What does it take to learn a word?

Vocabulary learning is deceptively hard, but toddlers often make it look easy. Prior theories proposed that children’s rapid acquisition of words is based on language-specific knowledge and constraints. In contrast, more recent work converges on the view that word learning proceeds via domain-general processes that are tuned to richly structured—not impoverished—input. We argue that new theoretical insights, coupled with methodological tools, have pushed the field toward an appreciation of simple, content-free processes working together as a system to support the acquisition of words. We illustrate this by considering three central phenomena of early language development: referential ambiguity, fast-mapping, and the vocabulary spurt

A fresh look at instrumentation - an introduction

The theme of "instrumentation between science, state and industry" does not square well with the venerable discourse which opposes "science" and "technology" in social studies of science. In this discourse, "technology" stands for the contrary of "science"; it represents the practical uses of science in society at large and is understood as separate from the somehow autonomous sphere of "science" (Layton 1971a). This vocabulary, widespread as it may be, is not very useful for our purposes, and, for that matter, for any inquiry into the role of instruments. Technology, in the sense of technical instruments and the knowledge systems that go with them, pervades all societal systems. There are technologies of science, of industry, of state, and so forth, and it would be ill-advised to assume that, in the end, they all flow out of "science." But even if the crude opposition of science and technology has little analytic value, the dual problem remains: how to effectively conceive the dynamic relationship between scientific spheres and other societal spheres, and how to conceive the role that technological matters play in this relationship

Decision and Discovery in Defining “Disease”

This version (May 17, 2005) was published in its final form as: Schwartz PH. Decision and discovery in defining 'disease'. In: Kincaid H, McKitrick J, editors. Establishing medical reality: essays in the metaphysics and epistemology of biomedical science. Dordrecht: Springer; 2007. p. 47-63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-5216-2_5The debate over how to analyze the concept of disease has often centered on the question of whether to include a reference to values, in particular the ‘disvalue’of diseases, or whether to avoid such notions. ‘Normativists,’such as King ([1954], 1981) and Culver and Gert (1982) emphasize the undesirability of diseases, while ‘Naturalists,’ most prominently Christopher Boorse (1977, 1987, 1997), instead require just the presence of biological dysfunction. The debate between normativism and naturalism often deteriorates into stalemate, with each side able to point out significant problems with the other. It starts to look as if neither approach can work. In this paper, I argue that the standoff stems from deeply questionable assumptions that have been used to formulate the opposing positions and guide the debate. In the end, I propose an alternative set of guidelines that offer a more constructive way to devise and compare theories

On tacit knowledge for philosophy of education

This article offers a detailed reading Gascoigne and Thornton’s book Tacit Knowledge (2013), which aims to account for the tacitness of tacit knowledge (TK) while preserving its status as knowledge proper. I take issue with their characterization and rejection of the existential-phenomenological Background—which they presuppose even as they dismiss—and their claim that TK can be articulated “from within”—which betrays a residual Cartesianism, the result of their elision of conceptuality and propositionality. Knowledgeable acts instantiate capacities which we might know we have and of which we can be aware, but which are not propositionally structured at their “core”. Nevertheless, propositionality is necessary to what Robert Brandom calls, in Making It Explicit (1994) and Articulating Reasons (2000), “explicitation”, which notion also presupposes a tacit dimension, which is, simply, the embodied person (the knower), without which no conception of knowledge can get any purchase. On my view, there is no knowledgeable act that can be understood as such separately from the notion of skilled corporeal performance. The account I offer cannot make sense of so-called “knowledge-based” education, as opposed to systems and styles which supposedly privilege “contentless” skills over and above “knowledge”, because on the phenomenological and inferentialist lines I endorse, neither the concepts “knowledge” nor “skill” has any purchase or meaning without the other

Field's Logic of Truth

Saving Truth from Paradox is a re-exciting development. The 70s and 80s were a time of excitement among people working on the semantic paradoxes. There were continual formal developments, with the constant hope that these results would yield deep insights. The enthusiasm wore off, however, as people became more cognizant of the disparity between what they had accomplished, impressive as it was, and what they had hoped to accomplish. They moved onto other problems that they hoped would prove more yielding. That, at least, was how it seemed to me, so I was delighted to see a dramatically new formal development that is likely to rekindle our enthusiasm

Drawing Boundaries

In “On Drawing Lines on a Map” (1995), I suggested that the different ways we have of drawing lines on maps open up a new perspective on ontology, resting on a distinction between two sorts of boundaries: fiat and bona fide. “Fiat” means, roughly: human-demarcation-induced. “Bona fide” means, again roughly: a boundary constituted by some real physical discontinuity. I presented a general typology of boundaries based on this opposition and showed how it generates a corresponding typology of the different sorts of objects which boundaries determine or demarcate. In this paper, I describe how the theory of fiat boundaries has evolved since 1995, how it has been applied in areas such as property law and political geography, and how it is being used in contemporary work in formal and applied ontology, especially within the framework of Basic Formal Ontology

Prototype effect and the persuasiveness of generalizations

An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in the generalization. We conducted two experiments that investigated how the activation of the prototype affects the persuasiveness of the argument. The results of the experiments suggest that the features of the prototype overshadow and partly overwrite the actual facts of the case. The case is, to some extent, judged as if it had the features of the prototype instead of the features it actually has. This prototype effect increases the persuasiveness of the argument in situations where the audience finds the judgment more warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (positive prototype effect), but decreases persuasiveness in situations where the audience finds the judgment less warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (negative prototype effect)

Pictures, perspective and possibility

10.1007/s11098-009-9337-2Philosophical Studies1492135-15