Familiar Kind Research Articles

The Legitimacy of Metaphysics

Part of Kant's legacy to Peirce was a lasting conviction that metaphysics can and should be set on the secure path of a science. However, Peirce's understanding of metaphysics, unlike Kant's, uses the method of science, i.e., of experience and reasoning; but requires close attention to experience of the most familiar kind rather that recherche experience needed by the special sciences. This distinctively plausible reconstruction of what a genuinely scientific metaphysics would be is part of Peirce's legacy to philosophy today, enabling us to steer clear both of apriorism and scientism - the Scylla and Charybdis of recent metaphysics.

E. Nesbit, Pathfinder

E. Nesbit, Pathfinder Rod McGillis (bio) E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy: A Children's Classic at 100, edited by Raymond E. Jones. Lanham, MD: Children's Literature Association and Scarecrow P, 2007. This collection of essays on E. Nesbit's Psammead novels is the third of four volumes in the Children's Literature Association's Centennial Studies series, published in association with Scarecrow Press, to celebrate well-known works for children. The other volumes are on Peter Rabbit, Baum's Oz books, and Peter Pan. In the future the series may feature less well-known works, which promises to complicate and enrich the making of a children's literature canon, something ChLA has been interested in for a long time. The choice of E. Nesbit's Psammead trilogy is especially suitable, then, for its role in inaugurating the modernist template for children's books. The first decade of the twentieth century in Britain sees other justly famous children's books—Burnett's A Little Princess (1905), and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908)—but Nesbit's Psammead trilogy arguably constitutes the most influential of the books published in that decade in Britain. As writers in this volume point out, these books begin the time slip conventions so prevalent in recent children's books; they also combine fantasy and realism with social awareness and self-conscious narrative positioning. Even Nesbit's willingness to release her narratives from strict coherence and causality looks forward to a kind of plotting we might associate with more recent fiction than with the familiar kind of thing we see in the traditional bildungsroman. First, I note this volume's form. On the whole, the contents are free of typos and slips in grammar, the font is easy to read, and the page setup is serviceable. The margins might be somewhat larger than they are, but the book is certainly readable. What does strike me as an oversight is the absence of an index. The various chapters make reference to a great range of primary and secondary material, and an index would assist readers in locating, for example, discussions of Nesbit and C. S. Lewis or Nesbit and Fabianism, and so on. Scanning an index can prove useful in judging the thoroughness of a book, or it can bring surprises. We might not consider Nesbit a writer particularly receptive to psychoanalytic readings, but an index here would flag Freud and [End Page 228] Lacan for readers who might not read the book in its entirety. But I cavil; what matters is the strength of the various discussions, and these are uniformly impressive. The volume contains thirteen chapters plus the editor's introduction, in which Raymond Jones reviews Nesbit's critical reputation among her biographers and critics of children's literature. He also summarizes her life, and in doing so he raises pertinent issues relating to her work: her role as a woman writer, her formal innovations, and her socialist interests. With regard to the last of this list, Jones suggests: "If she was not always a penetrating or consistent social critic in her fiction, her concern with issues of class and poverty did add thematic depth to her stories, and this concern did pave the way for later writers to introduce serious social problems in books for children" (xiii). The comment that her work "did pave the way" for later writers to discuss weighty social matters implies that Nesbit was a pathfinder in her concern with "serious social problems." However, what we do not sufficiently see in the Nesbit presented in this book is her debt to earlier writers whose work confronts social issues such as poverty, class, economic exploitation, and race relations. We might argue that Nesbit is part of a tradition of socially conscious writing dating back to Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, a tradition that includes such writers as John Ruskin, Frances Browne, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, Charles Kingsley, Jean Ingelow, Augusta Webster, and Oscar Wilde. Many of the contributors to E. Nesbit's Psammead Trilogy focus on the influence of Fabianism on Nesbit's work without noticing the trail of writers behind her. Indeed, the Nesbit who emerges from this...

