In this article we discuss the aspects of designing facial expressions for virtual humans (VHs) with a specific culture. First we explore the notion of cultures and its relevance for applications with a VH. Then we give a general scheme of designing emotional facial expressions, and identify the stages where a human is involved, either as a real person with some specific role, or as a VH displaying facial expressions. We discuss how the display and the emotional meaning of facial (...) expressions may be measured in objective ways, and how the culture of displayers and the judges may influence the process of analyzing human facial expressions and evaluating synthesized ones. We review psychological experiments on cross-cultural perception of emotional facial expressions. By identifying the culturally critical issues of data collection and interpretation with both real and VHs, we aim at providing a methodological reference and inspiration for further research. (shrink)

Business, management, and business ethics literature pay little attention to the topic of AI robots. The broad spectrum of potential ethical issues pertains to using driverless cars, AI robots in care homes, and in the military, such as Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. However, there is a scarcity of in-depth theoretical, methodological, or empirical studies that address these ethical issues, for instance, the impact of morality and where accountability resides in AI robots’ use. To address this dearth, this study offers a (...) conceptual framework that interpretively develops the ethical implications of AI robot applications, drawing on descriptive and normative ethical theory. The new framework elaborates on how the locus of morality and moral intensity combine within context-specific AI robot applications, and how this might influence accountability thinking. Our theorization indicates that in situations of escalating AI agency and situational moral intensity, accountability is widely dispersed between actors and institutions. ‘Accountability clusters’ are outlined to illustrate interrelationships between the locus of morality, moral intensity, and accountability and how these invoke different categorical responses: illegal, immoral, permissible, and supererogatory pertaining to using AI robots. These enable discussion of the ethical implications of using AI robots, and associated accountability challenges for a constellation of actors—from designer, individual/organizational users to the normative and regulative approaches of industrial/governmental bodies and intergovernmental regimes. (shrink)

In “Naming with Necessity”, it is argued that Kripke’s thesis that proper names are rigid designators is best seen as being motivated by an individual-driven picture of modality, which has two parts. First, inherent in proper-name usage is the expectation that names refer to modally robust individuals: individuals that can sustain modal predications like ‘is necessarily human’. Second, these modally robust individuals are the fundamental building blocks on the basis of which possible worlds should be conceived in a modal semantics (...) intended to mirror the conceptual apparatus behind ordinary modal talk. The individual-driven picture is distinct from two views inspired by Kripke, direct reference theory and Millianism. The former covers only the first half of the picture, while the latter explicitly gives up on that half even, opting to remain neutral about what expectation expressions impose on the nature of their referents. (shrink)

Focusing on the first journal in 'The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath', this book writes a convincing case for the value of corpus-based stylistics and narrative psychology in the analysis of representations of the experience of affective states.Situated at the intersection between language study, psychology and healthcare, this study of the personal writing of a poet and novelist showcases a cutting-edge combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, including metaphor analysis, corpus methods, and second person narration. Techniques that systematically account for (...) representations of experiences of affective states, such as those in this book, are rare and crucial in improving understanding of these experiences. The findings and methods of this book therefore potentially have bearing on the study, diagnosis and treatment of depression and other mental illnesses. Zsófia Demjén follows the cognitive turn in both literary studies and linguistics here, emerging with a greater understanding of Plath, her diarized output and her experience of her inner world. (shrink)

In patent law most of the crucial legal questions such as patentability and infringement are linked to the patent claims. The European Patent Office regards patent claims as a set of independent features which are examined separately in a more or less formal way. The author has found that this approach allows for developing a simple mathematical model which treats patent claim features as logical statements and patent claims as compound statements wherein the individual statements are connected by logical connectives. (...) The proposed mathematical model provides a uniform system for examining various legal questions that are dealt with separately under current case law, moreover, it allows for developing an expert system for resolving complex legal situations and for automating the evaluation of a large number of patent claim variants that is currently not possible. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWhen faced with hardship, how do we emotionally appraise the situation? Although many factors contribute to our reasoning about hardships, in this article we focus on the role of linguistic metaphor in shaping how we cope. In five experiments, we find that framing a person’s cancer situation as a “battle” encourages people to believe that that person is more likely to feel guilty if they do not recover than framing the same situation as a “journey” does. Conversely, the “journey” frame (...) is more likely to encourage the inference that the person can make peace with their situation than the “battle” frame. We rule out lexical priming as an explanation for this effect and examine the generalizability of these findings to individual differences across participants and to a different type of hardship—namely, an experience with depression. Finally, we examine the language participants produced after encountering one of these metaphors, and we find tendencies to repeat and extend the metaphors encountered.... (shrink)

