The visual system is known to extract summary representations of visually similar objects which bias the perception of individual objects toward the ensemble average. Although vision plays a large role in guiding action, less is known about whether ensemble representation is informative for action. Motor behavior is tuned to the veridical dimensions of objects and generally considered resistant to perceptual biases. However, when the relevant grasp dimension is not available or is unconstrained, ensemble perception may be informative to behavior by (...) providing gist information about surrounding objects. In the present study, we examined if summary representations of a surrounding ensemble display influenced grip aperture and orientation when participants reached-to-grasp a central circular target which had an explicit size but importantly no explicit orientation that the visuomotor system could selectively attend to. Maximum grip aperture and grip orientation were not biased by ensemble statistics during grasping, although participants were able to perceive and provide manual estimations of the average size and orientation of the ensemble display. Support vector machine classification of ensemble statistics achieved above-chance classification accuracy when trained on kinematic and electromyography data of the perceptual but not grasping conditions, supporting our univariate findings. These results suggest that even along unconstrained grasping dimensions, visually-guided behaviors toward real-world objects are not biased by ensemble processing. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay explores ways that looming climate change will affect how we think about future winters in New England. By all accounts, by the end of the twenty-first century the depth of the region's winter snow and cold will be much reduced from their historical averages. Drawing upon personal reflection, scientific data, and close readings of iconic New England authors, the essay examines potential future conceptions of the region's winters. I am particularly interested in how the expected warmer winters will (...) demand rereading literary works by iconic figures such as Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Robert Frost. The essay begins with an examination of the role nostalgia has played in popular images of New England winters and argues for a critically informed version of nostalgia that will enable readers to mourn for what they might lose in the future. The concluding section examines the folklore behind the January Thaw. Climate change, I argue, will usher in a period of an ongoing New England thaw to which our poetry and natural history writing will have to adapt. (shrink)

Greg Frost-Arnold’s book is a highly elegant edition and commentary of Carnap’s notes, claiming just as much as he is warranted on the basis of the manuscript and other relevant texts, and formulating his scholarly assumptions very carefully. Along the way he tries to unify the three historiographical strategies: narrative, argumentative and micro-historical.

This paper develops and defends a new account of therapeutic trust, its nature and its constitutive norms. Central to the view advanced is a distinction between two kinds of therapeutic trust – default therapeutic trust and overriding therapeutic trust – each which derives from a distinct kind of trusting competence. The new view is shown to have advantages over extant accounts of therapeutic trust, and its relation to standard (non-therapeutic) trust, as defended by Hieronymi, Frost-Arnold, and Jones.

This paper considers the implications of precautionary restrictions against technologies, in the context of the potential for creating and sustaining rumours. It focuses on the restriction against mobile phone use at petrol stations, based on the rumour that a spark might cause an explosion. Rumours have been substantiated by precautionary usage warnings from mobile phone manufacturers, petrol station usage restrictions, and a general lack of technical understanding. Petrol station employees have themselves spread the rumour about alleged incidents, filling the information (...) gap about the basis for the restriction. (shrink)

The Catholic Church’s Social Teaching dealing with mankind is interested in the person and their way of progressing in the world. As John Paul II stated, Catholic Social Teaching “belongs [...] to the field [...] of theology, particularly moral theology” (SRS 41; CA 55). Polish moralists in the area of social moral theological studies undertake the issue of economic-social life, and in particular its anthropological dimension. Moral reflections from the theological point of view allow for an integral grasping of the (...) involvement of the person in the life of society. The goal of the presented report is to show an integral concept of the person as the fundamental dimension of social-economic life. The principle source of this work is comprised of views presented on the given topic by the nation’s moralists during over a dozen lately held yearly meetings of the Section of Polish Moral Theologians. The contents of the report are divided into three parts: (1) the integrated vision of the person as the principle element of evaluating the social-economic order; (2) threats to the human person in the context of contemporary social-political life and (3) pointing to ways of overcoming these threats. (shrink)