A theory-based innovation systems framework for evaluating diverse portfolios of research, part two: macro indicators and policy interventions

This framework for multi-level evaluation of scientific research is a bridge between social science theory and the provision of effective feedbacks to governments so they can overcome systemic blockages to innovation and successful outcomes of research policy. Starting with the idea of innovation network theory and organizational theory involved in the research environment survey, a small set of indicators is suggested at micro, meso, and macro levels. Data from this integrated set of indicators can identify the blockages and suggest corrections. This paper concentrates on the macro-level indicators. Three familiar kinds of government policy lever — capital, capabilities, and coordination modes — are discussed. However, the discussion of ways in which these interventions can correct blockages is far more complex than has previously been acknowledged in the evaluation literature. The proposed framework is an important step for evaluators and policy-makers to develop research, technology and development investment portfolios and strategies more effectively. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Association of familial colorectal cancer with variants in the E-cadherin (CDH1) and cyclin D1 (CCND1) genes

About 20% of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients show some kind of familiarity, which might be caused by yet unknown combinations of low penetrance susceptibility genes. We aimed to identify genetic factors for familial CRC (fCRC) in a unique study design that includes phenotypic extremes as represented by fCRC cases and 'hyper-normal' controls without CRC history and no adenomatous polyps on colonoscopy. Candidate gene variants were determined by allele-specific amplification (SLC10A2 c.169C>T and c.171G>T) and restriction fragment length polymorphism assays (CCND1 c.870A>G; CDH1 -160C>A; TP53 R72P; VDR T2M). In total, 98 patients with fCRC, 96 patients with sporadic CRC, and 220 hyper-normal controls were included. The minor allele of the CDH1 -160C>A polymorphism occurred significantly more often in controls compared to fCRC cases (OR = 0.664; p = 0.042). Homozygosity of the minor allele was significantly associated with affiliation to the control group (OR = 0.577; p = 0.029), indicating that both heterozygous and homozygous carriers of the common allele are at-risk for CRC. With respect to the CCND1 c.870A>G mutation, comparison of fCRC and sporadic CRC cases showed that A/A homozygosity was more common than G/G homozygosity among fCRC patients compared to controls (OR = 2.119; p = 0.045). However, no differences in allele or genotype frequencies were detected between sporadic CRC cases and controls, and no associations were observed for SLC10A2, TP53, and VDR polymorphisms. We report a potential association of variants in the CCND1 and CDH1 genes with fCRC using a unique study design with phenotypic extremes.

Familiarity, Complexity, and Team Performance in Geographically Distributed Software Development

While prior research has found that familiarity is beneficial to team performance, it is not clear whether different kinds of familiarity are more or less beneficial when the work has different types of complexity. In this paper, we theorize how task and team familiarity interact with task and team coordination complexity to influence team performance. We posit that task familiarity is more beneficial with more complex tasks (i.e., tasks that are larger or with more complex structures) and that team familiarity is more beneficial when team coordination is more difficult (i.e., for larger or geographically dispersed teams). Finally, we propose that the effects of task familiarity and team familiarity on team performance are complementary. Based on a field study of geographically distributed software teams, two of our hypotheses are disconfirmed: Our results show that the beneficial effects of task familiarity decline when tasks are more structurally complex and are independent of task size. Conversely, the hypotheses for team familiarity are confirmed as the benefit of team familiarity for team performance is enhanced when team coordination is more challenging—i.e., when teams are larger or geographically dispersed. Finally, surprisingly, we find that task and team familiarity are more substitutive than complementary in their joint effects on team performance: Task familiarity improves team performance more strongly when team familiarity is weak and vice versa. Our study contributes by revealing how different types of familiarity can enhance team performance in a real-world setting where the task and its coordination can be highly complex.

