Fleming and Michel discuss the slowness of conscious vision and the predictions generated by an internal model of the world. However, these two points correspond to two different times. The slowness of consciousness puts the organisms in the past, whereas predictions give them a preview of the future. Given this tension between past and future representations, when is “now”?

Why might people make negative moral judgments about others’ consensual exchanges? Within triple theory, these should count as mutually beneficial agreements and therefore enjoy uncontroversial moral approval. We propose two explanations: observers of an exchange may (1) do their own cost-benefit analysis or (2) prioritize moral norms. Additional theorizing is required for either of these to align with resource rationality.

Wingleaf primrose-willow [Ludwigia decurrens Walter] is a pervasive rice (Oryza sativa L.) weed native or naturalized to South America, the Caribbean, and the southeastern United States. While it was first noted in California in 2011 and provided with the highest pest rating “A” by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, enforcing eradication or quarantine was relatively disregarded, and it did not appear to spread significantly past its initial infestation area. Here, we report the spread within four counties (Butte, Placer, Shasta, and Tehama) of California, for which it has been found up to 184 km away from the initial infestation, and the expansion of the initial infestation within Butte County. As L. decurrens is already a problematic rice weed in parts of Asia, Africa, India, and the United States, monitoring new infestations is pivotal to prevent negative economic and environmental consequences to California and the United States.

Martin-Löf’s identity types provide a generic (albeit opaque) notion of identification or “equality” between any two elements of the same type, embodied in a canonical reflexive graph structure $(=_A, \mathbf{refl})$ on any type A. The miracle of Voevodsky’s univalence principle is that it ensures, for essentially any naturally occurring structure in mathematics, that the resultant notion of identification is equivalent to the type of isomorphisms in the category of such structures. Characterisations of this kind are not automatic and must be established one-by-one; to this end, several authors have employed reflexive graphs and displayed reflexive graphs to organise the characterisation of identity types. We contribute reflexive graph lenses, a new family of intermediate abstractions lying between families of reflexive graphs and displayed reflexive graphs that simplifies the characterisation of identity types for complex structures. Every reflexive graph lens gives rise to a (more complicated) displayed reflexive graph, and our experience suggests that many naturally occurring displayed reflexive graphs arise in this way. Evidence for the utility of reflexive graph lenses is given by means of several case studies, including the theory of reflexive graphs itself as well as that of polynomial type operators. Finally, we exhibit an equivalence between the type of reflexive graph fibrations and the type of univalent reflexive graph lenses.

Contractualism might not be the only computational-level theory of morality that can unify multiple moral mechanisms. Other moral theories can be combined with resource-rationality in the same way. Extending resource-rational analysis to other potential functions of morality (e.g., global consequentialism), combinations of multiple moral objectives, and additional moral mechanisms might allow us to explain many additional aspects of commonsense morality.

Cette contribution examine la production des voyelles nasales du français chez les apprenants néerlandophones belges. Elle innove en ce qu’elle allie l'« intelligibilité » des voyelles non natives, évaluée par des auditeurs représentant Paris et Liège, à une analyse acoustique centrée sur la « nativité phonétique ». Les stimuli sont des mots monosyllabiques de haute fréquence produits par 20 apprenants néerlandophones. Les résultats indiquent que l’intelligibilité des nasales non natives est plutôt élevée, exception faite de /ɑ̃/. En outre, les deux groupes d’auditeurs ne diffèrent pas dans leur compréhension des voyelles, à l’exception de /ε̃/, que les Liégeois identifient plus souvent. Cette différence peut être liée à l’impact de (i) la variation en L1 ou (ii) la familiarité des auditeurs belges avec la parole néerlandaise. Enfin, l’étude montre que ce n’est pas tant la nasalité même qui pose des difficultés de production aux apprenants néerlandophones, mais l’interaction avec le timbre vocalique.

The target article maintains that consciousness emerged only when slow perceptual processing would be useful. But the formation of a conscious percept could be fast even if the vulcanization of that percept is slow. And fast formation may be too fast for a higher-order pointer to form.