Infants acquire their first words through interactions with social partners. In the first year of life, infants receive a high frequency of visual and auditory input from faces, making faces a potential strong social cue in facilitating word-to-world mappings. In this position paper, we review how and when infant gaze to faces is likely to support their subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We assess the relevance of infant gaze to faces selectively, in three domains: infant gaze to different features within a face (...) ; then to faces ; and finally to more socially relevant types of faces. We argue that infant gaze to faces could scaffold vocabulary construction, but its relevance may be impacted by the developmental level of the infant and the type of task with which they are presented. Gaze to faces proves relevant to vocabulary, as gazes to eyes could inform about the communicative nature of the situation or about the labeled object, while gazes to the mouth could improve word processing, all of which are key cues to highlighting word-to-world pairings. We also discover gaps in the literature regarding how infants’ gazes to faces or to different types of faces relate to vocabulary outcomes. An important direction for future research will be to fill these gaps to better understand the social factors that influence infant vocabulary outcomes. (shrink)

The research described in this paper was designed to identify the factors that influence the importance small-scale farmers place on different marketing channels of short food supply chains. The focus concerns two entirely different types of market that are present in the bigger cities in Hungary: ‘conventional’ markets where there are no restrictions on locality but the farmer-market relationship is based on binding contracts, and newly-emergent farmers’ markets at which only local growers can sell ad hoc, using their own portable (...) facilities. Results are based on a survey that was conducted in 2013 among 156 Hungarian market oriented farmer-vendors at different types of market and confirm that different markets are visited by different types of farmers. Farmers who favour conventional markets are typically less educated, operate on smaller scales and are more committed to their chosen markets via long-term contracts. The preference for farmers’ markets is stronger with farmers who are more open to cooperation, have specific investment plans for developing their farms and among those who are specifically looking to directly interact with their customers to avoid middlemen. The relevance of the findings is highlighted by the ongoing Short Food Supply Chain Thematic Sub-programme in the present European Union financing period; farmers’ profiles in any given marketing channel must be understood if short food supply chains are to be effectively promoted. Different types of small-scale farmers will benefit from different supporting frameworks, interventions, and initiatives. (shrink)

My goal is to reflect on the phenomenon of inadvertent creation and argue that—various objections to the contrary—it doesn’t undermine the view that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. My starting point is a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The challenge: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently created an abstract artifact, then the “inadvertent creation” (...) element turns out to be inescapable yet theoretically unattractive. Based on considerations about actually existing concrete objects featured in fictional works (as Napoleon is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace), I argue that independently of one’s stand on mythical objects, admitting fictional characters as abstract artifacts is enough to give rise to the challenge at hand; yet this very point serves to undermine the challenge, indicating that inadvertent creation is not nearly as worrisome as Goodman suggests. Indeed, the inadvertent creation phenomenon’s generality extends far beyond objects of fiction and myth, and I will use this observation to counter a further objection. Taking fictional characters (and mythical objects) to be abstract artifacts therefore remains a viable option. (shrink)

Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring (...) Kripke’s fleeting remarks in the Addenda to his “Naming and Necessity” lectures about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account of reference determination, and its consequences for fictional names as well as nonfictional names without bearers such as ‘Vulcan’. (shrink)

