Quaestio Disputata: Divine Virtues and Divine Ideas of Virtues

Benjamin DeSpain has taken issue with my claim that the divine ideas according to Aquinas’s conception cannot be the objects of our moral striving, nor can they be approximated by us. I argue that he has not attended to a necessary distinction between the divine essence as single exemplar and the ideas as multiple exemplars of the varied imitability of that essence. The result is that Macrobius’s “exemplar virtues” are the divine essence; they are not divine ideas, nor are they eternal law. Approximation to these virtues is possible, but not to the ideas. I conclude with some reflections on Aquinas’s use of tradition, and on the question of his “Platonism.”

Utilizing analogical reasoning to aid children’s proportional reasoning understanding

Proportional reasoning is an important skill that relates to fraction learning and math achievement. Because both proportional and analogical reasoning involve comparing relations, we hypothesized that supports for analogical reasoning (multiple exemplars and labels) would help children match discrete proportions. Fourth and 5th graders (N = 119) completed a 16-item proportional equivalence choice task in a 2 (exemplars: one, two) x 3 (script type: juice mixing narrative, novel adjectives, no labels) x 2 (trial type: part-foil, whole-foil) mixed-effects design. The juice mixing script included common labels and a story paradigm, whereas the novel adjectives script only utilized common labels. The least-informative no-labels script served as a baseline. Results showed a significant three-way interaction between exemplars, script type, and trial type. Viewing two exemplars led to no significant differences across the other factors. However, when viewing one exemplar, children exhibited a part-matching bias with novel adjectives and no labels, but not the juice narrative. In sum, multiple exemplars and the juice narrative reduced children’s part-matching bias; we conclude that supports for analogical reasoning can aid proportional reasoning as well.

Decoding the sound of hand-object interactions in primary somatosensory cortex

Neurons, even in earliest sensory regions of cortex, are subject to a great deal of contextual influences from both within and across modality connections. Recently we have shown that cross-modal connections from vision to primary somatosensory cortex (SI) transmit content-specific information about familiar visual object categories. In the present work, we investigated whether SI would also contain content-specific information about sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions (e.g. bouncing a ball). In a rapid event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, participants listened attentively to multiple exemplars from three sound categories: hand-object interactions, and control categories of pure tones and animal vocalizations, while performing a one-back repetition counting task. Multi-voxel pattern analysis revealed significant decoding of different hand-object sounds within bilateral post-central gyrus (PCG), whilst no significant decoding was found for either control category. Crucially, in the hand-sensitive voxels defined from an independent tactile localizer, decoding accuracies were significantly higher for decoding hand-object sounds compared to both control categories in left PCG. Our findings indicate that hearing sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions elicit different patterns of activity in SI, despite the complete absence of tactile stimulation. Thus cross-modal connections from audition to SI transmit content-specific information about sounds depicting familiar hand-object interactions.

Micro- to Meso- to Macro-Scale Coordinated Individual and Group Action(s) on Electronic Hive Minds

So many human endeavors are dependent on others' actions and interests. On an electronic hive mind (EHM), coordination online may spark and sustain actions by the body (the members of the EHM). Such coordination occurs over a range of human endeavors and continuously at different scales: micro (individual, dyadic, and motif levels), meso (small to large groups), and macro (system-wide, societal, web-scale levels). This chapter explores EHMs as planned-action entities and offers some early insights about some common practices based on multiple exemplars and the application of abductive logic.