Early in development children rely on other people’s verbal testimony to acquire information about things that are not available to their immediate perception. There is evidence that children as ...young as 22 months can use language to learn about an object that undergoes a property change (e.g., “Lucy got wet”) out of their sight. If the verbal input conveys a change in the location of an absent object (e.g., “The puppy is moved from the bag to the box”), 30-month-olds successfully use this information and find the object in its new location, whereas the majority of 23-month-olds perseverate to the object’s initial location. These findings suggest that young children’s ability to use verbal testimony to update their mental representations of absent entities shows variability within and across tasks. The goal of the current research was to replicate the pattern of performance observed in previous cross-sectional studies within the same group of children. A total of 59 2-year-olds (Mage = 26.9 months, range = 21.4–34.5) were administered two versions of verbal updating tasks: property and location change. As a group, children showed more variable performance when they learned about a change in an object’s location (58% success) than when they learned about a change in its property (75% success). Moreover, comparison of individual children’s performance across the two tasks revealed that at this age children found the location change harder to update than the property change. We discuss possible explanations for children’s differential performance on verbal updating tasks involving property and location change.
ABSTRACT 'The Duologue of King/Governor Pāyāsi' ("Long Discourses") has long been recognised as a source for the proto-materialism current at the time of the Buddha. What needs to be stressed is the ...significance of the text as a pointer to the development of Logic in India. Perception (observation and experiment employing the joint method of agreement and difference), which is an accepted method of experimental enquiry, and reasoning from analogy, which can lead at best to a probable conclusion - these two are the only means employed to settle the dispute concerning the existence of the other-world. The Jain version of the same duologue-cum-parable, though varying in minor details regarding the name and identity of the monk refuting the king/governor, contains the same contrast, namely, perception versus analogical reasoning. There can be little doubt that the original parable was conceived with a view to asserting the existence of the other-world. In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (sixth century BCE), an earlier Brahmanical text, however, instead of argument by analogy, verbal testimony (śabda) was invoked to settle the same point. Naciketas is assailed by doubt about the existence of a person after his or her death. The authority of Yama, the Pluto of Indian mythology, is invoked to convince him that the other-world does exist. Thus, the three parables taken together exhibit three means of knowledge in operation: verbal testimony and argument by analogy pitted against perception.
RESUMO 'O duólogo do rei/governador Pāyāsi' ("Discursos Longos") há muito tempo é reconhecido como uma fonte da corrente protomaterialista da época do Buda. O que é necessário ressaltar é o significado desse texto como um indicador do desenvolvimento da lógica na Índia. Percepção (observação e experimento que empregam o método dúplice do acordo e da diferença), aceita como método de investigação experimental, e raciocínio por analogia, que no máximo pode conduzir a uma conclusão provável - apenas esses dois são os meios utilizados para dirimir a disputa que diz respeito à existência do outro-mundo. A versão jaina do mesmo duólogo-cum-parábola, mesmo com variações que concernem ao nome e à identidade do monge que se opõe ao rei/governador, contém o mesmo contraste, a dizer, percepção contra raciocínio por analogia. Não há muita dúvida de que a parábola original foi concebida com o intuito de afirmar a existência do outro-mundo. Entretanto, na Kaṭha Upaniṣad (século sexto a.C.), um texto bramânico mais antigo, em vez do argumento por analogia, o testemunho verbal (śabda) foi invocado para resolver o mesmo ponto. Naciketas é tomado pela dúvida sobre a existência da pessoa depois da sua morte. A autoridade de Yama, o Plutão da mitologia indiana, é invocada para convencê-lo que o outro-mundo existe. Portanto, as três parábolas juntas exibem três meios de conhecimento em função: testemunho verbal e argumento por analogia opostos à percepção.
The epistemology of śabda is one of the main themes in Bhaṭṭa Jayanta's Nyāyamañjarī, and, in the hypotheses explored in this paper, also the conceptual basis of Jayanta's textual re-use. The sixth ...chapter of the Nyāyamañjarī contains a debate between Vaiyākaraṇas and Mīmāṃsakas who, respectively, advocated an holistic or atomistic theory of language. Selected Jayanta's re-uses from Vyākaraṇa, Mīmāṃsā, and Nyāya sources are here surveyed and analyzed, with a focus on their meaning and on the context. The method of analysis is partially following Moravcsik's scheme for a classification of citations, as well as Small's classification by symbolic functions. By re-using texts Jayanta not only imparted authority to his own arguments, but also reassessed the relation of his tradition with other ones. Re-used ideas and words stand for symbols of those authors' tenets, and those authors represent symbols of their respective traditions. Moreover, by quoting a certain author Jayanta often anointed him with a symbolic status of trustworthy authority, and his statement with a status of śabdapramāṇa.