Artifactualism about fictional characters, positing Harry Potter as an abstract artifact created by J. K. Rowling, has been criticized on the grounds that the idea of creating such objects is mysterious and problematic. In the light of such qualms, it is worth homing in on an argument in favor of artifactualism, showing that it is the best way to include the likes of Harry Potter in our ontology precisely because it incorporates authorial creation. To that end, I will be exploring (...) Kripke’s fleeting remarks in his “Naming and Necessity” lectures (1972, 156–7) about expressions like ‘unicorn’ and ‘Harry Potter’. Elsewhere, Kripke motivates artifactualism by suggesting that incorporating authorial creation (as artifactualism does) is a move that is intuitive and natural; but beyond this, he doesn’t provide any arguments in favor of such a move. My purpose in this paper is to construct such an argument based on considerations about Kripke’s general view about proper names, in particular, his seminal causal-historical chain account of reference determination. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a line of argument against one form of realism about fictional characters : abstract artifact theory, the view according to which fictional characters like Harry Potter are part of our reality, but, they are abstract objects created by humans, akin to the institution of marriage and the game of soccer. I will defend artifactualism against an objection that Mark Sainsbury considers decisive against it: the category-mistake objection. The objection has it that artifactualism attributes to people (...) who produce and process sentences and thoughts about Harry Potter massive error, indeed, a category mistake about what kind of thing Harry Potter is; for an abstract object isn’t the sort of thing that can wear glasses, ride a double-decker bus, attend school. Given problems with this objection, artifactualism, I shall conclude, remains a tenable contender. (shrink)

My aim is to show that once we appreciate how Searle (1958) fills in the details of his account of proper names – which I will dub the presuppositional view – and how we might supplement it further, we are in for a twofold discovery. First, Searle’s account is crucially unlike the so-called cluster-of-descriptions view, which many philosophers take Searle to have held. Second, the presuppositional view he did hold is interesting, plausible, and worthy of serious reconsideration. The idea that (...) Searle’s account is a largely Fregean interlude between the Fregean description theory of proper names and Kripke’s proposals presented in “Naming and Necessity” is in major ways a myth, a mythical chapter in how the story of 20th-century philosophy of language is often told. (shrink)

In several papers, Petr Koťátko defends an “ontologically modest account of fictional characters”. Consider a position (which I have been defending) that is anything but ontologically restrained: positing fictional characters like Andrei Bolkonsky in War and Peace as abstract artifacts. I will argue, first, that such a position turns out to offer a nice fit with Petr Koťátko’s proposal about narrative fiction, one that fares better than an alternative pretense-based theory that doesn’t posit Bolkonsky as existing in any sense. Second, (...) I will explore a recent challenge by Jeffrey Goodman—which I will call the inadvertent creation challenge—that is originally posed for those who hold that fictional characters and mythical objects alike are abstract artifacts. The crux of the challenge is this: if we think that astronomers like Le Verrier, in mistakenly hypothesizing the planet Vulcan, inadvertently create an abstract artifact, then the inadvertent creation” element turns out to be inescapable yet theoretically unattractive. Third, based on considerations about actually existing concrete objects being featured in fictional works (as Napoleon is in War and Peace), I argue that regardless of where one stands on mythical objects, admitting fictional characters as abstract artifacts is enough to give rise to the inadvertent creation challenge; yet this very set of considerations serves to undermine the challenge, indicating that inadvertent creation is not nearly as worrisome after all as Goodman is suggesting. Taking fictional characters (and mythical objects) to be abstract artifacts therefore remains a viable option. -/- . (shrink)

In a series of papers (two of them in previous ESA Proceedings), I have been defending a fictional artifactualist position according to which fictional characters (like Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s War and Peace are non-concrete, human created objects (which are commonly labeled abstract artifacts). In this paper, I aim to bring together from my previous work two lines of defending fictional artifactualism: that (for the fictional artifactualist) making room for (i) authorial creation and for (ii) inadvertent authorial creation are tenable (...) moves. Indeed, instances of authorial creation (intentional or inadvertent) are what we expect if we accept Saul Kripke’s general view about what determines the reference of proper names, and this view’s consequences for fictional names. Fictional artifactualism emerges as our best choice if we want to admit fictional characters in our ontology and are sympathetic to Kripke’s general view about proper name reference. Fictional artifactualists having taken these two conditions on board need not worry about these features of their view: that authors sometimes create fictional characters and sometimes do so inadvertently. (shrink)

