Competence and Performance

I was listening to a popular music song of this year, entitled Manchild. It is sung by Sabrina Carpenter, and written by Sabrina Carpenter, Amy Allen, and Jack Antonoff. It contains these fascinating lyrics: “And I like my men all incompetent.” One’s conception of women is usually that women prefer competent men, who have money and status. Now some men probably approach trying to attract a certain woman as like trying to meet certain job requirements, to be competent for a (...) particular job. That leads to paradox, given the Sabrina Carpenter character: in order to be competent for the job of being this woman’s man, one has to be incompetent. But there is a simple solution: more fully, one has to be incompetent by normal standards, not by the standards of this job or this woman. There is no actual contradiction once this clarification is offered. I shall leave the video for Humeans! (shrink)

In this first of two essays written on the topic of ancient greek inscriptions, I will briefly explore and discuss the role of the written word and of visual language within the cult of Asclepius at Epidauros, by both looking at the creation and function of the Epidaurian sanctuary's healing inscriptions—also called 'iamata'. Throughout the essay I have made use of J.L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to better contextualize the meaning of the inscriptions dealt with.

In this second of two essays on the topic of ancient Greek inscriptions, I will briefly explore and discuss the textuality of ritual norms or, 'sacred laws', by looking 1) at the reasons for these ritual norms to have been written down in the first place and 2) how these norms/laws/decrees were able to get their observers to adhere to them. Throughout the essay I have made use of J.L. Austin's Speech Act Theory to better contextualize the meaning of the (...) inscriptions dealt with. (shrink)

This paper starts from the debates on whether the seemingly effortless creation of AI artworks, and by extension some Avant-Garde pieces, diminishes their artistic value. This leads to a broader inquiry into how effort, or the lack thereof, influences our perception of an artwork’s quality and significance. Traditionally, effort in art has been seen in two ways. On the one hand, a skilled artist’s work, which may appear effortless, is often valued for its apparent ease, reflecting genius or inspiration. On (...) the other hand, the Romantic era highlighted the artist’s internal struggle, shifting emphasis from technical proficiency to emotional and intellectual effort. Contemporary empirical research seems to confirm the existence of an “effort heuristic”, suggesting that artworks perceived as requiring more effort are generally valued higher. Finally, this paper suggests defining a notion of “distributed effort” as a category for the appreciation of content and artworks that are the product of complex influences, tradition, technological advancements. As a conclusion it is suggested to investigate the possibility of “artificial effort” in AI-generated art. (shrink)

The style, tone and tenor of the New Testament writers are unique and exceptional. Jesus of Nazareth, Hebraic roots, Old Testament literature, oral tradition, Hellenistic influence, Roman governance, 1st century socio-politics, and multifarious linguistic elements combined to immortalize their literary records and make them indelible in the minds of contemplative readers. This book acknowledges previous work and seeks to connect the thoughts gleaned from them to seminal ideas that have their locus in the inquiry of how language can influence thought (...) and vice-versa. The information has been sourced from the fields of religion, biblical studies, linguistics, English literature, grammar learning, geo-politics, philology, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence as they have to do with thought, language, and society. The carefully quoted and paraphrased opinions of writers from the related disciplines since the fourth century BCE are presented here. However, the volume reflects the very marked influence of 20th century thinkers who have had the benefit of perusing the work of their predecessors and 21st century pioneers who have at their disposal ultra-modern technology, computing power, and easy access to a global community to which the ideas may be applied for comparative analysis. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Keith Lehrer’s account of freedom of choice, when allied to the Performance/Competence distinction commonly deployed in cognitive Science (by scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor) helps us distinguish the human capacity for freedom, which looks free and “uncaused”, as Sartre influentially puts it in Being & Nothingness, from the external/performance aspects of freedom. Analytic philosophers have been preoccupied with the latter, performance aspect of freedom. Attending to the internal aspect, that is, the (...) capacity for freedom, helps us form a richer and more complete picture of the possibilities of human freedom. This approach ties Lehrer’s innovative account of freedom of choice with the broader rationalist tradition in cognitive science and philosophy, and also allows us to better appreciate the Sartrean strain in Lehrer’s work. (shrink)