On an Engineering Use of Engineering History

This is a tale of how writing about the engineering past is benefiting the engineering present. Our story is not of the familiar kind, however, in which knowledge of the past failure or success of a particular device has influenced later, related designs. Instead, we deal here with a general methodology from the history of one engineering field and its fruitful application to presentday research and design in another, very different field. The field of application human-computer interaction is the primary discipline supporting the design of computer-based artifacts that people use directly, such as websites, computer games, mobile phones, electronic notebooks, and other interactive programs and devices. Like many fields of engineering in their early years, it has been feeling its way as an area of activity. Because advances in information technology have been so rapid and new applications have emerged with such regularity, no overall research or design methodologies have become established a situation rarely apparent to those who enter the field. This was certainly true of one of the coauthors of this tale, William Newman, an engineer and computer scientist who went to work in the Xerox laboratory in Cambridge, England, in 1988. Confronted with design choices in his work on novel user interfaces, he sought help in journals and conference proceedings devoted to human-computer interaction, but rarely found it. It gradually dawned on him that there was no coherent view

Environmental Agencies' Funding Sources Should Follow Their Diverse Business Models

Environmental agencies provide a variety of regulatory, consulting, analysis, and other services that are typically funded by a mix of mechanisms including taxes, fees, contributions, and earmarked streams. Public deliberation in this area mostly attends to the levels of funding of these services, with inadequate attention to the relationship between means and funding adequacy, or between means and agency performance.The characteristic business models of such agencies provide useful guidance regarding appropriate funding mechanisms. In particular, five different such models are commonly found, each with strong analogies to other familiar kinds of enterprise: (i) Agriculture: the Wildlife Ranch; (ii) Habitat; (iii) Maintenance: the Park; (iv) Consulting, education, and permits: the Think Tank; (v) Risk Spreading: Insurance; and (vi) Enforcement: The Police. Each of these models has strong although not usually decisive implications for the type of funding mechanism best suited to it. Budget analysis and internal accounting that incorporates these models would improve agencies' practice and their claims on appropriate funding. The analysis uses the California Department of Fish and Game as an example.

Multidimensional Hermite–Hadamard inequalities and the convex order

The problem of establishing inequalities of the Hermite–Hadamard type for convex functions on n-dimensional convex bodies translates into the problem of finding appropriate majorants of the involved random vector for the usual convex order. We present two results of partial generality which unify and extend the most part of the multidimensional Hermite–Hadamard inequalities existing in the literature, at the same time that lead to new specific results. The first one fairly applies to the most familiar kinds of polytopes. The second one applies to symmetric random vectors taking values in a closed ball for a given (but arbitrary) norm on R n . Related questions, such as estimates of approximation and extensions to signed measures, also are briefly discussed.

Comparison of Spectrographic Records of Two Syllables Pronounced from Scripts in Hiragana and Romaji by Students with Different Familiarity with English

The same syllables /mu/ and /ra/ written in Japanese hiragana and romaji given on a standard speeded naming task elicited phonetically or acoustically different responses in a syllabic hiragana condition and a romaji condition. The participants were two groups of Japanese college students (ns = 15 and 16) with different familiarity with English as a second language. The results suggested that the phonetic reality of syllables represented in these scripts can differ, depending on the interaction between the kind of script and speakers' orthographic familiarity.

‘Indo-European’ designates languages: not pots and not institutions

Kristian Kristiansen, cogent critic though he may be, commits a category error of a depressingly familiar kind. It is a confusion which has led distinguished scholars such as Dumézil into error, and which, by allowing the conflation of such categories as language, ethnicity, race and institution, worked to the detriment of many groups and nations during the twentieth century, and now, no doubt, also in the twenty-first.Nowhere does he define precisely what he imagines the term ‘Indo-European’ to mean. Following the perspective agreed by most historical linguists I take it to be a linguistic term, pertaining therefore to languages, members of the language family first recognised by Sir William Jones in 1786, and then further analysed and defined by subsequent generations of linguists. Through examination of the phonology, the morphology and the lexicon, all of which are well-defined and well-understood, it can readily be decided and demonstrated whether a specific language belongs to this family or not. So that when Hittite emerged in the early twentieth century from the archives of Hattusa, and later when documents in Tocharian were discovered and deciphered, the place of both those languages within that family could readily be agreed. Such a methodology is clearly not applicable to social institutions: it only works with words.

Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing of History by Herb Wyile

Herb W yile. Speculative Fictions: Contemporary Canadian Novelists and the Writing o f History. Montreal: M cGillQueens University Press, 2002. 318 pp. $75"Cloth. Contemporary theoretical accounts of history and historiography clearly demonstrate the need to rethink received understandings about the rela­ tionship between historical and literary texts. No longer seen simply as a chronicle of events from the past, history, as Hayden White and others have taught us, is not something one finds, but rather something one produces, a reconstruction of the past as we have been led to see it from the context of a particular time, place, and subject-position. In his timely and important study of the uses to which history has been put in contem­ porary Canadian novels, Herb Wyile draws on the work of White, Linda Hutcheon, and others to offer a trenchant and detailed analysis of what has clearly become a salient preoccupation for many Canadian writers. Even a short list of novels produced by Canadian novelists over the course of the last three decades makes clear just how popular a subject the writing of histories has become. Think, for example, of Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood), The Englishman’s Boy (Guy Vanderhaeghe), Ana Historic and Taken (both by Daphne Marlatt), The BiggestModern Woman ofthe World (Susan Swan), Fox (Margaret Sweatman), A Deathful Ridge (J. A. Wain­ wright), Fox’s Nose (Sally Ireland), Blood Libel (Allan Levine), The Afterlife of George Cartwright (John Steffler), Green Grass, Running Water (Thomas King), The Invention of the World (Jack Hodgins), Away (Jane Urquhart), and Obasan (Joy Kogawa), as well as several books by Timothy Findley, Rudy Wiebe, and Michael Ondaatje. These books (and others like them) turn to the past (and, most often, to actual persons and events from the past) in an effort to raise compelling questions about knowledge, power, identity, representation, and social responsibility. Through richly detailed readings of a number of these texts, Wyile focusses on how contemporary Canadian fiction challenges us to think anew about historical processes and priorities. Many of these novels, he argues, invite us to recognize how the project of nation-building in Canada has been played out through narrowly-focussed assumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality: they reflect an “inclination toward the telling of untold tales (of natives, immigrants, minorities, workers, and women)” (137), and focus our attention on pasts that have been silenced, repressed, or misread in institutionalized forms of historical representation. In rewriting history from the point of view of those who have been left out 170 IHeble of dominant narratives of the nation, these books encourage us to ask, W ho has the institutional power to determine what counts as history? These, surely, are pressing questions, and Wyile’s wide-ranging, thor­ oughly contextualized, and well-researched account of this important area of focus in contemporary Canadian fiction is certainly a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on the topic. I must confess, however, that at times it did seem to me as though some of the arguments and analyses (about the foregrounding of the research process in these novels, about how historical novels comment on contemporary society, about the skepticism towards historical objectivity, about history as process, about history and/as intertext, and so forth) were perhaps a little too familiar: these issues have been amply theorized and documented by Hutcheon and others. True, Wyile extends the lines of argument initiated by Hutcheon in “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction” to engage in detailed read­ ings of textual strategies in a number of more recent novels by Sweatman, Vanderhaeghe, Urquhart, and others; yet it seems to me that this study is at its best not when Wyile is applying familiar kinds of arguments to new texts, but rather when he is framing and entering into bold new debates about shifting patterns of salience. In this regard, Wyile’s response to Jack Granatstein’s diatribe against social history, Who Killed Canadian History?, is particularly resonant. Countering Granatstein’s fear-mongering suggestion that the revisionist focus of social history has resulted in the failure of history graduates in Canada to know the facts of their own nation, Wyile rightly (and impor­ tantly) insists on “a recognition, rather...

