Factual Sentences Research Articles

Exact psychiatry: Six axioms

Psychiatry is a clinical technological practice where the rational fundaments, methods and knowledge “corpus” have a scientific nature. The science philosopher Mario Bunge proposes that philosophy, as well as science, may tend to be exact. Philosophy of science is the rational setting where any scientific discipline can ascribe sense to its theoretical models and factual sentences. Axiomatization is the method to exactify a discipline. By axiomatization, we can exactify psychiatry as “medicine of the soma”, therefore avoiding fallacies in the theoretical models we use.ObjectiveTo describe six axioms for the definition of “exact psychiatry” as “medicine of the soma”. Six axioms will be defined and explained. They are ordered attending to hierarchical and historical priority:–axiom of the cultural universal of social cohesion: since the antiquity all cultures have cultural universals which promote social cohesion;–axiom of healing as a form of “isonomia”: health-related cultural constructs are related with help receiving due to body vulnerability. It appears with Hippocratic medicine;–axiom of nosological realism: diseases really exist. They are biological regularities that accelerate death. It appears in the 17th century;–axiom of illness subjectivity: the personal impact of disease is subjective. There exist diseases in patients. It appears in the 20th century;–axiom of the unification of neuroscience: psychiatry and neurology have the same ontological reference, brain diseases. It consolidates in the 21st century;–axiom of clinical phenomenology as the epistemological specificity of psychiatry: clinical phenomenology characterizes “soma” as the referring of psychiatry. The future.Disclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.

Auditory cortical function during verbal episodic memory encoding in Alzheimer's disease

Episodic memory encoding of a verbal message depends upon initial registration, which requires sustained auditory attention followed by deep semantic processing of the message. Motivated by previous data demonstrating modulation of auditory cortical activity during sustained attention to auditory stimuli, we investigated the response of the human auditory cortex during encoding of sentences to episodic memory. Subsequently, we investigated this response in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and probable Alzheimer's disease (pAD). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, 31 healthy participants were studied. The response in 18 MCI and 18 pAD patients was then determined, and compared to 18 matched healthy controls. Subjects heard factual sentences, and subsequent retrieval performance indicated successful registration and episodic encoding. The healthy subjects demonstrated that suppression of auditory cortical responses was related to greater success in encoding heard sentences; and that this was also associated with greater activity in the semantic system. In contrast, there was reduced auditory cortical suppression in patients with MCI, and absence of suppression in pAD. Administration of a central cholinesterase inhibitor (ChI) partially restored the suppression in patients with pAD, and this was associated with an improvement in verbal memory. Verbal episodic memory impairment in AD is associated with altered auditory cortical function, reversible with a ChI. Although these results may indicate the direct influence of pathology in auditory cortex, they are also likely to indicate a partially reversible impairment of feedback from neocortical systems responsible for sustained attention and semantic processing.

Counterfactual sentences activate embodied meaning: An action–sentence compatibility effect study

Recent evidence suggests that understanding factual action-related sentences involves embodied simulations. But, what happens with counterfactual sentences that describe hypothetical events in the past? This study demonstrates that even in this case embodied simulations of actions take place. Participants listened to factual or counterfactual sentences describing a transfer away from or towards them. After the transfer verb (e.g., gave) was received, either a motion cue (Exp. 1) or a static cue (Exp. 2) prompted participants to move their finger towards or away from them to press a button. Finger motion was initially interfered with in cases involving a concurrent matching sentence (e.g., transfer away-motion away), suggesting that counterfactual meaning involves a motor simulation or “resonance”. The temporal course of this resonance differs slightly between factual and counterfactual sentences.

