Early and automatic neuropsychological processes may be influenced by altered dopaminergic functions but cannot be fully explained by these or by altered reinforcement and extinction processes. The reinforcement-extinction model is excellent for understanding certain causal pathways of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but it can hardly explain the heterogeneous developmental trajectories of ADHD fully. It should be integrated into a multiple pathways model.

Business and Economic textbooks warn against committing the Sunk Cost Fallacy: you, rationally, shouldn't let unrecoverable costs influence your current decisions. In this paper, I argue that this isn't, in general, correct. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to wish to carry on with a project because of the resources you've already sunk into it. The reason? Given that we're social creatures, it's not unreasonable to care about wanting to act in such a way so that a plausible story can be told (...) about you according to which your diachronic behavior doesn't reveal that you've suffered, what I will call, diachronic misfortune. Acting so as to hide that you've suffered diachronic misfortune involves striving to make yourself easily understood while disguising any shortcomings that might damage your reputation as a desirable teammate. And making yourself easily understood to others while hiding your flaws will, sometimes, put pressure on you to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

The sunk cost fallacy is a well-established phenomenon where decision makers continue to commit resources, or escalate commitment, because of previously committed efforts, even when they have knowledge that their returns will not outweigh their investment. Most research on the sunk cost fallacy is done using hypothetical scenarios where participants make a single decision to continue with a project or to abandon it. This paradigm has several limitations and has resulted in a relatively limited understanding sunk cost behavior. To address (...) some of these limitations, we created a dynamic repeated choice paradigm where sunk costs are learned over time and opportunity costs are explicit. Over three experiments we show that the sunk cost fallacy depends on the relative a priori importance of the goal being invested in. We observed escalation of commitment only when the sunk cost domain is more important than alternatives, and participants showed de-escalation of commitment to the sunk costs domain otherwise. (shrink)

Although the sunk‐cost effect is a well‐documented psychological phenomenon in monetary investments, existing literature investigating behavioral investments (e.g., time, effort) has not replicated this effect except when such investments relate to monetary values. The current explanation for this discrepancy proposes that purely behavioral sunk‐cost effects are unlikely to be observed because they are difficult to book, track, and balance in a mental account. Conversely, we argue that, through an effort‐justification mechanism, people account for the amount of behavioral resources invested when (...) selecting an alternative, in which case they may fall prey to purely behavioral sunk‐cost effects. The results of two experiments support this prediction. Because many decisions involve behavioral investments, behavioral sunk‐cost effects should be pervasive psychological phenomena. (shrink)

The problem of moral sunk costs pervades decision-making with respect to war. In the terms of just war theory, it may seem that incurring a large moral cost results in permissiveness: if a just goal may be reached at a small cost beyond that which was deemed proportionate at the outset of war, how can it be reasonable to require cessation? On this view, moral costs already expended could have major implications for the ethics of conflict termination. Discussion of sunk (...) costs in moral theorizing about war has settled into four camps: Quota, Prospect, Addition, and Discount. In this paper, I offer a mathematical model that articulates each of these views. The purpose of the mathematisation is threefold. First, to unify the sunk costs problem. Second, to show that these views differ in the nature of their justifications: some are justified qualitatively and others quantitatively. Third, to clarify the differential force of qualitative and quantitative critiques of these four views. (shrink)

Decision theorists generally object to “honoring sunk costs” – that is, treating the fact that some cost has been incurred in the past as a reason for action, apart from the consideration of expected consequences. This paper critiques the doctrine that sunk costs should never be honored on three levels. As background, the rationale for the doctrine is explained. Then it is shown that if it is always irrational to honor sunk costs, then other common and uncontroversial practices are also (...) irrational. Second, it is argued that there is no satisfactory way to make a distinction between the two kinds of cases. Third, a proposal is developed which would explain how it could be rational, under certain circumstances, to honor sunk costs. (shrink)

Many find it reasonable to take our past actions into account when making choices for the future. In this paper, I address two important issues regarding taking past investments into account in prudential deliberation. The first is the charge that doing so commits the fallacy of honoring sunk costs. I argue that while it is indeed irrational to care about sunk costs, past investments are not sunk costs when we can change their teleological significance, roughly their contribution to our excellence (...) as temporally extended, reasons-responsive, and goal-directed agents. I suggest some general principles for evaluating such significance. Second, it’s a live issue whether we should care about the fate of our past projects, even if we can now affect it. I reject Dale Dorsey’s recent answer, and argue that the puzzle he addresses turns out to be merely apparent, if we take seriously the fact that we are temporally extended. (shrink)

