The Language of Postwar Intellectual Schmittianism

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombartfour young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their intellectual Schmittianism was less than a full commitment to Schmitt's political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock's terminology, I identify a particular language of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from Schmitt's narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars' arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticism without necessarily rejecting the newly adopted institutional forms, it also constrained their choices. Linguistic resources can always be used for novel purposes, yet the dense internal structure of the language of postwar intellectual Schmittianism hindered revaluation and selective utilization. Kesting excluded, the young scholars gradually grew critical of Schmitt to varying degrees, but they never directly confronted his problematic language.Peer reviewe

Design Theories in Information Systems - A Need for Multi-Grounding

Within the information systems community there is growing interest in design theories. These theories are aimed to give knowledge support to design activities. Design theories are considered as theorized practical knowledge. This paper is an inquiry into the epistemology of design theories. It is an inquiry in how to justify such knowledge; the need to ground and how to ground a design theory. A distinction is made between empirical, theoretical and internal grounding. The empirical grounding has to do with the effectiveness of the application of knowledge. External theoretical grounding relates design theory to other theories. One part of this is the grounding of the design knowledge in general explanatory theories. Internal grounding means an investigation of internal warrants (e.g. as values and categories) and internal cohesion of the knowledge. Together, these different grounding processes form a coherent approach for the multi-grounding of design theory (MGDT). As illustrations some examples of design theories in IS are discussed. These are design theories concerning business interaction which are based on language action theories

A Missed Opportunity: The Relationship between Language, Cognition, and Poverty in Early Childhood among Bilingual Children

Human development is a continuous process with critical periods, and early childhood is part of that process, with internal changes prompted by external factors. An essential part of human development is language acquisition and cognitive skills which are shaped by heredity, brain structure, personal differences, social interaction, and socioeconomic background. In recent decades the exposure to multiple languages at home has been growing, causing differences between the language status (bilingual or monolingual) and the executive functions of developing children. Some previous studies have pointed out cognitive differences in bilingual children, while others have not. The present study observed three variables (language, cognitive skills, and poverty), among 500 children between 18 – 36 months, with 250 children identified with a home language other than English and 250 children identified exclusively with English as the home language. The relationship between the variables was observed from DAYC2 scores, a standardized test used to determine eligibility for early intervention services in the categories of no delay, delay, and significant delay. The results can be summarized as a statistically significant relationship of \u3c.001 between language and cognitive skills in all participants and a moderate influence (though not statistically significant) of poverty in language delays. The present study concluded that bilingualism impacts cognitive and language skills and acts as a protective factor that buffers the effect of poverty in early childhood

Social Interaction: A Crucial Means to Promote Sustainability in Initial Teacher Training

This study aims to identify the set of elements in the educational process that affect the creation of a teaching profile consistent with the principles of sustainability. In this research, we focus on identifying those sustainability attributes related to understanding social interaction and its role in the learning process of logical-mathematical knowledge. Social interaction is an essential part of the principle of collaboration. The study participants were 133 future teachers, students of the degree in Early Childhood Education at the Universidad de Cádiz (Spain). Qualitative methods and techniques were used to collect data, and mixed methods and techniques were employed for their analysis. The data relating to the student’s perception of the importance of social interaction in learning were gathered through the final reports produced by the students. The data were processed by classifying them into categories and subcategories. The meaning condensation method used enabled identifying 33 sustainability attributes linked to socio-cultural learning. Those attributes identify and describe the internal dynamics of cooperative learning and show the synergies and interrelationships between social interactions, socio-cognitive conflict and language. The results stress the importance of a meaningful understanding of the role of social interaction in learning in order to promote the principles of sustainabilit

The construction of self in relationships: narratives and references to mental states during picture-book reading interactions between mothers and children

Previous studies showed that mothers vary in the way in which they discuss past experiences with their children, since they can exhibit narrative (elaborative) or paradigmatic (repetitive) styles to different extents. Given this background, the aim of the present study was to analyze differences in the mothers’ use of narrative styles and mental state language (MSL), as a function of children’s age and gender. Thirty dyads consisting of mothers and their 4- to 6-year-old children were observed during a picture-book reading interaction. Maternal utterances were coded according to the categories described by Tessler and Nelson (1994), classifying each mother as Narrative or Paradigmatic. Eight categories of MSL were analyzed: perceptual, emotional (positive and negative), volitional, cognitive, communicative, and moral. The results confirmed the existence of the two maternal styles observed in the earlier studies. Importantly, we found that the mothers of younger children were more narrative than paradigmatic, whereas the opposite pattern occurred for the mothers of older children (they were more paradigmatic than narrative). As concerns MSL, the results indicated that the use of communicative terms was significantly more frequent for narrative than for paradigmatic mothers, and decreased linearly with children’s age. Lastly, the mothers of younger children referred their MSL more frequently to the book characters than to themselves or to the child. Taken together, these results support the idea that mothers adapt their narrative styles and MSL input to the growing abilities of their children, therefore contributing to the development of social understanding

