Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Boundaries and Prototypes in Categorizing Direction

Projective terms such as left, right, front, back are conceptually interesting due to their flexibility of contextual usage and their central relevance to human spatial cognition. Their default acceptability areas are well known, with prototypical axes representing their most central usage and decreasing acceptability away from the axes. Previous research has shown these axes to be boundaries in certain non-linguistic tasks, indicating an inverse relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic direction concepts under specific circumstances. Given this striking mismatch, our study asks how such inverse non-linguistic concepts are represented in language, as well as how people describe their categorization. Our findings highlight two distinct grouping strategies reminiscent of theories of human categorization: prototype based or boundary based. These lead to different linguistic as well as non-linguistic patterns

Statistical physics of language dynamics

Language dynamics is a rapidly growing field that focuses on all processes related to the emergence, evolution, change and extinction of languages. Recently, the study of self-organization and evolution of language and meaning has led to the idea that a community of language users can be seen as a complex dynamical system, which collectively solves the problem of developing a shared communication framework through the back-and-forth signaling between individuals. We shall review some of the progress made in the past few years and highlight potential future directions of research in this area. In particular, the emergence of a common lexicon and of a shared set of linguistic categories will be discussed, as examples corresponding to the early stages of a language. The extent to which synthetic modeling is nowadays contributing to the ongoing debate in cognitive science will be pointed out. In addition, the burst of growth of the web is providing new experimental frameworks. It makes available a huge amount of resources, both as novel tools and data to be analyzed, allowing quantitative and large-scale analysis of the processes underlying the emergence of a collective information and language dynamics

Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 ‘untranslatable’ words pertaining to well-being

Although much attention has been paid to culture-specific psychopathologies, there have been no comparable attempts to chart positive mental states that may be particular to certain cultures. This paper outlines the beginnings of a positive cross-cultural lexicography of ‘untranslatable’ words pertaining to wellbeing, culled from across the world’s languages. A quasi-systematic search uncovered 216 such terms. Using grounded theory, these words were organised into three categories: feelings (comprising positive and complex feelings); relationships (comprising intimacy and pro-sociality); and character (comprising personal resources and spirituality). The paper has two main aims. First, it aims to provide a window onto cultural differences in constructions of wellbeing, thereby enriching our understanding of wellbeing. Second, a more ambitious aim is that this lexicon may help expand the emotional vocabulary of English speakers (and indeed speakers of all languages), and consequently enrich their experiences of wellbeing. The paper concludes by setting out a research agenda to pursue these aims further

Verbal thinking and inner speech use in autism spectrum disorder

The extent to which cognition is verbally mediated in neurotypical individuals is the subject of debate in cognitive neuropsychology, as well as philosophy and psychology. Studying “verbal thinking” in developmental/neuropsychological disorders provides a valuable opportunity to inform theory building, as well as clinical practice. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive, critical review of such studies among individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD involves severe social-communication deficits and limitations in cognitive/behavioural flexibility. The prevailing view in the field is that neither cognition nor behaviour is mediated verbally in ASD, and that this contributes to diagnostic features. However, our review suggests that, on the contrary, most studies to date actually find that among people with ASD cognitive task performance is either a) mediated verbally in a typical fashion, or b) not mediated verbally, but at no obvious cost to overall task performance. Overall though, these studies have methodological limitations and thus clear-cut conclusions are not possible at this stage. The aim of the review is to take stock of existing empirical findings, as well as to help develop the directions for future research that will resolve the many outstanding issues in this field

Experiential cartography and the significance of “untranslatable” words

Mainstream psychology can be regarded as largely Western-centric, with its concepts and priorities biased towards Western ways of thinking and understanding. Consequently, the field would benefit from greater cross-cultural awareness and engagement. To that end, this article offers one means of engagement, the study of “untranslatable” words (i.e., terms without an exact equivalent in another language, in our case English). A key function of language is that it offers a “map” that allows us to understand and navigate the world. In that respect, such words point to cultural variation in the maps we use, and even to variation in the actual territory mapped. The paper concludes with suggestions for why and how psychology could benefit from engaging with such words

Novel therapies in genitourinary cancer: an update

In recent years, new treatment for renal cell carcinoma (RCC) has been a spotlight in the field of cancer therapeutics. With several emerging agents branded as 'targeted therapy' now available, both medical oncologists and urologists are progressively more hopeful for better outcomes. The new remedies may provide patients with improved survival and at the same time less toxicity when compared to traditional cytotoxic agents. This article will center on current and emerging treatment strategies for advanced RCC and other GU malignancies with updates from 2008 annual ASCO meeting

Intrecci linguistici. Lingue e dialetti italiani tra i giovani italoamericani nella grande area di New York

Da quando furono introdotti dai primi immigrati che si insediarono sul suolo americano, la lingua e i dialetti italiani negli Stati Uniti si sono continuamente trasformati. Sui comportamenti linguistici degli emigrati italiani all\u2019estero incisero fattori di natura sociale, culturale, geografica ed economica, nonch\ue9 le diverse ondate migratorie. In particolare, nelle comunit\ue0 italoamericane, la lingua e i dialetti italiani andarono a comporre un continuum linguistico che si accompagn\uf2 all\u2019inglese secondo combinazioni diverse e con un variegato ventaglio di forme. Questo saggio si propone di ripercorrere le tappe che hanno segnato questi cambiamenti, analizzando alcune ricerche svolte a partire dagli anni Ottanta nonch\ue9 i dati della condizione in cui versa attualmente la lingua italiana negli Stati Uniti. Vengono, inoltre, presentati i risultati legati all\u2019uso della lingua e dei dialetti, frutto di una survey condotta nel 2013 su un campione di giovani italoamericani residenti nella grande area di New York. Nonostante le differenze tra le diverse generazioni d\u2019immigrazione dei giovani partecipanti allo studio, emerge come vi sia, soprattutto nelle nuove generazioni di italoamericani, una tendenza alla ripresa di interesse verso la lingua delle origini e i dialetti, espressa anche attraverso la volont\ue0 di trasmetterla ai propri figli

Indigenous Languages of Scotland: culture and the classroom

Scotland’s indigenous languages were, for very many years, under attack. The Gaelic of the Highlands and Western Isles, arguably one of the earliest written European languages, after Greek and Latin, had a brief apotheosis around 1000CE when it was the language of the Scottish Royal Court. Scots, spoken by the mass of the people, was the language of the renowned Mediaeval poets known as the Makars. Gaelic was effectively ignored but for attempts, by the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, to engender transient bilingualism in order to have the Gaelic diminished and then forgotten. Following the accession of the James VI of Scotland to the throne of the United Kingdom of England and Scotland, the Authorised Edition of the Bible was commissioned and published but only in English, no Scots version being deemed necessary. After the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, what prestige remained to the Scots language diminished rapidly and henceforth almost the entire written output from Scotland has been in English. Exceptions have included Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, Liz Lochhead’s translation into Scots of Molière’s Tartuffe (1664/1986), which toured urban working-class areas in the 1980s and to great acclaim, and Trainspotting