This book argues that external world skepticism is false for straightforward reasons. To make this case it develops and defends a neglected methodological approach involving a distinctive process of first-person reflection. We begin within the practices, procedures, and commitments of ordinary life and science. We then seek some reason to think skepticism true, carefully scrutinizing all the most important arguments. Finding no reason to think it true and decisive reasons to think it false, we reject it. As the book shows, (...) this is a fully satisfactory refutation. No epistemological theorizing is needed. The book begins by exploring and defending this method in seminal works of G. E. Moore and J. L. Austin. Turning to contemporary epistemology, it asks why we shouldn't appeal to considerations about the world when responding to skeptical argumentation. No good reason is found, despite exploration of a wide range of central issues in recent epistemology. To the contrary, perfectly ordinary examples indicate that it is correct to reject the skeptical scenarios - the dreaming worry, Descartes' evil demon, the brain-in-a-vat - by appealing to things we know about the world. Likewise, considerations about sensory perception do not provide any reason to think our evidence excludes considerations about the world. Along the way, methodological lessons are drawn from consideration of the most important skeptical arguments in the contemporary literature. The book concludes by defending the satisfactoriness of its approach. What emerges is a new understanding of what philosophical illumination might look like in relation to core epistemological issues. (shrink)

Precision testing of the quantum electrodynamics (QED) and the standard model provides some of the most secure knowledge in the history of physics. These tests can also be used to constrain and search for new physics going beyond the standard model. We examine the evidential structure of relationships between theoretical predictions from QED, precision measurements of these phenomena, and the indirect determination of the fine structure constant. We argue that "pure QED" is no longer sufficient to predict the electron's anomalous (...) magnetic moment, and that standard model effects are needed. The details relevant to low-energy QED are robust against future theory change. (shrink)

In this paper I formulate Minimal Requirements for Candidate Predictions in quantum field theories, inspired by viewing the standard model as an effective field theory. I then survey standard effective field theory regularization procedures, to see if the vacuum expectation value of energy density ) is a quantity that meets these requirements. The verdict is negative, leading to the conclusion that \ is not a physically significant quantity in the standard model. Rigorous extensions of flat space quantum field theory eliminate (...) \ from their conceptual framework, indicating that it lacks physical significance in the framework of quantum field theory more broadly. This result has consequences for problems in cosmology and quantum gravity, as it suggests that the correct solution to the cosmological constant problem involves a revision of the vacuum concept within quantum field theory. (shrink)

I provide an account of precision testing in particle physics that makes a virtue of theory-ladenness in experiments. Combining recent work on the philosophy of experimentation with a broader view of the scientific process allows one to understand that the most precise and secure knowledge produced in a mature science cannot be achieved in a theory-independent fashion. I discuss precision tests of the muon’s magnetic moment and effective field theory as a means to repurpose precision tests for exploratory purposes.

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach (...) to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life. (shrink)

The growth of responsible innovation scholarship has been mirrored by a proliferation of RI definitions and practices, as well as a recognition of the importance of context for RI. This study investigates how researchers in the field of nanotechnology for food and agriculture define and practice RI, as well as what motivations they see for pursuing RI. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with nano-agrifood researchers from industry and academia in the USA, where we asked them to describe their RI definitions, (...) practices, and motivations. We analyzed the emergent themes from these interviews, including how the themes aligned with four prominent RI principles. We found that nano-agrifood researchers largely focused their descriptions of RI definitions, practices, and motivations around a narrow envisioning of the RI principle of anticipation — emphasizing product safety, efficacy, and efficiency. We also found noteworthy tensions surrounding the less frequently mentioned RI principles. For example, some researchers envisioned inclusion as a way to align products with industry interests while others saw it as a way to align products with the public good. Concerning motivations for RI, some researchers viewed RI as a way to protect one’s reputation and avoid lawsuits while others viewed it as a way to improve human well-being and solve societal problems. Given these findings, future efforts to foster RI within nano-agrifoods should promote discussions among researchers concerning what it means to responsibly innovate and what practices this could entail, particularly beyond ensuring product safety, efficacy, and efficiency. (shrink)