Duplicated Replications

In a recent interview, Omer Fast asserted much of his interest as a video artist and filmmaker is grounded on media: e.g., the impact television was having on the way my generation experienced reality and how we recall and retell it. (1) He has qualified assertion by stating elsewhere: There is a shorthand way of reading my work as a media critique, which is pretty much a dull and dead end as far as I'm concerned. (2) Between impact, experience, and critique, Fast seems to approach the media from a perspective is clearly stated at the end of The Casting (2007), when his alter-ego (a director conducting auditions) says he is not interested in exploring a political angle in the film he is making, but rather how experience turns into memory, and then becomes stories are ... recorded, and then broadcast. In view of the piece, this may seem rather reductive and self-evident but its frankness anchors its purpose and asserts authorial commitment to its goals. If the transition of live experience to reproduced memory and simulated reality is indeed a large concern for Fast, his work questions what narratives and histories these transformations produce. In our ultra-mediated world, how might the excess of reproductions affect our experiential apprehension of the world, no less our comprehension of the past? Mid-twentieth century cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin announced the eclipse of the aura-infused object to its mechanically reproduced image and theorized the attendant shifts in perception this seismic change inaugurated. Fast seems to have concerns about the same fate for experience itself, as it is replaced through multiple forms of replication, duplication, and recreation. Fast's earlier work demonstrated a more direct interventionist stance toward the media. In T3-AEON (2000), fast, altered then returned video store copies of The Terminator (1984) to include disturbing personal anecdotes interrupt the film's soundtrack. In CNN Concatenated (2002), a single-channel video, he created a phantasmagoric narrative out of 10,000 words spoken by a series of CNN newscasters he recorded alter September 11, 2001. This mass of borrowed words, he said, is an aggregate of what's out there, in public, on the air.(3) Through cutting, splicing, and using single words and short phrases, Fast edited eighteen minutes of talking heads into imaginary narrative driven by manipulation, need, abuse, and desire. Fast explained his technique of interventions these conspicuous cuts and splices in the footage ... highlight what is generally suppressed in narratives are based on the real.(4) Thus, what begins as a combination of words strung into seemingly factual sentences becomes increasingly ominous and devolves into derangement, abuse, and need: need to know I'm being understood, the staccato of newscasters announce, that I'm alive ... We've developed a taste for each other's weaknesses ... we thrive on consuming each other ... I feel more alone in your company ... no more than ever. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Fast's subsequent work seems more firmly sealed in the process of transcription itself by examining the change occurs as events and experiences travel toward their recreations, fabrications, reenactments, and reproductions. In Godville (2005), a two-channel video installation, Fast interviewed actors at the historic theme park in Colonial Williamsburg, then aggressively cut and spliced the piece to highlight the discordance produced between contemporary reality and fabricated reenactment. However, not all his work posits replication and reproduction as products of increasingly mediated landscape, but rather as a generative process of narrative function itself. A recent piece he created for Performs 09 dramatized this process of transformation. For Talk Show (2009), Fast used the format from the game Broken Telephone to depict how a single story, told by invited guest, might transform when it is repeated down a chain of professional actors. …

Canceling updating in the comprehension of counterfactuals embedded in narratives

Participants were given counterfactual sentences--for example, "If Mary had won the lottery she would have bought a Mercedes car"--or factual sentences--for example, "Because Mary won the lottery, she bought a Mercedes car"--embedded in short narratives. Reading times showed that readers were immediately sensitive to the special status of counterfactual information (Experiment 1). In addition, probe-recognition latencies demonstrated that old information was more accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories, and new information was equally accessible in both kinds of stories (Experiment 2). However, after reading additional clauses, new information became less accessible in counterfactual than in factual stories (Experiment 3). These results suggest that counterfactual events are momentarily represented but are later suppressed and the readers' attention goes back to previous events in the story.

More Bad Newsfor the Logical Autonomy of Ethics

Since the time of Hume, many philosophers have thought it impossible to deduce an ‘Ought’ from an ‘Is,’ or in general to deduce ‘ethical sentences’ from purely ‘factual sentences.’ Some of these philosophers claim that this is due, not to any Special feature of ethics, but to a general feature of logic, namely, its conservativeness:A conclusion containing an ‘ought’ cannot (as a matter of logic) be derived from ‘ought’-free premises. (The same, of course, goes for the other moral words.) Logic is conservative; the conclusions of a valid inference are contained within the premises. You don't get out what you haven't put in. Hence if ‘ought’ appears in the conclusion of an argument but not in the premises, the inference is not logically valid.’

A scientific formulation of tropical forest management

The paper introduces a scientific formulation to deal with value judgements, factual knowledge and norms, required for a rigorous treatment of tropical forest management. The model arising from this approach is able to establish norms of natural forest management pursuing the ecological objective of pristine tree species preservation in situ. Consistent with this objective is presented a set of factual sentences about the structure and dynamics of the tropical forest, specifically Atlantic forest. The logarithmic form of the diametric density distribution reveals cohorts of similar adaptive strategies and permits the statistical estimation of survival coefficients from the inventory of a pristine stand. As a consequence of the non-linearity of the density matrix, specific algorithms had to be worked out in order to simulate the dynamics of the pristine forest. Adjoining to the ecological objective of tree species diversity preservation the (simple) economic objective of maximum log output, together with the factual sentences (describing the forest reality from the point of view of a forester or a forest enterprise) entail logically the set of selection criteria or norms for tree felling. The use of these norms to a stand of Atlantic forest is described, demonstrating the preservation of the pristine structure and of all tree populations after logging under natural forest management in a cutting cycle of 23 years. Finally is demonstrated the incompatibility of current felling norms with the ideal of pristine tree-diversity preservation, as for instance the forest legislation for the state of Santa Catarina allowing the felling of 40% of trees with DBH (diameter at breast height) above 40 cm for at most four species.