It is traditionally thought that metaphorical utterances constitute a special— nonliteral—kind of departure from lexical constraints on meaning. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson have been forcefully arguing against this: according to them, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specifi c to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical (...) utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specifi c to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors and consider what additional (metaphor-specifi c) details—about the role of constraints due to what is lexically encoded by the words used—might be added to relevance-theoretic comprehension procedures. (shrink)

In his influential Naming and Necessity lectures, Saul Kripke made new sense of modal statements: “Kant might have been a bachelor”, “Königsberg is necessarily identical with Kaliningrad”. Many took the notions he introduced-metaphysical necessity and rigid designation -- to herald new metaphysical issues and have important consequences. In fact, the Kripkean insight is at bottom semantic, rather than metaphysical: it is part of how proper names work that they purport to refer to individuals to whom modal properties can be ascribed. (...) We can see this by reflecting on analytic truths that ground modal claims like the two examples above. (shrink)

According to Sperber and Wilson, relevance theory’s comprehension/interpretation procedure for metaphorical utterances does not require details specific to metaphor (or nonliteral discourse); instead, the same type of comprehension procedure as that in place for literal utterances covers metaphors as well. One of Sperber and Wilson’s central reasons for holding this is that metaphorical utterances occupy one end of a continuum that includes literal, loose and hyperbolic utterances with no sharp boundaries in between them. Call this the continuum argument about interpreting (...) metaphors. My aim is to show that this continuum argument doesn’t work. For if it were to work, it would have an unwanted consequence: it could be converted into a continuum argument about interpreting linguistic errors, including slips of the tongue, of which malaprops are a special case. In particular, based on the premise that the literal–loose–metaphorical continuum extends to malaprops also, we could conclude that the relevance theoretic comprehension procedure for malaprops does not require details specific to linguistic errors, that is, details beyond those already in place for interpreting literal utterances. Given that we have good reason to reject this conclusion, we also have good reason to rethink the conclusion of the continuum argument about interpreting metaphors. (shrink)

This paper offers a unified, quantificational treatment of incomplete descriptions like ‘the table’. An incomplete quantified expression like ‘every bottle’ (as in “Every bottle is empty”) can feature in true utterances despite the fact that the world contains nonempty bottles. Positing a contextual restriction on the bottles being talked about is a straightforward solution. It is argued that the same strategy can be extended to incomplete definite descriptions across the board. ncorporating the contextual restrictions into semantics involves meeting a complex (...) array of desiderata, yet the apparently simpler pragmatic alternative faces severe problems and is therefore a nonstarter. (shrink)

This paper concerns a thorny problem posed by conditional requirements: we expect some modal conditionals of the form ‘if p, then it must be that p’ to be false, yet they all come out true given two basic assumptions needed to account for ordinary conditional requirement like ‘If the light turns red, then cars must stop’. The first assumption is a semantic expectation linking conditional requirements with absolute ones, the second is the possible-worlds-based definition of modal sentences. Keeping the former (...) means giving up the latter, a result with profound implications for Kratzer’s formal semantics, modifications thereof, as well as deontic logics. (shrink)

This book provides a survey of the ethical aspects of health care resources distribution. It first distinguishes health from health care in an effort to clear up the ethical landscape. After this, still with the same purpose, it makes a distinction between problems of macro-allocation and micro-allocation. In the rest of the book two questions of macro-allocation are treated in some detail. First, several approaches – in particular: utilitarian, egalitarian, communitarian, and libertarian – to the question whether we have a (...) right to health care are assessed. Second, it is discussed how best, if we have such a right, health care resources are allocated given obvious budget constraints. Here again the major theories discussed are utilitarian, communitarian, and egalitarian. Although it is not the aim of the book to propose a new theory of the ethics of health care resource distribution, the critical approach throughout is broadly egalitarian in spirit. (shrink)

