Cultural factors weaken but do not reverse left-to-right spatial biases in numerosity processing: Data from Arabic and English monoliterates and Arabic-English biliterates

Directional response biases due to a conceptual link between space and number, such as a left-to-right hand bias for increasing numerical magnitude, are known as the SNARC (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect. We investigated how the SNARC effect for numerosities would be influenced by reading-writing direction, task instructions, and ambient visual environment in four literate populations exemplifying opposite reading-writing cultures—namely, Arabic (right-to-left script) and English (left-to-right script). Monoliterates and biliterates in Jordan and the U.S. completed a speeded numerosity comparison task to assess the directionality and magnitude of a SNARC effect in their numerosity processing. Monoliterates’ results replicated previously documented effects of reading-writing direction and task instructions: the SNARC effect found in left-to-right readers was weakened in right-to-left readers, and the left-to-right group exhibited a task-dependency effect (SNARC effect in the smaller condition, reverse SNARC effect in the larger condition). Biliterates’ results did not show a clear effect of environment; instead, both biliterate groups resembled English monoliterates in showing a left-to-right, task-dependent SNARC effect, albeit weaker than English monoliterates’. The absence of significant biases in all Arabic-reading groups (biliterates and Arabic monoliterates) points to a potential conflict between distinct spatial-numerical mapping codes. This view is explained in terms of the proposed Multiple Competing Codes Theory (MCCT), which posits three distinct spatial-numerical mapping codes (innate, cardinal, ordinal) during numerical processing—each involved at varying levels depending on individual and task factors.

Leibniz on the Frege Point

In the debate on the Frege Point, the ‘Spinoza thesis’ is often mentioned. But Leibniz is kept out. Yet, on this topic, Spinoza and Leibniz shared a fairly similar goal. They sought to root the assertive force in the conceptual activity of the subject. But Leibniz, unlike Spinoza, wanted also to build a coherent theory of propositions. Propositions are for him always provided with assertive force. But what is affirmed by the propositions of logic is only a possibility – the possibility of the conceptual link they express. Stronger assertions require something more: a mark of actuality, a modal symbol in logic or the use of notae or particulae which belong to natural languages. Leibniz does not modify his conception of propositions in his “analysis particularum”. He tries to understand what we do when we use them in various contexts. The Leibnizian proposition is neutral, but it is not forceless. Since it is not forceless, there is no need to appeal to an external act or to a judgment. Leibniz thinks, like most of the authors of the Aristotelian tradition, that the proposition contains the act of judging. Since it is neutral, there is no need to venture into the many difficulties raised by cancellation to account for the force/content relation in the conditional, disjunctive or fictional contexts.

The midwife of truth: The nature of irony and a rationale for its prevalence in the Gospel of John

<p>The Gospel of John is renowned for its pervasive use of irony. While this phenomenon is widely recognized by scholars, there have been only a few attempts to explain the “how” of Johannine irony and no meaningful attempt to explain its “why.” The last major treatment of the topic was by Paul Duke in his 1985 work, Irony in the Fourth Gospel, which provides an account of how Johannine irony works through an analysis of local and extended ironies. Other examinations, such as Gail O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel in 1986, explore irony as a corollary of some other thematic concern. The reticence of scholars to delve deeper into the nature of Johannine irony is understandable given that as Duke puts it, irony laughs at all pretensions, especially the pretension of claiming to have grasped irony. This study undertakes the demanding but necessary task of describing irony to a level that allows meaningful engagement with ironic texts, while accepting that it remains ultimately indefinable. Particular attention is paid to historical shifts of understanding of the nature of irony and the implications this has for appreciating irony at a conceptual level. From a survey of the Johannine scholarship, a comprehensive but non-exhaustive overview of the Fourth Gospel’s use of irony is derived. No previous work has attempted to approach the subject in this way. The main advantage of doing so is that it allows for the identification of broad patterns of irony and the way it functions in the narrative. This in turn provides a framework for proceeding to an examination of particular texts and the identification of a possible rationale. The present study assesses several hypotheses to explain why the author of the Fourth Gospel makes such sustained use of irony. The preferred hypothesis is that it is intrinsically linked to a predominant Johannine theme of alētheia (truth). Drawing on the conceptual link between irony and truth, it argues that the truth theme is a deliberate literary strategy employed by the author to entice the reader to seek certain propositional truths within the narrative. This ultimately serves the author’s desire to evoke revelation and response in line with the Gospel’s purpose statement in 20:31. The argument that irony serves the Johannine truth theme is tested with particular reference to the Prologue (1:1-18) and the Passion Narrative (chapters 18-19). The study establishes that irony serves as the link between appearance and reality in the narrative. Its subtle and engaging qualities make irony the most suitable vehicle to testify to the Gospel’s propositional statements in a manner that fulfils the author’s stated Christological (a revelation of Jesus’ true identity) and soteriological (a response that leads to salvation) purposes.</p>