If you are more likely to continue a course of action in virtue of having previously invested in that course of action, then you tend to honor sunk costs. It is widely thought both that (i) individuals often do give some weight to sunk costs in their decision-making and that (ii) it is irrational for them to do so. In this paper I attempt to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom about sunk costs, understood as the conjunction of these two (...) claims. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'sunk cost'. In economics, a sunk cost is an investment that can never be recovered. Prime examples include money spent on research and development or advertising for a product. However, there is a way to think of cost in terms of time, energy, and even emotion. The way to avoid this fallacy is to not allow the fear of losing what was already invested in something to influence (...) one's rational, objective decision about a present or future investment. In Eric Nielsen's words, when making any decision, economic or otherwise, it “makes no sense to factor in sunk costs precisely because they are sunk; no present action can change them. No matter what happens, the sunk costs are always there”. (shrink)

Suppose that you are trying to pursue a morally worthy goal, but cannot do so without incurring some moral costs. At the outset, you believed that achieving your goal was worth no more than a given moral cost. And suppose that, time having passed, you have wrought only harm and injustice, without advancing your cause. You can now reflect on whether to continue. Your goal is within reach. What's more, you believe you can achieve it by incurring—from this point forward—no (...) more cost than it warranted at the outset. If you now succeed, the total cost will exceed the upper bound marked at the beginning. But the additional cost from this point is below that upper bound. And the good you will achieve is undiminished. How do the moral costs you have already inflicted bear upon your decision now? (shrink)

This project tackles the problem of analyzing a specific form of reasoning called ‘sunk costs’ in economics and ‘argument from waste’ in argumentation theory. The project is to build a normative structure representing the form of the argument, and then to apply this normative structure to actual cases in which the sunk costs argument has been used. The method is partly structural and partly empirical. The empirical part is carried out through the analysis of case studies of the sunk costs (...) argument found in business decision-making, as well as other areas like medical decision-making and everyday conversational argumentation. The structural part is carried out by using existing methods and techniques from argumentation theory, like argumentation schemes. The project has three especially significant findings. First, the sunk costs argument is not always fallacious, and in many cases it can be seen to be a rational precommitment strategy. Second, a formal model of argumentation, called practical reasoning, can be constructed that helps a rational critic to judge which sunk costs arguments are fallacious and which are not. Third, this formal model represents an alternative model of rationality to the cost-benefit model based on Bayesian calculation of probabilities. This alternative model is called the argumentation model, and it is based on interpersonal reasoning in dialogue as the model of rational thinking. This model in turn is based on the underlying notion of commitment in dialogue. (shrink)

Optimal foraging theory has been criticized for underestimating patch exploitation time. However, proper modeling of costs not only answers these criticisms, but it also explains apparently irrational behaviors like the sunk-cost effect. When a forager is sure to experience high initial costs repeatedly, the forager should devote more time to exploitation than searching in order to minimize the accumulation of said costs. Thus, increased recognition or reconnaissance costs lead to increased exploitation times in order to reduce the frequency of future (...) costs, and this result can be used to explain paradoxical human preference for higher costs. In fact, this result also provides an explanation for how continuing a very costly task indefinitely provides the optimal long-term rate of gain; the entry cost of each new task is so great that the forager avoids ever returning to search. In general, apparently irrational decisions may be optimal when considering the lifetime of a forager within a larger system. (shrink)

This paper presents a very simple model in which situational cues associated with a particular consumption good compel an agent—who may have otherwise been “thinking about” something else—to consider the decision to consume that good. Within this framework, it is shown how an endowment effect and a present bias can arise through a common mechanism. The analysis points to a novel, contributing role for inattention in understanding both of these behavioral anomalies while also speaking to evidence that they are often (...) cue-induced. (shrink)

In the WebSurf task, humans forage for videos paying costs in terms of wait times on a time-limited task. A variant of the task in which demands during the wait time were manipulated revealed the role of attention in susceptibility to sunk costs. Consistent with parallel tasks in rodents, previous studies have found that humans preferred shorter delays, but waited longer for more preferred videos, suggesting that they were treating the delays economically. In an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample, we replicated (...) these predicted economic behaviors for a majority of participants. In the lab, participants showed susceptibility to sunk costs in this task, basing their decisions in part on time they have already waited, which we also observed in the subset of the mTurk sample that behaved economically. In another version of the task, we added an attention check to the wait phase of the delay. While that attention check further increased the proportion of subjects with predicted economic behaviors, it also removed the susceptibility to sunk costs. These findings have important implications for understanding how cognitive processes, such as the deployment of attention, are key to driving re-evaluation and susceptibility to sunk costs. (shrink)