This article presents findings of a research carried out among pro-refugee individuals in social media in Hungary. During the so-called refugee crisis that emerged in the summer of 2015, anti-immigrant sentiments in the Hungarian public were fueled by a strong governmental campaign. This unusually strong propaganda campaign created a strong hegemonic discourse. Nevertheless, a pro-refugee counterpublic opposing the hegemonic discourse also emerged. The article discusses existing scholarly literature on the phenomenon and how it appears in and is shaped by the (...) digital sphere. The empirical findings focus on two characteristics of the pro-refugee counterpublic. First, we look at the political affiliations of this counterpublic. Second, we ask if the different digital affordances used by the counterpublic and their combinations indicate the formation of a community. The methodological ambition of the article is to present a digital data-driven approach, based on data provided by Facebook, which allows the individual profiling of each user. The connections and schemata of these profiles provide the analytical background of the present research. We aim to illustrate that such a digital approach has a number of advantages over traditional sociological methods, especially in the research of subaltern counterpublics. (shrink)

This article explores the formal and functional characteristics of narratives of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deaths as they were told by 13 UK-based hospice managers in the course of semi-structured interviews. The interviewees’ responses include a variety of remarkably consistent ‘narratives of successful/frustrated intervention’, which exhibit distinctive formal characteristics in terms of the starting point and core of the action, the choice of personal pronouns and metaphors, and the ways in which positive and negative evaluation is expressed. In functional terms, the (...) hospice managers’ narratives play an important role in representing and constructing their professional views, challenges and identities. Overall, the narratives argue for the role of hospices and professional hospice staff in facilitating a ‘good’ death, and, by presenting a relatively unified view, may potentially preclude alternative perspectives. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo further delineate risk and resilience factors contributing to trajectories of mental health symptoms experienced by college students through the pandemic.Participantsn = 183 college students.MethodsLinear mixed models examined time effects on depression and anxiety. Propensity-matched subgroups exhibiting “increased” versus “low and stable” depression symptoms from before to after the pandemic-onset were compared on pre-pandemic demographic and psychological factors and COVID-related experiences and coping strategies.ResultsStudents experienced worsening of mental health symptoms throughout the pandemic, particularly during Fall 2020 compared with Fall 2019. (...) The propensity-matched subgroup exhibiting relative resilience reported less alcohol use prior to the pandemic, greater use of active coping strategies, and less of an impact on their college progress.ConclusionsResults point to several potential targets of screening and intervention to decrease residual impacts of the pandemic. (shrink)

Change blindness experiments had demonstrated that detection of significant changes in natural images is extremely difficult when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene. On the other hand, research on the visual mismatch negativity component of the event-related potentials identified sensitivity to events different from the regularity of stimulus sequences, even if the deviant and standard events are non-attended. The present study sought to investigate the apparent controversy between the experience under the (...) change blindness paradigm and the ERP results. To this end, the stimulus of Rensink, O’Reagen, and Clark was adapted to a passive oddball ERP paradigm to investigate the underlying processing differences between the standard and deviant stimuli measured in 22 subjects. Posterior negativity within the 280–330 ms latency range emerged as the difference between ERPs elicited by standard and deviant stimuli, identified as visual mismatch negativity. These results raise the possibility that change blindness is not based on the lack of detailed visual representations or the deficiency of comparing two representations. However, effective discrimination of the two scene versions requires considerable frequency differences between them. (shrink)

In this paper, by applying a feminist bioethical perspective, we identify a new form of medical paternalism that still shapes contemporary legal policies on human egg cryopreservation performed without medical reasons. The fear of negligent, careless women who opt to delay their pregnancy for mere convenience is a widely known gender biased stereotype. Nevertheless, the opinions and judgments of medical professionals on this issue have not yet been sufficiently explored by in-depth research. In this essay, therefore, first we look at (...) the broader bioethical, legal, and social aspects of human egg cryopreservation. In the second part of the paper we discuss a unique qualitative study conducted with professionals working at Hungarian IVF clinics. We argue, based on a bioethical analysis of the collected data, that when new reproduction technologies provide opportunities for women to widen their range of reproductive choices, the traditional forms of medical paternalism can be reinforced by gendered paternalism, as well. We identify several elements of gendered paternalism that characterized the attitudes of the IVF staff and discuss the professionals’ resistance to elective egg freezing and vitrification of eggs for the future. We conclude by suggesting directions for future policy. Although we focus on the Hungarian case in this paper, we are aware that similar attitudes can be observed in some other countries where this technology has become available and requested by women, but where they also face difficulties in their access to it. (shrink)