The midwife of truth: The nature of irony and a rationale for its prevalence in the Gospel of John

<p>The Gospel of John is renowned for its pervasive use of irony. While this phenomenon is widely recognized by scholars, there have been only a few attempts to explain the “how” of Johannine irony and no meaningful attempt to explain its “why.” The last major treatment of the topic was by Paul Duke in his 1985 work, Irony in the Fourth Gospel, which provides an account of how Johannine irony works through an analysis of local and extended ironies. Other examinations, such as Gail O’Day’s Revelation in the Fourth Gospel in 1986, explore irony as a corollary of some other thematic concern. The reticence of scholars to delve deeper into the nature of Johannine irony is understandable given that as Duke puts it, irony laughs at all pretensions, especially the pretension of claiming to have grasped irony. This study undertakes the demanding but necessary task of describing irony to a level that allows meaningful engagement with ironic texts, while accepting that it remains ultimately indefinable. Particular attention is paid to historical shifts of understanding of the nature of irony and the implications this has for appreciating irony at a conceptual level. From a survey of the Johannine scholarship, a comprehensive but non-exhaustive overview of the Fourth Gospel’s use of irony is derived. No previous work has attempted to approach the subject in this way. The main advantage of doing so is that it allows for the identification of broad patterns of irony and the way it functions in the narrative. This in turn provides a framework for proceeding to an examination of particular texts and the identification of a possible rationale. The present study assesses several hypotheses to explain why the author of the Fourth Gospel makes such sustained use of irony. The preferred hypothesis is that it is intrinsically linked to a predominant Johannine theme of alētheia (truth). Drawing on the conceptual link between irony and truth, it argues that the truth theme is a deliberate literary strategy employed by the author to entice the reader to seek certain propositional truths within the narrative. This ultimately serves the author’s desire to evoke revelation and response in line with the Gospel’s purpose statement in 20:31. The argument that irony serves the Johannine truth theme is tested with particular reference to the Prologue (1:1-18) and the Passion Narrative (chapters 18-19). The study establishes that irony serves as the link between appearance and reality in the narrative. Its subtle and engaging qualities make irony the most suitable vehicle to testify to the Gospel’s propositional statements in a manner that fulfils the author’s stated Christological (a revelation of Jesus’ true identity) and soteriological (a response that leads to salvation) purposes.</p>

Abduction and entrepreneurial learning

PurposeThe purpose of this article is to describe the similarities between abductive reasoning and entrepreneurial learning processes in order to contribute to the conceptual understanding of learning as an entrepreneurial process in itself.Design/methodology/approachThe research is theoretically rooted in a conceptual development of the understanding of entrepreneurial learning processes as abductive reasoning inspired by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. The theoretical explication of the connection between entrepreneurial learning processes and abductive reasoning is additionally illustrated by a hypotheses-based didactic model, developed by the authors to scaffold abducting reasoning into learning processes.FindingsThe authors found in the theoretical investigation of abductive reasoning a conceptualisation of entrepreneurial learning processes that connects entrepreneurial learning processes to basic cognitive human competences, and the authors found that key concepts in entrepreneurship, such as hunches and experiments, can be understood in a broader philosophical framework as basic cognitive competences.Practical implicationsThe authors exemplify how abductive reasoning can be used in practice through a hypothesis-based didactic approach designed as a loop model.Originality/valueThe authors have discovered that abduction is closely related to entrepreneurship and can be a central conceptual link in understanding the relationship between entrepreneurship and learning. The athors also believe that Peirce's concept of abduction can contribute to the philosophical understanding of entrepreneurship as another name for a constant rethinking of the world.

Identifying Condition-action Statements in Medical Guidelines: Three Studies using Machine Learning and Domain Adaptation

Background: Medical guidelines provide the conceptual link between a diagnosis and a recommendation. They often disagree on their recommendations. There are over thirty five thousand guidelines indexed by PubMed, which creates a need for automated methods for analysis of recommendations, i.e., recommended actions, for similar conditions. Results: This article advances the state of the art in text understanding of medical guidelines by showing the applicability of transformer-based models and transfer learning (domain adaptation) to the problem of finding condition-action and other conditional sentences. We report results of three studies using syntactic, semantic and deep learning methods, with and without transformer-based models such as BioBERT and BERT. We perform in depth evaluation on a set of three annotated medical guidelines. Our experiments show that a combination of machine learning domain adaptation and transfer can improve the ability to automatically find conditional sentences in clinical guidelines. We show substantial improvements over prior art (up to 25%), and discuss several directions of extending this work, including addressing the problem of paucity of annotated data.Conclusion: Modern deep learning methods, when applied to the text of clinical guidelines, yield substantial improvements in our ability to find sentences expressing the relations of condition-consequence, condition-action and action.