INCONTINENCE, HONOURING SUNK COSTS AND RATIONALITY According to a basic principle of rationality, the decision to engage in a course of action should be determined solely by the analysis of its consequences. Thus, considerations associated with previous use of resources should have no bearing on an agent’s decision-making process. Frequently, however, agents persist carrying on an activity they themselves judge to be nonoptimal under the circumstances because they have already allocated resources to that activity. When this is the case, agents (...) are said to be honouring sunk costs. Honouring sunk costs is thus typically viewed as irrational economic behaviour. Two striking findings of the psychological literature on the sunk cost effect are that it is, in general, not lessened by having taken previously courses in economics, and that agents who did take such courses and that do honour sunk costs seem to be frequently aware of a cognitive dissonance in their behaviour. Davidson’s account of the possibility conditions of incontinent action renders continent action materially unfeasible. The very idea of incontinent action becomes thus a hollow one. I’ll present an alternative description of these possibility conditions that renders continent action materially feasible, and both, continent and incontinent action, cognitively plausible. In a nutshell, my proposal rests upon the drawing of an essential cognitive contrast between explicit processes of deliberative reasoning and lower level heuristic procedures. I conclude the paper arguing that my redescription of incontinent action accounts for the above mentioned cognitive dissonance effect better than the alternatives and that viewing at least an important subset of behaviours of honouring sunk costs as incontinent actions will enable us to consider them as peculiar manifestations of a more general and meaningful pattern in human behaviour. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

It is a commonplace in economics that we should disregard sunk costs. The sunk cost effect might be widespread, goes the conventional wisdom, but we would be better off if we could rid ourselves of it. In this paper, I argue against the orthodoxy by showing that the sunk cost effect is often beneficial. Drawing on discussions of related topics in dynamic choice theory, I show that, in a range of cases, being disposed to honor sunk costs allows an agent (...) to mimic a resolute chooser, someone who adopts the best plan at the outset of a decision problem and sticks with it, even when resoluteness is unfeasible. I discuss several kinds of cases in which honoring sunk costs coincides with resolute choice. (shrink)

The present study describes the mechanism of need regulation, which accompanies the so-called “biased” decisions. We hypothesized an unconscious urge for psychological need satisfaction as the trigger for cognitive biases. In an experimental study (N = 106), participants had the opportunity to win money in a functionality test. In the test, they could either use the solution they had developed (sunk cost) or an alternative solution that offered a higher probability of winning. The selection of the sunk-cost option was the (...) most chosen option, supporting the hypothesis of this study. The reason behind the majority of participants choosing the sunk-cost option seemed to be the satisfaction of psychological needs, despite a reduced chance of winning money. An intervention, which aimed at triggering self-reflection, had no impact on the decision. The findings of this study contribute to the discussion on the reasons for cognitive biases and their formation in the human mind. Moreover, it discusses the application of the label “irrational” for biased decisions and proposes reasons for instrumental rationality, which exist at an unconscious, need-regulative level. (shrink)

Cunha and Caldieraro (2009) investigated whether sunk-cost effects, which are well documented in hypothetical situations involving monetary investments, also occur in choice situations with purely behavioral investments. Their results suggest that decision makers indeed fall prey to behavioral sunk-cost effects under certain circumstances. I have been unable to replicate their pattern of results in three separate investigations. In these studies, I attempted to recover the effect using two other behavioral effort manipulations in addition to the manipulation used by Cunha and (...) Caldieraro. This failure to replicate the pattern of results calls into question the robustness of the initial findings. (shrink)