Documenting Teaching Excellence within the Peer Review of Teaching

The initial autumn email from a communication scholar chairing a department's tenure committee was welcomed and welcoming. I'll be happy to review your candidate's teaching scholarship, I wrote back. I requested artifacts on which I could make an evidence-based peer review - syllabi, course assignments and readings, copies of papers the assistant professor had graded including comments returned to the students, lesson plans, examples of creative computer, visual or audio presentations and tutorials, student assessments - in short, a teaching portfolio. Thanks anyway, the committee chair responded. We can't provide that material. The committee was anxious to reach a decision. The faculty member under review, the committee chair wanted me to know, always received strong student ratings, some of the best in the department. The tenure committee was planning its peer review around student evaluations and the individual's reputation, as well as upon the two classroom visits a committee member conducted to observe the assistant professor at work. My role, apparently, would have been to comment on reputation. I don't know the fate of the faculty member under review, or even the individual's name. The procedures briefly outlined, however, are worthy of discussion. Can the evidence described form the basis of a valid peer review? Let's examine the data that held the tenure committee's interest. What elements of teaching excellence are being rewarded? Which are being left out? Where is the emphasis? Student ratings are frequently used as a basis for peer review (the questionable use of student ratings for salary setting and the problems inherent in using any assessment for both formative and summative purposes are issues for another occasion). Although the research is not unanimous, student reviews carefully tailored to elicit opinions about teaching performance in a specific: instructional environment and administered with focused instructions and a clear explanation of what is at stake, may provide data that is both reliable and valid. Fears that student ratings reward the funniest faculty performers and the easiest graders are unfounded. In fact, students give the highest marks when they feel they have learned the most. The infamous bubble sheet can and often does provide an important data point for those graphing teaching performance. Student ratings are easy to use, but they are also subject to easy abuse. Students are not peers. Their assessments are not based upon the kinds of deep familiarity with, and mastery of, either teaching and learning or the field of communication that resides in the professional educational cohort we think of as peers. Student ratings tend to paint with broad brush strokes. Neither the bubble sheets nor open-ended student questionnaires capture a faculty member's professional pedagogical and curricular judgments, or the course preparation, mentoring, tutoring, grading effort, and assessment reflection that take place outside of the classroom. Student ratings also fail the innovation test. Many of us have had personal experience with at least one botched experiment in which our best attempts at new curriculum or pedagogy turn out well below expectations. Student ratings do not distinguish, however, between time-tested classroom delivery and the development of new pedagogies and curricular enhancements that carry the potential of discovery and the risk of poor classroom reception. Student Testimonials provide an additional and related data point a review committee of peers may consider. Although rarely critical, testimonials afford valuable context when viewed as one tile in a larger assessment mosaic. Unlike student ratings, there is little to suggest they are representative and, as indicators of teaching excellence, they may lack both validity and reliability. Classroom Observation, which a cynical colleague of mine refers to as drive-by assessments, are common. …