The question as to whether the Vedas have an author is the topic of vivid polemics in Indian philosophy. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the classical Sāṁkhya view on the authorship of the ...Vedas. The research is based chiefly on the commentaries to the Sāṁkhyakārikā definition of authoritative verbal testimony given by the classical Sāṁkhya writers, for these fragments provide the main evidence (both direct and indirect) for the reconstruction of this view. The textual analysis presented in this paper leads to the following conclusion. According to most classical Sāṁkhya commentaries, the Vedas have no author. Two commentators state directly that the Vedas have no author, and four commentators allude to the authorlessness of the Vedas. Only one commentator seems to hold the opposite view, stating that all the authoritative utterances are based on perception or inference of imperceptible objects by authoritative persons, from which it follows that the Vedas too have an author or authors.
Reports, Schedules, and Audiovisuals Beecken, William H; Beecken, Clark A
Fraud Examination Casebook with Documents,
2017, 2017-04-24
Book Chapter
This chapter discusses the components of a written fraud examination report. It explains how to refer to schedules and audiovisuals in the body of the report. As with reports, each organization has ...its format for schedules and those schedule formats often appear similar to schedule formats used in audit reports. While reading the report, the reader will need to review the underlying schedules, exhibits, and audiovisuals that may be attached to and/or support the report. The chapter explores the types of audiovisuals available to simplify the information found during the fraud examination. It further discusses how to enhance and script the expert testimony with audiovisuals. Accordingly, verbal testimony augmented by audiovisuals (visual) both increases the absorption of the facts and supports the expert's opinion. With well‐conceived audiovisuals, the triers of fact will pay closer attention, better understand the complexities of the fraud examiner's conclusion, and better remember the fraud examiner's testimony during deliberations.
Documenting Wordless Testimony Pitt, Jon L.
Angelaki : journal of theoretical humanities,
07/2023, Volume:
28, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article considers what it means to give plants a voice as witnesses to nuclear events. It examines two texts that attempt to represent the nonverbal testimony of irradiated plants through a ...hybrid approach of text and image: Sugihara Rieko's Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees (Hibakuju junrei, 2015) and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur's The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness (2016). Published a year apart, both texts focus on the afterlife of nuclear catastrophes: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. Sugihara's book is an account of the hibakujumoku - trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and continue to produce new growth to this day. Combining maps, photographs, interviews, and short essays, Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees is intended as an immersive guidebook to the nearly 170 irradiated trees located within a two-kilometer radius around Hiroshima's ground zero. It presents these trees as "living witnesses" whose subsequent flourishing has provided human survivors with a conceptual figuration of destructive plasticity. Marder and Tondeur's The Chernobyl Herbarium formally resembles Sugihara's Pilgrimage to the A-Bombed Trees, and likewise combines text (a combination of short theoretical essays and personal remembrances of the Chernobyl meltdown) and images (Tondeur's photograms of plants grown in the exclusion zone) into a slim volume that calls for a rejection of language as the sole means of bearing witness. According to Marder, Tondeur's photograms "bring out the testimony of the plant," and yet the same procedure renders these plant witnesses "specimens," full of radioactivity but devoid of life (something Sugihara's book avoids through the medium of photography). The Chernobyl Herbarium is an attempt to capture, in fragmentary form, the limits of language in the conceptualization of plant life and in the proper conceptualization of the Chernobyl disaster. Ultimately, both texts are experiments to "think the unthinkable and represent the unrepresentable," to borrow Marder's words, through a deep, speculative engagement with the botanical realm. As wordless testimony is given voice through human-botanical intra-action, the plasticity of plant life (its capacity to adapt and change) is highlighted, and this allows us to locate moments of phytomorphism - the attribution of vegetal qualities to the human - in these two self-proclaimed "guidebooks."
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