Only in recent years have developmental psychologists begun advocating and exploring dual-process theories and their applicability to cognitive development. In this paper, a dual-process model of developments in two processing systems—an “analytic” and an “experiential” system—is discussed. We emphasise the importance of “metacognitive intercession” and developments in this ability to override experiential processing. In each of two studies of sunk cost decisions, age-related developments in normative decisions were observed, as were declines in the use of a “waste not” heuristic. In (...) the second study, children and adolescents were presented with arguments for normative and non-normative sunk cost decisions. Following argument evaluation, participants were re-presented the original problems and a set of novel, transfer problems. Results indicated that post-argument improvements were most apparent during adolescence. Age-related improvements were most noticeable on the transfer problems. In general, the findings suggest that the ability to metacognitively intercede (i.e., reflect on arguments; inhibit experientially produced responses) emerges towards middle adolescence. However, even by the end of adolescence, in the absence of significant contextual cues and motivation, this ability is infrequently utilised. (shrink)

The all too common sunk cost effect is apparent when an investor influenced by what has been spent already persists in a venture, committing further resources or foregoing more profitable opportunities, when the economically rational action is to quit. Less common but arguably just as much a sunk cost effect is the mistake of giving up on a failed or failing venture too readily, sometimes out of nothing but pique at what has been lost, or perhaps through the more subtle (...) psychological forces posited by Kahneman, Tversky, Thaler and others within prospect theory and related work on ``mental budgeting''. Two case examples are considered, wherein decision makers dissatisfied with the results of their investments, and having lost money, appear to compound their losses by selling out at prices less than their own estimates of the remaining financial worth of the failed assets. These decisions are evaluated from the perspectives of both behavioral and prescriptive economics, and are found to have possible explanations in both. Their prescriptive rationale assumes a portfolio theory of investment decisions, and is demonstrated within both expected utility (economics) and mean-variance (finance) frameworks. (shrink)

Ratio Juris, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 21-29, March 2022.

There is growing interest in whether and how sunk-cost effects for purely behavioral investments occur. In this article, we further discuss Cunha and Caldieraro’s (2009) Behavioral Investment Sunk Cost (BISC) model and reconcile Otto’s (2010) results with the BISC model predictions. We also report new data from two unpublished experiments that are consistent with the BISC model, and we discuss the conditions under which purely behavioral sunk-cost effects are likely to be observed.

Many philosophers hold that the achievement of one's goals can contribute to one's welfare apart from whatever independent contributions that the objects of those goals or the processes by which they are achieved make. Call this the Achievement View, and call those who accept it achievementists. In this paper, I argue that achievementists should accept both that one factor that affects how much the achievement of a goal contributes to one’s welfare is the amount that one has invested in that (...) goal and that the amount that one has invested in a goal is a function of how much one has personally sacrificed for its sake, not a function of how much effort one has put into achieving it. So I will, contrary to at least one achievementist, be arguing against the view that the greater the amount of productive effort that goes into achieving a goal, the more its achievement contributes to one's welfare. Furthermore, I argue that the reason that the achievement of those goals for which one has personally sacrificed matters more to one’s welfare is that, in general, the redemption of one's self-sacrifices in itself contributes to one’s welfare. Lastly, I argue that the view that the redemption of one's self-sacrifices in itself contributes to one's welfare is plausible independent of whether or not we find the Achievement View plausible. We should accept this view so as to account both for the Shape of a Life Phenomenon and for the rationality of honoring "sunk costs.". (shrink)

How should deontologists approach decision-making under uncertainty, for an iterated decision problem? In this paper I explore the shortcomings of a simple expected value approach, using a novel example to raise questions about attitudes to risk, the moral significance of tiny probabilities, the independent moral reasons against imposing risks, the morality of sunk costs, and the role of agent-relativity in iterated decision problems.

Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated—put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography’s attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by different groups in order to examine broader questions of how we might (...) come to understand data ethnographically. (shrink)

Paul M. Pietroski, University of Maryland I had heard it said that Chomsky’s conception of language is at odds with the truth-conditional program in semantics. Some of my friends said it so often that the point—or at least a point—finally sunk in.

In this paper I attempt to respond to the worries of the source incompatibilist, and try to sketch a naturalistically plausible, compatibilist notion of self-authorship and control that I believe captures important aspects of the folk intuitions regarding freedom and responsibility. It is my hope to thus offer those moved by source incompatibilist worries a reason not to adopt what P.F. Strawson called “the obscure and panicky metaphysics of Libertarianism” (P. F. Strawson, 1982) or the panic-inducing moral austerity of the (...) hard incompatibilist (Pereboom, 2001). I am well aware that many great minds have sunk their teeth into this problem and have not prevailed, but at the very least, I hope to become clearer on where the sticking points are. (shrink)