Walt Whitman and New Biographical Criticism

Pollak,Vivian R. 2000. The Erotic Whitman. Berkeley: University of California Press. $50.00 hc, $18.95 sc; xxiv + 261 pp. Krieg, Joann P 2000. Whitman and the Irish. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. $39.95 hc, $19.95 sc; xvii + 273 pp. Where is biographical criticism going? Studies of Walt Whitman could be excellent places to ask this question. The exemplary poet of the self, whose self moves so insistently out toward the world, arguably provides perfect grounds for rethinking how we might use biography as a portal for understanding literature, and perhaps culture, and perhaps the self itself. Indeed, Whitman invites such rethinking-and waits somewhere for us, we might say, to catch up. Now that the death of the author has become a cliche, as has the glib student's quick satisfaction with an easy biographical interpretation, it is certainly time to ponder again what biography can do for us. So little rethinking has been done, even as the theoretical denunciations of biographical interpretation have subsided, and as literary biography and biographical criticism (along with psychoanalytical criticism) have moved persistently along in their furrows. Here are two books that speak to the current state and the possibilities of biographical criticism. They both have great virtues, and they provide estimable contributions to scholarship about Walt Whitman-Pollak staking out well-worked territory but making a strong argument that she carefully distinguishes from previous work, and Krieg informing us about a timely concern as our understanding of the nature of ethnicity sharpens. Whereas they address rather different topics, the books relate to each other, and form a kind of salient contrast in method, because each undertakes an essentially biographical kind of study. The difference in what they understand biographical study to be can help us see both the virtues and the shortcomings of these books-as well as the way their biographical intentions both enable and obscure what they have to offer. I'll venture that their differences can also suggest to us something about the possibilities of current biographical criticism. Vivian R. Pollak's The Erotic Whitman is, she says, a blend of biography and criticism. There is nothing methodologically new about her blend, and, indeed, the book resonates strikingly with Pollak's Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender (1984), her previous work of self-avowedly biographical criticism. Many of the concerns of the Dickinson book resurface almost twenty years later in the Whitman book: the poet's crisis of sexual and gender identity, relationships as the grounds for understanding the literature, the idea that the art is a response to psychosexual anxieties, the idea that the poetry provides a critique of gender roles under patriarchy. The familiarity of the themes doesn't take away from the accomplishment of the book. Like the Dickinson book, the Whitman book's value lies in Pollak's critical sensibility, especially in her attunement to the complicated ambivalences of the poets, and to the correspondingly complex contradictions and paradoxes in their poetry. But the familiar shape of the kind of biographical criticism used here generates familiar kinds of quibbles. While the mix of biography and criticism is often skillfully blended, for example, the proportions of the ingredients sometimes get out of balance. At times the biographical detail becomes too full, and the biographical story takes off on its own trajectory, veering so much into life narratives (of Whitman's father, his mother, himself that we lose sight of any critical argument. At other times too much about Whitman and his writing is subsumed under the main critical argument-that in his early life, and in his early fiction, Whitman wrestled with his relationships with his parents, and with patriarchal and matriarchal forms of the family, only to reject the competition and cruelty of patriarchy and the helplessness of feminine domesticity for comradeship, a different model of family that found expression in his poetry. …

Double Sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain

Yes, we are going to suffer, now; sky Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real; groping searchlights suddenly reveal little natures that will make us cry, Who never quite believed they could exist, Not where we were. They take us by surprise Like ugly long-forgotten memories ... --W. H. Auden, Time of War, 1938 (English Auden 256) Hands of longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on hands of yesterday In double sorrow. --Stephen Spender, The Separation, 1939 For countless citizens in Britain in late 1930s, looming confrontation with Hitler produced an uneasy sense of deja vu. Premonitions of commingled with memories of endured in Great War. Faces were lit with conscience past or future / Of men gone, eyes filled with tears of twenty-four years (Hendry). (1) At Armistice Day services and military exercises, Britons watched who [were] about to die try out their paces alongside ghosts of Gallipoli and Flanders (MacNeice 39). (2) Coming to terms with this prospect ofdouble sorrow was a great and linguistic challenge, as poets and politicians struggled to enroll words of for a second round of suffering. I would like to propose a term for texts that voice this Janus-faced on and for wider cultural syndrome of which they were a part. I define as consolatory writing produced in anticipation of sorrow, where expected loss is of a familiar kind. Its occasion is need for psychological rearmament in face of a threat, its opening strategy pragmatic one of marshaling resources already known to be useful in of mourning. It records and responds imaginatively to anticipatory grief (Woodward 88). (3) commingling of remembered and anticipated is hardly unique to this period (indeed, Jacques Derrida has located a measure of grieving at heart of all human friendship (4)), but there is evidence to suggest that it was especially prevalent in Britain during late 1930s. Those who had fought in trenches, or who had loved and lost those who had, greatly feared the repetition of salutes (Skelton 185). (5) For them, prospect of enduring of war again so soon produced both intense anxiety and what Fredric Jameson, discussing roots of utopian impulse, has called a glacial perspective (122) on consolatory narratives: a cold distance enabling them to weigh both their validity and their efficacy. It put extraordinary pressure on hearts, minds, and language of Britons, pressure so great that many familiar consolatory strategies could not withstand it. works from which I derive my generalizations are written by men too young to fight in Great War but whose fathers and older brothers and friends died in trenches. They include also works by women, of a range of ages, who lost sons, loves, brothers, and husbands in that conflict. Though I shall derive defining characteristics, in first instance, from poetry, I shall extend category of proleptic elegy to fiction and, eventually, to political polemic. texts I shall consider are fascinating in themselves, but they also contribute to our understanding of modern in general. It has become a truism about modern that it is typically antielegy: it expresses a refusal to mourn (6) or rejects what Freud called therapeutic work of (Mourning 245). Because it cannot accept traditional religious and ethical certainties, it disowns the ... propensity of [elegiac] genre to translate into consolation (Zeiger 15). (7) It rejects valuation of mourning that would see the obliteration of dead by socioeconomic laws of exchange, equivalence, and progress . …