Cognitive development research distinguishes between what children know (competence) and their ability to demonstrate their knowledge (performance). An experiment can fail to reveal a child’s competence if its design limits the child’s performance. This distinction allows researchers to design experiments that limit the impact of performance factors, leading to observations of competence earlier in cognitive development. The distinction is often used in a deflationary way, where performance factors are taken to be extraneous to the competence of interest, so that they (...) are irrelevant to a theory of competence. Using the role of children’s pragmatic inferences in mentalizing development as a case, I argue that this is sometimes an implausible use of the distinction. Performance factors do not necessarily support deflationary explanations and so are not always extraneous. I develop the concept of a learning procedure which specifies the attentional and inferential constraints that govern the construction of children’s developing competences. Changes in children’s pragmatic inferences can critically reshape learning procedures with developmental consequences for mentalizing. This case has the wider implication that performance factors split into two kinds. Synchronic performance factors are extraneous to competence and track competence at a specific time. Diachronic performance factors are developmentally entangled with competence and affect competence over developmental time. I outline how these two kinds of performance can be teased apart empirically. (shrink)

This essay explores enunciation phenomena that cannot be classified either as veritative assertions, attempts at deception, or purely fictional stagings. It addresses situations where an individual declares facts while adopting the role of a sincere speaker, even though it seems evident to both the speaker and the audience that what is being said is unwarranted. In the attempt to define what do we do when we “perform believing”, the discussion will include cases from contemporary arts, and roles such as lawyers, (...) sports fans, superstitious individuals, and religious believers. This leads to define the features of belief performing as connected with epistemological notions such as acceptance and commitment. In conclusion, a particular case of contemporary artistic practice, i.e., parafictions, will be examined as a specific approach of critical and self-reflective exploration of staged-truth mechanisms, where creators engage with truth and deception to challenge viewers’ perceptions and the categorization of belief. The paper argues that such engagements reveal societal mechanisms about how we construct and accept truths within our communities. By analyzing instances like conspiracy theories and cultural narratives, the essay underscores the performative nature of truth-asserting, calling for a reevaluation of how beliefs are negotiated in public discourse. (shrink)

A ideia da primeira parte deste e-book surgiu durante a disciplina de Tópicos Especiais em Políticas Linguísticas ministrada por mim no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Estudos de Linguagens (PPGEL) da Faculdade de Artes Letras de Comunicação (FAALC) da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS) durante o segundo semestre de 2023. A segunda parte da obra surgiu de afinidades teóricas e metodológicas entre as professoras do curso de Letras da UFMS (Campo Grande) que orientam os capítulos 7, 8 e (...) 9 e traz diferentes questões relacionadas ao ensino de línguas. [...] Por fim, espero que esta obra possa contribuir para ampliar e qualificar as reflexões acerca das temáticas aqui levantadas e que possa suscitar novas propostas de pesquisa ou de intervenção no ensino de línguas e nas Políticas Linguísticas. (shrink)

This article defends the view that having a language just is knowing how to engage in communication with it. It also argues that, despite claims to the contrary, this view is compatible and complementary with the Chomskyan conception of language on which humans have languages in virtue of being in brain states realizing tacit knowledge of grammars for those languages.

A familiar argument goes as follows: natural languages have infinitely many sentences, finite representation of infinite sets requires recursion; therefore any adequate account of linguistic competence will require some kind of recursive device. The first part of this paper argues that this argument is not convincing. The second part argues that it was not the original reason recursive devices were introduced into generative linguistics. The real basis for the use of recursive devices stems from a deeper philosophical concern; a grammar (...) that functions merely as a metalanguage would not be explanatorily adequate as it would merely push the problem of explaining linguistic competence back to another level. The paper traces this concern from Zellig Harris and Chomsky’s early work in generative linguistics and presents some implications. (shrink)

The topic of this dissertation is the nature of linguistic competence, the capacity to understand and produce sentences of natural language. I defend the empiricist account of linguistic competence embedded in the connectionist cognitive science. This strand of cognitive science has been opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science, coupled with transformational-generative grammar, which was committed to nativism due to the view that human cognition, including language capacity, should be construed in terms of symbolic representations and hardwired rules. Similarly, linguistic (...) competence in this framework was regarded as being innate, rule-governed, domain-specific, and fundamentally different from performance, i.e., idiosyncrasies and factors governing linguistic behavior. I analyze state-of-the-art connectionist, deep learning models of natural language processing, most notably large language models, to see what they can tell us about linguistic competence. Deep learning is a statistical technique for the classification of patterns through which artificial intelligence researchers train artificial neural networks containing multiple layers that crunch a gargantuan amount of textual and/or visual data. I argue that these models suggest that linguistic competence should be construed as stochastic, pattern-based, and stemming from domain-general mechanisms. Moreover, I distinguish syntactic from semantic competence, and I show for each the ramifications of the endorsement of a connectionist research program as opposed to the traditional symbolic cognitive science and transformational-generative grammar. I provide a unifying front, consisting of usage-based theories, a construction grammar approach, and an embodied approach to cognition to show that the more multimodal and diverse models are in terms of architectural features and training data, the stronger the case is for the connectionist linguistic competence. I also propose to discard the competence vs. performance distinction as theoretically inferior so that a novel and integrative account of linguistic competence originating in connectionism and empiricism that I propose and defend in the dissertation could be put forward in scientific and philosophical literature. (shrink)