Mental accounting is a concept associated with the work of Richard Thaler. According to Thaler, people think of value in relative rather than absolute terms. They derive pleasure not just from an object’s value, but also the quality of the deal – its transaction utility (Thaler, 1985). In addition, humans often fail to fully consider opportunity costs (tradeoffs) and are susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. Why are people willing to spend more when they pay with a credit card than (...) cash (Prelec & Simester, 2001)? Why would more individuals spend $10 on a theater ticket if they had just lost a $10 bill than if they had to replace a lost ticket worth $10 (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984)? Why are people more likely to spend a small inheritance and invest a large one (Thaler, 1985)? According to the theory of mental accounting, people treat money differently, depending on factors such as the money’s origin and intended use, rather than thinking of it in terms of the “bottom line” as in formal accounting (Thaler, 1999). An important term underlying the theory is fungibility, the fact that all money is interchangable and has no labels. In mental accounting, people treat assets as less fungible than they really are. Even seasoned investors are susceptible to this bias when they view recent gains as disposable “house money” (Thaler & Johnson, 1990) that can be used in high-risk investments. In doing so, they make decisions on each mental account separately, losing out the big picture of the portfolio. (See also partitioning and pain of paying for ideas related to mental accounting.) . (shrink)

Consciousness exists in time, but time is also to be found within consciousness: we are directly aware of both persistence and change, at least over short intervals. On reflection this can seem baffling. How is it possible for us to be immediately aware of phenomena which are not (strictly speaking) present? What must consciousness be like for this to be possible? In "Stream of Consciousness" I argued that influential accounts of phenomenal temporality along the lines developed by Broad and Husserl (...) were fundamentally flawed, and proposed a quite different account: the overlap model. While recognizing that the latter has merits, Gallagher argues that it too is fundamentally flawed; he also takes issue with some of my claims concerning Broad and Husserl. My reply comes in three main parts. I start by clarifying my use of certain terms, in particular realism and anti-realism as applied to theories of phenomenal temporality in general, and the accounts of Broad and Husserl in particular. I then turn to Gallagher’s main criticisms of the overlap theory. Gallagher argues that the theory is sunk by a problem with ongoing contents, that if our experience possessed the structures I ascribe to it, we would be aware of contents as having longer durations than is actually the case. I suggest otherwise: the version of the overlap theory which is afflicted by this difficulty is not the version I put forward, as becomes clear when two distinct forms of overlap are distinguished. Gallagher is also concerned that the theory lacks phenomenological grounding, and has difficulties with experiential holism. The latter worry, I argue, is completely misplaced. While the former has more warrant, it too is rooted in a misconception: the overlap theory was intended only to provide an account of the most basic sensory components of our short-term experience of temporality, and can easily be expanded to accommodate other aspects. I supply a sketch an augmented theory to back up this claim. I conclude with an assessment of the intentional account of time-consciousness Gallagher ascribes to Husserl. A meaning-based account of this kind is incapable of accounting for experienced sensory continuity, or so I argue. I also suggest that both Broad and Husserl may have had leanings towards the Simple Conception of consciousness. -/- . (shrink)

In reflecting on events of considerable significance, it is commonplace to remark that ‘it hasn’t sunk in yet’ or ‘it’s still sinking in’. Such talk is sometimes associated with things seeming unreal, surreal, unfathomable, or somehow impossible. In this paper, I develop an account of what these experiences consist of. First of all, I suggest that they involve explicitly acknowledging the reality of one’s situation, while at the same time experiencing it as inconsistent with the organization of one’s life. I (...) go on to show how this tension is experienced dynamically, through disturbances of unfolding patterns of anticipation. I suggest that these patterns contribute to our grasp of what is and is not the case, thus accommodating the manner in which things can seem ‘unbelievable’ or ‘unreal’. (shrink)

Important moral dilemmas arise in the context of what I have called jus terminatio and Darrel Moellendorf has called jus ex bello—the norms governing the termination of war. I discuss three dilemmas, showing how they also illuminate proportionality and jus ad bellum: morally accounting for new costs that arise during the course of a war; two variants of the “sunk-cost dilemma” in which an agent is permitted to contribute to a project that is all things considered morally unjust, when that (...) project is morally justified on a forward-looking basis; and the problem of moral hazard in peace negotiations. (shrink)

