In the wake of David Lewis’s seminal paper ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’ (1983), a certain use of the word ‘natural’ has become widespread in metaphysics and beyond. In this usage, properties can be classified as more or less natural, with perfectly natural properties as a limiting case. For example, Lewis would claim that being negatively charged is much more natural than being either ...

Previous research has shown that viewing images of nature scenes can have a beneficial effect on memory, attention, and mood. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the preference of natural versus man-made scenes is driven by bottom-up processing of the low-level visual features of nature. We used participants' ratings of perceived naturalness as well as esthetic preference for 307 image...

Abstract It has been suggested that particle physics reached the “dawn of post-naturalness era.” I explain current shift in physicists’ attitude toward naturalness. argue naturalness principle was perceived to be supported by theories it inspired. The potential coherence between major beyond standard model (BSM) proposals and led an increasing degree credibility among physicists. absence new at...

This paper describes issues relating to the subjective evaluation of synthesised visual speech. Two approaches to synthesis are compared: a text-driven synthesiser and a speech-driven synthesiser. Both synthesisers are trained using the same data and both use the same model for rendering the synthesised visual speech. Naturalness is used as a performance metric, and the naturalness of real visu...

This study investigates how different prosodic features affect native speakers' naturalness judgement of L2 English speech by Chinese students. Through subjective judgment by native speakers and objectively measured prosodic features, timing and pitch related prosodic features, as well as segmental goodness of pronunciation have been found to play key roles in native speakers' perception of nat...