Many theorists assume that a request is sincere if the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act requested. I argue that this assumption predicts an implausible mismatch between sincere assertions and sincere directives and needs to be revised. I present an alternative view, according to which directive utterances can only be sincere if they are self-directed. Other-directed directives, however, can be genuine or fake, depending on whether the speaker wants the addressee to perform the act in question. Finally, I (...) argue that this new perspective opens the door to a satisfying theory of authentic expression, for both assertive and directive utterances. Authenticity consists in the combination of genuine and sincere speech, for example, in the case of assertion, when speakers assert something which they both believe (sincerity) and want the addressee to believe (genuineness). (shrink)

Brief: Analysis on English and British Literature widely along-with creative genre, on using different styles of linguistic capability at different types of Essays, reflected now on recent book 'The Revolt in the Desert (Journey on English Literature from India to USA).

According to one prominent view of exercising abilities (e.g., Millar 2010), a subject, S, counts as exercising an ability to ϕ if and only if S successfully ϕs. Such an ‘exercise-success’ thesis looks initially very plausible for abilities, perhaps even obviously or analytically true. In this paper, however, I will be defending the position that one can in fact exercise an ability to do one thing by doing some entirely distinct thing, and in doing so I’ll highlight various reasons (epistemological, (...) metaphysical and linguistic) that favor the alternative approach I develop over views that hold that the exercise of an ability is a success notion in the sense Millar maintains. (shrink)

Paul Pietroski has developed a powerful minimalist and internalist alternative to standard compositional semantics, where meanings are identified with instructions to fetch or assemble human concepts in specific ways. In particular, there appears to be no need for Fregean Function Application, as natural language composition only involves processes of combining monadic or dyadic concepts, and Pietroski’s theory can then, allegedly, avoid both singular reference and truth conditions. He also has a negative agenda, purporting to show, roughly, that the vocabulary of (...) standard truth conditional semantics is far too powerful to plausibly describe the linguistic competence of mere human minds. In this paper, I explain some of the basics of Pietroski’s compositional semantics and argue that his major objection to standard compositionality is inconclusive, because a similar argument can be mounted against his own minimalist theory. I argue that we need a clear distinction between the language of the theorist---theoretical notation---and the language whose nature we are trying to explain. The theoretical notation should in fact be as expressively powerful as possible. It does not follow that the notation cannot be used to explain mere human linguistic competence, even if human minds are limited in various ways. (shrink)

According to standard assumptions in semantics, ordinary users of a language have implicit beliefs about the truth-conditions of sentences in that language, and they often agree on those beliefs. For example, it is assumed that if Anna and John are both competent users of English and the former utters ‘grass is green’ in conversation with the latter, they will both believe that that sentence is true if and only if grass is green. These assumptions play an important role in an (...) intuitively compelling picture of communication, according to which successful communication through literal assertoric utterances is normally effected thanks to our shared beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences uttered in the course of the conversation. Against these standard assumptions, this paper argues that the participants in a conversation rarely have the same beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences involved in a linguistic interaction. More precisely, it argues for Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition which more than one language user believes to be that utterance’s truth-conditional content. If Variance is true, we must reject the standard picture of communication. Towards the end of the paper I identify three ways in which ordinary conversations can be communication-like despite the truth of Variance and argue that the most natural amendments to the standard picture fail to explain them. (shrink)

The chapter introduces a new puzzle—albeit one that is reminiscent of Meno’s famous puzzle about investigation. The puzzle that Plato formulates challenges the possibility of inquiry in general, whereas this puzzle concerns the special case of inquiry into our thoughts. Our puzzle is that, in the difficult cases of articulation, coming to know what we are thinking seems to require knowing the words that capture our thoughts; yet, at the same time, having the latter knowledge itself seems to require already (...) knowing what we are thinking. After characterizing the cases that give rise to the puzzle and honing its presentation, the chapter addresses several lines of response to it, including the worry that the puzzle simply reduces to Meno’s original paradox and the worry that it does not constitute a genuine philosophical paradox at all. (shrink)