It is easier to criticize others and their foreign way of life, than to turn the mirror of critical reflection upon one’s own customs and laws. I argue that Plato follows this basic premise in the _Timaeus_ when he constructs a story about Atlantis, which Solon, the Athenian, learns during his travels to Egypt. The reason why Plato appeals to the distinction that his Greek audience makes between themselves and the ξένοι is pedagogical. On the example of the conflict between (...) Atlantis—a mythical and, therefore, a foreign polis— and ancient Athens, Plato seeks to remind the Greeks what even a mighty polis stands to lose if it pursues expansionist war. On the example of the failure that befalls the mythical Atlantis, and on the basis of the religious similarity between ancient Athens and ancient Sais (21e), Plato bridges the distance between the Greeks and the Egyptians, who would have been seen as actual (as opposed to mythical) ξένοι. The next step that Plato encourages his contemporaries to take is this: look at the history of Egypt (8 – 7BC) and the internal conflicts that led to the demise of the last bastion of Egyptian power—Sais—and recognize in the internal political intrigues of the “Athens-loving” (21e) ξένοι the pattern of the destructive actions of the Greeks. Plato moves from the less to the more familiar—from the story about a mythic past and Atlantis, to ancient Athenians, to ancient Egyptians, to the Egyptians and Athenians of Solon’s time. The meeting between the ξένοι—the Egyptians at Sais—and the quintessentially Athenian Greek, Solon (7BC – 6BC), undeniably problematizes the customs, national identity, and political dealings of Plato’s contemporaries, the Greeks in the 5BC – 4BC. By the time that Plato writes the _Timaeus_, circa 360BC, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, Athens is all but undone. However, the fate of Greece is not yet sealed. Why turn to Egypt? Toby Wilkinson’s (2013) description of the Egyptian kingdom offers a clue: “The monarchy had sunk to an all-time low. Devoid of respect and stripped of mystique, it was but a pale imitation of past pharaonic glories” (_The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt _431). The Greeks face that same prospect, but how to make them see? Direct criticism (the Philippic addresses of Demosthenes, for example) fails. Plato devises a decoy—make Greeks reflect on the repercussions of their poor political decisions by seeing them reflected in the actions and the history of the Egyptians—the Greek-loving and, by Plato’s time, defeated ξένοι. (shrink)

Benj. R. Tucker, the business partner and confrère of E. H. Heywood of Princeton, Mass., has translated and published, in an elegant volume of nearly 500 royal octavo pages, the most renowned of the politico-economical works of the justly celebrated P. J. Proudhon. The title of the work in English is: What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government. I am requested to write a review-notice of the work. The temptation is strong to expand into (...) au exhaustive review, but I am not certain of any avenue to the public for such a treatise, and I shall confine myself to the smaller plan. First, as to what is usually put last. The volume as a book is superb. Print, presswork, paper, and binding are at the top of the powers of the bookmaking art, and the price is not excessive. The work of the translator is also conscientiously and well done, and is nearly faultless from the literary point of view. A few Gallicisms may be pointed out, but they are exceptionally few, and the translator's personality is completely sunk in the labor of love which he evidently had before him. (shrink)

The concept of memory has always been a crucial topic in philosophical discourse. This book re-traces the thought of major philosophers such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, William James, José Luis Borges and Sigmund Freud to provide an in-depth exploration around several aspects of this timely issue. How is a memory formed? How can we bring into existence what has sunk into oblivion? What is the role of our instincts and inner drives in the constitution of (...) memory? What is the connection between memory and forgetfulness, as well as that between mercy and remembrance? Focusing on these fundamental questions, the author presents a rich interconnection of concepts and ideas that build a significant work on the great theme of memory"--Front cover flap. (shrink)