This article argues that feminist theorists should conceive of the life sciences not only as a factual resource but also as a figural resource. It proposes that in shifting our conceptual orientation to biological science from fact to figure, feminists will be able to give theoretical life to scientific findings about the ways in which social environments and material habitats are processes integral to our development, growth, and social and political well-being. The figuration of ourselves as specifically biocultural creatures will (...) enable feminists to gain a stronger theoretical and analytic purchase on the ongoing mutual shaping of the biological and social dimensions of existence. This, in turn, will enable feminists to creatively re-imagine the fields and fora of feminist politics. (shrink)

Drones deployed to monitor endangered species often crash. These crashes teach us that using drones for conservation is a contingent practice ensnaring humans, technologies, and animals. This article advances a crash theory in which pilots, conservation drones, and endangered megafauna are relata, or related actants, that intra-act, cocreating each other and a mutually constituted phenomena. These phenomena are entangled, with either reciprocal dependencies or erosive entrapments. The crashing of conservation drones and endangered species requires an ethics of care, repair, or (...) reworlding. Diffractions, disruptions that expose difference, result from crashes and reveal the precarious manner by which technologies, laws, and discourses bring nature and culture together. To support crash theory, this article presents three ethnographic cases. A drone crash in the United Kingdom near white rhinoceroses while building machine learning training data exhibits the involvement of the electromagnetic spectrum; the threat of crashes in the Pacific Northwest near Puget Sound orcas discloses the impacts of drone laws; and drone crashes in Sri Lanka among Asian elephants presents the problems of technoliberal ideals around programming natural worlds. Throughout the article, a methodology is developed, parallelism, which attends to the material similarities in lateral phenomena. (shrink)

Science and technology have been integral issues of development cooperation for more than sixty years. Contrary to early efforts’ transfer of established technologies from the West to developing countries, contemporary technology aspirations increasingly articulate and practice the Global South as a live laboratory for technological experimentation. This approach is especially furthered by a group of private foundations and philanthrocapitalists whose endeavors in developing countries are, like their companies, shaped by logics of the individual, the market, and of societal progress through (...) technological innovation and experimentation. This article draws upon critical intellectual thought about the political and social ramifications of technology to reflect on the renascent role of technology in development cooperation. It traces the discourses and practices of philanthrocapitalist organizations, in particular the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to understand how their experimentalist technology aspirations influence human life and relations in the Global South. This article argues that this newfound focus on technology in development cooperation may challenge the essence of democracy, reduce participation, and have undesirable consequences for populations in the Global South. (shrink)

Answering in negative a question of M. Hrušák, we construct a Borel ideal not extendable to any $F_\sigma$ ideal and such that it is not Katětov above the ideal $\mathrm {conv}$.

This essay examines the contrasting conceptualizations of reason in the thought of John Henry Newman and Andrew Martin Fairbairn in their articles published in The Contemporary Review in 1885. This essay articulates both Fairbairn’s charge of philosophical scepticism against Newman as well as Newman’s defense of his position and concomitantly details Fairbairn’s and Newman’s competing notions of the efficacy of reason to provide reliable knowledge of God. The positions of Fairbairn and Newman remain two of the most important perspectives on (...) the role of reason in the acquisition of knowledge about God in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian theology. (shrink)

This joint response to the roundtable takes the form of a written dialogue, based on longer conversations via video link and instant messaging. The written dialogue seems an especially apt format for this response, so interconnected is it with the traditions of utopian thinking from Plato onward, and one which moreover has much to do with utopian heuristics.

It used to be that a book on utopia that did not quote Oscar Wilde's homily about a map of the world without utopia was itself not worth glancing at, for it left out the one thing we thought we could all agree on. But what if the world map only serves to reinforce the systems of domination inherent to colonialism, racism, capitalism, and patriarchy? And why should the quest for utopia take us to the high seas anyway, rather than (...) surveying those existing social formations that resist oppression?For David Bell, Wilde was wrong. Utopia is on the world map, but it lies neither in the unexplored place on the horizon for which humanity is forever setting sail nor in some nonexistent linear future: following Tom Moylan's... (shrink)