Articulating a thought can be astoundingly easy. We generally have no trouble expressing complex ideas that we have never considered before, though not always. Articulating a thought can also be extremely hard. Our difficulties in articulating thoughts pervade many aspects of philosophical inquiry, as well as many ordinary situations. While we may overcome some of the challenges through education and practice, we cannot do away with them altogether. And the hardest thoughts to articulate often come to us unbidden: as we (...) neither assemble them from other thoughts nor get them from any source of external information. They can come from us freely and spontaneously, and frequently we articulate them in order to find out what they are. In many cases, we would not bother articulating our thoughts if we already had this knowledge--yet, when we find the right words, we can often instantly tell that they express our thought. How do we manage to recognize the formulations of our thoughts, in the absence of prior knowledge of what we are thinking? And why is it that producing a public language formulation contributes in any way to the deeply private undertaking of coming to know our own thoughts? In Articulating a Thought, Eli Alshanetsky considers how we make our thoughts clear to ourselves in the process of putting them into words and examines the paradox of those difficult cases where we do not already know what we are struggling to articulate. (shrink)

On the proposed solution to the puzzle, we recognize the correct formulations of our thoughts by relying on our implicit knowledge of what we are thinking. After discussing an analogous puzzle in the case of basic perceptual classification and constructing a model of implicit knowledge for the simpler case of color recognition, the chapter extends the model to the trickier case of thought. On this model, our implicit knowledge of an item consists in its stored _signature_—the invariant aspect of experience (...) that its instances share. On the proposed solution, the process that mediates between implicit and explicit knowledge is not itself wholly sub-personal. Instead, it is best understood as straddling the personal/sub-personal divide. A deeper source of the puzzle that emerges from this chapter’s discussion of our involvement in articulation lies in the conflation between two types of freedom (or control) that we may have over a response. (shrink)

This chapter looks closely at another important aspect of the articulation process: the kind of _reasoning_ that we engage in when we articulate a thought. Although we often articulate our thoughts without engaging in any reasoning, a certain kind of reasoning does sometimes play an ancillary role in our assessment of a formulation. In articulating a thought, we are often cognizant of various attitudes that we have in reaction to it. The thought may seem true or false, hopeful or alarming, (...) frivolous or serious, and so on. We reject formulations that do not support such attitudes in any way. This chapter shows that these attitudes pass through a kind of “normative filter”, or a rapid normative evaluation, and goes some way toward understanding the character of this evaluation using the previous account of implicit knowledge. Understanding how we reason with unarticulated thoughts can enhance our understanding of reasoning, more generally. (shrink)

After rejecting deflationism, the central further question is whether our rejections and acceptances of words, in the articulation process, are based on reasons. Reasons-theorists say “yes” and look for some mental state that gives us a reason for accepting/rejecting a formulation. One kind of reasons-theorist argues that our reasons come from some _knowledge_ we have of our thought. Another kind of reasons-theorist argues that our reasons come from _feelings_ that result from sub-personally matching our thought with our words. Contra the (...) reasons-theorists, this chapter maintains that we cannot make sense of the bulk of our responses in the articulation process by assimilating them into the reasons framework. Resolving the puzzle calls for an alternative model of rational control—one that may be implicated in learning and numerous other epistemologically central activities, ranging from basic perceptual categorization to sophisticated mathematical discovery. (shrink)

In articulating our thoughts, our attention rarely goes to the formulation itself. What we evaluate are not sounds or inscriptions but ways in which other competent users of our language would interpret them. But how do we arrive at words that would elicit precisely the needed interpretation? And why does the other person enter into the picture at all? Why do we need to know what some other person would think we think, and realize that that is, in fact, what (...) we think, to know what we ourselves think? Why do we take the other person’s response into account in trying to come to know our private thoughts? Although these questions span several different areas of philosophy, their most natural home is the subject of self-knowledge. This chapter sketches the territory of the subject from a distinctive perspective and indicates the place of the book’s project in it. (shrink)

Deflationists seek to reinterpret the puzzle cases so that the puzzle never arises. On this type of view, what we do in the difficult cases of articulation does not consist in articulating thoughts already in place, but rather in using language to form new thoughts. A _moderate deflationist_ draws an analogy between what we do in these cases and the elaboration of a plan, whose detailed implementation we work out later, as we go. A _radical deflationist_ denies that we search (...) for any fixed type of formulation at all, arguing that our acceptance of a formulation is either a free choice or a consequence of reaching a natural stopping point in our thinking. Examining a wide range of deflationary views helps bring out many of the key features of the puzzle cases and map out the variety of ways in which we can think in words. (shrink)