Abstract“Sit down,” Mr. R demanded. “I've got something to say to you.” I shot the medical student a querying glance as we simultaneously sunk into our chairs. He continued, “You don't know me, and I got some things to tell you.”I thought I knew Mr. R, and I certainly had some idea of what he was all about. But then he called to me. In his summoning, Mr. R arrested all my preconceived ideas about him. And as the medical student (...) and I began to understand him better, we wanted to know more. We began to engage him more deeply. In the subsequent days, caring for him somehow felt easier, akin to the care one gives a distraught friend rather than a difficult patient. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Two Creations: Metamorphoses: i.5–162, 274–415 OVID (Translated by C. Luke Soucy) The Metamorphoses of Ovid opens with the creation of the world, only to recount its destruction and recreation almost immediately after. These stories begin Ovid’s mythic anthology with a sustained exploration of the uncertain origin of humanity, the conflicts in its nature, and its uneasy place in a world governed by divine forces. The following excerpts endeavor (...) to reproduce and contextualize that exploration in a blank verse translation, preserving much of the original wordplay and employing the same number of lines as in the Latin. Before there were seas, lands, and arching skies, Throughout the whole world, nature bore one face, Which was called Chaos, an unordered, rough And tumble mass of lifeless weight, wherein Lay packed the jangling elemental seeds. 10 No Titan1 then brought sunlight to the earth, No Phoebe2 yet wrought full her lunar curve; Nor hung the Earth self-poised in swaddling air, With Amphitrite’s3 arms stretched round her banks. For though the land, the sea, and air were there, 15 The land could bear no tread, the waves no stroke, The mist no light. No being retained its shape, And each opposed with each, for in one self arion 28.3 winter 2021 1. The Sun, son of the Titan Hyperion. 2. Diana, here representing the moon. 3. A Nereid and the wife of Neptune, here representing the sea. 46 the two creations Heat battled cold, wet strove with dry, soft parts Struck against hard, and weight fought weightless things. 20 A god—and better nature—broke this strife. He tore the lands from sky and seas from land, And from the dense air split the crystal heaven. Then, after he released the separate forms, Plucked from that sightless mass, he fastened them 25 In place with common peace. Next, weightless fire Leapt up and claimed its place in vaulting heaven, With air beneath, the next by lightness placed. But denser earth sank under its own weight And drew down heavy masses by its side. 30 The circling water took hold last of all, And wrapped the solid earth inside its flow. Once he, whichever of the gods he was, Had so reduced the whole to living parts, He spun the land into a giant sphere, 35 And, to begin, lest all sides be alike, He ordered straits to stream and swell beneath The sweeping winds and clasp the circled earth. And he made springs and lakes and boundless pools, And tilted banks hemmed in by slanting streams, 40 A share of which the earth absorbs; the rest Runs to the sea, where, in a freer flood, It pounds no banks, but breaks on ocean shores. He ordered fields unrolled and valleys sunk, The forests wreathed with leaves, the mountains raised; 45 And, as two regions on both left and right Divide the sky (a fiery fifth between), So did the might of god segment its load: The same five bounds are stamped upon the earth. The middle zone is home to heat alone, 50 The outer two to snow, but those between He gave both flame and frost in measured fare, And over all, the air—as great a weight Compared to fire as water feels from earth. Ovid 47 He ordered there the mists and there the clouds, 55 And thunder, soon to frighten mortal minds, And, mixed with bolts of light, the flashing Winds. To them, the maker did not grant the air Outright (for even now, when each one blows In his own realm, the brothers quarrel so 60 They scarce withhold from shattering the world). So Eurus sought Arabian lands of dawn And Persian peaks aglow with morning rays, While near the western shores by sunset warmed, Dwells Zephyrus; and wintry Boreas seized 65 The Scythian north, while southern lands drip wet With constant clouds and rain by Auster’s hand. Above them all, the god let aether flow, A liquid lacking weight or earthly trace. Such boundaries had he scarcely set in place 70 Before the stars, which had so long been crushed In sightless gloom, began to light the sky. And... (shrink)

The paper presents the project, begun in 2005, of publication of the Collected Works of Salomo Friedlaender / Mynona , a German philosopher and satirist. Starting from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, Kant, and Ernst Marcus, Friedlaender developed the basic motives of „creative indifference” and the specific polarity into an original and penetrating philosophy. Living in Berlin from 1902, he was at the center of significant philosophical and literary developments of the 20th century . He was a determined pacifist and Kantian whose (...) popular satires , during the Frist World War and the Weimar Republic, formulated a severe critique of culture and convincingly suggested that the utopia of eternal peace was practical. Due to unvaforable circumstances and cruel fate he had undeservedly sunk into fatal oblivion. This edition, which will include 30 volumes over several years, finally shows him the way he deserves. (shrink)

What I say here has been said before on many days and nights by reflective persons, for centuries long and planetary wide. Why, then, say it again, Sam? Is it because Heraclitus was onto something when he told us the Logos speaks but few hear? Or is the situation that of the Hassidic tale as recounted by Martin Buber? A man took it upon himself to convey the message of the high and holy one. He found no response and so (...) went directly, petulantly, to the author of the message. "Why are you here?" asked the high and holy one. "I have offered your message and no one hears me." "But," comes the response, "there is no hearing here for you. I have sunk my hearing in the deafness of mortals." More directly we can recall .. (shrink)

