Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also (...) whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

Richard Holton has drawn attention to a new semantic universal, according to which (almost) no natural language has contrafactive attitude verbs. This semantic universal is part of an asymmetry between factive and contrafactive attitude verbs. Whilst factives are abundant, contrafactives are scarce. We propose that this asymmetry is partly due to a difference in learnability. The meaning of contrafactives is significantly harder to learn than that of factives. We tested our hypothesis by conducting a computational experiment using an artificial neural (...) network. The results of this experiment support our hypothesis. (shrink)

Organisations are computing systems. The university’s sports centre is a computing system for managing sports teams and facilities. The tenure committee is a computing system for assigning tenure status. Despite an increasing number of publications in group ontology, the computational nature of organisations has not been recognised. The present paper is the first in this debate to propose a theory of organisations as groups structured for computing. I begin by describing the current situation in group ontology and by spelling out (...) the thesis in more detail. I then present the example of a sports centre to illustrate why one might intuitively think of organisations as computing systems. To substantiate the thesis, I introduce Piccinini’s restrictive analysis of physical computation. As I show, organisations meet all criteria for being computing systems. Organisations are structured groups with the function of manipulating medium-independent vehicles according to rules. Furthermore, I argue for the modal claim that this is a necessary feature of organisations. Having sketched the computational account of organisations, I compare it to other proposals in the literature. (shrink)

The Sense Complexity Dataset (SeCoDa) provides a corpus that is annotated jointly for complexity and word senses. It thus provides a valuable resource for both word sense disambiguation and the task of complex word identification. The intention is that this dataset will be used to identify complexity at the level of word senses rather than word tokens. For word sense annotation SeCoDa uses a hierarchical scheme that is based on information available in the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. This way we (...) can offer more coarse-grained senses than directly available in WordNet. (shrink)

De auteurs van Aristoteles in actie menen dat nog iets anders essentieel is voor de vorming van professionals: de notie van praktische wijsheid. Zij ontlenen dit begrip aan de Griekse filosoof Aristoteles (384-322 v.Chr.). Aan de hand van verhalen en casussen uit de onderwijspraktijk laten zij zien hoe praktische wijsheid het fundament vormt onder alle vaardigheden en competenties en hoe je studenten in het middelbaar en hoger beroepsonderwijs praktische wijsheid bijbrengt. -/- Aristoteles in actie is samengesteld door Elke Müller. Het (...) bevat bijdragen van Niek van Antwerpen, Gerben Bakker, Bert van den Bergh, Chris Detweiler, Juul Gooren, Henriëtta Joosten en Elke Müller. Het voorwoord is geschreven door Paul van Tongeren. (shrink)