Abstract Are mental disorders (autism, ADHD, schizophrenia) natural kinds or socially constructed categories? What is at stake if either of these views prove to be true? This paper offers a qualified defence for the view that there may disorder, but also implications this claim are generally overestimated. Especially concerns about over-inclusiveness diagnostic categories and medicalisation abn...

Background: Mothers with preterm infants experience numerous stressful problems which can be associated with negative effects on maternal role adaptation. Objectives: The present study aimed to evaluate maternal role adaptation in mothers with late-preterm infants and its related factors. Methods: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted in Ayatollah Mousavi Hospital in Zanjan, Iran du...

Naturalization without Natural Kinds: On the prospects of a unified theory of religion. From the propagation of religion, it is not hard to understand the causes of the resolution of the same into its first seeds or principles; which are only an opinion of a deity, and powers invisible and supernatural; that can never be so abolished out of human nature but that new religions may again be made ...

The first of the two sentences in (1) entails the second; necessarily, if the first is true then so is the second. Moreover, (1) is an instance of a more general pattern whose validity doesn’t seem to depend on the specific meanings of the words in (1). The adverb ‘quickly’, for example, can be replaced with any of a wide range of adverbs without loss of validity; analogous remarks hold for the...

The status of transderivational constraints (TDCs) in syntactic theory has always been controversial. TDCs – informally definable as any that make syntactic well-formedness dependent upon sets of sentences – were proposed throughout the 1970s in various forms.1 Most were quickly discovered to be factually or theoretically unsound. But this did not lead to a rejection of transderivational thinki...

Situated cognition motivates a review of knowledge maintenance. If knowledge is situated, then a symbolic knowledge base will require modi-cation as the situation changes. We examine the AI and software engineering literature which relates to acquiring and changing programs. Based 5 on a reverse engineering of that literature, we see that strategies have been ooered to maintain diierent types o...

Problems in probabilistic induction are of two general kinds. In the first, we have a linearly ordered sequence of symbols that must be extrapolated. In the second we want to extrapolate an unordered set of finite strings. A very general formal solution to the first kind of problem is well known and much work has been done in obtaining good approximations to it [LI 93, Ris 78, Ris 89, Sol 64a, ...

This research addressed how inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning are related. We directly compared the ideas that the same cognitive mechanisms are applied to both types of judgments and that different processes lead induction and deduction to use different information. In an experiment, subjects either judged inductive strength or deductive validity, for a common set of arguments. A fin...