A rise of academic capitalism over the past four decades has been well documented within many research-intensive universities. Largely missing, however, are in-depth studies of how particularly situated academic groups manage the uncertainties that come with intermittent and fickle commercial funding streams in their daily research practice and problem choice. To capture the strategies scientists adopt under these conditions, this article provides an ethnographically detailed (and true) story about how a single project in Artificial Intelligence grew over several years from (...) a peripheral idea to the very center of an academic lab’s commercial portfolio. The analysis theorizes an epistemic form—nimble knowledge production—and documents three of its lab-level features: 1) rapid prototyping to keep sunk costs low, 2) shared search for “real world problems” rather than “theoretical” ones, and 3) nimble commitment to research problem choice. While similar forms of academic knowledge transfer have been lauded as “mode 2,” “innovative,” or “hybrid” for initiating cross-institutional collaboration and pushing science beyond disciplinary silos, this case suggests it can rely on fleeting attention to problems resistant to a quick fix. (shrink)

Jacques Dalarun’s “re-discovery” of The Life of Our Blessed Father Francis by Thomas of Celano is about as exciting a find as the field of medieval history is ever likely to provide. As André Vauchez remarked in Le Monde in January 2015, “There hasn’t been a discovery of this importance in half a century.” And indeed, there may never have been a major manuscript discovery for which the new text was made available in an impeccable Latin edition so quickly, translated (...) into French and published in book-form almost before the initial announcement of the discovery had sunk in, and then translated into practically all the major European languages within the next year and a half, including... (shrink)

In 1854 the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley pointed to a significant change in the way that reviewers were treating books that endorsed deeply flawed scientific theories. In the past, “when a book had been shown to be a mass of pretentious nonsense,” it “quietly sunk into its proper limbo. But these days appear, unhappily, to have gone by.” Due to the “utter ignorance of the public mind as to the methods of science and the criterion of truth,” scientists were now (...) forced to review such books in order to expose their deficiencies (Huxley 1903, 1). Huxley’s observation indicates how the development of a mass reading audience in mid-nineteenth century Britain transformed the very nature of scientific controversy. Scientists were compelled to debate the validity of theories in new public sites, not just in exclusive scientific societies or in specialized scientific journals with limited circulation. It was during the nineteenth century that public controversy—not limited to science alone—became possible for the first time. In this short piece I will discuss how the “communications revolution” produced a public space for the debate over evolutionary theory in mid-nineteenth century Britain. I will focus on periodicals as one of those public spaces in which the debate took place.1 As Huxley found, attempting to resolve a scientific controversy in the general periodical press could be a risky venture. Although a non-specialized journal could provide the public space necessary for reaching the reading audience, maintaining scientific authority in such a site was somewhat problematic. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

Sentences such as “The ship was sunk to collect the insurance” exhibit an unusual form of anaphora, implicit control, where neither anaphor nor antecedent is audible. The non-finite reason clause has an understood subject, PRO, that is anaphoric; here it may be understood as naming the agent of the event of the host clause. Yet since the host is a short passive, this agent is realized by no audible dependent. The putative antecedent to PRO is therefore implicit, which it normally (...) cannot be. What sorts of representations subserve the comprehension of this dependency? Here we present four self-paced reading time studies directed at this question. Previous work showed no processing cost for implicit vs. explicit control, and took this to support the view that PRO is linked syntactically to a silent argument in the passive. We challenge this conclusion by reporting that we also find no processing cost for remote implicit control, as in: “The ship was sunk. The reason was to collect the insurance.” Here the dependency crosses two independent sentences, and so cannot, we argue, be mediated by syntax. Our Experiments 1–4 examined the processing of both implicit (short passive) and explicit (active or long passive) control in both local and remote configurations. Experiments 3 and 4 added either “3 days ago” or “just in order” to the local conditions, to control for the distance between the passive and infinitival verbs, and for the predictability of the reason clause, respectively. We replicate the finding that implicit control does not impose an additional processing cost. But critically we show that remote control does not impose a processing cost either. Reading times at the reason clause were never slower when control was remote. In fact they were always faster. Thus, efficient processing of local implicit control cannot show that implicit control is mediated by syntax; nor, in turn, that there is a silent but grammatically active argument in passives. (shrink)