Trouble on the left periphery

Adjuncts may occur (by ‘adjunct preposing’) before a wh-interrogative clause which is a main clause, but not before one which is subordinate; for example: (i) Tomorrow what shall we do? (ii) I told you (*tomorrow) what we shall do. Why should the possibility of adjunct preposing vary between main and subordinate clauses? The pre-theoretical answer is obvious: the wh-word has the extra function in a subordinate clause of signalling the start of a subordinate clause, so like any other subordinator it must be the first element in its clause. Less obvious is how to capture this insight in a formal grammar, and the paper will show that this challenge favours flexible word-based grammars over the more familiar kind which assign a uniform clause structure. The paper considers and rejects a number of examples of the latter approach, especially that of Rizzi [Rizzi, L. 1997. The fine structure of the left periphery. In: Haegeman, L. (Ed.), Elements of Syntax. A Handbook in Generative Grammer. Klewer, Dordrecht, pp. 281–337]. The proposed solution is based on enriched dependency structure (Word Grammar) which makes head-hood ambiguous in certain constructions. In particular, the head of a wh-interrogative may be its finite verb when it is a main clause but must be the wh-element when it is subordinate.

Two-year-olds' expectation that lexical gaps will be filled

Children tend to select unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds as the referents of novel names. This tendency has been hypothesized by some to derive from an expectation that unfamiliar kinds will be labelled. In Study 1, two-year-olds (N = 16) showed little evidence of such an expectation when they had to decide whether a visible picture of an unfamiliar object or a depicted object concealed in a box was the referent of a novel name. They tended to check the box before making a selection. This test was preceded by two tasks, the first requiring the same type of decision about familiar names and the second highlighting the status of unfamiliar objects as ‘new kinds of things’. In Study 2 (N = 16), the latter task was replaced by one in which toddlers had to decide whether unfamiliar kinds were more likely than familiar kinds to be the referents of novel names. After this experience, participants showed a moderately strong expectation that unfamiliar kinds would be labelled. In Study 3 (N = 60) this finding was replicated. In two other conditions, the task that preceded the test was replaced with direct teaching of novel names for unfamiliar kinds. These groups showed little expectation that lexical gaps would be filled. Although results are compatible with a restricted form of the lexical gap filling hypothesis, they do not support the broad form that has been advanced by some theorists.

Thinking about thinking: language, thought and introspection

Peter Carruthers has made a vigorous attempt to defend the admittedly unfashionable doctrine that we think ‘in' language, despite its displacement by something like Fodor's ‘language of thought'. The idea that we think in language has considerable intuitive persuasiveness, but I suggest that this is not the force of good argument and evidence, but a familiar kind of introspective illusion. In this regard, the question of language and thought derives a more general interest, since the illusion is independently familiar from other notorious disputes in cognitive science such as the ‘imagery debate’.