Once we are done articulating the thought, we can easily articulate it again, using different words with the same meaning. But the thought may become difficult to articulate again, with time. In many such cases (for example, during teaching, job interviews, and exams), our knowledge of the thought does not dissipate altogether, but switches back to an implicit format. We can regain our explicit knowledge by engaging in an effortful process of recollection. The memory process shares the key features of (...) the process of articulation and lends itself to a variant of the initial puzzle. Placing the memory puzzle alongside analogous puzzles in the case of thought and perception brings out the general form of the puzzle that pertains to our knowledge of all foundational facts. Our knowledge of such facts, in all these cases, could be underwritten by our possession of certain bits of implicit knowledge. (shrink)

I present a novel, collaborative, methodology for linguistics: what I call the ‘explanatory economy’. According to this picture, multiple models/theories are evaluated based on the extent to which they complement one another with respect to data coverage. I show how this model can resolve a long-standing worry about the methodology of generative linguistics: that by creating too much distance between data and theory, the empirical credentials of this research program are tarnished. I provide justifications of such methodologically central distinctions as (...) the competence/performance and core/periphery distinction, and then show how we can understand the push for simplicity in the history of generative grammar in this light. (shrink)

This article surveys the philosophical literature on theoretical linguistics. The focus of the paper is centred around the major debates in the philosophy of linguistics, past and present, with specific relation to how they connect to the philosophy of science. Specific issues such as scientific realism in linguistics, the scientific status of grammars, the methodological underpinnings of formal semantics, and the integration of linguistics into the larger cognitive sciences form the crux of the discussion.

In the literature seeking to explain concepts in terms of their point, talk of ‘the point’ of concepts remains under-theorised. I propose a typology of points which distinguishes practical, evaluative, animating, and inferential points. This allows us to resolve tensions such as that between the ambition of explanations in terms of the points of concepts to be informative and the claim that mastering concepts requires grasping their point; and it allows us to exploit connections between types of points to understand (...) why they come apart, and whether they do so for problematic ideological reasons or for benignly functional reasons. (shrink)

Eu começo com alguns comentários famosos pelo filósofo (psicólogo) Ludwig Wittgenstein porque Pinker compartilha com a maioria de povos (devido às configurações padrão de nosso psychology inata evoluído) determinados preconceitos sobre o funcionamento da mente, e Porque Wittgenstein oferece insights únicos e profundos sobre o funcionamento da linguagem, pensamento e realidade (que ele viu como mais ou menos coextensivo) não encontrado em nenhum outro lugar. Ore é apenas referência a Wittgenstein neste volume, que é mais lamentável, considerando que ele foi (...) o mais brilhante e original analista de linguagem. No último capítulo, usando a famosa metáfora da caverna de Platão, ele lindamente resume o livro com uma visão geral de como a mente (linguagem, pensamento, psicologia intencional)-um produto de egoísmo cego, moderado apenas ligeiramente por altruísmo automatizado para fechar parentes carregando cópias de nossos genes (inclusive fitness)--funciona automaticamente, mas tenta terminar em uma nota otimista, dando-nos esperança de que podemos, no entanto, empregar suas vastas capacidades para cooperar e tornar o mundo um lugar decente para viver. Pinker é certamente consciente de mas diz pouco sobre o fato de que muito mais sobre a nossa psicologia é deixada de fora do que incluído. Entre as janelas na natureza humana que são deixadas de fora ou dada a mínima atenção são matemática e geometria, música e sons, imagens, eventos e causalidade, ontologia (classes de coisas ou o que sabemos), a maioria da epistemologia (como sabemos), disposições (acreditando, pensando, julgando, pretendendo etc.) e o resto da psicologia intencional de ação, neurotransmissores e entheogens, Estados espirituais (por exemplo, Satori e iluminação, estimulação cerebral e gravação, danos cerebrais e comportamentais déficits e distúrbios, jogos e esportes, teoria da decisão (incluindo teoria do jogo e economia comportamental), comportamento animal (muito pouca linguagem, mas um bilhão de anos de genética compartilhada). Muitos livros foram escritos sobre cada uma dessas áreas de psicologia intencional. Os dados neste livro são descrições, não explicações que mostram por que os nossos cérebros fazê-lo desta forma ou como é feito. Como sabemos usar as frases de sua maneira (ou seja, conhecer todos os seus significados)? Esta é a psicologia evolutiva que opera em um nível mais básico-o nível em que Wittgenstein é mais ativo. E há pouca atenção ao contexto em que as palavras são usadas = uma arena que Wittgenstein foi pioneira. No entanto, este é um trabalho clássico e com estes cuidados ainda é bem vale a pena ler. Aqueles que desejam um quadro até à data detalhado para o comportamento humano da opinião moderna dos dois sistemas consultar meu livros Falando Macacos 3ª Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica da Filosofia, Psicologia, Mente e Linguagem em Ludwig Wittgenstein e John Searle 2a Ed (2019), Suicídio Pela Democracia,4aEd(2019), Entendendo as Conexões entre Ciência, Filosofia, Psicologia, Religião, Política e Economia Artigos e Análises 2006-2019 (2019), Ilusões Utópicas Suicidas no 21St século 5a Ed (2019), A Estrutura Lógica do Comportamento Humano (2019), e A Estrutura Lógica da Consciência (2019) y outras. (shrink)