Processing of Hand-Related Verbs Specifically Affects the Planning and Execution of Arm Reaching Movements

Even though a growing body of research has shown that the processing of action language affects the planning and execution of motor acts, several aspects of this interaction are still hotly debated. The directionality (i.e. does understanding action-related language induce a facilitation or an interference with the corresponding action?), the time course, and the nature of the interaction (i.e. under what conditions does the phenomenon occur?) are largely unclear. To further explore this topic we exploited a go/no-go paradigm in which healthy participants were required to perform arm reaching movements toward a target when verbs expressing either hand or foot actions were shown, and to refrain from moving when abstract verbs were presented. We found that reaction times (RT) and percentages of errors increased when the verb involved the same effector used to give the response. This interference occurred very early, when the interval between verb presentation and the delivery of the go signal was 50 ms, and could be elicited until this delay was about 600 ms. In addition, RTs were faster when subjects used the right arm than when they used the left arm, suggesting that action–verb understanding is left-lateralized. Furthermore, when the color of the printed verb and not its meaning was the cue for movement execution the differences between RTs and error percentages between verb categories disappeared, unequivocally indicating that the phenomenon occurs only when the semantic content of a verb has to be retrieved. These results are compatible with the theory of embodied language, which hypothesizes that comprehending verbal descriptions of actions relies on an internal simulation of the sensory–motor experience of the action, and provide a new and detailed view of the interplay between action language and motor acts

How nouns and verbs differentially affect the behavior of artificial organisms

This paper presents an Artificial Life and Neural Network (ALNN) model for the evolution of syntax. The simulation methodology provides a unifying approach for the study of the evolution of language and its interaction with other behavioral and neural factors. The model uses an object manipulation task to simulate the evolution of language based on a simple verb-noun rule. The analyses of results focus on the interaction between language and other non-linguistic abilities, and on the neural control of linguistic abilities. The model shows that the beneficial effects of language on non-linguistic behavior are explained by the emergence of distinct internal representation patterns for the processing of verbs and nouns

Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

Abstract concepts, language and sociality. From acquisition to inner speech

The problem of representation of abstract concepts, such as “freedom” and “justice”, has become particularly crucial in recent years, due to the increased success of embodied and grounded views of cognition. We will present a novel view on abstract concepts and abstract words. Since abstract concepts do not have single objects as referents, children and adults might rely more on input from others in learning them; we therefore suggest that linguistic and social experience play an important role for abstract concepts. We will discuss evidence obtained in our and other labs showing that processing of abstract concepts evokes linguistic interaction and social experiences, leading to the activation of the mouth motor system. We will discuss the possible mechanisms that underlie this activation. Mouth activation can be due to re-enactment of the experience of conceptual acquisition, which occurred through the mediation of language. Alternatively, it could be due to the re-explanation of the word meaning, possibly through inner speech. Finally, it can be due to a metacognitive process revealing low confidence on the meaning of our concepts. This process induces in us the need to rely on others to ask/negotiate conceptual meaning. We conclude that with abstract concepts words work as social tools: they extend our thinking abilities and push us to rely on others to integrate our knowledge

Rating scale development: a multistage exploratory sequential design

The project chosen to showcase the application of the exploratory sequential design in second/ foreign (L2) language assessment comes from the context of rating scale development and focuses on the development of a set of scales for a suite of high-stakes L2 speaking tests. The assessment of speaking requires assigning scores to a speech sample in a systematic fashion by focusing on explicitly defined criteria which describe different levels of performance (Ginther 2013). Rating scales are the instruments used in this evaluation process, and they can be either holistic (i.e. providing a global overall assessment) or analytic (i.e. providing an independent evaluations for a number of assessment criteria, e.g. Grammar, Vocabulary, Organisation, etc.). The discussion in this chapter is framed within the context of rating scales in speaking assessment. However, it is worth noting that the principles espoused, stages employed and decisions taken during the development process have wider applicability to performance assessment in general