Crossing the symbolic threshold: a critical review of Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species

Terrence Deacon's views about the origin of language are based on a particular notion of a symbol. While the notion is derived from Peirce's semiotics, it diverges from that source and needs to be investigated on its own terms in order to evaluate the idea that the human species has crossed the symbolic threshold. Deacon's view is defended from the view that symbols in the animal world are widespread and from the extreme connectionist view that they are not even to be found in humans. Deacon's treatment of symbols involves a form of holism, as a symbol needs to be part of a system of symbols. He also appears to take a realist view of symbols. That combination of holism and realism makes the threshold a sharp threshold, which makes it hard to explain how the threshold was crossed. This difficulty is overcome if we take a mild realist position towards symbols, in the style of Dennett. Mild realism allows intermediate stages in the crossing but does not undermine Deacon's claim that the threshold is difficult to cross or the claim that it needs to be crossed quickly

Kinds of conversational cooperation

The Cooperative Principle was the organizing principle in Grice’s pragmatics. More recently, cooperation has played a reduced role in pragmatic theory. The principle has been attacked on the grounds that people are not always or generally cooperative. One response to that objection is to say that there are two kinds of cooperation and Grice’s principle only applies to the narrower kind, which concerns linguistic or formal cooperation. I argue that such a distinction is only defensible if it is accepted that linguistic cooperation can be determined by an extra-linguistic goal. To make distinctions among types of cooperation is helpful but this strategy does not remove all concerns about speakers who are not fully cooperative and in particular the operation of the principle needs to be qualified in situations of conflict of interest. I propose that the principle, once qualified, can have a significant continuing role in pragmatic theory

Can the question 'Does Literature Exist' persist?

A response by Robert Lumsden to ‘Does Literature Exist? A Transnational Symposium’ published in Volume 1 no. 1

My aspirations for the IMS

No abstract available

The Early Years Professional: holding a mirror up to policy makers

The importance of the early years for later life outcomes is increasingly being recognised. The former Labour Government (1997-2010) in England introduced a raft of policies aimed at raising the quality of early years provision and outcomes for the youngest children. As part of the changes a new graduate professional role and status, the Early Years Professional, was introduced evidencing a new era of involvement by policy makers in the professions. Government involvement in imposing and shaping the development makes the Early Years Professional vulnerable to political change; it was developed by government and could be removed. Indeed, political change in 2010 brought considerable uncertainty about whether the Coalition Government would continue to support the development, though they have now provided funding until 2015. Alongside this uncertainty, commissioned research evidence is emerging of the positive impact of the policy agenda of the former government. A situation that has not been formally recognised, rather it appears to have gone unnoticed by policy makers. Indeed, the current government have taken a range of actions to dismantle changes previously made and there is an emerging discourse reframing the early years as a period that supports the youngest children being ‘prepared’ for education. This paper aims to address the challenges of this change of emphasis by drawing upon doctoral research critiquing the concept, implementation and impact of Early Years Professional Status as a new professional model. The research design was underpinned by Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Theory of Human Development and rather than being a linear development it has been impacted upon at every stage of development by instability in wider systems, therefore providing evidence that supports his under theorised ‘Chaotic System’ and that childhood is not only a development phase but one shaped by political ideolog

An IR Study of the Velocity Structure of the Cometary Compact HII region G29.96-0.02