When dealing with complex value-driven problems such as sustainable development, individuals need to have values and norms that go beyond the appropriation of tangible business outcomes for themselves. This raises the question of the role played by individual moral antecedents in the entrepreneurial process of opportunity recognition for sustainable development. To answer this question, an exploratory empirical research design was used in which 96 would-be entrepreneurs were subjected to real-life decision-making processes in an online environment. The participants were guided through (...) the process of opportunity recognition for sustainable development. Furthermore, they were subjected to several tests linked to individual moral antecedents. The mixed methods design used to analyze the results led to the conclusion that pro-environmental behavior values and moral competencies are important indicators of the ability to recognize opportunities for sustainable development. These results provide useful insights about relating moral antecedents to idea generation for sustainable development and can help researchers, higher education institutes, and sustainable entrepreneurs to further develop the concept of sustainable entrepreneurship and its underlying processes. (shrink)

In the history of formal semantics, the successful joining of linguistic and philosophical work brought with it some difficult foundational questions concerning the nature of meaning and the nature of knowledge of language in the domain of semantics: questions in part about “what’s in the head” of a competent language-user. This paper, part of a project on the history of formal semantics, revisits the central issues of (Partee, 1979) in a historical context, as a clash between two traditions, Fregean and (...) Chomskyan, a clash that accompanied early work combining Montague’s semantics with Chomskyan syntax. Recent advances in philosophy of mind (from, e.g., Stalnaker and Burge) go a long way towards changing the framework of arguments about “psychological reality” and “competence”, challenging the suppositions on which the original dichotomy rested, thus largely defusing the tension. (shrink)

انطلاقا من التقارير الدولية ، والتقرير الأخير للمجلس الأعلى للتعليم ، يتضح جليا أن التعليم نظام يعاني أزمة تتمثل مظاهرها في ضعف مستوى تعلم الخريجين، وتفشي أزمة البطالة، الشيء الذي يؤثر سلبا على التنمية ويعرقلها. سوف لن ندعي أننا سباقون إلى تناول هذه الظاهرة بالتحليل، كما أننا لسنا بصدد وضع خطة للنهوض بالمنظومة التعليمية، ولكن ما يشفع لنا في الكتابة فيه، أنه موضوع مزمن ويحتاج إلى الكثير من الدراسة. كما أن هذه الخطة ستتضمن من أهم عناصرها جديدا غير وارد في (...) الدراسات السابقة وهو الدعوة إلى إدماج تعليم المهن والحرف اليدوية في الأسلاك التعليمية، بدءا من الخامس ابتدائي وإلى مستوى الباكلوريا. والدعوة إلى تغيير النظرة الدونية لهذه المهن ولأصحابها باعتبارها النواة الأساسية لبناء اقتصاد مستقل. ولأنها تشكل الحلقة المفقودة بين تعليمنا وبين مشكلات الحياة باعتبارها غائبة عن هذه الأسلاك، وهذا واقع لا يمكن لأحد نكرانه ولا أحتاج عليه دليلا. وحتى إذا قال أحد أن هذا التعليم موجود، سنرد عليه أنه وجود في مراكز التكوين المهني المستقلة عن الأسلاك التعليمية، كما لا يدخله في نظر العامة إلا الفاشلون. مع العلم أن من أسبا ب فشل نظامنا التعليمي هو كونه تعليما نظريا لا علاقة له بالجانب التطبيقي. للتوصل إلى هذه الخطة، والتي سنحاول قدر الإمكان أن تكون متكاملة، سنعرض لبعض تصورات مفكرين وتربويين مغاربة مثل محمد عابد الجابري 1973، ومحمد جسوس 1997، ومادي لحسن 1997، وكل من الفضيل العيرج وبوشعيب الزين 2014. كما سنعرض لعناصر الالتقاء بينها ولطبيعة اشتغال أصحابها. ثم سنتناول تجربتين عالميتين رائدتين هما اليابان وماليزيا. وسوف لن نقارن بينها وبين المغرب من أجل المقارنة لذاتها، ولكن من أجل وضع الأصبع على سر نهضتها وسر أزمتنا التعليمية الدائمة، وأيضا من أجل استلهام خطتنا التي ذكرنا بعضا من ملامحها قبل قليل. فما هي طبيعة التصورات السابقة؟ وما طبيعة النماذج العالمية الناجحة؟ وما هي بالتالي الخطة التي نقترحها للخروج من الفشل؟ وما الفرق بينها وبين تصورات المفكرين المغاربة المذكورين؟ وهل نحن في حاجة إلى خطط وتصورات، أم أننا في حاجة إلى شيء آخر؟ هذا ما سنحاول الإجابة عليه، اعتمادا على منهج يجمع بين الوصف والتحليل والمقارنة والتفسير في إطار يجمع بين دراسة المضمون ودراسة الحالة. Revue Brochures Educatives مجلة كراسات تربوية (2018). (shrink)