The recognition and reconciliation of ‘opposites’ lies at the heart of our most personal and global problems. These problems are ‘wicked’ in the sense that they are difficult or impossible to solve and arise at the interface of interdependent polarities. By exploring the human tendency to divide the world into two parts, _Wicked Problems & the Reconciliation of Opposites_ argues that our relationship with such pairings and polarities is profoundly important to the way we recognise and resolve wicked problems. Using (...) an original theory of bi-relational development, Adam proposes that our everyday ways of knowing and being can be powerfully located and understood in terms of the creation, emergence, opposition, convergence, collapse and trans-positioning of dyadic constituents. Chapters use this concept to frame key debates in and across domains of knowledge, including education, psychology, law and theology, as well as to offer a new perspective on the most profound problems of the twenty-first century: globalisation, sustainability and secularisation. This book is a comprehensive study of dyadic structrures and relationships and provides a multidisciplinary and original approach to human development. It will be of great interest to students and academics of social psychology, psychosocial development, psychoanalysis and transpersonal psychology, but it is also relevant within the fields of education, human development and theology. (shrink)

Two definitions of algorithm, their uses, and their implied models of computing in society, are reviewed. The first, termed the structural programming definition, aligns more with usage in computer science, and as the name suggests, the intellectual project of structured programming. The second, termed the systemic definition, is more informal and emerges from ethnographic observations of discussions of software in both professional and everyday settings. Specific examples of locating algorithms within modern codebases are shared, as well as code directly impacting (...) social and ethical concerns. The structural distinction between algorithms and social concerns is explained as mirroring the engineering construct of algorithms and data structures. It is proposed that, rather than this separation being an attempt to enforce a professional boundary and evade social responsibility, it is a crucial technical distinction within code which makes it clearer and more transparent. The power structures reinforced by the broader, cultural interpretations of algorithm are reconsidered, along with what it would mean for software to have an inclusive design culture. (shrink)

The difficulty of a dilemma is often due to the pattern of one's desires: the way in which your wants for different things are related to one another. When one sees how many patterns desires can take one begins to appreciate the real difficulty of decision making. But one also begins to see that dilemmas are not all unfortunate and insoluble traps. There are good and not so good strategies for dealing with them. In dealing with the resulting dilemmas the (...) strategy may find ways of reducing them to more comparable desires, or it may not. Desires of each kind are often fairly easy to compare among themselves. Qualified trumps are a form of incomparable desire. This chapter gives simpler examples of this desire. In some cases, it is much less obvious how a conflict between first and second order desires should be resolved. The chapter discusses such case. (shrink)

The Samenleving and Bedrijf (S&B) network of Dutch organizations seeks to embed corporate social responsibility (CSR) within business practices but faces challenges with regard to how to do so across various organizational practices, processes, and policies. The integration of CSR demands cultural change driven by senior management and other change agents, who push CSR principles throughout the organization. This study examines the change processes that S&B member organizations have initiated, with a particular focus on the role of high potentials—those persons (...) who have been selected for the fast track into senior management. Interviews with nine S&B organizations document their levels of CSR integration and implementation, the role of senior managers, and the effects of high potentials’ competencies on the realignment process. High potentials have the ability and opportunity to act as CSR change agents, but organizations’ expectations of their purposes as future senior managers prevented them from doing so. In the existing organizational cultures, leadership focused on economic success, and the CSR implementation process had just initiated. Therefore, a measure of CSR embeddedness might refer to the performance measurement and expectations of high potentials as potential CSR change agents. (shrink)

The paper discusses the possibility of a cinematic image which represents future catastrophes, while avoiding ideological entrapments and self-serving fantasies. Taking a Japanese ghost story and a brief note by Walter Benjamin as his dual starting point, the author first attempts to define the possible dangers inherent to the very idea of showing the future, the most important being the danger of the premature, cathartic discharge of the spectator’s anxiety in a sadistic/voyeuristic show. After discussion of the mechanisms of this (...) discharge, the author offers an analysis of a positive example, namely Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf. According to the analysis, Haneke manages to avoid the traps by constructing reflective images that make the spectators watch themselves as they are searching in vain for the cathartic images of the catastrophe. (shrink)

The aim of this abstract ie to present the latest results concerning a system of nonsense-logic, known as the system W. Thus, we recall only those of previous results which are indispensable for our present considerations. A more exhaustive survey and bibliography can be found in [1]; our notation and terminology are those of [1], too.