We have mapped the velocity structure of the cometary compact HII region G29.96-0.02 using long-slit echelle spectra of the HI Br gamma line. This technique detects line emission over a much wider area at the necessary spatial resolution compared to radio recombination line observations. Significant structure in both the velocity centroids and the line widths is seen over the entire nebula. Large line widths are seen ahead of the bow and in the tail which may be due to turbulent motions in shocked and interface regions respectively. We construct analytic models of the density and velocity structure in order to attempt to distinguish between the bow shock and champagne flow models which have been put forward to explain the cometary morphology of many compact HII regions. The bow shock model is unable to explain the large velocity gradient that we see right across the tail of the cometary region which can only be explained by the streaming motions towards low density regions in the champagne model. However, our approximation to the champagne model is also not able to fit all of the features of the data. More realistic versions of this model which include the effects of stellar winds and density gradients may be able to provide a better match to these data.Comment: 19 pages Latex source, 9 postscript figures and macros. gzipped tar set. To appear in Astrophysical Journal, June 20. Also available by anonymous ftp from ftp://aaoepp.aao.gov.au/local/sll/g29.uu (uuencoded gzipped tar file

Universities with a commitment to social change can shape the Post-2015 agenda

The University of Northampton is the only university in the UK to achieve a 'Changemaker Campus' status from Ashoka U. As a 'Changemaker Campus', the University of Northampton is at the forefront of social innovation and entrepreneurship in the UK and Europe, and in an elite consortium of 24 universities and colleges from around the world, including institutions such as Brown University and Duke University. That means in reality that we, as staff, have taken on board the underlying philosophy of social enterprise and believe that both ourselves and our students have the ability, and indeed a responsibility, to promote change for social good. And where better to start than Early Years

Help! Virtue Profiles and Horses for Courses

Glen Pettigrove addresses the proportionality principle in ethics, the principle that “our actions, attitudes, or emotions should be proportional to the degree of value present in the object or events to which they are responding” [p. 1]. He argues this is inconsistent with some familiar features of common-sense morality. In response, he brings virtuous character into the picture, a move we support but wish to modify. We show that certain helping actions should be guided by whether one has the virtue profile most suited to the situation from amongst a surrounding network of people

Near Infrared Spectroscopy of the Ultracompact HII region G45.12+0.13

We present complete, low resolution IJHK spectroscopy of the ultracompact HII region, G45.12+0.13. From the observed HI line strengths, we derive a near infrared extinction law that is slightly steeper than the average. After correction with this extinction law, we find good agreement between the observed line ratios of HeI, Fe+, Fe++, S+ and S++ and the available atomic data. Our data show that the density within the core of G45.12+0.13 must be at least 10^4/cm^3. This is consistent with the known radio structure of the HII region and in considerable disagreement with previous work using mid and far infrared lines. There must also be considerable opacity in the HeI 2 3P-2 3S transition, and we show how the observed strengths of the other HeI lines are consistent with this. From modelling the photoionisation structure, we find good agreement with most of the observed data if the hottest star present has Teff < 42000K. Consideration of the helium ionisation state places a lower limit on this value so that we can also constrain Teff > 38000K. Discrepancies still exist between some of the observed and model line ratios, but the most obvious tend to be the mid-IR observations.Comment: 17 pages Latex source, 5 postscript figures and macros. gzipped tar file. TO appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronimcal Society. Also available by anonymous ftp from ftp://aaoepp.aao.gov.au/local/sll/g45.uu (uuencoded gzipped tar file

Molecular and Ionised Gas Motions in the Compact HII region G29.96-0.02

We present a new observation of the compact HII region, G29.96-0.02, that allows us to compare the velocity structure in the ionised gas and surrounding molecular gas directly. This allows us to remove most of the remaining ambiguity about the nature of this source. In particular, the comparison of the velocity structure present in the 4S-3P HeI lines with that found in the 1-0 S(1) of molecular hydrogern convincingly rules out a bow shock as being important to the kinematics of this source. Our new observation therefore agrees with our previous conclusion, drawn from a velocity resolved HI Br gamma map, that most of the velocity structure in G29.96-0.02 can largely be explained as a result of a champagne flow model. We also find that the best simple model must invoke a powerful stellar wind to evacuate the `head' of the cometary HII region of ionised gas. However, residual differences between model and data tend to indicate that no single simple model can adequately explain all the observed features.Comment: 10 pages, 4 postscript figures. To be published in MNRA