In this paper, I critique a recent claim made by Stokhof and van Lambalgen (2011) (hereafter S&vL) that linguistics and science are at odds as to the models and constructions they employ. I argue that their distinction between abstractions and idealisations, the former belonging to the methodology of science and the latter to linguistics, is not a real one. I show that the majority of their arguments are flawed and evidence they cite misleading. Contrary to this distinction, I argue that (...) linguistics, like some variants of the scientific enterprise, uses a minimalist method of idealisation (Weisberg, 2007b), one which includes abstractions (as defined by S&vL) and other idealisations not uncommon to scientific model-building. Finally, I offer an alternative account of the problems cited by S&vL as a direct result of the modelling choices of linguists as opposed to the methods they use to define such models. I do so through the use of the specific example of the treatment of tense and aspect in the mainstream literature. (shrink)

Wittgenstein has shown that that life, in the sense that applies in the first place to human beings, is inherently linguistic. In this paper, I ask what is involved in language, given that it is thus essential to life, answering that language – or concepts – must be both alive and the ground for life. This is explicated by a Wittgensteinian series of entailments of features. According to the first feature, concepts are not intentional engagements. The second feature brings life (...) back to concepts by describing them as inflectible: Attitudes, actions, conversations and other engagements inflect concepts, i.e., concepts take their particular characters in our actual engagements. However, inflections themselves would be reified together with the life they ground unless they could preserve the openness of concepts: hence the third feature of re-inflectibility. Finally, the openness of language must be revealed in actual life. This entails the possibility of conceptual ambivalence. (shrink)

Phonological change of vowel length in Farsi -/- Author / Authors : Reza Heidarizadi Page no. 50 - 55 Discipline : Persian Linguistics/language Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Keywords: Farsi vowels, vowel length, Compensatory lengthening.

The majority rule has caught much attention in recent debate about the aggregation of judgments. But its role in finding the truth is limited. A majority of expert judgments is not necessarily authoritative, even if all experts are equally competent, if they make their judgments independently of each other, and if all the judgments are based on the same source of (good) evidence. In this paper I demonstrate this limitation by presenting a simple counterexample and a related general result. I (...) pave the way for this argument by introducing a Bayesian model of evidence and expert judgment in order to give a precise account of the basic problem. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: (a) To measure the effect of a guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared with the performance after unspecific training by a competency question based evaluation; and (b) to provide empirical evidence for the applicability of competency questions in formal ontology evaluation in general. BACKGROUND: A close connection between ontology development and ontology evaluation as quality management procedure can been attained with the use of competency questions. Competency questions are often used as a semi-formal specification of requirements (...) for an ontology under development. Hence they can also be used as evaluation instruments, in order to check how far an ontology fulfills these requirements. METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was conducted with two groups of 12 students each. The intervention consisted in a differential guideline-based training on ontology development vs. unspecific training. After a group-specific training focusing on three topics per group, performance of students was assessed with 12 exercises (2 exercises per topic), in which the students had to apply their skills. Different types of competency questions were elaborated for the analysis of the students' ontologies. We used the proportion of correct answers as a measure of ontology quality. RESULTS: On single topic level, the performance of ontology developers increased after guideline-based training for two out of the six topics: it increased from a proportion of 0.46 to 0.63 for the topic Process \& Participation and from 0.44 to 0.53 for the topic Collective Material Entity. In regression analysis, a positive correlation was shown between the performance of students on untrained topics and the performance after specific guideline-based training. Moreover, in multiple regression analysis an overall effect of specific training of 0.09 was calculated (p < 0.1). CONCLUSION: The results show an effect of a specific guideline-based training on the performance of ontology developers compared to the performance after unspecific training by an increase of about 10 \% on the rate of correct competency questions. In addition, this study has shown the general applicability of competency questions in a formal ontology evaluation scenario. However, the study also shows that the training of ontology developers and their performance evaluation is a tedious task. The resulting performance of ontology developers is more dependent on the a priori individual competencies than on the specific acquired skills after training. (shrink)