Epistemicist Models: Comments on Gómez‐Torrente and Graff

Every philosopher should wish for commentators as thoughtful and rigorous as Mario G6mez-Torrente and Delia Graff. Their papers contribute significantly to our understanding of the fine structure of vagueness, but not by undermining its epistemicist interpretation. According to epistemicism, there is an unknowable truth of the matter in borderline cases. Either is bald or he is not, but we cannot know which. Why not? Suppose that in fact is bald; the argument is similar if he is not. Then we speak truly if we say Harry is But since the case is borderline, we might easily have uttered the same words even if our overall pattern of use had been slightly different so as slightly to shift the boundary of 'bald' in that context, making 'Harry is bald' express a different and false proposition. Thus even if we actually make the true judgement that is bald in this case, we do so on an insufficiently reliable basis to count as knowing that is bald. This is a conceptual analogue of more familiar kinds of ignorance, in which limits on our powers of perceptual discrimination prevent us from knowing the exact values of physical quantities by ordinary perception. Such limits on our knowledge can be expressed as margin for error principles (Williamson 1992, 1994: pp. 216-47). Gomez-Torrente points out that in perceptual cases we can discover the values of the quantities exactly (or at least far less inexactly) by scientific measurement; the unknowability is relative to limited cognitive means. He suggests that the epistemicist explanation establishes at most a similarly limited ignorance in borderline cases, thereby missing the depth of the phenomenon to be explained. The epistemicist explanation is as general as its underlying assumptions. In this context the relevant ones are: (a) the boundary of a vague term is unstable with respect to small changes in use because there is no natural line for it to follow; (b) because our use of such a term is not perfectly co-ordinated internally, a small change in one aspect of use (enough to shift the boundary a little) can easily be combined with preservation of another aspect

The Spectre of Populism in Philippine Politics and Society: Artista, Masa, Eraption!

This paper seeks to explore the origins of the populist appeal of President Joseph Ejercito Estrada, and to recapture some of its peculiar workings in the broader context of Philippine post-colonial politics and society. To that end, the paper provides a brief glimpse of the rapidly changing urban landscape which first saw the rise of Estrada as the superstar of the moviescreen and the mayor of San Juan municipality in Metropolitan Manila during the 1960s. In the following section of the paper, key developments in the Philippine film industry are identified, and an attempt is made to demonstrate the emerging possibility of a new kind of social imaginary, or mass consciousness, reflective of cinema's power to reveal to an audience entirely new structural formations of the subject. Here, the notion of Tagalog movies as a ‘visualized lingua franca’ – unburdened by tradition, hierarchy, and easily accessible to a wide spectrum of the population – suggests one possible link between the expanding cinema audience at lower-class theatres and the new forms of recognition implied by the rise of artista politicians in Manila in the 1960s. Finally, a closer look at narrative and character in some Estrada films from the peak years of his movie stardom in the 1960s and 1970s points to the kind of familiarity and appropriation Estrada may inspire among his fans and followers. The paper was completed as (former) President Estrada faced, first, an unprecedented impeachment trial in the Philippine Senate and, eventually, an unceremonious end to his presidency in the parliament of the streets (ie ‘People Power’ at ‘EDSA’).

Conceptual Changes in Chemistry: The Notion of a Chemical Element, ca. 1900–1925

In this paper I examine the relationship between historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, and indeed scientists themselves. I argue that (i) they co-habit a shared intellectual territory (science and its past); and (ii) they should be able to do so peacefully, and with mutual respect, even if they disagree radically about how to describe the methods and results of science. I then go on to explore some of the challenges to mutually respectful cohabitation between history, philosophy and sociology of science. I conclude by identifying a familiar kind of project in the philosophy of science which seeks to explore the worldview of a particular scientific discipline, and argue that it too has a right to explore the shared territory even though some historians and sociologists may find it methodologically suspect.