Faced with the pressures of digital transformation, media organizations in China are undergoing a “think-tank turn,” in which Public Opinion Monitoring Services (POMS) are playing an integral role. This study uses POMS as a case to examine the digital transformation of Chinese media organizations and to explore the broader shifts in the political economy of Chinese media in the digital age. Combining in-depth interviews, fieldwork and analysis of secondary documents, this qualitative research study identifies the emergence of consulting as a “third role” of Chinese media, supplementing the traditional roles of news reporting and ideological propagation. This new role caters to the government’s need to govern the online space and manage public opinion through three primary operations: “timely firefighting” against dissident voices, “regular monitoring” of public opinion and the “periodic training” of information officials. In this context, POMS not only enable media organizations to navigate financial challenges but also significantly reshape their role and relationship with the state.

The postdictive experimental paradigm is not superior to the direct detection paradigm, according to which the best strategy to identify the neural correlate of visual consciousness is to treat postdiction as a confounding factor. We could at most establish an equal claim to legitimacy of the two paradigms; hence, there is no puzzle about the function of a “slow” consciousness.

This paper analyzes the structure of Noun Phrases with repeater classifiers (i.e., numeral classifiers that are only used with the single noun they are form-identical with). I show that a previous attempt to account for repeaters in terms of syntactic head movement encounters both empirical and theoretical problems. I suggest that repeaters emerge in the post-syntactic component, via a melody copying operation, which I characterize as a type of syntactic reduplication.

This commentary critiques the target article’s conflation of contractarianism and contractualism, arguing it overlooks how moral standards influence reasoning in bargaining. We propose integrating standards of fairness and individual differences into agreement-based models of moral cognition, arguing that principles of fairness and justification that go beyond strategic self-interest are indispensable in explaining moral judgments and decisions in asymmetric interactions.

Gauging the extent of public acceptability of reforms is an important concern for policymakers. Timely insights into public perceptions can illuminate how reforms are received and how attitudes evolve over time. In this study, we build on the OECD’s Public Acceptability Tool, a framework encompassing four key dimensions of reform acceptability—Economic, Fairness, Behavioural, and Process—to evaluate the public acceptability of policy reforms. We take the 2023 French pension reform as a relevant case study, using online media articles and parliamentary speeches as indicators of discourse surrounding the reform. Using word embeddings, we classify these texts according to the four dimensions and apply matrix factorisation topic algorithms to uncover the latent themes within each. Our analysis shows that the Process dimension dominated media coverage during the discussion and legislative phases of the reform, consistent with previous literature on pension reforms. In contrast, no particular dimension was predominant in parliamentary speeches, suggesting a mismatch between policy and public debates. Finally, we identify the main topics driving public discussion within each dimension, highlighting notable differences between media narratives and parliamentary discourse that offer further insight into the dynamics of public acceptability.

Resource-rational contractualism explains human moral reasoning as efficient heuristics approximating idealized bargaining processes. Levine et al. compellingly model pairwise and small-group moral cognition, but overlook how institutions serve as computational shortcuts – pre-computed agreements that eliminate repeated negotiation. These cached computations can become rigid over time, driving new opportunities for flexible negotiation.

Research suggests that reasoning about occluded objects, reality monitoring, and especially planning develop relatively late in children, and are capacities not universally shared with other land animals. F&M’s proposal needs to more clearly delineate their use of these concepts to avoid misunderstandings about what they see as essential for the evolution of conscious vision.

Yào in Mandarin, typically a modal, has subjunctive-like uses in complement clauses. Such uses are textual in that they signal interclausal modal cohesion between the main verb and the complement clause in a construction known as the pivotal manipulative construction. They fall into three types, depending on the relationship between yào and the main verb. All three likely originate from complement clauses negated by prohibitives. However, despite a common origin, two of the types are diachronically later and more contentful, rather than procedural. Therefore, it is proposed that the development of uses in complement clauses out of modality proper does not necessarily involve unidirectional increases in procedural meaning, as is often hypothesized.

This article explores how cultural representations of outer space in Kazakhstan reflect and shape public debates on the history and legacy of the Soviet cosmos while offering new perspectives on national cosmic imaginaries. Kazakhstan inherited much of the Soviet outer space physical infrastructure, including its most potent artefact, spaceport Baikonur. The article demonstrates that the artistic representations of the cosmic themes provide an important ground for understanding 1) how the cosmic enthusiasm and utopianism of Soviet astroculture have been moulded into a more critical interpretation of outer space and its impact on Kazakhstani society and 2) how the cosmic mythologies of the past have been used for reinventing Kazakho-futurism as an element of the nation’s future. ‘Cosmic art’ offers a unique lens for exploring how cultural representations of outer space contribute to the redefinition of societal conditions and the complexity of becoming a sovereign nation in the twenty-first century.