Two experiments investigated the effects of ambiguity of an emergency situation on helping behavior. In Experiment I, 70 male undergraduates waiting either alone, with a stranger, or with a friend heard a maintenance man fall and cry out in agony. Half of the two-person groups were naive; the other half included a confederate who was instructed to react as passively as possible. In contrast to ...

König (1989) argues that there is a relation of duality between concessive and causal constructions. Therefore, he maintains, any account of the meaning of causal connectives like because, via duality, also provides an account of the meaning of concessive connectives such as although. This paper lists a number of problems with König's account. Appealing to notions central to relevance theory, i...

Patient AB had her first episode of depression at age 18 when leaving home to attend university. Numerous periods of elevated mood, increased activity, racing thoughts, rapid speech and distractibility followed, each lasting about a week. However, she was able to complete her university degree. At age 26, following the birth of her first child, she had a 2month episode of depression with low mo...

In this paper, we investigate the question, “what are the best features for face identification?” Ullman et al. used mutual information as measurement of how good a feature is for a class [Ullman et al., 2002]. Their experiments suggested that features of intermediate complexity are best in tasks of face vs. non-face and cars vs. non-cars. We are interested in the tasks of face identification a...

We formalize several ways of accounting, in the context of logically closed theories, for foundationalist intuitions that underlie change operations applying to belief bases. A positive and a negative concept of entrenchment is defined on the basis of the structure of a given, possibly prioritized belief base. Only the latter, more fine-grained concept proves to be appropriate for a successful ...

ASYMMETRY There exists a cross-linguistic asymmetry in availability of discourse items among adjunct clauses between because-clauses on one hand, and temporal clauses and if -clauses on the other (see examples (1) for English obviously , (2) for German ja and (3) for Japanese wa; see Hooper and Thompson 1973, Tenny 2002, Sawada and Larson 2004 among others for the same type of asymmetry with ot...

Have you ever considered preparing for an exam by doing physical exercise? Would it not be great to go outside and play capture the flag or double Dutch with your friends instead of doing math? Of course, you already know that this is wishful thinking. Everyone has to prepare carefully and learn attentively if they want to do better on their exams. However, it is also true that physical activit...

The melancholy mind has been recognized throughout recorded history. It was given a medical context by the ancient Greeks who claimed for it a relationship with constitution in the form of physique, body chemistry and temperament. It was subject to scholarly analysis by Burton (1927) over three hundred years ago. The disorder has not always been medicalized and some cultures have tended instead...

Because (of) is ambiguous between a ‘reason’ and a ‘plain cause’ interpretation. Presenting a semantic analysis within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, I argue that because (of) always denotes a causal relation between causing facts and caused entites of various sorts and that its interpretational variance is dependent on the ontological nature of the caused entity. Finally, I ...

documentary called 23 Week Babies: the Price of Life. My thoughts and feelings as I watched this programme were not always straightforward. The documentary was moving, sometimes profoundly so. How could it avoid emotional impact when it dealt with life and death, compassion and vulnerability, hope and loss? There were other times when I found myself irritated and frustrated with the presenter a...