Language is a Public Thing

Is Cooperation a Good Thing?

Is the Internet a Thing?

N o, I'm not trying to apply the term " Inter-net of Things " recursively, though it would be fun to give the root domain file an IP address and have it be reachable. I'm just using a current colloquial expression to ask what the Internet actually is, and who might own it. I'm asking these questions because of the announcement that ICANN will move out of US Department of Commerce authority (and...

Is Interactivity a Good Thing

This paper investigates whether adding interactivity to diagrammatic representations aids learning. More specifically, the analyses focus on the extent to which 3D interactive diagrams facilitate the comprehension of a geometry concept, the stereographic projection, that is usually taught using 2D diagrams. Four Interactive Learning Environments (ILE) were built in order to test the effectivene...

What Kind of Thing is a Language Faculty? A Critical Evaluation of OT Phonology

" A psychology (rationalist, empiricist, or whatever) needs to do more than just enunciate the laws it claims that mental processes obey. It also needs to explain what kind of a thing a mind could be such that those laws are true of it; which is once again to say that it needs to specify a mechanism. " (Jerry Fodor, 2000:17, italics in original) For the purposes of this article, OT will refer t...

Consciousness Is a Thing, Not a Process

The central dogma of cognitive psychology is ‘consciousness is a process, not a thing’. Hence, the main task of cognitive neuroscientists is generally seen as working out what kinds of neural processing are conscious and what kinds are not. I argue here that the central dogma is simply wrong. All neural processing is unconscious. The illusion that some of it is conscious results largely from a ...