical. In the Confessions we see one of the earliest Christian blendings of several models: first, the educative journey, the archetypal pattern familiar from the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and even The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Augustine's version, like later medieval cosmologies, also 176 Elizabeth Hanson-Smith1 77 includes a vision of the cosmic order and its relationship to human order, elements of significance in pagan philosophical works such as the Timaeus and the Dream of Scipio. But Augustine's journey also depends upon the Judeo-Christian conception of history as a series of figurae or types of the Messiah: the protagonist of the Christian educative journey joins thefigurae of the Biblical past. Christ's incarnation as Mansoul and his life on earth are the pattern of universal history from Fall to Apocalypse; Christ's life becomes a figurative pattern for the actions of Everyman.3 The Confessions is one of the earliest Christian works to apply this pattern in a narrative context. Augustine was also preoccupied with the Hexaemeron, the six days of creation and the seventh of rest. He views the exegesis of Genesis as an explanation of all subsequent life; the Ages of Man recapitulate the days of creation, as do the sacraments and the seven steps in the ascent of the soul. Thus, to the figurative pattern of Christ's "pilgrimage" from creating Logos to Incarnate God and finally to judge at the Second Coming, Augustine applies the schematic seven-fold ascent found in the De quantitate: the soul passes through the ascending steps of animation, sense, art, religion, tranquillity, initiation, and contemplation—each of which is figured by or patterned on a stage in Christ's life, as represented by the sacraments, and each of which, further, reflects a segment of universal history. The seven steps are not simply the movement of the individual soul, but the progress of Mansoul on its journey to Apocalypse. The stylistic differences between the two works—one an exposition written as Socratic dialogue, the other a metaphorical personal narrative —will no doubt give rise to differing interpretations; but one may, I think, object to certain details I suggest while still agreeing that the De quantitate provides the structuring model. Let me first define the major areas of difference between the two works. In the De quantitate, each of the levels or steps of the soul takes on a discrete, separate... (shrink)

Most of the research done with spatial demonstratives have focused on the production, not the interpretation, of these words. In addition, emphasis has been largely on demonstrative pronouns, leaving demonstrative adverbs with relatively little research attention. The present study explores the interpretation of both demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adverbs in Estonian—a Finno-Ugric language with two dialectal-specific demonstrative pronoun systems. In the South-Estonian dialectal region, two demonstrative pronouns, see—“this” and too—“that”, are used. In the North-Estonian region, only one, see—“this/that”, is used. (...) The aim of this study is twofold. First, we test if the distance and the visual salience of a referent have an effect on the interpretation of demonstratives. Second, we explore if there is a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between native speakers from SE and NE. We used an interpretation experiment with 30 participants per group and compared the SE and NE group responses. The results clearly show that the distance of the referent has an effect on how demonstratives are interpreted across the two groups, while the effect of visual salience is inconclusive. There is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two dialectal groups. When using the Estonian with an influence of the SE dialect, the NE speakers rely on demonstrative adverbs in interpreting the referential utterance that includes demonstrative pronoun and adverb combinations, whereas the SE speakers also take into account the semantics of demonstrative pronouns. We show that, in addition to an already known difference in the production, there is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two groups. In addition, our findings support the recognition that languages that have distance neutral demonstrative pronouns enforce the spatial meaning of a referring utterance by adding demonstrative adverbs. Not only is the interpretation of demonstrative pronouns affected, but the interpretation of demonstrative adverbs as well. The latter shows the importance of studying adverbs also, not just pronouns, and contributes to further knowledge of how demonstratives function. (shrink)