A Re-examination of illusory inferences based on factual conditional sentences

According to mental model theory, illusory inferences are a class of deductions in which individuals systematically go wrong. Mental model theory explains them invoking the principle of truth, which is a tendency not to represent models that falsify the premises. In this paper we focus on the illusory problems based on conditional sentences. In three experiments, we show that: (a) rather than not representing models that falsify the conditionals, participants have a different understanding of what falsifies a conditional (Experiment I); (b) specifically, participants think that a conditional with an impossible antecedent or consequent is false (Experiment 2); (c) if the domain of the conditionals in the illusory problems are expanded to show that their antecedents and consequents are possible, the participants find it easy to reach the correct conclusions (Experiment 3). According to our results, the illusory inferences based on conditional premises, differently from those based on disjunctive premises, are caused by a difference between the understanding of natural language factual conditionals and the truth table of the factual implication; the principle of truth is not necessary to explain them.

A preservation condition for conditionals

Adams's Thesis is the claim that the probabilities of indicative conditionals equal the conditional probabilities of their consequents given their antecedents.' It is strongly supported by both introspection and observation of the use of conditionals in hypothetical reasoning. But a series of 'triviality results' show that it is impossible to accommodate Adams's Thesis within standard semantic and probability theory.2 The bottom-line is that there is no way of assigning truth-values to indicative conditionals so as to ensure that their probabilities of truth invariably satisfy Adams's Thesis, unless the assignment itself varies in the right kind of way with the relevant conditional probability. It follows that either Adams's Thesis is false or the probabilities to which it refers are not standard probabilities of truth. What has not been generally recognized however is that triviality results (or something similar) can be established for a much wider class of conditionals than just those satisfying Adams's Thesis. The class in question is identified by a very weak constraint on the interpretation of indicative conditionals to the effect that if someone considers it possible that A is true but not that B, then they should regard the sentence 'If A then B' as false. I call this the Preservation Condition and I will argue that it is immediately and rationally compelling in a way that Adams's Thesis is not. But it will be shown that the Preservation Condition is also incompatible with orthodox semantic and probability theory, raising the question as to whether there are not elements of the orthodoxy that require modification. Throughout I will use italic capitals as sentence variables, reserving the symbols A, B and C for variables that range over factual sentences only (these being sentences in which the conditional operator introduced below does not occur). The symbol --will denote the sentential operation performed by the English words 'If ... then ...' in indicative conditional sentences. Without affecting the generality of the conclusions, our discussion will be confined to indicative conditionals with factual consequents and antecedents.

Quick Triviality Proofs for Probabilities of Conditionals

A new attack on the thesis that conditional probabilities are probabilities of conditionals must seem superfluous given the battering the thesis has sustained since David Lewis (1976) first proved his triviality results.' In mitigation I plead that although the proofs that follow may not be quite the strongest presently available they employ only weak premisses and are, to the best of my knowledge, the shortest. And short they most certainly are. To a language for propositional logic we add a new connective, '-'. Call sentences factual, following Ernest Adams and Vann McGee (McGee 1989: 486), if they contain no occurrence of this new connective. We suppose only that the extended language ? contains a conditional sentence a-c for each pair of factual sentences a and c and compounds of such conditionals employing the standard connectives (so there are no iterated =*-conditionals). An assignment P of probabilities to sentences of I fulfils the conditional construal of conditional probabilities (henceforth CCCP, following Haijek and Hall (1994)) if: for factual a and c, P(a=-c) = P(c/a) when P(a) > 0.

Moral Judgments and Emotional Displays: A Comment

Professor Braybrooke has presented some interesting and novel points in support of the emotive theory in his recent paper. I imagine that his points are designed to worry objectivists or antiemotivists. In this note I will try to show that they need not worry very much.1. In addition to moral sentences and factual sentences (M-locutions and F-locutions) we should pick out for comparison a class of expressive sentences (E-locutions) whose function is to express or evince emotions. I much prefer “express” to Braybrooke's “display” here. Examples of expressive sentences are: “I am angry,” “I am afraid,” “I am furious,” “I am very pleased,” etc.