This article deals with the cognitive relationship between a speaker and her internal grammar. In particular, it takes issue with the view that such a relationship is one of belief or knowledge (I call this view the ‘Propositional Attitude View’, or PAV). I first argue that PAV entails that all ordinary speakers (tacitly) possess technical concepts belonging to syntactic theory, and second, that most ordinary speakers do not in fact possess such concepts. Thus, it is concluded that speakers do not (...) literally ‘know’ or ‘believe’ much of the contents of their grammars, and moreover, that these contents can only be attributed at a subpersonal level. (shrink)

A supposition which underlies and guides much theoretical work in linguistics and philosophy is that ordinary speakers "internally represent" recursive systems of linguistic rules. This supposition is not only pervasive; it is also extremely persuasive, for it is supported by a nest of very powerful arguments. Perhaps the most compelling of these is the argument from linguistic creativity, viz. that apparently the only explanation of how ordinary speakers with finite brains can understand an infinite number of sentences involves such systems (...) of rules. Now, this argument and others like it raise an interesting problem for the student of the later Wittgenstein. On the one hand, they are entirely incompatible with this philosopher's adamant rejection of the "calculus" view of language. On the other hand, since they were formulated only after Wittgenstein's death, it is not clear how Wittgenstein would try to undermine them. ;The challenge, then, is to mount, on the basis of Wittgenstein's later writings, an attack against these arguments and the methodological supposition which they bolster. This challenge is met by my dissertation. I show first that the argument from linguistic creativity tacitly presupposes very basic views of understanding and meaning which Wittgenstein had compelling, albeit neglected, reasons for rejecting. I then argue that, contrary to the opinion of most analytic philosophers and linguists, Wittgenstein can account for the ordinary speaker's ability to understand an infinite number of sentences without invoking recursive systems of rules. ;Finally, I demonstrate that all of the remaining evidence for the methodological supposition either is a disguised version of the argument from linguistic creativity or is based upon highly controversial philosophical assumptions. (shrink)

The goals ofthis paper are to identify (in Section II) some general features of problem solving strategies in science, to discuss (in Section III) how Chomsky has employed two particularly popular discovery strategies in science, and to show (in Section IV) how these strategies inform Chomskyan linguistics. In Section IV I will discuss (1) how their employment in linguistics manifests features of scientific problem solving outlined in Section Il and (2) how an analysis in terms of those features suggests a (...) natural account for many controversial aspects 0fChomsky’s methods. I will specifically examine how this analysis bears on Chomsky’s claims concerning competence theories’ centrality in psychology and their psychological reality. Although no methodological considerations bar Chomsky from tinkering with our notion ofpsychology, competence theories mus! eventually offer some fruitful empirical connections with psycholinguistics and that part of mainstream cognitive psychology concerned with language study tojustify that tinkering. After twenty years of research such connections have proven rare enough to raise important doubts about thejustification ofChomsl·:y’s claims for the place of competence theory in cognitive psychology {and for the psychological reality of the mechanism it describes). Although I will argue (contra man) tf C}iom.rk_y’s critics) that his methods are unexceptionable, still [contra Chomsky) his theories have not proven sufficiently robust empirically to justify his strong claims concerning their position in cognitive psychology. (shrink)

In light of the sharp linguistic turn philosophy has taken in this century, this collection provides a much-needed and long-overdue reference for philosophical discussion. The first collection of its kind, it explores questions of the nature and existence of linguistic objects--including sentences and meanings--and considers the concept of truth in linguistics. The status of linguistics and the nature of language now take a central place in discussions of the nature of philosophy; the essays in this volume both inform these discussions (...) and lay the groundwork for further examination. (shrink)

The book from which these sections are excerpted is concerned with the prospects for assimilating the study of human intelligence and its products to the natural sciences through the investigation of cognitive structures, understood as systems of rules and representations that can be regarded as These mental structui′es serve as the vehicles for the exercise of various capacities. They develop in the mind on the basis of an innate endowment that permits the growth of rich and highly articulated structures along (...) an intrinsically determined course under the triggering and partially shaping effect of experience, which fixes parameters in an intricate system of predetermined form. It is argued that the mind is modular in character, with a diversity of cognitive structures, each with its specific properties arid principles. Knowledge of language, of the behavior of objects, and much else crucially involves these mental structures, and is thus not characterizable in terms of capacities, dispositions, or practical abilities, nor is it necessarily grounded in experience in the standard sense of this term. (shrink)