Developing support teachers’ digital competencies for an inclusive citizenship

The present work focuses on the construct of digital citizenship from an educational and inclusive point of view. Considering the general European interest in implementing citizens’ digital skills and with particular care for the contemporary situation of overall emergency, due to the Covid 19 pandemic case, the idea is that of considering a possible conceptual link between digital skills and the Capability Approach. In the light of an ‘Education for all’, the aware development of teachers and, particularly support teachers’ digital skills, may be a crucial key to enact inclusive processes able to guarantee any pupil and student the chance to become a capable and valuable citizen, despite his/her frailties and social failures. This paper is part of a wider research project entitled “Best practices and tools of analysis in schools and community contexts: learning, teaching & inclusion”, started in March 2019 and funded by the Department of Psychological, Pedagogical Sciences, Physical Exercise and Training, of the University of Palermo, and of which just a segment related to the analysis of support teachers’ digital competence is reported here.

Humanistic meanings in the educational conventions of modernity: on the problem of understanding the philosophical content of subjectivity

A holistic understanding of the current approaches and strategies circulating in the educational environment, where in a situation of global transformation, there is an intensive search for ways and methods to overcome the crisis, is relevant. Within the framework of the pedagogical and philosophical analysis, the authors attempt to discover new aspects of the humanistic content of subjectivity. It is necessary to recognize the absolute value in students, which is seen through the manifestation of individual qualities and abilities. This means that it is necessary to ontologically recognize any subject of knowledge as self-sufficient, regardless of the ranks on the institutional ladder that are common in social structures, in other words, it is necessary to go beyond the boundaries of evaluative categories that, as is known, determine the intellectual status of the subject according to the degree of acquired and certified knowledge. First, the teacher overcomes his power complex, dominance over the student, which is deliberately placed by the traditional approach in the position of ignorant and incompetent person. Secondly, the emphasis on such concepts as discipline, norm, and standard has been changed. Third, the strengthening of group solidarity, to guarantee the basic social meanings in a world of increasing risks, where there is a growing desire to consolidate not with society as a whole, as in previous eras, but with a separate small group. Fourth, the most important conceptual link in these constructions is the ability to communicate. Fifth, there is a rejection of excessive rationalistic perception of reality. A new post-materialistic pedagogical paradigm is formulated, which puts in the first place the deep aspects of the subject, conditioned by his emotionality, soulfulness, humanity, which are least associated with such behavioral parameters as punctuality, perseverance, and academic performance.

Actual and Imagined Movements Reveal a Dual Role of the Insular Cortex for Motor Control

Movements rely on a mixture of feedforward and feedback mechanisms. With experience, the brain builds internal representations of actions in different contexts. Many factors are taken into account in this process among which is the immutable presence of gravity. Any displacement of a massive body in the gravitational field generates forces and torques that must be predicted and compensated by appropriate motor commands. The insular cortex is a key brain area for graviception. However, no attempt has been made to address whether the same internal representation of gravity is shared between feedforward and feedback mechanisms. Here, participants either mentally simulated (only feedforward) or performed (feedforward and feedback) vertical movements of the hand. We found that the posterior part of the insular cortex was engaged when feedback was processed. The anterior insula, however, was activated only in mental simulation of the action. A psychophysical experiment demonstrates participants’ ability to integrate the effects of gravity. Our results point toward a dual internal representation of gravity within the insula. We discuss the conceptual link between these two dualities.

Experimental evolution of adaptive divergence under varying degrees of gene flow

ABSTRACTAdaptive divergence is the key evolutionary process generating biodiversity by means of natural selection. Yet, the conditions under which it can arise in the presence of gene flow remain contentious. To address this question, we subjected 132 sexually reproducing fission yeast populations sourced from two independent genetic backgrounds to disruptive ecological selection and manipulated the level of migration between environments. Contrary to theoretical expectations, adaptive divergence was most pronounced when migration was either absent (‘allopatry’) or maximal (‘sympatry’), but was much reduced at intermediate rates (‘parapatry’, ‘local mating’). This effect was apparent across central life history components (survival, asexual growth, and mating), but differed in magnitude between ancestral genetic backgrounds. The evolution of some fitness components was constrained by pervasive negative correlations (trade-off between asexual growth and mating), while others changed direction under the influence of migration (e.g. survival and mating). In allopatry, adaptive divergence was mainly conferred by standing genetic variation and resulted in ecological specialization. In sympatry, divergence was mainly mediated by novel mutations enriched in a subset of genes and was characterized by the repeated emergence of two strategies: an ecological generalist and an asexual growth specialist. Multiple loci showed consistent evidence for antagonistic pleiotropy across migration treatments and provide a conceptual link between adaptation and divergence. This evolve-and-resequence experiment demonstrates that rapid ecological differentiation can arise even under high rates of gene flow. It further highlights that adaptive trajectories are governed by complex interactions of gene flow, ancestral variation and genetic correlations.